> The Ballad of Beat-Pot Aelwrin: Good, but where's the notes? :-)
I've tried singing it to "The Yellow Rose of Texas" (but the last line needs to be stretched to fit), and to the verse of the Pogues' "Sally MacLennan" (or however her ridiculous Irish name is spelled: it's the one where the chorus goes: "We walked him to the station in the rain <rat tat tat tat>"). But neither of these works too well. If you can think of a good tune for it, please let me know.
> King Argrath: Good indeed! Did you win?
Nope, that honour went to John Hughes (and his rattle), with a Far Point creation and survival myth similar to the one recently printed in Questlines.
> I especially liked the statement that Argrath is the one who made
> Dorastor what it is...
I thought my story would need more crude sexual and lavatorial humour to appeal to the notoriously unsophisticated Australian audience, so I added the Dorastor scene and the Men-and-a-Half's sexual dysfunction. In fact, these solved the problems I'd had in completing the story originally: they only came to me while I was flying to the Con and worrying about not having a new story to tell.
>> A key part of this is the final frantic statement at the end of >> Argrath's Saga, about how the Moon is still there but now is invisible.
> But then how do we fit in the White Orbiter (mentioned in the Zin Letters)
> and the fact that the Lunars have said the Moon is going to become White?
It depends on what you understand the 'final frantic statement' to have been saying. Off the cuff, the explanation could be any of:
Take your pick: any of these could be true. More than one of the Zin Speculations could be simultaneously true, of course. The author of the Zin Letters only tentatively identified the Moon with the White Orbiter; his Fourth Age "Lunar Thinkers" didn't.
Or read "King Argrath", if you want to know what *really* happened. ;-)
I'm only speculating about how it "could have been", hoping to show that a Lunar victory is not incompatible with the events described in King of Sartar. Once you recognise that the Lunar Way is separable from the Lunar Empire, this becomes a lot easier. This seems to me a better line of approach than writing an alternate history where the Lunar Empire overtly "wins" the Hero Wars.
Do you suppose Sheng's "Shadowmoon Empire" directed worship to the Red Moon in her Dark Phase, emphasising the "downside" of the Lunar Way for the profit of the rulers, while simultaneously wounding Yara Aranis, anathema to horse nomads (and associated with the Full Moon Phase via the Glowline)?
> Apropos of Argrath's culpability, I think he doesn't know what he's
> doing.
We mortals can hardly imagine how long it took Our Goddess to create the weapon She chose to wield for Her final passion. In the seventh generation after She, as Hon-eel, discovered Sartar Peacemaker, his descendant Argrath Moonslayer was born. Her Empire shaped him in his youth into a tool of death, slaying all his kin to force him into identification with the barbarians' kinless God of Death.
Who could be better than this man, descended from a master of Transformative Magic, now warped into the semblance of an Iron Sword and possessing certain secrets of Draconic Magic, to perform the utuma suicide-ritual which enabled Our Goddess to transcend Herself and transform the world into the Lunar Cosmos?
Was it necessary for this tool to know what he was doing? His wielder surely knew! But who speaks of 'culpability' when the issue is the successful transformation of the world? We have passed beyond the Three Ages of Myth, the Three Ages of History: now begin the infinite Ages of the Moon.
The Goddess Is Dead: Long Live The Goddess!
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