jeriendhal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jeriendhal) wrote2016-12-14 10:09 am
jeriendhal) wrote2016-12-14 10:09 am
Entry tags:
LMB: The Five Gods and the Wide Green World
Okay, follow along with me here…
This came about when I got to thinking about how “magical” healing worked in both universes. If you look closely, they have a lot in common. The both require at least some basic medical knowledge, they both tend to generate heat and other unpleasant effects if you overdo things, and the energy required can be replenished is slightly disturbing ways. In the Five Gods verse it’s by having your demon murder vermin, and in the Wide Green World a Lakewalker can Ground rip up to small vermin (but mind the apple pies). Also much of the “easy” healing is by destroying, whether it be by killing intestinal worms or lightly ground ripping a tape worm out of someone’s stomach.
Also, there are the similarities between demons and malices. Both lack bodies when they first appear, both need to steal or make one to get anything done, both can control another person’s body, and both can do “magic” in a similar fashion. The only differences are the level of power and range, with malices, even small ones, seeming to be much more powerful.
So how does that jibe with what Dag told Fawn about Lakewalker history? Well, for one thing it was a thousand years ago, some of the information may have been distorted and lost in the cataclysm. And at least in skin tone, there seems to be a bit of similarity between Lakewalkers and the Roknari.
We already know that Desdemona was an old and powerful demon by the time that Penric acquired her at the beginning Penric’s Demon. Assuming she still existed by the time of The Curse of Chalion, she’d be even older and more experienced. Go beyond that to some theoretical future time, when the balance of power shifted again to the Roknari, and maybe she became the pet of some future Golden General who succeeds in uniting the Roknari princedoms and Chalion-Ibra and beyond under the Roknari banner. A continent wide empire, absolutely unstoppable. A true Golden Age. And perhaps in the Golden Age demon magic became more refined, so it could be bred into the Roknari people, carrying bits of unconscious demonstuff into their DNA to be passed along to their children. [1] If anyone could figure out how to do it, it would be a person with enough will and intelligence to provide a mount for Desdemona. And this would be a Desdemona with all the memories and personality of clever Penric in her, along with however many other future mounts.
And so with one continent conquered they went across the sea to the West and began colonizing. And Desdemona and her mount when with them, where even more magical experimentation went on, and she jumped to new mounts, and grew even more experienced, and even more powerful…
And maybe one day she decided, after one particularly good mount teetered on the verge of death, that she was tired of jumping from body to body, dooming herself to link with another mortal, only to see them die again. And, maybe, she was old enough, and clever enough now, to finally be able to make a body for herself, so she could live on in a single form, forever…
And in the immortal words of so many young people who fall into the arms of the Son, “It seemed like a good idea at the time...”
The world, or at least the West, broke. In the wake of the cataclysm the Five Gods ran, creating a barrier across the sea to protect the old world from this new, demon infested continent. The Roknari’s western empire collapsed, devolving into the Lakewalkers, and their former peasant servants now becoming the Farmers. Slowly the memory of old empire began to become history, then myth. The Lakewalkers created the sharing knives, made with their demon tainted bones and blood, the only thing able to teach the demonic malices mortality, to return them to the arms of the Bastard.
So the world moved on. The Lakewalkers began their long war, fighting until the last remaining bit of Desdemona could be cleansed from the world, and the Five Gods might return.
[1] Yes, this presumes that the Roknari Quadrene practices are snuffed out rather hard. Given that Quadrene belief in the Bastard’s essentially irredeemable nature is demonstrably wrong, going by the Five Gods stories, perhaps they finally underwent a religious revolution that brought them mostly into the Quintarian forms of worship
This came about when I got to thinking about how “magical” healing worked in both universes. If you look closely, they have a lot in common. The both require at least some basic medical knowledge, they both tend to generate heat and other unpleasant effects if you overdo things, and the energy required can be replenished is slightly disturbing ways. In the Five Gods verse it’s by having your demon murder vermin, and in the Wide Green World a Lakewalker can Ground rip up to small vermin (but mind the apple pies). Also much of the “easy” healing is by destroying, whether it be by killing intestinal worms or lightly ground ripping a tape worm out of someone’s stomach.
Also, there are the similarities between demons and malices. Both lack bodies when they first appear, both need to steal or make one to get anything done, both can control another person’s body, and both can do “magic” in a similar fashion. The only differences are the level of power and range, with malices, even small ones, seeming to be much more powerful.
So how does that jibe with what Dag told Fawn about Lakewalker history? Well, for one thing it was a thousand years ago, some of the information may have been distorted and lost in the cataclysm. And at least in skin tone, there seems to be a bit of similarity between Lakewalkers and the Roknari.
We already know that Desdemona was an old and powerful demon by the time that Penric acquired her at the beginning Penric’s Demon. Assuming she still existed by the time of The Curse of Chalion, she’d be even older and more experienced. Go beyond that to some theoretical future time, when the balance of power shifted again to the Roknari, and maybe she became the pet of some future Golden General who succeeds in uniting the Roknari princedoms and Chalion-Ibra and beyond under the Roknari banner. A continent wide empire, absolutely unstoppable. A true Golden Age. And perhaps in the Golden Age demon magic became more refined, so it could be bred into the Roknari people, carrying bits of unconscious demonstuff into their DNA to be passed along to their children. [1] If anyone could figure out how to do it, it would be a person with enough will and intelligence to provide a mount for Desdemona. And this would be a Desdemona with all the memories and personality of clever Penric in her, along with however many other future mounts.
And so with one continent conquered they went across the sea to the West and began colonizing. And Desdemona and her mount when with them, where even more magical experimentation went on, and she jumped to new mounts, and grew even more experienced, and even more powerful…
And maybe one day she decided, after one particularly good mount teetered on the verge of death, that she was tired of jumping from body to body, dooming herself to link with another mortal, only to see them die again. And, maybe, she was old enough, and clever enough now, to finally be able to make a body for herself, so she could live on in a single form, forever…
And in the immortal words of so many young people who fall into the arms of the Son, “It seemed like a good idea at the time...”
The world, or at least the West, broke. In the wake of the cataclysm the Five Gods ran, creating a barrier across the sea to protect the old world from this new, demon infested continent. The Roknari’s western empire collapsed, devolving into the Lakewalkers, and their former peasant servants now becoming the Farmers. Slowly the memory of old empire began to become history, then myth. The Lakewalkers created the sharing knives, made with their demon tainted bones and blood, the only thing able to teach the demonic malices mortality, to return them to the arms of the Bastard.
So the world moved on. The Lakewalkers began their long war, fighting until the last remaining bit of Desdemona could be cleansed from the world, and the Five Gods might return.
[1] Yes, this presumes that the Roknari Quadrene practices are snuffed out rather hard. Given that Quadrene belief in the Bastard’s essentially irredeemable nature is demonstrably wrong, going by the Five Gods stories, perhaps they finally underwent a religious revolution that brought them mostly into the Quintarian forms of worship