# Mts. Carved & Not *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 07 Feb 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### m.driussi *07 Feb 1998, 05:00* Reply: Item #2637374 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INTERNET# viz, Right, that's the scene: Typhon carves the first and biggest; the autarchs that come after him, from Ymar to somebody-who-died-long- before-living-memory (i.e., what with falling technology it is even =less= than the 1,000 years of carving we've been talking about) make theirs in (diminishing?) immitation. And though you didn't say it, I was probably wrong to write that we couldn't count the mountains in Ascia, because (little known fact here) after he became autarch Severian spent a year as a slave in Ascia, where he would have much more opportunity to see an Ascian mountain than he would in the Commonwealth. OTOH, the war between Ascia and Commonwealth seems to have been going on nearly as long as the Commonwealth has been around--hard to carve mountains in contested territory. Finally, regarding your speculation on who put the black hole in Ol Sol. It felt heretical to me when I stumbled upon the possibility that it was done by Severian and/or the forces of light; your version, that it was a necessary evil to check Typhon from recreating the horrors of the First Empire, make it much more palatable! However, just to keep things tangled, the rebels against Typhon whom you mentioned? That would be Scylla, at least, and probably Abaia and Erebus (eventually if not from the start). (I wonder how the mere mortal autarchs managed to emerge from such a clash of the titans? Aside from making the covenant with the guys from Yesod, of course.) =mantis= ---