TWK: The Aelf dilemma

transentient · 07 Dec 2005, 04:18 · from 2005-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: transentient at gmail.com (transentient)
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 23:18:56 -0500
Subject: (urth) TWK: The Aelf dilemma
In-Reply-To: <000901c5fae0$959eae70$0201a8c0 at wdw.disney.com>
References: <000e01c5fa9d$9690ab00$c23ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
	<496C1A7C-84CC-4563-BF06-C0637E749E5F at gmail.com>
	<000901c5fae0$959eae70$0201a8c0 at wdw.disney.com>
Message-ID: <838D4754-A40D-4E03-8573-D227DE395905 at gmail.com>

On Dec 6 2005, at 10:44 PM, James Wynn wrote:

>> Also, what are the implications of the "up-giving" of blood? It is
>> clear that, for a human, the blood of an Aelf has terrific healing
>> properties. But both Baki and Uri were so eager to have Able drink
>> from them that it must confer some desirable benefit to the Aelf as
>> well. My guess was that it served to bind the human to them somehow,
>> but I don't think I saw any clear evidence that Able was compelled to
>> do anything for Baki.
>
> This seemed pretty obvious to me. It was a sacrifice. All  
> worshippers desire
> to have their sacrifices accepted by their gods. What is the  
> benefit to
> humans to chop up an ox and burn it on an altar?

Well, that makes some sense. Though humans only do this if there is a  
living covenant with their gods. Uri and Baki were Garceg's, so they  
had rejected humanity as their gods. So it seems curious to me.

Also, they didn't seem to treat the blood-gift as a holy thing. They  
seemed downright lusty and eager to have Able and Toug drink from  
them. Now, maybe lusty is just how the hot-blooded salamanders were,  
but I kind of feel undersatisfied by your answer. I feel that the  
Aelfs must have been after some kind of interpersonal alchemy.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net