Typhon & Whorl

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 24 Dec 2007, 02:51 · from 2007-December.txt.gz

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From: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 13:51:54 +1100
Subject: (urth) Typhon & Whorl
Message-ID: <20071224025154.533BD50039 at mailserver9.hushmail.com>

On Mon, 24 Dec 2007 12:36:48 +1100 Marc Aramini 
<marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:
>--- thalassocrat at nym.hush.com wrote:
>
>> Triskele *looked* dead but Sev doesn't say that he
>> actually was 
>> dead. He doesn't seem to have any of the vagueness
>> resurrected 
>> humans seem to experience. 
>> 
>
>Here is the quote:
>
>"Our guild buries its own dead beside the wall ... but
>the keepers of the Bear Tower leave theirs to be taken
>away by others.  He was the smallest of those dead."
>(p 29 shadow and claw)
>
>which, the second time I read it, screamed to me that
>Sev's powers worked BEFORE the claw was his.
>
>then ...
>
>"I went over and put my hand on his head - I don't
>know why.  He seemed as dead as the rest, but he
>opened one eye then and rolled it at me, and there was
>a confidence in it that the worst was over now"
>
>This is ambiguous because he is classified as the
>smallest of those dead and only evinces life ONLY
>AFTER  Severian touches him.  I have always read this
>as definitive proof that it is not the claw but
>Severian who carries these powers.

Maybe he was in fact dead, and Sev1 had just enough New Sun-mojo to 
resurrect his little doggie life. 

As I said before, I think of Sev and his timelines as being some 
kind of quantum-ish superposition of different possibilities. After 
Yesod, he is 100% New Sun and can act like a god in some respects. 
Before then, the timeline hasn't been fully determined; it will 
probably turn out to be one with him becoming New Sun, but some 
other reality might prevail. (Master Ash fades, he doesn't just pop 
out of existence - and so on.) So he's not as powerful - he's only 
X% New Sun (and, I suppose, there's only X% wormhole speeding 
towards Urth's sun etc etc). 

On my story, at the time of the Triskele incident even on a Sev1-
ish timeline there would still I guess be a small probability of a 
New Sun final resolution - so perhaps Sev1 is Y% New Sun for some Y 
which is small but big enough to do the trick for Triskele.

But anyway, I prefer to think that Triskele wasn't actually dead.

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