The Severian Behind Curtain #3

Dave Tallman · 14 Jun 2008, 17:32 · from 2008-June.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: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:32:00 -0600
Subject: (urth) The Severian Behind Curtain #3
In-Reply-To: <CA3A324C-E3D4-41A1-9CD7-717F76C3AF69 at io.com>
References: <CA3A324C-E3D4-41A1-9CD7-717F76C3AF69 at io.com>
Message-ID: <48540090.1010003 at gmail.com>

I'll accept this as the new thread even though the first theory is a 
joke. I'll try to propose a self-consistent set of rewrites of Sev's 
life around the drowning incident.

Sev1. (thalassocrat version) didn't nearly drown and got home that night 
without incident. He heals and cares for Triskele. When the dog is 
discovered, he runs north to the war and becomes a soldier. He does not 
become autarch; Baldanders probably does and no New Sun is brought.

Sev2. Identified as a good candidate for the New Sun because the story 
of his healed dog got around. His ancestry is checked and he is found to 
be a grandson of Fechin (b sharp theory). Hierogrammates begin to 
influence his life to make him an autarch.

Sev3. Abaia wants Sev stopped, so Juturna drowns him by catching him in 
her hair.

Sev4. Hierogrammates make an aquastor of Sev and save him. The woman who 
offered him soup was working for them -- the food was to help him 
stabilize but she misjudged the temperature. This Sev glimpsed the face 
of Juturna and believes she saved him.

SevN. Many rewrites later, Sev has brought the New Sun. He tells Juturna 
she saved him, and she goes along with this in hopes of tempting him in 
the future.

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