TWK: Mag & Stuff I Don't Understand About Dragons

Alan Lewis · 27 Mar 2005, 07:33 · from 2005-March.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: alanarc at frontiernet.net (Alan Lewis)
Date: Sun Mar 27 07:33:23 2005
Subject: (urth) TWK: Mag & Stuff I Don't Understand About Dragons
References: <200503270903.j2R93wAF070279 at mailserver2.hushmail.com>
Message-ID: <008a01c532e2$4d8f1eb0$1087d2d1@VALUED7B9600FA>

I agree with Andrew that Mag is not Art's mother, for the same reasons he 
gives.

> That leads in a tenuous kind of way to Stuff I Don't Understand
>
> 2. Why doesn't Setr keep women on Glas as sailor-bait any more?

My guess on this one is Setr stopped the practice because he trapped Mag up 
there, which in the future will lead to a scenario where he has Art discover 
her remains up there.  I think it possible Setr was thinking that far ahead 
to try to manipulate Art, but Art gets much bigger than Setr anticipates and 
winds up much harder to control.

> 3. Why do Art and Setr have to battle their way up the stairs of
> the Tower of Glas? Why doesn't Setr simply reveal himself to the
> Khimarae and tell them to scram?

This answer I'm almost sure of -- because he doesn't want Art to know who he 
is.  In the form of Garsceg he's got a pretty good chance of manipulating 
Art into helping him take over Aelfrice.  With his cover blown, it becomes 
much harder, as we see.

> 4. Art asks Uri towards the end of Knight how Setr expects him to
> kill Kulili, when Setr + a host of Aelf couldn't do it? (How would
> you go about killing Kulili anyway?) He says he knows the answer to
> his question, but I don't. Setr is terrified of Art after his
> healing; so why did he heal him? Even if Art did kill her, wouldn't
> it be a net loss for Setr - replacing one threat by a stronger one?
> Why didn't he just eat Art when he was weak?

Only in retrospect does it become obvious that Art would become a threat to 
Setr.  Keep in mind Setr seems to be locked into a stand-off with Kulili for 
a long time, and bringing in Art is his attempt to tip the balance with a 
wild card.  Of course he wants Art to be as strong as possible, and it helps 
that Art is coming from Mythgathr also.  I don't know for sure how Art 
thinks he can kill Kulili, but my guess is it would involve him using his 
power as an Overcyn and becoming as big as Kulili before he fights her.  As 
we know, he doesn't defeat her, and we know he doesn't break his promise to 
the Valfather at that time, so I think that supports the case also, since he 
didn't want to win.

Alan

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