mora et al

Dave , I agree jahlee attacks chenille after auk fixes the lander. one point about your number fourteen: the island where the pit was was made up of giant trees - the scene made Horn terrified. the pit he fell in was inside one of the vanished gods - the maw of the tree. this proximity to the master race of vanished gods allowed him to travel - not an inhumi liana branch, which may or may not have gained sentience from their parasitic relationship with the vanished tree gods.

Very interesting. The earliest layer of religion in the Old Testament is (according to some) tree worship. .

That's a good observation about the pit being made up of Neighbor trees. There had to be a strong Neighbor presence for Horn to be resurrected there, and that probably enabled his first astral projection, too. I think your Neighbor/tree and inhumi/liana theory is well-established in the text. On the matter of the reshaped ring, I tend to think of that as coming from within Horn rather than an outside force. It seems related to the following: 1) When astral-projecting, Horn can create and re-shape "imaginary" objects and make them solid. 2) He can manifest the light-ball in the real world sometimes. 3) When he head Fava's story, Horn projected himself into it and changed it. Just as the Claw was not a real magical artifact until Severian made it one, I think the ring Oreb found was nothing in itself. Unconsciously Horn wanted Seawrack's ring back, both for the connection to Seawrack and to the Neighbors. Gradually, his reshaping power made it so. I see the same thing happening to the pen case from Viron. He turned it into a leather-and-pasteboard pen case like the one he used as a boy in the school, but it started as a more durable and expensive leather-and-metal pen case owned by his father. He didn't want to acknowledge the debt to his father, so he fuzzed out the details in this memory. I think Horn had a cold relationship with his father when he was growing up, which was replayed in his relationship to Sinew.