Presumably anyone who hasn't read Issola isn't reading this, given the Subject: line. I can take a few guesses, but the other Steve might give more, er, accurate answers. > 1. Was Godslayer created whole in the first place? Or was it created > as 'Spellbreaker' and combined with any Morganti weapon would become > Godslayer? One clue is Verras reaction to Spellbreaker. She doesn't recognize it before it reacts to her. When it does, she *still* doesn't seem to know what it is - although she recognizes it as threatening her and (I think) as an object of power. To me, this argues that *if* Godslayer had existed as a unit and was later disassembled, that Verra and the other gods had nothing to do with that disassembly. Otherwise she would have recognized the pieces. Conversely, the first Serioli that sees Spellbreaker knows exactly what it is and says it is 'not yet' a Great Weapon. If it had been one in the past, he probably would have said `not at the moment'. I base this opinion on the clear Serioli tendency to try and say *exactly* what they mean, in mind-numbing detail. > 3. Vlad said in Issola that he did not get all the 'pieces' of Lady > Teldra's soul when he was creating Godslayer. What are the implications > of the missing 'pieces' to the personality of 'Lady Teldra'? I believe this is what the author would call a `plot device'. :-) Should the plot of some future story require that Lady Teldra forget something she should have known, there's a convenient and reasonably plausible excuse. So long as it's not overdone, anyway. > 7. Can 'Lady Teldra' be separated into its constituent parts, i.e. > 'Spellbreaker' and a Morganti dagger, and what happpens to Lady > Teldra's soul if this happens? On purely personal grounds, I would like to think that Lady Teldras soul (since is it clearly not destroyed) would return entire to the Paths of the Dead for re-incarnation. > 8. Did it matter what Morganti weapon was combined with Spellbreaker > to create Godslayer? Did the dagger given to Vlad by the Jenoine have > particular properties. They expected him to kill Verra with it, it > may not have been an ordinary Morganti dagger! Unless the Jenoine > knew Vlad could create Godslayer using Spellbreaker. But, if the > Jenoine knew this, you think they would have made conditions a little > better for the creation of the weapon, i.e. it needs a soul for a > personality. I believe that not just *any* Morganti weapon was required. If memory serves (which means I'm too lazy to go find the reference) Vlad obtained Spellbreaker from a wizard who had a bunch of Morganti weapons stored with it. Presumably he'd been experimenting with reassembling Godslayer. On the other hand, it's possible that a consumed soul was also required and/or that the soul was *freshly* consumed. My guess is that the Jenoine saw Spellbreaker and assumed Vlad knew what he carried and could recombine them. This might argue that the Jenoine assisted the Serioli in designing and building the Great Weapons. > 9. It also seems that Sethra knew what Spellbreaker was. Was she > setting up the conditions necessary to create Godslayer? No. Sethra seems honestly shocked by what happened, but she immediately recognized the situation for what it was. She's rarely been afraid to tell Vlad after the fact that she knew something in advance. Taking those two together, I think Sethra was truely shocked at what occurred. -- ``If you're a software engineer, your basic building material is human intellect and your primary tool is *you*.'' -- Steve McConnell, `Code Complete', pg 755