Dragaera

Concerning Great Weapons & Baritt (spoilers for POTD)

Tue Mar 11 19:31:35 PST 2003

> I would assume some necromany was involved with all they deal with
> souls.  Also, from Vlad's sensitivity to the blades, I figure some type
> of psionics/witchcraft[1] was also involved.  Most likely the necromancy
> is involved in destroying the souls (as well as binding souls for the
> GWs), and the psionics to give it the sentience that the blades are
> sometimes said to possess.

D'oh!  In my long essay about the nature of the soul, I forgot one of
my prime supporting examples -- the appearance of the Necromancer in
tPotD.  While normal (modern) english usage has necromancy being "the
branch of magic concerned with death" (or, sometimes in a more friendly
vein, "magic concerned with the life-force"), that doesn't at all seem
to be what Sethra talks to the Necromancer about while establishing her 
bona-fides.  What they are talking about, and the Necromancer's specialty,
seems to be a "magic concerned with location", or possibly "magic
concerned with dimensional travel".  This seems like a case where the
english word is simply a poor approximation of a hard-to-translate
Dragaeran concept.

I believe that, to Dragaeran "necromancers" (and to the Jenoine),
"aliveness" is in some way translatable into "location" -- perhaps
in a similar way to how Einsteinian physics sees space and time as
inextricably bound-up aspects of each other.

Alexx

Alexx Kay
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employers
alexx at world.std.com
http://world.std.com/~alexx
Relaxed Agnostic --
 I don't know any answers -- I'm not looking very hard, either.
   [Seen on a Nancy Button, http://www.nancybuttons.com/]