On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, Steve Simmons wrote: >And real spoilers for ISSOLA. > >On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 04:11:33PM -0400, Alexx S Kay wrote: > >> Spoiler space, so I can stop talking around possible future spoiles. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> Morrolan has a big Morganti weapon he refers to as his "black wand" >> (note the lack of capitalization), and which none of the better-informed >> people in his retinue have yet referred to as a Great Weapon. >> >> Remember, in _Issola_, how a powerful Morganti blade only became a GW >> when combined with a human soul? I believe that we'll be seeing a >> similar scene at some point in _Sethra Lavode_. > >If I'm reading Alexx correctly, he's saying that the 'black wand' >will become a Great Weapon and will bond with Morrolan only when >consuming a human soul, possibly combined with some other qualifying >event. If so, I must disagree. >As a part of that process, a soul was consumed by the Morganti >weapon which shortly after became Godslayer. That process also >seemed to result in the bonding of Godslayer to Vlad. I am not sure "consuming" is the correct word. Vlad had to go to great and extraordinary lengths in order to ensure that Lady Teldra's soul was *not* consumed. So I think it is important to note that it is not just that Spellbreaker+Morganti blade+Teldra's soul that made Godslayer - it was also Vlad's exertion of... something, maybe witchcraft, maybe a little of everything, that caused the combination to meld properly. Teldra's soul was *bound* to the Morganti weapon+Spellbreaker - she was not *consumed* by it. >However, we have seen another case where a GW meets a bonded owner >without a soul being sacrificed. When Aliera obtains Pathfinder, >no such sacrifice, assembly, or reassembly occurs. Aliera picks up >Pathfinder and the bonding seems to be there immediately. I believe there was a significant event that took place some time before Aliera picked up Pathfinder, which was that the "cloaked" Morganti blade killed Napper. I have speculated elsewhere that the only Morganti blade that was in there was Pathfinder itself; that the feeling that it was a "weak" Morganti blade was caused by Pathfinder being covered with more mundane metal. So in other words, the Morganti blade that took in Napper's soul (I hesitate to say "consumed"; see above) was in fact Pathfinder itself. On the other hand, the feeling that Vlad gets from Pathfinder does not appear to be consistent with what we saw of Napper's personality. So I may well be utterly worng on that count. At least part of the reason that speculation has tended toward Tazendra's soul being bonded with Blackwand, though, is that the fierce, female personality that Vlad senses from that weapon could well be Tazendra, given that she is indeed so much a Dzur. >To me, this argues both that the capture of a soul is *not* part of >the bonding process, but *may* be part of the assembly or re-assembly >process. You may be correct. However, I believe that an alternate model of Great Weapons is that they are created in a "primed" state, where they are fully powerful but not fully sapient, not truly self-aware - until they take their first soul, and then that soul, which binds to the bearer, causes the entire weapon to be a sapient entity in and of itself. That suggests that when Morrolan first receives Blackwand, it has either never been used to kill (that is, never had a soul bound to it), or that the soul that orginally inhabited it eventually evaporated, leaving the weapon in its "primed" state again. Hmm. In Dragon, the Serioli says that Morrolan does not introduce Blackwand because they have already met. Presumably, that was after it (she?) had woken up.