On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Alexx S Kay wrote: >[Discussion of the Great Sea possibly being the cause of the Maelstrom >snipped. For the record, I've long thought that it was.] > >> Well, the Lesser Sea *doesn't* just sit there. It flows and ebbs and >> glows different colors in different places, and occasionally lashes >> out. Apparantly it refrains from solving because the gods damn well >> keep it from doing so, using the Orb. > >Why "using the Orb"? They held in the Greater Sea somehow, and had no >Orb to work with. (Well, I suppose they *might* have done, what with >living in non-linear time and all, but it strikes me as inelegant.) > When I wrote that, I had just re-read the bits in /Issola/ that talked about the Greater Sea and the Lesser Sea, and the Orb - an artifact of trellanstone - being used to control amorphia. Perhaps the gods used the trellanstone that would eventually become the Orb to control the amorphia of the Greater Sea before it *was* an Orb (and still do so even after it has been fashioned into an Orb, and therefore necessarily use it to control the Lesser Sea). Or so I understood Sethra's comments.