>What's really in question is I think is whether Blackwand grabbed Morollan's >soul after he was killed. It may have acted to prevent his soul from being >eaten, but would simple death trigger that reaction? If so, then Morollan >was in no danger of anything other than an unpleasant experience, regardless >of how long it would have taken to beat down the shield. There may be more too it than that. It's an area where we have to speculate rather than draw on hard facts. The three-day limit may not be arbitrary. There may be some meta-physical change that takes place in a corpse after three days that makes it no longer viable as a host. At that point, you can use Necromancy to force the soul and body to reunite but you end up with an undead being instead of a living being. Granted that being undead doesn't seem to be nearly as awful in Dragaeran aristocratic society as it might be elsewhere, it's still a serious social problem. The average Dragaeran would probably prefer the Paths or reincarnation. We've also been told that there are preservation spells that keep the body >from decaying. Morollan says that the soul awakens three days after being dumped over the Falls. This corresponds to the same three days that Vlad says an anti-revivifaction spell has to last in order to assure non-revivification. Khaavren takes a year to carry his friends to the Falls "the old way" (meaning sans teleportation) so we can assume that the preservation spells keep the body "fresh" enough that the soul doesn't wake up and leave it until those spells are removed. Otherwise, there'd be no point in taking someone to the Falls. Theoretically, you could preserve a corpse indefinitely and revivify it whenever you wanted. Pre-Interregnum, there were no revivification spells so there was no need to attempt to preserve someone that long. All this really means is that the sorcery used to prevent revivification would also likely prevent preservation as well. If that's the case, then the three days IS a hard limit. Past that time, the corpse has decayed to a point where it can't contain a soul any more. If Vlad had failed to find the Left Hand sorceress responsible for the spell on Morollan's body, then it would ultimately have been impossible to revivify Morollan regardless of whether his soul was being held by Blackwand or not. This would also account for why Barritt ended up in the Paths despite having owned Pathfinder. That's simplifying things since he had Pathfinder hidden, perhaps needed to be holding it to be saved by it, etc... In the end, though, Pathfinder did NOT preserve his soul for an indefinite period of time for it to be reunited with his body. The only alternative after the three days limit is a new, fresh body. This required the intervention of a god in Aliera's case,though Sethra implied that the Necromancer could possibly provide it. Her worry was that even with a fresh body they still wouldn't be able to join them. It really required Verra to provide Aliera's own body (in whatever mystical way the gods accomplish these things) in order to guarantee success.