>This gets me to thinking about the 'Accident' that cause >the Great Sea of Chaos. Has it ever been discussed here before? >I'm wondering what exactly caused it. I'm still don't 100% understand why >the lesser sea was created in 500 years after. Anyone got any good >ideas or know the answer? We don't know what caused the Greater Sea, except that it was the result of one or more experiments by the Jenoine that were sabotaged by Verra and some co-conspirators who are so far unnamed. What follows is pure speculation with no supporting evidence of any kind. Amorphia is found nowhere else in the multi-verse, or so Sethra believes. Since the Jenoine are rather clearly from "elsewhere" and subject to different ideas of time and space, I'd hazard a guess that they originally came to "Seriol" because they detected trace amounts of amorphia on the world. Perhaps the Serioli were using it in their smithing or had their own version of sorcery powered by the kinds of "amorphia stones" that we see Vlad make in _Issola_ and Aliera make in _Jhereg_. The Jenoine found the Serioli unusable for whatever reason. However, they discovered an immigrant race with latent psychic powers. (The serioli in _Dragon_ knows that the "Old People" came from the "small invisible lights" (stars) implying that the Terran colonists had managed to communicate with the Serioli and establish some kind of relations with them.) Capturing some or all of these people, they set about doing whatever they do in their genetic labs, (we don't know if it was breeding for a trait, manipulation of a living being's DNA or a combination of things) and strengthened this psychic ability. Once they had a control group with the latent abilities they wanted, they set them loose to breed in the East. Whenever they needed new breeding stock or just a handy source of DNA they'd grab a few Easterners, but otherwise they left them alone to run free in their "pasture". Imagine a nineteenth century American rancher who threw a bunch of beef cattle out into 1000 acres of open range in the spring, then rounded them all up in the fall and took them to market to be butchered, with no care or worries about what they did with themselves in the meantime. (It's likely that the culture and technology of the people who had once been Terran colonists had been wiped out at this point, leaving the survivors and Easterners to work out their own systems of governance based on lifestyle and tradition. I like to imagine this period as if the Jenoine had landed in _Creatures of Light and Darkness_ and destroyed the "gods" but left the people with their cultures more or less intact.) Members of the control group were then used in breeding/altering experiments to refine the latent psychic gene and make it active such that a test subject would be able to manipulate raw amorphia to produce results desired by the Jenoine. While they were at it, they made some improvements in the base genome and ended up with the prototypical Dragaeran. These experiments were more or less successful depending on circumstance and the genetic material involved. To this day, certain family lines have an easier time doing Elder Sorcery than most others and, as Vlad has shown, the ability involves a kind of "psychic genetics" moreso than the physical DNA manipulation that we think of as genetics. Now, one of the characteristics of amorphia is that it's viral. It consumes non-amorphic matter and grows in proportion to what it consumes. There are limits, apparently, given that the Great Sea and Lesser Sea stopped growing more-or-less on their own, (perhaps the gods intervened in both cases) but for all practical purposes a bit of amorphia let loose in the wild will grow until it consumes everything in existence around it. Vlad has shown us that one can take an amorphia stone and alter its state back to that of "liquid" amorphia, or even use an existing source of "liquid" amorphia to conjure more of the stuff. (One could argue that what he did in _Jhereg_ was convert matter to amorphia but the result is the same as if he'd conjured it up.) Here, then is where Verra and her band of rebels come in. They sabotaged whatever safeguards the Jenoine were using in their amorphia experiments and the result was an explosion of amorphia that engulfed a major section of "Seriol". Through accident or design, Verra and a host of others (even some Jenoine, according to Aliera) survived the cataclysm but were altered by it at a fundamental level (rather like what the cosmic rays did to Reed Richards and his crew, *heh*). These survivors became the gods. Barlen, I believe, claims that the Cycle is a fundamental law of the universe, so we don't know if they discovered the Cycle or created it. In any case, they took it and built the Empire upon it as a bulwark against any future invasions by the Jenoine. The Serioli,(whose arts used in creating Morganti weapons and other such things are likely what caught the interest of the Jenoine in the first place) found that they'd traded one master for another. Their response was to create the Great Weapons and hope that the New People would one day use them against their oppressors, as the Serioli styled the Lords of Judgement. Unfortunately for them, most Dragaerans respect the Gods even if they don't revere them and the Serioli themselves are too powerless to fight them directly or they would have done so long ago. As to the Lesser Sea, if we believe Paarfi then Adron appears to have procured several of the amorphia stones. It's not entirely clear why he did this, what with having a perfectly good Sea of Chaos at hand to use, but perhaps it was supposed to allow him finer control of the spell he was attempting. It might also be that, the Orb being linked to the Sea of Chaos, that a spell designed to overcome and/or destroy the Orb required a power source of an independent nature. In any case, when we've seen Vlad attempt Elder Sorcery there's invariably been some raw amorphia around to power it. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to presume that Adron likewise had to convert some of his amorphia stones to raw amorphia in order to power the spell. (Paarfi doesn't neccesarily report it this way, but we already know from Aliera that Paarfi doesn't neccesarily know all the particulars of the event.) Whether it was simple incompetence on the part of Adron or the power feedback described by Paarfi, the spell got out of control, the amorphia being used by Adron broke free (perhaps causing a chain reaction as each of the amorphia stones exploded into life), and the resultant explosion wiped out Dragaera City and created a new Sea of Chaos to go along with the previously existing one.