On 11/8/05, J C <greyw01f at hotmail.com> wrote: > Does creating a morganti blade require the soul or maybe blood of a Taltos? > (the animal, not the family name, though I imagine that Vlad is a Taltos as > well) > > It would explain how morganti do what morganti do---prevent manifestation in > certain planes or places. > Huh. That's exactly backwards from my own Speculation:Great_Weapons. That is, I would posit that Bolk, in and of himself, *was* a Great Weapon. I am not sure how this could be, of course, but I considered it to be empirically demonstrated by the action of his blood. I would not have said that taltos blood *in general* was the essence of Morganti - see below for why. One noodling notion is that perhaps Bölk learned how to become a Great Weapon by somehow absorbing the Morganti weapon-ness that Fenarr owned. But perhaps he simply knew how to change himself to become a Great Weapon at the cost of his life, and did so. To somewhat rebut your suggestion: We know that there are many Morganti weapons, and more than one Great Weapon as well. We have no idea if there is more than one táltos animal; there is reason to suspect that all of the táltos horses and bulls were one entity, confused by witnesses as being different because they change, and thus were all Bölk. Why would Bolk have donated his blood to the cause of soul-destruction? Recall, too, that he was not always the enemy of the Demon Goddess, and perhaps therefore was not the enemy of the other Gods as well. Another argument against taltos blood being a general ingredient for Morganti weapons is that the Demon Goddess showed disgust when viewing Bolk's bloody heart, but not fear. Shouldn't she have perceived that his blood was the same stuff that went into all of the weapons that could kill her? Sigh. I have more notions, but too much to do. So much speculation, so little time.