Dragaera

the honing of Vlad

Fri Feb 3 10:52:32 PST 2006

> 
> >Also, do we have textev that the vial is actually Verra's 
> Blood? I don't
> >recall.

What textev there is, from _Orca_, courtesy of Amazon's Look Inside
----
"...what was the whole business with the blood of the goddess? Not that I
haven't figured out who the goddess is." "I can't tell you that, Vlad. She
said it was important for you to have that vial, and that she, herself,
didn't know why."
----

Verra is implicated rather than named outright.

This is the biggest reason why I think it's a mistake to spend too much time
trying to analyze events. Taken at face value, Verra didn't intend Vlad to
use the vial to rescue Morollan. She never intended anything at all. With no
way to know the reason for the gift,there would be no way to know when to
drop a hint about it. 

Even if Verra remembered the vial, thought "That could save my high priest",
and trusted Vlad to succeed at retrieving it from another reality, there'd
be no way for her to know that THIS event was the one that had been
foreshadowed. She could end up wasting it to save a single human life only
to find that she had completely hosed a more important and far-reaching need
for it down the road.

The only way to make the whole thing work as some kind of sneaky plan on
Verra's part is to invent a lot of conspiracy and planning that there's no
evidence of at all. In fact, as I've pointed out previously, Verra appears
to be anything but a long-term planner. That puts her at odds with most of
the other Gods, but it also makes her useful as a catalyst to action when
the other Gods are gridlocked in debate to the point of doing nothing at
all.