On 6/5/06, Jon Lincicum <lincicum at comcast.net> wrote: > Davdi Silverrock wrote: > > Take, for example, the life-state of Aliera from /Paths of the Dead/ to > the middle of /Taltos/... Her body was "permanently dead", but her soul > was--what? Bound to inanimate? What state was her soul in before Orlaan > trapped in in a white staff with a rusty star on one end? I would guess at "disembodied". I'll try and clarify that next post. Alternatively, Aliera's soul might have been bound to some other inanimate object, such as something she wore or had to hand (such as a purple stone?) when she was teleported out of Dragaera City. > How about when she was revived by Verra, but hadn't yet left the > Paths in /Taltos/? > > Is Aliera "alive" again now? How can this be, since her soul was rebound > to her body again while in the Paths? By these definitions, she would > appear to be "undead", yet the term is not used by Vlad, Morrolan, > Sethra, or (perhaps most tellingly) The Necromancer when referring to her. I would assert that Aliera was made entirely alive in the Paths of the Dead, because of what you note. Aliera is indeed a special case, an exception to most of the rules. I would suggest that Verra was able to return Aliera to the state of being alive because of a combination of factors: (1) Verra was intimately familiar with Aliera's body, since she gave birth to Aliera in the first place. Thus, Verra was able to either re-create Aliera's body exactly, or retrieve it from the exact point in spacetime where it disappeared. (2) The Paths of the Dead is the sort of place that enables close manipulation of the soul and of life-states, so Verra, once she had Aliera's body back, was able to bind Aliera's soul to that body in such a way as to return it to being alive, rather than undead. Again, close familiarity with Aliera's body and soul could well have been a decisive factor. (3) Devera may have helped.