Dragaera

Loraan, souls, and the Paths of the Dead

Davdi Silverrock davdisil at gmail.com
Tue Jun 13 13:02:18 PDT 2006

On 6/13/06, Felix Eisen <felixeisen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I don't think I need spoiler space on this one, but...
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>   I think what everyone's forgetting is a single six-letter
> word, and what it means in Dragaera: wizard.  A wizard is
> someone who takes sorcery, wizardry, and whatever other mystic
> magical '-y' words there are in Dragaera (yeah, so I forget) and
> twists them all together.  Oh, and in so doing he also creates a
> staff in which he keeps his soul.  So why's this important?

>   Well, a Morganti weapon cannot destroy a soul if it isn't
> there; you can't destroy the soul of someone who's already dead,
> for example.  The soul, according to the explanation of
> revivification, hangs around for about 3 days before moving on,
> but it isn't -in- the body, and thus subject to destruction via
> Morganti.  Loraan's soul at the time of his 'first' death by,
> apparently, Blackwand, was in his staff -- not in his body.
> While clearly he was still alive, the mystic details (or
> 'engineering', as the Necromancer would put it) of being a
> wizard preserves his soul from being destroyed.

I would tend to doubt this, simply because Vlad has never, ever
suggested that a wizard was somehow immune to Morganti weapons.
Indeed, the "cramp his style" quote seems to emphasize that wizards
are just as vulnerable to simple weapons as anyone else.  If wizards
had their souls that well guarded against attack, I would think that
the Jhereg grapevine would have passed this information along at
*some* point.

The only ones who *are* specifically described as being immune to
Morganti weapons are the bearers of the Great Weapons, which will
indeed protect the souls of their bearers - and even there, Aliera
describes it as being a chancy sort of thing, as I recall.