: Unfortunately I don't have an actual quote, but I heard
: it from someone who was told that by a Bungie employee
: at MacWorld or E3 or something. I also seem to recall
: that being a common practice in fantasy mythos; you
: can only be killed by destroying your heart, so if you
: cut your heart out and hide it away somewhere, no
: matter how much you're hacked up, you're still alive
: and could theoretically be put back together again
: (something like undeath, I suppose).
I think the oldest story about this I've heard is of Kochii the Deathless, a Russian sorcerer who hid his life in an egg, so that the hero had to journey over mountains and oceans and so on to find it and break it. Well, if a Bungie guy said it, it has to be taken as gospel. Nonetheless, even in magic it's probably hyperbole to say that, thanks to a ritual, you can't be killed by anything in the universe. I mean, Achilles was said to be vulnerable to injury only at his heel; on the other hand, I wouldn't give much for his chances against a tactical nuke aimed at any part of his body. Being immersed in lava is a pretty extreme sort of demise. Even if having his heart removed made Soulblighter unkillable, he's not going to be very dangerous as a swirl of ashes inside a volcano. And if he was unkillable, wouldn't he be a little less interested in self-preservation throughout the game? He wouldn't need much of an army; he could just fly into Alric's room like the crow does in the intro, kill Alric before he wakes up, and escape. Even if he was surrounded by the entire militia of Madrigal he'd know they couldn't do him any permanent harm; he might lose a couple of limbs but I think he could escape.
: I've often wondered how posessing one of Soulblighter's
: crows crippled him. He turned into a murder, Myrdred
: grabbed one crow, and the rest flew off. When the
: murder came back together as Soulblighter, did he have
: a big chunk of an arm
: missing, or something? And what's to keep Soulblighter
: from turning into another murder, still minus one
: crow, and flying off somewhere else? Do the crows have
: to stay within a certain proximity? And if so,
: couldn't Soulblighter have just flocked back to the
: one lost crow after Myrdred died? (assuming the crow
: lived). Or does Myrdred's posession of a crow equate
: mystically to owning a part of Soulblighter's soul,
: giving Myrdred some control over what Soulblighter can
: and cannot do? But in that case, shouldn't
: Soulblighter be free again once Myrdred died?
Yes, I felt that "possession" was being used in the mind-control sense. When The Deceiver possessed one crow, he basically got a chunk of Soublighter's mind to play with. I agree that Soulblighter should probably have been freed by Myrdred's death (although if Myrdred dies during a level the Charmed units stay under your control), but to me that's evidence that Myrdred didn't die.
: I originally imagined them as parts of his soul fleeing
: his dying body, something like a Fetch, but
: Soulblighter's soul is in a bunch of little crow-bits.
I don't suppose there's much evidence for either of our interpretations over the other, although I think that if the crow-spirits were supposed to be escaping, we'd see them at least move away from his body instead of just appearing inside and fading. This seems like something we could ask Bungie; I'm sure they're too cruel to tell us whether Soulblighter really did die or not, but they might at least tell us what he's supposed to be doing in the cutscene.
--SiliconDream
