: The sacking of Muirthemne occured 110 years before the
: Alric was crowned emperor, but the penance of the
: Heron Guard is "only" 100 years old
: according to the journal entry of
: "Redemption". That means the Heron Guard for
: whatever reason waited a full ten years before
: deciding they should do the ascetic thang. Either that
: or a boo boo by our beloved story writers.
Not necessarily a boo boo: it could just be the narrator's poetic license. He's making the point that they did penance for a *long* time, and "a hundred years of self-imposed penance" sounds better than "A hundred and ten years, five months and fourteen days of self imposed penance." After all, if you were talking about Christianity you'd probably call it "two thousand years old" instead of "one thousand nine hundred and seventy-eight years old" or however old it actually is.
If it is an exact number and not just the narrator rounding off, can it be explained? Let's see...well, we don't know how long it took the Heron Guard to return and find Muirthemne sacked, so I suppose they could have not gotten back for a few years after the city fell if they were attacked by Dark forces pretty much continuously on their journey. And maybe they spent a while trying to save the rest of the empire once they got back. A responsible soldier wouldn't let his self-destructive impulses get in the way of protecting his empire's citizens; maybe the Heron Guard exiled themselves only when they were certain the rest of the empire had been destroyed. Not a perfect explanation, but then I think the "hundred years" was only the narrator being imprecise, as I already said. Does that seem unlikely to you?
--SiliconDream
