: 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.
Well, true, but otherwise it seems as if the number of years in Myth is kept surprisingly accurate. I have certainly seen no sign of either of the journal writers going off and varying years at different times. The journal writers seems to be quite concerned with not making anything up and sticking to the sources he knows off. Considering the very long life spans of so many individuals, the Heron Guard in particular, it would seem unlikely that they miss a few years here and there.
: 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?
Actually, I somwhat like the idea of the Heron Guard doing something we know not of in those ten years. Maybe the penance consisted of even more than the healing of mere mortals and the wearing of gold tiles.
Peter isotalo
