: While Forrest has put a lot of though into his theory, he
: leaves one crucial gap--WHAT ABOUT BALAMUNG???
: Balamung comes with this suit of armor that makes its
: wearer invulnerable, right? Or at least, so Bungie
: tells us.
Bungie doesn't link the two--Balor's sword isn't Balmung, if that's what you're thinking. They look and work completely differently. Nor is Alric's armor the same as Balor's.
: So, if this armor makes its wearer
: invulnerable, and Balor has it, how is it possible
: that Alric can kill him? He's invulnerable, which
: should mean that nothing affects him (okay, maybe the
: Eblis Stones, but that should logically be it).
If the Eblis Stones can immobilize the world's most powerful mage, who's to say they can't weaken a suit of magic armor?
Remember, also, that the only place we hear about the armor is from The Head, who says it's buried out East. Balor could be wearing a completely different suit of armor from the one The Head's talking about. That suit of armor might not even exist; The Head is a notorious liar.
: Clearly, since Balor is killed, and his head thrown
: into the Great Devoid to keep him from coming back, it
: must not work like that. BUT...what if the armor
: really doesn't make its wearer invulnerable, but in
: reality simply resurrects its wearer after he gets
: killed.
If we assume The Head was wrong or lying about exactly what the armor does, why don't we just go one step further and assume that the armor doesn't do anything? :-)
: This would explain why it is so hard to kill
: Balor. Now, since we know that this difficulty in
: actually killing them is one of the few traits
: constant in all incarnations of the Leveller, it makes
: sense that this is because they would all have been
: wearing a suit of armor much like Balor's--OR, they
: were actually wearing the original suit, and simply
: lost it to the hero that saved the world from them,
: who in turn was infected by this suit that contained
: the Leveller, and the cycle begins anew...
: This would explain why the Leveller is always the great
: hero of the age--he is simply the one who ended up
: wearing the armor.
The Leveller isn't always the Great Hero. So far as we know, he alternates being a former Great Hero with being a powerful born-bad d00d. Moagim Reborn, for instance, is in the latter category.
And the individual Leveller's aren't notably hard to kill, except insofar as they're überpowerful mages and warriors. The problem is keeping them from reincarnating again in a thousand years, which is why people keep trying new and interesting ways of disposing of their bodies.
: Now, we come to the good part. What about Alric?
: Remember, as far as we know, he is unique in the
: history of the Ages in that he is not a warrior but a
: wizard, and so does NOT don the enchanted armor and
: pick up Balamung to finish the job.
Connacht accomplished impressive magical feats--the use (if not the creation) of the Tain, the melting of the Trow cities, possibly the imprisonment of the Watcher. Alric, on the other hand, is a skilled warrior who spends most of his combat time on swordplay with a few Dispersal Dreams and other spells to back him up. These two heroes show a very similar mix of physical and magical powers. As for earlier heroes, we have no idea.
: So the Leveller,
: exerting its influence, retrieves Soulblighter from
: the Great Devoid. Because the Great Devoid is a
: bottomless pit, and because the Fallen Lords draw
: their power from Balor, it is logical to assume that
: Soulblighter would not have been able to escape on his
: own--and, of course, he is bound by numerous powerful
: dreams to, in essence, die before Balor. If he could
: escape on his own, he would only be able to do it with
: Balor's head--which Balamung most probably did not
: want. After all, its work in terms of population
: control and all that was done--the entire population
: of the empire of Cath Bruig and most of the population
: of the Province had been exterminated, for Wyrd's
: sake. So when Soulblighter was retrieved from the
: Great Devoid, it was not as further population
: control, but to force Alric to don the enchanted suit
: of armor, and take up Balamung to defeat him.
Soulblighter wasn't "retrieved" from the Devoid. He never fell in--when the Devoid was about to blow up, he fled in crow-form, without Balor's head. And, again, Alric's arms are a completely different set from Balor's.
: I can't prove it, but I suspect that the Leveller may
: also be Wyrd's antithesis. I think the reason the Trow
: hunted all those other races to extermination was
: because they were controlled by the then-current
: incarnation of the Leveller (remember, if this thing
: is a divinity, it would have to be OLD!!!) This would
: fulfill its purpose rather nicely, as any new species
: would simply be eradicated. Then, in the Oghre revolt,
: the lesser brethren of the Trow, i.e. the Oghre,
: killed whoever it was who wore Balamung. After all,
: any suit of armor that is that powerful can be
: expected to fit itself to its wearer, right? It
: wouldn't be that big a deal. Besides which, Alric is
: certainly smaller than Balor, and both still manage to
: be able to wear it. Anyway, once Balamung disappeared,
: all was well and good, except that the Trow went
: beserk and exterminated the rest of the Oghre. Only,
: without Balamung and the Leveller, the Oghre and the
: other younger races were no longer exactly easy meast.
: So the Trow, realizing that they could no longer
: afford to commit genocide against all the younger
: races, stopped--and Balamung moved on, eventually
: resurrectign itself among the lesser races.
All evidence is that, before the Younger Races appeared, the Leveller was *fighting* the Trow. They sat around and did their thing, and every thousand years a new race appeared from somewhere else and they had a brief war. This suggests that the Leveller was on the side of the "aliens," not the Trow.
There were human Levellers long before the Oghre revolt. In fact, precisely at the moment of the revolt Moagim Reborn was the Leveller, so by your theory the Oghres would somehow have managed to kill him.
--SiliconDream
