: Does this mean that Balor has been killed before (must
: have been earlier during the Wolf Age) or is it
: implying that the Leveller has been 'killed' before?
: If it is Balor who has been killed, I wonder when and how
: since he was conquering cities most of the time.
: If it means the Leveller in general, then Alric obviously
: knows that the Leveller keep coming back, and thinks
: he can stop the cycle by throwing Balors (Levellers)
: head into the Great Devoid (perhaps because it would
: keep falling forever so the Leveller would never die,
: meaning it could not escape Balors head).
I take it to mean the Leveller in general; since most people in the province didn't know about the cycle, Alric didn't want to waste time explaining the whole thing, and what the distinctions between Balor, Connacht and the Leveller are, so he just went for the simplest statement that would get the point across: namely, that Balor can't be killed.
: The JMan at the end of Myth II and the journal writer are
: talking. The JMan seems to think that Alric didn't
: help by throwing the head in, because he is pondering
: whether Soulblighter broke the cycle and there is no
: mention of any other way the cycle may have been
: broken (Alric).
Although there are many theories on precisely why the gigantic explosion at the end of TFL occurred, and I'm not certain which is correct, I'm pretty sure the point of the explosion is that it destroyed Balor's head, allowing the spirit of the Leveller to escape. Maybe one of the other Fallen, or Balor himself, rigged the head to explode; maybe it was some unforeseen effect of the Great Devoid. But whatever it was, Alric failed. You'll note that past disposers of the Leveller's body were basically either trying to destroy it as fundamentally as possible (burnt to ash and then mixed with salt) or trying to keep it more or less intact so that the spirit can't escape, but unable to do any harm (torn apart with the pieces taken to the ends of the Earth). Alric chose the second method.
--SiliconDream
