OK, now a newbie (bought TFL in December) wants to take a turn at the crackpipe or whatever it is you people are on.
You could say The Head did a lot more in the game to earn the title of Deceiver than the shriveled guy with the skull staff ever did.
According to the game engine, The Deceiver was just a tiny sliver of mana away from being the man on top at the end of it all. Could he have planned to block Alric's escape from Tharsis and make it look like an accident? Bungie was careful to let us know he could have gotten there in time.
There's almost a contradiction between the game engine and the cutscene of The Forge. However, you could hypothesize that although Soulblighter needed another hour or more to build up the energy to shatter the Cloudspine, interrupting him released the energy immediately and triggered a conventional eruption.
: This has certainly been a popular theory, yes. As to
: which god--well, you could follow GURPS and call The
: Head Segoth.
They tried to insinuate that Segoth was the head without actually saying it, right? So there could be a scenario that acknowledges GURPS and has Segoth and The Head as separate characters.
: Forrest has argued for The Head's being a
: maintainer of the Cycle, possibly Nyx. And I suggested
: once that The Head was a Thoth-like avatar of balance.
: This seems the most likely option to me. Most of The
: Head's actions either benefit The Deceiver (e.g.,
: allowing him to capture Alric), harm the Light, or
: harm one of The Deceiver's rival Lords (particularly
: Shiver and The Watcher.) And as you say, The Head's
: heavy on secret knowledge and mind-control powers.
Then he told the Light where to go to get him back. There were probably more than two sides who thought The Head was working for them.
"It all started when The Nine learned that Alric had been captured by The Deceiver, and his army decimated. I'm not certain how they figured this out, but I'll bet The Head told them (and this was back when the Head could do no wrong)."
"He [?Alric] claimed that it [?Mjolnir Armor] was buried somewhere in the eastern desert, and that he had been sent by The Head to retrieve it."
There's still the question of how and why The Deceiver would allow one of his allies to be buried for years and finally end up in the custody of his number one enemy (or number two next to Balor).
"Once Alric even spoke of The Head's defeat by Balor, where it lost its body. But I've begun to wonder how one of the avatara of the Wind Age outlived Connacht himself by hundreds of years, to fight Balor in a battle long before the West had even heard of The Fallen Lords."
Yeah, that's all the relevant text I can think of.
None of this addresses the disturbing symmetry of Myth beginning with The Head being dug up and ending with Balor's Head falling down a hole, even though it was supposedly based around the buried journal (and attached references such as the Mazzarin flavor texts?) of a common soldier who never figured out all the answers.
