: Yes, but the cycle could try to correct itself by making
: the next age dark instead.
Sure, but it could just as easily use the Leveller who's supposed to appear--Balor reborn--as corrupt Alric. Certainly it appears to be trying presently to produce a Dark Age through external evils like Soulblighter rather than by turning Alric bad. I think the best bet is do the opposite of what the cycle wants for now, by making it a very extreme Light Age with all Avatara including Alric alive--and then maintain Light domination against all Dark influences. That way you can be sure that the cycle isn't progressing.
: He didn't neccesarily have two of them killed. They died,
: but that's not the same thing.
I doubt thousands of soldiers decided to fight for him of their own free will. They fought because he wanted them to fight. He could have minimized the fighting, if all he sought was escape, and it's highly unlikely that two ultrapowerful archmages would die by accident. He must have commanded his brainwashed warriors to kill them.
: Anyway, it seems to me, he was against both the dark and
: the light. Maybe he was trying to break the cycle by
: making sure there wasn't enough left of either side to
: make the cycle continue. Basically, kill all the big
: guns on both sides.
But if he wanted to kill everyone on both sides, he should have restricted himself to attacking the Dark, and let Fate take care of the Light. Attacking both sides equally just sped up the Dark victory, since they were going to win anyway.
It did occur to me that he might have been trying to break the cycle in a different way. The Dark Age was supposed to be inaugurated by the deaths of both Alric and Balor--perhaps The Head was trying to keep them *both* alive?
He double-crossed the Nine, and started a civil war, so that the doomed Light forces would have to remain in the West and would be exterminated without ever getting close enough to Balor to kill him even by chance. Meanwhile, he sent Alric to be captured by The Deceiver because he knew Myrdred wouldn't kill him, either because a) Myrdred and The Head were working together or b) Myrdred wouldn't destroy such a valuable asset, both as a potentially brain-washable weapon and as a bargaining chip ("behave, Balor, or I'll sic Alric on you") as the fated hero of Light. Indeed, we see that The Deceiver captured Alric instead of killing him on sight, like a truly dedicated Fallen Lord would.
The Head planned on both Alric and Balor surviving into the new Dark Age, hopefully screwing up the cycle as much as possible. Instead, Alric escaped--perhaps with the consent of The Deceiver--and used his new-found knowledge (from where did he gain this knowledge, unless The Deceiver told him) to defeat Balor. The Head did manage to mess up the cycle, but not in the way that he'd hoped.
One of these days I'm going to have to pick *one* of my ten thousand Head theories and stick to it...
--SiliconDream
