: ...Damas to Soulblighter.
: Forrest posted somewhere earlier Myth Pre-release info,
: noting that "Damas" is one of the shade
: names that bungie had listed. We know that
: Soulblighter's name was once Damas.
: So, a list of things: Damas = shade
: Damas = Soulblighter
: Soulblighter = Twice Born
: So, maybe SB used to be a shade, and after his death he
: was brought back as Soulblighter. But not just brought
: back... reborn. This implies that he didn't simply
: arise from the dead, but was returned to life through
: some sort of birth (as in Christ and the virgin birth,
: though details are obviously lacking here).
Damas/Anshar/Soulblighter shouldn't have ever been a shade, since he was never an Avatara. My guess is that Bungie liked the name and used it for a more important character than just any old shade. Damas was Connacht's lieutenant, his military specialist, in his first life. Then he went east for reasons unknown. Out there he went through a rather dramatic ritual that involved cutting off his own face and tearing out his own heart (and apparently suturing himself, since he did such a lousy job of it) and was granted immortality as a result, but an immortality that changed him forever, in essence being born again, thus Twice Born. I still don't know who called him Anshar. I guess that could have been his name before he was Damas.
: This said, maybe that is also (please don't reply to just
: this one point... how annoying :) a clue to anchient
: evils, telling us that they were evil to being with,
: and never turned from the light. 'Course, I may have
: missed a post pointing out someone that was both light
: and achient evil, but I'll know soon. ;-)
Yep, Damas was both light and ancient evil--when he worked with Connacht he was definitely on the side of the angels. The ancient evil part never made any sense to me, but I guess he could have had a previous life (again, as Anshar) in which he ruined somebody's day, and the cycle brought him back as a good guy to teach him a lesson. I'm not sure I buy it, though.
: So conclusion--our boy damas may have been a shade, with
: all the history that implies. Maybe Soulblighter would
: have been the leveler, but Balor got in the way, and
: that was how things got screwed up... anyway, now I'm
: just speculating. Interesting, though... after all,
: Connacht was trying to break the cycle, so maybe this
: is how he succeeded? ;-)
My feeling--again speculation--is that SB was just a wannabe. He was never a shade, he was never an ancient evil, but his time in the East gave him a big swollen ego and he thought he was the equal of all the world's baddies. The M2 epilogue says that SB could not be the leveller and suggests that by trying to assume that identity he was going to pay big time (in some Mythworld version of hell, I suppose). I don't think Connacht ever had any doubts about his buddy Damas. My theory has always been that when Connacht came back as Balor, he still thought of himself as the emperor of Muirthemne and thus he gathered all of his old lieutenants (who had gone through a similar process and became evil in the mean time, or whose minds were warped by Balor's magic) and turned them into Fallen Lords. A few, like Shiver and maybe the Watcher, were always bad and he probably brought them along as backup.
: --Stinger
