Ha! I'm back! I had to leave town to go to a wedding, and now that I've returned you all will pay!
Well, no, that isn't what I meant, really. Actually, it's quite nice to see you all again. See you all... pay!
Er, um, perhaps I should just get on with the theorizing.
: According to GURPS, Balor's body (back at Rhi'anon) blew
: up at the same time. So I tend to believe the
: explosion was simply something to do with Balor
: himself, and not with the Devoid.
GURPS says this, huh? Aw, I personally always liked the theory that the big explosion at Rhi'anon was what a dispersal dream sounded like when it hit a massed army of half a million thrall.
I actually thought
: this long before GURPS came out, for a different
: reason; it seems to me that Balor might have
: anticipated the possibility of defeat and, rather than
: risk spending the rest of his life as an
: eternally-falling head, he built a "time-bomb
: spell" into his body so that it'd blow up after
: his death and the Leveller could escape and
: reincarnate again in a thousand years. Or maybe he
: just hoped to catch Alric in the explosion and achieve
: posthumous revenge.
It's a good theory but it ignores a basic function of the Mythverse, which is that it possesses a fully working Pathetic Fallacy (if you folks don't know this one, it's a term from Literary Theory, which describes how in many old stories the weather, the stars, comets, etc. can be affected by dramatic happenings in the plot, for instance the Star of Bethlehem appearing over Christ's birth, or lions walking the streets of Rome just before Julius Caesar got his). We know that comets appear on cue and that the weather in the Mythworld is driven by dramatic effect (else why have it start raining so hard, right when you need your dwarves the most?). I've always thought the explosion was merely the very earth being unhappy about being contaminated with such foul evil, and rising up against those who would pollute it... well, something like that.
Your Balor as Super-Wight theory works, too, though.
: --SiliconDream
--David Wellington
