First off, let me start with: Loving the discussion.
The Vault wrote:
toodeep wrote:
Yes, but in his vision, "He watched as the Dark One made pacts with the enemies of his creations and the breaking of the world." So if he was Umor (the dark one?) than how did he fulfill this?
You are assuming Umor is the Dark One, and that assumption is based on Umor being evil. Umor is only considered evil by the PoM. Not by the Elorii or by the Ssethrics. The Dark One must be a yet unidentified being in league with the Silence. A being who Kassegore would consider an enemy.
I’m not assuming he’s the Dark One, I’m giving supporting evidence for it. I started my description of my thinking by indicating I specifically started with the premise that he wasn’t, but the data didn’t appear to support that hypothesis. The question to answer then is, if Umor isn’t the dark one, who is? My original thought was that it might be the Sorcerer King, since I think he has been identified before (I think) as dark, and we know he had an entropic being on his island recently. It would fit very nicely into a storyline that he, in his drive to become a god, makes deals with the Silence, or taps into energies he shouldn’t, and becomes the agent of destruction. But I just don’t see the evidence supporting that yet.
The Vault wrote:
toodeep wrote:
Hmmm, considering that Umor was hanging with Belisarda, the goddess of life and plants, right before his imprisonment, I'm much more inclined to guess the "green goddess" was Belisarda, rather than Yig.
Unfortunately you'd be wrong with that. The description specifically mentioned Belisarda being placed into a void by Umor (the double loop dragon) to hide her. So her picture is already known to the reader of the wall. And the exact wording of the goddess is "a new deity, a strange green skinned woman." The entire story is of the arrival of the PoM to Arcanis. There is only one new deity at the end of that story that the PoM would trust with half of Umor, Anshar.
I don’t have that text at hand, so I can’t review it. I’ll readily take your word that it already indicates the disposition of Belisarda. I agree with the reasoning at that point of the green skinned woman possibly being Anshar. Though I don’t think anything we’ve seen depicts her as greened skinned. It makes me wonder about the skinless lady.
The Vault wrote:
toodeep wrote:
Additionally, everything we've seen about the black moon ties it to the silence. It's appearance over the citadel at the defeat of the sword of the heavens, the ritual you can almost see during the attack on the citadel, the epilogue of the Codex Arcanis, all point to a darker inclination to the moon than as a prison of a benign being.
That is not true either. Everything we know about the moon ties it to the PoM. It didn't exist until they arrived. The Elorii mention this specifically in Vision of Lives Past. Also the darker inclinations of the moon come from human beliefs, the other races don't have the same fears of that moon. In the story The Storm it talks about humans doing an important ritual on the moon. Again in For the Lesser Gods it mentions the creation of the moon. The exact text is half of Umor "is wound up by a deity playing a lyre into what looks like a black moon or planet". Sounds like a prison to me. I found this surprising because I always thought the moon was a means of transport that brought the PoM to Arcanis, hence why it appeared after they arrived, but this is much more interesting.
I disagree. The source of the moon obviously appears to be the imprisonment of Umor by the PoM. I’m not discussing source – I’m discussing connections in writing. Its appearance over the citadel, the “important” (which I read as to be dangerous or threatening) actions taking place on it during the Storm, the epilogue of the Codex Arcanis, and the time-travel module all indicate a connection with the Silence. The epilogue is vague about whether the connection is opposition or support, but the others all appear to be pretty strong connectors to the moon being “bad.”
The Vault wrote:
Kassegore didn't need to fool Belisarda, he needed to convince her to go along with his plan. He could have very well told her the complete truth. His identity, what he did, why, and what to do to stop the future. Or maybe he left some things out. Whatever he did Belisarda seems to have agreed. Also it's important to know that if Belisarda is the living spirit of Arcanis as everything seems to point, then the Ssethric are not her enemies because she would be on the side of life itself.
Belisarda’s chosen creations were fighting regularly against Kassegore’s at the time of his arrival. Considering the “as below, so above” premise of divine and racial conflicts that we believe play out when races fight, than we have to assume that Belisarda and the Elemental Lords probably had a fight against Kassegore and Yig when the Elorii revolted. I can’t imagine she would immediately trust him as she appeared to in the stories, if she knew Umor was Kassegore.
I understand your argument that she would be on the side of life itself on Arcanis, but that doesn’t make her dispassionate and logical. After all, using that logic she should be supporting the PoM whole heartedly right now since they’re out fighting entropy, but it would appear she holds a grudge still. Right? Additionally, if his logic was so strong as to win over her, why try to trick the PoM and be partially imprisoned? Why not just have the same talk with the PoM and get everyone on the same page with reason?
The Vault wrote:
I have thought of both of Hara'mia siblings. His brother who was allowed by Cadic to flee into the shadow realm, and his sister Leeata of the Whispers who Illiir allowed to live. It's possible that his brother is the Dark One (after living in the Shadow Realm) made a pact with the Silence for revenge, it makes sense and fills in some holes. Also it's possible that Leeata is their creation god, and Illiir just let her go and killed all the rock people, and she was crying/raging in that cave for thousands of years to be found and call herself Belisarda. But I wondered more if she was prophetic (what else could "of the Whispers" mean) and Larissa absorbed her. And then looking into the future made Larissa go mad, hence why she went mad after arriving on Arcanis. I mean if she had prophetic powers before arriving here, why not use them during all that fighting in their homeland. What's it called, The Gods' War in the Eastern Continent? But she didn't, she used them here, and went mad here on Arcanis.
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I believe legend says that Cadic defeated the lord of the shadow realm to become its current master, so it is unlikely that the Dark One, is the Hara,mia shadow god – though that would be interesting that he could be Umor, since if he was, and Belisarda is his Leeata, it would explain their instant connection upon meeting again. And we all know legend can be wrong too, so it’s a thought.
But why would Larissa wait several Millennia to absorb her, until they came to Onara? Why not do it right then? If they just wanted her power, I assume they could have killed/absorbed her then. They wanted her, for some reason, out running around doing stuff.
As for the other Eastern continent, I believe what happened over there is generally called “the age of legends” and that is when the god’s warred amongst themselves (Illiir vs Neroth, etc). That doesn’t seem to have ended until immediately before the fight with Umor, called “The God’s War.” That is when they fought the being we now call Umor (actual name erased, Umor mean’s, I believe, “waits in darkness” or something like that in Elorrii, indicative of being in the black moon). If you look at the timing of Manetas’s first rebellion against Illiir during the mythic age and when he mislead the first empire, there doesn’t appear to have been enough time in between for there to have been a long time of peace before the God’s War against Umor.