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how was aimia invaded in the first place?


king of nowhere

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So, it is mentioned that aimians are very rare after the "scouring of aimia", implying that aimia was invaded and the abitants exterminated. We've seen axies the collector, and he had pretty nifty abilities. can heal small wounds, he's ageless, a few more. surely that would make for a fearsome warrior. And then we saw the hordeling-creature. stiking a sword through it would br pretty pointless. even a shardblade could only kill a small number of cremlings. he easily dispatched two knight radiants, commenting that he can't claim self-defence as a justification because they were no threat to him.

And aimia was an island. full. of. those. things.

SO how the hell someone actually managed to conquer it and kill the inhabitants??

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Well first of all, we don't actually know how many Aimians lived there before the Scouring. Long lived (or immortal) species usually are not really fertile. So maybe there were something like 100 Aimians originally....of course we don't know enough about their biology so say something in this context.

Anyway the Sleepless (and maybe also the Axies's type) are really defenseless aganist fire. A legion of soldier with too oil may burn the whole island down and reduce the Aimians' popolation a lot (also a single Soulcaster may be used to create in place great amount of oil...or directly fire)

 

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Another good question is why
Even Hitler had a reason why. You don't invade a continent of creepy immortal bug people, just because they are creepy. 

And why have they not started rebuilding hives. Is there something they are now missing? 

Also, why did the scouring of Aimia involve killing larkins? What do they have to do with it? Is this a creature that Aimians would find particularly important? Perhaps important to starting a hive/nest? 

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Scouring did bring to mind fire in my mind, perhaps some type of explosive or napalm equivalent (we haven't seen anything like that in use, but then it wouldn't have been practical on the Shattered Plains and would have been horrible and unnecessary in the border skirmishes Kaladin fought in, so it may simply not have come up).  That would be effective enough at killing Aimians of both types most likely, and would also have killed the Larkins on Aimia.  I do think there's a significant connection between the Larkins and the Aimians, but I'm not sure how.

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Hmm...I could see something like setting fire to an island that they are all on, and letting it burn all the cremlings on the island as something that might work. Also soulcasting might be something that could work against them, depends if you could soulcast one cremling to something and end up souldcasting the entire network.

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I keep imagining an aimian set on fire dissolving into cremlings that all fly away in different directions, mostly surviving... that is until the point where I remember that those cremlings cannot fly. So ok, something napalm-like would work. but using it on a large scale with the level of technology they have is quite impractical. if they did, they must have had a really great reason.

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Scouring is often a description of cleaned by fire. It has been used to great effect with many midevil armies. All you need is grass or woods, not napalm. Much harder to fight than to light, and excellent for mass extermination. Military uses go back long before Sun Su, but he wrote about it extensively.

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4 minutes ago, teknopathetic said:

isn't it mentioned that the island was scoured in order to collect gemhearts from some now-extinct beast?

The page for the Scouring on the Coppermind says that

Quote

the vast majority of Aimia's ecosystem collapsed, leading to the extinction of the Lanceryn and the near extinction of the Larkin. Most creatures there are quite rare since the scouring.

It sounds more like the Lanceryn dying out was as a result of, rather than the focus of. Especially since the page on the Lanceryn states that they died out "to the dismay of those who had harvested their gemhearts."

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On 1/21/2017 at 3:08 PM, ZenBossanova said:

Another good question is why
Even Hitler had a reason why. You don't invade a continent of creepy immortal bug people, just because they are creepy. 

Honestly, given human nature, "they're freaky monsters who can spy on us as stealthy miniature bugs" is probably enough of a reason.

Quote

And why have they not started rebuilding hives. Is there something they are now missing? 

Also, why did the scouring of Aimia involve killing larkins? What do they have to do with it? Is this a creature that Aimians would find particularly important? Perhaps important to starting a hive/nest? 

I doubt the larkins were targeted. Probably they just totally devastated the island and killed pretty nearly everything on it... probably to catch all the little bug-lets they can split into. 'Scouring' IMO implies something rather complete and thorough.

How they managed that I'm not sure; Aimia looks pretty big on the map. We don't have a scale, but given that the Reshi Isles at the north edge of the Roshar continent are pretty tropical and the southernmost part is called 'Frostlands', the scale of the map must be fairly large.

Plus Brandon's called Roshar a supercontinent; if it's the size of Eurasia, Aimia would be at least as big as New Guinea (which is ~300,000 square miles - larger than Texas). If it's the size of Pangaea, Aimia would be more than twice as big, maybe roughly Greenland- or Mexico-sized. I really can't see any Rosharan nation or even alliance of nations having the ability to totally burn down or devastate an area that big*.

*In a time short enough for 'the scouring of Aimia' to be seen as one historical event, anyway. I can see it being done over centuries of settlement, clearcutting forests etc. - although that wouldn't be complete enough to keep creatures that can split into a thousand little bug-lets from hanging on in the changed environment.

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21 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

*In a time short enough for 'the scouring of Aimia' to be seen as one historical event, anyway. I can see it being done over centuries of settlement, clearcutting forests etc. - although that wouldn't be complete enough to keep creatures that can split into a thousand little bug-lets from hanging on in the changed environment.

Sapient creatures no less.  Surely that makes wiping them out much, much harder?

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12 hours ago, happyman said:

Sapient creatures no less.  Surely that makes wiping them out much, much harder?

Yeah, exactly.

Either the Aimians have some exploitable weakness - say they need some kind of specific (and destroy-able) wetland for some part of their life cycle, or something like that.

Or some powerful magic was used.

Or they never inhabited the majority of Aimia (the physical island shown on the map) and the area 'scoured' was far smaller.

It would have to be really small though - the non-magical capabilities of Rosharans seem rather limited, maybe ancient Rome level at best & possibly somewhat less. Alethkar can mobilize a hundred thousand troops or something like that to the Shattered Plains (IIRC it's about 10,000 per highprince), which is on that level, but they've got Soulcasting to help with their logistics. The Romans were capable of destroying cities like Carthage*, but burning half of North Africa to the ground would have been beyond them. They did do environmental damage to the area by overharvesting (elephants were extirpated from North Africa in Roman times), but this wouldn't be nearly sufficient to do what seems to have been done to Aimia.

*though apparently the whole 'salting the earth of Carthage so nothing could grow' is probably legendary.

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Do we know if the Scouring happened after the Recreance or not? I remember people wondering if the Scouring was the battle in which the Radiants began to lay down their arms but I don't remember anything specifically stating if that was true or false. I'm not sure I would believe that second part but if Radiants were around, I am sure there were enough of them to cause some real damage.

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12 hours ago, nervousnerd said:

Do we know if the Scouring happened after the Recreance or not? I remember people wondering if the Scouring was the battle in which the Radiants began to lay down their arms but I don't remember anything specifically stating if that was true or false. I'm not sure I would believe that second part but if Radiants were around, I am sure there were enough of them to cause some real damage.

I think it happened long after the Recreance - if I recall correctly, Shallan mentions Scouring at one point, and she talks about it as if it was recent history rather than a mythic event that the Recreance is. The impression I got from that scene (was it when she was chatting with Adolin about Chasmfiend biology? It might've been) was that it happened no earlier than two, maybe three hundred years before the current events.

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2 hours ago, Rasarr said:
15 hours ago, nervousnerd said:

Do we know if the Scouring happened after the Recreance or not?

I think it happened long after the Recreance.

Aimia was a nation during the Era of Solitude. From the Coppermind: "The current calendar in the Era of Solitude did not begin at the end of Aharietiam, but a date approximately three thousand years afterward." Aharietiam was 4500 yrs ago, so that puts the start date of the Era of Solitude at roughly 1500 yrs ago.
Best estimates from what few things Brandon has given us, the Recreance is about 22-2500 yrs ago. So Aimia had to still exist in the post-Recreance era.

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17 hours ago, The One Who Connects said:

Aimia was a nation during the Era of Solitude. From the Coppermind: "The current calendar in the Era of Solitude did not begin at the end of Aharietiam, but a date approximately three thousand years afterward." Aharietiam was 4500 yrs ago, so that puts the start date of the Era of Solitude at roughly 1500 yrs ago.
Best estimates from what few things Brandon has given us, the Recreance is about 22-2500 yrs ago. So Aimia had to still exist in the post-Recreance era.

Minor correction here, the Era of Solitude began at Aharietiam, not at the start of the modern Vorin calender.

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Another point is that from the Aimians we've seen so far and the in-universe text on the dust jackets, the peoples of that kingdom were allies with the human inhabitants of Roshar for a long time. The Scouring sounds like it happens after the Recreance, meaning after all the people who remembered Aimians as allies in the fight against the Voidbringers are long dead, probably after the Vorin church started demonizing the Radiants as well. I wouldn't put it past them to have forgotten that the Aimians used to be allies and declared them to be Voidbringers or allies of them because, as noted, they're 'creepy'. Given that what the church teaches about the Radiants is demonstrably false in certain ways, I don't see it as being a stretch that the church was at least indirectly responsible for the Scouring as well.

As for how they managed it given how tough the two examples of Aimians we've seen so far are, I don't think we can say at this point.

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3 minutes ago, Extesian said:

While I'm not at all convinced it was fire, Roshar has a high-oxygen environment so it would be a lot easier to burn an entire island than it is on Earth.

roshar, on the other hand, has also a much wetter climate and a lack of combustibles. highstorms would wash out all the dead weeds that would make excellent tinder otherwise. I believe using fire on a large scale on roshar is actually more difficult.

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2 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

roshar, on the other hand, has also a much wetter climate and a lack of combustibles. highstorms would wash out all the dead weeds that would make excellent tinder otherwise. I believe using fire on a large scale on roshar is actually more difficult.

Good point. You would have to bring your own source of combustion, like oil, then it would burn very well. 

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3 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

roshar, on the other hand, has also a much wetter climate and a lack of combustibles. highstorms would wash out all the dead weeds that would make excellent tinder otherwise. I believe using fire on a large scale on roshar is actually more difficult.

while the wetter climate holds and Aimia is an island, there is the slight issue with your statement in that Aimia is on the west of the Shinovar Mountains, so if a Highstorm actually made it there, it would not be supremely strong and it is entirely possible that Aimia is more combustible because it is safer from storms. But yea, people would still probably have to bring some fuel, if only to accelerate the fires

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