Ripheus23

Maybe the distinction between virtue ethics, and consequentialism and deontology, is on the level of "acting under a description." Like your typical consequentialism or deontology use action descriptions that are less organic than virtue ethics does?

So it says in AATE that the magic crystal sword was made from crystal exposed to the Blood of the Earth. Loric got this crystal. He also knew the danger of the Blood, I think, from Damelon. In the fanfiction I wrote, though, I said that Loric knew the danger from seeing an evil Insequent and a quellvisk (some evil magical monster) use the Power of Command from the Blood to have one of the Elohim accept being possessed by one of the croyel. The outcome was that the croyel, feeding on the Elohim, could not survive the power of it, and then the Elohim drove his enemies into the Blood, which destroyed them. Then the Elohim explained to Loric the grave danger of the Blood, and claimed that he was the Lord to protect that place.

But I guess it was Damelon, from the canon/lore, except Loric is talked about questing under the mountain, for the Blood, so I don't know...

And Amok says Kevin made him, yeah? Because Amok is himself one of the Seven Wards. But Amok is a way around the Door, from later than the Door by name, so, hmm...

I think the evil Insequent had studied the quellvisk species, but they knew of the EarthBlood, so, hmm...

Well, let's say Loric couldn't access the core zone, under the mountain, of the EarthBlood. Instead, he went a little deeper, where a secondary, but still powerfully concentrated, rivulet of Blood flowed. There should also be a flow of molten hurtloam below that... But then how does the Elohim scene make sense? Maybe it wouldn't. Or there would be some weird threat anyway, not as grave as that of Command...

Anyway, Loric would find a crystal which would have been energized by ages of exposure to the Blood, which is not a normal liquid, but which has the same positive density at all scales. It is a superabundant substance of prime matter, almost. This is why the Worm consuming the Blood will destroy time, because the Blood is infinitely dense/compacted.

Hmm... I wanted a scene just now, though, where Loric Commands the crystal to live... So the sword is alive, and it is in the books anyway. To an extent. But I wanted it to come alive like a Wraith of Andelain, to explain why the Wraiths were so enamored with the sword.

Also, the Ravers are like anti-Seven Words. They have no true names, and they *are* their false names. Magically speaking, I mean. So rending them meant breaking their names into letters, magically/metaphorically.

Hypothetical far-future chronology: let's say, the second version of the original world is shown to exist for 200,000,000ish years, and by then, they've discovered 9 total other universes, one of which is so large (in some sense) that exploring it is what made for the gap between the discovery of the 5th and the discovery of the 6th. Still, the ur-destroyer has not awoken/returned/been released, and no proof has been found by the explorers that the entity still exists. So, the question of the Second Destruction is thus far unanswered.

("What about the tangent you imagined at the end, where a band of adventurers stays behind to square off against the emergent ur-destroyer at the last? Who are left there like that as a little last mystery for the readers? Like, that's all the reader is given to 'know,' that at the end, there was this squad, and they tried something, maybe it worked, maybe it didn't, everyone else had escaped that world so..." Yeah, true. Well, I guess that turns on whether the bizarre ethereal sci-fi post-narrative is worth writing more strongly than that scene? Or we adapt the idea some. Suppose either way that, when mortals left the destructible world when the ur-destroyer did at last re-emerge into their world, then the escapees did not find out what happened, not as a matter of common/public knowledge thereafter. Whether the adventurers "saved the day," whether the world was redestroyed but then recreated again, or redestroyed and left that way, etc. none of that is automatically given to be known to the reader via the POV of the final epilogue/coda, arguably. So, instead, from the invincible realm, explorers have gone out, and they know not how many other universes there are "period," but they assume that the more they find, the likelier it is that there are as many as can be.)

I guess it can't be "Nightmare-hallows" because that phrase is already in circulation from someone else. So maybe "Nightmare-falderal," that would be a neat little odd word, maybe...

Buried War, the. Or maybe "the Tomb War," who knows, but it's a legendary war being fought for centuries/millennia (depending on the storyteller) deep underground by gigantic underground insect/kindred monsters. The scorpion colossi that are "common knowledge" dwell principally and strongly in mountain areas, but they seem potentially capable of living deep in the earth. But what would they be fighting? Not a gelatinous cube swarm, no (I forgot to mention that I decided that gelatinous cubes, spheres, Platonic solids broadly, maybe even things like tesseracts, would be an ecological feature of the scenario). But... oh, gosh, well, haha, let's say, when the old world was recreated, then a large mass of osseous detritus was assembled at random into a metaphorically deeply-buried skeleton monster. Not an animalistic bulk, not quite, but like a network of bristling skeleton-tentacles in a certain vast underground sector. Something that makes very distinguishable noise when it's about... (Like, if there is somehow, somewhere, underground air flow, enough for effective wind, then the passage of this wind through hollow skull structures might produce a wind-instrument effect of some sort?) And so the underground scorpion colossi armies are constantly fighting with massive skeleton-tentacles in the Buried War's objectively valid referent (the stories of this meta-event are laden with odd magical and false details, that is, like a nonexistent intervening faction composed of just one unique separate monster; this is to be shown at some point to be a distorted application of knowledge that there is surely a surface-dwelling hypermonster from the old world, otherwise fully recomposed in the new one, to the expected underground "situation": these people incorrectly judged that the elder demon was interfering in the Buried War, when, even if "surprisingly," it was not).

(How long has it been going on? Well, how old ought this recreated world be, in terms of its intended sense of historical timing ("providence")? I'm suggesting that it's at this stage only about 7,000 years old, aren't I? Elsewhere, somewhere, in my writing this down... But is the Buried War a holdover from the "olden days"? Because then it could be millions of years going. I guess, if the skeleton-tentacle blob was created by warped recombination then no, though... hmm... Actually, it would be a little bit more worldbuilding-optimizing to talk about at least three major "factions" in the underground war. So, the scorpion colossi... Wait, I think the way I defined them, they're from the recombination warpage too... Argh! So there'd have to be two from before instead, as such. For four total later; but what would they be?)

(Hmm... Maybe like far below even the gem-fracturing stones along the ways of the scorpion colossi and the skeleton demon, there was an enormous lightless cavern, enough for two whole nations to be roughly stacked atop each other inside of it and still have enough room to fight pointlessly over control of the sky. Which there was a lost abyss, after all. But ensconced in a mountainous alcove there, there is a titan city that does have the capacity for physical self-illumination. This city was created unknowably long ago in the first iterate of the world, and continues to send out deadly stone-theurgy "probes" up into other under-realms, towards the high surface. There is some evidence that the fourth major faction was also an especial foe of the coverted city, either directly or by the legends of even those days. But its physical/corporeal presence was not clearly recorded anywhere. Some of the more weirdly, piously rationalistic applicants of their relevant scriptures would conclude, "therefore," that this was strong evidence that the intact elder demon had genuinely been at work in the deep. "We already have it available in the record, it's more 'parsimonious,'" I could see an argument like that...) (It turns out to be a magical distortion in social realities, which is why it was so dangerous to the deep city: because any city in its path would be at risk, but given the background situation (including the bulk of old-world time involved), the threat of the social magic cloud "infecting" a surface city was historically low. It mostly has had access, such as even when it has truly "existed" as a cohesive enough mass at all (a fact which fluctuates over time), to the deep city, and a few other settlements from other beings of some long-forsaken ages. (Maybe it's like, you're trained to associate the weird wind-whistling from the skull horde, WITH that horde, so some POV character "down there" is at first all like "whew, there's no skulls for that wind to be whistling through" and their knowledgeable companions look at them aghast, like, no, it's worse when there's no skulls, because then something else is mimicking the wind-whistling of the skulls, and the thing that is doing the mimicking is from the olden realms, from some other endlessly dark quarter far, far below the mantle?)

(In fact, near enough to the core zone(s), there is a form of mass sentient magma, the living serum of the planet I guess. This can be communicated with somehow, and is communicated with, at some time, for some reason. It's probably a positive event, like the protagonists are helped out by "talking to" the magma-serum. There are also skittish diamond-based creatures called ur-mice, though they don't necessarily look like mice as much as potatoes bristling with flimsy roots. And who knows what else. Suppose, for example, some unknown anomalous recombination that deposited its object in the deep underground. This is reasonable to consider as possibly having happened, so that we would have reason to expect that there is as such one other huge magical-faction/factor in this underground domain.)

Nightmare-hallows, the. Place dreamt into subsistence by the ur-destroyer, but not the same as the full parallel cosmos of the police defector and the fugitive. Source of the arcane demon which split itself into Sitra Achra and Amente after the old recreation of the world.

Above the Sea. Poetic name for the ur-destroyer's full dreamworld? Maybe. Well, somewhere, anyway...

("The angel could call them from realm to realm because it came from the dream, not of the ur-destroyer but the ur-creatrix instead. So half its essence was enough like the original world, and half enough like the shadow of the Nightmare-hallows, to conduct them accordingly...")

Some scenes/scenarios in a Thomas Covenant storyline after THE LAST DARK:

The main our-world POV is the sheriff from the other books. He's now in the Land, twenty years later. He's been drawn there by an Insequent known as the Covenant (the sheriff thinks "oh, perfect: another person who's obsessed with that damn leper," and the Insequent shows up in our world like the man in the ochre robe from earlier books). Now in the Land, maybe 7000 to 8000 years have passed.

Some things that happened in the meantime: moksha Jehannum has split into two Raver-like demons named Sitra Achra and Amente. These have quasi-possessed Jeremiah's two briefly-mentioned sisters, one of whom has been abroad long upon the Land's Earth, gathering an intercessory army to challenge Thomas Covenant for failing to destroy a-Jeroth at the center of time. This is the strange ploy of the Raver-fragments to serve their old master.

When the leader of the army, from the people of the Sandgorgon desert, enters the city of the Land withal, Revelstone, he finds out, however, that Jeremiah disappeared first, long ago, followed by Linden Avery, then Covenant entered a sort of peaceful caesure and has been physically inaccessible ever since.

Jeremiah, in the meantime, is not in a caesure, but Linden is too. But Jeremiah is with the Elohim, including two who have been goaded or twisted by the dark Insequent into believing that a second awakening of the Worm is inevitable, and this time it will be the Elohim who voluntarily awaken it, to emulate Linden (whom they now highly esteem). What is currently at stake is not that, but the message is that the seeds of the first awakening were planted deep in ancient time, so too now will the second tree of Desecration be born...

The sheriff, partly in guilt, recognizes Jeremiah from photos he'd seen after he and his men gunned Roger, Linden, and Jeremiah down.