(urth) mora et al

Dave Tallman davetallman at msn.com
Sat Aug 2 04:46:26 PDT 2008


Marc Aramini wrote:
> Dave , I agree jahlee attacks chenille after auk fixes the lander.  one point about your number fourteen: the island where the pit was was made up of giant trees - the scene made Horn terrified.  the pit he fell in was inside one of the vanished gods - the maw of the tree.  this proximity to the master race of vanished gods allowed him to travel - not an inhumi liana branch, which may or may not have gained sentience from their parasitic relationship with the vanished tree gods.
>   
That's a good observation about the pit being made up of Neighbor trees. 
There had to be a strong Neighbor presence for Horn to be resurrected 
there, and that probably enabled his first astral projection, too. I 
think your Neighbor/tree and inhumi/liana theory is well-established in 
the text.

On the matter of the reshaped ring, I tend to think of that as coming 
from within Horn rather than an outside force. It seems related to the 
following:

1) When astral-projecting, Horn can create and re-shape "imaginary" 
objects and make them solid.
2) He can manifest the light-ball in the real world sometimes.
3) When he head Fava's story, Horn projected himself into it and changed it.

Just as the Claw was not a real magical artifact until Severian made it 
one, I think the ring Oreb found was nothing in itself. Unconsciously 
Horn wanted Seawrack's ring back, both for the connection to Seawrack 
and to the Neighbors. Gradually, his reshaping power made it so.

I see the same thing happening to the pen case from Viron. He turned it 
into a leather-and-pasteboard pen case like the one he used as a boy in 
the school, but it started as a more durable and expensive 
leather-and-metal pen case owned by his father. He didn't want to 
acknowledge the debt to his father, so he fuzzed out the details in this 
memory. I think Horn had a cold relationship with his father when he was 
growing up, which was replayed in his relationship to Sinew.




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