(urth) Ted = Goldwurm?

[Roy C. Lackey]

Andrew wrote:
> Griffins were supposed to guard gold. Not exactly dragons, but as Jake
> Jacobson says (p214), "Sort of like a dragon".
>
> Not wedded to the idea, but I like it more than Ted = Ambrosius.
>
> It might explain why Ieulan run's away from Ted's ghost, if that's what it
> was (Emlyn at any rate seems to be afraid of Goldwurm, and wouldn't
> necessarily know that he's been dead for a couple of years).
>
> Ted's ring might be Goldwurm's weapon of power. Doris gives it to Bax just
> after commenting on Bax's/Ambrosius' ring. Her explanation of why she does
> this makes zero sense to me.

It makes no sense at all. First she tells Bax that she wants him to wear
Ted's ring so that she can see it now and then. When she next speaks it is
to say that the sight of it breaks her heart. Then why did she have it in
her purse? She came prepared to give it to him.

That lunch was only the second time she had even laid eyes on him, and the
first time she had seen the opal ring. Something changed from her
perspective after their brief first meeting at the real estate office. She
trumped up an excuse to see him again, so she may have learned something in
the meantime that caused her to start acting like a gold digger. I can't
imagine why any woman would hand over her dead husband's ring to a virtual
stranger. It's just not done.

But maybe I'm being too hard on her. That is, maybe she was subject to
forces beyond her control and we have been making too much of the import of
Ted's ring. It may have been nothing more than a gold ring, and Bax acquired
it for the same reason he got the opal ring and the gold coins and the stash
of cash -- his ignorant use of the triannulus.

Between Doris's lunch note and her arrival to pick him up, Bax got out the
triannulus. Its three rings were still aligned to fish but "the pointer had
wandered away." (33) More importantly, he first noticed at that time that
"When the rings were aligned to fish, several other things fell into line as
well." Recall that among the glyphs were some that "may be indecent." (26)
We aren't told which other glyphs also lined up or where the pointer had
wandered away to, but it would be a good bet that one of those glyph
alignments was "indecent", and its magic is what put Doris and Winker in the
sack with Bax.

-Roy