[Glorantha] Re: Soul Wound and unhealability

From: Jane Williams <janewilliams20>
Date: Tue Apr 4 20:01:07 2006

• Nils Weinander <nils_at_weinander.org> wrote:
  > With this terminology, I think that healing the soul
  > wound
  > is of the same difficulty as a resurrection. i.e.
  > heroquest stuff.
  

I think we can all agree on that - "it's difficult but it can be done" is what we want for plot purposes.

> Once you have accepted the vampire way of
> "surviving"
> the wound as an undead I think you have a chaos
> taint as Simon suggests,

Once it's accepted, yes. But when it's merely inflicted - before the first feed, in fact - then something should be possible.

I'd agree that this link to the Void probably is a chaos taint of a sort, simply because ISTR the Great Chaos Debate found a possible conclusion that Chaos is a by-product of the Void contacting Reality - sort of like the by-products of matter and anti-matter colliding (lots of hard radiation, and delighted astro-physicists)

Coming back a step, I think we all agree that the Humakti attitude to full vampires is to kill them, and that they regard this method as satisfactory. Does this in fact "kill" them in the normal sense, or does it consign them to immediate oblivion? I suspect the latter. And if so, is this ability to consign a being to total oblivion confined to vampires (where it's a function of the vampire's nature), or can it be done to others (a special Humakti ability)? The former seems likely, but I could believe the latter.

Looking at what else a Humakti might do, the concept of severing the victim from the Void was mentioned, and at the time I thought it was a good idea. But now I think about it, that raises questions as to what we mean by "wound". If you have a broken leg, or a gashed side, you don't "sever" it. Well, not unless you're solving the broken leg by amputating it. If on the other hand the link to the Void is seen as a parasitic attachment, then yes, severing would work. But it sounds as if what we want here is the soul equivalent of stopping something bleeding.

There was, however, mention of the Sword of Life quest, and Humakt "healing" a similar wound inflicted on the Universe by (of course!) hitting it with a sword. The only version of this quest I know of is here:
http://glorantha.temppeli.org/digest/gd9/2003.11/2802.html#2805qlink1

and that doesn't mention that at all. Is there a more complete version of the Quest somewhere?                                   

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