I had a sneaking suspicion the ante would get upped somehow. Well played.
Since I can’t figure out how to use the MultiQuote feature, I’ll just say “everything is everything,” Jonathan Chance. You?
Hate to break it to you, but Durkon’s 2-1 in that department.
Seconded. Haven’t seen you around in Erf lately. You still following?
Wild out-there guess almost certainly as wrong as all my other guesses–but what if it’s a Protean, birthed from the Snarl? Better yet, what if the Monster in the Dark IS the last gate?
We know that Kraagor’s Gate is in some huge cave complex–or at least we think we know that. It wasn’t actually built by the barbarian, it was built by the rogue, who claimed that she would honor Kraagor’s belief in physical might as the ultimate defense in the design of the gate.
What if that was bullshit?
What if instead this sneaky rogue built the entire cave complex as a giant distraction, instead somehow binding the Snarl into corporeal form and tasking it with maintaining the gate? Somehow Xykon found out that the MitD was the key to unlocking the fifth gate (or it was the key to loosing the power of the Snarl, or whatever), so he captured it and is taking it with him. (Xykon did find the rogue’s journal, so maybe that’s where he got the hint from?)
The MitD isn’t really clear on what it is, but when Xykon is trying to find the final gate, it’s surreptitiously sabotaging the hunt.
Would justify the MitD as a protean–surely the form the Snarl would take if bound into corporeal form. Would fit the story. Is almost certainly wrong.
Edit: or maybe the thing about honoring physical might as the ultimate defense isn’t bullshit after all: Proteans are hella strong.
That’s a thread on the OotS boards about the monster’s identity, and it’s FIFTY-ONE PAGES LONG.
And it’s the tenth thread in a highly-organized series of threads about the identity. The ninth one was fifty pages, and I suspect the others were all similarly long. And an eleventh thread is started.
I don’t think I’m likely to guess anything that’s not already been said. Indeed, “Son of Snarl” is mentioned in the first couple of posts of that thread as a suggested but unlikely identity. I still think it’s possible–if the snarl was bound into the form of another creature–but it’s really unlikely that I’ve got an idea on the subject hasn’t been covered exhaustively in ~500 PAGES (not posts, PAGES) of discussion.
I liked that one of those threads was titled “Everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid Tarrasque”.
He isn’t speaking directly to Thor in that strip. Just putting in his standard orders via celestial prayer support as all clerics do.
That doesn’t really fit the backstory of the MitD from Start of Darkness:
After Xykon had disappeared for a few years, Redcloak found his brother Right-Eye’s village, where the MitD was on display as a circus attraction. He decides that a powerful monster might be useful for re-starting his scheme to use the Snarl to blackmail the gods. Xykon then shows up and forces Redcloak and Right-Eye to start working for him again, and incidentally acquires the MitD in the process.
I don’t think that necessarily contradicts the backstory. Hunters had found the MitD deep in the wilderness, and had brought it back to civilization.
If the rogue wanted to make it hard to open the gate, she might embody it in a dangerous creature and then release it deep into the wilderness, under a compulsion that prevented it from learning anything about the gate and that compelled it to sabotage others who were trying to learn about the gate; meanwhile she’d create a huge decoy maze hundreds of miles away.
It’s like how smart evil overlords make a giant red button that says “SELF DESTRUCT: DO NOT PUSH,” and link it to nothing more than a circuit containing lethal electrical current; meanwhile the actual master switch is an unassuming unlabeled button a dozen feet away.
Now, it’s true (I think) that we have no indication that Xykon thinks the MitD is directly a key for opening the last gate, so I should leave out that bit of my totally improbable theory :).
The gates are stationary because they are holding rifts in the fabric of the universe closed. The rifts are not mobile, so the gates can’t be mobile. They can’t be put in a mobile object such as a creature.
Smart evil overlords don’t include a self destruct at all unless absolutely necessary.
The most recent 9 strips have been coming out about twice a week. I had two hypotheses about this high rate:
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Burlew is trying to get through this book quickly so it could be published later this year (in time for Christmas). There’s likely 20 or so more strips left in this book, so that would take 10 weeks. It takes a couple months or so to prepare the strips for a book, so that would be about right.
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When Durkon was vampirized, he did a strip per day for 10 days or so. This was a Kickstarter reward, but that particular section of the story was chosen deliberately. He didn’t want to drag that part out in realtime. Because of the latest art upgrade, the fastest he can draw a strip is about 3 days, so this is the counterpart of that.
There hasn’t been a strip yet this week, so it looks like the twice/week rate is no longer holding. That would argue for #2 and against #1.
Well, there’s a workaround for that inside Redcloak’s head. A ritual that moves the gate AND the rift. And since the ritual has both a Divine and an Arcane half, if the MITD is a god, it could be constantly embodying the ritual.
That wasn’t my reading of what RC says in SoD. A gate/rift can be released from the prime material plane and shifted to another plane. But not to move around within a single plane. Admittedly, he really doesn’t address the latter, but that’s because the Plan doesn’t call for doing that.
I don’t think we’ve ever seen that gates are necessarily stationary–just that the others are. Is there anything that indicates that this is a requirement for them?
The fact that you require a complex ritual with two types of magic to move them.
Plus the original heroes decided to each take the gate closest to their homeland and then retire near the gate to see to its defense by building some sort of fortress or stronghold around it. This would strongly suggest that the gates are static and immovable things without special magic like Redcloak’s.
I suppose the counterpoint to this would be that Soon’s gate would have had to very conveniently manifest itself in Azure City.
It wasn’t perfectly convenient, though. The rift wasn’t near ground level, but rather well above it. They had to build a big citadel up to it so that they could place the throne in the exact right place that the rift/gate was at its top.
True. For that matter, it could have even been outside the city proper at that time and the city expanded around the castle they built. In any event, I think the events in the story heavily imply that the gates aren’t moveable absent significant magic for that purpose.
It looks like it’s above the city, inside the walls. Hard to tell perspective from a small crayon drawing, but that is how it appears.