First off i have to thank you, i just finished my first read through DOD and i was confused as shit all the way to the end including how Icarium had gone all the way up to getting ampelas-rooted or whatever working and flying. finding and reading this thread just made my second read through that book, that i am just about to start before i start TCG, much easier because this was the one story i had trouble with, and kind of the snake i'm confused about. However now that i look at it after reading this, and finishing the book which helped considerably,(EDIT: I understood all the characters were dead already, and i pieced together who most of them were, Rautos, and Taxilian due to my reading system i remembered quite well, and i did figure that breath was FW) i have to consider that the 'ghosts' inside iccarium however real they might once have been, are actually the aspects of himself. Taxilian for example seems to be that sense of his old former intelligence, when they found the sky keep he was the one who said something along the lines of "You can look up to the skys and heavens and not find a hole, the entrance were looking for is beneath the ground. Then the 'Stronger' two personality's took over to dig out that hole. Looking back..... several couple of his books there was a secene where Iccarium had almost been brained by a mountain goat which mappo was cooking while Karsa Orlong first met Iccarium, and Mappo had suggested that Iccarium in his mindless forbearance just kept throwing boulders and moving impossible weights so he could see a relic he remembered being buried beneath where the landslide was. The woman, Rauto's wife appears to be his insecurity's as well.
Edit: I have a strange reading system where when i get the new book in the series the last book i read had to have been the previous one before it (Ie: to read 10 i have to read 9 first), After i get a new book in the series, i read it twice, and then the entire series from book 1 over again until the next book comes out. This worked great for me for the better part of 6 years, until books 8, 9, 10 came out ahead of the points where i could continue my system. At this point i am in a dilemma, about to get 10th book for Christmas, and i'm only going to have time to read 9th for a second time (Having took 7 months to read the other 8 damn books) so i'm not sure its been far enough for me to read the entire series through one more time before i start the 10th? What do you guys think?
This post has been edited by SkornClaw: 18 December 2011 - 10:37 PM