[Underwaterbob]

It's implied that they're somewhere that's very hard to get in and out of. Someone (an elder god?) says that it even took the blood of a dragon (which one?) to open the gate that they did. I can't think of anywhere else as unaccessible. (except maybe wherever the Cripple God is from!??!) Were they sent there by the Che'malle or some other power sometime during their civil wars? How were they sent there?

Are the K'chain somehow responsible for having locked up so many dragons? Does their reverence for/similarity to dragons (the source of all magic... maybe) have something to do with their achievements with technology (which is kind of the antithesis of magic)? Are there bigger things going on here? Am I whacked in the head?

[Silencer]

I'd suggest that the reference to the difficulty of opening the gate was due to it's size, not where it was from.

See in the Bonehunters, where to open a gate wide enough for a mere 3 ships to pass at the same time, required years of preparation, and Quick Ben's power, too. Compare that with a gate which devours the horizon, and allows several mountain-sized objects to pass through...the difficulty of such a task would be immense, require huge reserves of power that, to be quite honest, the Nah'ruk probably don't have, given that K'chain Che'malle tend to have a Matron as the focus of their power, and the Nah'ruk are severed from the Matrons...

Also in the Bonehunters, we see the Nah'ruk skykeeps floating around in the Imperial Warren, so I'd suspect that to be the location they came from.

And Sorritt is one potential answer to your question, 'which dragon'.

[iRFNA]

Ya, the location and timing of the nah'ruk appearance seems to check out pretty well with sorrit. The real question is what took them so long, considering they were travelling not only by warren but also by hightech skykeep. Did they just get wasted for a year in celebration and do donuts in the imperial warren?

As for where they came from, one clue is in the blackwood that sorrit is crucified on. Perhaps they were trapped in a particularly isolated fragment of kurald emurlahn. Or ST and cotillion thought it'd be funny to give them a gate.

[Illuyankas]

When they're seen in the Imperial Warren back in TBH, they appear to have entered it from Chaos. Why they came from Chaos or how they got there, I have no idea about.

[Midnight]

The size (rather than the nature) of the gate makes sense in terms of the power needed.

Quote

the Nah'ruk probably don't have, given that K'chain Che'malle tend to have a Matron as the focus of their power, and the Nah'ruk are severed from the Matrons..."

It seems likely that the Nah'ruk are indeed severed from the power of hte matron's but if so how do they breed without one? Stormy/Gesler mentions that they breed like rabbits....could they have evolved to no longer require a matron?

This post has been edited by Midnight: 18 February 2010 - 06:06 AM

[Underwaterbob]

Righty-oh. Completely forgot about seeing them in the Imperial Warren back in tBH. And Sorrit does fit for which dragon, with the implication that it was someone other than the Nah'ruk themselves who opened the gate: it seems unlikely that they are responsible for the crucifixion given the circumstances. The continent they appear on, and the blackwood cross would seem to suggest the Edur (and thus the Crippled God who was running their show for some time) are responsible.

[Aptorian]

 Midnight, on 18 February 2010 - 06:05 AM, said:

It seems likely that the Nah'ruk are indeed severed from the power of hte matron's but if so how do they breed without one? Stormy/Gesler mentions that they breed like rabbits....could they have evolved to no longer require a matron?

The Nahruk are older than the Matrons. Most likely they never needed Matrons and they procreated the normal way before the second generation of KCCM came about.

As for where they came from, I remain convinced that they came from the moon and the ones we saw in the Imperial Warren were Lizards that evacuated before the statue hit.

[Silencer]

One problem, Apt - the Nah'ruk didn't predate the Matrons entirely. The Nah'ruk/Che'malle civil war that occurred was after the Matrons tried to start producing Nah'ruk again, after centuries of evolution.

As for the Moon...possibly, but that would imply that they either don't need, or can create, oxygen/an atmosphere.

[Aptorian]

 Silencer, on 18 February 2010 - 08:08 AM, said:

One problem, Apt - the Nah'ruk didn't predate the Matrons entirely. The Nah'ruk/Che'malle civil war that occurred was after the Matrons tried to start producing Nah'ruk again, after centuries of evolution.

I can't remember the quote any longer, I assume we're both referring to the Kallor passage in MoI, but I got the impression that the Nah'ruk came first and the Matrons system was something that adapted afterwards.

 Silencer, on 18 February 2010 - 08:08 AM, said:

As for the Moon...possibly, but that would imply that they either don't need, or can create, oxygen/an atmosphere.

You're assuming that the Malazan Moon is like ours? After all, there's said to be gardens up there.

[Silencer]

I'd be fairly confidant in saying that the 'gardens' are rather like the 'face' some people see in our moon - a construct based off lack of knowledge.

We probably are, but I think it said that the Nah'ruk were from an older time - the Matrons brought them back, sought to control them, and failed. Have to look it up, I suppose. XD

[Hetan]

It is quite clear in BH that Sorrit was killed by the Edur, that the fragment of Shadow containing the cruciform had wandered and became trapped within the sky-keep, which in turn was caught in Ganath's ice ritual. However there are other dragons out there - dust of dreams prologue shows us this.

As for the Nah'ruk - they are more primitive than the Che'malle so one presumes they were the fore-runners and the Che'Malle came later, died out, but then the Matron resurrected the species to carry out her war.

Oh yes and there is of course more than one moon The Ceda mentions four of them.

[Silencer]

Cheat!