[Sinisdar Toste]

 worrywort, on 26 October 2011 - 03:06 AM, said:

My question is, where are all the T'lan Imass children? There's potentially another dark secret they have going, right?

wow, no shit. i've never thought about that. did they knife them all the night before the ritual? did the children 'fail' first, because they weren't prepared for it?

holy crap.

[tiam]

A couple of theories

They might not have survived the Ritual themselves. It may have been to harsh for them.

They might not have been involved in the Ritual actually though I find it difficult to understand what they did with them. Its possible that the Imass that undertook the Ritual, those who led the hunt across the ice that was raised, left there children behind with elders of the tribe. At the same time I do remember that it was the Ritual that stopped the Imass being extinct. However this abandonment seems unlikely given that the Ay were included to stop them starving.

From a sequence of events though it seems plausible that there were no Imass children, atleast joined in the Ritual. The Imass hunted the Jaghut across the ice, ice that was raised in defence by the Jaghut. A consequence of that ice, coupled with the over hunting mentioned numerous times that led to the Ay being included, was starvation for the Imass. They could not survive on the ice and its likely that there children were the first to die given the severity of the conditions. I do remember somewhere that starvation threatened all the peoples of the Imass, as it did with the Ay. A cause for the Ritual itself was to stop the Imass race becoming extinct (though we know this to be untrue given the Imass and the Second Ritual) so its likely that there wasnt any children.

Im going to reword this later as its poorly worded but you can see what im getting at.

[worry]

Yah, both those theories make sense and are plausible. It's just a question that goes essentially unspoken in the books, and may indeed be linked to their hatred of the Jaghut.