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polishgenius, on 02 October 2017 - 06:20 PM, said:
Spoiler
Puck may be onto something with the 'the stated origins of humanity aren't the only ones' theory, but I don't ever recall a mention of any kind of human presence in FoD, beyond that High King mention, and tbh throughout the series there has so far as I've reread been no serious evidence that the Onrack/Kilava story isn't the true one, or at least that humanity existed in any form before the Ritual of Tellann.
Wall of text incoming, beware...
Spoiler
Aaactually, there are mentions of humans pre-Tellann Ritual, though they come rather late, hance my comment about DoD/tCG. Since you're doing a reread anyway you can just see if you find the mentions, but it's stated that humans and Imass co-existed on Lether prior to the ritual and in fact, humans hunted the Imass almost to extinction and would have finished the job had the Ritual not changed things:
Emphasis added by me. I think an important lesson FoD teaches us is that many things we had taken as fact in the MBotF were actually only meant figuratively, things like familial relationships among Ascendants/Gods and, in fact, those between races. In that line of though, humans are in theory the children of Kilava and thus the Imass, but they are not in fact, which makes sense because I've always wondered how Kilava was supposed to kickstart the human race on her own. It makes no sense in a work written by an anthropologist.
Here's another bit confirming the simultaneous existence of humans and Imass:
Of course, one could argue that Olar Ethil is not trustworthy, but what she says there is echoed by several T'lan Imass from those who were on Lether when the Ritual happened and thus from the group Tool does not recognize, and which doesn't even share a langue with the T'lan Imass Tool has been aware of, meaning they developed parallel and differently to the ones Tool knew about. The Imass co-existed with and fought different races depending on their geolocation: Jaghut, K'Chain Che'Malle and also humans.
There's another thing that I find interesting regarding Kallor's statement about the Imass being young/children when he ruled his empire. Consider the nature of the Imass. Onrack in particular is described as very childlike, natural and raw when he returns to flesh in RG, and the same can be said of all the Imass we encounter in their flesh, like those in the Refugium. They as a race don't seem to have changed much over the ages up until the point of the Ritual, which leand me to think that they may as well have existed - parallel to humans elsewhere - for hundreds of thousands of years and still seemed young and childlike to an outsider. Kallor doesn't show much understanding of these things, so he may have been just going off what it looked like to him.
I also don't want to spoil anything from FoL, however small, but the fact that there are freaking
in there leands me to suspect that it's not entirely impossible for the mentioned High King to be Kallor and Kallor to be human. An early human, but human nonetheless.
Aaactually, there are mentions of humans pre-Tellann Ritual, though they come rather late, hance my comment about DoD/tCG. Since you're doing a reread anyway you can just see if you find the mentions, but it's stated that humans and Imass co-existed on Lether prior to the ritual and in fact, humans hunted the Imass almost to extinction and would have finished the job had the Ritual not changed things:
Quote
The children of the Imass, who were not children at all, but inheritors nevertheless, had flooded the world with the taste of Imass blood on their tongues. Just one more quarry hunted into oblivion, with nothing more than a vague unease lodged deep inside, the mark of sin, the horror of a first crime.
[DoD, Bantam HC, p. 483]
[DoD, Bantam HC, p. 483]
Emphasis added by me. I think an important lesson FoD teaches us is that many things we had taken as fact in the MBotF were actually only meant figuratively, things like familial relationships among Ascendants/Gods and, in fact, those between races. In that line of though, humans are in theory the children of Kilava and thus the Imass, but they are not in fact, which makes sense because I've always wondered how Kilava was supposed to kickstart the human race on her own. It makes no sense in a work written by an anthropologist.
Here's another bit confirming the simultaneous existence of humans and Imass:
Quote
[Olar Ethil] '[…] There were thousands of my people who did not join the Ritual of Tellann — what happened to them? Why, you did. No matter where they hid, you found them. Oh, on rare occasions there was breeding, a fell admixture of blood, but most of the time such meetings ended in slaughter. You saw in our faces the strange and the familiar — which of the two frightened you the most? When you cut us down, when you carved the meat from our bones?'
[DoD, Bantam HC, p. 489]
[DoD, Bantam HC, p. 489]
Of course, one could argue that Olar Ethil is not trustworthy, but what she says there is echoed by several T'lan Imass from those who were on Lether when the Ritual happened and thus from the group Tool does not recognize, and which doesn't even share a langue with the T'lan Imass Tool has been aware of, meaning they developed parallel and differently to the ones Tool knew about. The Imass co-existed with and fought different races depending on their geolocation: Jaghut, K'Chain Che'Malle and also humans.
There's another thing that I find interesting regarding Kallor's statement about the Imass being young/children when he ruled his empire. Consider the nature of the Imass. Onrack in particular is described as very childlike, natural and raw when he returns to flesh in RG, and the same can be said of all the Imass we encounter in their flesh, like those in the Refugium. They as a race don't seem to have changed much over the ages up until the point of the Ritual, which leand me to think that they may as well have existed - parallel to humans elsewhere - for hundreds of thousands of years and still seemed young and childlike to an outsider. Kallor doesn't show much understanding of these things, so he may have been just going off what it looked like to him.
I also don't want to spoil anything from FoL, however small, but the fact that there are freaking
Spoiler
Napans, as well as Toblakai existing alongside Thel Akai
in there leands me to suspect that it's not entirely impossible for the mentioned High King to be Kallor and Kallor to be human. An early human, but human nonetheless.
This post has been edited by Puck: 02 October 2017 - 07:56 PM
