[I HATE PORMQUAL]

i never thought doing a re-read would end up giving me more questions than answers.

but this... "Uber Elder" warren Starvald Demelain keeps popping up during GOTM (my current re-read). Tool says to the Adjunct that its the warren of dragons. but that got me thinking, in HOC lostara and pearl find a chained skeleton (but still very much alive) of a dragon strapped to the ceiling while travelling the Imperial warren.

is the Imperial warren derived from starvald demelain? or is it like K'rul with warrens flowing from him? is starvald Demelain K'rul's warren?

Edit: i just read the prologue to MT and it seems to deal alot with dragons so perhaps my questions are answered there.
i also went looking in HOC for the passage and for the character who goes and speaks with his father (also a dragon) but i cant find it and i've forgotten their names. can anyone jolt my memory?

[Dolorous Menhir]

I HATE PORMQUAL;117095 said:

is the Imperial warren derived from starvald demelain? or is it like K'rul with warrens flowing from him? is starvald Demelain K'rul's warren?

Starvald Demelain and Kurald Galain are the beating chambers of K'rul's heart. If you want to call it "his warren" then you can.

There are two apparent origins of the Imperial Warren:

a) K'rul created it to hold the devastated surface of Jacuruku. It had no prior existence. (MoI prologue)

It is the racial warren of the KCCM/KCNR (BH).

The truth is probably somewhere between those two, but neither has anything to do with Starvald Demelain (except insofar that all warrens can be said to derive from the first warren).

We see dragons trapped in Shadow too. This does not mean that Shadow is directly derived from Starvald Demelain.

Quote

i also went looking in HOC for the passage and for the character who goes and speaks with his father (also a dragon) but i cant find it and i've forgotten their names. can anyone jolt my memory?

I think you are talking about L'oric and his father, Osric. But only Osric is an Eleint, L'oric does not appear to be. They speak, I think, two times in the book. Once somewhere in the middle (not very helpful) and quite briefly at the end.

[I HATE PORMQUAL]

ahhhhhh, that was his name. cheers man.

so if they are these "chambers" and Kurald Galain is one of them and its darkness by powers of deduction Starvald Demalain could be light and then the Tiste Liosan warren?

lol ,so clever

[Aptorian]

No Starvald Demalain has nothing to do with Light... that we know of. It is "The Dragon Hold" if you want. It is Tiamat or Tiam, the Matron of the Dragons, realm. It's a place people that are eleint can tap into. It seems to be outside the rest of the holds influences. Certainly older than the Elder gods and probably also the other creations of Mother Dark.

Some theorize that along with Darkness it is the realm closest to chaos, SD being extremely old. We don't really have any information on what goes on in SD other than Dragons live their. Is there a thousand million dragons in there or just a dozen? Is Tiam in there or what rules this realm? Does SD lead to other relams or is it solely connected to Wu... the questions go on and on.

[timmbuktwo]

so is mother dark a dragon? (as in pure, not shapeshifting?) i cant figure out if mother dark was the "mother" of the three offsprings, dark ,light,shadow, ,does that mean she was before starvald demelain was created, or maybe is tiam "mother dark"?
and if they're not the same, since i beleive krul said before MD created the others there was only dark, did all dragons exist in the "dark"?or did the dragons come after mother dark's other offsprings?

[Dolorous Menhir]

I don't think Mother Dark is a Dragon - Tiam is the Mother of all Dragons. It's an open question over the relationship between Tiam & MD, though I don't think they are the same individual. Tiam is repeatedly referred to as dead, and appears to be a real physical being - frequent sexual encounters - neither of these descriptions agree with my perception of MD.

The Edur legend that Fear & Binadas told Trull in the Stone Bowl in MT strongly implied that Mother Dark was a black hole.

As for "what came first?" between

Mother Dark
Tiam
The Dragon Race
The Tiste Andii
Starvald Demelain, the First Warren

we just don't know.

[SiriusL]

I think this is the point in the history where it's tough interpret things literally. Yes, the TA refer to Mother Dark as a real person, and KG and SD are the chambers of K'rul's heart, but it's probably more metaphorical than that.

SE seems to be taking the idea of mythology and extending it, so that some myths are literally real (gods exist, walk the world, people know them personally), but some remain abstract (chaos chasing after KG inside a sword just doesn't make a whole lot of literal, physical sense, nor does the idea of Burn being the world).

Some people would say that all myths are abstractions, and that they serve to interpret metaphysical, transcendant reality for our limited minds. I think that's why it gets really hard to pin down things like K'rul's veins, Mother Dark, etc. SE is acknowledging the human tendency to take an abstraction and try to make it physically real.

That's just my two cents. Of course, it could be that, because I can't figure all this stuff out, I just want to write it off as metaphor to protect my ego. :outta:

[Abyss]

...but since HoC is post MoI, i'm comfortable in pointing out that the "first warren" does not necessarily equal 'the first source of magic/power/sorcery/whatever'.

- Abyss, early forum drive-by poster.

[Abyss]

...which brings us to the ever contentious 'what came first, the chicken or the warren full of fire-breathing-super-intelligent-lizards' topic, but chances are Tool's comment is limited to the actual warrens and not the broader categories discussed in later books i can't raise here. But in MoI Paran did, in his wandering thru the Finnest House, come upon the pre-warren/deck tiles that suggested a wandering.

- Abyss, likes his lizards scrambled.

[Abyss]

Unfortunately it's hard to really carry on this discussion without treading into spoilers for later books. Do you want to flip this to the RG forum?

- Abyss, knows with great spoilers comes great responsibility.