HFQ Official Snippet #5

n7axw wrote:
In terms of providing food for thought and speculation, I think this is the best snippet yet...

Don

I agree. This snippet wasn't up when I retired last night and we're already to the bottom of page four this morning. There is a lot of wonderful info in this one and plenty of grist for additional speculation.

Thanks rfc!

Ramhawkfan wrote:I think it was around 70 years,, could be faulty memory though.

Pretty sure that was the Day of Creation.

n7axw wrote:So we have several things going on here. We have a seijin who comes to question orthodoxy to the extent of doubting that the Rakurai strike on Alexandria means that Shan-wei is a fallen angel. He goes to Zion and dies there with the strong implication that he was murdered. We discover seijins on both sides of the War against the Fallen. The Order founded to care for the tomb and protect Khody's memory is murdered in their abby after refusing a decree to disband...except for a small group who is moved along with the tomb and duplicate records to a secret location. Finally you have the sisters as individuals remaining part of the church but as a group separate from it.

In terms of providing food for thought and speculation, I think this is the best snippet yet...

Don

Indeed. There is also the interesting point that the Archangels 'left' years before the minor Angels gradually died out. I had assumed that they had been among the last to go.

This was in the period immediately after the Fallen’s final defeat, you understand, after Schueler and Cihiro had departed in victory — the period in which I think the remaining Angels were waiting for the last Adams and Eves to die before purging The Testimonies

It could be that they did really 'ascend' to the Dawn Star in a blaze of glory OR that the remaining Angels claimed that they did to provide backing for themelves, fudging up some sort of highly visible event - maybe S & C had been mortally wounded in those final days, OR....

If Kohdy had a NEAT,
and if it was possible to extract anything from it,
then whoever killed him would have done the extracting, and then removed the NEAT.

HTM, who has not yet read pages 4 & 5.
I beg pardon if this duplicates something there.

Joat42 wrote:I just had a thought.

If the remains of Kohdy still exists, do you think it's possible to extract information from his NEAT?

A most interesting way of writing-

She approaches Merlin- They have their long conversation. Merlin reports to his own "inner circle". Then the whole of it is played back to us- mostly in first person narrative- via Merlin's memory.

Why not just have the conversation?
Not that I object to the writing style- It's just a very interesting way of going about it.

Archangels being, well, angels, can't really die of course, whatever happens to their visible body, they just 'depart' to be with God once more.

Not at all surprising that the minor angels, being junior members of the Crew, no doubt, were younger than the Archangels and so lasted longer on Safehold.

dwileye13 wrote:

DrakBibliophile wrote:Quote

This was in the period immediately after the Fallen’s final defeat, you understand, after Schueler and Cihiro had departed in victory

End Quote

Interesting phrase, does "departing in victory" means that Schueler & Cihiro had died or does it mean that they left Safehold in the Hamilcar?

IMO the millenial return could be the Hamilcar. A relativistic trip to bring the Archangels back alive and with a ship. Uh Oh

I seem to recall in OAR that one of the major political fights between Langhorne and Shan-wei was the destruction of Hamilcar which was the last remaining hyper capable vessel they had. Indeed, the original plan called for retaining 2-3 ships that were supposed to be hidden in the Kau-zhi System's asteroid belt - "...Assuming we could convince Langhorne, or at least a majority of the Administrative Council, to go along with us, we would also place two or three of the expedition's ships in completely powered-down orbits somewhere in our destination star system, where they'd be only a handful of additional asteroids without any active emissions, impossible to detect or differentiate from any other hunk of rock without direct physical examination, but available for recovery once indigenous spaceflight was redeveloped. They would serve as an enormous bootstrap for technological advancement, and they'd also provide a yardstick by which to evaluate the relative capabilities of later, further developments... That was essentially what the original mission plan for Operation Ark called for, and if Halversen had been in command, it's what would have been done." -- OAR

tootall wrote:A most interesting way of writing-

She approaches Merlin- They have their long conversation. Merlin reports to his own "inner circle". Then the whole of it is played back to us- mostly in first person narrative- via Merlin's memory.

Why not just have the conversation?
Not that I object to the writing style- It's just a very interesting way of going about it.

To keep the readers in suspense and torture them a little bit longer

Randomiser wrote:Archangels being, well, angels, can't really die of course, whatever happens to their visible body, they just 'depart' to be with God once more.

It was just the phrase 'depart in victory' which caught my eye. Seems to imply something more spectacular than not being there any more. Unlike Langhorne and Bedard whose 'bodies' were destroyed, so not available to 'go up in glory'!

Randomiser wrote:Not at all surprising that the minor angels, being junior members of the Crew, no doubt, were younger than the Archangels and so lasted longer on Safehold.

True

DrakBibliophile wrote:Quote

This was in the period immediately after the Fallen’s final defeat, you understand, after Schueler and Cihiro had departed in victory

End Quote

Interesting phrase, does "departing in victory" means that Schueler & Cihiro had died or does it mean that they left Safehold in the Hamilcar?

For that matter, did anyone see them leave?

The Schueler of Writ doesn't match the one we've seen a recording of. What if a lesser angel wanted a promotion? What if only they knew what Langhorn would have wanted?

Edited for spelling