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damien-mckinley a t ofb nEt
Other Damar stories are "The Healer" and "The Stagman" from The Knot in the Grain, possibly the two stories after those, and "The Stone Fey" in Imaginary Lands. Deerskin mentions Aerin and Maur but is not otherwise connected. I don't know about Beauty; odd animal names might connect it, but not much else.
{I have an idea Spindle's End may have mentioned the Damarian names as well, but I'm not certain.}
Luthe in _Blue Sword_ does give the impression that Aerin is absent or dead. But she's certainly active somehow; perhaps she and Luthe just had a falling out. "Damnit! I can't stand a man who never leaves his valley!" "I was more mature at 20 than you'll ever be!"
"Huff. Everyone's going on about our magic, living in awe and fear of us, calling us demons. Of course we have kelar; you try living in these damn mountains without it. Half the time there's nothing to eat but your own spells. And that goes to explain our funny looks, too. You think alcohol's bad for developing infants, try raising them on kelar. There's a reason the stuff doesn't develop until puberty.
So we keep on invading Damar. Our stupid ancestors decided to colonize the roof of the world; can you blame us if we want out? Not that we've had much luck. If I go down there to trade the peasants will scream and call me 'demon' just because I've got three eyes (two of them blind), a cock's comb, and more joints than I know what to do with. And a horse with sharp teeth. Stupid horse. Damn animals have a tenuous enough grasp on reality without making them carnivorous. So we invade. Only the damn Crown turns us, or that damn blue sword. I'd like to know what her problem is. Stupid Damarians don't even use her more than twice in 500 hundred years. If she wants a chick with kelar we can provide, but no, she has to go around helping demonphobic people drop mountains on us. I never got to meet either of my granddaddies because of her. It's a tough life when even a sword hates you.
So, will I get to see a copy of this Weekly World News of yours?"
{I still love this piece of mine. The slander of horses comes from Pratchett's Lords and Ladies.}
{The mailing list re-read Sword together, at which point it was pointed out that Corlath in fact does mention priests, although I forget how. They still don't have a big role, though.}
Hero does have gods, but they don't seem to matter. There are priests, who officiate at all the rituals and determine who gets to be the heir. There's mention of the Seven Perfect Gods, and Aerin mentions the God Who Isn't There. Oh, and Aerinha. But we never see anyone pray to them, or worry about them, or hope for aid against the Northerners from them, or take them all that seriously. There's Aerin's private god-name just mentioned and her own thoughts about being "The God that Climbs". Aerinha is mentioned very early on -- and never again after that; if you expected her to be revered like Aerin in Sword, tough. (Although if my theories are correct, that wouldn't have been effective anyway: Aerin's still alive in Harry's time; Aerinha was actually her mother, and dead shortly after her birth.) And as for the ceremonies, they seem to have more social than religious significance to the royals, like atheists or agnostics having their weddings in a church and being concerned that the wedding go right, without valuing the priests as more than necessary props.
And there's no clue to an afterlife, a major component of most religions. Luthe says he almost thought Aerin was a ghost, so ghosts might be real, and there's disagreement on whether Aerin is alive and corporeal in Harry's time; but there's no mention of what, if anything, Damarians think happens to them when they die. The impression is that they just die, but some (like Maur) are more tenacious.
On the other hand, the master mages seem like good standins for gods, at least in power. Agsded, who can play "demons" like puppets, makes a good devil, and Luthe sounds like the name of a light-god. If you heard the story from two removes and the words describing various relationships were changed you could easily buy that they were gods.
And as far as Luthe is concerned, they're almost beneath contempt. Presumably none of them holds a candle to Sahath from "The Healer", a true mage who taught his pupils words to burn the ocean and crack the earth asunder, yet who considers Luthe's power beyond his own comprehension. (Interesting chain: Goriolo to Luthe to Sahath to others.) Luthe is at least 2000 years old, and probably older. Agsded is to Maur as Maur is to vermin-drakes; he can also cause (presumably kelar-rich) Northern generals to do things without them noticing that their ideas aren't entirely their own. Agsded's tower has some odd relationship with time, to the order of centuries. Luthe rescues Aerin from those centuries. Agsded's death apparently wipes out the surka.
Maur's skull flattens and desertifies at least several square miles. Gonturan, Harry, Corlath, and perhaps Aerin relocate a mountain range. I guess I haven't actually come up with a point in all this yet, except to make sure that people go "wow".
What I said on the Discussion site one time. Aerin did get married, as is the standard happy ending for fairy tales (although finding two loves, one of them at least a hundred times older than she is, is different.) Jame is nowhere near such a state, but the Kencyr series isn't moving quickly towards any ending (or at all.) Aerin's uncle didn't try to marry her; on the other hand, the attempt (well, the first one) probably wouldn't be counted against Gerridon, as it was expected that he marry his sister. He's done worse than rape or incest, at any rate. Aerin has way more pets. Jame has way more power, and more powerful items. One does not necessarily envy her in this. They both had less than happy childhoods, but in different ways. And the way Jame experiments on poor Gorgo and Aerin re-invents chemical engineering is really amusing. (I.e. the systematic experimentation they both do; delightful for a scientist type like me, but unexpected in the genre.)