Understanding the final confrontation in To Green Angel Tower [Spoilers MST]

So, I just finished To Green Angel Tower, and it was great! I really loved the series. It's a bummer there don't seem to be more active places to talk about it, especially with its at once very obvious and complicated relationship with A Song of Ice and Fire. If there are other enthusiasts out there, I'd love to talk about it!

The first thing that comes to mind is the final confrontation in the tower. I'm not 100% sure I knew exactly what happened. I had the feeling of it being a tiny bit disappointing - an overly simple solution to a really complex and desperate problem. But I also wonder if, reading into it, there is more to it than what there seems to be, because for as simple as it was, it was still really complicated.

Also if he goes into it and recontextualizes what happened in The Witchwood Crown or somesuch, please let me know, but I guess don't spoil that yet? Maybe?

Anyway, here's my sense for what happened. Correct me if I'm wrong:

• Ineluki and Utuk'ku have been using the Breathing Harp in Stormspike - a Master Witness - to access the Dream Road and the general realm of mind and spirit beyond the material world.
• They have been using this to spread visions, prophesies, and false promises to convince the living to help complete the ritual to bring back Ineluki. Utuk'ku has been planning this and laying groundwork for hundreds or thousands of years.
• Pyrates is suckered in by a promise to be first among mortals and have heretofore untold knowledge. (AND HE GETS A ONE-LINER WORTH OF COMMANDO INSTEAD)
• Miriamele thinks Elias has been suckered in by promises that he will be reunited with his dead wife, but Elias actually seems to be more interested in power and immortality than his daughter thinks he is.
• The swords themselves have to be suckered in and would not just participate willingly. So the plan involves having each sword be discovered by a man who is well-suited to wield it, and who is wielding it at least an imitation of its devoted purpose.
  • Thorn is a sword of imperial glory. It goes with Simon because he fights a dragon with it and the sword wants to fight a dragon. Then Thorn goes with Caramis because it is an imperial sword of Nabban and wants to be held in battle by the rightful Imperator of Nabban who is also a great knight.
  • Bright-Nail is a sword of righteousness, specifically for Aedonites (Christians). It refuses to go with Elias and burns him, presumably because he is godless and not righteous. It goes with blind Guthwulf, presumably because Guthwulf is a Usires/Christ figure who is suffering in the underworld looking to be reborn, and he uses it in the Christ re-enactment to free Simon from his crucifixion the Wheel - he dies and Simon is resurrected. Bright-Nail is down with all of this, and it's down with Simon carrying it to save the world in righteousness.
  • Sorrow is a sword of grief and loss. It goes with Elias because Elias is crushed by the death of his wife and what he sees as the betrayal and implied infidelity of his brother. Elias's sense of loss, betrayal and abandonment is similar to Ineluki's, and Elias is looking to achieve what Ineluki wants, so Sorrow is down with that.
• Team good-guys has to be convinced to go get the two remaining swords and bring them to Green Angel Tower for the ritual. So the mad prophet Nisse has been influenced through the Master Witness, and perhaps through the time travel aspect of the ritual, or just by the horrendous presence of Ineluki as a malevolent spirit, to write down a prophesy in the past that the heroes read in the present.
• Part of the ritual involves building the five "houses" to coincide with the arrival of the Conqueror's Star - this is just classic astrological stuff. As the "houses" are built, the members of the Red Hand materialize into the world.
• The Fire Dancers exist for three reasons:
• The way the Art works, religious faith is able to ward against various sorts of magical things, and priests of Aedon and the High King of Osten Ard as a religious figure have been warding important places for a long time to prevent the Sithi from using them generally, which in turn, unbeknownst to them, has been preventing Utuk'ku from doing stuff. So the Fire Dancers need to attack and destroy the religious faith of Aedonites in order to create psychospiritual room for other sorts of realities to emerge in the material realm.
• The rituals requires a great deal of human sacrifice, and the Fire Dancers round up people to ritualistically kill them.
• War and chaos in general (including the ghants, the kelpie, the fire dancers, the war in Rimmersgard, Josua's war, all of it) will prevent the good guys from recognizing they are being played and do the one thing that would actually pose a threat to Utuk'ku, which is to talk to the Tinukeda'ya (either the Dwarrows or the Niskies) The Tinukeda'ya would be able to figure out what the plan is and stop it, as they understand the Words of Making and Unmaking, and humanity does not.
• <INSERT DISCUSSION OF THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON CAMARIS THAT KILLS GELOE, WHICH IS A WHOLE OTHER TOPIC>
• So, once the Houses start to get set up in earnest, the psychospiritual space in the Dream Road and beyond gets really polluted with tons of evil, and people who are sensitive to it are assaulted by it pretty much all the time. Once the various folks have the swords and we're close to the end game, they feel an inexorable pull to attend the ritual, even if they know it is bad.
• In the final stroke before the ritual, Utuk'ku defeats Jiriki and Friends and the power of the First Hokage at the pool in the basement, which gives them the power of that Master Witness and gets things going.

Okay, so, to get to the actual ritual:

• Elias has been prepared as a vessel for Ineluki without his knowledge - Pyrates has been taking dragon bones from the Dragonbone Chair and boiling them into a potion, telling Elias it will heal him, but really it is gradually changing his physiology into a sort of demonic, infernal Sithi, fit for Ineluki's possession. Dragon's blood appears to have transformative powers and attune people to the psychospiritual world.
• Pyrates is also planning to double-cross Ineluki and has planned to use the Words of Changing at the last minute to bind Ineluki to his will.
• The three dudes with the three swords stand in their little circle and touch blades, and the ritual releases the pent-up energy of the Words of Making, which is a sort of counterbalancing tension to reality's tendency to revert to the mean even when influenced by the Art.
• The idea is for the energy of the swords to be released by Words of Unmaking, and they kind of snap like rubber bands, creating a bubble of unreality and sending Green Angel Tower back in time to a time before it was warded against the return of Ineluki by the Aedonite priests.
• This all happens. Nobody does anything to stop it. The swords release their energy, Elias becomes possesed by Ineluki, and Pyrates springs the trap to seize control of Ineluki.

At this point, things get a little confusing, but my sense is a few things happen in succession.

1. While coming into the material world, Ineluki becomes vulnerable because he enters a mortal body.
2. Pyrates's attempt to control Ineluki fails, and Elias-Ineluki kills him by boiling his face with his hand.
3. Simon comes to understand Ineluki, and lets go of his hate for him, which weakens the ritual in some way and turns Bright-Nail to dust.
4. Miriamele, released from magical constraints by the death of Pyrates, puts on her backwards baseball cap, turns her bow and arrow sideways and shoots Elias-Ineluki gangster-style with Jiriki's White Arrow.
5. The white arrow has an arrowhead made out of a psychospiritually active material (it's said to be similar to the witnesses, and the mirror are said to be scales of the wurm or whatever, so maybe it has a dragonscale-tipped point, which is a sort of psychic resonator designed to summon help in a time of need? Maybe?). The arrow critically injured Elias-Ineluki both physically and spiritually, killing him.
6. This then causes "everything to be okay" in a rather straightforward and friendly cascasde. The tower collapses and Cadrach has to offer his noble sacrifice. The ward is released and the tower goes back to normal time. The Red Hand and the other houses... go away? Utuk'ku and the few remaining Norns go home to feel sorry about themselves for losing again.
7. And then we go to the denouement with the kingdom and the marriage and all that.

Okay, so, did I get it? Is this what happens? Or am I missing something here?

I do have a few questions about all this:

- What's the deal with the Sithi and Unbeing? There seems to be a sense that what Utuk'ku really wants is an end to the material universe so she doesn't have to be alive anymore, but nobody outlives her. I was kind of surprised that Ineluki's plan seemed to be to resurrect himself, rather than to destroy all of existence. Or am I reading that wrong?

- What happened to the Red Hand and all the other Houses?

- What was the deal with the First Tree and why didn't Utuk'ku kill all the Sithi?

- Did Ineluki really just die because he was shot?

- Did this seem like an 80s fantasy movie climax to anybody else? Complete with lightning effects and stop motion animated monsters?

- Simon seems to at least take some credit for having accomplished something constructive through all these adventures that helped out and won the day. Why does he think this? It seems like at the end of the day, he barely does anything, and most of what he did ended up just making things worse (and it's arguable that the real ending/triumph in the story that brings everything full circle isn't the death of Ineluki, but his reunion with Rachel the Dragon anyway). He seems correct to believe that Miriamele deserves the credit, but even that seems like dumb luck based on how screwed everybody was. Is this a case where Simon starts to begin to believe the lie that he was a hero, in the same way Prester John did?

Thanks for reading!

Submitted November 29, 2018 at 10:34PM by GyantSpyder https://ift.tt/2FLLYQU