[Dragaera] [Issola, Dzur spoilers] GWs and aging (was: A Devera thread)

[Jon Lincicum]

Maximilian Wilson wrote:
> On 10/23/06, Lang, Douglas (Contractor) <Douglas.Lang at ed.gov> wrote:
>   
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>> Max Wilson wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Come to think of it, there's that whole thing with Laszlo and
>>> witchcraft. So who knows, maybe even Vlad Sr. will still be hale and
>>> hearty a hundred years from now. Unless he's been dissolved in a
>>> puddle of Jenoine amorphia...
>>>       
>> I have wondered if the possession of a great weapon has an effect on the aging process - not unlike LoTR's rings, the bearer does not age nor die "in the usual way".  I can't think of any textev that would indicate that anyone wielding a GW died of natural causes.   Not that you can't get killed, just that you're not going to die of old age.
>>
>> To the left, of the GW holders we know of, Morrolan, Aliera, Telnan, and Vlad are all too young for this to have become an issue, and Sethra is a law unto herself.  It *could* be that she's so old because of her relationship (and ability to hold on to) Iceflame.  Is there any word on how long she's been carrying Iceflame?
>>     
>
> I dunno, but the Sorceress in Green is 30,000 years old, and she
> doesn't have a GW. 
Do we *know* that she doesn't have a GW?

I'll grant you, the way she dies in /Yendi/ calls into question why she 
wouldn't have used it to protect herself--but perhaps she was just not 
showing all her cards, and trusting in the fact that her friendship with 
Zerika would cause her to be revivified (as it happened)?

> Postulating that Sethra's age is due to Iceflame
> seems to me to be multiplying entities unnecessarily.
>   

Sethra certainly is enough of an enigma that she may not need any 
life-extending properties of a GW--but that's no proof that these 
properties might not be important to other people.


Take Baritt, for example... He apparently lived for so long that an 
entire branch of his descendants "the e'Barritt line", was "almost wiped 
out" during the *first* Dragon-Jhereg war... so, 10,000 years before 
Vlad, Baritt's line of Dragons was a well-established fact... (/Jhereg/, 
Chapter 6, pg 54 omnibus)

We know he had Pathfinder, and it's implied in /Dragon/ that this was 
his primary source of power... Coincidence?

Majikjon