[Dragaera] Tiassa -- Chapter the Sixth vs Epilogue -- spoiler

[Scott Schultz]

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>>> Maybe the tiassa is Paarfi's source.
>
>> I doubt it acted as a source for Paarfi, like an oracle or some such. 
>> More likely it gave him literary insight that  he might not have had 
>> without its influence.

>Beyond Occam, why?  It was present, or had access to the people involved,
and seems to have 
>some agency, and certainly can read and write people's brains.  Maybe it's
like a GW and 
>contains someone's soul.  More likely, as is claimed by its maker, it has a
good chunk of a god in it.

I think Occam is a pretty good reason, given that it dispenses with
unverifiable speculation. You can speculate about what effect a piece of a
God has in its composition, but unfounded speculation is all it is. The
effects of the Tiassa when it is in proximity to an artist are facts,
insofar as any of the story can be said to be factual. 

Devera tells us in not so many words that artists who own the Tiassa become
masters of their craft. Paarfi  IS an acknowledged master of his craft. His
acquisition of the Tiassa almost certainly corresponds with his rise to fame
as an author. (I haven't double-checked the timeline against Devera's time
jumps.) This is entirely consistent with Devera's description of Chuvin and
Pindua's seemingly passive stewardships of the Tiassa. I don't see the need
to invent other active uses of the Tiassa by its owner without some evidence
showing those uses.

Vlad has this history of the Tiassa first-hand from Devera, so he comes to
much the same conclusion  himself. That's what leads him to try and put the
Tiassa into Savn's possession and see if "linking his conscious and
unconscious" cures his condition.

In fact, there's this - Thanks to Devera, the Silver Tiassa is not pursuing
a strictly linear path through time. Since Paarfi has stewardship  of the
Tiassa before Vlad becomes its steward, Paarfi could NOT have used any
stored knowledge in the Tiassa to describe the events in Special Tasks. At
the point in the Tiassa's personal timeline that Paarfi owns it, the Tiassa
has not yet met Vlad. The only way to make it work is to start hand-waving
about the divine essence. (Note that said essence is primarily symbolic. The
hand represents the conscious and the eye represents the unconscious, or
maybe vice-versa; who knows? One watches. One acts.)

My guess - Paarfi only decides to write about the Tiassa after Devera takes
it and leaves him the note. That note might even be what piqued his interest
about the erstwhile Count Szurke in the first place.

I'd expect that any divine essence held by the Tiassa is primarily
responsible at this juncture for the whole business of Kieron being
temporarily (or maybe permanently!) reincorporated rather than as an oracle
or a sort of divine hard disk.