Having some thoughts about the Great Battle, the one to end the First Devourer War.
Imagine if Kovo, Gerathon and the Four Fallen were so massive that they couldn't help but destroy some of their own allies amidst the fighting. Especially the two traitors, because we know their soldiers were disposable to them, but the Four Fallen as well. As Uraza tangles with Gerathon, her claws rake through scores of Greencloaks. As Briggan and Kovo lunge for each other's throats, Greencloak and Conqueror and animal alike are crushed into oblivion beneath the two giants' feet. Adding to the senseless horror of it all.
What if the Four Fallen had grievously wounded Kovo or Gerathon (or perhaps both), in such a way that the results are visible in the time of the Second Devourer War and strike fear in the hearts of their soldiers? I think it would be cool if the two traitors, despite having survived the event that eliminated the Four, are permanently disfigured and only dull echoes of their former glory. Can you imagine if Gerathon's hood was torn to shreds by Uraza, her once beautiful scales marred by claw wounds that Tellun cursed to fester and rot? Or if part of Kovo's face was mutilated by Briggan's fangs and covered in scar tissue, with Essix's talon marks stretching across his shoulders, bare where the fur never grew back? They lived, but at the cost of being forever marked by the brethren they slew.
They should have explained the Fall of the Four by establishing that a Great Beast can only be killed by another. Gerathon killed Uraza and Jhi with her venomous bite, Kovo ripped Briggan and Essix apart with his bare hands. No human blade could have felled them -- it was going against two of their own that resulted in their downfall. The fact it came to this is a great tragedy. Once, Briggan, Uraza, Jhi and Essix lived peacefully, even happily, with Kovo and Gerathon. They were brethren, forged by the same catastrophe; survivors who found comfort in one another (or so I like to believe). They would have walked beside each other for eons. They should never have met in battle. And when they did, they discovered they could destroy one another. This could be one reason as to why the remaining Great Beasts retreated into isolation and did not commune for hundreds of years -- perhaps, for the first time, they were afraid of each other.
In The Book of Shane, Shane reveals that Feliandor's grave is only symbolic because "when the Greencloaks had finished with him, there hadn't been enough left of him to bury". This might be one of the most haunting sentences in the series. In A Revised History of Erdas, they dismembered him and paraded his head around, then burned him to ash. Some say Tembo kept the skull and hid it somewhere in the newly built Greenhaven, but Tembo himself denied these claims. (Meilin once searched the castle for the skull, to no avail.)
I personally would have liked to know more about the genocide of Stetriol (if it truly happened) and who took over as ruler after Feliandor. All my thinking about it led me to draft some plans for a novella about Feliandor's successor and what happened in Stetriol after the defeat of the Conquerors. His name is Lysander. He is the cousin of Feliandor and the direct ancestor of the present-day royal family, including Shane. I'm still figuring him out, but I think y'all will like him.
I also think now would be the proper time to mention that in ARHoE, Essix gets a longer chapter where she bonds with a human like the other three. I haven't decided on the boy's name, but he is Amayan and has a jackrabbit spirit animal. He is bright, spirited and adventurous. The eldest son of the chief, but all of 16 at the war's end, he successfully convinces Essix to fight on the side of the Marked resistance. He is full of wonder and respect for nature, Essix most of all, and she finds herself warming up to him. She likes him enough to let him ride on her back and see the world he so loves from miles above, delighting in the way he spreads his arms and whoops into the wind. Essix, who is able to read souls, looks at him and sees something special in him. He is destined to do great things. This future of his is dashed when he dies in the Great Battle, though, cut down by some nameless soldier, just a boy with all the life and hope gone out of his eyes as Essix cradles him in her talons. She mourns him for a moment, then steels her heart and renews the charge.
