#gerathon

And then you reincarnate in one of your enemies jail cells because your bonded is somehow a criminal (AT 12.) that got caught and was a bad enough person to land in the worst prison out there.

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.

Drawing a random scene from every Spirit Animals book

Part 10 (v): Tales of the Fallen Beasts: Betrayal

(Unleashed; The Trunswick Blade; A Chill Wind; Rebel Bond; Betrayal)

Additional arts:

And their references:

P.S.

I really like Raisha as a character, too! We know so little about her, but in my opinion, she's one of the most fascinating characters in the series. Unfortunately, she meets a sad end in A Revised History of Erdas.

All we know about Raisha post-infection is that she was present at the final battle in The Burning Tide, still under Zerif's control and in pretty bad shape. She vanishes off the grid after that, never mentioned again, not even in the concluding montage of Great Beast summoners reuniting with their fallen spirit animals. My retelling offers some closure, but not the good kind.

In my version of events, Raisha is flanking Zerif when he emerges from the ship with his Great Beasts. Zerif, in an act of cruel irony, saw fit to keep Raisha by his side even in her mindless, infected state. Shane, up in the archers' keep with Abeke, hardly recognizes the girl who helped steal Halawir months earlier. Later, she reappears to restrain Abeke when Zerif brings the defeated Redcloak forces to the Wyrm. When the Wyrm is killed and the parasites lose their power, though, Raisha collapses to the ground and doesn't get back up. The Wyrm had pushed her finite body to an extent that it couldn't recover from. Many people and animals in Zerif's army are the same; their possession eventually killed them. The Wyrm was a child playing with toys, the mechanics of which it couldn't possibly understand. Thankfully for it, its parasites could go on controlling a body in the event of an untimely death. Indeed, Stead raises the possibility that Raisha had been dead for some time, and the parasite was only animating a corpse.

Like I've said before, I didn't do this out of dislike for Raisha or anything like that. She was ultimately another victim of Zerif -- a young, lonely, impressionable girl he took advantage of -- and didn't deserve anything that happened to her. I'll always support AUs where she is alive and well. In my eyes, though, her story was always meant to end in tragedy. By the time she realized her mistake and reached for the light, it was too late.