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Glint's Torment?


Hypnowulf.7403

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There's one thing that's been playing on my mind a lot lately, how many dragons are stricken with torment exactly?

The Forgotten ritual cleansed Glint's mind and freed her thinking, she was able to conceive of new ideas and was open to new experiences such as empathy for the other races. The easy assumption is that it was Kralkatorrik doing this, of course, but what if it wasn't? What if whomever afflicted Kralkatorrik with the torment did so to all of the dragons? Not just the elders but the lessers as well that fell into step with the affliction as their lieutenants.

Here's a more interesting question, too: Why did the Forgotten believe that their ritual would work on Kralkatorrik? What were they trying to achieve with their ritual? The answer is immediately obvious in hindsight, they were attempting to cure Kralk's affliction. This however leads to an even more interesting question: How did the Forgotten know of the torment, let alone understand enough of its nature to plan to cure Kralkatorrik? This would imply that the Forgotten or someone involved with their kind was responsible for the torment affliction at one point. Who could that be, I wonder?

I won't speculate on the nature of the true villains hidden behind the veil but I can't help but notice that this is reminiscent of Mass Effect. In that narrative the leviathans were waiting behind the scenes and manipulating their pawns into doing their dirty work, they were actively encouraging and hoping for the destruction of the reapers so that they could step back out from the shadows and mind control all of the organic races again. They pretty much tell you as much in the leviathan DLC because they're smug, cocky sods.

I can't help but feel that that's the case here. I wonder if at some point in Tyria's distant past the dragons were the guardians of that world. Our real villain afflicted them with torment to take them out of the picture, intending to have the dragons sink into a neverending nightmarish sleep so tha they could step in and take control. Our true villains never intended for the dragons to wake up, so now that they have—and they're waking up mad—the villains of the piece have had to retreat into the background. They expect us to destroy the dragons so that they can come out of the woodwork and take control again.

There are a lot of potential antagonists in the lore who could be responsible for this and I find the potential story-behind-the-story here to be intriguing and compelling. I feel that this isn't just conjecture on my part because it was introspectively examining Glint's words and Kralk's words that brought me to htis point. Freeing Kralk from his torment seemed to have a similar effect to when the Forgotten freed Glint from her torment. Thus it's possible that all of the dragons are afflicted with a similar pain and torment, very possible, one that the Forgotten knew about and initially intended to cure.

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I think yur doubling down on this Torment being an actual affliction.I think that what was tormenting Kralkatorik was his base nature as an Elder Dragon, following the life cycle of the world, consuming magic until the land is dry, then slumbering.

If all the Elder Dragons were left to their own vices without any interference by the mortal races, they would go through their eternal cycle of consuming magic and slumbering, and awaking and repeating.

But what happened was the mortal races actually killed an Elder Dragon - Zhaitan, causing the magic he stored up to be spilled into Tyria.This magic was then consumed by the other Elder Dragons, who consumed it most likely based on instinct rather than needing or wanting to.

Kralk also consumed an amount of Balthazar's magic when he expired, most likely also due to his ED nature.

This was why Glint needed her scions plan to work : to make Elder Dragons which consume magic only for balance, not to just consume based on pure instinct and destroy the world and potentially themselves.

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@Yasai.3549 said:I think yur doubling down on this Torment being an actual affliction.I think that what was tormenting Kralkatorik was his base nature as an Elder Dragon, following the life cycle of the world, consuming magic until the land is dry, then slumbering.It was confirmed that the Torment is born from consuming conflicting types of magic.

That said, @"Hypnowulf.7403" - I see no reason for Glint to have been afflicted by Torment. There is no indication that she ever consumed magic that wasn't Crystal and Fury domain, which would mean that she wouldn't be affected given what gives birth to Torment is conflicting magic.

I don't think your conclusion about the Forgotten is accurate either. They were trying to "cleanse Kralkatorrik" but there's no real indication that the ritual affects torment. The reason they thought the ritual might work is rather ambiguous - the ritual, for all we know, merely gives the individual free will once again, but as Glint herself established in the novel Edge of Destiny, merely having free will does not turn one good. One could surmise that the Forgotten thus believed Kralkatorrik to not be in his right state of mind, and thus could be given freedom and a choice - there's one theory floating around that the entire reason why Kralkatorrik's mind is fractured in two during S4 is because of the Forgotten's ritual performed after the events of Edge of Destiny - but there's certainly no "obvious in hindsight"ness to it.

If anything, the Forgotten didn't know about Torment, and didn't know the ritual would have any effect, they were merely performing a last ditch gamble because their primary hope, Glint, was dead, their secondary hope, Vlast, had no champion to bind him to mortals, and their tertiary hope, Aurene, had not yet hatched. At the time they performed the ritual, their best hope was Vlast, and that was a dim hope to entrust so much power to a dragon suffering chronic depression and disassociation to reality.

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