This tidbit in RaFoaDK made me consider what I had not before.
For ages Rajaat had explored the sun and light; in the Hollow, he studied dark and shadow. That’s when he made the shadowfolk and the shadowfolk made you.
The lore says Rajaat’s halfling servants were imprisoned in the Black by the traitors, but was their newfound existence as shadowpeople a result of that imprisonment?
RaFoaDK posits another possibility, that Rajaat told his trapped servants how to become shadowpeople themselves, or perhaps how the next generation could.
It seems suspicious that shadowpeople would turn out so formidable as merely a side effect of their imprisonment, and not as intention? So why can’t the two things - imprisonment and turning into shadowpeople - not be seperate outcomes stemming from the actions of seperate parties for wildly different reasons?
Yes, it’s in the prologue of Cerulean Storm. Khidar’s eyes and mouth appear in the ‘edge’ of the Black where he can telepathically talk to Rajaat.
Beneath the scratching talons appeared a pair of blue embers and a long slitlike mouth. The features were all the skeleton ever saw of its servants. The shadow people were part of the Black, as trapped within the dark shell as their master was, inside the emptiness of the egg. We felt your summons, Omnipotent One. The servant used thought-speech to report, for sound did not exist within the skeleton’s eternal prison.
The shadow people do seem extremely powerful, and presumably that wasn’t the goal of the Champions/sorcerer-kings imprisoning them. So it makes sense that their power comes from something Rajaat did.
(I wonder why the Champions imprisoned the halflings that would become shadow people rather than simply killing them? Rajaat couldn’t be killed, but surely that didn’t apply to his servants…)
Maybe Rajaat had the ability to bring his servants back to life? Tithian asks if Rajaat can give him that power, and Khidar says something like “Rajaat can give you magic, what you do with it is up to you” - but he doesn’t say it’s not possible. And Sadira, when she’s fighting the wraiths in the Gray in Cerulean Storm, thinks that Borys gave the soul gems to his captains(?) who became wraiths to store their life energy so that he could bring them back to life if they were killed.
So maybe the Champions did kill Rajaat’s minions, and he restored them, so they then had to imprison them in the Black?
Or … the shadow people aren’t halflings anymore, they need obsidian to reproduce in some kind of weird incubator process. That could be a result of whatever Rajaat did. If that RaFoaDK quote means they were made shadow people after Rajaat had had time to study his new imprisoned state, maybe they were killed in the battle to imprison Rajaat, but instead of passing into the Gray their souls/essences were trapped by the imprisonment spell. So they were still available to Rajaat later, when he learned about the nature of the Hollow and the Black, and he gave them new shadow bodies?
Btw, I had the impression the shadow people were not spellcasters, and that Sadira’s transformation was the result of activating certain artifacts. As per PP.
But in RaFoaDK the shadow people are spellcasters (who use the Black or the sun, or both, as a power source), and they did cast spells on Sadira to complete her transformation.
Based on what’s written, though it is likely contradictory, which one is correct, or are they both correct?
I had always seen the PP shadow giants/shadow people as not spellcasters, but having significant “innate” magical powers related to the Black (like when Umbra wipes out a whole bunch of Tyrian soldiers in Crimson Legion). Sadira does say things about their power being derived from the sun, and linked to hers; she says early in Cerulean Storm that her magic won’t work against them. So I think there’s something there… But not spellcasting in the usual sense.
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I looked up the shadow giant entry in the Dark Sun MC Appendix II, and it says “Shadow giants are the descendants of the loyal servants of Rajaat who the Champions sacrificed to complete the betrayal of their master. These halflings merged with the Black and can only interact with the real world in the form of shadows.” That does support that they weren’t just imprisoned in the Black… They were “sacrificed”, apparently as part of the Rajaat-imprisoning spell itself.
Maybe they were the living creature sacrifices for a major dragon magic spell, but since it was part of the imprisonment spell their souls or equivalent got imprisoned and Rajaat could then access them to make into shadow people.
There’s nothing to keep individual shadow people from being spellcasters, especially if they’re occasionally personally speaking to the guy who invented arcane magic.
Likewise, there’s nothing to say that the shadow people, in general, don’t have “rituals” and whatever or use artifacts like the Dark Lens or Steeple of Crystals to achieve all sorts of supernatural effects…