It is stated directly that Rajaat developed his link with the element of water/rain while within the Hollow.
Indirectly, and after the facts, the unpublished-yet-written TSR manuscript for the Dead Lands has Rajaat tasking his best sorcerers with exploring the elemental planes as a source of energy after his Champions had already been created. This exploration was cut short when the Dead Lands formed. Rajaat continued the exploration of the link to the elemental planes…in his head, while trapped in the Hollow. The guy was a genius, what can I say.
I don’t think he successfully established a link with an elemental plane while inside the Hollow, as any link to the outside (beyond sight and sound, it seems) could be exploited to escape.
But I think he prepared himself for the link to go online the second he was freed.
Yeah, that would make sense. Like he had planned out how to do it but didn’t actually have access to a power source while imprisoned. But he could essentially press the “tap elemental plane” button immediately as soon as his planar Wi-Fi connection came back?
Maybe Rajaat had some special ability that let him do spell research without the normally necessary material resources, or maybe it was a psionic thing so he could do the development entirely in his own mind.
When he developed sorcery, he started by inventing simple spells that required gestures, vocalizations, and reagents. Move an object around, change its color. But within years he would have moved on to experimenting with epic spells.
A few centuries more and he seems to have passed that. He now breathes magic, so to speak. In RaFoaDK, Abbey adequately portrays the Champions as beyond mere spells. Their very will is magic. I also imagine Rajaat as like that, but to an immense scale. It doesn’t quite port over, but think what a human can do when joined with a Shard in a Brandon Sanderson Cosmere novel. To a lesser extent that’s a Champion, and to a far greater one it’s Rajaat.
Maybe he can in fact do magic within the Hollow, draining part of his lifeforce to power sorcery, or even convert psionic energy into a power source for sorcery, and wait out his regeneration before draining more. I think the nature of the Hollow is not unlike one characteristic found in a real world black hole: it’s not that gravity is so strong even light can’t escape, but rather that the gravity gradient ensures that within a black hole all paths lead inward. I think Rajaat can do whatever he wants inside it, but he can’t affect it or connect to the outside. His only allies inside are a limited if slowly regenerating power source, and the idea that he’s so immortal he remains alive despite imprisonment in an airless, foodless, waterless cage.
Hmm, I always thought Rajaat while imprisoned was essentially “dead” - his soul/essence/spirit separated from his lifeless body, and imprisoned separately: his body in the stone cyst/Black Sphere, and his soul/essence/spirit in the Hollow.
Just that he had some kind of super regeneration or contingency-type raise dead effect (or both) so that he couldn’t be kept dead without the double, separate imprisonment.
But looking back, this might be more a RAFoADK thing; the prologue of Cerulean Storm makes it sound like Rajaat’s skeleton is in the Hollow (but then what’s in the Black Sphere)?
I honestly can’t remember which novel contains the following, but in this scene taking place in the Black a shadow giant (that would likely be Pentad 2 or 3) is hovering next to the Hollow, a transparent prison. Rajaat is the size of a giant, his body said to occupy all of the prison’s space. Whether it’s his actual body in there, or a self-representation his spirit manifests, who knows?
If Rajaat could be killed they would have done so instead of locking him away. In RaFoaDK this is made clear. They do kill him, but he regenerates in front of their very eyes. That’s when one of them proposes a special prison he had been working towards. Later they find that Rajaat has nearly succeeded at breaching the Hollow from within, and conclude they must reinforce the prison spell on a yearly basis (this becomes the Levy).
The Cerulean Storm prologue describes Rajaat’s skeleton as filling the entire Hollow, because there’s no space there.
Yeah, clearly Rajaat couldn’t be killed killed (in the sense that he would stay dead). I meant that he might have been ‘dead’ while imprisoned in the Hollow in the sense that if his spirit/essence was imprisoned separately from his lifeless body, he might not really have had access to his life force (but also not have been doing magic to survive without food/water/air - if what was imprisoned was just a spirit…)
Well, not dead dead, but he wasn’t really alive either. He was a skeleton, so there probably wasn’t any ‘animal life energy’ for magic to use.
And Rajaat’s soul or whatever appears to have actually been in his shadow - not in his skeleton + cloud flesh body - Sadira realizes that in the Cerulean Storm when the sorcerer kings are trying to imprison his body, right before his shadow form pops up and imprisons Andropinis / kills Tectuktitlay. And that realization seems to be the key thing that lets him get imprisoned again. He’s not exactly undead, I don’t think, but his shadow form seems kind of reminiscent of undead.
(And re-reading, I realize I was wrong about the “thousand years” thing. He actually says “eternal imprisonment” when he banishes Andropinis; he says “a thousand years of torment” when he goes after Nibenay, but doesn’t get to finish that attack.)
Given his advancement and change while in the Hollow, I can think of a couple possible explanations
His spirit was free to travel, at least parts of it, at least some places. So, his whole self might not have been able to go places, but he was able to travel enough to visit the plane of rain.
He created a psionic VR training ground. He wasn’t able to work outside of himself, but he could go into his own mind, create a virtual world, and act within that. He studied, he theorized, he tested theories based on what he knew (or possibly divined)… basically gaining experience from confronting himself over thousands of years. When he got out, things didn’t work QUITE like he planned, so he became a giant made of clouds, rather than whatever he was aiming for… but it still resulted in POWER.
I see I erroneously and temporarily associated death with a lack of animation, but thank you for reminding me that there is a supernatural aspect to death in this setting, and thus the Rajaat trapped in the Hollow might very well be his literal spirit (as in a thing that should have went directly to the Gray if not for the spell).
I never considered Rajaat might be dead all this time.
His skeleton body he starts to wrap in cloud-flesh as soon as he’s out, so I don’t think that’s undeath. At least it blurs the lines.
His shadow containing his essence is a new thing he came up with to allow him to avoid recapture through the same method as before.
You’re right about the 1,000 years. I wonder if I’m just one of those who made the mistake or if the mistake is also enshrined somewhere official, like a TSR or Athas dot org product…
Not exactly undead, no, but the shadow separate from his body and acting on its own is kind of reminiscent of it. But maybe it’s more like some kind of psionic projection? I guess just the fact that his body was a skeleton left me thinking ‘ghost’.
Another thought on Rajaat: way back when he was working on inventing magic in what became Rajaat’s Swamp, he tried to tap the life energy of the planet itself. It “failed” (in the sense that he didn’t get the result he wanted) and nearly killed him, but clearly something happened.
So what if there’s more to that ‘it nearly killed him’? The Rajaat that recovered from that magical accident wasn’t quite the same being he was before. He couldn’t use the planet’s life energy for spells, but he was still linked to it. He couldn’t control it willingly, but maybe this is why he wouldn’t stay dead - the life energy of the planet was flowing into him, restoring him?
Or maybe it just changed him psychologically/spiritually/mentally. Maybe his self-hatred and mad pursuit to bring back the Blue Age was the result of making contact with the planet’s spirit (maybe not intelligent, at this point, but having at least drives/impulses) - the Spirit of the Land of Athas itself, or some proto-version of it? (I’m not sure when druids got started, but perhaps the process of epic druids merging into spirits of the land has made them more fully sapient and human/demihuman-understandable in the current setting than they were eight or nine thousand years ago?)
Rajaat felt the world’s pain as the Swamp formed, and its hatred of him for inflicting that wound… but more than feeling it, it was imprinted on his mind (in some psionic sense). But what was ‘imprinted’ wasn’t a full “image” of the Spirit of Athas … only the most pain-driven and destructive part of it, since that ‘imprint’ was formed in a moment of cataclysm and agony. Thus Rajaat’s self-hatred (he can feel the world’s hatred for him for wounding it, but that’s incorporated into him now), his desire to “restore” the world, and his choice of bloody, destructive methods to do so.
The Spirit of Athas might still have largely seen itself as the Blue Age world… the five thousand years or so between the Rebirth and the Swamp might not be that long, to a planet’s spirit.