Headscratchers / The Elenium

• After Sparhawk gets Bhelliom, everyone talks about how it endangers your very soul merely to look upon it for too long, corrupts people, etc. and demands he keep it hidden most of the time. Given this, it seems beyond inadvisable for King Sarak, and presumably numerous previous kings of Thalesia, to have worn it on their heads whenever they were in public. It's mostly known to history as part of the Crown Jewels.
  • Keep in mind that much of what is known about the Bhelliom is a lie meant to dissuade people from trying to use it. If Bhelliom can screw with Aphrael's mind, it can easily screw with some Muggles in Thalesia, and it likely intended to be well-known so that Anakha could easily find and release the World-Maker.

• Ehlana was dying from a poison that had no cure. They needed Bhelliom to cure it. Then later, they realize Bhelliom isn't just some randomly powerful magic item, it's a primal, universal, creative force so powerful that Sparhawk, basically it's own child, on his own could destroy the gods. So why couldn't Bhelliom also cure Ehlana of her sterility? It seems like such a small matter to such a powerful force.
  • Maybe because her sterility was probably caused by the poison killing all her remaining eggs? There was nothing left for Bhelliom to cure. Yes, obviously it could have magicked a new set, but they wouldn't have been her children anymore than Aphrael was "really" her child.
  • There were other artifacts that could cure the poison (they at one point curse the stupidity of a healer who'd powdered one such artifact, which worked but obviously meant it couldn't be used again), Bhelliom was just the only one they knew about that was still around, and given that Bhelliom wasn't all that cooperative at that point it'd hardly have volunteered going beyond the base level for curing the poison (which presumably did not include saving fertility for women, explaining how Sephrenia knew about it).
  • Of course, one of the things that made no sense: How could they have known it would cause sterility if it was universally fatal? Only Ehlana and the patients of the above-mentioned healer ever survived it. A rather small sample size and not exactly a side effect that would be notable, considering the main effect is just a bit more severe.
    • The person who tells Sparhawk this is Aphrael. She might just know. Also, the novel doesn't get into dosage, which realistically always matters. It could be that others had taken it in trace amounts and become infertile thereby. It could seem there being entire villages in the region who just stopped having children due to minutes amount of the poison getting caught up in the grain harvest.

• In "The Sapphire Rose", the captured Krager wants a cash reward for ratting out Martel and Annias. He gets it (at least, he's promised it — by the Preceptors of the Church Knights and Archprelate Dolmant, so odds are they weren't just lying to him), and Sephrenia points out that giving Krager that much cash means he'll drink himself to death within months. So why is he still around years later to be a major player in the Tamuli? He's just beginning to develop jaundice in his final on-page scene at the very end of "The Hidden City".
  • Before he got around to drinking himself to death, Zalasta grabbed him for his World Domination Plan v2.0. He then spends the next 6 years running errands, which cuts down his drinking time to "manageable" levels.
  • Krager's smart enough to know when he would need to back off the booze for a while to let his liver recover, but age and addiction mean that the cumulative effects will rack up until he will die even if he quit cold turkey.

• How is Sephrenia the mother of the entire order of Pandion Knights, and their only instructor in the arts of Styricum? There are supposed to be 25,000 Pandions, and similar numbers for the other three orders. Let's say that the upper limit for an average knight's lifespan or effectiveness is around 56 years old. They begin training in the arts no earlier than 16, as Talen is this age in the Tamuli and has yet to start training. This gives each Pandion a 40 year knighthood. To keep up 25,000 knights, you'd need to add 625 knights each year. Even if Styric training only lasts a single year, Sephrenia has class sizes in the hundreds. They all seem to personally know her, meaning she'd be meeting them at a rate of about 2 per day. Realistically, the arts probably take years to learn to the level the Pandions are trained to.
  • The best guess is not ALL Church Knights are trained in the arts. It's implied they all are in some places, but on the other hand you rarely see them using magic in full force. It's implied they tried to train Kalten, and failed. This goes both ways though, since it means they're wasting time on relative incompetents, so even if they are only training a fraction of the knights, they're not doing a good job parsing which fraction to train.
  • Given that Styric magic requires fluency in the Styric language, at least some of the preliminary language instruction could easily be done by others. Sephrenia probably wound up with Kalten as a student because darn it, he should be able to speak Styric better than that by now.