- Forgot to mention, Ed's been exiled 17 years. 30 years is the difference between "old hag" and "still looking" for hyenas, so it's possible agewise, too.
- It really is all but stated outright. Practically confirmed.
- Maybe Journey (2012) takes place in Digger's far future, and the shadow race are descendants of Shadowchild, who taught demons how to be good. The species could be a distant result of her work.
- Distressingly likely now that he's accompanying Digger into the hole.
- Confirmed.
- He clearly says he remembers it. But, as he put it, he remembers the rabbit he ate, too, and both it and his name are still gone.
- Possibly confirmed by Boneclaw Mother?
- Pretty much confirmed by Boneclaw Mother in the last few pages. She says she can't do anything for Skin-Painter anymore but will mention a distant relative named Ed who bravely fell in battle with a demon to her tribe.
- Unlikely, skin-painter is more a job description than a name (skin-painter as a surname might work, after all there are plenty of Smiths, Fletchers, etc. around these days).
Blood-Eyes, her mother Bloodmare, and her sister Bloodtail all have the word "Blood" somewhere in their names. Blood is kind of like their 'surname', while 'Mare', 'Eyes', and 'Tail' are sort of like 'given names'.
Grim Eyes, though, doesn't have her mother's surname. She does share her mother's given name, however. Maybe Hyena naming, at least for secondborns (and the very rare surviving firstborn), works by taking the father's surname - taken from his mother - and combining it with the mother's given name, thus starting a new matriline. Later children would have the mother's given name and the surnames of other male relatives, like maternal uncles and grand-uncles. Never paternal uncles, I'd imagine - none of Ed and Blood-Eyes' hypothetical later children would have been partially named after Owl Caller.
Anyway, if this is how Hyena names work, Ed's 'surname' was once Grim. Goodness knows what his 'given name' was.
- Grim Painter?
- Or maybe Grim Caller? or Grim Owl? Or look below to the theory that says that he is Boneclaw mother's son, maybe Boneclaw something?
- I reckon Bone and Claw make up her name, and being called Mother has to do with being the eldest. Admittedly the names aren't consistently hyphenated, compounded, or spaced...
- I found a possible monkey wrench in this WMG - apparently one of the elders is named Stone-in-the-Ear. Of course, Shadebones calls her that right before saying they should just go with what Boneclaw's decided, so it could also be a lighthearted insult among equals, I suppose.
- Also Digger's Hyena name is "Little Mother of Earthquakes". But there again, she doesn't have a Hyena mother and father to pull from, and her adoption was a unique situation to say the least.
We know that breaking the shackles is a singularly Bad Idea, as this would release Sweetgrass Voice - and that is exactly Sweetgrass Voice's plan. Further, we know that he fears Digger as told to us (and Digger herself) by Shadowchild, and she has the best possible chance of destroying him by destroying He Is's heart, and he's more than likely viewed her as a threat since the very beginning. Sweetgrass Voice might have seen Jhalm's mistrust and dedication to the greater good as a way to kill two birds with one stone: free himself and be rid of a major problem. And since he works primarily by cajoling and suggesting, Sweetgrass Voice was able to bend Jhalm's thoughts to the path he wanted, doing it subtly and slowly enough to avoid the detection of the Statue.
- They're trying to kill a hyena god.
- Gods are shaped by mortal belief (see the Black Mother).
- Hyenas believe that their soul resides in the liver.
Destroying the heart will release the Sealed Evil in a Can, and Digger and co. will have to stop it.
- What else was there left to destroy? Besides, although He-Is was a hyena god, he was bound by humans, dwarves and wombats, so it's more than possible that their belief (or the heart containing the soul or whatever) overrode the hyena one.
- Possibly Jossed - she specifically mentions that her brothers are all dead when adopting
DiggerLittle Mother of Earthquakes, and calls Owl Caller "old friend" instead of "brother". On the other hand, if the Hyenas follow matrilinal views of descent (not an unreasonable guess), they may not consider your father's-sisters to be your aunts at all: only mother's-sisters. So while most/pretty much all of the audience would see Boneclaw as Grim Eyes' grandmother if the above is correct, the Hyenas themselves might not.- Jossed by the profiles of the hyena elders in the omnibus edition. Owl Caller is referred to as her occasional paramour.
- Yep: Boneclaw Mother specifically states that all her brothers are dead in the oath she gives as she adopts Digger, so definitively Jossed. A far nastier but still plausible possibility is...
- Ed talks weird because he hasn't spoken at all in seventeen years.
- Yet they are still different in one important respect: Ed sacrificed everything for the sake of his child, while He-Is (albeit unintentionally) sacrificed his child for his own demon-fueled ambitions. Perhaps what really allowed Ed to kill He-Is was being the superior father of the two.
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