#660. Just exactly how bad would it have been... [SPOILERS]

[ackmondual]

If the phylactery fell into the Rift, couldn't they just go in there and try to find it like they did anyways? Do they not have free entry and exit of that domain?

[Geodude6]

No one knows. That's why it would have been bad; no one knows what would have happened.

[Nith]

The presence of the Snarl would presumably have complicated the phylactery's retrieval.

[Nightcanon]

I think that the most accurate answer to this is that no-one really knows how bad it would have been. Almost certainly, Xykon would have dispatched groups of goblins to find his phylactery if it had fallen into the Rift, but whether they would have been successful is anyone's guess. Others may be able to help here, but I think we can summarise the totality of knowledge regarding the Rifts as follows:

• They are portals to another dimension
• That dimension contains the Snarl, a being of sufficient power that it can kill gods and destroy worlds
• The Rifts were sealed with Gates to trap the Snarl
• The Dark One has a plan to use magic to change the location of the Gates/ Rifts for the purposes of blackmailing the established gods into providing a better deal for the goblin races

It's possible that Xykon's forces could freely enter the Rift, rummage about for his phylactery, and leave freely, but this is certainly not known to be the case.

[snowblizz]

Laurin rummaging around through a rift woke the Snarl, sooo...
and Soon's wife doing the same was what sparked the plot in the first place.

[Ron Miel]

The rifts are, supposedly, entrances to a prison that holds a powerful force that destroys anything that comes near. It supposedly wiped out an entire pantheon of Gods. Anyone entering the rift will be destroyed. If it had gone into the rift, it would be lost beyond retrieval.

THat's what Xykon and Redcloak believe, anyway. The belief may be wrong, or at least not the whole story.

[Spelsidorn]

no one knows - what a mystery!

[Peelee]

I think spoiler tags are a bit much eight years after the fact.

[Kish]

Okay, I'm not sure what you're thinking is in the rift or what you're thinking Xykon and Redcloak think is in the rift, but the answer to the first question is "to some extent unknown but definitely includes an aggressive soul-eating monster," and the answer to the second is "an extremely aggressive soul-eating monster that ate the soul of a goblin who merely held a chicken up to Lirian's rift, and nothing else."

[KorvinStarmast]

Okay, I'm not sure what you're thinking is in the rift or what you're thinking Xykon and Redcloak think is in the rift, but the answer to the first question is "to some extent unknown but definitely includes an aggressive soul-eating monster," and the answer to the second is "an extremely aggressive soul-eating monster that ate the soul of a goblin who merely held a chicken up to Lirian's rift, and nothing else."

Hungry-Hungry-Snarl is perhaps the parent of MiTD: both are hungry all of the time, it seems.

[ackmondual]

Thanks for the replies!

Could Red Cloak or whomever just make another phylactery then and just ignore the one that would've fell in?

[Snails]

The value of the phylactery is that Xykon can "re-spawn" at its location if physically killed, thus a properly protected phylactery vastly increases the likelihood he could (un)live a very very long time.

This whole quest is built around the assumption that the Snarl is potentially so lethal you can intimidate gods with the mere threat of it peeking through a open rift at them, once the rift is pushed in close physical proximity to a target god, of course.

If Xykon believes such is reasonably close to the truth, then re-spawning over there could result in instant permanent annihilation. In other words, the phylactery might be useless. Obviously Xykon would expend many a goblin to get it back.

It is actually quite plausible that if he sent a team of goblins into the rift, they would return without incident. We simply do not know how attentive the Snarl is to those rifts. We do know that the Snarl was less attentive to the big rift over Goblintopia than Redcloak expected.

[Snails]

Could Red Cloak or whomever just make another phylactery then and just ignore the one that would've fell in?

That is a level of technical rules detail that we do not know with certainty.

I believe Xykon explicitly said that he is actually in his own body right now, and the existence of a phylactery does not matter unless his physical body is killed. That suggests that his soul is not in the phylactery or enough of his soul is not in the phylactery that making a new one is plausible.

Can you have more than one phylactery? I would have said no. The backstory of Harry Potter is that you can make 7, albeit at a cost.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I think spoiler tags are a bit much eight years after the fact.

Geez, has it been that long?

That is a level of technical rules detail that we do not know with certainty.
I believe Xykon explicitly said that he is actually in his own body right now, and the existence of a phylactery does not matter unless his physical body is killed. That suggests that his soul is not in the phylactery or enough of his soul is not in the phylactery that making a new one is plausible.
Can you have more than one phylactery? I would have said no. The backstory of Harry Potter is that you can make 7, albeit at a cost.

Horcruxes are not phylacteries and Voldemort was not a lich. Horcruxes are Horcruxes and Voldemort was...I dunno what they were called, but he was something else.
In D&D, a lich gets one phylactery and that's it. You don't get to make a spare if you lose the first one or if it gets broken; that would kinda defeat the purpose of making it in the first place.

Xykon would just chuck goblins into the rift.

Remember when Redcloak was using the rift to kill people? I'm pretty sure that even Xykon knows how pointless that would be.
I suspect that Xykon would just temper-tantrum for a while, and eventually keep going and just hope nothing bad happened to the phylactery. He'd probably be more cautious in the future, since he might permanently re-die.

[Throknor]

Remember when Redcloak was using the rift to kill people? I'm pretty sure that even Xykon knows how pointless that would be. I suspect that Xykon would just temper-tantrum for a while, and eventually keep going and just hope nothing bad happened to the phylactery. He'd probably be more cautious in the future, since he might permanently re-die.

Redcloak was intimidating O-Chul and partly playing off of what he thought O-Chul believed would happen. He may have been completely honest that he considered it an experiment (even if his control group was ridiculous). He only knows about the rift through his cloak and was puzzled that the Snarl didn't reach out after all.

[Kish]

No one accurately remembers when Redcloak was using the rift to kill people, because that never happened. He sent the Azurite prisoners back to their cells after O-Chul didn't come through with information he didn't have.

That said, phrasing that gives an undue amount of credit to Xykon aside, it is certainly the case that Xykon would have considered the phylactery destroyed and gone had it landed in the rift.

[hroþila]

Redcloak was intimidating O-Chul and partly playing off of what he thought O-Chul believed would happen. He may have been completely honest that he considered it an experiment (even if his control group was ridiculous).

His control group was the best joke in the history of OotS if you ask me!

[Jay R]

"Dude, don't taunt the god-killing abomination."

[GreatWyrmGold]

Redcloak was intimidating O-Chul and partly playing off of what he thought O-Chul believed would happen. He may have been completely honest that he considered it an experiment (even if his control group was ridiculous). He only knows about the rift through his cloak and was puzzled that the Snarl didn't reach out after all.

Alright...um...what part of "was puzzled that the god-killing abomination didn't reach out" suggests that he thinks the inside of the rift is in any way habitable? I'll admit that I can't definitively prove anything, but what we have strongly suggests that he doesn't exactly expect the other side of the rift to be all sunshine and lollipops.

[Throknor]

Alright...um...what part of "was puzzled that the god-killing abomination didn't reach out" suggests that he thinks the inside of the rift is in any way habitable? I'll admit that I can't definitively prove anything, but what we have strongly suggests that he doesn't exactly expect the other side of the rift to be all sunshine and lollipops.

Um, what? You said he'd used the rift to kill people. I corrected you that he'd only threatened to throw people in and had been seen pondering why the snarl hadn't reached out on its own. The point is that while he may suspect it to be deadly he doesn't know what would happen - he literally states he doesn't expect them back and that he is using the scientific method to find out what would happen.

While he is enslaving humans he likes to think he's better than those he hates. He was willing to use the prisoners as guinea pigs to try to get O-Chul to talk and multi-task as a research project but he isn't so far gone as to use them solely for his experimental curiosity.

[hroþila]

My interpretation of that scene is that it was a bluff and that Redcloak wasn't willing to have the souls of the prisoners undone by the Snarl. Knowing the character, however, I'm sure he'd be able to rationalize such an action eventually if he felt he needed to do it.

[Kish]

Speculation aside, he sent them back to their cells and did not kill them; that's explicit.

[Concept]

I think the three fiends explained the situation pretty well in the bottom left panel.