From: "Tony Ellis" 
Subject: Re: (urth) 5HC: Shadow Children in the Lupiverse?
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2002 10:17:49 +0100

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> Okay, I'm dumb and I admit it; I hadn't remembered that the Shadow
> Children actually _call_ themselves humans. Now I do. But are they
> really? And if they are, _who_ are they?

This is a question I've come back to and come back to over the years. You
can find a rather-too-condensed synopsis of what I understand to be the
truth in a post I made called '5HC: a timeline without dates', back in 2000:
http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0152.shtml

> Possible explanations exfoliate:  It's _fairly_ clear, though,
> that the Shadow children are the first, French, colonists.

They can't be. 'A Story' ends with the arrival of the French colonists.

That leaves us with two possibilities that I can see. Either the Shadow
Children are indigenous or, as you say there is
> the somewhat vaguer possibility that the Shadow children are not
> the French at all but a much earlier round of colonists -- among
> the names the great WOO remembers for their ancient home are
> "Atlantis or Mu -- or Gondwanaland, Africa, Poictesme, or the
> Country of Friends."

This is the explanation we are set up to believe for most of the story.
But - and it's a very big but - toward the end the Old Wise One does a
complete about-face, and admits that his race was already here when the
first, prehistoric Earth colonists came:
"Now I am half a man, and know that we were always here..."

> Another
> possibility occurs to me -- perhaps the abos are not shapeshifters

Heh. I've been saying this for years: the abos are -not- shapeshifters.
There's not a scrap of evidence to suggest that they are, and a big heap of
evidence to suggest that they have simply been mythologised by the
colonists. They are gifted mimics, certainly, but not supernaturally so.

> at all, but humans, either the French or someone earlier, who

The French, no. Someone earlier, absolutely. The prehistoric humans the Old
Wise One refers to.

If I sound a little cocksure, forgive me, but as I say I've been banging on
about 5HC for years in this list, to the extent that I'm pretty confident
about this stuff. If you want me to back any of it up with solid evidence,
just ask.





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