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Good afternoon!
I decided to replay Heroes 5, to reminisce about the past.
And finally, to get to the bottom of two questions that arose 10 years ago. Questions about Raialag and Isabel.
It's clear that the game ended in a hurry, the plot was distorted, but there should be some logical explanation for what happened.
While browsing the discussion, I saw a link:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/might-magic/qa-from-jeff-spock-writer-on-heroes-vi-answering-timeline-questions-about-heroes/167142279978411.
As for Raialag, everything is clear.
He got stuck in Shi'o, saving the real Isabel, while everyone else had already fled to the surface with Biara. And they were getting out of Shi'o for years.
It's not entirely clear how Zephyr didn't realize during the second ritual in the Silver Cities that he was dealing with a succubus, not Isabel. It's also not clear why Raialag completely forgot all the secret paths that he had learned like the back of his hand over hundreds of years and could easily and quickly escape from Shi'o. And it's completely unclear why one of the most experienced commanders of Ashan, who could significantly change the balance of power in a major battle with demons, became a Knight of the Dragon and now just performs minor tasks for Tieru.
But all of the above can be attributed to stupidity and the rushed ending; at least everything is understandable here.
But with Isabel, everything is completely unclear.
At the moment when the heroes defeat the Demon Lord at the end of the first part, Isabel should be pregnant.
When we meet her in the Dwarven add-on, she says to Raialag, "I would go with you, but after what they did to me, and what came of it..." What did she mean? Psychological trauma? A serious wound? Magical impotence? And it's not a bad translation; the original has the same nonsense. And where did the child go? As we learn in Dark Messiah, he is quite a normal person. And he was clearly not born an adult.
And in the third part, we see Isabel, or rather, her spirit, in Holyfire. The spirit somehow knows about her main person, but the person knows nothing about the spirit and is very scared when Arantir merges them.
It's impossible to assume that Arantir messed up the merging; he's a nerd and very knowledgeable about what he's doing.
At the same time, after the merging, Isabel starts screaming "No!" and shouting "Demon flame!" and "What have they done to me!"
What is this? Did she remember childbirth? Exactly what she was talking about in the second part, "what they did to me, and what came of it"?
And finally, Biara's completely irrelevant words at the end: "You?! Alive?! I'm going to be sick!"
After which, Biara, who had just planned to fight to the last drop of blood, suddenly almost agrees to let Isabel kill her.
Yes, there is also a lot of rushed storytelling and ambiguity here, but if there is at least some logic in the story with Raialag, there is simply none here.
Maybe someone has a more coherent idea of what happened?