SPOILERS!!!
duh
His death just really pisses me off. Warren, the 180 something year old Wizard who was in the process of being trained by First Wizard Zorander himself, dies of a knife wound? A freaking KNIFE WOUND? And yet he was with Sisters immediately, so why couldn’t they simply heal such a minor wound like with everyone else? Why couldn’t Zedd? He only said “it’s beyond my power to heal,” well freaking why? Just a few paragraphs before Kahlan talked about how the Gifted could heal gut wounds, GUT WOUNDS, so long as they got to the injured person fast enough. A full on lance in the gut would not phase them at all so long as they got there in time to stop the bleeding, meaning the only time the Gifted failed was when the injured bled out before Gifted could heal them. Warren had Sisters with him the moment he went down, & was alive for who knows how long before Kahlan & Verna got there, but nooooo, “it’s beyond my power to heal.”
That is the most bullshit way to kill a character if you ask me, especially a Wizard. I dislike that magic & its power are so ill-defined, it allows Goodkind to just rip the rug out from under you all the time in a lazy fashion, rather than work within existing parameters like Christopher Paolini could & did. Authors like Paolini & Jim Butcher use clear cut magical systems that actually flow with the series, with just enough open-endedness to be able to expand into new phenomena while still maintaining a viable, logical magical system with clearly or at least semi-clearly defined rules to prevent bullshittery, but Goodkind uses it as his go-to cop-out just to shove the story along.
Now, it’s usually a great story mind you, if a bit deadpan with the constant Randian “muh free market” diatribe, but it’s good. He shouldn’t have to use inconsistent magic to drag it along like a dead horse. For example, one moment magic can, in a couple minutes or less; bring down a 3,000 year old barrier, bind two women irrevocably together as if they were mother & daughter regardless of distance, or even heal someone’s broken spine, but then in the next moment it is completely powerless to stop a simple knife attack, & can’t even heal that up even with expert sorceress healers as the first responders & the First Wizard himself as the doctor, but by god the victim can still lie there in agony just long enough before dying to deliver the “fateful last words of advice.” It’s corny & it’s incredibly obvious that it’s a cop-out.
Ugh. I’m not even that sorry that he died. Warren was awesome, & sometimes it is a pointed means of expressing the danger or gravity of a situation by killing an important or loved character, but to have him die in so stupid a fashion for “muh plot thickener” just grates my nerves.