Nice line at the bottom. I like the way 'save' begins both segments, tying them together.
In R.O.S.E. Online A Muse is a Magician, and in TurfBattles Niphilim is a Race of Elves
^ I know I got it spelled wrong.
Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess that might seem similar at first glance. But, no, nothing near the same. By 'Muse' I mean the true old sense: the Muse that is invoked at the beginning of epics (indeed, that's an epic beginning, asking the muse to sing of something); the Muse that dwells on mount Helikon. They are the divine inspiration of the ancient Greek aoidoi, the singers or bards of the epics.
And for Nephilim... well, it's nearer what Magus just said. A lot of people have used the term and, in my opinion, massacred it. Personally, I got it from Genesis. However, most people seem - for some strange reason - to make Nephilim half-angelic monsters. They focus on the first part of those verses. However, my own opinion on the matter is that 'Nephilim' is simply referring en masse to the heroes of the old world (especially Gilgamesh) who were more often than not half-divine. Anyway, my Nephilim - you see, I'm referencing my long story in my sig - are more realistic in that regard, bearing more resemblance to classical heroes than anything else. They are not monsters, they are not neccessarially evil, and they are certainly not a race of Elves.
The name itself is a little interesting. In Hebrew, as I've always heard, it means 'fallen ones.' However, a not too different sounding word in Greek would be Nephelidai. Okay, it looks similar to me. That means, essentially, 'children of the clouds.' The children of the clouds in Greek myth were the Centaurs. Anyway, Centaur myths are thought to have begun when the Greeks saw mounted soldiers, a practice not much in use in archaic Greece. As such, I have a very prominent group in my writing who are like the Scythians: warriors on horseback, nomads of the Black Sea. From this - okay, it's a bit of a complicated assocciation, I admit - I can connect both the Semitic idea of Nephilim, and the Greek idea of Centaurs. In the end, I use it as a general term, like in the way Homer uses 'hero' not for someone who does exceptional deeds, but for any free aristocratic male of the heroic age. Well, I - okay, I'm pulling a Tolkien here with my feigning the development of myth and all; I pretend that all this came through Greek sources - use the term in a very similar way, assuming it eventually took to have that sort of more general meaning. They're just the people of the world roughly around the time of the unification of Egypt under Narmer (who comes up in my writing.)
And my sig comes from all that. Can I ramble or what?
