Doc said:Perhaps not necessarily the denizens themselves, but Falconia and its personal significance to Griffith. [...] As for what might bring about such an action, I was building on the original proposition: that Guts somehow develops a means of destroying Griffith with the Dragonslayer.
But the problem remains of the circumstances of such a ceremony. Do you picture Femto using a beherit (and which one? The crimson one?) to call upon his kindred while he's in the throes of death? That seems terribly unlikely to me. I think such an occurrence would be far beyond "bending rules", but then again, how do we define what rules apply to the God Hand themselves? Especially now, in this new world?
On a separate note, sorry to nitpick, but "Dragon Slayer" isn't a single word. Same for "God Hand" or "Black Swordsman". I often see people writing them as one word for some reason.
Doc said:It was certainly a departure from what we had hitherto gleaned about Apostles & sacrifice in the Berserk universe. In hindsight, sure, the rules can be loosely defined but it was fairly black and white how the process worked before the Beherit-Apostle entered the equation. After all, what if anything was the Beherit-Apostle, if not causality's loophole for having Femto incarnated?
Well, the first and only apostle ceremony we ever saw was already completely extraordinary: a second sacrifice by an apostle, one that was actually a failure as he refused to sacrifice, and that also included a former sacrifice and an elf intruding into the ceremony and attacking the God Hand. That doesn't really establish a strict setting to me. That being said, there's no denying the Beherit-Apostle was a special case, fittingly so in the face of what happened at Albion. And I believe that answers your last question: that event was a thousand years in the making, and I think we can assume that the peculiar situation of the Beherit-Apostle was possible because he was such a key part of it.
Then again, we have how varied these things can be, so who knows... Maybe the circumstances of the sacrifices of Zodd, Irvine, Locus, Rakshas or Grunbeld will be revealed to have been quite special as well. Not to mention Slan, Ubik, Conrad or Void.