When you get right down to it, nothing matters, because everything is just staging for the showdowns between the Prophecies, and so things happen arbitrarily. We have a whole group of loyal proven warriors. Let's all go GET the bad guy! No, we can't, because the rules say so! That is LITERALLY the justification for forcing otherwise inexplicable decisions by the characters. The whole Mallorean, they do completely counter-indicated things in order to drag out their quest into a tour of the heretofore unexplored regions, so David Eddings can show off his world-building. Just kill the villain right away? NO! That's not what the Prophecy wants! It was a complete crock that dragged out the books, and Eddings all but admitted it when he wrote basically the same story with the Elenium and the Tamuli, but did it in three books each.