FelixEisen at aol.com wrote: > Damn. Can't find it online, don't actually -have- the book... anyhow. IIRC, > the quote from the Brust-written preface ran along the lines of '... caused > by people using magic to take out the garbage for something like 100,000 > years.' If that ain't an explanation, I don't know what is. ;) >From my copy of Dzurlord... "There is an orange-red overcast that hangs over the Dragaeran Empire. Standing near the eastern border, there are, indeed, times when the overcast will break and you can see a blue sky, or a gray overcast, or white clouds, or a yellow sun, or bright stars. Other times, with a strong wind from the west, the Easterners will see orange-red instead of blue or gray or white." Which is kindof interesting - if the winds can move it, that implies its physical, and therefore it's being constantly renewed by Dragaeran sorcery - so was the sky blue during the Interegnum? "The overcast may, if you are so inclined, be considered pollution. It is the result of sorcerers casually using magic for war, pleasure, and taking out the garbage for something like two hundred thousand years." Which could be taken as meaning that there are no other effects beyond an overcast, so you can't blame the apparently rather low Dragaeran birthrate on magical pollution - although it could be interesting to see what happened if someone did think that, since Dragaerans probably like their sorcery even more than Americans like their SUVs.