On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Philip Hart wrote: #Do we know there were no pre-Interregnum resurrection? Ah yes, _Phoenix_, #Lesson 8, tDG talking to Vlad about the upgraded skills of sorcerers. This is involved in a Crack (inconsistency): http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/deaths.html#Beheading >>> Off With His Head, For Now Vlad's preferred method of permanent killing is a stiletto through the left eye and into the brain. [Yen9] Duels in Castle Black are always under the conditions of "no cuts to the head, and revivification afterwards". [Jrg76] But even without damage to the brain itself, chopping off the head or otherwise severing the spine makes a person unrevivifiable [Jrg42,Phx139]. But in the events leading up to the first Dragon-Jhereg war, about 10,000 years before the Interregnum, the Dragons "... got the head of their messenger returned to them in a basket. The insult, reasoned the Jhereg, wasn't *that* great. After all, they hadn't destroyed the poor fellow's brain, or done anything else to make him unrevivifiable. They were just sending the Dragons a message." [Jrg73] As I reconstruct it, my lords, here is Brust writing his first novel, still building the world of Dragaera. The general idea of revivification is clear to him, and he thinks at one point, "The brain has to be intact". That allows for non-permanent decapitation, and the early Jhereg-Dragon insult is framed in those terms. But later it occurs to him that what we think of as the brain is continuous with the spinal cord, so that severing the spine actually does damage the brain irrecoverably; and that becomes the premise for all further writing about revivification. Unfortunately, he forgets to fix the part already written. It's not as though the sorcerers of the Sixteenth Cycle knew how to revivify a spinal case. It should be possible in Vlad's time, if ever, because of the methods developed during the Interregnum to deal with the absence of the Orb [Phx117]. [*] Since it's not possible in Vlad's time, it probably wasn't possible before the Interregnum either. <<< -- Mark A. Mandel http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/ a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website