This one's too much fun to sit on till I post my next list of updates to Cracks and Shards. http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/names.html#Loraan-Orlaan Loraan / Orlaan [2003-05-20] The male Athyra wizard from whom Vlad steals the staff containing Aliera's soul in Taltos, and whom he battles in Athyra, is named Loraan. The sorceress who opposes our young heroes in Paths of the Dead and who, when we first meet her, seems to be picking flowers in a meadow but is actually searching for a disembodied soul, is named Orlaan. It is easy and obvious to suppose a connection between them, and in fact... ("Boss! BOSS! You're beginning to sound like Paarfi again!" "Wha'?... Oh! Yes, I was. Thanks, pal." "Just doing my job.") Where was I? Oh, yes. When POTD came out, several members of the Dragaera mailing list noted this similarity and inferred that Loraan and Orlaan were the same person, with a change of sex. (Ben Newman points out the similarity to Virginia Woolf's character Orlando, who also changed sex.) Brust replied to the effect of (not anything like an exact quote) "Oh, damn! No, they're not the same person. That was a dumb mistake on my part. I never even noticed that similarity." For that matter, there also is, or was, a Jhereg boss named Rolaan [Yen13]. There are three other permutations of R-O-L followed by "aan": Lroaan, Rloaan, and Olraan, of which only the third is reasonably pronounceable by the norms of the fairly large number of Dragaeran names we've seen. The first one, though, brings to mind Röaanac and his daughter Röaana in _The Paths of the Dead_. (I don't think the dieresis ["umlaut"] on the 'o' is meant to indicate a front rounded vowel as in German or Hungarian, but a syllable boundary between the "o" and the "aa": "roe-ah-na" instead of "roan-a".) Steve, I urge you to shake off your obsession with these particular letters. In case you can't, or to help you catch yourself, I offer you a table of the 360 anagrams of "Loraan" <http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/Loraanagrams.html>. Use it in good health. -- Mark A. Mandel http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/ a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website