doo dee doo On Thu, 6 May 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: @> On Wed, 5 May 2004, Caliann the Elf wrote: @> @> >>> @> One of the reasons I believe this is that, in Paresh's telling, he @> states that Aerich said to him, "Inform your master that the Duke of @> Arylle will see him." @> @> <<< @> @> We can also hypothesize a grammatical explanation, similar to one that @> has already been proposed and has gained Steve's stamp of approval @> (http://cracksandshards.com/deaths.html#Zerikas_Parentage). Briefly, @> Vlad and Paarfi seem to disagree about Zerika's parents, swapping the @> names Vernoi and Loudin between the father and the mother. The passage @> in Five Hundred Years After speaks of Loudin's pregnancy, but the one in @> Taltos has only the names and the pronoun "she". Personally, I believe Paresh's account. Let us examine the credibility of the witnesses: on the one hand, we have Paarfi, who is a damned liar. On the other hand, we have Paresh, who certainly did not give me any such impression in Teckla. And, in fact, Paarfi's version simply does not square with the character that Vlad met, who was not particularly cowardly or deferent in any way. Furthermore, Vlad is working from a primary source (albeit one with a specific agenda), whereas Paarfi is, as has been pointed out, either getting his information from Paresh and manipulating it to his own ends, or dealing with a secondary source (that is, someone who heard Aerich or Paresh's account of what happened and then made their own story). Of course, for all we know someone asked the Necromancer to go talk to Tazendra and Aerich in the land of the dead or something, but that doesn't seem terribly likely. Keep in mind that, nice as Aerich is, he has already been revealed to have no shortage of disdain for the lower classes. As Paarfi's character, he embodies the virtues of the Dragaeran nobility, but those virtues are not necessarily the virtues of present-day Americans.