Kenneth Gorelick <pulmon at mac.com> 01/10/06 08:27 AM To Jon_Lincicum at stream.com cc Dragaera List <dragaera at dragaera.info> Subject Re: the honing of Vlad >I think you are mistaking elder sorcery with the ability to "create" >amorphia. It seems that anyone who is willing can use elder sorcery-- >it was the only flavor available during the interregnum, and was used >by Sethra, Tazendra and Grita, among others. The ability to CREATE >amorphia appears to rest with the heirs of Kieron--to wit, Aliera and >Vlad but not Morrolon. Verra seems to have the power to channel and >control amorphia, as does Aliera. Vlad can be trained to do so. But >these talents are different from the ability to use amorphia for >spellcasting...unless there is something we don't know about the >ancestry of Tazendra and Grita (I grant we don't know anything about >Sethra's ancestors... Okay, this subject came up when we were trying to define "Elder Sorcery" in the wikicity. "Elder Sorcery" is used somewhat interchangably in the texts to refer both to the ability to create and control Amorphia directly using the power of the mind (as Vlad does in /Jhereg/, then again later in /Issola/) and in the use of Chaos stones to channel a flow of amorphia (As used by Adron in FHYA). It should be noted that Chaos stones were invented in the ninth cycle, then banned by Cuorfor II in the eleventh cycle after being used effectively in battle by Dragon soliders. So for nine cycles (about 150,000 years) the first sort of "Elder Sorcery" was all there was. (Which had been banned at the beginning of the Empire.) As to the abilities of Grita, Tazendra et al. to use Elder Sorcery despite not being e'Kierons, well, I can see two possibilities; this is Elder Sorcery of the second sort (Both Grita and Tazendra use staves, maybe these are laced with Chaos stones?), or else maybe the e'Kieron line is the only group of *Dragons* that can use this ability, but this last supposition is not supported by the textev that we have so far. Majikjon