Scott Schultz wrote: <snip> > Vlad is not the first Easterner to learn sorcery. He's surely not the first > to learn of Elder Sorcery. If manipulating amorphia is an innate ability of > Easterners, I'd think that would be common knowledge and that the place of > Easterners in Dragaeran society would be quite a bit different than it > currently is. > I didn't mean "sorcery that uses raw amorphia sans Orb", I meant creating raw amorphia with apparently nothing but pure willpower. Given that if Aliera hadn't been around, said raw amorphia would have eaten Vlad since he was too tired to do anything to get out of its way, there's no reason to believe it would become common knowledge - first, most Easterners wouldn't think to try it (which makes it hard to have the necessary willpower behind it), and second, if someone did try it and it worked, very good odds that the amorphia would eat the Easterner who did it, which makes it hard to practice, or convince the friends of the late Easterners to try it themselves. I suppose I'm kinda coming off the idea that Aliera's reciting of the role of the Jenoine in creating Easterners and Dragaerans is colored by her pride that of course, e'Kierons are the best line, Dragons are the best House, and Dragaerans are better than Easterners. If you wonder if maybe the Jenoine did find Easterners interesting enough in themselves to tinker with, as opposed to just being a control so they could see how much better the new and improved Dragons were compared to Easterners, the question becomes what interested them? And the Jenoine seem to be mostly interested in getting control of amorphia. Second, why would they add the ability to create raw amorphia to a line of lab humans, when apparently they can't do it themselves? Admittedly, the Jenoine are exceedingly mysterious, but maybe the reason is that the Easterners had the ability in potentia, and the Jenoine were trying to figure out how it worked so they could do it to themselves (or at least control some tame pets who could do it for them), rather than that they knew how to do it and for some mysterious reason decided to see what it would do if they added the ability to a lab human line, even though they didn't want it for themselves. So, assuming Jenoine aren't idiots, maybe the reason almost all Dragaerans can't create raw amorphia is because they deliberately turned that ability off, while they experimented with various adding various Dragaeran animal genes in to see if they could get a reliably tame 'human', before they unsuppressed the ability. In this theory, possibly the reason only the e'Kieron Dragaerans have the ability is that Verra was only able to sneak one unsuppressed Dragaeran past her Jenoine supervisors. (Or does anyone know of any textevd about whether Kieron was created in a Jenoine lab, as opposed to being born a few generations later? If he wasn't created in a Jenoine lab, the idea that Verra pulled a fast one in her revolt doesn't work so well - after all, why would Kieron and his siblings be the only one in the Tribe of the Dragon who could trace their ancestry to one lab human? Maybe human-Dragaeran crosses can be fertile, but Kieron's mom was the only one perverted enough to try it? Makes for a different interpretation as to why Kieron didn't like Easterners one bit.....VBG) <snip> > The thing about reincarnation is that it's a new start in life. Having a > history doesn't change who you are now. Even if you have an especially adept > and powerful mentor like Sethra to lead you in a past-life regression, doing > so doesn't somehow transform you back into that person that you used to be. > It just gives you some insight into your soul's history and maybe some > pointers on what mistakes to avoid this time around. Never mind the legal > morass of souls moving around through different Houses in each life. So Dragaerans don't go in for bull sessions or speculative fiction? Karen