Elcenia Spoilers

[Alicorn]

Okay. So after Revenn saves her, Mirra is quite thoroughly alive, but she doesn't have any dragon magic (she is staying alive because a ton of kamai was thrown at her). She was actually very relevant to the breakthrough in the canonical shren cure because they knew she would have died and could see she didn't have any dragon magic.

In her magicless state, she cannot breathe fire, will not answer to her name, does not acquire language, etc. She can fly (since that's nonmagical) and she is just as smart as a normal dragon baby of her age, just with a severe language disorder in her way of expressing this or learning facts. The word for a dragon in this condition is "tojia", but when there's only one of her the existence of a word for the state doesn't come up (I invented the word for a thing kappa wrote in which the fourth baby in the clutch was also saved and there were two tojias, not just Mirra). If allowed to continue being a tojia until age twenty, she still wouldn't learn to shapeshift.

Mirra receives a magic transplant - she needs as many donors as Korulen or Kanaat did - but because she is supposed to be a dragon and has a place for the magic to go, and because she's being kept alive by factors unrelated to possessing dragon magic, the transplant can be done with wizardry alone without divine intervention. After the fact she is magically normal. However, she does not acquire standard comfort with language as a late acquisition, and prefers to do without it whenever possible.

[jalapeno_dude]

thing kappa wrote in which the fourth baby in the clutch was also saved

Is this something that will ever be released for public consumption?

[Kappa]

We have toyed with the notion of making it an RP continuity, and may yet do so. I don't think I'm going to release the original for public consumption.

[jalapeno_dude]

Ok. :(

[cbhacking]

Huh, I guess I was wrong about at least a few things, then:
Doomed babies have no firebreathing or language (or other dragon-magic tricks) even before their doom catches up to them.
The reason shrens can't fly isn't because dragonflight is magical so much as because shrenhood specifically steals wing strength (for magical fuel, somehow?).
Things like speech and fire probably aren't available to less-than-a-month-old non-doomed dragons, or it'd be possible to distinguish them from doomed ones.

Have I got that all right, then? In retrospect, this fits everything I remember from canon; the magic-less baby (Mirra?) could fly but not speak. Un-named babies were carried, rather than being told to do things. I thought there had been some reference to doomed babies "running out" of magic, but it's quite possible I'm misremembering. I remembered the bit about "current theory is that dragonflight is mechanical not magical" but had assumed that theory was in error (how does a metallic lizard with muscle-powered wings fly, non-magically? Oh wait, everything I think I know about physics is questionable here unless explicitly established).

Guess I have to go re-read Elcenia. Oh dear, this is *such* a tragedy! How ever will I survive? :-D

[Alicorn]

That is all correct.

[DanielH]

I thought there had been some reference to doomed babies "running out" of magic, but it's quite possible I'm misremembering.

Perhaps you’re remembering when the kyma were working on the doomed baby: “At length, Talyn said, "Look, Grandfather. Her lifeforce is draining away to nowhere - there - the lifelink isn't plugging the hole, it's just regenerating more. Can we patch it?"”. Lifeforce is, however, not the same thing as dragon magic.

“I remembered the bit about "current theory is that dragonflight is mechanical not magical" but had assumed that theory was in error (how does a metallic lizard with muscle-powered wings fly, non-magically? Oh wait, everything I think I know about physics is questionable here unless explicitly established).”

I haven’t checked with metal, and I am not a biologist, fluid dynamicist, aeronautical engineer, etc., but as far as I could tell (I did the calculation a few months ago and don’t remember details), the common statement that dragons’ wings would be too small to support them because of the square-cube law is not actually true even in an Earthlike environment. Given relatively large but not ridiculous wings, a dragon in whatever size range I happened to check would be in the upper range of wing-to-weight ratios for extant Earth species, but well within the extant range. I suspect it wouldn’t even get much worse for Elcenian dragons as they aged, because I think they grow longer but not thicker.

[jalapeno_dude]

Almost done with my reread of Empaths. I'd forgotten most of the details, and am mildly pleased with myself for figuring out Keo's Deep Dark Secret several chapters before it was revealed. I knew her love of spicy food wasn't just an extraneous detail!

FYI, there's an inconsistency between Chapter 10 of Empaths and Chapter 21 of Blood (in Blood, Hallai yells at Kaylo after being cured, and he teleports away and doesn't come back and cure Ilen until she's gone; in Empaths, Hallai is present when Ilen is cured). The scene in Empaths seems more important to the plot, and is also much more feels-inducing, so presumably the scene in Blood is the one that should be changed if you're concerned with that sort of thing.

[Alicorn]

I'll tweak Blood; thanks! It's got a new cover commissioned so it'll get the change in the new edition.

[jalapeno_dude]

In the same vein as my last post, two minor continuity issues I noticed in the first part of Siaddaki (which I saw on Twitter you're working on again! Hooray!):

-In Chapter 5, Mallyn tells Kenar he's been in the household for "half a month" (and the dates in the source code support this). But enough has happened in the story that half a year seems more appropriate. In particular, it seems really hard to believe that Mallyn has learned to read, in Martisen to the point of reading "everything...Ehail had on her bookshelf" and at least to the point of kids' books in Leraal, in two weeks--let alone learning arithmetic, growing to trust his parents, etc, etc. Given that there's a several month time-skip in the next chapter, so that by the end of Chapter 6 it really has been half a year since Mallyn's adoption, it seems like it'd be fairly easy to remedy this problem either by changing Mallyn's response or changing the order of the scenes in Chapter 5/6.
-In Chapter 7, Mallyn is surprised that Korulen has a boyfriend--but she's already mentioned her boyfriend Kaylo to him in the previous chapter.