alexandraerin

Started: 5/12/2011
Status: In Progress
Last Updated: 5/13/2011, 5:30
Word Count: ~4500
Hours Writing: 4

[4 hours.]

Because enduring a conversation about dragons apparently wasn't enough, the first question was about another race with a taste for sentient flesh that I'd had too many close encounters with over the course of my academic career to date.

"So... that thing of separate halves," a student asked. "How does that apply to someone like a mermaid?"

"You mean, is their top half legally human and their bottom half legally fish?" Hart said, to scattered bits of laughter. "They're not actually talking about that kind of halves."

"No," the guy said. "They can change forms, from, you know, mermaid to something more human-looking."

"I know merfolk can split their tails into legs, but that's not quite as drastic as a werewolf, or a half-dragon," Hart said. "I don't see that the decree would apply. She'd still clearly be a mermaid, in either form."

"I have a friend who dated a mermaid for part of last year," he said, "and he said that she could... make her scales go away, and then she looked pretty much like a human. So, legally, would she be a human?"

"Okay. I did not actually know that," Hart said. "But the specific thing about Separate Halves... you have to remember that it was originally applied to werewolves. And Thylean bear-skin adepts, but I swear I'm trying not to steer the conversation around to them. A werewolf does not adopt the appearance of a human. A werewolf in its... his.. werewolves in their human form are human. That's the point of the decree. There are these dwarves who can turn their hands into axes and hammers and picks and things..."

"Bonesmiths, I believe you mean," Hall supplied.

"Yes. Dwarven bonesmiths," Hart said. "The law doesn't need a Decree of Separate Halves to treat a bonesmith as a dwarf, whether he's got a hand for a hand or an axe for a hand. I don't know what actually goes on with a mermaid's physical form when she goes from having a tail to having legs, but I suspect it's got more in common with a bonesmith than a werewolf."

"Just so," Hall said. "Indeed, there are rumors that the bodies of merfolk are more protean than most land-dwellers would imagine. It is well-known that many tribes of shore-dwelling merfolk, colloquially known as 'sirens', can transfigure their upper limbs into wings... why should not their cousins in the deep be able to assume a flipper-like configuration? And yet the sirens remain just as human... which is to say, not at all... when they show traits of mammals, reptiles, and birds."

"Good question, though," Hart said to the guy who'd asked. "We're dealing with a big topic and so a lot of concepts we only passed over with a glance, but this is a long period so there's no reason we can't stop and amplify something if it wasn't clear."

"I have a question for Professor... uh... Hall, I think?" she said. She was looking at him. I supposed that if I didn't have prior experience with one of them, I might have found it hard to keep track of which was which after the brief introduction at the beginning of the class.

Hall looked at Hart.

"I believe that in the interest of fostering discussion and lessening confusion, we can do away with a degree of formality," he said. "I have no objection to being addressed by my given name, by anyone who feels comfortable doing so."

"If you can stand to be called 'Fenwick', I guess I don't mind being Aaron," Hart said.

"Okay, Professor Fenwick, then," the girl said. "How exactly did dragons change during the Fall? You said they became mortal, but what did that actually entail in terms of their abilities?"

"Oh, yes," Fenwick said. "Well, just as what seems to be a relatively simple idea like 'shapeshifting' can actually cover a variety of concepts, so, too, does one like 'mortality'. Dragons have always been prone to aging and to death, though there's little in the way of proof that great and greater dragons will ever die of old age. When one speaks of 'mortals' in relation to dragons, one is usually referring to the so-called created kinds, the order of creation that humans and elves and dwarves belongs to... the sorts of beings sometimes erroneously and prejudicially referred to as 'humanoids'.

"During the Fall, every intelligent dragon within the sphere of the world was transformed into the form of a so-called humanoid, and the less intelligent dragons became a variety of hunting beasts. It is from the latter category that the world's population of chimerae descended, as they followed their new instincts and mated with natural beasts of their newly assumed kind."

"As far as their abilities are concerned," Hart said... and to me, he was still Hart, "the intelligent dragons didn't lose any of their accumulated knowledge or magical power. They couldn't fly by flapping the wings they'd lost, or breathe plumes of fire or lightning. To what extent they retained their less physical abilities is hard to judge. They weren't in any hurry to advertise the extent of their power loss."

"There are stories about the trapped dragons displaying draconic-level feats of strength," Fenwick said. "But this could easily have been magic or trickery... as Aaron suggested, the de-scaled wyrms had a powerful motivation to keep up the appearance of power and strength traditionally associated with them."

"Or it could just be stories," Hart added.

"True enough," Fenwick said. "Does anyone have another question?"

There was no immediate response. A few people looked at each other. I imagined there were questions on the tips of people's tongues, but we weren't quite into the flow of things yet. Despite my discomfort with the topics at hand, I did have a desire to know more... it just wasn't coalescing into specific questions. I wanted to know more about such things as the Pelorians and their brief empire, and their absorption into the armies of the old empire.

"Well, if no one else has an immediate question coming to mind," Fenwick said, "then I'd like to further the discussion by expanding on another point I found interesting, the Decree of Separate Halves. I'd be surprised if this decree... it's a Metric one, I gather from the time frame, but it's part of our common law, I suppose?" Hart nodded, and Fenwick continued. "Yes, well. As a sidenote, I'd be very surprised if this Decree has ever been applied to a full-blooded dragon who assumed a human form through whatever means. Do you know anything about that, Aaron?"

"To my knowledge, it hasn't," Hart said. "Though I've never looked into it. Anyway, your half-dragon has two natural forms that aren't just different races, they're different kinds of creatures. Orders?" He looked at Fenwick for confirmation, who nodded. "I don't think that last part matters. If there were such a thing as a were-elf, who was human most of the time and elf some of the time, Separate Halves would still apply. The key is that they're different kinds of creatures, or beings, or people. Like the werewolf, the half-dragon really is human and really is dragon. Does that make sense?"

Around the room there were some scattered nods.

"I guess what I would like to know," one guy asked, "is how does the law decide if it applies?"

"Well, that's really a question for lawyers," Hart said. "I assume they look at past precedents, and if the question arises for a new type of creature someone has to make a determination of what's actually going on. In all honesty, it doesn't get invoked very often. It's more important for purposes of the historical context of how we came to our current understanding of equality under the law. Nowadays... well, last year, there was an unfortunate incident on campus involving a young lady from a kingdom in the Khazarus who was killed on campus. It was put down to a monster attack, eventually, but it was initially being investigated as a murder."

I wondered at Hart's choice of words, when he said that Leda's death was "put down to" a monster attack... in his history classes, he'd displayed a tendency to acerbically repeat the official line on some of the more controversial aspects of the Imperium's history while making it clear to most of the class what he thought of it.

I doubted he knew or suspected the exact truth, but it didn't seem beyond reason that he might not trust the official outcome of the investigation.

"Now, this young lady... like many people from that part of the world... was a shapeshifter," Hart continued. "She could move between the forms of a swan and a human. Would she have been covered by the Decree of Separate Halves? Probably. But the question of whether or not she 'counts' as human never came up, because under the current law a swan-person is supposed to be the same as a human-person."

"Um, Aaron... I have a question that's not really directly related to half-dragons," a girl said. "But it does relate to something you said."

"Go for it," Hart said. "Like Professor Hall said, let's keep things 'organic'."

"Okay," she said. "Well, the thing is... I was wondering where werewolves come from?"

"If you mean, were they created in a similar way to half-dragons, I think we can probably say no," Hart said, to more laughter. "But other than that, I really don't know. Fenwick?"

"There are stories, of course," Fenwick said. "Old stories, and not very pleasant ones. Persons afflicted with lycanthropy are recognized as persons these days, and are not punished for their condition, but simply held responsible for the consequences of failing to control it... but once upon a time, they were seen as a thing of nightmares. Those stories that spoke of a specific origin for them inevitably put it down to a curse or hex. But I believe that the truth is contained in a story that's not about werewolves in particular.

"In the beginning, the goblins say, there were the Old Ones... sleeping titans, gods of chaos and primal power. And one of the old gods, a figure identified as The Claw That Corrupts, also known as the Father of Beasts and Mother of Madness, is said in some tales to have shaped beasts into the forms of mortals, or to have created a plague that would infect mortals with the forms of beasts. The story varies with the telling... and with the translation... but either way we read it, it seems clear that goblinkind attribute the creation of werewolves and similar creatures to their dark god."

"All earlier kidding aside," Hart said, "I think we do have to take these theological stories with a grain of salt. They seem less likely to be contemporary accounts that were handed down and more likely to be retrospectively trying to put together pieces from before any race has any credible knowledge."

"True, perhaps," Fenwick said. "We find more conflicts... or competition, if you will... among the various accounts of creation and origin told by varying peoples. In some cases we may be able to approach the truth by looking at the commonalities between them. In other cases we're left with irreconcilable conflicts. The interesting thing here, though, is that there are no conflicting accounts. No other story takes credit or assigns blame for lycanthropy and related plagues."

"That's not definitive," Hart said.

"But it's suggestive," Fenwick said. "Now, I should stress that the story involving The Claw That Corrupts refers only to true werecreatures who are distinct from those who can take on the shape of animals in other ways... such as Professor Hart's beloved berserkers, or members of certain druidic sects. Sadly it is not at all uncommon for a human who happens to take the form of a wolf to be mistaken for a werewolf. True werebeasts can pass their condition on through a bite, have some degree of a lack of control over their shapeshifting, and assume the form of 'dire' creatures rather than natural ones."

"On the subject of shapeshifting..." another student said. "I wonder about half-dragon shapeshifting. How does it work?"

"Well, now," Professor Fenwick said, "I believe that Professor Hart has touched on an important truth when he said that a half-dragon truly is both dragon and person. A half-dragon has two natural forms. Whichever form one is born in, the other form will want to assert itself. Even those whose draconic parents have no natural shapeshifting talent may spontaneously shapeshift as they mature. As for the actual mechanism? It's best to think of it as one life, one mind, occupying two different bodies."

"So, does the other body exist in some kind of extraplanar space when it's not being used?" the student asked.

"Oh, heavens, no," the loremaster said. "Nothing like that. Nor can a half-dragon survive the death of 'one' body. The two bodies are one, in the manner of the dualistic or trinitarian gods that were in greater favor some millennia ago, or in the Universal conception of the relationship between Khersis Dei the god and Lord Khersis the man. Definitely two separate bodies. Definitely one unified one. It's a difficult idea to grasp from within the framework that we exist in, I admit."

Yeah, that idea seemed to take some getting around for a lot of the students. I dealt with it by accepting that I didn't understand it, but I'd had some practice... my grandmother had been a staunch member of the Universal Temple of Khersis.

"So... would a half-dragon born to a dragon mother be born in dragon form?" was the next question.

"If the mother resumes her dragon form and lays an egg, then yes," Fenwick said. "That has been known to happen. If she carried the pregnancy to term in the form of a human or elf, the offspring would be the same as a half-dragon born to a human or elven mother and a dragon father. The stories are not quite unanimous on this point, but it seems that some half-dragons who are 'born dragons' may be accepted by their kin as full dragons, though of a lesser caliber than their parents. At the very least they seem to have the option of 'passing' for a dragon."

"So is that where lesser dragons come from?" another student asked.

"That seems unlikely," Fenwick said. "Dragons of lesser ranks have always been more common than those of greater ranks, and one of the traits that distinguishes the greater ones is that shapeshifting abilities are more common among them. But the ranks of common dragons have certainly been bolstered by mixing with mortals... any non-great dragon who can assume a mortal form without powerful and difficult magic likely has a parent or ancestor of that mortal race."

"If dragons don't approve of hybrids, why do some of them mate with mortals in the first place?"

"Well," Fenwick said, "while we don't have anything like a census, it seems that more half-dragons were born during the era of the Fall than any time before or since... from that, we can infer that the intelligent dragons were also prey to their new bodies' instincts."

"But what about the ones born before and after? Why would there be any?"

"Well, there's a danger in thinking of dragons as a monolith," Fenwick said. He chuckled. "Though the resemblance can be uncanny, depending on the type of dragon and the angle from which it is viewed in repose... no, in all seriousness, to understand how this can be you must only think of any activity that your own society can be said to disapprove of, and then count all the examples of that activity you have witnessed, heard about, or performed in your own lifetime."

"How exactly do we get the views of dragon society about that kind of thing?" another student asked.

"That's an excellent question," Fenwick said. "The thing is, 'dragon society' is perhaps something of a contradiction in terms. Even the most sociable dragon is a fairly solitary creature. Dragons covet the approval of other dragons, but they don't tend to seek it... that is to say, dragons do as they please, but when they do something they think would garner the envy of their peers they crow about it. Thus, the culture of dragon consists largely of boasts... the written form of High Draconic, from which our own alphabet descends, was invented solely to disseminate news of grandiose claims and great feats farther and faster."

"On the subject of grandiose claims, I think you might be overstepping a bit," Hart said. "Dragons are some of the best record-keepers in the world. They're basically nature's accountants."

"If you use a somewhat expansive definition of 'nature', perhaps," Fenwick said.

"Okay, whatever," Hart said. "My point is that records taken from dragon hoards... and, in some cases, copied by scribes who paid an exorbitant price for the privilege... give us accounts of things like the geography, weather, and population of their dragon hunting territories in minute detail. They don't always mark time on a scale that's convenient for building a timeline, and sometimes there are large gaps where the dragon might have been sleeping or absent, but dragons use their script for their own convenience often enough that it seems questionable that they invented language just to trade boasts."

"Ah," Fenwick said, "but before your well-heeled scribes took an interest, how often did these dragons share their records? Dragons do not, as a rule, think of posterity. They can plan for the long term... for extremely long terms... but in general, their viewpoint is on the here and now. The treasures they store aren't being stored for future use, they're being stored for the present and every present that follows. Likewise, the records are for the dragon's own benefit. The practice of record-keeping may have arisen in isolation, that I'll grant, but a shared language?"

"They could have brought it with them," Hart said.

"From across the void?" Fenwick said. "It's possible, assuming that dragons weren't native to our sphere, but we're still stuck with the same basic problem: why would a shared language have arisen if it wasn't being used to communicate? Unless draconic nature was once fundamentally different, it seems likely to me that their script was created for boasting, not for bookkeeping."

It seemed that Hart couldn't find anything to fault in that logic.

"You see," Fenwick said, with a hint of triumph twinkling in his eye, "we keepers of lore do not 'uncritically' pile up stories. It takes a degree of discernment to untangle the disparate threads of many knotty traditions and weave them together into a useful tapestry of knowledge."

"Point to lore," Hart said. He looked around the circle for a distraction, but no one was volunteering a question. His gaze fell on a girl. "You look like you've had something on your mind for a while now."

"Um, yeah," she said. "When we were talking about all the people with dragon blood born during the Fall. The ones who didn't shapeshift... which I guess was all of them, during the Fall... but what distinguishes them, if they don't show draconic appearances?"

"Well in some cases... particularly during the Fall... the draconic parent was known," Fenwick said. "In later cases it was often only rumored, or inferred when those traits that will not be suppressed began to manifest themselves."

"Here's where we get into the area of history vs. lore again," Hart said. "There's not a lot of actual evidence for a lot of the so-called 'dragonblooded heroes'. In the earlier Age of Heroes... also known as the Classical Age of Heroes... we saw this with figures who performed great feats and achieved far-reaching fame being acclaimed as descendants of various gods. The thing is that in most cases nobody had any idea about this lofty parentage when those heroes were alive. Is it possible that some heroic figures had divine blood that it took centuries for sharp-eyed storytellers to recognize? Sure. But I think in most cases, claiming divine blood or dragon blood is like claiming distant kinship to a king or emperor... it's hard to prove anything either way, so it's an easy way of puffing up one's hereditary credentials."

There was a possibility I hadn't considered, regarding the question of Puddy's ancestry... it was possible that she herself wasn't making up the claim about having dragon blood but that it was still a lie all the same. Puddy's family, the La Belles, seemed to be a Family with a capital F, the sort of people who didn't just have ancestors but a lineage. But it also seemed they'd only risen to prominence a few centuries ago... might they not have concocted an illustrious and powerful ancestor further back to help cement their position?

The only problem with this theory was that they didn't seem keen to advertise the mixing that had gone on inside their family. From Puddy's account, they were still hushing up a dwarven ancestress even though having a small measure of dwarf blood had become slightly fashionable with the elevation of Magisterion XIII.

Still...

"Professor Hart?" I said.

"Yes?" he said.

"Given the Decree of Separate Halves, and the fact that dragon blood doesn't really 'mix' with human blood the way elven and dwarven blood do... well, I don't know if this is actually a history question, but I was wondering if it seems possible that a human family that would be loathe to admit to non-human blood might 'puff itself up' with dragon blood, as you put it," I said. "Since it wouldn't be seen to diminish their humanity."

From the slim smile hiding within his bushy beard, I kind of suspected that he knew exactly what I was getting at. I didn't know if he'd ever had a run-in with Puddy, but he'd butted heads with at least one of her innumerable cousins.

"Yes, it's possible," he said. "I won't name names, but at least one of the first families of Prax is almost as infamous for its dubious claim of a dragon ancestor as they are for hushing up their dwarven blood."

Well, that was one mystery solved, more or less. As Hart himself would say, it wasn't definitive... but it did give something of an explanation.

I'd done my best to stop caring about Puddy over the course of the last year. Switching dorms meant that we were no longer living on top of each other, no longer moving in the same sphere. Still, it was hard to ignore an anomaly and there was much that was anomalous about Puddy Banks-La Belle.

There was a little voice in the back of my head that said that the rumored dragon blood might be more than a rumor, if Hall was right and dragon blood carried the potential for heroic feats. That would explain how Puddy was able to display such incredible strength intermittently... I'd assumed it had something to do with the chain of faerie gifts that seemed responsible for the La Belles' elevation to the position of a "first family of Prax", but there was no way to know for sure.

"So, if dragon blood doesn't exactly mix," I said, directing my attention to Fenwick, "then as it gets 'bred out' over the generations... would the recipients basically have lower potential for displays of the same levels of strength and power of their 'purer' ancestors?"

"In essence, yes," Fenwick said. "The whole thing seems to get unpredictable over successive generations, but one way to look at it is that someone seven generations removed from a full-blooded dragon does not have one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth of a dragon inside himself, but has a one in one-hundred-and-twenty-eight chance of manifesting some aspect of full dragonhood. That's an oversimplification, obviously, but it conveys the general idea."

"Still," Hart added, "there's are many other ways to come by the 'greatness' that gets chalked up to something like dragon blood. Durkon's Hammer applies."

"I believe applying Durkon's Hammer would leave one to conclude that someone who displays strength or will or magical puissance equal to a dragon is most likely, in some measure, a dragon," Fenwick said.

"Here's the thing," Hart said. "This whole idea of heroic traits coming from 'hidden' dragon blood comes in part from the notion that not all dragons are natural shapeshifters, right? But the other part is that dragon side is too strong to be denied."

"Yes, hence the manifestation in great feats," Fenwick said.

"But why in so many individuals is it just in great feats?" Hart said. "In every case where there is provable ancestry from dragons, it manifest physically. The most striking example is the Pelorians. Here we have half-humans, half-dragons who look for all the world like humanoid dragons. When the proportion of dragon blood is smaller, we get humans with dragon eyes, or with scaly-textured skins, or with claws or wings or horns."

"Well, such accessories could be one way that the dragon blood shows itself," Fenwick said. "That doesn't mean that it's the only one."

"No, but I'm not aware of a documented case with a provable lineage to a dragon that doesn't carry such markers," Hart said.

"As you might say: that's not definitive," Fenwick said.

Even though Fenwick Hall had showed Hart up a bit on the matter of the draconic script, I was inclined to believe that Hart was on more solid footing here. Given the inherent power of dragons, it was natural that important and powerful people would claim a connection to them, or would have such a connection ascribed to them by those who came after... []

[3.5 hours. 400 words, this segment had more editing going on. Had to get the part where Hall starts being called Fenwick up higher in the body of the story because the whole point of it is to make Hart and Hall easier to distinguish.]

Because enduring a conversation about dragons apparently wasn't enough, the first question was about another race with a taste for sentient flesh that I'd had too many close encounters with over the course of my academic career to date.

"So... that thing of separate halves," a student asked. "How does that apply to someone like a mermaid?"

"You mean, is their top half legally human and their bottom half legally fish?" Hart said. "They're not actually talking about that kind of halves."

"No," the guy said. "They can change forms, from, you know, mermaid to something more human-looking."

"I know merfolk can split their tails into legs, but that's not quite as drastic as a werewolf, or a half-dragon," Hart said. "I don't see that the decree would apply. She'd still clearly be a mermaid, in either form."

"I have a friend who dated a mermaid for part of last year," he said, "and he said that she could... make her scales go away, and then she looked pretty much like a human. So, legally, would she be a human?"

"Okay. I did not actually know that," Hart said. "But the specific thing about Separate Halves... you have to remember that it was originally applied to werewolves. And Thylean bear-skin adepts, but I swear I'm trying not to steer the conversation around to them. A werewolf does not adopt the appearance of a human. A werewolf in its... his.. werewolves in their human form are human. That's the point of the decree. There are these dwarves who can turn their hands into axes and hammers and picks and things..."

"Bonesmiths, I believe you mean," Hall supplied.

"Yes. Dwarven bonesmiths," Hart said. "The law doesn't need a Decree of Separate Halves to treat a bonesmith as a dwarf, whether he's got a hand for a hand or an axe for a hand. I don't know what actually goes on with a mermaid's physical form when she goes from having a tail to having legs, but I suspect it's got more in common with a bonesmith than a werewolf."

"Just so," Hall said. "Indeed, there are rumors that the bodies of merfolk are more protean than most land-dwellers would imagine. It is well-known that many tribes of shore-dwelling merfolk, colloquially known as 'sirens', can transfigure their upper limbs into wings... why should not their cousins in the deep be able to assume a flipper-like configuration? And yet the sirens remain just as human... which is to say, not at all... when they show traits of mammals, reptiles, and birds."

"Good question, though," Hart said to the guy who'd asked. "We're dealing with a big topic and so a lot of concepts we only passed over with a glance, but this is a long period so there's no reason we can't stop and amplify something if it wasn't clear."

"I have a question for Professor... uh... Hall, I think?" she said. She was looking at him. I supposed that if I didn't have prior experience with one of them, I might have found it hard to keep track of which was which after the brief introduction at the beginning of the class.

Hall looked at Hart.

"I believe that in the interest of fostering discussion and lessening confusion, we can do away with a degree of formality," he said. "I have no objection to being addressed by my given name, by anyone who feels comfortable doing so."

"If you can stand to be called 'Fenwick', I guess I don't mind being Aaron," Hart said.

"Okay, Professor Fenwick, then," the girl said. "How exactly did dragons change during the Fall? You said they became mortal, but what did that actually entail in terms of their abilities?"

"Oh, yes," Fenwick said. "Well, just as what seems to be a relatively simple idea like 'shapeshifting' can actually cover a variety of concepts, so, too, does one like 'mortality'. Dragons have always been prone to aging and to death, though there's little in the way of proof that great and greater dragons will ever die of old age. When one speaks of 'mortals' in relation to dragons, one is usually referring to the so-called created kinds, the order of creation that humans and elves and dwarves belongs to... the sorts of beings sometimes erroneously and prejudicially referred to as 'humanoids'.

"During the Fall, every intelligent dragon within the sphere of the world was transformed into the form of a so-called humanoid, and the less intelligent dragons became a variety of hunting beasts. It is from the latter category that the world's population of chimerae descended, as they followed their new instincts and mated with natural beasts of their newly assumed kind."

"As far as their abilities are concerned," Hart said... and to me, he was still Hart, "the intelligent dragons didn't lose any of their accumulated knowledge or magical power. They couldn't fly by flapping the wings they'd lost, or breathe plumes of fire or lightning. To what extent they retained their less physical abilities is hard to judge. They weren't in any hurry to advertise the extent of their power loss."

"There are stories about the trapped dragons displaying draconic-level feats of strength," Fenwick said. "But this could easily have been magic or trickery... as Aaron suggested, the de-scaled wyrms had a powerful motivation to keep up the appearance of power and strength traditionally associated with them."

"Or it could just be stories," Hart added.

"True enough," Fenwick said. "Does anyone have another question?"

There was no immediate response. A few people looked at each other. I imagined there were questions on the tips of people's tongues, but we weren't quite into the flow of things yet. Despite my discomfort with the topics at hand, I did have a desire to know more... it just wasn't coalescing into specific questions. I wanted to know more about such things as the Pelorians and their brief empire, and their absorption into the armies of the old empire.

"Well, if no one else has an immediate question coming to mind," Fenwick said, "then I'd like to further the discussion by expanding on another point I found interesting, the Decree of Separate Halves. I'd be surprised if this decree... it's a Metric one, I gather from the time frame, but it's part of our common law, I suppose?" Hart nodded, and Fenwick continued. "Yes, well. As a sidenote, I'd be very surprised if this Decree has ever been applied to a full-blooded dragon who assumed a human form through whatever means. Do you know anything about that, Aaron?"

"To my knowledge, it hasn't," Hart said. "Though I've never looked into it. Anyway, your half-dragon has two natural forms that aren't just different races, they're different kinds of creatures. Orders?" He looked at Fenwick for confirmation, who nodded. "I don't think that last part matters. If there were such a thing as a were-elf, who was human most of the time and elf some of the time, Separate Halves would still apply. The key is that they're different kinds of creatures, or beings, or people. Like the werewolf, the half-dragon really is human and really is dragon. Does that make sense?"

Around the room there were some scattered nods.

"I guess what I would like to know," one guy asked, "is how does the law decide if it applies?"

"Well, that's really a question for lawyers," Hart said. "I assume they look at past precedents, and if the question arises for a new type of creature someone has to make a determination of what's actually going on. In all honesty, it doesn't get invoked very often. It's more important for purposes of the historical context of how we came to our current understanding of equality under the law. Nowadays... well, last year, there was an unfortunate incident on campus involving a young lady from a kingdom in the Khazarus who was killed on campus. It was put down to a monster attack, eventually, but it was initially being investigated as a murder."

I wondered at Hart's choice of words, when he said that Leda's death was "put down to" a monster attack... in his history classes, he'd displayed a tendency to acerbically repeat the official line on some of the more controversial aspects of the Imperium's history while making it clear to most of the class what he thought of it.

I doubted he knew or suspected the exact truth, but it didn't seem beyond reason that he might not trust the official outcome of the investigation.

"Now, this young lady... like many people from that part of the world... was a shapeshifter," Hart continued. "She could move between the forms of a swan and a human. Would she have been covered by the Decree of Separate Halves? Probably. But the question of whether or not she 'counts' as human never came up, because under the current law a swan-person is supposed to be the same as a human-person."

"Um, Aaron... I have a question that's not really directly related to half-dragons," a girl said. "But it does relate to something you said."

"Go for it," Hart said. "Like Professor Hall said, let's keep things 'organic'."

"Okay," she said. "Well, the thing is... I was wondering where werewolves come from?"

"If you mean, were they created in a similar way to half-dragons, I think we can probably say no," Hart said. "But other than that, I really don't know. Fen?"

"There are stories, of course," Fenwick said. "Old stories, and not very pleasant ones. Persons afflicted with lycanthropy are recognized as persons these days, and are not punished for their condition, but simply held responsible for the consequences of failing to control it... but once upon a time, they were seen as a thing of nightmares. Those stories that spoke of a specific origin for them inevitably put it down to a curse or hex. But I believe that the truth is contained in a story that's not about werewolves in particular.

"In the beginning, the goblins say, there were the Old Ones... sleeping titans, gods of chaos and primal power. And one of the old gods, a figure identified as The Claw That Corrupts, also known as the Father of Beasts and Mother of Madness, is said in some tales to have shaped beasts into the forms of mortals, or to have created a plague that would infect mortals with the forms of beasts. The story varies with the telling... and with the translation... but either way we read it, it seems clear that goblinkind attribute the creation of werewolves and similar creatures to their dark god."

"All earlier kidding aside," Hart said, "I think we do have to take these theological stories with a grain of salt. They seem less likely to be contemporary accounts that were handed down and more likely to be retrospectively trying to put together pieces from before any race has any credible knowledge."

"True, perhaps," Fenwick said. "We find more conflicts... or competition, if you will... among the various accounts of creation and origin told by varying peoples. In some cases we may be able to approach the truth by looking at the commonalities between them. In other cases we're left with irreconcilable conflicts. The interesting thing here, though, is that there are no conflicting accounts. No other story takes credit or assigns blame for lycanthropy and related plagues."

"That's not definitive," Hart said.

"But it's suggestive," Fenwick said. "Now, I should stress that the story involving The Claw That Corrupts refers only to true werecreatures who are distinct from those who can take on the shape of animals in other ways... such as Professor Hart's beloved berserkers, or members of certain druidic sects. Sadly it is not at all uncommon for a human who happens to take the form of a wolf to be mistaken for a werewolf. True werebeasts can pass their condition on through a bite, have some degree of a lack of control over their shapeshifting, and assume the form of 'dire' creatures rather than natural ones."

"On the subject of shapeshifting..." another student said. "I wonder about half-dragon shapeshifting. How does it work?"

"Well, now," Professor Fenwick said, "I believe that Professor Hart has touched on an important truth when he said that a half-dragon truly is both dragon and person. A half-dragon has two natural forms. Whichever form one is born in, the other form will want to assert itself. Even those whose draconic parents have no natural shapeshifting talent may spontaneously shapeshift as they mature. As for the actual mechanism? It's best to think of it as one life, one mind, occupying two different bodies."

"So, does the other body exist in some kind of extraplanar space when it's not being used?" the student asked.

"Oh, heavens, no," the loremaster said. "Nothing like that. Nor can a half-dragon survive the death of 'one' body. The two bodies are one, in the manner of the dualistic or trinitarian gods that were in greater favor some millennia ago."

"Would a half-dragon born to a dragon mother be born in dragon form?" []

"If the mother resumes her dragon form and lays an egg, then yes," Fenwick said. "If she carried the pregnancy to term in the form of a human or elf, the offspring would be the same as a half-dragon born to a human or elven mother and a dragon father. The stories are not quite unanimous on this point, but it seems that some half-dragons who are 'born dragons' may be accepted by their kin as full dragons, though of a lesser caliber than their parents. At the very least they seem to have the option of 'passing' for a dragon."

"So is that where lesser dragons come from?"

"That seems unlikely," Fenwick said. "Dragons of lesser ranks have always been more common than those of greater ranks, and one of the traits that distinguishes the greater ones is that shapeshifting abilities are more common among them. But the ranks of common dragons have certainly been bolstered by mixing with mortals... any non-great dragon who can assume a mortal form without powerful and difficult magic likely has a parent or ancestor of that mortal race."

[]

"If dragons don't approve of hybrids, why do some of them mate with mortals?"

"Well," Fenwick said, "while we don't have anything like a census, it seems that more half-dragons were born during the era of the Fall than any time before or since... from that, we can infer that the intelligent dragons were also prey to their new bodies' instincts."

"But what about the ones born before and after? Why would there be any?"

"Well, there's a danger in thinking of dragons as a monolith," Fenwick said. He chuckled. "Though the resemblance can be uncanny, depending on the type of dragon and the angle from which it is viewed in repose... no, in all seriousness, to understand how this can be you must only think of any activity that your own society can be said to disapprove of, and then count all the examples of that activity you have witnessed, heard about, or performed in your own lifetime."

"How exactly do we get the views of dragon society about that kind of thing?"

"That's an excellent question," Fenwick said. "The thing is, 'dragon society' is perhaps something of a contradiction in terms. Even the most sociable dragon is a fairly solitary creature. Dragons covet the approval of other dragons, but they don't tend to seek it... that is to say, dragons do as they please, but when they do something they think would garner the envy of their peers they crow about it. Thus, the culture of dragon consists largely of boasts... the written form of High Draconic, from which our own alphabet descends, was invented solely to disseminate news of grandiose claims and great feats farther and faster."

"On the subject of grandiose claims, I think you might be overstepping a bit," Hart said. "Dragons are some of the best record-keepers in the world. They're basically nature's accountants."

"If you use a somewhat expansive definition of 'nature', perhaps," Fenwick said.

"Okay, whatever," Hart said. "My point is that records taken from dragon hoards... and, in some cases, copied by scribes who paid an exorbitant price for the privilege... give us accounts of things like the geography, weather, and population of their dragon hunting territories in minute detail. They don't always mark time on a scale that's convenient for building a timeline, and sometimes there are large gaps where the dragon might have been sleeping or absent, but dragons use their script for their own convenience often enough that it seems questionable that they invented language just to trade boasts."

"Ah," Fenwick said, "but before your well-heeled scribes took an interest, how often did these dragons share their records? Dragons do not, as a rule, think of posterity. They can plan for the long term... for extremely long terms... but in general, their viewpoint is on the here and now. The treasures they store aren't being stored for future use, they're being stored for the present and every present that follows."

[]

"What distinguished the half-dragons begat during the Fall if they did not show draconic appearances?"

"In many cases, the draconic parent was known," Fenwick said. "In other cases it was only rumored, or inferred when those traits that will not be suppressed began to manifest themselves."

"Here's where we get into the area of history vs. lore again," Hart said. "There's not a lot of actual evidence for a lot of the so-called 'dragonblooded heroes'. In the earlier Age of Heroes... also known as the Classical Age of Heroes... we saw this with figures who performed great feats and achieved far-reaching fame being acclaimed as descendants of various gods. The thing is that in most cases nobody had any idea about this lofty parentage when those heroes were alive. Is it possible that some heroic figures had divine blood that it took centuries for sharp-eyed storytellers to recognize? Sure. But I think in most cases, claiming divine blood or dragon blood is like claiming distant kinship to a king or emperor... it's hard to prove anything either way, so it's an easy way of puffing up one's hereditary credentials."

There was a possibility I hadn't considered... it was possible that Puddy wasn't lying about having dragon blood but that it was still a lie all the same. Puddy's family, the La Belles, seemed to be a Family with a capital F, the sort of people who didn't just have ancestors but a lineage.

The only problem with this theory was that they didn't seem keen to advertise the mixing that had gone on inside their family. From Puddy's account, they were still hushing up a dwarven ancestress even though having a small measure of dwarf blood had become slightly fashionable with the elevation of Magisterion XIII.

Still...

"Professor Hart?" I said.

"Yes?" he said.

"Given the Decree of Separate Halves, and the fact that dragon blood doesn't really 'mix' with human blood the way elven and dwarven blood do... well, I don't know if this is actually a history question, but I was wondering if it seems possible that a human family that would be loathe to admit to non-human blood might 'puff itself up' with dragon blood, as you put it," I said.

From the slim smile hiding within his bushy beard, I kind of suspected that he knew exactly what I was getting at. I didn't know if he'd ever had a run-in with Puddy, but he'd butted heads with at least one of her innumerable cousins.

"Yes, it's possible," he said. "I won't name names, but at least one of the first families of Prax is almost as infamous for its dubious claim of a dragon ancestor as they are for hushing up their dwarven blood."

Well, that was one mystery solved, more or less. As Hart himself would say, it wasn't definitive... but it did give something of an explanation.

I'd done my best to stop caring about Puddy over the course of the last year. Switching dorms meant that we were no longer living on top of each other, no longer moving in the same sphere. Still, it was hard to ignore an anomaly and there was much that was anomalous about Puddy Banks-La Belle.

There was a little voice in the back of my head that said that the rumored dragon blood might be more than a rumor, if Hall was right and dragon blood carried the potential for heroic feats. That would explain how Puddy was able to display such incredible strength intermittently... I'd assumed it had something to do with the chain of faerie gifts that seemed responsible for the La Belles' elevation to the position of a "first family of Prax", but there was no way to know for sure.

"So, if dragon blood doesn't exactly mix," I said, directing my attention to Fenwick, "then as it gets 'bred out' over the generations... would the recipients basically have lower potential for displays of the same levels of strength and power of their 'purer' ancestors?"

"In essence, yes," Fenwick said. "The whole thing seems to get unpredictable over successive generations, but one way to look at it is that someone seven generations removed from a full-blooded dragon does not have one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth of a dragon inside himself, but has a one in one-hundred-and-twenty-eight chance of manifesting some aspect of full dragonhood. That's an oversimplification, obviously, but it conveys the general idea."

"Still," Hart added, "there's are many other ways to come by the 'greatness' that gets chalked up to something like dragon blood. Durkon's Hammer applies."

"I believe applying Durkon's Hammer would leave one to conclude that someone who displays strength or will or magical puissance equal to a dragon is most likely, in some measure, a dragon," Fenwick said.

"Here's the thing," Hart said. "This whole idea of heroic traits coming from 'hidden' dragon blood comes from the notion that not all dragons are natural shapeshifters, right? But the dragon side is too strong to be denied."

"Yes, hence the manifestation in great feats," Fenwick said.

"But why in so many individuals is it just in great feats?" Hart said. "In every case where there is provable ancestry from dragons, it manifest physically. The most striking example is the Pelorians. Here we have half-humans, half-dragons who look for all the world like humanoid dragons. When the proportion of dragon blood is smaller, we get humans with dragon eyes, or with scaly-textured skins, or with claws or wings or horns."

"Well, such accessories could be one way that the dragon blood shows itself," Fenwick said. "That doesn't mean that it's the only one."

"No, but I'm not aware of a documented case with a provable lineage to a dragon that doesn't carry such markers," Hart said.

"As you might say: that's not definitive," Fenwick said.

[3 hours. Another 800 words!]

Because enduring a conversation about dragons apparently wasn't enough, the first question was about another race with a taste for sentient flesh that I'd had too many close encounters with over the course of my academic career to date.

"So... that thing of separate halves," a student asked. "How does that apply to someone like a mermaid?"

"You mean, is their top half legally human and their bottom half legally fish?" Hart said. "They're not actually talking about that kind of halves."

"No," the guy said. "They can change forms, from, you know, mermaid to something more human-looking."

"I know merfolk can split their tails into legs, but that's not quite as drastic as a werewolf, or a half-dragon," Hart said. "I don't see that the decree would apply. She'd still clearly be a mermaid, in either form."

"I have a friend who dated a mermaid for part of last year," he said, "and he said that she could... make her scales go away, and then she looked pretty much like a human. So, legally, would she be a human?"

"Okay. I did not actually know that," Hart said. "But the specific thing about Separate Halves... you have to remember that it was originally applied to werewolves. And Thylean bear-skin adepts, but I swear I'm trying not to steer the conversation around to them. A werewolf does not adopt the appearance of a human. A werewolf in its... his.. werewolves in their human form are human. That's the point of the decree. There are these dwarves who can turn their hands into axes and hammers and picks and things..."

"Bonesmiths, I believe you mean," Hall supplied.

"Yes. Dwarven bonesmiths," Hart said. "The law doesn't need a Decree of Separate Halves to treat a bonesmith as a dwarf, whether he's got a hand for a hand or an axe for a hand. I don't know what actually goes on with a mermaid's physical form when she goes from having a tail to having legs, but I suspect it's got more in common with a bonesmith than a werewolf."

"Just so," Hall said. "Indeed, there are rumors that the bodies of merfolk are more protean than most land-dwellers would imagine. It is well-known that many tribes of shore-dwelling merfolk, colloquially known as 'sirens', can transfigure their upper limbs into wings... why should not their cousins in the deep be able to assume a flipper-like configuration? And yet the sirens remain just as human... which is to say, not at all... when they show traits of mammals, reptiles, and birds."

"Good question, though," Hart said to the guy who'd asked. "We're dealing with a big topic and so a lot of concepts we only passed over with a glance, but this is a long period so there's no reason we can't stop and amplify something if it wasn't clear."

"Now, on a related topic," Hall said. "I'd be surprised if this Decree... it's a Metric degree, I gather, but it's part of our common law, I suppose?" Hart nodded, and Hall continued. "Yes, well. As a sidenote, I'd be very surprised if this Decree has ever been applied to a full-blooded dragon who assumed a human form through whatever means."

"To my knowledge, it hasn't," Hart said. "Though I've never looked into it. Anyway, your half-dragon has two natural forms that aren't just different races, they're different kinds of creatures. Orders?" He looked at Hall for confirmation, who nodded. "I don't think that last part matters. If there were such a thing as a were-elf, who was human most of the time and elf some of the time, Separate Halves would still apply. The key is that they're different kinds of creatures, or beings, or people. Like the werewolf, the half-dragon really is human and really is dragon. Does that make sense?"

Around the room there were some scattered nods.

"I guess what I want to know," one guy asked, "is how does the law decide if it applies?"

"Well, that's really a question for lawyers," Hart said. "I assume they look at past precedents, and if the question arises for a new type of creature someone has to make a determination of what's actually going on. In all honesty, it doesn't get invoked very often. It's more important for purposes of the historical context of how we came to our current understanding of equality under the law. Nowadays... well, last year, there was an unfortunate incident on campus involving a young lady from a kingdom in the Khazarus who was killed on campus. It was put down to a monster attack, eventually, but it was initially being investigated as a murder."

I wondered at Hart's choice of words, when he said that Leda's death was "put down to" a monster attack... in his history classes, he'd displayed a tendency to acerbically repeat the official line on some of the more controversial aspects of the Imperium's history while making it clear to most of the class what he thought of it.

I doubted he knew or suspected the exact truth, but it didn't seem beyond reason that he might not trust the official outcome of the investigation.

"Now, this young lady... like many people from that part of the world... was a shapeshifter," Hart continued. "She could move between the forms of a swan and a human. Would she have been covered by the Decree of Separate Halves? Probably. But the question of whether or not she 'counts' as human never came up, because under the current law a swan-person is supposed to be the same as a human-person."

"Professor Hart, I have a question that's not really directly related to half-dragons," a girl said. "But it does relate to something you said."

"Go for it," Hart said. "Like Professor Hall said, let's keep things 'organic'."

"Okay," she said. "Well, the thing is... I was wondering where werewolves come from?"

"If you mean, were they created in a similar way to half-dragons, I think we can probably say no," Hart said. "But other than that, I really don't know. Hall?"

"There are stories, of course," Professor Hall said. "Old stories, and not very pleasant ones. Persons afflicted with lycanthropy are recognized as persons these days, and are not punished for their condition, but simply held responsible for the consequences of failing to control it... but once upon a time, they were seen as a thing of nightmares. Those stories that spoke of a specific origin for them inevitably put it down to a curse or hex. But I believe that the truth is contained in a story that's not about werewolves in particular.

"In the beginning, the goblins say, there were the Old Ones... sleeping titans, gods of chaos and primal power. And one of the old gods, a figure identified as The Claw That Corrupts, also known as the Father of Beasts and Mother of Madness, is said in some tales to have shaped beasts into the forms of mortals, or to have created a plague that would infect mortals with the forms of beasts. The story varies with the telling... and with the translation... but either way we read it, it seems clear that goblinkind attribute the creation of werewolves and similar creatures to their dark god."

"All earlier kidding aside," Hart said, "I think we do have to take these theological stories with a grain of salt. They seem less likely to be contemporary accounts that were handed down and more likely to be retrospectively trying to put together pieces from before any race has any credible knowledge."

"True, perhaps," Hall said. "We find more conflicts... or competition, if you will... among the various accounts of creation and origin told by varying peoples. In some cases we may be able to approach the truth by looking at the commonalities between them. In other cases we're left with irreconcilable conflicts. The interesting thing here, though, is that there are no conflicting accounts. No other story takes credit or assigns blame for lycanthropy and related plagues."

"That's not definitive," Hart said.

"But it's suggestive," Hall said. "Now, I should stress that the story involving The Claw That Corrupts refers only to true werecreatures who are distinct from those who can take on the shape of animals in other ways... such as Professor Hart's beloved berserkers, or members of certain druidic sects. Sadly it is not at all uncommon for a human who happens to take the form of a wolf to be mistaken for a werewolf. True werebeasts can pass their condition on through a bite, have some degree of a lack of control over their shapeshifting, and assume the form of 'dire' creatures rather than natural ones."

"On the subject of shapeshifting..." another student said. "I wonder about half-dragon shapeshifting. How does it work?"

"Well, now," Professor Hall said, "I believe that Professor Hart has touched on an important truth when he said that a half-dragon truly is both dragon and person. A half-dragon has two natural forms. Whichever form one is born in, the other form will want to assert itself. Even those whose draconic parents have no natural shapeshifting talent may spontaneously shapeshift as they mature. As for the actual mechanism? It's best to think of it as one life, one mind, occupying two different bodies."

"So, does the other body exist in some kind of extraplanar space when it's not being used?" the student asked.

"Oh, heavens, no," the loremaster said. "Nothing like that. Nor can a half-dragon survive the death of 'one' body. The two bodies are one, in the manner of the dualistic or trinitarian gods that were in greater favor some millennia ago."

"Would a half-dragon born to a dragon mother be born in dragon form?"

"If the mother resumes her dragon form and lays an egg, then yes," Hall said. "If she carried the pregnancy to term in the form of a human or elf, the offspring would be the same as a half-dragon born to a human or elven mother and a dragon father. The stories are not quite unanimous on this point, but it seems that some half-dragons who are 'born dragons' may be accepted by their kin as full dragons, though of a lesser caliber than their parents. At the very least they seem to have the option of 'passing' for a dragon."

"So is that where lesser dragons come from?"

"That's unlikely," Hall said. "Dragons of lesser ranks have always been more common than those of greater ranks, and one of the traits that distinguishes the greater ones is that shapeshifting abilities are more common among them. But the ranks of common dragons have certainly been bolstered by mixing with mortals... any non-great dragon who can assume a mortal form without powerful and difficult magic likely has a parent or ancestor of that mortal race."

"I have a question for Professor... uh... Hall, I think?" she said. She was looking at him. I supposed that if I didn't have prior experience with one of them, I might have found it hard to keep track of which was which after the brief introduction at the beginning of the class.

Hall looked at Hart.

"I believe that in the interest of fostering discussion and lessening confusion, we can do away with a degree of formality," he said. "I have no objection to being addressed by my given name, by anyone who feels comfortable doing so."

"If you can stand to be called 'Fenwick', I guess I don't mind being Aaron," Hart said.

"Okay, Professor Fenwick, then," the girl said. "How exactly did dragons change during the Fall? You said they became mortal, but what did that actually entail in terms of their abilities?"

"Oh, yes," Fenwick said. "Well, just as what seems to be a relatively simple idea like 'shapeshifting' can actually cover a variety of concepts, so, too, does one like 'mortality'. Dragons have always been prone to aging and to death, though there's little in the way of proof that great and greater dragons will ever die of old age. When one speaks of 'mortals' in relation to dragons, one is usually referring to the so-called created kinds, the order of creation that humans and elves and dwarves belongs to... the sorts of beings sometimes erroneously and prejudicially referred to as 'humanoids'.

"During the Fall, every intelligent dragon within the sphere of the world was transformed into the form of a so-called humanoid, and the less intelligent dragons became a variety of hunting beasts. It is from the latter category that the world's population of chimerae descended, as they followed their new instincts and mated with natural beasts of their newly assumed kind."

"As far as their abilities are concerned," Hart said... and to me, he was still Hart, "the intelligent dragons didn't lose any of their accumulated knowledge or magical power. They couldn't fly by flapping the wings they'd lost, or breathe plumes of fire or lightning. To what extent they retained their less physical abilities is hard to judge. They weren't in any hurry to advertise the extent of their power loss."

"There are stories about the trapped dragons displaying draconic-level feats of strength," Fenwick said. "But this could easily have been magic or trickery... as Aaron suggested, the de-scaled wyrms had a powerful motivation to keep up the appearance of power and strength traditionally associated with them."

"Or it could just be stories," Hart added.

[]

"If dragons don't approve of hybrids, why do some of them mate with mortals?"

"Well," Fenwick said, "while we don't have anything like a census, it seems that more half-dragons were born during the era of the Fall than any time before or since... from that, we can infer that the intelligent dragons were also prey to their new bodies' instincts."

"But what about the ones born before and after? Why would there be any?"

"Well, there's a danger in thinking of dragons as a monolith," Fenwick said. He chuckled. "Though the resemblance can be uncanny, depending on the type of dragon and the angle from which it is viewed in repose... no, in all seriousness, to understand how this can be you must only think of any activity that your own society can be said to disapprove of, and then count all the examples of that activity you have witnessed, heard about, or performed in your own lifetime."

"How exactly do we get the views of dragon society about that kind of thing?"

"That's an excellent question," Fenwick said. "The thing is, 'dragon society' is perhaps something of a contradiction in terms. Even the most sociable dragon is a fairly solitary creature. Dragons covet the approval of other dragons, but they don't tend to seek it... that is to say, dragons do as they please, but when they do something they think would garner the envy of their peers they crow about it. Thus, the culture of dragon consists largely of boasts... the written form of High Draconic, from which our own alphabet descends, was invented solely to disseminate news of grandiose claims and great feats farther and faster."

"On the subject of grandiose claims, I think you might be overstepping a bit," Hart said. "Dragons are some of the best record-keepers in the world. They're basically nature's accountants."

"If you use a somewhat expansive definition of 'nature', perhaps," Fenwick said.

"Okay, whatever," Hart said. "My point is that records taken from dragon hoards... and, in some cases, copied by scribes who paid an exorbitant price for the privilege... give us accounts of things like the geography, weather, and population of their dragon hunting territories in minute detail. They don't always mark time on a scale that's convenient for building a timeline, and sometimes there are large gaps where the dragon might have been sleeping or absent, but dragons use their script for their own convenience often enough that it seems questionable that they invented language just to trade boasts."

"Ah," Fenwick said, "but before your well-heeled scribes took an interest, how often did these dragons share their records? Dragons do not, as a rule, think of posterity. They can plan for the long term... for extremely long terms... but in general, their viewpoint is on the here and now. The treasures they store aren't being stored for future use, they're being stored for the present and every present that follows."

[]

"What distinguished the half-dragons begat during the Fall if they did not show draconic appearances?"

"In many cases, the draconic parent was known," Fenwick said. "In other cases it was only rumored, or inferred when those traits that will not be suppressed began to manifest themselves."

"Here's where we get into the area of history vs. lore again," Hart said. "There's not a lot of actual evidence for a lot of the so-called 'dragonblooded heroes'. In the earlier Age of Heroes... also known as the Classical Age of Heroes... we saw this with figures who performed great feats and achieved far-reaching fame being acclaimed as descendants of various gods. The thing is that in most cases nobody had any idea about this lofty parentage when those heroes were alive. Is it possible that some heroic figures had divine blood that it took centuries for sharp-eyed storytellers to recognize? Sure. But I think in most cases, claiming divine blood or dragon blood is like claiming distant kinship to a king or emperor... it's hard to prove anything either way, so it's an easy way of puffing up one's hereditary credentials."

There was a possibility I hadn't considered... it was possible that Puddy wasn't lying about having dragon blood but that it was still a lie all the same. Puddy's family, the La Belles, seemed to be a Family with a capital F, the sort of people who didn't just have ancestors but a lineage.

The only problem with this theory was that they didn't seem keen to advertise the mixing that had gone on inside their family. From Puddy's account, they were still hushing up a dwarven ancestress even though having a small measure of dwarf blood had become slightly fashionable with the elevation of Magisterion XIII.

Still...

"Professor Hart?" I said.

"Yes?" he said.

"Given the Decree of Separate Halves, and the fact that dragon blood doesn't really 'mix' with human blood the way elven and dwarven blood do... well, I don't know if this is actually a history question, but I was wondering if it seems possible that a human family that would be loathe to admit to non-human blood might 'puff itself up' with dragon blood, as you put it," I said.

From the slim smile hiding within his bushy beard, I kind of suspected that he knew exactly what I was getting at. I didn't know if he'd ever had a run-in with Puddy, but he'd butted heads with at least one of her innumerable cousins.

"Yes, it's possible," he said. "I won't name names, but at least one of the first families of Prax is almost as infamous for its dubious claim of a dragon ancestor as they are for hushing up their dwarven blood."

Well, that was one mystery solved, more or less. As Hart himself would say, it wasn't definitive... but it did give something of an explanation.

I'd done my best to stop caring about Puddy over the course of the last year. Switching dorms meant that we were no longer living on top of each other, no longer moving in the same sphere. Still, it was hard to ignore an anomaly and there was much that was anomalous about Puddy Banks-La Belle.

There was a little voice in the back of my head that said that the rumored dragon blood might be more than a rumor, if Hall was right and dragon blood carried the potential for heroic feats. That would explain how Puddy was able to display such incredible strength intermittently... I'd assumed it had something to do with the chain of faerie gifts that seemed responsible for the La Belles' elevation to the position of a "first family of Prax", but there was no way to know for sure.

"So, if dragon blood doesn't exactly mix," I said, directing my attention to Fenwick, "then as it gets 'bred out' over the generations... would the recipients basically have lower potential for displays of the same levels of strength and power of their 'purer' ancestors?"

"In essence, yes," Fenwick said. "The whole thing seems to get unpredictable over successive generations, but one way to look at it is that someone seven generations removed from a full-blooded dragon does not have one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth of a dragon inside himself, but has a one in one-hundred-and-twenty-eight chance of manifesting some aspect of full dragonhood. That's an oversimplification, obviously, but it conveys the general idea."

"Still," Hart added, "there's are many other ways to come by the 'greatness' that gets chalked up to something like dragon blood. Durkon's Hammer applies."

"I believe applying Durkon's Hammer would leave one to conclude that someone who displays strength or will or magical puissance equal to a dragon is most likely, in some measure, a dragon," Fenwick said.

[2.5 hours. 800 words in half an hour. Credit to Dave for fixing "debate" to "date" in the opening.]

Because enduring a conversation about dragons apparently wasn't enough, the first question was about another race with a taste for sentient flesh that I'd had too many close encounters with over the course of my academic career to date.

"So... that thing of separate halves," a student asked. "How does that apply to someone like a mermaid?"

"You mean, is their top half legally human and their bottom half legally fish?" Hart said. "They're not actually talking about that kind of halves."

"No," the guy said. "They can change forms, from, you know, mermaid to something more human-looking."

"I know merfolk can split their tails into legs, but that's not quite as drastic as a werewolf, or a half-dragon," Hart said. "I don't see that the decree would apply. She'd still clearly be a mermaid, in either form."

"I have a friend who dated a mermaid for part of last year," he said, "and he said that she could... make her scales go away, and then she looked pretty much like a human. So, legally, would she be a human?"

"Okay. I did not actually know that," Hart said. "But the specific thing about Separate Halves... you have to remember that it was originally applied to werewolves. And Thylean bear-skin adepts, but I swear I'm trying not to steer the conversation around to them. A werewolf does not adopt the appearance of a human. A werewolf in its... his.. werewolves in their human form are human. That's the point of the decree. There are these dwarves who can turn their hands into axes and hammers and picks and things..."

"Bonesmiths, I believe you mean," Hall supplied.

"Yes. Dwarven bonesmiths," Hart said. "The law doesn't need a Decree of Separate Halves to treat a bonesmith as a dwarf, whether he's got a hand for a hand or an axe for a hand. I don't know what actually goes on with a mermaid's physical form when she goes from having a tail to having legs, but I suspect it's got more in common with a bonesmith than a werewolf."

"Just so," Hall said. "Indeed, there are rumors that the bodies of merfolk are more protean than most land-dwellers would imagine. It is well-known that many tribes of shore-dwelling merfolk, colloquially known as 'sirens', can transfigure their upper limbs into wings... why should not their cousins in the deep be able to assume a flipper-like configuration? And yet the sirens remain just as human... which is to say, not at all... when they show traits of mammals, reptiles, and birds."

"Good question, though," Hart said to the guy who'd asked. "We're dealing with a big topic and so a lot of concepts we only passed over with a glance, but this is a long period so there's no reason we can't stop and amplify something if it wasn't clear."

"Now, on a related topic," Hall said. "I'd be surprised if this Decree... it's a Metric degree, I gather, but it's part of our common law, I suppose?" Hart nodded, and Hall continued. "Yes, well. As a sidenote, I'd be very surprised if this Decree has ever been applied to a full-blooded dragon who assumed a human form through whatever means."

"To my knowledge, it hasn't," Hart said. "Though I've never looked into it. Anyway, your half-dragon has two natural forms that aren't just different races, they're different kinds of creatures. Orders?" He looked at Hall for confirmation, who nodded. "I don't think that last part matters. If there were such a thing as a were-elf, who was human most of the time and elf some of the time, Separate Halves would still apply. The key is that they're different kinds of creatures, or beings, or people. Like the werewolf, the half-dragon really is human and really is dragon. Does that make sense?"

Around the room there were some scattered nods.

"I guess what I want to know," one guy asked, "is how does the law decide if it applies?"

"Well, that's really a question for lawyers," Hart said. "I assume they look at past precedents, and if the question arises for a new type of creature someone has to make a determination of what's actually going on. In all honesty, it doesn't get invoked very often. It's more important for purposes of the historical context of how we came to our current understanding of equality under the law. Nowadays... well, last year, there was an unfortunate incident on campus involving a young lady from a kingdom in the Khazarus who was killed on campus. It was put down to a monster attack, eventually, but it was initially being investigated as a murder."

I wondered at Hart's choice of words, when he said that Leda's death was "put down to" a monster attack... in his history classes, he'd displayed a tendency to acerbically repeat the official line on some of the more controversial aspects of the Imperium's history while making it clear to most of the class what he thought of it.

I doubted he knew or suspected the exact truth, but it didn't seem beyond reason that he might not trust the official outcome of the investigation.

"Now, this young lady... like many people from that part of the world... was a shapeshifter," Hart continued. "She could move between the forms of a swan and a human. Would she have been covered by the Decree of Separate Halves? Probably. But the question of whether or not she 'counts' as human never came up, because under the current law a swan-person is supposed to be the same as a human-person."

"Professor Hart, I have a question that's not really directly related to half-dragons," a girl said. "But it does relate to something you said."

"Go for it," Hart said. "Like Professor Hall said, let's keep things 'organic'."

"Okay," she said. "Well, the thing is... I was wondering where werewolves come from?"

"If you mean, were they created in a similar way to half-dragons, I think we can probably say no," Hart said. "But other than that, I really don't know. Hall?"

"There are stories, of course," Professor Hall said. "Old stories, and not very pleasant ones. Persons afflicted with lycanthropy are recognized as persons these days, and are not punished for their condition, but simply held responsible for the consequences of failing to control it... but once upon a time, they were seen as a thing of nightmares. Those stories that spoke of a specific origin for them inevitably put it down to a curse or hex. But I believe that the truth is contained in a story that's not about werewolves in particular.

"In the beginning, the goblins say, there were the Old Ones... sleeping titans, gods of chaos and primal power. And one of the old gods, a figure identified as The Claw That Corrupts, the Father of Beasts and Mother of Madness, is said in some tales to have shaped beasts into the forms of mortals, or to have created a plague that would infect mortals with the forms of beasts. The story varies with the telling... and with the translation... but either way we read it, it seems clear that goblinkind attribute the creation of werewolves and similar creatures to their dark god."

"All earlier kidding aside," Hart said, "I think we do have to take these theological stories with a grain of salt. They seem less likely to be contemporary accounts that were handed down and more likely to be retrospectively trying to put together pieces from before any race has any credible knowledge."

"True, perhaps," Hall said. "We find more conflicts... or competition, if you will... among the various accounts of creation and origin told by varying peoples. In some cases we may be able to approach the truth by looking at the commonalities between them. In other cases we're left with irreconcilable conflicts. The interesting thing here, though, is that there are no conflicting accounts. No other story takes credit or assigns blame for lycanthropy and related plagues."

"That's not definitive," Hart said.

"But it's suggestive," Hall said.

"On a kind of more related subject," another student said. "I wonder about half-dragon shapeshifting. How does it work?"

"Well, now," Professor Hall said, "I believe that Professor Hart has touched on an important truth when he said that a half-dragon truly is both dragon and person. A half-dragon has two natural forms. Whichever form one is born in, the other form will want to assert itself. Even those whose draconic parents have no natural shapeshifting talent may spontaneously shapeshift as they mature. As for the actual mechanism? It's best to think of it as one life, one mind, occupying two different bodies."

"So, does the other body exist in some kind of extraplanar space when it's not being used?" the student asked.

"Oh, heavens, no," the loremaster said. "Nothing like that. Nor can a half-dragon survive the death of 'one' body. The two bodies are one, in the manner of the dualistic or trinitarian gods that were in greater favor some millennia ago."

"Would a half-dragon born to a dragon mother be born in dragon form?"

"If the mother resumes her dragon form and lays an egg, then yes," Hall said. "If she carried the pregnancy to term in the form of a human or elf, the offspring would be the same as a half-dragon born to a human or elven mother and a dragon father. The stories are not quite unanimous on this point, but it seems that some half-dragons who are 'born dragons' may be accepted by their kin as full dragons, though of a lesser caliber than their parents. At the very least they seem to have the option of 'passing' for a dragon."

"So is that where lesser dragons come from?"

"That's unlikely," Hall said. "Dragons of lesser ranks have always been more common than those of greater ranks, and one of the traits that distinguishes the greater ones is that shapeshifting abilities are more common among them. But the ranks of common dragons have certainly been bolstered by mixing with mortals... any non-great dragon who can assume a mortal form without powerful and difficult magic likely has a parent or ancestor of that mortal race."

"I have a question for Professor... uh... Hall, I think?" she said. She was looking at him. I supposed that if I didn't have prior experience with one of them, I might have found it hard to keep track of which was which after the brief introduction at the beginning of the class.

Hall looked at Hart.

"I believe that in the interest of fostering discussion and lessening confusion, we can do away with a degree of formality," he said. "I have no objection to being addressed by my given name, by anyone who feels comfortable doing so."

"If you can stand to be called 'Fenwick', I guess I don't mind being Aaron," Hart said.

"Okay, Professor Fenwick, then," the girl said. "How exactly did dragons change during the Fall? You said they became mortal, but what did that actually entail in terms of their abilities?"

"Oh, yes," Fenwick said. "Well, just as what seems to be a relatively simple idea like 'shapeshifting' can actually cover a variety of concepts, so, too, does one like 'mortality'. Dragons have always been prone to aging and to death, though there's little in the way of proof that great and greater dragons will ever die of old age. When one speaks of 'mortals' in relation to dragons, one is usually referring to the so-called created kinds, the order of creation that humans and elves and dwarves belongs to... the sorts of beings sometimes erroneously and prejudicially referred to as 'humanoids'.

"During the Fall, every intelligent dragon within the sphere of the world was transformed into the form of a so-called humanoid, and the less intelligent dragons became a variety of hunting beasts. It is from the latter category that the world's population of chimerae descended, as they followed their new instincts and mated with natural beasts of their newly assumed kind."

"As far as their abilities are concerned," Hart said... and to me, he was still Hart, "the intelligent dragons didn't lose any of their accumulated knowledge or magical power. They couldn't fly by flapping the wings they'd lost, or breathe plumes of fire or lightning. To what extent they retained their less physical abilities is hard to judge. They weren't in any hurry to advertise the extent of their power loss."

"There are stories about the trapped dragons displaying draconic-level feats of strength," Fenwick said. "But this could easily have been magic or trickery... as Aaron suggested, the de-scaled wyrms had a powerful motivation to keep up the appearance of power and strength traditionally associated with them."

"Or it could just be stories," Hart added.

[]

"If dragons don't approve of hybrids, why do some of them mate with mortals?"

"Well," Fenwick said, "while we don't have anything like a census, it seems that more half-dragons were born during the era of the Fall than any time before or since... from that, we can infer that the intelligent dragons were also prey to their new bodies' instincts."

"But what about the ones born before and after? Why would there be any?"

"Well, there's a danger in thinking of dragons as a monolith," Fenwick said. He chuckled. "Though the resemblance can be uncanny, depending on the type of dragon and the angle from which it is viewed in repose... no, in all seriousness, to understand how this can be you must only think of any activity that your own society can be said to disapprove of, and then count all the examples of that activity you have witnessed, heard about, or performed in your own lifetime."

"How exactly do we get the views of dragon society about that kind of thing?"

"That's an excellent question," Fenwick said. "The thing is, 'dragon society' is perhaps something of a contradiction in terms. Even the most sociable dragon is a fairly solitary creature. Dragons covet the approval of other dragons, but they don't tend to seek it... that is to say, dragons do as they please, but when they do something they think would garner the envy of their peers they crow about it. Thus, the culture of dragon consists largely of boasts... the written form of High Draconic, from which our own alphabet descends, was invented solely to disseminate news of grandiose claims and great feats farther and faster."

"On the subject of grandiose claims, I think you might be overstepping a bit," Hart said. "Dragons are some of the best record-keepers in the world. They're basically nature's accountants."

"If you use a somewhat expansive definition of 'nature', perhaps," Fenwick said.

"Okay, whatever," Hart said. "My point is that records taken from dragon hoards... and, in some cases, copied by scribes who paid an exorbitant price for the privilege... give us accounts of things like the geography, weather, and population of their dragon hunting territories in minute detail. They don't always mark time on a scale that's convenient for building a timeline, and sometimes there are large gaps where the dragon might have been sleeping or absent, but dragons use their script for their own convenience often enough that it seems questionable that they invented language just to trade boasts."

"Ah," Fenwick said, "but before your well-heeled scribes took an interest, how often did these dragons share their records? Dragons do not, as a rule, think of posterity. They can plan for the long term... for extremely long terms... but in general, their viewpoint is on the here and now. The treasures they store aren't being stored for future use, they're being stored for the present and every present that follows."

[]

"What distinguished the half-dragons begat during the Fall if they did not show draconic appearances?"

"In many cases, the draconic parent was known," Fenwick said. "In other cases it was only rumored, or inferred when those traits that will not be suppressed began to manifest themselves."

"Here's where we get into the area of history vs. lore again," Hart said. "There's not a lot of actual evidence for a lot of the so-called 'dragonblooded heroes'. In many cases,

[2 hours]

Because enduring a conversation about dragons apparently wasn't enough, the first question was about another race with a taste for sentient flesh that I'd had too many close encounters with over the course of my academic career to debate.

"So... that thing of separate halves," a student asked. "How does that apply to someone like a mermaid?"

"You mean, is their top half legally human and their bottom half legally fish?" Hart said. "It's not that kind of half."

"No," the guy said. "They can change forms, from, you know, mermaid to something more human-looking."

"I know merfolk can split their tails into legs, but that's not quite as drastic as a werewolf, or a half-dragon," Hart said. "I don't see why the decree would apply."

"I have a friend who dated a mermaid for part of last year," he said, "and he said that she could... make her scales go away, and then she looked pretty much like a human. So, legally, would she be a human?"

"Okay. I did not actually know that," Hart said. "But the specific thing about Separate Halves... you have to remember that it was originally applied to werewolves. And Thylean bear-skin adepts, but I swear I'm trying not to steer the conversation around to them. A werewolf does not adopt the appearance of a human. A werewolf in its... his.. werewolves in their human form are human. That's the point of the decree. There are these dwarves who can turn their hands into axes and hammers and picks and things..."

"Bonesmiths," Hall supplied.

"Yes. Dwarven bonesmiths," Hart said. "The law doesn't need a Decree of Separate Halves to treat a bonesmith as a dwarf, whether he's got a hand for a hand or an axe for a hand. I don't know what actually goes on with a mermaid's physical form when she goes from having a tail to having legs, but I suspect it's got more in common with a bonesmith than a werewolf."

"Just so," Hall said. "Indeed, there are rumors that the bodies of merfolk are more protean than most land-dwellers would imagine. It is well-known that many tribes of shore-dwelling merfolk, colloquially known as 'sirens', can transfigure their upper limbs into wings... why should not their cousins in the deep be able to assume a flipper-like configuration? And yet the sirens remain just as human... which is to say, not at all... when they show traits of mammals, reptiles, and birds."

"Good question, though," Hart said to the guy who'd asked. "We're dealing with a big topic and so a lot of concepts we only passed over with a glance, but this is a long period so there's no reason we can't stop and amplify something if it wasn't clear."

"Now, on a related topic," Hall said. "I'd be surprised if this Decree... it's a Metric degree, I gather, but it's part of our common law, I suppose?" Hart nodded, and Hall continued. "Yes, well. As a sidenote, I'd be very surprised if this Decree has ever been applied to a full-blooded dragon who assumed a human form through whatever means."

"To my knowledge, it hasn't," Hart said. "Though I've never looked into it. Anyway, your half-dragon has two natural forms that aren't just different races, they're different kinds of creatures. Orders?" He looked at Hall for confirmation, who nodded. "I don't think that last part matters. If there were such a thing as a were-elf, who was human most of the time and elf some of the time, Separate Halves would still apply. The key is that like the werewolf, the half-dragon really is human and really is dragon. Does that make sense?"

"I guess," the guy said. "How does the law decide if it applies?"

"Well, that's really a question for lawyers," Hart said. "I assume they look at past precedents, and if the question arises for a new type of creature someone has to make a determination of what's actually going on. In all honesty, it doesn't get invoked very often. It's more important for purposes of historical context. Nowadays... well, last year, there was an unfortunate incident on campus involving a young lady from a kingdom in the Khazarus who was killed on campus. It was put down to a monster attack, eventually, but it was initially being investigated as a murder."

I wondered at Hart's choice of words, when he said that Leda's death was "put down to" a monster attack... in his history classes, he'd displayed a tendency to acerbically repeat the official line on some of the more controversial aspects of the Imperium's history while making it clear to most of the class what he thought of it.

I doubted he knew or suspected the exact truth, but it didn't seem beyond reason that he

"Now, this young lady... like many people from that part of the world... was a shapeshifter," Hart continued. "She could move between the forms of a swan and a human. Would she have been covered by the Decree of Separate Halves? Probably. But the question of whether or not she 'counts' as human never came up, because under the current law a swan-person is supposed to be the same as a human-person."

[]

"I have a question for Professor... uh... Hall, I think?" she said. She was looking at him. I supposed that if I didn't have prior experience with one of them, I might have found it hard to keep track of which was which after the brief introduction at the beginning of the class.

Hall looked at Hart.

"I believe that in the interest of fostering discussion and lessening confusion, we can do away with a degree of formality," he said. "I have no objection to being addressed by my given name, by anyone who feels comfortable doing so."

"If you can stand to be called 'Fenwick', I guess I don't mind being Aaron," Hart said.

"Okay, Professor Fenwick, then," the girl said. "How exactly did dragons change during the Fall? You said they became mortal, but what did that actually entail in terms of their abilities?"

"Oh, yes," Fenwick said. "Well, just as what seems to be a relatively simple idea like 'shapeshifting' can actually cover a variety of concepts, so, too, does one like 'mortality'. Dragons have always been prone to aging and to death, though there's little in the way of proof that great and greater dragons will ever die of old age. When one speaks of 'mortals' in relation to dragons, one is usually referring to the so-called created kinds, the order of creation that humans and elves and dwarves belongs to... the sorts of beings sometimes erroneously and prejudicially referred to as 'humanoids'.

"During the Fall, every intelligent dragon within the sphere of the world was transformed into the form of a so-called humanoid, and the less intelligent dragons became a variety of hunting beasts. It is from the latter category that the world's population of chimerae descended, as they followed their new instincts and mated with natural beasts of their newly assumed kind."

"As far as their abilities are concerned," Hart said... and to me, he was still Hart, "the intelligent dragons didn't lose any of their accumulated knowledge or magical power. They couldn't fly by flapping the wings they'd lost, or breathe plumes of fire or lightning. To what extent they retained their less physical abilities is hard to judge. They weren't in any hurry to advertise the extent of their power loss."

"There are stories about the trapped dragons displaying draconic-level feats of strength," Fenwick said. "But this could easily have been magic or trickery... as Aaron suggested, the de-scaled wyrms had a powerful motivation to keep up the appearance of power and strength traditionally associated with them."

"Or it could just be stories," Hart added.

[]

"If dragons don't approve of hybrids, why do some of them mate with mortals?"

"Well," Fenwick said, "while we don't have anything like a census, it seems that more half-dragons were born during the era of the Fall than any time before or since... from that, we can infer that the intelligent dragons were also prey to their new bodies' instincts."

"But what about the ones born before and after? Why would there be any?"

"Well, there's a danger in thinking of dragons as a monolith," Fenwick said. He chuckled. "Though the resemblance can be uncanny, depending on the type of dragon and the angle from which it is viewed in repose... no, in all seriousness, to understand how this can be you must only think of any activity that your own society can be said to disapprove of, and then count all the examples of that activity you have witnessed, heard about, or performed in your own lifetime."

"How exactly do we get the views of dragon society about that kind of thing?"

"That's an excellent question," Fenwick said. "The thing is, 'dragon society' is perhaps something of a contradiction in terms. Even the most sociable dragon is a fairly solitary creature. Dragons covet the approval of other dragons, but they don't tend to seek it... that is to say, dragons do as they please, but when they do something they think would garner the envy of their peers they crow about it. Thus, the culture of dragon consists largely of boasts... the written form of High Draconic, from which our own alphabet descends, was invented solely to disseminate news of grandiose claims and great feats farther and faster."

"On the subject of grandiose claims, I think you might be overstepping a bit," Hart said. "Dragons are some of the best record-keepers in the world. They're basically nature's accountants."

"If you use a somewhat expansive definition of 'nature', perhaps," Fenwick said.

"Okay, whatever," Hart said. "My point is that records taken from dragon hoards... and, in some cases, copied by scribes who paid an exorbitant price for the privilege... give us accounts of things like the geography, weather, and population of their dragon hunting territories in minute detail. They don't always mark time on a scale that's convenient for building a timeline, and sometimes there are large gaps where the dragon might have been sleeping or absent, but dragons use their script for their own convenience often enough that it seems questionable that they invented language just to trade boasts."

"Ah," Fenwick said, "but before your well-heeled scribes took an interest, how often did these dragons share their records? Dragons do not, as a rule, think of posterity. They can plan for the long term... for extremely long terms... but in general, their viewpoint is on the here and now. The treasures they store aren't being stored for future use, they're being stored for the present and every present that follows."

[]

"What distinguished the half-dragons begat during the Fall if they did not show draconic appearances?"

"In many cases, the draconic parent was known," Fenwick said. "In other cases it was only rumored, or inferred when those traits that will not be suppressed began to manifest themselves."

"Here's where we get into the area of history vs. lore again," Hart said. "There's not a lot of actual evidence for a lot of the so-called 'dragonblooded heroes'.

[1.5 hours. Still shaping up.]

Because enduring a conversation about dragons apparently wasn't enough, the first question was about another race with a taste for sentient flesh that I'd had too many close encounters with over the course of my academic career to debate.

"So... that thing of separate halves," a student asked. "How does that apply to someone like a mermaid?"

"You mean, is their top half legally human and their bottom half legally fish?" Hart said. "It's not that kind of half."

"No," the guy said. "They can change forms, from, you know, mermaid to something more human-looking."

"I know merfolk can split their tails into legs, but that's not quite as drastic as a werewolf, or a half-dragon," Hart said. "I don't see why the decree would apply."

"I have a friend who dated a mermaid for part of last year," he said, "and he said that she could... make her scales go away, and then she looked pretty much like a human. So, legally, would she be a human?"

"Okay. I did not actually know that," Hart said. "But the specific thing about Separate Halves... you have to remember that it was originally applied to werewolves. And Thylean bear-skin adepts, but I swear I'm trying not to steer the conversation around to them. A werewolf does not adopt the appearance of a human. A werewolf in its... his.. werewolves in their human form are human. That's the point of the decree. There are these dwarves who can turn their hands into axes and hammers and picks and things..."

"Bonesmiths," Hall supplied.

"Yes. Dwarven bonesmiths," Hart said. "The law doesn't need a Decree of Separate Halves to treat a bonesmith as a dwarf, whether he's got a hand for a hand or an axe for a hand. I don't know what actually goes on with a mermaid's physical form when she goes from having a tail to having legs, but I suspect it's got more in common with a bonesmith than a werewolf."

"Just so," Hall said. "Indeed, there are rumors that the bodies of merfolk are more protean than most land-dwellers would imagine. It is well-known that many tribes of shore-dwelling merfolk, colloquially known as 'sirens', can transfigure their upper limbs into wings... why should not their cousins in the deep be able to assume a flipper-like configuration? And yet the sirens remain just as human... which is to say, not at all... when they show traits of mammals, reptiles, and birds."

"Good question, though," Hart said to the guy who'd asked. "We're dealing with a big topic and so a lot of concepts we only passed over with a glance, but this is a long period so there's no reason we can't stop and amplify something if it wasn't clear."

"Now, on a related topic," Hall said. "I'd be surprised if this Decree... it's a Metric degree, I gather, but it's part of our common law, I suppose?" Hart nodded, and Hall continued. "Yes, well. As a sidenote, I'd be very surprised if this Decree has ever been applied to a full-blooded dragon who assumed a human form through whatever means."

"To my knowledge, it hasn't," Hart said. "Though I've never looked into it. Anyway, your half-dragon has two natural forms that aren't just different races, they're different kinds of creatures. Orders?" He looked at Hall for confirmation, who nodded. "I don't think that last part matters. If there were such a thing as a were-elf, who was human most of the time and elf some of the time, Separate Halves would still apply. The key is that like the werewolf, the half-dragon really is human and really is dragon. Does that make sense?"

"I guess," the guy said. "How does the law decide if it applies?"

"Well, that's really a question for lawyers," Hart said. "I assume they look at past precedents, and if the question arises for a new type of creature someone has to make a determination of what's actually going on."

[]

"I have a question for Professor... uh... Hall, I think?" she said. She was looking at him. I supposed that if I didn't have prior experience with one of them, I might have found it hard to keep track of which was which after the brief introduction at the beginning of the class.

Hall looked at Hart.

"I believe that in the interest of fostering discussion and lessening confusion, we can do away with a degree of formality," he said. "I have no objection to being addressed by my given name, by anyone who feels comfortable doing so."

"If you can stand to be called 'Fenwick', I guess I don't mind being Aaron," Hart said.

"Okay, Professor Fenwick, then," the girl said. "How exactly did dragons change during the Fall? You said they became mortal, but what did that actually entail in terms of their abilities?"

"Oh, yes," Fenwick said. "Well, just as what seems to be a relatively simple idea like 'shapeshifting' can actually cover a variety of concepts, so, too, does one like 'mortality'. Dragons have always been prone to aging and to death, though there's little in the way of proof that great and greater dragons will ever die of old age. When one speaks of 'mortals' in relation to dragons, one is usually referring to the so-called created kinds, the order of creation that humans and elves and dwarves belongs to... the sorts of beings sometimes erroneously and prejudicially referred to as 'humanoids'.

"During the Fall, every intelligent dragon within the sphere of the world was transformed into the form of a so-called humanoid, and the less intelligent dragons became a variety of hunting beasts. It is from the latter category that the world's population of chimerae descended, as they followed their new instincts and mated with natural beasts of their newly assumed kind."

"As far as their abilities are concerned," Hart said... and to me, he was still Hart, "the intelligent dragons didn't lose any of their accumulated knowledge or magical power. They couldn't fly by flapping the wings they'd lost, or breathe plumes of fire or lightning. To what extent they retained their less physical abilities is hard to judge. They weren't in any hurry to advertise the extent of their power loss."

"There are stories about the trapped dragons displaying draconic-level feats of strength," Fenwick said. "But this could easily have been magic or trickery... as Aaron suggested, the de-scaled wyrms had a powerful motivation to keep up the appearance of power and strength traditionally associated with them."

"Or it could just be stories," Hart added.

[]

"If dragons don't approve of hybrids, why do some of them mate with mortals?"

"Well," Fenwick said, "while we don't have anything like a census, it seems that more half-dragons were born during the era of the Fall than any time before or since... from that, we can infer that the intelligent dragons were also prey to their new bodies' instincts."

"But what about the ones born before and after? Why would there be any?"

"Well, there's a danger in thinking of dragons as a monolith," Fenwick said. He chuckled. "Though the resemblance can be uncanny, depending on the type of dragon and the angle from which it is viewed in repose... no, in all seriousness, to understand how this can be you must only think of any activity that your own society can be said to disapprove of, and then count all the examples of that activity you have witnessed, heard about, or performed in your own lifetime."

"How exactly do we get the views of dragon society about that kind of thing?"

"That's an excellent question," Fenwick said. "The thing is, 'dragon society' is perhaps something of a contradiction in terms. Even the most sociable dragon is a fairly solitary creature. Dragons covet the approval of other dragons, but they don't tend to seek it... that is to say, dragons do as they please, but when they do something they think would garner the envy of their peers they crow about it. Thus, the culture of dragon consists largely of boasts... the written form of High Draconic, from which our own alphabet descends, was invented solely to disseminate news of grandiose claims and great feats farther and faster."

"On the subject of grandiose claims, I think you might be overstepping a bit," Hart said. "Dragons are some of the best record-keepers in the world. They're basically nature's accountants."

"If you use a somewhat expansive definition of 'nature', perhaps," Fenwick said.

"Okay, whatever," Hart said. "My point is that records taken from dragon hoards... and, in some cases, copied by scribes who paid an exorbitant price for the privilege... give us accounts of things like the geography, weather, and population of their dragon hunting territories in minute detail. They don't always mark time on a scale that's convenient for building a timeline, and sometimes there are large gaps where the dragon might have been sleeping or absent, but dragons use their script for their own convenience often enough that it seems questionable that they invented language just to trade boasts."

"Ah," Fenwick said, "but before your well-heeled scribes took an interest, how often did these dragons share their records? Dragons do not, as a rule, think of posterity. They can plan for the long term... for extremely long terms... but in general, their viewpoint is on the here and now. The treasures they store aren't being stored for future use, they're being stored for the present and every present that follows."

[1 hour. I like how this is going.]

Because enduring a conversation about dragons apparently wasn't enough, the first question was about another race with a taste for sentient flesh that I'd had too many close encounters with over the course of my academic career to debate.

"So... that thing of separate halves," a student asked. "How does that apply to someone like a mermaid?"

"You mean, is their top half legally human and their bottom half legally fish?" Hart said. "It's not that kind of half."

"No," the guy said. "They can change forms, from, you know, mermaid to something more human-looking."

"I know merfolk can split their tails into legs, but that's not quite as drastic as a werewolf, or a half-dragon," Hart said. "I don't see why the decree would apply."

"I have a friend who dated a mermaid for part of last year," he said, "and he said that she could... make her scales go away, and then she looked pretty much like a human. So, legally, would she be a human?"

"Okay. I did not actually know that," Hart said. "But the specific thing about Separate Halves... you have to remember that it was originally applied to werewolves. And Thylean bear-skin adepts, but I swear I'm trying not to steer the conversation around to them. A werewolf does not adopt the appearance of a human. A werewolf in its... his.. werewolves in their human form are human. That's the point of the decree. There are these dwarves who can turn their hands into axes and hammers and picks and things..."

"Bonesmiths," Hall supplied.

"Yes. Dwarven bonesmiths," Hart said. "The law doesn't need a Decree of Separate Halves to treat a bonesmith as a dwarf, whether he's got a hand for a hand or an axe for a hand. I don't know what actually goes on with a mermaid's physical form when she goes from having a tail to having legs, but I suspect it's got more in common with a bonesmith than a werewolf."

"Just so," Hall said. "Indeed, there are rumors that the bodies of merfolk are more protean than most land-dwellers would imagine. It is well-known that many tribes of shore-dwelling merfolk, colloquially known as 'sirens', can transfigure their upper limbs into wings... why should not their cousins in the deep be able to assume a flipper-like configuration? And yet the sirens remain just as human... which is to say, not at all... when they show traits of mammals, reptiles, and birds."

"Good question, though," Hart said to the guy who'd asked. "We're dealing with a big topic and so a lot of concepts we only passed over with a glance, but this is a long period so there's no reason we can't stop and amplify something if it wasn't clear."

"Now, on a related topic," Hall said. "I'd be surprised if this Decree... it's a Metric degree, I gather, but it's part of our common law, I suppose?" Hart nodded, and Hall continued. "Yes, well. As a sidenote, I'd be very surprised if this Decree has ever been applied to a full-blooded dragon who assumed a human form through whatever means."

"To my knowledge, it hasn't," Hart said. "Though I've never looked into it. Anyway, your half-dragon has two natural forms that aren't just different races, they're different kinds of creatures. Orders?" He looked at Hall for confirmation, who nodded. "I don't think that last part matters. If there were such a thing as a were-elf, who was human most of the time and elf some of the time, Separate Halves would still apply. The key is that like the werewolf, the half-dragon really is human and really is dragon. Does that make sense?"

"I guess," the guy said. "How does the law decide if it applies?"

"Well, that's really a question for lawyers," Hart said. "I assume they look at past precedents, and if the question arises for a new type of creature someone has to make a determination of what's actually going on."

[]

"I have a question for Professor... uh... Hall, I think?" she said. She was looking at him. I supposed that if I didn't have prior experience with one of them, I might have found it hard to keep track of which was which after the brief introduction at the beginning of the class.

Hall looked at Hart.

"I believe that in the interest of fostering discussion and lessening confusion, we can do away with a degree of formality," he said. "I have no objection to being addressed by my given name, by anyone who feels comfortable doing so."

"If you can stand to be called 'Fenwick', I guess I don't mind being Aaron," Hart said.

"Okay, Professor Fenwick, then," the girl said. "How exactly did dragons change during the Fall? You said they became mortal, but what did that actually entail in terms of their abilities?"

"Oh, yes," Fenwick said. "Well, just as what seems to be a relatively simple idea like 'shapeshifting' can actually cover a variety of concepts, so, too, does one like 'mortality'. Dragons have always been prone to aging and to death, though there's little in the way of proof that great and greater dragons will ever die of old age. When one speaks of 'mortals' in relation to dragons, one is usually referring to the so-called created kinds, the order of creation that humans and elves and dwarves belongs to... the sorts of beings sometimes erroneously and prejudicially referred to as 'humanoids'.

"During the Fall, every intelligent dragon within the sphere of the world was transformed into the form of a so-called humanoid, and the less intelligent dragons became a variety of hunting beasts. It is from the latter category that the world's population of chimerae descended, as they followed their new instincts and mated with natural beasts of their newly assumed kind."

"As far as their abilities are concerned," Hart said... and to me, he was still Hart, "the intelligent dragons didn't lose any of their accumulated knowledge or magical power. They couldn't fly by flapping the wings they'd lost, or breathe plumes of fire or lightning. To what extent they retained their less physical abilities is hard to judge. They weren't in any hurry to advertise the extent of their power loss."

"There are stories about the trapped dragons displaying draconic-level feats of strength," Fenwick said. "But this could easily have been magic or trickery... as Aaron suggested, the de-scaled wyrms had a powerful motivation to keep up the appearance of power and strength traditionally associated with them."

"Or it could just be stories," Hart added.

[0.5 hours. To begin with I'm mostly going to just be jumping into questions, so next several draft updates may be disjointed.]

Because enduring a conversation about dragons apparently wasn't enough, the first question was about another race with a taste for sentient flesh that I'd had too many close encounters with over the course of my academic career to debate.

"So... that thing of separate halves," a student asked. "How does that apply to someone like a mermaid?"

"You mean, is their top half legally human and their bottom half legally fish?" Hart said. "It's not that kind of half."

"No," the guy said. "They can change forms, from, you know, mermaid to something more human-looking."

"I know merfolk can split their tails into legs, but that's not quite as drastic as a werewolf, or a half-dragon," Hart said. "I don't see why the decree would apply."

"I have a friend who dated a mermaid for part of last year," he said, "and he said that she could... make her scales go away, and then she looked pretty much like a human. So, legally, would she be a human?"

"Okay. I did not actually know that," Hart said. "But the specific thing about Separate Halves... you have to remember that it was originally applied to werewolves. And Thylean bear-skin adepts, but I swear I'm trying not to steer the conversation around to them. A werewolf does not adopt the appearance of a human. A werewolf in its... his.. werewolves in their human form are human. That's the point of the decree. There are these dwarves who can turn their hands into axes and hammers and picks and things..."

"Bonesmiths," Hall supplied.

"Yes. Dwarven bonesmiths," Hart said. "The law doesn't need a Decree of Separate Halves to treat a bonesmith as a dwarf, whether he's got a hand for a hand or an axe for a hand. I don't know what actually goes on with a mermaid's physical form when she goes from having a tail to having legs, but I suspect it's got more in common with a bonesmith than a werewolf."

"Just so," Hall said. "Now, I'd be surprised if this Decree... it's a Metric degree, I gather, but it's part of our common law, I suppose?" Hart nodded, and Hall continued. "Yes, well. As a sidenote, I'd be very surprised if this Decree has ever been applied to a full-blooded dragon who assumed a human form through whatever means."

"To my knowledge, it hasn't," Hart said. "Though I've never looked into it. Anyway, your half-dragon has two natural forms that aren't just different races, they're different kinds of creatures. Orders?" He looked at Hall for confirmation, who nodded. "I don't think that last part matters. If there were such a thing as a were-elf, who was human most of the time and elf some of the time, Separate Halves would still apply. The key is that like the werewolf, the half-dragon really is human and really is dragon."

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Magic Under Construction: TOMU 2-14

Magic Under Construction: TOMU 2-14

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