(urth) Urth Digest, Vol 76, Issue 169

[Andrew Mason]

> James Wynn wrote:

> Oh, yeah. Auk.


I agree that Auk is very likely to be an embryo. He has exceptional
abilities,  and the gods take an interest in him which can't obviously
be explained by his situation in life. I also suspect that Mint was
his surrogate mother. This explains the special interest she takes in
him, and the way he sometimes thinks of her as a mother, while not
conflicting with the undoubted fact that she is a virgin. (She would
have to have been very young; but Mucor was very young when she gave
birth to the lynxes. We know she had some kind of traumatic experience
before becoming a sibyl.) Of course, this leads to more puzzlement -
the two undoubted embryos we know of, Silk and Mucor, both had wealthy
sponsors; who could Auk's sponsor be?

Regarding the origin of the embryos, though, Crane says that Mucor's
parents 'probably met in a petri dish', implying that they are the
result of in vitro fertilisation rather than clones. ('How would he
know?', you may ask. But if enough is known about the embryos that
people can find out what they were bred for, it's not impossible that
their origin is known as well.)

>
> Well, I don't *think* that Tartaros possessing him and making him do
> something is the even similar to Auk "thinking more clearly" OR
> receiving a message from Tartaros.

In the abstract, no. In context I don't think it's too much of a
problem. Tartaros _does_ tell him to let Hyacinth go - this is
explicit - and 'explains' this by saying that he has healed Auk's mind
as much as possible.  I take it the point is that he can now tell Auk
to let her go because, having recovered from his injury, he can work
out what he ought to be doing. (Also Tartaros earlier said he was able
to communicate with Auk because of his injury. I don't think it's
exactly possession - he holds Auk's hand, for instance, which isn't at
all like what Chenille experienced when possessed.)