I hadn't considered that it might be a Topos from all the torture and eugenics. Still, I'd think Kellhus would have remembered something like that.

Notation that I had mentioned elsewhere but I do think we need to consider Yatwer's role in Dunyain pregnancy.

I never got the impression that Kellhus was at all surprised at his breeding difficulties. He was exceedingly careful in choosing Esmenet as his mate in the first place. So either Yatwer fucks up ALL Dunyain pregnancies, not just Kellhus' and Moe's, or it really is just genetic drift.

Golgotterath has to truly be something special if the Consult is still willing to reside there despite it almost certainly being a thin spot dangling over Hell. Their fetid souls are so utterly rife with sin I imagine they attract quite a lot of attention.

Imagine the poor scifi invaders' surprise when they discover they crash-landed on fantasy planet, and instead of just blowing up the iron age savages with their superior tech, it turns out the savages can shoot down all their stuff by firing magical lasers from their hands, and have bullshit like impossible flying chariots.

It's just not fair.

If the thought occurred to him, then I'd say it was probably Kellhus who blew it up, to prevent such an eventuality.

+1 your post, The Sharmat. By the way, is this bit textual or something you're otherwise noting? Just curious if this results from an isolated population breeding over long periods of time?

It's from the text. If I remember correctly, Esmenet said she'd carried most of them for around a year.

Somehow it does not seem possible to me.
(No eyes, that's something I could accept as a genetic glitch, but eigth arms?)

Duplication of whole limbs is a very easy mutation, actually. You see it a lot in nature. There are even a number of recorded instances of it occurring in humans, some very recent. A girl in India with 8 limbs a few years back was thought by some to be the avatar of a Hindu Goddess. Just copy some Hox genes somewhere during meiosis, and suddenly you get an extra arm. Or you switch something out, and you now have legs where the antennae are supposed to go.

I'm guessing what we're seeing here is a fairly nasty incompatibility in gene loci. It's not even so much that Kellhus' genome is hugely different than Esmenet's in content as it is the possibility that Kellhus doesn't keep genes in the same places she does, leading to hideous errors during crossover with crucial genes being duplicated or deleted. Hell, it's even possible the Dunyain ended up with a different number of chromosomes than Homo Sapiens (A similar event seems to have been a big part of generating Hominids from apes. One of our chromosomes appears to be two primate chromosomes that fused together). You can still produce offspring despite that, sometimes. Though they're almost certainly sterile. Do we know if any of Kellhus' children are fertile?

There's one other factor to consider though: Just how aberrant is Kellhus' success rate with Esmenet? To really judge how incompatible they are, we need to know how fertile Dunyain are when they mate with each other, as well. Maybe they have a great deal of rejects too, and it helps fill up their supply of "defectives". If that's the case, then some or all of the problem may just be inbreeding depression rather than something akin to speciation, albeit inbreeding depression so profound that even outbreeding with a very genetically distant individual still produces a lot of deformities.

Thanks Sharmat, thats the kind of input I was hoping for. Might I direct you to my thread regarding the initial size of the original Dunyain refugees? (http://second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=993.msg8304#msg8304) I've been fishing for a biologist for a while its got visual aids at the bottom.

I'll take a look.

That's the thing though. A Dunyain can conjure imagery, once exposed to it, by copying speech patterns. But they can never believe it, because they only use it to lie.

Though it has to be pointed out, Consult members have been known to lie before.