Cerrit bristles slightly, trying to think of how to explain everything and not really wanting to explain.
"Is there any group of people in your world, about whom the default assumption is that they are primitive and savages, who live outside cities and divorce their culture from the civilized world? Where if one does live in a city, everyone is going to assume they're potentially dangerous? So someone hoping to be treated with respect must be perfectly genteel, as polished and polite and harmless as possible. Make the right friends who can vouch that 'no, no, that one's not a beast, that's our friend who knows better than to rip into raw carrion on the nice rug'. Raise one's children to be as well-behaved as possible, aware of what prejudices they'll face otherwise. I am the only eisfuura who has ever been named Sightwarden before. Part of that, honestly, is that for a lot of important city roles, they prefer longer-lived races. Elves or dwarves who will be able to keep everything stable for the centuries they live."
It's all spilling out now, because he's never laid this out before for anyone, not so directly. He could never have explained this to Patia and Laerryn, elves who were set to be working their magical miracles for perhaps two hundred years after he was gone. Or Nydas, whose mercantile empire would have been much harder to build if he weren't a respectable human. Perhaps Loquatius might have understood, but Cerrit had always found the changeling slippery. A prejudice of his own.
no subject
Cerrit bristles slightly, trying to think of how to explain everything and not really wanting to explain.
"Is there any group of people in your world, about whom the default assumption is that they are primitive and savages, who live outside cities and divorce their culture from the civilized world? Where if one does live in a city, everyone is going to assume they're potentially dangerous? So someone hoping to be treated with respect must be perfectly genteel, as polished and polite and harmless as possible. Make the right friends who can vouch that 'no, no, that one's not a beast, that's our friend who knows better than to rip into raw carrion on the nice rug'. Raise one's children to be as well-behaved as possible, aware of what prejudices they'll face otherwise. I am the only eisfuura who has ever been named Sightwarden before. Part of that, honestly, is that for a lot of important city roles, they prefer longer-lived races. Elves or dwarves who will be able to keep everything stable for the centuries they live."
It's all spilling out now, because he's never laid this out before for anyone, not so directly. He could never have explained this to Patia and Laerryn, elves who were set to be working their magical miracles for perhaps two hundred years after he was gone. Or Nydas, whose mercantile empire would have been much harder to build if he weren't a respectable human. Perhaps Loquatius might have understood, but Cerrit had always found the changeling slippery. A prejudice of his own.