"I don't know how your dragons work, but for ours up to about age two hundred you can divide by ten and get a human equivalency and then after that there is no real equivalency, just 'that's a dragon,'" says Aurin. "Mial works the same way age-wise even though he's not a dragon, he's a hundred seventy at the moment."

"What is he instead?" Jann asks, quite innocently.

"...He's a shren, and now you're going to make me explain that, aren't you. Mial, you're the one who decided to be a shren, explain it to these people."