conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for a book with the title 'Forged by Fire'?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Forged by Fire
  For support unlimited, thanks go first and foremost to Linda DeMeulemeester. Sincere gratitude to my editor, Liz, and my agent, Caitlin, for their insights and patience. Thanks also to all the listserv folks at SF Canada; Claire Eddy, for encouraging and challenging me, way back when; John D., my computer guru; and Sean Kerr, who asked me some pertinent questions when I'd reached an impasse, and thus provided me with forward mobility. As always, much love to the Faerie and the Bean, for all the magick they regularly conjure.
  The tunnel reeked of dead air. No mildew or lichen grew on the walls; the stones were a lifeless gray that leapt briefly into a fluctuating tapestry of shadow and flamelight under Gen's torch before being swallowed again by darkness.
  Gen gripped my elbow, urged me on faster. I stumbled. Pain lanced across my fractured ribs and I cried out.
  Earthquake, I thought with a spurt of panic, but realized, even as I thought it, that the rumble was the bellowing of the bull dragon in Arena above us, answered by the cheers of two hundred thousand Arena spectators. A clammy sweat broke over my skin.
  I don't know why; perhaps because I'd smelled the sweat of fear on him as he'd attacked me in Arena, just a short while before.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know four more paragraphs? End with the sentence ' Every terrifying tale I'd heard about the Djimbi came rushing to the forefront of my mind: They kidnapped Clutch babies and fed them alive, limb by severed limb, to dragon hatchlings; they were cannibals who used human skulls for bowls and cups; they knew dragons in the most abominable of ways, inserting fingers and tongues and cocks into leathery orifices.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I was still on the ground, where I'd landed from slipping upon the toadstools. Warily, I rose to my feet.
  Their whorls blended in perfectly with their surroundings, shadings of moss green and palm frond emerald dappled with the rich, wet brown of loam and the grayish brown of peeling tree bark. The women wore crude loincloths only, like the men, made of shagreen. Their breasts were small and high, their nipples and areolae a dark, wet ivy. Great hanks of hair the exact pale green of hanging moss hung to their waists; the men were hairless, their pates as smooth as the tree roots about us. All of them were lean and sinewy, their arms and legs long. The untanned leather loincloths they wore were no more than a waistband strip of granulated leather with a flap attached fore and aft; their hard, lean buttocks were visible.
  Two men and one woman held spears, and the others each carried a small quiver of blow darts slung across their backs. One woman with eyes like chips of jade had a wicked blade tied by a thong to her loincloth. As well as spears, the two men carried damp leather sacks, around which buzzed flies and hung the odor of fresh blood.
  The Djimbi woman who'd sung to the escoas spoke to me. She looked arrogant and menacing, her spear sharp, her eyes and nose hawkish. Her long, long arms were hard with sinew and muscle. Every terrifying tale I'd heard about the Djimbi came rushing to the forefront of my mind: They kidnapped Clutch babies and fed them alive, limb by severed limb, to dragon hatchlings; they were cannibals who used human skulls for bowls and cups; they knew dragons in the most abominable of ways, inserting fingers and tongues and cocks into leathery orifices.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And what of dragons? What of the fifteen bulls that so many people died protecting the day the efru mildon clashed? I'll answer the latter first: They were taken from us. As Tansan had predicted.
  When Xxamer Zu's allies departed, the Council of Seven took every bull with them. But the old brooder that Tansan had stolen from Xxamer Zu's egg stables prior to the war and force-marched into the hills produced a neonate bull. That's all we needed: a single bull. From that single bull and the brooders left to us, the dragoncote grew. Several more bulls were produced over the years, and those that we could afford to give away, were given away wisely, to two small Clutches that proved open to certain radical ideas, such as refraining from amputating the wings of brooders and not shackling them for life in egg stables. Ideas such as overturning the barbarous laws that prohibit pairings between Djimbi. Ideas such as teaching rishi—male and female, Djimbi and otherwise—how to read and write.
  The irony is not lost on me that just when I'd found the strength and conviction to say good-bye to my mother forever, I discovered that not until my own death would I be freed of the entity that grew from my mother's obsession with Waivia. Through whatever obscure powers she wielded when alive, Mother rooted herself to the earthly realm through me when she died in Convent Tieron, when I was but nine. Now that angry, grieving, powerless entity is trapped within me until I myself die.
  But somewhere in that anger and grief, buried beneath those sweet and sour memories she forces me to relive some nights, lies my mother. The mother who turned the blood of her body to milk for me to suckle as an infant. The mother who molded with her power and art the soft and yielding heart of a child, a child who became a woman who shook an entire nation.
  In my journey on these foreign seas, I hope the two of us— mother and daughter—can finally make peace with each other. I know it won't be easy; little between a mother and her child ever is. But the bond between us both is there. Forged in flesh, secured in spirit, and buried in our experiences, the bond remains.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As Tansan had predicted.
  When Xxamer Zu's allies departed, the Council of Seven took every bull with them. But the old brooder that Tansan had stolen from Xxamer Zu's egg stables prior to the war and force-marched into the hills produced a neonate bull. That's all we needed: a single bull. From that single bull and the brooders left to us, the dragoncote grew. Several more bulls were produced over the years, and those that we could afford to give away, were given away wisely, to two small Clutches that proved open to certain radical ideas, such as refraining from amputating the wings of brooders and not shackling them for life in egg stables. Ideas such as overturning the barbarous laws that prohibit pairings between Djimbi. Ideas such as teaching rishi—male and female, Djimbi and otherwise—how to read and write.
  The irony is not lost on me that just when I'd found the strength and conviction to say good-bye to my mother forever, I discovered that not until my own death would I be freed of the entity that grew from my mother's obsession with Waivia. Through whatever obscure powers she wielded when alive, Mother rooted herself to the earthly realm through me when she died in Convent Tieron, when I was but nine. Now that angry, grieving, powerless entity is trapped within me until I myself die.
  But somewhere in that anger and grief, buried beneath those sweet and sour memories she forces me to relive some nights, lies my mother. The mother who turned the blood of her body to milk for me to suckle as an infant. The mother who molded with her power and art the soft and yielding heart of a child, a child who became a woman who shook an entire nation.
  In my journey on these foreign seas, I hope the two of us— mother and daughter—can finally make peace with each other. I know it won't be easy; little between a mother and her child ever is. But the bond between us both is there. Forged in flesh, secured in spirit, and buried in our experiences, the bond remains.