[Dragaera] Devera's birth

[Scott Schultz]

Devera appears to be unbound by time and space. She goes when and where she
pleases, as she pleases, at least as far as we can tell from her appearances
in Steve's stories.

Even so, she has an actual birth event at some point. She refers to Vlad as
"Uncle Vlad" and show obvious affection for him and an active interest in
his life. It seems to me that she would have known him for several years
during her early childhood. That is, she developed that affection from
knowing him while she was growing up rather than developing it sometime
after she started planeswalking.

Given that Vlad seems to be in his late thirties or early forties, he hasn't
got a lot of time left to start developing that relationship.  (Granted that
his lifespan may not be subject to normal Easterner limitations at this
point.)

It's possible that Vlad is an old man during Devera's childhood, and she's
just interested in his whole life time.  In that case she could be a few
decades away, still, assuming that Vlad has a long life. That seems like an
unsafe assumption given the kind of life he leads, but it could happen.

My feeling, though, is that Devera is interested in Vlad's "youth" primarily
because he's still relatively young during her childhood. We don't know all
that much about Dragaeran early childhood development (do we know how old
Savn's sister is?) but it would not be surprising for Devera to give the
appearance of being a human girl of around ten years old, while having an
actual age of thirty or forty, I should think. 

If that's a decent ballpark guesstimate of her actual age and Vlad himself
has either a normal Easterner lifespan or a foreshortened one due to his
lifestyle, then the conclusion I'd come to is that Devera's birth must be
pending in the near future.  "Near" being sometime in the next ten years or
so, though I'd lean towards earlier than later, just because I expect that
Vlad's lifestyle is going to wind up killing him earlier rather than later.

On the gripping hand, if we actually make it all the way to The Final
Contract and Vlad can't narrate that story because he dies in it, then it
will be a bit of a shame, I'd think. Hmm...