Catching up on a few comments that I overlooked before:
No – my “Old Earnn” comment above was a joking reference to someone else’s speculation. I’ll give plenty of evidence in future games but don’t plan to give hard confirmation one way or another.
Less than fifty meters. Really quickly.
No, just the tantalizing first mention. I think the most I’ve shared about him since is behind spoiler-blurs here.
I don’t think I’ve ever said the second Thaumatarch was male – for years I didn’t have a clear image of them, and just referred to them as Hera’s “successor.” Let me know if I’ve called them a son anywhere and need to fix it. I’ve since decided that the second Thaumatarch was actually Hera’s daughter Eosphora, and the third and current one is Eosphora’s son Kleitos.
First: there’s no canon art (not even the “book jacket,” really) so take anything you’ve seen with a big grain of salt. Ethnicity in Shayard is mainly linguistic – the names of the Rim and Westriding are different from those in the Coast and Southriding, and the names from the Reach sound weird to all of them. They’ve all got their own accents and dialects.
But assuming you’re asking about skin color, Shayardenes are some shade of brown-to-black. Readers might have assumed that the Anglo-French cultural signifiers of Shayard go with pink skin, but there’s really no reason to expect that, especially considering:
- The people whose skin color is noteworthy to the MC (because out of place) are the “pallid” Neres and the olive skinned Karagond Theurge. The reader is I suppose free so far to imagine the Nyr as a race of albinos.
- Nobody from Shayard gets their hair color or eye color described, which is consistent with a context where all “normal” people are black-haired and brown-eyed.
- Nobody from Shayard “turns red” when they get embarrassed or other pale-skinned signifiers (unless I’ve messed up and included some such signifier by mistake – which readers are warmly encouraged to point out)
- For those who’ve got their head around the world map, Shayard is a lot closer to its world’s equator than France or England are in ours.
So while I’m certainly not going to nitpick lovely art like this, it’s not the author’s own vision for what the characters look like.