Headscratchers / The Darkangel Trilogy

• Syllva and Irrylath made their pilgrimage in the first place because Syllva was infertile after giving birth the first time. When Irrylath and Aeriel touch down in Esternesse, she's managed to have six subsequent sons. Huh?
  • It's entirely possible her husband was the infertile one.
    • And that Irrylath was from, well, a great deal of luck—if it's from low sperm count or mostly defective sperm...well, get enough in there and something will eventually hit.
• How long is a daymonth? It’s amazing how hard it is to divine this from context, even given the sheer number of times it’s used throughout the trilogy...
  • It's a lunar day that's as long as an earth month, because the moon takes the same amount of time to rotate on its axis as it does to orbit the earth (the near, visible side is gravitationally locked to the earth, so it only rotates as a function of revolving around us.) This is why the daytime and nighttime periods are called fortnights (i.e., two weeks), and they wake and sleep multiple times per fortnight.
• What is the atmosphere composed of? The sky remains black and starry at all times, even when Solstar is up, because the gases in the atmosphere apparently don't scatter light, or are incredibly thin (humans from Oceanus can't breathe outside without equipment). We know there's oxygen from the lorelei's Intro to Chemistry lesson, but what else might be producing the lack of colour in the sky?