in one of the chapters of "Peace Is A Journey" you had the gang eat snow to stay hydrated, you should never eat snow to stay hydrated. in fact, it does the opposite and dehydrates you. My family comes from a long line of Mountaineers and my mom used to be a cross-country skier. Other than that you've been incredibly accurate with mountaineering knowledge.
See, I'm actually of two minds about this one, because you're right that in the long run, eating snow dehydrates you more than it hydrates you....but I've been debating whether or not that would be known by Rayla in-setting.
I have shown her to have pretty damn good all terrain survival knowledge, so on one hand, yes in theory she could know it. But on the other hand, I have to think about what her people in the Silvergrove do or do not know, and where they'd get that information from.
The reason snow dehydrates is because melting it inside the body and then reheating the body's core temperature takes energy, and that's like, metabolic knowledge that I'm not sure everyone would have. People who live in cold regions would probably have most of their populace knowing that eating snow is bad just from folk knowledge and experience, but for everyone else....I'm not so sure.
The Silvergrove is located in a temperate forest. Certainly Runaan and the assassin squad would have been trained in a lot of survival knowledge, so they might know intricate cold weather survival stuff like this. But it could also be that, like for us, there's a basic assumption that eating snow is a good way to rehydrate if you can't make a fire to melt it, and either Runaan would know or wouldn't, and then Rayla would know or wouldn't, because in the end she is less knowledgeable and experienced than Runaan. I've been leaning towards 'yes they do know', because they did travel through mountainous regions in winter to get to the castle, so Runaan would probably have brushed up on operational knowledge and learned it even if he didn't previously - IF that information is actually available. And that's where I'm stuck.
Moonshadow elves in piaj ain't any better at thermoregulating than humans. But. In piaj worldbuilding, Skywing elves are very very cold resistant, and Sunfire elves can keep their core temperature high with very little energy, because their thermoregulatory processes are augmented by magic. So if Sunfire and Skywing elves can very efficiently stay warm, and therefore snow hydrates them, and they can live in cold regions more easily, it might be harder for Moonshadow elves who don't generally live in cold regions to know whether or not snow is an efficient water source, since they only have hearsay from other races. This makes it more likely that Runaan and his squad wouldn't necessarily know that snow-eating itself is dehydrating, just that eating it makes you colder, so wherever possible you want to melt it on a campfire first.
- Runaan knows, because the Silvergrove has accurate niche information about Moonshadow elf cold survival for some reason, presumably from hypothetical cold environment Moonshadow societies or a pronounced past history of cold weather ops. In this case, Rayla either knows, in which case the story text needs editing, or doesn't, in which case only the notes need editing.
- Runaan doesn't know, because either Silvergrove information on cold weather survival isn't that detailed, or because the differing physiologies of different elf races means that information just plain isn't available.
So in sum I really haven't decided yet what my stance is on this lmao, and that's why I haven't made any notes about it in story yet. I was kind of hoping no one would notice >.> Good catch though.
I welcome input / opinions! I'm still making up my mind on this one. I really like it when there's funky racial difference reasons for there being misinformation, so I'm biased towards that, but on the other hand I feel like the Silvergrove assassins are pretty resourceful and might have conducted enough cold weather ops to know anyway.
