Question time! Toby Daye trivia is fun.

I have been thinking - an act often thought of as dangerous - and I got to wondering about the immortality of the fae and the longevity of changelings. Clearly my mother has just the faintest trace of fae inheritance, because she is 90 and going strong.

Fae can heal from injury, so their cells must be able to divide. Either they divide in a magical way that doesn't shorten the telomeres, or else they have a burst of telomerase (or magic) after cell division to rebuild the telomere. Either way, they must be immune to transcription errors or else they would suffer from cancer, sooner or later.

Extending that reasoning, maybe past its breaking point, how do changelings live longer but not for an unlimited time?

Several ideas occur. The most obvious is that they are not *quite* immune to transcription errors, and maybe exposure to carcinogens can eventually cause problems (For example, afaik the benzene molecule is about the right size to fit inside the double helix and cause errors - which is one reason why unleaded fuel is not an improvement in all respects.)

In that case the main cause of death other than injury, for changelings, would be cancer at a very great age. One would expect them not to show much sign of age until close to the end of their lives.

Or, maybe the magic that rebuilds the telomeres, or that prevents/repairs transcription errors if they are rebuilt using telomerase, only works a limited number of times. In that case, again, one would expect changelings to retain a youthful appearance and health until, eventually, they start to show signs of age at the rate the rest of us do.

Strangely, this makes me think of The Doctor and regenerations.

Whatever, the two most obvious ideas I thought of suggest that changelings show few signs of age until they have a normal human lifespan or less remaining.

Does this make sense?