Lasher's possession of the Taltos fetus

Lasher's possession of the Taltos fetus is the central secret behind Rowan’s account of the child she bore and took away from Michael. She describes Lasher waiting across generations for a witch with enough psychic power to help him enter an unborn Taltos, then recounts how his presence transformed the circumstances of the birth. The episode binds supernatural inheritance to Rowan’s scientific agency, the loss of the child’s original soul, and the separation of a family.

Origins and Conditions

Rowan explains that Lasher was biding his time, generation by generation, until a witch could bear a Taltos child and use psychic power to assist his rebirth inside the fetus. His possession therefore depends on a conjunction of inheritance, pregnancy, and the mother’s extraordinary abilities. Rowan also describes the Mayfair family as a matriarchy in legal and moral fact, and says that she and Michael fit Lasher’s design. Her reflection places the event within both a family structure and a long supernatural plan.

The Birth and Rowan’s Account

The child was not, Rowan stresses, a pure Taltos: it was a mixture of Taltos and human and had been in the womb for about five months. On the night of its birth, Lasher entered the infant, and Rowan says she used her knowledge of circuitry and cells to guide the resulting being. The account presents her scientific skill not as a detached observation but as an active force in the event: she understood how to respond to the child, even as the birth became something she later remembered with distress.

The Child’s Identity and Michael’s Loss

Rowan says that Lasher’s presence displaced the child’s true soul, which went to Heaven, leaving the physical body as a vehicle for the mystery. This distinction changes Michael’s position in the story: he is, in Rowan’s words, father only of the mysterious body, not of the soul that had belonged to his child. The possession thus creates a painful divide between biological parenthood and spiritual identity, and gives Michael a reason to oppose the being that Rowan took away.

Flight and Consequence

Rowan left with the child, which she described as a Man Child with no name except that of a ghost. She says that she acted first to save it from those who might destroy it, while believing that Michael would not stop until he had killed it. She fled with the being and, in retrospect, calls that choice a dreadful error. Her account preserves both the protective purpose she gave the decision and its consequence: the possession became the cause of her departure from Michael and a lasting source of regret.