I hear that a lot about Serbian in general. It's sort of a vowels-optional language. [Julian wasn't his birth name, his adopted parents had changed it in part for his safety and in part because Zvezdan was not an easy name for most people to work with.]

I didn't know plants were a power kistune could have. I don't really know what's typical and what isn't for most nonhumans outside of what I've read about ones from my own home country.

So you became partly human when you tried to escape death? How does that work, exactly? [If there's anything roughly equivalent in Balkan folklore, he hasn't read about it, and that's really the upper limit of his knowledge about these things.]