I’m a little late with this, everyone. I had some life stuff happen on Thursday, completely forgot, and then saw that Azalea is sick and the chapter will be delayed, most likely until today or tomorrow.
Azalea, we’re sending good vibes to you and hope that you feel better soon! Hopefully you’ve been getting some rest.
Ok… she’s definitely going to end up visiting other worlds/planes at some point!
I wonder if the Red Guard has the portal Aberrant and have been using it, or if they never found it.
I feel like this one gives support to my theory that the Siobhan we know might be a spirit possessing her body, that has had it’s memories limited to resemble her own. In addition to the tenuous connection with her own body, her inclination to avoid lying whenever possible seems to be a trait of spirits.
oh those traits make so much sense in that context! I was also speculating a few chapters back that she might not be a human but another kind of entity trapped in the body and given the context we now know, her being a spirit makes even more sense.
I am now justified in my discomfort in naming Siobhan’s inner demon!
Well, spirit probably. Although it lies and lies as much as it likes. (And isn’t it interesting that spirits should avoid being named? Humans are very prone to giving things names - as we’ve seen in this community, creating a name for the spirit/creature/aberrant inside Siobhan. I wonder how many practitioners fell prey to that little trap?)
I do not think that Siobhan as a spirit makes sense, unless her grandfather managed to introduce her consciousness into this body in the womb/as an infant. Her father knew nothing about it and he has watched her grow and knew her personality. I know he was a lousy father, but he was adamant that she was never replaced AND he knew her well enough to guess that all this Raven Queen milarky was smoke and mirrors.
A con man does need to pay attention to other people if he wants to con them.
Now what I found fascinating was the mentions of other planes? places? accessible by aberrant. Recall the details of Siobhan’s nightmares where she’s looking into a mirror that isn’t a mirror made of twisted limbs and a face that she does not want to recognise because it hurts and how this all happened AFTER her mother started casting through her own flesh. We don’t know what became of her or what grandfather might have done with those remains.
Did her fear of mirrors spark from that point or was it earlier? I’ll have to do a reread from start to finish and see if I can pick out any details.
Thank you for the chapter! You really should have taken the week off to recover but I’m selfishly glad you didn’t.
Edit: I wonder if one of the mistakes Myrddin made was putting a spirit in his metal horse and naming it Carnagore?
Second Edit: so this is what Lacer meant when he said she knew something of a shaman’s craft. The guiding light chant describes her in cryptic terms and allows others to contact her in specific and limited ways (her symbol). She’s described herself to the watcher and now she owns that description to an extent. They can’t call out to Siobhan Naught - they call out to the daughter of Charybdis mists and raven’s flight.
The grandfather adopted her Mother, so any project he might have planned could very well been started in the womb.
I’m still dubious.
For all intents and purposes Siobhan was a normal child. She’s fond enough of children and spends enough time with them to note any difference in how they act vs how she acts.
Also, everyone makes a big deal about how she has no muscle memory but that’s definitely an autistic trait and I’ve been long convinced that Siobhan is on the spectrum. I’m not willing to put that down as proof of her being a spirit.
It just feels too contradictory to the evidence we have.
I’m willing to believe her grandfather might have tinkered with her in the womb - possibly to improve her sensitivity to and resistance to magic, but I’m not convinced he replaced the original soul of her body with a spirit.
Also, I’m a bit skeptical that Miakoda would just let him mess with her child. She clearly married for love (since her adoptive father disapproved of her husband) and if she was so willing to let him run experiments on her unborn baby then she probably would have married - or at least conceived - with a man who would have been more useful, presumably one of the people.
And yes, we do know that Ennis is her biological father. They tested her blood.
Side note: I’m dying to read “A Builder of Dreams” where we finally see what happened in Siobhan’s past before the break. The whole thing with dreams coming true and a mysterious stranger arriving in their village has me frothing at the mouth. Also - dreams again. There’s definitely something going on with these dreams.
There are new possibilities: Siobhan may either be the spirit (and her real consciousness is trapped inside - say because it was a break event) , or a spirit is trapped inside her subconscious (an experiment from Grandfather). Also, the shadow told her that grandfather was quite mad: the name of the spell implies its the spell that caused his break.
The nightmare was lying a lot during that conversation. It even said “it seems he raised no imbecile” when she called it out on its lies and said that it was part of the nightmare leaking out of the box.
“You just want me to let you free,” she whispered. “But I won’t. I never will.”
He lurched forward a couple more steps, his face too hidden in shadows to make out the features except for that gold, glowing eye. “What do you think is in the box? Aren’t you curious? Aren’t you afraid? Don’t you hear me scratching from the inside?”
The creature was trying everything to get her to remember, trying to provoke her into rash action. It started by pretending to be her grandfather and dropped that act when she figured it out. It just keeps trying different tactics to get under her skin. Including that comment about going to “his friend” to finish the job.
If there was such a friend why would the spirit tell her about it if it would be detrimental to its own chances? Very likely it’s yet another gambit to get her to try and remember or to lead her to someone who betrayed her grandfather and is more likely to free the nightmare than help Siobhan.
It’s like being forced to negotiate with a sociopath - or perhaps a psychopath - where they have no empathy, they just search for buttons to press to see what they need to push to get the outcome they want and have no compunction about lying. But it’s inside her head.
Desperate to escape isn’t the same, to me, as desperate to go on a murder spree. If the thing in her head really is an aberrant, and Siobhan seems to think so, then it would be because of information we don’t have about what she really knows.
Something killed her entire village. We know Siobhan is deliberately not thinking about it and remembers more than she tells us. We know she hates and fears the thing inside her and that it was deliberately imprisoned which is why her memories were hidden to create a trap. We know it torments her every time she sleeps and is constantly trying to trip her up and push her buttons.
I’m not necessarily saying what’s inside her is a mass murderer but it does not have her best interests at heart and I do not trust it. There’s something about its tone, its actions, its fakeness and ability to flip flop between emotions makes it just feel very artificial. Like someone faking emotion to try and create a connection without fundamentally understanding what emotions are.
SPOILER(?) between brackets (We also know from the synopsis of Azalea’s as of yet unreleased book “A Builder of Dreams” that the villagers were dying from dreams becoming reality but that’s a bit meta 
)
And, we know it probably wasn’t the thing in her head.
This is one of the most interesting things about the sequence of events (as she recalls them): Her mother dies. Ennis runs away, leaving her with Grandfather. He starts training her: potions, some enchantment, esoteric spells, modern thaumaturgy. Somewhere in there, Grandfather locks something in her head. She discovers Grandfather is dead, and there’s a mirror/doorway in his workshop. Village dies - roughly at the same time Grandfather died (either right before, or right after). She runs away before the Red Guard arrive.
Now, we don’t know when he locked the thing in her head, but presumably before he died, and definitely before the village is destroyed.
There’s some interesting points that make me believe that the break that killed the village is not the same thing as in her head. For one, the Red Guard doesn’t seem to worry that she would be infected by what killed the village; otherwise there’d be a lot more panic on their part.
If the doorway did it, how did she survive? So, there is a second point that makes me believe that while the mirror is an aberrant, that’s not what killed the village. But she may have been insanely lucky to escape, or the doorway/mirror’s murdery effect didn’t start right away.
As an aside, I’m counting three possible break events not including ideas like a spirit has been trapped in her head:
Miaoka could have broken - perhaps enticed to cast the crown of madness spell? Perhaps on her own? She could be the mirror/door?
Grandfather could have (and probably did) have a break event trying to control the thing in her head, control the doorway, or save Siobhan - because its the only way I can think of that an old Thaumaturge could screw that up. He also might have been trying to transfer his consciousness to her or other potentially dark or sinister things, but if so, why does she “find” his body - she would have been there when it happened.
Finally, Siobhan could have had a break event; a very tiny one. Namely, the little shadow familiar came to life.
She had to think about every move her body made, and she couldn’t even get into a rhythm of movement like she could for something like jump-rope. It was never instinctive, and as the attacks became quicker and required her to move in more complex ways, she couldn’t keep up the mental calculations with enough time left to send instructions to her body.
I feel like this has been hinted at for a long time. At the very least when she is in the Sebastien body, she’s more like a spirit inhabiting the body than a person.
I’m confused how you came to the conclusion that the thing in her head probably wasn’t what killed the village. Could you talk me through the logic?
Edit: never mind, I think the logic you laid out is related to that initial statement.
Alternative hypothesis: Miakoda breaks and becomes the mirror. Grandfather is studying it in his workshop. Something escapes and starts killing the villagers slowly (rather than all at once) so it flies under the radar for a while.
Then Siobhan finds grandfather’s secret workshop and that’s the memory he doesn’t know she had so he can’t erase it and she either gets infected with the nightmare or alerts him to what’s going on in the village and so he traps it inside her head but then someone else breaks (or perhaps the break was what alerted him to what was going wrong) and kills him. Or the backlash of the spell kills him because the Aberrant/spirit is fighting him.
I mean, Ennis does clearly note that she changed drastically after the events in that village. He both mentions that she was acting like a completely different person until she found a way to shut off her dreams, and after that he was unable to get her to stop repeatedly casting spells, which was not a previous behavior.
After that kind of intense trauma (not only the stuff with her mother, the mirror, her grandfather, and the village, but her dreams and near-starvation and homelessness) it would be weirder if she didn’t have any kind of change in personality, and Ennis would likely know that and take it into account.
And if the spirit was connected to only her memories and actively believed that it was her, then it would assume that how she acted in those memories was how it acts, and keep on acting that way.
The most compelling part is her absolute disconnect with embodiment to me. She has to be actively thinking about standing in order to continue standing, and if too much of her conscious attention slips elsewhere she will literally collapse without noticing…
But, at the same time, she is a remarkable prodigy when it comes to light refinement, beyond what Lacer would’ve thought possible, because consciously controlling every subtle movement of her body is what she was doing all the time anyway and she doesn’t have any subconscious habits to throw it off.
Likewise, Anders is absolutely fucking terrified when he sees her moving out of the sensor deprivation spell, because he had considered moving out of it to be impossible, and we know that the Pendragon Corps trained by putting each other under the spell. Of their master-level thaumaturges, someone has to have thought about providing themself with some secondary form of feedback, but the absolute shock that she was able to move says to me that none of them were able to devise countermeasures that let them walk. Nobody else under the effects of the spell seemed capable of so much as twitching or flailing. This feels related to me.
Even her ability to use a conduit against any part of her body could be a matter of her just having a different relationship with being embodied than anyone else. There seem to be plenty of thaumaturges which have never cast before coming to the University, but none of them seem to be able to duplicate her trick, despite not having had time to build up the same mental ruts as everyone else…
She wasn’t acting like a completely different person, she was acting like a traumatised child who was having nightmares every night:
“She was…different, for a long while. A real burden, truth be told, but she was too young to marry off, and who would ‘ave a girl like that, even if she was pretty? Wouldna’ talk, wouldna’ practice magic, couldna’ sleep.”
And then:
“She didn’t start acting normal again until she learned there was a spell that could ward off nightmares. And just like that, she was back talking and running around, practicing all those little magic tricks until I had to beg ‘er to stop.”
She went back to normal including the practicing of magic. She said in an earlier book how when she was young she’d practice magic obsessively.
Sebastien had learned the spell as a child, to ward off animals. She hadn’t used all the spell array variations Burberry wanted them to practice, but as with most of the simple spells she’d learned that young, she had practiced creating sparks to exhaustion, perpetually entertained by the wonder of casting magic.
Side note: I wonder if 19 year old Siobhan would consider her 15 year old self a child (since that’s when she started practicing magic again, she was sleepless and tormented for TWO YEARS, that poor baby) or if that refers to when she was younger, when she was learning from her grandfather.
As for her lack of muscle memory, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - it’s one of the many symptoms of autism. Which I’m almost certain Siobhan has. Her special interest being magic is a pretty big advantage with how the system works 
Also she didn’t completely collapse -
She reached the door to Professor Lacer’s office and leaned one hand against the wall to support herself as the world fuzzed out around her, too unimportant to allot any mental power to.
She’s a little lightheaded from an overwhelming thought
The relief left Sebastien momentarily dizzy. - She opened her eyes to find herself half collapsed against the wall, her forehead leaning against the white stone as Damien’s fingers dug into her shoulders with worry.
She’s having very big, very scary thoughts and they’re very overwhelming. Anxiety can turn your legs to jelly and she’s both clinging to the wall for support and using it to cool down her head while she has her internal panic attack.
I just feel this is a more likely explanation than a spirit was implanted in her and started to think it actually is her and has forgotten everything about it’s previous existence and has become the Siobhan we know today and the internal creature (OG Siobhan? Another spirit? The remainder of the current Siobhan’s original self?) is there trying to remind it of what it was and trick it into checking the hidden memories.
Also, with regard to her being able to cast from any part of her body, we know that her bloodline is special and there’s something up with the Naughts. Something that makes them better suited to magic and protected from the effects of casting through their own flesh - to an extent.
Anyway, I just don’t think her being terrible with physical things is an indication that she’s not human. She clearly does have muscle memory, it’s just worse than other people’s. She doesn’t have to think about every step she takes, she doesn’t have to think about how she holds her cutlery when she eats, she breathes even in her sleep, she can skip rope - she just sucks at dodging and isn’t really motivated to improve because she thinks she can just solve the issue with magic.
It’s like…dancing. Some people can see the steps and just do it once and they get it. They don’t need to think about it. Other people have to think about every step in their head and it takes them ages to get it to come naturally.
Other people just say they suck at dancing and have no rhythm and don’t bother putting the effort in because they know they suck and they would rather put the effort into something else instead of putting in the thousands of hours it’ll take them to get good.
But if you took their words literally you’d think they literally didn’t understand rhythm (or muscle memory if that’s what they used as an excuse) and you’d think they were well weird for not being able to do something normal humans can do ;p
It’s best not to take Siobhan too literally. She’s not the most reliable narrator.
Sure.
There are two dream memories. One of them is in Sword of Damocles, the other is in Eigengrau.
Which one came first?
Well, in Eigengrau, we know that she acquired the amulet after Grandfather died. This was his artificery, not his magic workshop. She definitely fled after this point.
In Sword of Damocles, Siobhan comes across the mirror in his tower workshop. He isn’t there. She appears very young in her dream.
Now, he wasn’t in the process of sealing the thing when he died, because if he had been, she wouldn’t need to enter the room. Ergo, he died after it was sealed away.
If that’s so, then there’s a good chance Sword of Damocles came first, she saw the mirror without his supervision before he died. But even if it was after, when would Grandfather have time to seal the thing in her head, and start making a custom amulet?
And, its sealed when Ennis finds her.
So, seems like the thing in S.’s head was sealed before the village was destroyed, because there’s not time enough for there to be a seal and kill Grandfather and make the amulet.
The village could have been destroyed by what was in the mirror, if she’d opened the workshop door and let an aberrant out after Grandfather died. Or, whatever broke Grandfather — some other break event — may have been what he died defending himself from.
I suspect she saw the mirror first and was infected there, he sealed her, then started work on the amulet, then something went wrong with it something else, because the seal is still in place - if it was not, she’d be spreading aberrant plague.
But we at least know that the specific thing in her head shouldn’t have been the thing that killed the village.
And here’s the post where I talk myself out of my own theory:
Let’s say Grandfather starts making an amulet. He’s busy and curious Siobhan sneaks up to the workshop, sees the Mirror, and has her own break event or mirror magic runs rampant.
It’s a dream thing and it starts infecting everyone. When it tries to infect Grandfather, he realizes what’s going on and improvises shamanistic magic to travel to her and seal part of the aberrant in her. The effort kills him. Up in the tower, Siobhan wakes up, makes her way to into the home, and finds him dead.
Everyone is dying/going crazy and she runs away, because she Knows she’s got an aberrant in her head.
This way we get minimum one break event: the one that made the mirror.
Chapter 236 is now available to all! Chapter 236 – Conceptual Beings – Azalea Ellis
I’m still wondering about the plane of darkness that Lacer says doesn’t exist. Maybe you need to use an aberrant or parts to make a doorway to that plane. The thing in Siobhan’s head could be something from that plane - I vaguely remeber S seeing things/beings in a land through the mirror. I might find out eventually if I live that long.