Discuss, my loyal flock!
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She really is progressing well !
It’s not a surprise that she would work hard during the break but I bet the other students are still going to be shocked regardless !
The next magic capacity test is going to be something 
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Thank you for the chapter!
My hopes for your swift recovery. These winter lurgies have been tenacious this year. My mother brought back a fresh plague after I’d just finished recovering from the last plague.
I really wonder what she’s going to ask Thaddeus. I suspect she’s going to query him about the data Damien found - but I guess I have to wait a week to find out!
It’s amazing to see her practicing so many different spells on the go. She’s got that bloody single minded determination to be the absolute best that will absolutely turn her into the best thaumaturge in the world - or kill her.
I am so glad she’s finally thinking about what else she can absorb in her shadow. I really want her to learn how to absorb kinetic energy so it can be a proper shield!
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Once she master the spell to create sound it’s going to be awesome for her Raven Queen persona, either to frighten/for theatrics, as a distraction or even to communicate over short distances.
Fake it until you make it ^^
Yea she has been casting 24/7 for a while now and some of that time is spend casting multiple spells at the same time. That got to stretch the will like crazy. I wonder HOW much of a jump that is compared to the “safe” limit of 6h/day single spell that everyone else is doing at maximum.
Its also fun to see how far she stretches that shadow spell of hers. It really slowly becomes an aspect of her and she does not really notice it 
I worry that she will find herself in a stressful situation soon, weakened by her excess practice, unable to really use her will, and her shadow is going to make an escape, or she’ll have a sudden collapse when the sleep proxy spell fails at the wrong moment.
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I feel like the direct combination of thinking about how to use a spell to create sound and thinking about how to use her shadow familiar spell to absorb different types of energy is going to ultimately lead to the sound-creation spell becoming irrelevant, as she figures out how to create sound with her shadow familiar.
After all, Amber was able to use the spell to speak already during her confrontation with the Red Guard, so there clearly is some possible way to make it produce sounds.
Honestly, I feel like she got incredibly lucky that during her demonstration the Red Guard agents didn’t seem to notice that this time the spell was completely silent, when she was supposedly speaking through it in their prior meeting.
wonder HOW much of a jump that is compared to the “safe” limit of 6h/day single spell that everyone else is doing at maximum.
I do wonder about this too, but in the sense that people don’t usually see much growth in their maximum capacity unless they’re casting spells that are near their limit and that they are unfamiliar, and her shadow familiar is neither, so doesn’t really count as that type of practice.
Her split will casting and increasingly complex applications of the spell do up the Will requirements some, but I don’t think it’s enough for her to see much extra growth in her capacity itself from it.
But the other aspects of her Will are more subject to change. She already had a remarkably high clarity of Will before she even made it to Lenore, likely because of her frequent casting of the shadow familiar spell in her youth… Enough so that she is continually impressing or even out-performing Grandmaster level thaumaturges. Now that she is casting the shadow familiar 24/7, I think those aspects are going to get even more freakishly developed.
The facets of will as listed by Lacer are clarity, force, soundness, explosiveness, and endurance. The shadow familiar is stretching clarity and presumably some endurance, casting the sleep proxy spell on herself (which I doubt Liza is going to resume when she gets back, because Siobhan can do it herself and it’s good practice) is stretching endurance and forcefulness, and light refinement is improving clarity and soundness in a way people don’t normally do.
I feel like all of those aspects are making her very powerful very quickly in a more subtle way than just capacity growth.
And then she’s just got her 10 or so hours of more standard practice on top of all of that stretching her capacity.
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I’m not sure it won’t significantly contribute, one thing that can lead to Will Strain is casting for too long and she’s casting all day and most of the night, so she is pushing the boundaries in that aspect, the sleep proxy spell might affect the gains though.
Also she’s not just casting and doing nothing else, she is living her life, learning, casting, … while maintaining that spell so she’s using her Will more than if she was simply casting the spell.
And she is casting more in general thanks to the sleep proxy spell anyway.
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I don’t think we have much to support that anything that can cause Will-strain also causes capacity growth. I’m pretty sure that the risks from casting too long come from being too mentally exhausted and effectively losing control because of that.
If risk of strain was what caused growth then I think we would see more opposed casting practice, like we see in Lacer’s class, and people might even practice casting through weak (non-celerium) Conduits until they broke.
But we are told several times that unfamiliarity is a necessary requirement for growth.
Earlier in the story we have:
Simply increasing the intensity of a spell’s output had diminishing returns, just as muscle growth would plateau if someone only did the same exercises over and over. To grow, the Will needed to be stressed in new, interesting ways, but many thaumaturges spent their lives casting the same few spells, or variations thereof.
and a bit after that:
A thaumaturge needed variety and new magic to grow. Simply increasing the power channeled through the spells they were already familiar with was insufficient. Even if she could brew a batch of twenty, fifty, or even a hundred regeneration potions, eventually the homogeny would lead to stagnation of her Will’s growth.
A spell that she has spent literally thousands of hours casting and was one of the first spells she ever learned certainly seems to meet the criteria she laid out for stagnation if it was all that she was casting.
It’s not about the Will-strain, but about the fact that it is mentally exhausting, meaning it’s not something easy that does not stress the Will.
I’d argue that’s what she is doing in a way, it’s just that the cost is offloaded to the sleeping raven.
Except she’s not just simply casting the same spell over and over, she’s adding to what it does without changing the spell itself, pushing its limits and finding new interesting ways to use it. This chapter is a great example with the scouting using her shadow. Trying to make a spell do something it wasn’t designed to do it definitely one way to make casting interesting.
And it’s clearly not the only spell she’s casting either.
They probably want to limit the risks of accidents, but I don’t doubt that fighting or opposing someone with magic helps growth if the opponent is strong enough to be challenging. Fighting a difficult opponent will force someone to pushes the boundaries, to innovate, … It’s the perfect recipe to stimulate growth but it does have higher risks.
Overall Siobhan is doing a lot of things that stimulate her Will.
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I’m surprised she is waiting so long to renew the sleep spell. She knows how long it takes her to cast it by herself and she’s young but I just thought she would be more on top of something that is so important to her (not sleeping)
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I think it is winding up to the previous mention she made with discussing with Liza about expanding the number of ravens to carry the load over several or many, she has that raven summoning spell she could literally over time add the whole cities worth and they should have nearly no burden
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