The chapter we’ve all been waiting for with bated breath. 
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Here we go again, she’s really out of options to flee now :x
But she is indeed very clever, sadly Lacer is bullshit level OP and trained to handle unknown situations while she’s a young, albeit talented thaumaturge.
With everything that has happen he’ll have a really hard time believing it when he learns of her true capabilities (next chapter maybe ?)
And her Shadow is really becoming an integral part of her arsenal !
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Well. I was determined to go to sleep before 1am today, but then the chapter released at 00:35.
Once again, the adrenaline is going to keep me up all night.
Curse you, Azalea. But thank you for the early chapter anyway. My impulse control is very poor and if I woke up at 3am as I sometimes do, I have no doubt I would have read the chapter 
She did so well. So well. Oh Siobhan, this surely can’t be the end of the road?
Chekhov’s dazzler is out (unless…?) and the promise by the Red guard is out. I wonder if she could throw herself off a cliff to escape. That ward still exists on her necklace!
Unless she gets very very good with her shadow. Lacer can’t exactly rip it from her eyes - her shadow is hers - and he seems susceptible to its effects (absorption).
Still, she’s just a baby. And he’s a dragon slayer. It’s not looking good 
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Hmm where does everyone think we are headed next. Lacer going to accidently let her shadow aberrant out from its bonds more?
After two chapters of Lacer chasing her I can’t imagine her getting away at this point.
Or does he just wipe the relevant info and life goes on. Well goes on until she finds out he wiped her memory.
I feel like the next step here is that he will bind her beyond her ability to escape and then compel her to speak truthfully about how she received such information, both so he has the necessary context for erasing it, and for eliminating other links in the trail of forbidden knowledge. Normally I would say that she would loosen this compulsion with name shenanigans, but she made the mistake of providing Lacer with her full Shamanic identifier, which she has applied her will towards being synonymous with herself, so there is no luck there.
From there I’m guessing that she will try to use technical truths to avoid implicating Damien and exposing her Sebastien identity, e.g.:
“I was given this information through the research of a member of a secret society that I am a part of.”
“Who else in this society is aware of this?”
“Every fully inducted member of this society”
“Is anyone outside of this society aware of this?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
And thus the Undreaming Order will get thrown under the Red Guard bus, but Damien will be spared.
I’m guessing that he will then ask for her to recite every memory in which she learned or thought of this information, and will get a surprisingly thorough list that tips her hand on how fantastic her memory is, and he will replace their contents one by one, being the diligent man that he is and knowing that just flat out erasing them would tip her off.
He’s then going to be stuck coming up with some scenario for how they got to this location and why so many of her supplies are missing (though he might miss some of the implications of her taking the Quintessence of Quicksilver).
I think that her memory is precise enough that she is going to start to notice inconsistencies soon enough even if Damien doesn’t tip her off, and I think that her resulting need to comb through every moment of her memories for errors, possibly combined with some future Quintessence usage will ultimately create the cracks that Amber can use to escape.
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I feel like Azalea read your post and went, “oh, I better fix that because that’s not the way I wanted to go.”
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I like to think if Siobhan can aways have two answers set out with the hidden third answer being correct, then Lacer can do the same.
I’d hate for this encounter to end with them as enemies.
But, mostly, I think Siobhan literally can not escape this unless the thing in her head does something awful: she’s been giving it a lot of power from Lacer’s spells. Doesn’t she wonder where all that power has gone?
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Well, I know Lacer said that it needed a rare component but with the right imagination you can usually get around it. Take a humble rock, for example. A rock can be a crude weapon, hit someone on the head with it and you can get brain damage, brain damage can lead to memory loss - ergo, a rock can be used as a component to get rid of memories.
Obviously, on the fly while trying to escape from Lacer is maybe not the time to come up with untried modifications based off of third or fourth order associations.
Also, if Azalea did read through my comment and used it as a basis to firmly and explicitly rule things out, then I’m quite honoured to have left my small mark on the book
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Isn’t all the power just sacrificed the way the light and heat is? Have we heard of their being a maximum amount of power that can be used on a simple effect.
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Right now I think she’s (most likely) in the same situation she was in when she was trapped in Radiant Hell. She’s used up most of her tricks and abilities and is at a dead end. Barring maybe “Amber’s” assistance, escape seems impossible.
Her best option is most likely to use her mouth. Not by insulting him (much ), but by convincing him that it’s in his best interests to leave her unharmed and unmodified, and maybe working together to find a way around his oath/compulsion.
She should probably start by doing something dramatic AF, like asking him to kill her instead of modifying her memory. That would probably throw him a little bit off balance, as it doesn’t fit his mental model of her. Then maybe explaining that it would not only be a violation of her very being, but further modification of her mind could unravel her stability completely… And it could be the most dangerous thing he’s ever done.
Make it about him. While I think he cares about her a little bit, his chief concern and obsession is with himself. She’s got to reframe her view of him entirely and negotiate accordingly by communicating with a narcissist like he’s a narcissist.
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That’s very true.
I’ve been thinking about her using her shadow to stop him being able to modify her memory but surely he has methods that don’t involve going via her eyes and ears.
But even if he doesn’t, he’s proved to be able to overload her shadow with so much energy that she can’t absorb it. So something would slip past. Mind you, I’m not sure how good his control would be at that point. In theory she might have a breakthrough about how to use her shadow but… yes, I think she’s out of tricks.
Now, being slightly meta, —STOP READING HERE IF YOU DON’T WANT SPECULATION BASED ON AMAZON’S SUMMARY OF THE NEXT BOOK— I know that A Builder of Dreams is the next book and the amazon summary sets it back when Siobhan was smol and grandfather was still alive but the nightmare is tormenting the village. It also, curiously enough, has a dark skinned man on the cover. Now, he looks a bit young to be grandfather but he was a very powerful thaumaturge so that’s who my money’s on, it’s doubtful (but possible?) that it’s Lacer, though we’ve yet to get a character card of him. And there was that one comment from Titus that he’d have to have mated with an albino to produce Sebastien…
Anyway, irrelephant.
Azalea has said that this book is winding to a close which means whatever happens here sets us up for that - which means that this confrontation could be the reason why.
Either Lacer shakes loose her memories while digging in her head which leads to us seeing what actually happened (and thus loosing the nightmare to cause carnage) or something goes wrong in their confrontation causing the nightmare to rattle its cage and possibly get free.
Regardless, I think we’re building up to the mother of all cliffhangers.
—End of errant speculation based on the thinnest of evidence—
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you can use [spoiler] <text> [/spoiler] to hide things
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And another thing!
(Yes, I know, I have a ridiculous amount of comments already but what do you expect when I’m left on this kind of cliffhanger?)
I’m REALLY impressed by Siobhan. Like, Thaddeus Lacer, the man, the myth, the goddamn Archmage (you know he’s performed feats worthy of the rank, whether he has it or not is entirely immaterial) is impressed and shocked by her abilities. He has no idea how she cut him off from his lightning spell! He had no idea it was even possible! And she did it with her shadow.
Our lil 21 year old baby who’s been scratting around for spare magic since she was 13 and has barely 3? 4? years of formal training (11-13 with grandfather, 1 year at university) is going toe to toe with a legend. This is as shocking as a gecko facing off with a dragon and actually making the dragon bleed. We know she’s ingenious and resourceful but we also know how badly she’s out of her depth.
And yet, this baby has Thaddeus saying things like “I apologize for underestimating you,” and “What was that? How did you do that?”
I mean, our guy is breathing hard and then there’s this whole sentence:
Thaddeus gasped and stumbled, wide-eyed.
I couldn’t be more proud of her. She has the monster of monsters, the guy who is the youngest master of free casting, probably the youngest archmage and the person who had four or five thousand thaums at her age on the back foot.
No one would ever believe even Sebastian could so much as scratch Lacer. This is outrageously good.
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To be fair that little bit of training she got before university was with an Archmage.
But this is why I think while Thaddeus would be upset if he learns who she really is his greed would overwhelm everything else. His apprentice is far more of a monster than he thought so he will be able to turn her into an equal eventually.
Not to mention if Sihoban explains she didn’t trust him because of his red guard oaths and Amber then he would also have an aberrant capable of speech the red guard don’t know about to help with his immortality research.
This would also help him build trust with her by showing the research that goes against his oaths.
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You’re an Oracle, Hannah!
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This is true. 