With the much-awaited release of A Cauldron of Bitterness comes the release of discussions that were previously restricted. To prevent unwanted exposure to spoilers, make sure to read A Cauldron of Bitterness in full - available now on AzaleaEllis.com.
Sorry everyone, I started it a bit late for the usual speculation.
Will it be an end to the cliffhangers? (Probably not) Will there be a major plot twist? Will we get a new Aberrant? Weāre open for guesses.
Thereās a lot to unpack thereā¦
And Lacer is scary enough to make an Aberrant play nice !
I wonder where sheās going to end up, and what happens in the morning.
And do you think Lacer is going to check Sebastienās apartment ? (and find the book+many clues)
Or at least try to find him to get him away from the Raven Queen.
Oh yeahā¦ and did we just get more info on what became her Aberrant ? (and what sparked it ?)
I suspect she was doing magic as a kid and broke when her mom died Then something from the dream realm crawled into her head.
So it doesnāt pretend to be Siobhanās mom any more since it said human not child. Furthermore it is now clear that it is really completely lucid and not just some fragmented memory. Iām not even sure any more if it is an aberrant. The vow is puzzling, it sounds more like a binding for a creature that has to follow ancient rules. Maybe a creature from the so-far unknown plane of darkness? Maybe where she is now?
NGL, I didnāt think Siobhan would actually choose the nightmare.
Well. Well, well, well.
āFine. I vow that I shall not harm you this night, on my magic. I vow that I shall not harm you this night, on my memories and dreams. I vow that I shall not harm you this night, on my future. I have thrice vowed your safety, human. Until the sun rises, you are safe with me.ā
Itās 3:45AM, maybe 4 with all that running around. I wonder what time sun rise is?
And how long it will take her to come out the other sideā¦wherever the other side may be.
Sheās truly travelling through shadows and darkness now.
What an ending. What. An. Ending.
Brava, Azalea. Iām deeply impressed.
This storyline is epic. I keep waiting for Lacer to overwhelm Siobhan. Heās so much more powerful itās a little unbelievable that he didnāt earlier. But all power to the Raven Queen!
If he has strands of her hair in his possession, how long will it be until they are used?
@Stef, thanks for administering this!
She also has his blood sooo.
I also wonder what Lacer is thinking.
She met his gaze through his faceplate. He was serious now, and she could sense his determination to break her like a constrictor snake broke the bones of its prey. He had lost all patience with their game of cat and mouse.
He final got serious then she stared him in the face and disappeared into a shadow cloak.
He must be thinking that she could do that the whole time. He has to be thinking something like āWas she just playing games of cat and mouse with me for fun?ā And now she has his blood.
He has to assume she has been lying the whole time about it being a ācompletely harmlessā shadow-controlling spell now that it attacked him and made him bleed. It also ate the power link breaking his battle spell. He also has to assume she could have escaped whenever she wanted but didnāt.
Wondering if she could use his blood to weaken his Red Guard vows somehow.
Itās looking more like youāre right with your more meta-analysis-y guesses last chapter. Amber is going to take her physically to the Land of Dreams, which relates to flashbacks to Siobhanās past interacting with manifesting dreams.
But also, that dialogue in particular strikes me as rather un-aberrant-like. This being is able to bargain and swears by dreams and memories. That seem like a spirit thing rather than a single minded spell propagating aberrant thing.
might Amber be a spirit and not a aberant?
Which begs the question - can a spirit become an Aberrant?
Lacer has been looking into Aberrants with sentience, I wonder if a spirit would hold its sentience betterā¦or if someone with a Naught like resistance would hold onto their sanity more if they broke? Like her mother, say.
What if the nightmare was not an aberrant but a malicious spirit that was purposefully tormenting and killing the villagers?
And lastly, I have this niggling thought at the back of my head about that Aberrant that was being researched that could open portals to other worlds. It sounds oddly similarā¦I have to wonder at the significance of that.
Maybe she was an aberrant and turned into the spirit named raven queen? Oh my this is so exciting.
If this is an aberrant ā of the type that a sorcerer had become a monster ā then I feel confident that Amber violates every rule I every imagined for them.
She has more than crude sentience; she adapted to Lacerās attacks, she knows when sheās been beat, she offers a solution to Siobhan, and she does the ādoor openingā magic. But what really seems radical is that she makes a promise not to harm Siobhan: that is higher level thinking.
Who is she? What is she? Siobhan is convinced she is an aberrant.
But I am not. What would be her promulgated effect?
I speculate that sheās a demon. She may be taking on the aspects of belief of the Raven Queen, but I suspect sheās something else too.
Whether its the same one that Myrrdin released and then shackled (ie the mirror story) or something that came through a different door to an alternate reality, Amber is something different.
What are we betting on? New type of Aberrant? Plane of Darkness? Something completely different?
But itās still doing the weird world breaking feeling when itās let loose, like an Aberrant being created (born ?) so itās really weird, maybe itās not specific to them but more like the effect of a being some other place/dimension coming in ?
Iāve always thought that the shadow is some kind of being from the shadow plane. Summoned in the past and now controlled by the spell. I mean the shadow binding spell has been passed down through her family for generations at this point right?
I always thought the family figured out how to bind the shadow being to their will. That its not exactly evil and is passed down through the generations kind if like her mothers ring.
I even wonder if her motherās ring has more effect / role with the shadow than we know. It seemed like using the ring as a conduit is what sparked the memories that finally triggered her to release the shadow to protect her. Also if the āday dreamsā are actual memories of the shadow protecting her from a wolf. Then that means that its been protecting her since she was a child. This is the first time weāve seen her use the family ring to cast the shadow spell right? The ring has been lost since the start of the book? (gah, I really need to do a full reread) I donāt remember how she lost the ring. Didnāt her father have it? Maybe there is more reasons that her father didnāt want her to have the ring. Like he didnāt want her manifesting a shadow being into the world using the ring because he was scared of it or he saw it killed people.
Maybe it killed people to protect her. Maybe her grandpa blocked memories of it killing people to protect her. I would think that would be pretty traumatizing for a kid. I need to go back and reread everything involving the ring. Didnāt really think about it at the time but now Iām thinking the ring is more important then we knew.
At that start of the book. The Gervins wanted her to marry into their family and give them a bloodline heir. They also kept the ring locked in a vault if I remember right. Maybe their is a connection there with the shadow. Maybe its passed down in combination to the youngest member of the bloodline and the ring is also a part of the ability to manifest it.
Also do we know if celerium is an expendable resource? They are running out of celerium in the mines right? So that must mean that conduits get used up over time? How is it that the small but pure celerium in the ring has not been used after its been passed down for generations.
I have a feeling there is more to the family ring then it just being a heirloom with a decent piece of celerium in it.
Also didnāt she ask the shadow what it wanted? It said something like it wanted to be remembered or her to remember it? My thought has always been that its not pure evil. That when she was a child she was friends with it but she doesnāt remember. This memory of it protecting her from a wolf makes me feel even stronger about that.
Thinking more about it: Both the Spirit and the Daemon theory have some more indicators pointing to it:
Amber wants S to remember her name. Going by common folklore (and this story does borrow a bunch from that), names have inherent power both for Spirits and for Daemons, so manipulating Sās memory so she forgets the name and probably also using it in the memory prison would make for an effective counter measure and also for a way for Amber to escape that prison.
More speculation time. Running with my line of thinking.
Lacer might have been right about Sās being a descendant of Myrddin. Not Sebastien but Siobhan. Maybe the Gervins know the Naughts are descended from Myrddin. Myrddin bound the shadow a long time ago to aid him with the tare in the world to the showdow realm / black waste.
Maybe Siobhans father knew more about the journals / ring / transformation amulet then he told her.
Maybe he knew about it because the knowledge of the existence of Myrddins journals and transformation amulet had been passed down by the family he married into. Myrddins descendants. Overtime the black wastes has been growing? Myrddins hut that was on the edge of the waste or just inside its border got enveloped in the black waste overtime as it spread. The descendants couldnāt get to it / find the hut in the black wastes.
Maybe her father heard about the University getting the journals and amulet knew that rightfully they belonged to Siobhan as her inheritance. Thatās why he gave her the book at the start and told her to run. Maybe he had more intentions then him stealing a random valuable book. If he wanted the book greedy for him self why would he have gave it to her at all?
Also at the start of the book Siobhan got the amulet out of the book by channeling a small bit of will into a spell array she was sure she couldnāt power.
The same journals have locks upon locks and encryptions that require maintaining dual focus casting just to read. Lacer said you canāt even get to the dual casting wards section without first bypassing the lock. I always assumed the amulet allowed her to bypass that security measure. But the journal gave her a valuable amulet artifact out of a folded storage space at just a small channeling of her will. Why? Maybe Lacer was right about the journal recognizing S as a descendant of Myrddin.
This the thought thatās been bouncing around in my head so morning. She has his blood, if she successfully saves it. But he has her hair. Where will that lead him? With his abilities and power, he could probably find anywhere in the city that has some of her skin cells. It wouldnāt take more than visiting her apartment and Dryden Manor for him to come to the correct conclusions. (Oh Godās, what if the next chapter is an Oliver chapter?)
Okayā¦ Hear me out. We know spirits seek the stability of a body/thaumaturge. We know they are powerful tricksters, possibly fey like. What if Amber is a spirit bound to the body of an Aberrant?
What if itās a spirit that has somehow bound several Aberrants?
I hope this is the conclusion he comes to. One of the other alternatives is that sheās actually very weak and reliant on help from the thing trapped in her brain.
Realizing that she made this pact with the devil about an hour before dawn is the only thing that makes me hopeful sheās going to the plane of darkness.
Eeeeeee I love cliffhangers!
I mean Lacer doesnāt know that something is trapped in her. He canāt really come to that conclusion.
I was under the impression that he thinks Raven Queen / Siobhan are now one being?
I also was just rereading 203 icarus rising. The meeting between Lacer and Siobhan.
I wonder if Lacer knows / thinks there is something more with the ring. Like the Gervins. Lacer seems to think she showed up to his house specifically for the ring. He also was keeping the ring inside a lead box. A box made of lead seems like an odd place to keep a ring.
Celerium gets used up when it breaks which happens due to overchanneling. Sihoban had that happen to a conduit earlier in the series. It has also been mentioned that Celerium dust is sometimes used in spells. I think Sihoban thought of how it was being used up when she first learned it was running out.