With the much-awaited release of A Cauldron of Bitterness comes the release of discussions that were previously restricted to Patreon members. To prevent unwanted exposure to spoilers, make sure to read A Cauldron of Bitterness in full - available now on AzaleaEllis.com.
Buckle up, friends, grab your familiars and put on your tin foil hats! Hopefully we get to figure out exactly what’s going on with Siobhan’s little hitchhiker. (Or maybe something even better..)
Ha! So her medallion gets another use - the fall protection. Sadly it’s one time only.
Such a shame the creature didn’t take her further, but holy shit she TELEPORTED.
How is this fight still going on???
Also, this has gone beyond cliff hanger. Azalea! YOU THREW HER OFF A CLIFF!!! This poor child, I swear.
If Lacer flies down and catches her I’m going to mentally slap him across the face.
We know he can fly, though -.-
I don’t think she’s free.
Well… it should end at some point right ?
Also I doubt free falling to flee someone that can fly will do much…
And he could simply pull her up too.
Well, technically her medallion does protection against falling and it can help her breathe under water.
He has to react to her jumping, cast his flight spell, catch up with her - again, he has seconds before she hits the water - and then he can’t dual cast so in theory IF she hits the water before him she can let the artefact handle her survival while she shields, attacks and maybe uses a spell to speed off into the deeps like some kind of baby kraken. If he’s casting a spell to breathe underwater he can’t really do anything else because he can’t dual cast.
Obviously he might have all kinds of potions and artefacts of his own, but he’s so used to being the top dog that he’s not as paranoid as Siobhan is. I think she genuinely has a chance.
Obviously, it’s more likely that he grabs her by the ankle and shakes her down for spare secrets, but, you know, she’s a cunning little thing so I’m really hoping that she gets away.
She’s exhausted though. That teleport really did cost her.
Edit: oh and she can just shoot him in the face if he tries to fly after her. He needs to armour up. That will cost him time.
Edit 2: actually, imagine if they get attacked by a kraken in the water and the kraken takes him out for her? There. That’s my tinfoil hat theory for the thread.
Edit 3: imagine him actually telling Kiernan why she’s not showing up for their little study sessions. “Oh, yeah, she figured out some stuff the Red Guard considers forbidden so my vows kicked in to kill her but I figured if I just removed her memories of knowing about it I could skip the killing part. She didn’t really like that, so she stabbed me, teleported and jumped off a cliff. Not really sure what we’re supposed to do about the books now, maybe get my apprentice to try splitting his Will?”
Azalea is under investigation for abuse of main characters, for this and other similar instances. 
(Unsurprisingly, Damien is the whistleblower..)
I love this chapter so much.
Thaddeus has teleporting now or at least can travel very fast. Siobhan mentions that from the entrance to the top of the cliffs is 1000 ish meters.
That means Thaddeus has a spell that let him travel
that distance in under a second. Super fast through a cliff no less.
With that speed he could literally use the spell to travel under her before she can even land. Faster then she can fall at terminal velocity.
Good luck trying to shoot the guy that’s moving like 500+ mph.
He’s travelling through the rock using some kind of a tunnelling spell.
He’s not doing it in a second:
She was walking quickly along the side of the cliffs and preparing to cast the shedding-disintegration spell when something latched on to her. She tripped, caught herself, and turned to see nothing…except, belatedly, a finger-width sized hole in the cliff stone a few feet behind her.
She screamed as a horrible pulling and tearing sensation tried to rip her toward the tiny hole.
Half a second later, Thaddeus was there, floating two feet off the ground. The hole in the stone collapsed from a tunnel back into the smaller size as he released whatever space-warping spell he had cast.
All of that had to take time.
I think the spell is also based off of some kind of worm from the Tataroc (?) desert so I don’t think it works so well in air. Who knows? We’ll find out.
By the way, since Azalea wants bonus content ideas:
Thaddeus PoV of the duel
Thaddeus PoV of this fight if we don’t get it naturally
Oliver miserably telling Katerin about his fight with Siobhan and getting told off
Sharon’s sneaking suspicions about Oliver and Sebastien (this was a poll option a while ago and it still makes me chuckle)
Liza. Just give me some Liza PoV because that woman has got to have some Thoughts about all these shenanigans.
Half a second later gave me the impression from the point of him casting the spell that made the tiny hole it took like a second.
Even if it doesn’t work in air. There is a cliff under him. He can just dig back through the cliff to the bottom like he did to the top. Even if there is water under the cliff at most she’s landing a couple of meters off the shore.
She has a sperate thread for the bonus content ideas. Might want to post them there so she see them for sure.
We need a side chapter/story with Mirdyin everyday mundane stuff like making cookies , sexy statues or something… a couple thousand years ago… commenting on something trivial but relevant to Siobhans plight … maybe even writing in the books… Easter egg worthy hints and clues
Given he is already casting a spell that makes things float he might be able to stretch the affect to just float her in front of him. If he does keep her off the ground it would prevent her from running away again.
That’s half a second from when she tripped on the small hole in the rock.
You have to remember, she’s a little dazed from her journey through the spirit realm. Her thoughts are bruised, she feels like her body was unraveling. She pulled herself together after the divination and she’s:
The other part is that he’s probably not actually having to go a kilometre to get to her. The tunnels she was in were under the white cliffs and the creature already told her that the correlation is not direct:
“Does distance here correspond to distance and location in the real world? Because if you plan to dump me out of this place at the height of the white cliffs, a thousand meters walk away from where we entered, I warn you that you’d better do it after the sun rises.”
“Haven’t you heard any of the stories? Neither time nor space are absolute. But I can control the narrative. Close your eyes.”
Thanks for the link to the other thread for bonus content - I missed that last night!
Thaddeus needs to die. I’m so over his horror noir movie villain behavior.
(I know this is unreasonable but I’m 85% serious in hating him right now. Azalea if you read this could you please 1.5x whatever agony you have for him in store? Just for me, pretty please? 
)
From chapter 241:
She had freed herself and taken two steps when Thaddeus burst out of the side of the hallway a few meters in front of her. The stone closed up behind him, leaving no sign of his passage. He skidded to a stop and took several deep, gasping breaths.
‘Did he just cast some sort of stone-traversal spell and sprint toward me in a straight line, diving right through everything in between?’ She had heard that skolex worms—giant, predatory, sand-worms—did something similar to ease their movement through the ground, deep in the Tataroc Desert.
So, I’m pretty sure this is the same spell, except this time he didn’t have the option to sprint so he would have needed to fly, so this spell can possibly be cast and then dropped for him to fly himself to her or the spell is an artefact that can be activated or he modified the spell so it would propel him upwards along the path and the floating is just a side effect.
I suspect that if you want to float an object - or a person - you might need line of sight on them. Also, her shadow can gobble up his magic if he tries casting it on her.
You know, the shadow spell she’s not casting at the moment. But she can get it up pretty fast and probably in mid air. If her poor tender brain works fast enough.
I’m actually curious why his reaction is so extreme. Either he is a victim as well because the red guard are the good guys or it’s his own fault.
We know the red guard vows are compulsive and that they spend a lot of effort hunting traitors. We also know that their vows can be resisted with enough effort because Thaddeus already has in the past for his research.
Presumably his reasoning is that it isn’t worth doing for the Raven Queen given they are only friendly acquaintances and he views the consequences for her as relatively minor.
Additionally, if he reveals he is capable and willing to resist his oaths then it could make people question if he has done so in other circumstances. This would jeopardise his research both to her and possibly the red guard if she lets something slip.
Why do you think this?
So far he has been much nicer to her than she has to him.
Okay, let’s break this down:
He took vows to the Red Guard
He’s managed to get some wiggle room in those vows but they still restrict him and he hates it
One of those vows requires him to kill anyone who has this particular forbidden knowledge on Aberrants
He’s trying to wipe her memories of this knowledge so that he doesn’t have to kill her or report her to the other Red Guard members who will try to kill her
She is strenuously resisting and has spiked him in the ear, eaten his magic, stabbed him in the knee, thrown an Aberrant/spirit/THING at him which ripped into his face and then she just casually teleported away
Yeah, I can see why he’d be a little pissed, especially when he’s trying to save her life 
I don’t literally think he should die. I do however hate his actions during this duel. Given the huge power differential, he could have communicated, negotiated, allowed her to escape, or chose anything other than acting like a horror villain. As to him being “nicer”, I disagree and also he is the aggressor so he categorically can not be nice.