Chapter 246 Discussion - Perfidious

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.

Today arrives the promised second chapter this week, and hopefully it feels like a balm for all those of you who have been hanging on to the edge of the cliff until your fingers bled for the last few weeks. Patreon is now 6 chapters ahead, yay!

What are your thoughts?

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Thanks, I hate it :sob:

I joke. I appreciate this chapter and the fact that you didn’t leave us hanging. But oh, I do feel bitter that he caught her.

Still, I don’t think his memory manipulation will work as well as he planned - not with the creature in her mind who watched as she fought, not with all the discrepancies - she tracks her supplies carefully - and especially not when Damien asks her what she heard from her contact. Oh, and when she finds her warding medallion damaged.

Oh dear, oh dear, it’s not a cliffhanger but I still feel tense.

Maybe she would have made it if she’d not tried to cushion her fall? Who knows?

Still, I cannot wait for her perspective. I need her confusion, her realisation, her wrath and her bitterness.

I wonder if he damaged the seal while he was groping about inside her brain?

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She also broke her black star sapphire conduit.

And her reply:

I am surprised you managed to take me down before I could react

Yeah, I’m sure she is…

It also sounds like he made her believe he got her in one spell which really doesn’t match.

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Oh… I hope she hasn’t forgotten her progress with her shadow familiar spell.

And it would be funny if he erased the memories from the wrong “person”, but I doubt that’s the case.

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I am aware Thaddeus didn’t want to do this and couldn’t fight against it, but this removed any sympathy I had for him. The thought of someone manipulating my memories in that manner… Urgh. Unforgivable.

I liked him before this, but not anymore.

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Something else I’ve noticed, I don’t know if it’s a mistake or not but it seems only her can feel the “break event” lite effect when the entity takes control of her detached shadow.

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Pretty sure she will notice her sapphire is shattered with shards of it stuck into her healed skin. Think this might even be alluded to in the chapter where Lacer didn’t want to strip her.

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Very much agree with you on the supplies and Damien points - her memories are not going to line up with all the resources she used and Damien sure ain’t letting go of his contribution to the secret order. I wonder how much she needs to realise for her brain to reforge the right connections or are those memories actually fully gone now and she’ll only be able to know of them third hand?

I’m also wondering if Amber is potentially going to be able to talk to her in the near future as well - presumably Amber will still recall most (if not all) of the actual events of the night and a conversation between them that reveals Lacer’s manipulations would be a huge foundation stone for Siobhan starting to trust Amber (rightly or wrongly).

Additionally, it was good to see from Lacer’s PoV here that he was almost out of options and that a lot of his big work relies on having beast cores. It wouldn’t surprise me if in a not too far off fight Siobhan starts checking/targeting her opponents beast cores/power sources to get an advantage.

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Personally I preferred to think of it as hovering in mid air with Siobhan loony tunes style - need those hands free to help with casting!

As for the chapter, I think it made a lot of sense narratively as she had tried everything she knew to escape him and having her memory changed sets up a lot of tension in their relationship (will be interesting to see if she can hide it as Sebastian) and it could lead her to accidentally remembering the stuff Amber wants her to remember.

Just have very conflicting emotions about Lacer and/or the Red Guard now!

Edit:
Could Lacer’s memory edits go as far back as Newton? Him not knowing what the memories he is erasing are could lead to some very awkward situations where he brings up to Sebastian or Siobhan things he thinks they know but he actually got rid of like the meeting in the maze with the Red Guard. What a minefield that could be!

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I don’t get that. How can we hold someone under compulsion accountable for their actions?

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I think one aspect that was mentioned in way earlier chapters if I remember correctly, that she has a mind that basically never forgets. So in this sense, I think she would find out the altered stuff in her head very fast.

Another thing that may have gone wrong is that, he deleted siobhan’s memories, but still there may be a copy as “Sebastien’s memories”.

Thirdly as many of you mentioned she could get informed from the thing in her head, or Damien, or some other source. (Like Miles telling her something that the wind whispered to him)

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I wonder how bad he damaged the seal. Curius that he actually didn’t notice anything to be amiss with her mind. Also it would be sad if she really lost all her new progress. Alone the experience of feeling magic after having left the dream world.

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He is ultimately responsible for getting involved with the Red Guard in the first place.

The mind is sacrosanct, and messing with it like this is the greatest violation it is possible to make. It is utterly unforgivable.

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That and the fact that under her clothes she would also have had a scar the same as Sebastien from her medallion, and he would have seen the holster she wears on her chest, the anklet she uses for casting her shadow - just many things that would have been clues.

I’m also….very interested to see this from Siobhan’s point of view. I reread the chapter and there’s quite a lot:

he quickly followed up with a paralysis spell that had nothing to do with sleep, shadows, or anything else that might be within her area of expertise

So she could have been communicating with the thing in her head and getting increasingly desperate during all this - desperate enough to do something crazy?

He repeated his earlier divinations to ensure she was not somehow near to waking, then retreated to the side room for several restricted components and a potion that would keep her in a coma for the next few hours.

I really wonder how this works with the binding to her sleeper raven active. I know she was tired and it was growing weaker, but even so…

It was a struggle to connect his own memory of that moment to Siobhan’s, as her mind writhed and fought against him like a panicked, rabid animal fighting against the snare. But once he had the thread of the memory, he could follow it to all the pieces that connected to it.

Several times, he was forced to pause for fear of damaging her, as her mind, still strangely agile, began to tear itself apart in her desperation to resist him.

Her struggles were exceptionally powerful, and several times, he almost thought they would cause him to lose control of the spell. If given enough time, she might have even overcome the potion he fed her earlier, well before her system had physically processed it.

Each thought that might otherwise have led to the realization that something was wrong, he bent around the edge of the hole and connected to another mundane thought.

The process was complex, and he was forced to adjust his weaving several times as certain thoughts and memories refused to bind properly to each other.

Even now, Siobhan fought him, though more feebly now that she had forgotten what was happening, who was doing this to her, and why. Her thought web was peculiar—less fluid than most, yet with more connections than normal. Perhaps it would lead to a strange form of creativity based on widespread experience rather than the more typical intuition. It certainly made reconstruction difficult.

But Thaddeus was persistent and meticulous. When he was done, the hole, empty of gleaming strands of memory, was left only with the faint ghostly shimmer and shadow of the underlying parts he could not remove. Otherwise, it was clean work. The wound was patched and would heal fully with time.

One wonders if it’s all her doing the fighting or both her and the creature - and what kind of thoughts he’s been joining to others. But most interestingly….

Finally, Thaddeus cast a spell to create new memories. Many among the Red Guard found this the most difficult, and it was because no two minds were alike. People were prone to noticing when a thought did not sound like their own or when memories felt alien. However, Thaddeus had a way to get around that.

Using one’s own mind against them required fourth order connections and a delicate touch, but given the slightest suggestion and a few nudges, people were incredibly good at filling in the gaps. He believed it was a design flaw in the brain.

This meant he could not definitively and precisely control what she filled in the gap in her memory with, only push her in the right direction and provide key points for her to latch on to. But whatever she created, it would feel natural to her.

Siobhan is a deeply paranoid and suspicious person. What memories will she have filled in? What might she have kept? What might the creature be telling her even now?

She gasped like a corpse risen from the dead, mouth gaping open, chest arched up as her fingers scrabbled at the fabric over her breasts as if to peel everything back until she could tear at her own heart.

This is…deeply concerning. I don’t want to speculate what’s happening here because there’s not enough information and too many options.

Siobhan looked wildly around with wide eyes, settling slowly as she seemed to piece together what had happened. She nodded, and in a hoarse voice, said, “I bear at least half the blame. I cannot believe I thought giving a bit of a scare to Thaddeus Lacer was a good idea. Though whatever you cast, I am surprised you managed to take me down before I could react.” She gave a tight smile and sat up. “This is a bit embarrassing.”

I half suspect she’s just playing along to get out of there and figure out what’s going on in her head.

Once again, I’m desperately yearning for the next chapter. Let me into her head, I want to know what’s going on because her external reactions are usually so different to what’s going on under the surface.

In my darkest and most tinfoil hatty fears, I almost wonder if the creature is currently running the show at the moment.

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I suspect that the seal in her mind is tied to or hidden in the memory Amber was trying to get Siobhan to remember when they were first revealed. Given Lacer couldn’t see the contents on the memories and he was working with links to the forbidden knowledge of Aberrant incidents increasing I don’t think he will have touched the seal at all.

Siobhan when she tries to sort out her missing memories however, who knows what she’ll accidentally do to the seal then.

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I am pretty sure she’ll twig onto the memory modification pretty quick. What he removed - the question, the events around it, won’t be enough. Even if her mind fills in blanks (how her preparation was destroyed, ect.) Damien had records that he gave Sebastien. Lacer didn’t imagine the Siobhan writes anything down? He’s bucking that Geas very, very hard.

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That was so gross! Just ew ewww!!!

I hope it didn’t work and Siobhan was acting at the end because after he put her to sleep he actually connected to the raven’s mind as well or something. Also, did he forget that she had used up so many potions and spells on the device?

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That is a ridiculous way of assigning fault. It assumes he took the oaths willingly and knew what he would have to do in the future. It ignores whether he had the ability to take any other action and how he was fighting against the oath the entire time.

It would be like blaming a rock falling on your head on the rock not the person that pushed the rock off or the one who decreed that a rock must be dropped on anyone who walks there. Except in this case the rock gave you a concussion because it was actively trying not to kill you.

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Given what she already figured out about the red guard bases she will realise something happened almost immediately and after one discussion with Damien she will probably know most of what happened. Though I don’t know if she will remember the dream realm or her void shield.

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Oh, no. She doesn’t remember the Time this fight took. Is she about to go into a coma from the Raven spell breaking?

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