Chapter 248 Discussion

A Practical Discussion (PGTS)
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Honestly, I think that actually neatly solves a bunch of problems. Damien is already trying to reconcile the Undreaming Order being weird cultists dedicated to a criminal that are also doing massive amounts of good right in front of his eyes, and he is also trying to figure out why Sebastien seems to be so important to them.

If he sees a coaster, I feel like that just answers both of those questions in his mind: Seeing the threat, this clandestine organization he really likes has clearly infiltrated the Order, and is steering it towards productive ends and is secretly using its resources to help fellow members. He knew that the 13-pointers were willing to do some shady things for the greater good and he now “knows” that’s co-opting a cult is one of those.

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I am absolutely certain that Lacer is going to end up convincing himself that S lost the fight to him on purpose in order to help him shirk his red guard vows

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Unless Damien questions them about the coasters and learns that the Raven Queen handed them out personally. Then he’s gonna have a whole new set of questions. Siobhan only told the Order members to not give away secrets to people who have coasters so it’s up to each individual whether they think where they got theirs is a secret.

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I don’t think that’s so much the problem - there’s no reason why she wouldn’t have given one to Sebastien to give to a provisional member like Damien Westbay who really shouldn’t know who he’s working for.

I think it’s the fact that he can talk to them while 7 (Sebastien/Siobhan → Sebhan → 7) is down for the count and they’re basically interacting with Damien unsupervised and unscripted and mildly unhinged.

But the REAL fun is if Ana notices, because ( @Keid this is mostly what was going through my head and I can’t reply to two comments at the same time) she’s definitely seen Sebastien with the coaster and she might well have seen Damien with it as well. He had that slightly indiscreet conversation with Sebastien about it in the carriage after the duel with Malcom, for example. He’s also been acting shady and having secret conversations with Sebastien. I think Ana has a bloodhound nose for this kind of social intrigue and she will not rest until she gets to the bottom of this.

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Chapter 220 The Dazzler

You will need to simulate a self who does not know. If the secret is entangled with many different parts of your life or affects different people in different ways, you will need to maintain the causality of two or more different realities. This…is harder than you might think, but a strong Will can help. In fact, holding contradictory information in the mind and simulating either side as truth is one of the ways the Red Guard has experimented with increasing the soundness and force of the Will.”

Rereading and came across this section. Lacer tells Sebastien about keeping a secret.

Sound to me like S is going to be stronger in Will after she is able to get stabilized and recover. Literally splitting your Will to hold two different memories separate is probably way beyond what the Red Guard ever experimented with given the likelihood of that leading to Will strain / break event.

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Good shout.

Lacer basically forced this on her, but the problem is one reality is trying to overwrite the other, or directly conflicts with it. Possibly because of the way it was imposed on her and leaves no space for doubt.

I think what she needs is a way of doing such a thing voluntarily - like a memory palace in her mind, a “liar’s palace” where she can retreat under interrogation to give answers congruent with the person she’s pretending to be. But that doesn’t really solve the issue of her day to day behaviour unless she creates a façade as a filter to run her actions through.

Interestingly enough, I think we’re getting clues as to how she’s managed to split her will all this time. If we know that her will carries her memories and that there was a segment of her memory partitioned away, perhaps since her will and memory are so strong linked (see these last chapters and how application of will while memorising glyphs made them easier to recall) then perhaps that initial partition led to the ability to have two concurrent wills.

I’m not 100% sold on this theory, but it would make the Brillig psyche more interesting. Perhaps their insanity was a by product of their split wills - or maybe the stories of their insanity are overblown and come down to the rituals they might have performed in order to bifurcate their wills. Or perhaps the split personality disorder from nurturing alternate personas.

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From Chapter 223

Some accounts even claimed that the most powerful Brillig could maintain dozens of spells at once, their minds compartmentalized into numerous discrete identities that contributed to their madness.
The same madness that made it necessary to eradicate them from the face of the planet.

So seems like the book she read had speculation if they split their Will into too many “identities” it leads to madness.

So if she just added a new separation she should be able to tricast now.

I kind of felt like reading the journal was sort of training for tricasting. Having to focus on three things at once. Focus on the two glyphs and also read at the same time.

Also Chapter 222 when she was reading Myrddin’s journal about the Black Waste.

I found it. I did not enter, because I had not prepared enough protections and I suspected my mind would be ripped apart. At this point in my life, I do not have enough sanity left to spare!
Siobhan wondered if that was supposed to be a dark joke, or if something had actually damaged Myrddin’s mental health. Maybe too many expeditions into the spirit realm?

Maybe Myrddin had split his Will too many times. Maybe it wasn’t a joke and he was bordering on insanity after his Will split. Maybe he thought he needed to split his Will again in order to protect his mind from the spirit realm Black Waste.

Chapter 223

The author proposed that the mind’s natural defenses were rooted in a person’s sense of self, their identity, and their Will. It was this innate barrier that usually prevented external forces from directly manipulating one’s thoughts or memories.

Maybe we have been getting clues that this mind split was going to happen for awhile now.

With multiple Wills maybe that’s why she was so resistant to Lacers memory wipe spell. Now with the new third split also fighting it, getting rid of the “external force” that manipulated her memories.

Maybe splitting your Will provides more mind protection to “external force” like the Black Waste or mind spells. But at the added risk of insanity.

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I’m nodding along to all that, but there’s one bit you didn’t bring up - after his investigations into the Black Waste he wrote the hot chocolate recipe but had a small comment about how he was concerned about the scar that wasn’t healing (and how Siobhan instinctively knew he wasn’t talking about a physical scar). I don’t have the actual quote to hand, but I’ve been mulling over that for a while. I think there was a bit about how he’d accidentally locked himself out of his own wards around that point as well, which is also “haha, how silly” on the surface, but could potentially be quite sinister under the hood.

I think Siobhan’s mind has scars - not just from what Lacer did, but what her grandfather did.

I don’t want to draw conclusions just yet, but I’m just throwing out things that have occurred to me. Things like we don’t know when Myrddin developed dual casting - just because the books were protected that way at the end of his life doesn’t necessarily mean they were originally protected that way.

Other thoughts percolating include Lacer mentioning that magic has no limits, except those that people impose on themselves.

So theoretically, it’s only a question of imagination and power.

But we also know people impose many limits on themselves (which, for example, stops them from freecasting).

Lacer seems to believe that dual casting is impossible. Is it impossible because of a self imposed limit? Perhaps it can begin naturally enough but the more extreme versions involve pushing yourself to the absolute limits of what a human can compute?

Anyway, back to Siobhan and the mind wipe - she’s been practicing the refinement of the nine heavens which gives her some protection - possibly more than Lacer would imagine, given that she’s suddenly developed a deep understanding of transmogrification and is probably pulling on the ideas of all the grandmasters who have truly mastered the craft. She’s got her will backing up her memories and she also has the memory that is sealed away and untouched, that holds the creature within her in check. There’s nothing to say that just because she can’t access the memory it can’t continue to function as a…a backup memory of sorts. Pure speculation, of course, but sleep is when the brain processes what happened during the day and creates long term memories. If that’s the point where the barriers between her mind and her sealed memories are at their most permeable (allowing the creature to torment her with nightmares) then perhaps that’s when it’s been “backing up” her man memories, so to speak.

It might also be why the creature can communicate with her so openly, if her brain is always in that state of rest and rejuvenation. It might have avoided sending her waking nightmares in hopes of the seal failing, or possibly because it’s so starved for stimulation being locked up all the time that now it gets to see more of the world.

I’m still intrigued by the raven dream she saw and what that betokens.

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I’m 99% sure this is a typo, but oh boy did it make me chuckle - only her Sebastian memories are getting backed up! Call the Trainee Thaumaturge Support line, this one has been set up wrong.

Really like a lot of the points you and @AlexDiaz make above about the splitting of wills and its possible benefits/drawbacks hinted at in the story. I do wonder if the random changes in topic on Myrddin’s books point towards different personalities directing his investigations or if he was genuinely following a thought and then switching as soon as he found more interesting avenues to explore. Both are very plausible.

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Unless he comes as lord stag he wouldn’t be let in.

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Random thought I had earlier about the will splitting: imagine if she could send her shadow completely detached with a part of her Will to do stuff/send messages ! (though it’d probably be dangerous if the shadow is attacked)

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I’m letting that typo stand. Main. Main memories. :joy:

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I think we’re underestimating Oliver a bit. I have a feeling he wouldn’t let wards or a small army stop him from going wherever he wants, as long as he found out about the situation and was willing to blow his cover.

Or if he was reckless and overconfident enough to show up in his main identity.., which, to be fair, is probably the only way he could get in there. Too many people would recognize his voice, and then it would show that Sebastien is linked to the Stags. Damien would lose his fucking mind. He’s got to be putting things together already.

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From Chapter 232

But it was the third function that made her breath catch. The scroll detailed a method of sending dream messages to another person who possessed a copy of her symbol…
The technical explanation fascinated her. Normal mental barriers made direct mind-to-mind communication nearly impossible, but dreams provided a natural lowering of those defenses, and a conduit of sorts for channeling them.
The final third of the scroll’s length contained exercises that would help the thaumaturge send actually coherent messages.

That sort of confirms your speculation to me. Sleep is when the separate minds / Wills can commune without the normal mental barriers. Maybe she will be able to adapt that dream message spell to talk to her other Wills more coherently.

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If he shows up as Oliver then Damien and Ana would keep him out thanks to Titus.

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Also with regard to the scar. My mind jumped to the Black Wastes.

Tinfoil hat speculation.

I’ve thought that the Aberrants are small tears in the world. Between the spirit realm and the mundane. Spells form a path between the two. In the spirit realm reality is what the mind / Will makes it. Spells are a way to channel the spirit realm reality into the mundane world.

The Black Waste is an Aberrant of the land itself caused by the Brillig. S speculated this if I remember right. I think the scar might be the Black Waste a tear between the spirit world and the mundane. We also know you can gain understanding of a spell by looking at it in the spirit realm. I think maybe he was trying to find out how the Brillig caused the Black Waste. To do that he had to find it in the spirit realm so he could look at it and better understand how to stop it.

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I am half with you, but I need to go back and reread because I am pretty sure Myrddin specified the land of dreams rather than mentioning the spirit realm. Siobhan makes the assumption that they’re the same (or possibly wonders about whether it’s an alternative name) but I’m not entirely convinced.

Maybe they are the same but land of dreams is more accurate to its nature (also, bearing in mind that lullaby Siobhan sings that her mother sang to her which I believe also references the land of dreams or the land where nightmares roam).

When we dream, our dreams are made up of the reality we experience distorted by our brains and imagination. Magic is part of that reality, possibly even more deeply impressed upon the psyche by the act of forcing it into reality by sheer will.

If the land of dreams made up of magic made real and other experiences turned into dream, it might be possible to get a look at the experiences of people who interacted with the black wastes as well as the intentions of those who created it. But it feels like it leaves people uniquely vulnerable to being…perhaps infected by the nightmares of others.

It’s late and my thoughts are not cohering the way I want them to. I think I’ll revisit this in the morning, but I still feel the distinction between spirits and dreams is important. Something about it nags at me.

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Liza asked Siobhan for an assistant to help with this project, and Siobhan said she would. But Liza doesn’t seem to have connected back up on it; she went traveling.

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I’m beginning to think the Brillig were people, and legend has made them into not people. They had a spell to split their will, and that spell makes the wastes. So, when people discovered what the spell was doing, they attacked and killed all the Brillig to stop the spread of the wastes.

Who thinks Myrrdin created the Red Guard?

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I know the Red Guard claims to be that old, but I’m thinking they were formed/suborned by the Blood Emperor … who may or may not have been Myrddin also, so we could both be right.