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.
Siobhan has seemingly hit the bottom of the many-tiered cliff and is rolling a bit, her bones battered and her meat slightly tenderized.
Discuss!
Going for understatement of the year so far @AzaleaEllis?
Soā¦ 3 spells casting soon ?!
Aaaaah! Chapter dropped early! I can sleep a full night tonight 
Thank you, Azalea!
So, that was a good chapter. I enjoyed that. I really liked that Ana spoke her mind and let Sebastien know what was going on.
I really liked Sebastienās comment about not having been a child for a long time. It was very fitting.
Iām sad that she didnāt see Oliver. I know he canāt be indiscreet, but I still wanted to see him talk to her. Hopefully thatās coming soon.
So, so, so! More cliffhangers to come, eh?
I will try not to go too deep into tinfoil hat territory, but I feel like somehow word of this will get back to Thaddeus Lacer. I expect he will grill her most severely to find out WHY THE HELL she didnāt use the coin he gave her when she was in trouble and WHO did this to her.
Orā¦heāll join the dots.
ā¦
ā¦
ā¦
Nah. He couldnāt possibly. Unless the mind healer mentions to him how extraordinary his apprentice was at piecing her mind back together.
But surely he canāt draw the correct conclusion at this stage?
Yeah, their fight really isnāt going to help him either since heās convinced she can do archmage level featsā¦ (or is at least close)
Feels like Lacer would have to undergo a similar level of mental gymnastics to what S has just done in order to untangle the huge mess of false assumptions and logical leaps he has made trying to understand the Raven Queen and her actions.
Tinfoil hat time: What if that is exactly what happens and Lacer splits his will because he finds himself to be more deeply confused than ever before? Then they repair their relationship (somehow) and they push magic into realms no-one has seen since the Titans?
More likely Lacer would become her rival/nemesis and we get some insane multi-split will fights 
Heās not allowed to split his will. He has too many advantages. Leave our poor girl alone!
Now she needs another low thaum spell she can cast that is inconspicuous. Like the shadow spell. Then she can low level cast two spells all day and grow her Will even faster. After she heals up some more that is.
Also looks like my prediction that more Will separations can help protect the mind from outside forces was right.
I hope Sā trusts Damien and Ana more. Her friends could really use that sleep proxy spell, all the restless nights sheās putting them throughā¦
For real though I could see him splitting his Will to sperate an āidentityā that is free from the Red Guard vows. A part that didnāt take those vows.
Oooh I hadnāt considered that possibility in my tinfoilness - very interesting idea!
So if she could get Thaddeus to do his mind magic on her againā¦
Just kidding, but now we know he was right and you have to mutilate your mind for a split. Whatever happened to her in the past was the cause for the first split and not related to Ember directly.
Iām not certain it would work like that. Iād imagine the bifurcation would need to exist at the time of taking the vows. Iām imagining it as splitting a branch of from an existing trunkā¦yeah that only really works with git trunks and branches but hopefully you get what I mean
I was rereading the chapter and noted the part where the raven died. I wonder what Liza will make of that, if she comes back while Siobhan is still recuperating?
I wonder how much impact that had on her mental state, on top of everything else.
She did say in this chapter that the raven dying triggered her fever and made it harder to think/focus.
Iām kind of expecting Liza to be gone a while, plus the nearby cliffs in the next chapters possibly suggesting S wonāt get back to Lizaās for a while either then there could just be a rotting bird carcass to welcome Liza home after what I suspect is a stressful and challenging personal expedition.
Liza walks in and sees the dead raven āOh Siobhan, what mess are you in now? You better not have gotten yourself killed, you [chose one: owe me money, are far to interesting, didnāt water my flowers]ā
This is the true crime. If Siobhan let her flowers die, Liza might kill her.
Lightbulb thought while trying to fall asleep:
S must have caused the third split herself in the previous chapter when she was pulling the two halves of her will apart to ease the pain.
Chapter 247
Siobhan mentally pulled the parts of her Will apart from each other. They didnāt want to go. Some kind of magnetism seemed to keep them together, but every bit of distance she managed seemed to ease the severity of the still-accruing damage, so she kept pulling. It also gave her something to focus on other than her mis-matched memories.The world changed.
She even recalls some of the time jump from 247 in this chapter, acknowledging she was using the third split at the time:
Chapter 249
The memories were less clear than usual, but she remembered finding a place to change and clean up, then going to her attic apartment to take her most important and valuable belongings. She had changed her plans and decided to leave via the northern tunnel so that she could send a high-cost, discreet runner to Damien on the way, warning him as soon as possible. She hadnāt gotten that far. āI was running on the third Will, then,ā she realized. āBut it was too weak to stay coherent?ā
Canāt wait for her to recover and reignite that insatiable curiousity of hers to dig into how it happened more!
Satisfying chapter! I really liked seeing her friends again, and how Ana points out what Iād been thinking, āWhy isnāt S making more use of her trustworthy friends?ā.
Now if S has to read Ana into her imaginary secret club with Damien, it will pretty much start to be real. That combined with Undreaming Order are the starts of a serious power base to rival Red Guard some day, in my musings.
She needs to find a way to mass distribute that information so that lacer and the others are basically unbound from their oaths by the fact of being unable to enforce them.
She didnāt say it triggered her fever she said:
As necessary as this work was, her body seemed to find it unnaturalāor perhaps it simply couldnāt stand the pain. When the sleeper raven bound to Sebastien died, she almost went with it.
The fever is mentioned in the next paragraph, so the raven dying might have caused the fever, but thereās no way to directly correlate the two especially considering her brain has been torn apart and sheās literally trying to stave off a mental breakdown while her mind is failing her and sheās doing it over several days without sleep and with her raven dead.
Too many confounding factors 
Yes, she probably did cause it by wrenching her two Wills apart but that might have just revealed the budding third. I have a theoryā¦
Sheās been doing a lot of dual casting recently while also needing her brain for other things, namely reading and keeping part of her brain reserved for tracking the symbol/glyph she created. Possibly because she was using that third Will is why she didnāt hear Deidre calling to her (or it could have been the aforementioned mental collapse, or just because she was too busy focusing keeping herself together and tuned everything else out).
I feel like Liza has been gone a while, Iāll go back and reread this segment from the start and check, but with Oliver finally back from Osham it feels like itās about time for Liza to show up, too. Not that their two trips were related or anything. Just narratively speaking, I feel like Liza might up the ante on her slightly. One of the last times we saw her before she left was at the meeting with Gera and the others where they were discussing both Siobhan and Sebastien in the aftermath of the duel. I think it was intimated that she had started guessing at the truth but she never really spoke to Siobhan after that before leaving.
I donāt know how but I really really want Damien and Ana to find out the secret soon.
the answer to why she does not make more use is that she didnt want to make use at all.