So what if Siohaban had a break event as a child and her Null bloodline kept her from becoming an Aberrant but an Aberrant was still born within her, giving her two wills.
Then while dying just recently she had a second break event, fracturing her Will a second time creating a third aspect.
Welcome Droughtbringer!!
The rules of Aberrants would be much different than the characters think to achieve this. It might be that she is a wierd abberrant, or has a wierd symbyosis with one. If there is a spell that creates a consistnet aberrant (the doorway), then there could be a spell that creates a consistent abberrant to split the will.
Very fair. I’m just trying to figure out where the third Will came from, and my only guess would be something to do with break events going on that we don’t. Possibly something else about getting close to a break event and not breaking? The timing of the third Will, specifically, is making me think it has something to do with it.
My pet theory is because she’s been splitting her attention so much she’s developed a third will to keep an eye on it.
You know how someone people require full focus to knit and others do it while having conversations? Well Siobhan has been fuelling her anti divination ward and casting and sometimes dual casting. She also has that prison in her head which may or may not require a portion of her unconscious mind to maintain.
Now surely, if it were as simple as knitting, other people would learn to do this?
Yes, but this is like knitting where if you get a stitch wrong you can kill yourself and everyone around you. Most people will then knit very carefully and with their full focus.
Lacer has commented that people can’t multitask, they just swap their attention between things. And he has a point. But it should be noted that people can be doing low process tasks while also doing a high process task - washing the dishes while also having a conversation, for another example.
I feel like, if we had 4 arms, we would be able to read books while knitting. I think magic gives Siobhan those extra arms, in a way. And she’s so good at the basic tasks that she doesn’t need her full focus on them to get them done.
She does stop her background tasks when she needs full focus and power on one specific thing. So if the conversation turns serious and she needs to figure out why someone is upset, this is difficult for her. She puts down her knitting, her book, the coffee she was drinking and focuses fully on the difficult emotional conversation.
That’s what I think is going on in her head, basically.
Siobhan has a lot of different characteristics, so it’s hard to pin down. That she has been the target of an experiment, maybe even a long term blood-emperor type experiment seems likely.
Or, it may be that splitting the will through psychotic break (rather than magical break) is enough. Dissociative disorder is a popular theme in superhero stories, so it could be a variant on that. Intense trauma giving her multiple wills instead of multiple personalities.
Humans are magical creatures. She may be tapping a new very risky but potential that people have not tried before because of the risk. It may be that Siobhan has the ability to channel magic through her body in a nonobvious way that others do not.
The Red Guard has driven her to madness to get these answers. She may not get them, or only part of them. For all we know the medallion doesn’t just protect, but also slowly alters her mental state to make multiple casting as well.
Or maybe she always has that ability, but the medallion restrains it (a la Marvel’s Jean Grey) . Over time, she overcomes the enchantment.
Who is in the box after all?
I had a similar theory at one point. I thought maybe Siobhan was maybe already able to split her will as a child, and that perhaps she broke while only casting with part of her will, resulting in a partial break. The broken part of her will was sealed to prevent it dragging the rest of her Will with it. It would have explained why the creature was so insistent on her remembering, and why she is so desperate not to.
However, there is a line (I forget which chapter so I can’t dig it out an exact quote), where the thing in her head asks her something along the lines of “Do you remember my name? Do you remember when we first met?” and Siobhan does remember, though she wished she didn’t.
It’s a bit of an odd exchange if thing in her head was a fractured part of her.
As for her third Will, I think perhaps it isn’t as new as we are led to believe. A split Will seems to be strongly associated with identity and it occurs to me that there is already a third identity that maybe could have surfaced in a moment of crisis. The one that was in control for the first 2 years following the accident before she learnt the dreamless sleep spell. The one she is running from. The one that knows.