Thoughts, theories, musings, and everything else related to this chapter are welcome.
Do you think the gods of irony are real? If they get angry at being cursed at, that would explain so much…
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Oooh extra chapter plans! Shiny!
Thoughts thoughts thoughts!
Miakoda’s death really did hit grandfather hard. I think it’s obvious she spoke very lovingly and extensively to Siobhan about him and how he changed through raising a child.
It’s quite sweet seeing him beaming with pride at Siobhan’s proficiency and rewarding her for being thorough and well reasoned. It makes it all the more interesting to see that Siobhan thinks he’s acting wrong. We don’t know him, we only know what Siobhan shows us.
(And her nightmares are terrifying, poor kid!)
It’s infuriating to see the first steps Ennis is taking to become the useless wastrel that we know today. It’s often said that meeting a person was the making of one. It’s clear that Miakoda’s death was the ruin of Ennis. The question is if he was like this before he met her and just shaped up for her or if her death just set him off on this path.
Not that I especially care. Parents who abandon their children like this are awful. Yes, you’re grieving - but she is too! And she depends on you!
I don’t like how tired Siobhan is. I hope it’s just grief.
I’m amused but heartbroken about Rory’s obvious puppy love and how much help he’s getting from people. He’s going to die, isn’t he? Him, the man who winked and gave him his chair, the village children who went to tell him Siobhan was there, even grandfather who’s turning a blind eye to all this so Siobhan can have a friend. Ah, my heart aches already!
On a lighter note - it’s interesting to see grandfather acting in the role of local hedgewitch despite his power and experience. I doubt the prospect of a free meal is really his motivation and I’m reminded of Myrddin’s journal entry about the old woman with the dentures and the fermentation pots. Both powerful thaumaturges dealing with people infinitely removed from them in power and education and yet treating them with a kind of respect anyway - enough to listen and give solutions to their woes.
I wonder what that gift of bread might lead to. Possibly nothing, but a gift freely given often leads to…something. A shift in the scales.
I don’t think he ate it. I think something is deeply wrong with him. I mislike him trying to turn her against her grandfather and create doubts in her mind.
Which leads us to the massacre.
As you say, the stones begin to tumble….
There are a lot of interesting details, we are still in the seemingly pristine halls of memory so some things may inform the future.
I had the thought that its possible her dreams of her mother related to acts being done upon her or relating in some way to acts done in the spirit realm but the dreams precede meeting Claudio. Still given their research and claudios own focus perhaps those dreams are side effects or actual messages of events. There are parallels to be seen with the sheep.
Had the thought before that inflection points of symmetry of assemblages of qualia in the spirit world may induce effects in the physical. And the note of those induction methodologies for divination seems to be going along with it somewhat. Which makes the good luck gotten by the dreams a semi-possible thing to my mind. And perhaps that is part of why Raaz gave his thoughts as he did, he is after all trying to map out the spirit world and such would be a sign that such would have practical uses.
Claudio not eating food, but throwing it up in a specific spot honestly seems like a mixture of making a anchor and putting out something related to the body to be able to check and kind of define the coordinates of in the spirit world. Of course it could also be some form of ritual starvation or avoidance due to a understanding of some kind of memetic overflow already happening. I would suspect it to be mapping and him being…impetuous about moving their project forward but it could be a mixture of factors.
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I was drawn back to an old comment of mine where I’d gone through and found most of the interactions with the nightmare.
The insistence that grandfather had a colleague he wanted to send her to for help, the questions about if she remembered its name and how they met, its insistence on her remembering it as well as the manipulative plausibilities really makes me feel like Claudio is a likely to fit the bill. After all, how many colleagues of her grandfather does she know? If she sat down and thought about it and tried to remember then he would likely come to mind.
Also, we now know that the yolk made of blood was a real memory and that Siobhan is still full of ambition to fly, so I await the hungry sky.
Interesting also to note that the red fungus makes an appearance in the tower in her memories, as does the mirror.
I still think the mirror is her mother and that it wasn’t there because there was an illusion placed. But I have a small, terrible fear for Rory.
Because if that memory of the tower is the one grandfather doesn’t know she had…what did he erase? What terrible things happened in that village?
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