Poor Siobhan.
Discuss away! 
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Fantastic reveal! So, as foreshadowed, it was mom. Surprises me that she can communicate though!
Where is Grandfather? He’d never let this get so far out of control unless something happened to him? Is he still in the mirror world? Can Siobhan save him?
Is she cursed with the dream now too? She did the eating thing. Is that thing in her head?
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I think she was just hungry. She’s marched all the way from the shaman’s house back to the village, she’s been running all over the place, she’s stressed and she hasn’t eaten in hours (and she’s a growing teenager!) so her being famished makes perfect sense.
Her being terrified of her own hunger also makes sense, all things considered.
Poor Siobhan. No wonder her nightmares are so terrible. We’ve suspected her mother was the mirror for a long time, but how horrible to see it.
Poor Miakoda! She was just trying to save them from the roc. She held it together all the way home and then this was her fate. Trapped, twisted and almost entirely helpless. I wonder how much she feels. I wonder how lucid she is. Enough to contact her daughter. Enough to send coherent messages. A living hell.
I would be screaming, too.
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Huh the mirror may be mirroring the spirit realm. That recurrant thing of another mirrored self with Myrddin begins to make more sense. Perhaps its the causal imprint on has left on the world that echoes even before one dies in the spirit realm. May actually make the reflection not having aged thing make some more sense, due to it literally holding qualia of a younger time that could perhaps be embodied…if one find the Will to link those states anyways.
A thing similar to such reaching for ones imprint may have been the Naughts purpose in being resistant to casting through the self. Or at least to mesh with the spirit world on a level of higher discontinuity or discongruence than others. I wonder if thats part of how she seemed to be reaching out even in her given state and perhaps a aspect of what would make for the most stable Aberrants.
The mirror seems to bridge points in the mundane and spiritual world which reflect each other, in truth a portal but fitting to seem a mirror. Especially given we know of aberrants that also had portals.
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I have had little time recently so only caught up now. Wow. I have goosebumps.
The changes caused by the aberrant brought me back to playing the Souls games (esp. Bloodborne) as a young teen and experiencing the disgust-horror of childbirth and motherhood. Except the descriptions here gave me even worse images.
My friends are starting to have children. I have been on the sidelines seeing them change physically and emotionally, transform their lifestyles and living spaces to focus on infants, and struggle to preserve the core of who they are. It confirmed my choice to nope out of all of that. And now, because of this aberrant, the next time I see a semi-translucent pregnant belly, I fear I will not manage to stop myself from running away. Not joking.
About the Miakoda portal. Is the barrier Siobhan touched the skin of her mom’s stretched belly? My brain is insisting on a horrific image with extremely stretched skin and the belly button in the middle of the portal expanding to let things through. The question I dread the answer to the most is: did the grandfather do this?
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Hm I think he may have intentionally gone to the mirror spot to see how the spread looks from there. Though I suspect he didnt quite know of the scale of this intrusive alignment.
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It had been pretty clear that technically, she did it to herself. This is almost exactly the same effect described in the last book as typical break event caused by the crown of madness.
One of the Aberrants opens up doors to…other places. Some of them are horrifically dangerous, just because of the way they spill over into here. But one of those doors leads to a place where the magic is more advanced than any I’ve seen before, and has spread throughout society all the way to the poorest of the poor. That world seems to have other doors to elsewhere, though they call them rifts, and harvest some kind of energy from the existence of the rifts, which can be used to empower people or directly charge their artifacts. It seems like some new form of magic.
The same spell Siobhan is casting right now.
I’m hoping plot armor doesn’t turn Siobhan into an aberrant, but if it did that would be very interesting. She might become the Raven Queen in truth.
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We know she had a break event because of her own actions. But she was still somewhat in control for a while because of her biology/skills/something. What made her get “more aberrant” and in this specific way? Was her body intentionally broken and stretched to fit the brimstone frame? Has she felt all of that and known who is responsible? Did she do it to delay her loss of control? What of the magic circle surrounding the frame? Is her magical aberrant body being used as a component to create the mirror/portal?
I might be misremembering (I got to do a series re-read after this book is done), but in my mind, break events happen fast but not instantaneously, and there was a sense of responsiveness/uncertainty before the aberrant “settled”. The Red Guards’ ways of using aberrant parts also seemed rather flexible. There has to be another aspect of being an aberrant that allows for modification or at least some sort of encapsulation.
If the grandfather was willing to risk all to get Miakoda back, he might have been trying to create a way to imprison her aberrant or kill it by severing its connection to Miakoda from the spirit realm side. He might have been in the process of having his mirror-self search the hunger realm while he and Claudio built a container in dreams. Then, they failed to contain it long enough, Siobhan sees horrors and has a break event, and grandfather uses the incomplete solution for Siobhan. Years later, the spell reminded Siobhan of the truth and Pandora’s box is open.
This is my theory anyway. I want the rest of this book yesterday.
For a long time I kinda hoped that the thing trapped in S.’s mind was some remnant of her mother. Can we separate the sentience from the aberrant? Is that what Lacer researches? Is that the magic the Red Guard hopes to find? Would it be the permanent solution to the problem of aberrants - removing them from the world permanently, instead of capturing and storing them?
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She did not break after the fight. She just got mad from casting through her own flesh. How and when she broke we do not know yet. But it was probably while casting some stupid spell for the bliss of it.
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Personally I suspect a break, casting within your own flesh and regular casting are all technically gradients of the same thing. Way I see it, all spells are just tapping into the spirit world which contains a lot of information on various states. A lot of that information is going to be fundamentally similar given it seems to come from and be affected by, living things, and as you find what bits of information have symmetry on a lot of levels most individuals are very similar.
So you can do a spell to find more variations of things to get a result, but at the risk of basically diffusing into a ocean of similar information. I would suspect that self casting is in many ways similar to a break event it simply is on a smaller scale. You shift around enough aspects of yourself til you cant orient to what you were and either mess up your bodies equilibria or reach too far and become something alien to what you were.
I very much suspect that one has bands of stable paradigms that may exist even after breaking, as well as for using oneself. Its simply the concepts and ideas integrated are often so distant and alienated from previous states that one may not easily function as before. Not that you cant, problem is finding and including a more human aligned pattern, optimally at least individualized, into the person. Which incidentallly is a big focus of shamanism…
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Good point! She seems exceptionally lucid given the state of her body so the way she broke might have been usual
Your theory fits in with a bunch of earlier “magic is defining” theories (as in definitions become reality through magic) so I’m inclined to agree. The idea of stable states/patterns of being to navigate between is cool.