Some of you guys are such close readers, I wonder if you will notice the thing I hid in plain sight in this chapter?
I won’t leave you hanging to confirm it, it’ll be stated clearly in the next chapter.
As always, discussion, random thoughts, and everything else even slightly related to the chapter is welcome. 
I still wonder how much Siobahn may be effectively that perfectly fitted vessel due to a mixture of Claudio dragging her and her mother mirroring her when she was younger. It would give a interesting dichotomy to the entities degradation within the seal. Would also be a fair explanation for her multiple wills and make her developing another…interesting in implication of method.
I rather suspect the right deal may help stabilize it, or at least if Siobahn linked some of its behavior back to its actions as a builder of dreams she may see a decent way to bind it with a deal. It lacks definement and if she can set the parameters while working with some of its own patterns there may be some space for cooperation.
Anyway enjoyable as always
I wonder if this, thing, can truly be classified as an Aberrant at this point. If so, any cooperation between them is going to have to allow for propagation of its anomalous effect
The benefits for Siobhan seem pretty clear though. Just the fight with Lacer alone proved how useful its abilities are, and that was with only its reluctant aid. Imagine how useful it’d be as an actual ally (perhaps as her true shadow familiar)
Now THIS is how you get back to her POV with style!
I love this, if she is careful here she might gain a true shadow familiar now, and when people realize that she has a spirit bound to her, it will be glorious!
I am not sure there is much difference between spirit beings and aberants anyway.
It kinda feels like magic is directly intertwined with the spirit realm. I would not me surprised if “making celerium from beast cores” means that you have to physically bring them to the spirit realm. It is something that Myrdin likely could do and would explain why everyone else fails who has tried before.
My thought is, we saw its goal when it was shaping gardens of concepts “originally” and Siobahn is in some sense doing similar things with the Undreaming Order and the Raven Queen. The possible benefit here is it may be shaped by the given concepts that such practices with dreaming may give it access to and as such be made less harmful perhaps. Or at least managed such that its story becomes that of a more benevolent being. And it may go along with such as any growth into new concepts may make it easier to eventually explore those outer reaches it may still want to go to eventually.
I have also just noticed that the entity bares some interesting resemblance to the description of Carnagore in Enough Yarn to Last the Night:
Its features shifted, the head of a lion and the tail of a scorpion at one moment, and then the wings of an eagle and body of a turtle the next. The beast had been sealed for eons and was very weak, and so it entered into a pact with Myrddin. It would serve him, and he would take it out of the well and strengthen it.
…let’s just hope this tale has a happier ending
Anyone think the reliving seeing through a pastry shop window and the walking over a plank between two buildings weren’t random memories. I’m thinking they aren’t memories at all and maybe she’s having glimpses of what her followers see.
All kinds of neat things. Conceptually, S. has taken part of it into herself:
And as if saying it made it true, the flow of herself into the being stopped. … She recalled the void, and everything that the being had eaten spewed back up out of it, along with several tiny, sharp fragments of its flesh.
Also, spirits that lie are weaker, and every time this shadow lies, she was able to beat it down a little more.
I can’t recall very well, but Shamans make contracts with spirits too, right? A familiar is a conduit, but it’s also usually from a plane:
It’s just that most things don’t work very well for the purpose, or have other downsides or requirements, like using your own body as a Conduit, or needing to make a contract with a being from another plane.
S. did some research that said this:
The author posited that, while shamanry was often considered a sub-craft of divination, in many ways, it was actually a type of witchcraft. Witches set out an enticement-laced summoning Circle and negotiated a contract with their prospective familiar, who they could then use to channel their magic. Technically, if Empress Regal had been a magical beast instead of a normal raven, Siobhan could have used the raven-summoning spell as the first step toward entering into a contract with her.
The author argued that shamans could do similarly, either for service within the spirit realm or outside of it. Due to the transitory nature of the spirit realm, these contracts were almost always short term rather than for life. Within the spirit realm, the contract was a standard enough process, though summoning a spirit had a few quirks that were different from summoning a magical beast in the real world, seeing as they had no identifiable, concrete species.
Also, I suppose it should not be a surprise how close Lacer’s guess was that S. was describing her dilemma, when he wrote:
Do you, perhaps, believe yourself to be a consciousness trapped within a memory, to have been released by some action of Siobhan Naught’s?
It’s shaping up to be a fascinating partnership.
A first I was shocked how naïve she is to trust it. Then I remembered that magical contracts are binding in this world. She could really get a novel type of spirit contract out of it. Expanding what is thought to be possible.
Walking on a plank between buildings of white stone is almost certainly the first combat magic exam. I think they’re just her memories.
I wonder if there’s any significance to the fact that her conduit wasn’t mentioned anywhere in this chapter.
I did wonder, but she always has one on her - she’s paranoid about it. She keeps one next to her skin with the chest strap thing (although, the sapphire she was keeping there did shatter…) and another in her boot. Well the boots are probably off, but I doubt she would have taken off the chest strap and she was holding one when she started casting so she might well still have it in her hand.
She was free casting for a bit, before recasting the spell to get better control of her shadow. I wonder if that’s what Azalea hid in plain sight?
I agree that the aberrant seems reminiscent of Carnagore. Siobhan’s life is eerily reminiscent of Myrddin’s and continues to echo him in odd ways. An odd little thought at the back of my mind reminds me of how Myrddin was said to move backwards in time. I’m ignoring that thought.
It’s a little heartbreaking how Siobhan keeps mentioning that the creature looks not like Claudio nor really like her. She can’t quite bring herself to say it looks like her mother.
I think that and the melancholy will end up swaying her.
Her mother’s effect was a little odd. She could open portals, yes, but she could still cast some magic. She sent Paimon’s semblance to Siobhan and there was the weirdness with the tree house and the blood egg.
I think we’re all treating it as a foregone conclusion that Siobhan is in fact going to make a deal with the creature 
It’s funny because she’s such a sensible, risk averse character, you’d expect her to just refuse and let it stay trapped in the cell.
Edit: on reread I caught
She hurt like she’d been run over by a whole street full of high-stepping erythreans horses and their carriages.
Erythreans or Erythrean horses or just horses. “And their carriages” is a bit odd, somehow.
Oliver was leaning over her, trying to tip some potion into her mouth, eyes bloodshot with worry and a faint sheen of tears.
This reads like the faint sheen of tears is contributing to his bloodshot eyes.
I don’t think so, most of the chapter happens in her mind (or possibly the spirit world/the spirit world’s representation of her mind) where the effects all stem from her imposing her will rather than actively casting in the way we are familiar with.
When they do come back into the real world/central plane the only spell she casts is her esoteric shadow familiar spell that she has refined a lot. I don’t recall whether S got to the point of being able to do this without the chant so the first part of controlling the shadow here might be new behaviour.
She recites the chant entirely non verbally in Eigengrau, but her ability to hold some control of her shadow through Will alone like she does when she first regains consciousness here definitely isn’t something she’s displayed before
I suspect that if the entity holds facets of her mothers mirroring and the builders conceptual gardens then entity similar to Carnagore could become more real with time, though perhaps in a bit of a alternate manner than I suspect Myrddin took. And the same techniques she is using and teaching the Undreaming Order may actually shape those too. I feel Siobahn may be looked at as a very successful test case by a fair few people if they knew her full history.
Well, for the non-spell shadow control thing I don’t think the notable actor showing a new power here was Siobhan, but the aberrant.
The past times when the aberrant took control over her shadow it was actively taking over a casting of a spell that she had poorly imposed her will over. And that aligns with the powers we saw from Claudio, he had the special secondary power of being able to sustain and take control over the unattended spells left by mortals, while not being capable of being their primary caster.
Siobhan wasn’t in control over her shadow which also should’ve meant that the aberrant/spirit should have no control over it. I think, to an extent, its foot was shoved into a shadow-shaped box and now became, partially a thing of shadows. It seems like it’s time imprisoned has both weakened it and molded it in a reflection of Siobhan, but this feels like the noteworthy bit.
What Siobhan initially does in response to me at least seemed to be a flexing of her will distinct from actual spellcasting, more akin to how animism functions. She doesn’t use her will to shape her shadow, she just uses her Will to assert that her shadow is a part of her, and naturally is something her Will extends to, as part of her domain. She has conceptualized her shadow as a part of her body in the past and I think she’s just using an extension of that conceptualization to give it an echo of the barrier to foreign manipulation that her skin has. This wouldn’t let her shape it, but it would make it harder for others to shape it.
That isn’t terribly effective though, of course, because she isn’t a trained animist, so she has to actually cast the spell that gives her full control instead.
I think at least the sand and the Paimon thing was her figuring out how to use her portaling ability to communicate. I think that’s why it was so awkward at first. She was manipulating a portal to the fireplace to listen to Siobhan and redirecting and reshaping it to sketch things in space bit by bit.
Other various musings from this chapter:
I wonder if the fact that a part of it was once a witch will make it easier to make a contract with, or harder? Possibly both?
I feel like Waverly would be absolutely ecstatic to be able to help someone negotiate contract terms with a horrifying Eldritch dream entity. Maybe Siobhan should set up a temporary contract and then research a more permanent one, which will ultimately involve Sebastien consulting with her?
We already knew that it didn’t know when Siobhan was lying, but I feel like it is new information that it doesn’t actually know what Siobhan knows… Like, it seems rather informed about her life and the things around her when they’ve interacted and seems to be able to watch/sense her surroundings, but apparently it doesn’t actually retain the information even if it is what she is paying attention to.
Tbh I feel like the following exchange is the big shocking takeaway from this chapter.
“Do you mind dying so much? At least you wouldn’t be trapped.”
It wavered for a moment of sheer longing fighting with a soul-deep fatigue. “But I never got to live. I haven’t done any of the things I’m meant to do,” it muttered to itself, so low that she almost couldn’t hear it despite how close they were.
It wants to live, like, in the sense of actually experiencing life, and it has things that it feels like it is meant to do, which sounds like something a lot more complicated than propagating an anomalous effect. That doesn’t seem like the aberrants we know. Claudio may have gone through the motions of living a life, but it was always a means to an end and not really something he did to experience that living.
Since the chapters were so close together it seems notable that this thing seems more human in its motivations than the Archeologist is at this point.
I did mull over that one for a bit (the wanting to live part). I found my thoughts about that part hard to put into words.
I’ll try and begin with the easiest to explain and see if it helps me draw out the more complicated thoughts.
Everything that lives struggles to survive and yearns to keep living. Even things that aren’t really sapient. It’s part of the biological imperative which wants you to survive, thrive and reproduce. The last one is interesting, because it puts me in mind of the Forsaken in WoW and how Sylvanas Windrunner spoke of how her people were dying out and they had no natural way of reproducing. The thing is, the Forsaken are undead, killed and raised to be puppets of the Lich King. In theory, now that they’re free of his control it should be a good thing that they’re dying out and that are no more, because their existence is tragedy, reflected in their name “Forsaken”. And yet they still yearn to live, to thrive and to be amongst others of their own kind.
Aberrants want to live - how coherent that desire is is a later thought - and they want to keep propagating their anomalous effect. Moonsable wanted to be beautiful and dance. Claudio wanted power. Siobhan’s mother…wanted to protect her daughter, which might have been tied to her state of mind when she broke or the last vestiges of who she was as a person. Newton wanted calm and sought out anything that disturbed that calm.
A tickling thought arises. “Why do demons use human speech? To deceive their prey.” (Words from Frieren, the context being that demons will often say things like “Mama it hurts” to get humans to waver but they have no concept of family, they just know what emotional levers are effective.)
Aberrants aren’t demons, but they do prey on humans to an extent. Siobhan can feel its sincerity and melancholy, but there’s still a trap of ascribing human motivations to it. I’m not saying those motivations can’t exist, I’m just saying that it could be yearning to go out and cause chaos by propagating its effect and gaining power such that it can never be trapped again.
From the stories, we’re pretty sure that Carnagore turned on Myrddin in the end.
And yet, despite everything I’ve written, I have a sliver of hope because I want to believe in Siobhan’s mother. I want to believe that there’s enough of her left in this horrific chimera to influence it towards humanity. I want to believe that the young woman who lost her life too soon, lost her husband, her daughter and her father, lost her future, her hopes and her dreams, I want to believe that she got this second chance. That there’s some hope for her.
This is a trap, of course. The trap of hope and sentimentality. But if I’m falling for it, how much worse must it be for Siobhan, who can barely bring herself to admit that she sees her mother in this creature because it’s breaking her heart?
It’s certainly a very painful and emotional line. My thoughts and feelings on it are still tangled.
My personal thought was the desire to live may be a mixture of two things maybe three if we note propagation as something related to the spirit realm. Ie. Propagation may be a derivation of stuff from the physical world imprinting things onto the spirit world. Things in that world are all akin to spells and so to exist in some sense is to act as a spell which extends to such a effect breaching back into the physical world. In some sense I think this principle applies to the gardener, it was defined by a moment of connection seeking to become more to reach a deeper space. That aspect of it is in essence focused on a “higher” goal that facilitates and needs larger planning. We know other aberrants can have complex propagation effects and I think this is similar. The other aspect is more variable and depends on how much of Siobahn and her mother was imprinted onto it during the moment it was sealed. Because I still very much think siobahns extra will is essentially due to the gardenee drawing all she was into a area for her mother to copy. And in such a case being around Siobahns will may actually have helped the gardener take on aspects of them as those were the most stable things to be around as it tried to maintain itself. It is very much like a spirit and I think the main thing its kept is that core mission.
I suppose comparatively I do not think sentiment is the main risk with it exactly but of building a working framework with a being whose main purpose is to go to places outside human understanding. The risk is logistical and skilled, and of ones own understanding of limits and getting past them. A risky thing in Siobahns circumstances but also what better a chance at salvation than such?