I think many of you have been looking forward to this particular development for a while. 
It’s nice to see Siobhan’s hard work pay off.
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I already said the same thing on the patron but I forgot these discussions were also a thing so I’ll put it here to.
What if becoming an aberrant, is like a save file getting corrupted? If this duplicate identity in the fabric of magic somehow gets damaged or “corrupted”, mabye thats how you become an aberrant. Your magical duplicate identity changes, so your body changes to reflect that. Like for instance, the Architect. What if while in the wastes something there caused him to lose or took the part of his magical identity that represents his original name. And thats why he no longer associates with it anymore. A change to the duplicate identity reflected in the real world, but different from aberration.
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This is indeed the development I was waiting for.
She’s going to test with weapons, too, right? I wonder how many of these conceptual upgrades work when she’s not relying on an Aberrant to beef up the spell. I’ve always thought that there were concepts she could lean on to stop spell fire and absorb the momentum of physical attacks (especially when she came across the concept of Absolute Zero!) and I’m really happy the void shield is finally coming to fruition. (I still think she could do it all by herself if she had a higher thaumic capacity to absorb more of the power).
On reread I note that she’s only using Legion to absorb the energy and make the tests safer. I leave my ramblings unedited as testament to 6am brain.
Aaaaah! I’m so excited to see how this goes!
Happy dance
I’m so glad your recovery is going well! Slow and steady and all that.
To (once again) paraphrase Oliver:
I do want the story, every bit of it, and that’s why I must protect the mind of the only author capable of telling it.
He has some excellent lines. I just wish people weren’t so quick to hate him.
I noticed no glaring errors while reading, but you might want to format the section where she’s talking about Night because it feels a little bit out of the regular narrative.
I want to query this bit:
She pulled out her small, folding slate table
Is it a table? I thought it was a folding slate - or possibly a slate tablet?
Edit: I have been informed that it should in fact be “effect change” rather than “affect change”. I had thought affect was correct in this instance…
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I wonder what she has in mind to be able to switch bodies more easily.
And it looks like she’s about to get a nice combat power upgrade which is bound to further increase the myth of the Raven Queen ^^
I also can’t wait for her to dig more into that esoteric lore/knowledge and learn more about magic !
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Maybe a greater degree of attention from magic like Legion said the Naughts have is required to gain additional Wills and so Myrddin planted all those different identities throughout the world to artificially increase his.
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I wonder if this “soul” is what Aberrants are driven by or made of. Imagining it as something like a fingerprint left on the spirit world when casting, maybe most people only leave faint impressions on the spirit world, and that’s why their Aberrants seem mindless and little like them. People like Miakoda and Claudio might leave more detailed impressions of themselves, and that’s part of why their Aberrants tend to be closer to sapient
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I am happy your health continues to improve.
I wonder if Myrddin had many names because he was essentially describing different configurations of his idenity. And by doing so belief in those configurations helped reinforce them and what they were believed to be able to do?There may be some symmetry with the ritual the People used to always be referred to as such.
If Myrddin walked to the outer reaches of the spirit world a zone more abstractly connected to more baseline human ideas and concepts Night being like Legion would make sense. Claudio already showed it was possible to essentially configure a spirit imprint into a corporeal shell. And it would make sense for some abstract affiliation of entropy perhaps to be affecting Myrddins own causality if Night is his shadow from the stories. Could be a mix of things though.
So implications as of yet is a aberrant could do the same if it is more or less just a estranged reconfiguration of identity when a person does a spell that pulls beyond the normal inflection points of being. Essentially they reach out to another part of their idetity and shift its priority, but they dont stabilize their baseline in reference to that new change. Which in essence would make spirits and aberranrs part of the same paradigm. And if so nothing says a place or location couldnt essentially become a aberrant. Which would explain a lot of the black waste, if its configuration is estranged from the patterns that allows human life yet still made of the same rearranged blocks it could alter anyone who entered it and wasnt able to maintain themselves.
A aberrant seems a imperfect spirit or a imperfect spell perhaps. And while living in general seems to facilitate essentially norms of magic through I assume standard pressures of living, so things like the skin provide some of a barrier for magic. Its likely those patterns of general enforcement basically only work for symmetrical stuff. So if you instead meet a very alien reconfigurement those norms dont provide protection. So induced changes that are more abstract are more likely to stretch someone into a alienated form. But intrinsically its a issue of understanding.
Since most people arent going to define or know how to define themselves enough to maintain their normal equilibrium when they extend their spell too far out into the fabric of magic. It seems to me that without something able to properly matrix information like a soul the risk of breaking comes from essentially a lack of precision in defining a casters own existance. Which is the sort of thing Shamans have been dealing with for a while.
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Her first void use was stabbing Thaddeus so I think it’ll be easy for her to want to apply it to offense and not just Myrddin’s famous shield
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Tomorrow I’m finally going to get the Symbol of the Raven Queen tattoo. I’ll make a new thread to show off pics if y’all want.
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Did we ever learn more about the plane of darkness that’s suppose to not exist?
Yes, I think she absolutely will, but my (poorly phrased) comment was about using the void shield to stop physical attacks like Myrddin did.
Light to spell fire isn’t a huge conceptual leap, but light physical momentum (or total absorption of physical matter) is.
She knows it’s possible from the stories, so I want to see her test it out and see how she handles that.
It’s a proper shield, then. The kind she’s been fantasising about in Fekten’s lessons since forever.
My secret desire is for her to be able to combine two spells - a movement spell for shattered glass (because there’s usually plenty of that around) and the shadow familiar spell - so that she can make shadow ravens that actually get past people’s defences and hurt them.
I’m not sure if Azalea will ever go this route, especially as a large part of their terror is their ephemerality and people not being able to quantify how it is the shadows are harming them - but I still hope 
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I am interpreting this as the void shield not only blocking all magic (already strong af) but also legion getting stronger bc they EAT the magic… That would be cool. Would also mean that the duel of myrdin we learned about a book or so ago was more just a buffet for his spirit and not a duel 
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So I think I figured out why abberants are increasing
Abberants are clearly caused by some failure that occurs when will strain occurs. They are essentially a self propagating magical effect that twists the former body and what myrddin wont call a soul together.
This creates essentially a knot between fabric of reality and fabric of magic. I throrize that this essentially slowly brings together the fabric of reality and magic, making it easier to knot together over time
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On the nature of aberrants, it seems relevant to me that Miakoda, a Naught, is the only person we know of to have retained memory and identity through the transformation into an aberrant, but she definitely wasn’t only partially transformed, her body was fully consumed.
Claudio retained sapience, but awoke as a new being with no autobiographical memory. By contrast, we know Miakoda retained memory and didn’t just piece things together from context clues because because she remembered Paimon, who died before she did, and we know she retained some manner of identity because she still cared about Siobhan. In contrast, her form and the extent to which she can’t help propagating her anomalous effect seem to be about average for aberrants that we’ve seen
To me that says that the transformation into an aberrant and annihilation of identity are two separate things, and the destruction of identity is a magical effect that can be resisted.
From there I have a couple possible conclusions:
- Maybe the identity-stripping component was something deliberately done to the fabric of magic, an actual spell that is still having effects similar to how The People forced others to refer to them as such. We know the Black Wastes were a created thing, and they seem to have a similar identity stripping effect. Maybe aberrants with identities (titans?) were too powerful, and stripping them of their identities was a measure taken to protect the world. But because this magic wasn’t fully understood and better left alone, it created a feedback loop of increasing break events.
- In the above case, The Work might be an attempt to reverse this, with tracks with some things we know about it. The transformation amulet might not just be a way of sending his boyfriend a body refresh, but a means of studying the separation of magical identity and bodily form. He set up a Hermitage in the Black Wastes not just for solitude, but to figure out how to reverse identity-stripping effects.
- This might just be what makes the Naughts special. They form magical identities that are immune to outside magical influence while their bodies have no such immunity, allowing them to still cast. Siobhan certainly seems to have no more resistance to potions than anyone else, while actual Nulls are unaffected by them.
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That would be so cool for the combination spell for glass and shadow familiar! It really would be a murder of ravens.
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I personally wouldnt think of it as a binary. The Archaeologist and Miakoda share interesting partialities. Elements lf who they are were maintained. Claudios former self defined himself uniformly with shamanic magic, most of what he was and did was thw practice so it is notable that what remained what focused on those patterns.
I think of it like this. You are in a room of shifting elements, carbon, oxygen, all moving about and rearranging themselves. How do you tell me what is a person vs some artful pieces of rock? Well, a person will have a relatively steady shape of carbon dioxide coming out and oxygen coming in. If that shape blurrs too much there is no longer a person as that gradieted shape was needed to maintain them as a person. If the fabric of magic records much if not all, then the difference between things is essentially what equilibrium they can maintain to be different than those wider patterns. I would thus suspect a Aberrant does not damage identity no more than a spirit does, but similar to a spirit fitting itself into a poor vessel a aberrant can be poorly rearranged to remain like a human.
The Peoples magical curse and the Naught lineage may help reinforce personhood in a similar principle to Claudio likely being humanlike as the context of his progenitors life was defined by him using shamanry where he defined his self and role to build dreams. The Naughts being some kind of multigen project to basically make such a normalization would track. Since essentially successfully making them more resistant would let them plum the depths of magic and make new spells without breaking a lot more easily.
I do agree though on the idea of more events helping make more aberrants. It could be a kind of butterfly effect. The imprints of break events allowing people to be drawn into alienated shapes easier because of the aberrants existing. Similar to practice and knowledge making specific spells easier.
As a furthee personal hypothesis I kind of suspect the Work is resurrection, like true resurrection. If you could trace info of a life perfectly and define such as a spirit and create a perfect body what difference would there be to them being alive again? It is notable that the soul is a artificial construct here. Because logically the information in its natural state is dispersed and only really specific to a enforced configuration.
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