Siobhan's Future Growth (203 spoilers)

A Practical Discussion (PGTS)
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So Siobhan is obviously growing as a future Archmage, but as of right now, she technically only has finite time, even if she tends to have more than others due to no longer needing to sleep. So like she is gonna need to focus on what will make her stronger and safer.

If I were her, this is what I would prioritize learning about.

Binding Magic- Its something that can absolutely fuck her shit up. She needs to be aware of the pits and falls of binding magic before the Red Guard can screw her over again. She narrowly avoided a dangerous fate and quite frankly she is only gonna get so much time before some enemy uses it against her

Free-Casting- She is Thaddeus Lacer’s apprentice and moreover, being tied to the limits of traditional sorcery really restricts people in ways they dont need to be. Being a free-caster has kept her alive and getting better is going to be necessary

Magic to deal with the evil being sealed within her-This may or may not be related to Shamanry, ultimately who knows, its not obvious what will help.

Alchemy- She is good at make potions and she already has a knack for it. Getting better at the subject will help provide her income (which admittedly, she doesn’t need much atm, but things change) and more importantly, its stuff she can prepare ahead of time that can save her life in a pinch

Artificery- She has Myrddin’s notes on Self Sustaining artifacts as well her grandpas masterpiece of a work. Moreover, its stuff she can prepare ahead of time. She also has a lot of money and Artificery requires a ton of cash

Healing Magic- Both traditional healing magic as well blood magic based stuff. She gets injured a lot. She is extremely good for a novice, but she definitely could do better, and she very much will have to. It does have to be noted she can only start taking a Healing magic based course in her 4th term

Defensive Magic- Shes a protag. She gets in situations that get her hurt.

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It’s more long term and kind of related to healing but her life extension technique is very promising.

Another thing that would be really useful: since flesh seems to be a good conduit and maybe blood from magical creature → if she can use a bit of those, removed from her body to create a tiny diamond, and then a bigger one it would be an awesome way to get out of a situation where she has no conduit.
Or simply learn to cast very low power and very efficient spells through mundane stuff like regular rocks. The killer would be using air !

She might also be able to cast more than 2 spell at once at some point too as she seems to be really good at dual casting now.
And I wonder if combining spells to create a stronger effect than one spell that combine their effects is possible.

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I was wondering if it’s possible for her to reprise her floating spell arrays via dual-casting. Use one spell to create an illusion of a highly complex spell circle, then cast through it with the other half of her Will. Could be a way to shortcut being a free-caster right away, and eventually surpass the limits of typical free-casting by augmenting her free-casting with illusions of spell layouts too complex to be held in one’s head all at once. Or if illusions don’t work as a spell medium, then perhaps molding chalk dust into a shape.

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I mean, my reading of conventional healing magic is that actually becoming good at it is an equivalent time sink to attending medical school is in our world. I don’t know that she has the time to commit to that.

Her repertoire of potions combined with her flesh-mirroring spell that she can duel cast with the magnifying spell are probably comparable with the forefront of battlefield medicine at this point, which is the probably the only subfield of healing that is going to be frequently relevant to her. I think refining her flesh mirroring would be good, possibly coming up with a variant of the spell that includes the magnifying spell so she doesn’t have to duel cast it.

She might also want to pick up practical blood typing and syphoning spells to allow for safe field transfusions, but honestly she doesn’t seem like she needs to study the intricate functioning of organ systems and niche medical conditions that a conventional study of healing would include, because that isn’t what she’s doing with her time.

For artificery, again, that seems like a very in-depth specialty and huge time sink that she doesn’t necessarily need to know in all that much depth, especially considering that she already has a strong ongoing business arrangement with the the best black market artificer in Gilbratha, if not all of Lenore. I think Siobhan could leverage the knowledge of the various types of self-charging artifacts to establish a more stable and formal alliance with Liza, possibly including a second apprenticeship, but possibly just a more permanent working partnership with all needed items delivered at cost.

Having Liza with the knowledge of self-charging at her disposal would probably be a bigger advantage than learning artificery herself for at least the next decade to come, so it doesn’t seem like a huge priority to learn herself.

I think her highest priority other than freecasting should be branching out from her knowledge of her unique and esoteric spells.

  • She has just seen that it’s possible to use her shadow familiar in a bunch of ways that she has never tried before. That spell can be distanced, produce sounds, and used to perceive sounds. It could probably even be used to absorb hostile spells. She could use it as an upgraded Lino-Wharton messenger if she wanted and was careful and should develop that further.

  • Her flesh mirroring spell has shown to be capable of doing things that conventional healing cannot do without considerable difficulty. Refining her use of it and incorporating the magnifying spell that seems like it was meant to be used together into the same spell array seems hugely valuable.

  • Her tracking mark spell is explicitly stated to have many other capabilities available to it. She should prioritize finding ways to investigate these. Is it possible to listen in on each of her marks? To cast through them as if she were nearby, without the added distance of normal output detachment? Could she set up a magic link where a series of sounds acts analogous to the mark, such that she really can tell whenever her name is spoken?

  • She spends large chunks of her day on light refinement, and is probably going to continue to do so without much change going forward, it would be good to look into how she can leverage this time for more advantages. I’m sure she’s been practicing with her increased strength and coordination in general in Fekton’s class, so that’s a plus, but might she look into another Gestura spell she could pick up now that she has a solid grasp of the principles? Are there non-Gestura spells that strengthen her will in other ways that can be duel cast with light refinement for synergistic effects? Or can she duel-cast at all to practice other things with her hands occupied?

If she was going to try to pick up a whole new conventional discipline, then ward breaking seems like it might be the best choice, since it is probably inevitably going to come up, but also is focused enough that it might not take too much time.

Learning more about spell design also seems like it would have synergistic effects with everything else that she is doing.

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That’s a great idea! Though I think it’s already been established that the problem with complex illusion spells is that you have to hold the entire image of the illusion in your mind all at once, so it doesn’t really seem to circumvent that limitation.

Still, it seems like a good shortcut akin to her “threads” being a good shortcut to output detachment.

Actually, she knows how to transmute diamond out of air now, or at least thinks that she will be able to soon! And we know that diamond is actually great as a magically conductive material. She could carve her spells out of diamonds in the air itself as she casts them, and because their are physically created, she wouldn’t have to keep the whole thing in her head at once. Or, hypothetically, she could use her output detached shadow familiar to form spell arrays if she ever feels comfortable with it again.

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I’m not sure that’s a good idea, it would make an easy target to destroy unless she can create it and destroy it very quickly, plus without anything to keep it in the air it’d fall.

But the idea is interesting, I thing something better would be to have a small sealed container where she can create the arrays as she need so they are hidden and protected. We know that arrays can be tiny when created with precision so she’d have to work on that.

I think free casting is going to be better in the long run though, it’s faster and I think she would have a better grasp on the spell with her Will.

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I mean, I don’t think she should become a conventional Healer. I think she should get good enough that in a pinch she can fake having more knowledge than she has. As well as be able to do be able to heal someone fairly recently in a pinch in both forms without compromising either identity

Plus she actually is still fairly restricted in a lot of way. Note the two things Prof Lacer mentions here are two things she still doesnt quite have the ability to fix yet via just blood magic (which she definitely can develop further)

Thaddeus frowned. “It is simplistic.” Not that she would have needed to write it down at all, as a free-caster, but there was nothing to keep the blood from clotting or gathering contaminants during the transfer process. It would kill the patient. Of course, she could have handled that part mentally, but if she was going to do that, why take the time to write the spell down at all? “I suspect there is more going on here than we understand.”

Studying the Body is gonna be useful in a lot of ways, and knowing enough healing magic and more blood magic to do better first aid is still stuff she can improve upon. She really definitely needs to improve her blood magic based healing. Being able to clean the blood, and avoid it from clotting is something she needs to be able to do on her own which she only really knows how to do via potions (which run out, and she can only carry so many at a time)

Time sink here is far less of an issue considering she has 24 hours a day of study time. She can only spend around 10 hours a day right now casting spells. Moreover, she has Liza now but who knows what the future may bring.

We have seen the power of Artifacts and quite frankly she has talent and the inclination to make good artifacts for herself. She has Myrddin’s knowledge of advanced artificery, an example of her grandfathers work (before it gets destroyed). Yes she could leverage Myrddins knowledge to get liza to help make her more artifacts, but honestly I think Siobhan would be more interested in Liza’s Knowledge. Liza’s knowledge could bring her up from basic apprentice level artifacts to Grandmaster Tier.

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I’d add:

  • Power of Faith

We “know” that Transmogrification is empowered by ‘everyone else’ having associations between concepts. That implies that some of the nature of magic is drive by ‘collective unconscious’, and that the more ‘well linked’ a concept is, the easier it becomes to ‘use’.

LIkewise ‘well known’ spells work more reliably because they’re well known, and ‘new’ magic is harder in comparison.

That I think has huge implications for theology in this setting. Like, having believers in the Raven Queen might well serve to empower the incarnation of the Raven Queen.

E.g. The People did a ritual to ensure everyone thought of them as The People too. Why? My theory is that altering the nature of reality at a fundamental level requires altering what everyone “knows to be true”.

I think I’ve got in my mind that the Red Guard know that, and part of their work is suppressing ‘the zeitgeist’ e.g. such as editing memories to say ‘Blood Magic creates Aberrants’ when there’s loads of ‘technically blood magic’ that’s in widespread use but everyone pretends it isn’t. But I can’t quite place my finger on where or when I picked that impression up, so maybe that’s just me projecting :).

But there’s clearly a load of knowledge suppression in this setting, and again, that might be a lot to do with that understanding of the nature of magic being adaptive and modifiable.

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Right now she’s at odds with whatever is in her head. But it seems to have been passed down - she got it from her grandfather. My really wild guess is that it was trapped by The People somehow, but before that it was the same being as the one living in Myrddin’s shadow. Myrddin seems to have made a deal with it. What is the nature of that deal?

Well, Thaddeus’ first guess back when Sebastian suggested it was that dual casting would require some kind of mental damage. Siobhan wondered if the thing in her head was part of why she could dual-cast. and Myrddin’s journal was specifically written to only be readable by someone who can dual-cast. In other words, by someone who has the same Aberrant that Myrddin did. So my guess is that the journals were very specifically intended to fulfil an agreement with that Aberrant. An agreement that, for both better AND worse, Siobhan is going to be pulled into.

Who knows what comes with that?

As for other ideas for growth, I’m VERY interested in what will come of Siobhan’s symbol. I started a public thread about it at What will Siobhan's symbol be able to do?. That explains why I think it is going to be so fascinating to watch. I know that @AzaleaEllis loves creating interesting magic systems. This symbol so clearly ties to everything creative about the magic system that finding interesting uses for it pretty much has to draw her like a cat to catnip. I really look forward to finding out what she’s come up with.

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One more area of potential growth for her.

Chapter 20 – Practical Will-based Casting – Azalea Ellis says:

However, with a complex enough, powerful enough spell, there is no reason that one could not shoot a spherical ranged attack that turns a frog into a bird, overcoming the creature’s resistance to magic and maintaining the complex magical instructions and power to do so over distance. The Archmage can do it. The theory is that you are literally shooting the Circle and its Word at the target. It is so hard, and requires so much power, that most sorcerers will never succeed at it in their lives, and indeed, most do not truly attempt to do so.

I wonder if it takes as much power if you’re casting one spell to create the Circle, and using a split will to cast spells from that Circle at the same time.

Heck, you don’t even have to get to freecasting. Have a circle whose output is a Circle with controllable glyphs. Now one Circle creates the next, and then you use the next normally. One piece of silk cloth becomes every circle you could possibly want!

And…what happens if she tries to joint-cast with herself?

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About her shadow - I had a thought.

So, obviously we see the parallels between her shadow and Myrddin’s void shield. It’s been mentioned many times that her shadow has a limit to how much it can absorb and she wonders how much more solid it can appear.

Now, I’m aware that Azalea draws heavily from the real world for her magic system. As such, I think it’s important for us to look at Einstein’s theory of special relativity - E = mc^2 which is essentially that energy and mass can be converted back and forth.

If we consider that her shadow absorbs both light and heat then we know that it feeds upon energy. If magic is a type of energy (which I would argue it very much is, and we’ve seen that it radiates in a similar way to traditional forms of energy) then there’s no reason she can’t get her shadow to absorb magic as well - it only requires her to make the conceptual leap.

It’s also possible for the shadow to block projectiles by absorbing the kinetic energy, allowing them to drop down harmlessly.

However, we come to the point of her shadow’s limited absorption. However much her shadow absorbs it remains incorporeal. But what if it radiates the excess energy that it can’t absorb and began to accrete it around (or perhaps excrete it out of?) itself and used it to create mass of its own. In theory it could reabsorb its own mass in case of energy depletion.

Now you’d have an impermeable shield that can change shape and touch people now. Can you imagine the intimidation factor?

I mean, the alternative is Siobhan absorbing all the extra magical energy but her reserves don’t feel like they’re large enough to handle that yet. She could redirect it all back into other spells and basically use her shadow as a battery in battle to fuel her other workings.

Anyway, I’m really excited about her little esoteric shadow spell. Who knew it would grow so much from its initial introduction? ^^

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Wait. This is absolutely brilliant. Do you mean the shadow familiar could have been the battery to power carnagore?

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I was not thinking that, but now the idea is there I see absolutely no reason why it couldn’t. Well, except that it only really works when someone’s attacking, otherwise it would suck in a lot of heat and light from the immediate area.

But that works as well - if there’s some beastcore powering the basic movement / functions of Carnagore and then you need to up the ante because you’re in a fight all the spare power absorbed by the void shield could go to powering special abilities like fire breathing.

Unless you were thinking that the shadow accreted mass around itself and became Carnagore in which case I sadly don’t think it’s plausible as per the revelations in chapter 222 (avoiding spoilers). Still, it’s an intriguing thought.

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But it can suck heat and solar energy. All Myrddin would have to do is sink the shadow far enough inside the earth to generate geothermal energy, or perhaps deep enough to reach magma? The energy from the sun alone is intense and powerful, and is what gives us most of our energy here on earth.

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That’s definitely intriguing. And if he could split it the way Siobhan does then he could keep a portion as his actual shadow in order to not look odd and also have it available for self defence while also having a portion continuously gathering energy for Carnagore.

Being able to turn your shadow into a power generator is crazy!

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Crazy brilliant… :open_mouth:

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I’m skeptical Myrddin used the exact same spell as Siobahn. Its too… convenient. Too neat and tidy. I don’t think Siobahn’s actual backstory should be related to Myrddin. It doesn’t feel right. The plot threads there are about The People and The Blood Emperor and Her Grandfather.

That Myrddin used something with similar principles is plausible considering the way the void shield is portrayed, but like I don’t think her shadow-familiar spell should be the same spell.

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I mean, Myrddin’s spell in the story clearly involved a very complex spell array that took him a long time to draw out, so unless that was an elaborate fake-out, I think it’s pretty clear that they aren’t the exact same spell, and I don’t think that anybody was saying that they are. But could they be used in similar ways? That’s a different thing.

Also, now that you have me thinking of the shadow familiar spell, where does the energy it absorbs even currently go? Like, it absorbs heat and light, and that is what defines it’s from, but that’s still all sacrifice and apparently no output? Obviously some of that goes into maintaining precise control of the shape, but with all of the energy it absorbs, does that really balance out? It doesn’t really take any energy to move or shape it, it’s just changing what sacrifice is being used…

Is it possible that the shadow familiar already has a hidden output for all of that sacrifice? Maybe it strengthens the barrier blocking her aberrant in?

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Not if you’re like me, who wants Grandfather to be Myrddin using S. to achieve a step toward some aspect of immortality … He therefore totally refined his shield spell into an esoteric one over a thousand years.

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I think I’m with you on that. I like to think that Myrddin wrote an enormous spell array to dual cast stone sort of emotional compulsion that ramped up as the day went on, and the rest was him using the shadow familiar spell to absorb anything and everything.

It might be an absolutely bonkers guess, but it amuses me. And I’m quite hopeful for the day where Siobhan can consume far more than light and heat with her spell. Like Lacer pointed out in his first lecture, thaumaturges can use anything as a sacrifice, but using light and heat comes easily.

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