The warding amulet thought (and a preamble)

A Practical Discussion (PGTS)
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So for those who aren’t aware, I’m at several different parts of the series.

Blue reads one chapter to me a night, and we are on the forth book. It’s kind of our let’s make sure to spend at least a little time together each day.

I listen to the first three on audible semi frequently, out of order, and my different devices are playing different books, so I will hear some of book three and when I switch devices I’m somewhere in book two. -this helps me with listening comprehension and learning how to speak more natural, repeating the books help me catch what I might have missed before…

Then I’m also, very slowly, actually reading the series, because I understand written English much better than listening to it. I have a much greater understanding of what is actually happening and can get even more details or ideas

Like my question.

What if the spell deflection ward on the amulet was powered by the spell it was misdirecting.

Trying to grab an easy way to explain my thoughts, let’s turn to some forms of physically fighting?

If someone throws a punch at you, blocking takes a lot of energy, or can

But, with training, the movement to make said punch turn into almost a throw or trip of the opponent takes very little energy, only as much as is needed to move your body, because they are doing all the momentum and you are just guiding it elsewhere.

So yeah, the amulet needs a little heat to trigger, but pushing a fireball somewhere else? It’s using the fireball.

… I can picture how various forms of magic would use this idea.

I think I can explain my it in a pseudo code

Sense attack = true
Use heat to asses attack
Use attack to adjust parameters of attack.

Example, fireball path 180° (to hit) changed to fireball path 45° - 135° (it will go off to the right)

And let the attack be a power source of that part.

I bet, using her will, our girl might be able to actually aim where the amulet sends the attack, and I bet if grandfather had more time, he would have tried to make spells go back to the attacker

I just think that would require a bit more complexity, and was settling for several good enough than absolutely perfect everything. There wasn’t time.

… Makes you wonder what actually happened when she was a child.

This though comes from the chapter just after they attacked the marrows and she’s looking at the amulet from her grandfather realizing that it prob runs on the same way as his [fridge] does, a little

Knowing more about the world and stuff, I took it and ran.

What do y’all think?

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Your nightly readings sound very sweet. I love that.

I also like the idea of this, but it also seems like it isn’t the case with her existing amulet, for a couple of reasons.

The big one is that means of sourcing energy for artifacts is a difficult, obscure, and extremely limited sub-field. The only widespread knowledge of how to make artifacts is based around having a set number of pre-made charges. Knowledge of how to make artifacts that draw heat from themselves and their surroundings for power seems to still exist, but it is incredibly rare and not shared freely. And how to make artifacts that draw energy from beast cores is entirely lost at this point, even though that seems like it should be relatively simple and similar to using an artifact’s charge. It is just using a big store of pure energy that the artifact is touching in a given spot. There haven’t been any artifacts mentioned that can do a matter to energy conversion, even though that seems relatively straightforward with conventional spellwork.

So, from all that, we can probably conclude that energy-sourcing for artifacts is rather tricky. No one has been able to re-invent even what should be rather straightforward methods like drawing the heat energy that is already within the object, or using a store of power that is touching it. Devising a method of locating energy that is some given distance away, contesting the will of the caster, and siphoning some of it off to use in defense seems like a long long way beyond everything else we know and everything anyone anywhere is able to come up with. Her grandfather could possibly have simply been that much of a master, but then fitting this legendary and presumably very complex spellwork into a tiny section of her already condensed multifunction medallion seems like a huge feat.

The other reason I feel like this probably isn’t happening is because when she has stepped directly in front of spells and essentially frozen them in the air for a moment there has been no mention of the fireballs shrinking or growing cooler in any way. Instead, she notices her amulet itself getting ever-colder and burning her skin more in those moments.

Spells that siphon energy from other spells seem to be a legendary feat, which is why Myrddin’s duel is such a big deal to be told and retold for a thousand years.

I think you might be on the right track in that Siobhan might someday develop a spell inspired by the duel, by the Gestura, and by her grandfather’s warding medallion, that uses a different spell’s own energy to direct the spell away from her. She is going to be facing opponents that can channel many more thaums than her for a long time yet, and she isn’t going to have the capacity or the conduits to directly oppose their Wills, but might be able to oppose a small percentage of it in order to redirect spells away from herself. That’d be a cool direction for her to develop in.

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But it takes almost so little of the opponents energy to do the misdirect, which is why you can turn stuff into throws.

The biggest thing about doing a throw from a punch is that the person has the ability to change their mind

But if you do something that misdirects a ball thrown at you, of some correctly, it loses very little of its momentum.

And the ball doesn’t stop or hover, it just changes, like you put a guide rail for it to suddenly follow,

We have seen a fireball aimed for chest to take a DRASTIC turn away from her, and yes, the amulet got cold, but I think it is a trigger to start stuff, and possibly get her to wake up and realize danger, because it can’t do everything.

The reason why I think it might use some of this, because the fireball didn’t ruin the amulet

The scrying needing an actual heat source makes sense

I’m talking about stealing some energy from whatever is going to physically hurt her

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I also believe that her grandfather is the blood emperor, and have since I learned of him, something just makes that feel right, lacer having thoughts along the lines later only gives my theory a little more consideration

If you look at how he taught her and freely used blood magic, he was from the blood empire, if not the emperor himself

But he is clearly a master with magic, and if anybody could do this, he could.

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I think it makes more sense that the amulet just detects then redirects, using as little energy as it can.

So if an attack comes from a staff, without a Will holding it on course, it can be redirected with relatively little power. Like happens in Chapter 30 – (A Rather Poor) Rescue – Azalea Ellis with:

She paused a moment, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it pushing against her ribs. The warding medallion her grandfather had given her was slightly cold against her chest, indicating that one of the protective spells had activated, probably changing the trajectory of the attack just enough to save her.

But when something is directed at her with a Will directing it? Then the protective spell turns into a contest of wills. Like happened in Chapter 33 – Temporary Inversion of Income vs. Expense – Azalea Ellis when she channeled all the heat from a fireplace into the amulet, just to feed it quickly enough. It certainly failed to steal from the divination.

Sure, the amulet has multiple protections. But I’d expect them to work similarly.

Her grandfather being the blood emperor makes a surprising amount of sense. In chapter 33 above, Liza is astonished at the device. Liza was an artificer for the army. Her attempt to recreate ONE of the protections, but much larger, she said would qualify her for grandmastery. It also took over 7000 thaums to make. The amulet is likely going to be much higher. Note that in Chapter 44 – Chastisment – Azalea Ellis, Liza says that her capacity is around 9000. And Siobhan is astounded because at 11,000 you’re in archmage territory.

So grandfather is very clearly at least a grandmaster artificer, of archmage capacity. And now go to Chapter 32 – Sheltered from the Storm – Azalea Ellis where we find:

She felt her muscles relaxing subtly under the touch and gave the fireplace a small smile. “My grandfather used to say, ‘If you aren’t over-prepared, you are underprepared.’ I remember thinking as a child that he was just paranoid from living too long, that the world wasn’t actually out to make every possible thing go wrong.” She let out a small huff of wry amusement.

That paranoia is very, very nicely explained if he’s actually the Blood Emperor…

(I had thought just a highly placed mage in the court. But the Emperor himself would be a better story.)

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Right?

My first thought is that he IS the emperor, they didn’t have proof he died, and yeah, the story is someone from their country killed him, how convenient, but where is the proof. We have more proof that they willing lie to the sheeple, I mean general population…

And it’s said that magic can extend your lifetime, where better than a place that barely seems to tolerate outsiders and forces them to call them “the people” to hide, because of you earn their respect, which he obviously did, they would hide you.

And if you go read what grandfather taught her, its like, they made mistakes, but it was for the better ment of all in the end, and left her to make her own choices.

My second guess is he was someone very close to the emperor

And I did point out that the scrying spell uses a different power source because how I view that spell works. It’s using heat to just push all scrying away from her, to target it anywhere gives a hint of her location.

I remember in the wheel of time, the younglings don’t attack a camp because it would make to much of an obvious area where they might be based from.

Just don’t let the scry find anything.

However, for actual attacks, dispurising them may not always be feasible, and you need to redirect.

And it redirecting a massive fireball did no damage to the array

But how hard she was being scryed took up so much heat she had to use a hearth, and how long did that attack actually last?

And again, I think the whole using heat to trigger anything it does to protect her (it’s more than those two spells if I recall correctly) is a “wake up, pay attention, you’re in danger”

I really hope we find out more information about grandfather and the amulet.

I wonder if he also made the ring?

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That Grandfather is the Blood Emperor, is an option, so is the possibility that he was Myrddin.

My favorite thought is that Myrddin, obsessed with Immortality, developed a method to move from one body to another (or just renewing his own body like the gender changing amulet). Proof? When he died, the protection on the hermitage broke.

Along the way, he started the Blood Empire to literally research how to make a Naught. When that was done, he retreated from the Empire to finish the job.

It was all part of an elaborate plan get rid of the thing that he put in Siobhan’s head, because its an aberrant that he could not figure out how to control.

Now that I have written this, Azalea is sure to NOT write him that way because its too obvious.

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… Hahaha

I questioned if the blood emperor was Merlin, and then dismissed it because that seemed to obvious

But now I want to know exactly when the protection of his home failed and find out if it actually correlates to her grandfathers death because I honestly hadn’t considered that yet.

She’s such a stickler for time tables (which I absolutely love)

Btw, I struggle with spelling names, and I’m on my phone and can’t see the proper spelling, however, it’s said a couple of times that he had several names, including some I know Merlin was also called. Please forgive me, with everything, proper spelling can get really hard, and I’m pretty sure everybody here knows who I mean.

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Hold on,

I think I found more proof about my theories on the amulet. Chapter 42: connections talks about the different ways an artifact can get it’s power.

-i read on a Paperwhite Kindle so grabbing quotes is quite hard, my phone is on a different book series, as a punishment for forgetting my kindle

But in the chapter it talks about how if you are using heat you need to have safety checks so you don’t just accidentally freeze someone.

But the second option is a power source sympathetically linked to something “far away” which I can absolutely see him doing for something like the protection from spells.

I think the cold is basically just the first part of the spell working to warn her, colder for more danger.

Maybe I’m wrong about it using the spell coming against her, though I can picture it, him having some kind of power source at his home that he uses to make sure things he cares about has protection seems like something a paranoid ex emperor would do

Even if that was the only spell to use an external power source, because he doesn’t want our girl to get harmed.

And if Blue’s theory about what’s in her head is true, absolutely, 100% wants to protect

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I am eager to see S. free up some time in her class schedule and take an Artificery class, so we can understand a little bit more about how special the warding amulet is, and see what S. can recreate of its special construction.

I remember Liza had trouble with linking nerve endings when healing the dogs, but S. was able to correctly connect everything. I wonder if this fine control would also extend to S’s artificery attempts, and allow her to more easily recreate or reuse parts of the warding amulet?

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image

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I need to take a picture of the babies hiding in my backpack, because they are wound up in the huge fluffy thread

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