If you don’t know what you need, take power, for it can be converted into almost anything else.
Gain lifespan, you can use it for things. Good solution. You have various desires but not enough lifespan? You might want to get moar.
Also, maybe some aberrants from before the cataclysm are still existing and they’re in red guard black sites or sundered zones and history incorrectly says they are more recent. Or Metanite destroyed them. Or something else. Somehow fairies and brillig were destroyed.
Or for the titans-are-aberrants idea, break events producing titans rather than aberrants is a nice idea. Also maybe they had normal break events and a specific way of doing something like a break event and they avoid dying of old age and keep their own minds and Thaddeus is interested in that. But then an archmage got a cause-a-cataclysm effect, or the first break-event-gone-wrong created a karmic seed, a rut in magic, that subsequent break events used, or something. Maybe aberrants have something to do with spirits.
I dont think that Titans were Aberrants. Nor the Brillig. But I do think that Aberrations have been around since the cataclysm, though until we see more information it’s hard for me to say which caused which.
I do wonder if the Brillig were more prone to breaking; I think humanity worked to wipe out the Titans the same way real humans have worked to wipe out predators everywhere we live.
Lacer is trying to find evidence of pre-cataclysm magic and my assumption is he thinks he’ll find a way to prevent break events from happening once he does. I think he’s wrong, but I wonder if he will find something allowing him to break his Red Guard vows entirely.
Brillig, they could split their will. More prone to becoming aberrants, yes that’s an idea.
And Siobahn’s disintegration landmine in a folded space bag with potions made a persistent effect and Siobahn thought it was like the black wastes which the Brillig made and the black wastes seemed like aberrant land. Maybe the Brillig were destroyed to stop them from making aberrant things which they could do because they could cast two spells at once. Maybe they kept making things like mini black wastes which were increasing the aberrant creation rate. And/or turning into aberrants like you said.
Hmm break event prevention, another idea.
We know that not all break events actually cause aberrants, which means it’s either pure chance or some other condition is involved. What if it requires a spirit to be available to possess the breaking person? Maybe the break event itself doesn’t even inherently create aberrants — it just destroys your natural defences against spirits looking for a way into the physical world.
From the descriptions of the spirit realm, it seems that spirits are fairly malleable so maybe they are changed by the contact with the breaking person, and that’s why the aberrant’s form and powers are derived from the circumstances of its creation. I think it’s established that powerful thaumaturges are more likely to produce aberrants with some level of lucidity. Perhaps the stronger someone’s will is when they break, the more like them the spirit becomes.
Assuming Siobhan’s shadow being is a spirit, which seems like a reasonable guess at this point, that would explain why it feels like a small break event whenever it posesses her shadow. It literally is the same process, only it’s unable to complete it because her body and mind are protected by grandfather’s spell.
I’m not sure if I’m ok describing the possession as a mini break event.
Not because I disagree with your theory, I think it has merit and I like it.
But mostly because Siobhan’s reaction seems consistent with someone suddenly losing control of something that they’d held on to while simultaneously getting a second body of sensation. She’s not just seeing double, she’s also feeling what the creature inhabiting her shadow feels, both physically and emotionally.
It’s also slipping out of its seal in some way, shape or form during these occasions and who knows what that’s doing to her brain.
I feel like her staggering around, falling over and feeling disorientated is fairly normal, all things considered.
woah woah woah woah. Hannah you are blowing my mind here. Now that you mention it, whenever I have ramen, I do feel like im having an out of body experience. Maybe you are on to something.
I agree with Lacer researching pre-Cataclysm esoteric magic. I think a lot of why S has skills like splitting Will and being able to spend so much time casting is because she was taught things that she just takes for granted - which at a certain point is only possible because of her unique bloodline, I suppose, but we haven’t really seen that tested yet. Because if a child is taught from infancy that certain things are possible/impossible with magic, that will stay with them for their whole life.
Like even Lacer is saddled with innate beliefs about the magic system that prevent him from doing things like splitting his Will. At least that’s what I think the limiter is. I don’t know how we’d be able to prove/disprove this given that they’d need to test this out on a literal baby, which I’m pretty sure constitutes child abuse under the current government if not blood magic.
So it makes sense that he’s researching a bunch of esoteric magic, because if he finds esoteric magic that runs under the same assumptions that S does, then he can understand more about what changed before/after the Cataclysm, and probably what caused it. And it would make sense that he works with the Red Guard if he’s operating under the suspicion/hypothesis that an aberrant caused the Cataclysm.
As for an ultimate goal with this question, I think he could just be curious. He seems to be as much a knowledge seeker as S, and seems to work with whoever is most likely to sate that curiosity. Or maybe he has a spouse he’s trying to revive or something - the classic .
I don’t know where I read it, but I remember something about (a lot of?) esoteric spells being from before the cataclysm. I re-read the story recently, but I don’t remember reading something saying that this time. Esoteric spell chants we have seen are in a modern language, but maybe old esoteric spells still work when they are translated.
There’s modern sorcery that uses glyphs. In chapter 186 Thaddeus said something about the first glyphs created shortly after the Cataclysm, or even perhaps before it. Ilma gave some ideas about what might have caused the Cataclysm. People might have done something they should not have done. Magic might have broken.
It looks like it makes sense to say that people might have done something to magic to make it accept glyphs, but that this caused the Cataclysm and perhaps aberrants.
Maybe a Billig could go aberrant, but with multiple wills, so he or she didn’t become a nice single aberrant, but a black waste.
Will strain and the black wastes can harm people’s minds. Maybe something like that happened to the titans. They could have been original gangsters that got hit with the old cataclysm.
The recipes being more encryption. That’s… a doubleplusgood idea.
I think this idea makes a lot of sense if we think of the spirit world as being akin to akashic record of imprinted patterns and ideas on reality. Stuff aligned according to how well it can maintain a structure. When someone breaks the lines between physical reality and those imprints may blur, and they could effectively be making themselves into a transmogrified vessel for ideas that have stable resonance with what they were trying to do with their spell. It would make some sense I think, given Aberrants more or less act like a spell trying to continue its purpose memetically or at least the given desire of the caster at the moment of breaking from whats been observed so far.
Aberrant spirit idea related quote from chapter 105
“Another interesting question,” he said. “No one truly understands how Aberrants are created. The break event is named such because it seems to follow when the Will is strained to the point of breaking, for whatever reason, but also because of the phenomenon you experienced. Thaumaturges can sense when a break event happens, and those with developed Wills experience it more powerfully. Some theorize that what we feel is the soul of the caster shattering, destroyed utterly and never to pass on to the afterlife. Others think some kind of malevolent sentience reaches through, possibly from the spirit world, and takes over the weak-minded, citing as evidence the fact that chain break events are possible, where one causes another in a nearby caster. Some think that we somehow sense the fabric of magic itself experiencing localized damage, which mends back together incorrectly, thus creating the Aberrant.”
Siobhan blinked, and for a fraction of a second, she saw something else in place of the shadow. She blinked again to repeat it. A skeleton wearing tattered shroud-cloth lay there, so long dead and removed from the before that who it once was would never be recovered.
I did indeed post it to the right thread. Indeed. (￢_￢)
The creature may have been an aberrant from Miakoda. The vision of the shrouded skeleton might have been of Miakoda. This might be typical for aberrant. Becoming or producing a sentient aberrant might be unviable for Thaddeus as a method of avoiding his own death.
I wonder what else could be done with knowledge of aberrants. Perhaps becoming an aberrant that stops the existence of mortals, if not their individual lives, from being doomed, like one that stops more aberrants from being created by getting rid of the karma-in-a-certain-Buddhist-concept.
I think Thaddeus is simply researching the nature of aberrants and how this has been evolving over time. After all, it was when he realised the Raven Queen might have an interest in the theories of aberrant formation that he first suspected she was after him for his research.
The existence of lucid aberrants might be the focus of this based on a theory I have about Myrddin.
The story that is oft said about Myrddin’s origin, the real world one, is that he was a soldier or bard whose mind broke during the Battle of Arfderydd. He lost his sanity, gained the power of prophesy and ran off to live as a hermit in the Caledonian forest.
If that myth was used as inspiration for Myrddin’s character in PGTS or even the concept of break events in general it raises some interesting possibilities. Perhaps the reason for Myrddin isolating himself in the Black Wastes was to quarantine himself following his own break event. Perhaps that is what he was referring to when he mentioned the ‘scar that is not healing’. Perhaps that’s the very brain damage that Thaddeus theorised would be necessary to develop the ability to split one’s Will.
It would mean that Myrddin not only kept his sanity after breaking, but also maintained his abilities as a sorcerer.
Perhaps the reason Thaddeus is so interested in aberrants like Moonsable is that they are the hint of a gap that once existed between the breaking of one’s Will and the descent into a mindless aberration. A gap that has shrunk with time. I recall Siobhan thought that Thaddeus wasn’t being entirely rhetorical when he asked her “Is it possible to stop break events?”
At the moment this is just a crackpot theory that goes against the commonly accepted wisdom of Aberrants presented in the books - but it would be interesting if Book 6 ends with Siobhan likewise surviving her own break event. It certainly seems like the kind of thing her bloodline might give some resistance to.
Okay, number 1 ~ I do not think in English, and trying to translate my thoughts into stuff others will understand can be hard and I take shortcuts
By “benders” I am referring to the group of beings who use gestures to control the elements, it’s where our girl gets the light refinement spell.
Iirc Azeal did admit to them being inspired by the TV series the last avatar?
If nothing else I vividly remember when blue excitedly told me how he was very sure that was where it came from and hoped that our girl would enter the avatar state…. I could be misremembering the if it actually got confirmed, that was a little while ago, while blue was proof reading for the book, I think
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