There’s been a lot written about Julien and Occtis’s extremely bad times at the Palazzo Davinos (and they were very, very bad times), but I’ve been thinking about Thaisha specifically and how horrifying that whole experience must have been for her personally. Just, like, spiritually.
She’s dedicated her life to healing the lands that have been blasted and damaged by the death of the Shapers. Not just that, she’s been trying to heal the metaphysical wound left by the idea of gods. She’s trying to “lead the world and the people who still miss the weight and heft of divinity [towards the realization] that that’s always existed within themselves.”
It’s a huge calling. She’s sacrificed a lot in service of it, and feels the pain of that sacrifice deeply, which serves as proof of the depth of her convictions. She believes in the Old Path.
From the start Thaisha is also portrayed as a woman of action. She does not like to sit still. She touches the mask. She can't stand around in Hal's kitchen, she needs to be doing something even if it's just making breakfast. She does favors for Thjazi, and is willing to take big risks to try and save him when he is slated for execution. When the plan goes south and he dies, however, she stops. She takes up her spiritual role as a druid. She guides his soul at the funeral while also getting sloppy with Tyranny, but hey, it’s been a rough day.
Guiding souls towards reincarnation is central to the Old Path - it's the path the "Old Path" name comes from. It's also the epitome of ‘we never needed the Shapers, that power was within us all along.’ It provides a real alternative to the Shapers' afterlives, one that predates them, and an alternative that the Shapers actively suppressed because it didn’t originate with them. These rites are important to Thaisha, and even when she desperately wants to find answers about how the plan went wrong, (and when getting blackout drunk in her grief), she makes sure that someone is always performing the rites for Thjazi.
But then the Palazzo attack happens.
It kicks off with that moment of connection with Vaelus on the bridge. Aramán might be doomed if she can’t find her spirit in this worshipper of the dead goddess of nature, and if that worshiper can’t find her spirit in Thaisha in turn. Thaisha has dedicated herself to helping people let go of the gods and something deep and true is telling her that she needs to find a way to connect with the walking epitome of not-letting-go-of-the-gods or everything will be lost. Wild. Insane.
And her response to that realization is a delightfully ambiguous mournful howl.
When she finally makes it to the Palazzo, Occtis is already dead. Gone. Brutally murdered just as she gets across the threshold. She gets up the stairs and Ethrand is sauntering away with Occtis’s torn out heart in hand. And then Primus Tachonis, before plane shifting away, deigns to tell Thaisha that the Tachonis plan to scrub the Old Path from the face of the beyond. They intend to destroy something that even the Shapers only sought to suppress. So that’s something else for her to process on what is rapidly becoming one of the worst nights of her life.
Thaisha then almost dies herself, but on the verge of death is able to speak with Occtis’s spirit. She sees him on the very path that she was guiding Thjazi’s spirit on earlier. A dark forest, lit with fireflies. She gets another chance to perform possibly her most sacred role as a druid. At that moment she thinks about the semi-joking, semi-maternal relationship she’s had with this young man, and thinks that she could offer him some words of comfort. That she could perform that same role now and help him move on. But it feels so wrong.
Aabria narrates: “Everything in my path is about accepting the cycles of life and not fighting when your time has come. But it's not his time, I know that. So I just turn and yell ‘Go back! Not yet. Not yet.’”
And Occtis trusts her judgement. It’s too early, anyway. He’ll come back. And then Alex fails a wisdom saving throw when Primus squeezes Occtis’s heart and pulls his soul in another direction. And Thaisha witnesses the spirit of her young friend forever lose his chance to walk the Old Path. Props to Aabria for acting out the absolute horror of that realization at the table despite only being able to see out of one eye due to spooky contacts.
Like, this isn’t just about her and Occtis. This is her seeing someone being denied access to everything she believes is natural and good forever. Thaisha told him to come back because this death felt wrong and because it felt too soon (and it was wrong, it was explicitly part of a deeply twisted necromantic ritual, even if Thaisha doesn't know that yet). When she said to turn back, she never meant forever. She meant not yet.
Thaisha never meant for this to be the outcome.
When Thaisha gets back up (thank you Lady Aranessa), she immediately rushes to Occtis’s body and starts to perform a reversal of the rites she gave Thjazi. She doesn’t have time to process the fact that Occtis is barred from the Old Path right now. His soul’s still lost in the Tenebral Reaches and she can still do something to help, she can still act, even if she can’t help him on the path and will never be able to do so again. She can try and get him away from his father. She can guide him somewhere even if it’s not towards new renewal. So she tries to guide him back to her. In druidic she calls out, “Follow my voice and get back here! Get off the path!”
And then she makes the famous wisdom saving throw to not have to think about it the dissonance between what she is saying and what it means for her fundamental beliefs. She isn't thinking right now. This is all feeling.
She gets no response from his remains though. So she taps into her druidic connection to help Aranessa instead and they manage to escape the Palazzo with their lives. She leads the survivors and they flee to Thaisha’s ancestral home and gardens. Aranessa then tells Thaisha the full story of exactly what happened to Occtis. There is no universe where she puts Occtis’s body down, except the one she is in right now, because as soon as her detect magic spell senses the divine necromantic energy of the Stone of Nightsong she is reflexively repulsed and driven back.
At this point she’s already staring down so much horror. There’s the general horror of everything that went down at the Palazzo, plus the fact that she’s been compromised - the Tachonis know who she is and that she was involved with the Thjazi plot, and that she came to save Occtis. She’s dealing with the personal misery of everything that happened with Occtis’s spirit on the Old Path, her own near death, the nightmare that is Primus Tachonis telling her that his house is planning on destroying the Old Path.
And now she has to face this. Divinity. The wound on the world that she’s been trying to heal. A relic of the Shapers, still affecting things even though the gods themselves are dead and gone, the same stone that might have gotten Thjazi killed. And it’s been shoved in the chest of the boy she couldn’t save for reasons she does not know or understand.
Murray and Bolaire manage to get the stone out and, in their exuberance from pulling off a nearly impossible magical feat, Bolaire starts cackling. Thaisha whispers the smallest, most miserable, “Please don’t laugh.”
But then the divine relic that makes her so viscerally uncomfortable performs a miracle. Through Murray and Bolaire, it brings Occtis back. Ish. He returns, just like she told him to, but heartless and soulless. A mockery of the true renewal the Old Path offers. He’s some unprecedented undead entity, one that Vaelus finds ‘remarkable,’ but it remains to be seen how Thaisha feels about it. Her facial expressions during Vaelus’s moment with Occtis are certainly interesting though.
Everything about what he is now goes against the Old Path. Occtis’s necromantic interests were already iffy for the Circle of Ancients based on Loza Blade’s questions to Thaisha the night before. Being a soulless revenant cannot jive with the natural cycles of life and death. A revenant created in part by divine necromancy even less so.
Thaisha’s happy to have him back, certainly. She’s the first to welcome him to the land of the living and quick to defend him from Julien’s anger, but there’s this tension that remains unresolved at the end of the episode. Vaelus is looking for a connection to Sylandri through Occtis, Julien is looking for the Tachonis’s puppeteering and machinations in this undead thing without a heart, and Occtis doesn't even know what to think yet. Plus there’s everything they might discover about the Stone of Nightsong now they have time to research it. She's been haunted by nightingale songs ever since she touched that mask, and now Occtis is part of that too.
Thaisha is left in the middle of this incredibly complex situation where she’s surrounded by things that keep clawing at her fundamental beliefs and tearing at the people she cares about. She’s facing threats to the Old Path both direct and indirect, threats to this person she has tried and failed once to protect, and threats to herself and her family. She's been pulled into something tied to the lingering power of gods that she has been doing her best to finally lay to rest. It’s an insane place to be and I’m excited to see how it plays out.
Palazzo Davinos! Come for the airy, open ambience, stay for the life-altering trauma!
titsay
kaledo-art
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
yousharknotpass
stormborns
annaxmalina
