Hi and welcome to some meta that no one asked for. The SUPER DUPER short version of all this rambling mess is: Liliana Temult can’t be saved because she is exactly where she wants to be, doing exactly what she wants to be doing.
For context, I was raised in, what I’ve come to understand in adulthood, was an ultra-right wing Christian cult. I was indoctrinated from very early childhood, and it took until young adulthood for me to fully get my brain unfucked from it (as much as one possibly can anyway). My mother came into this cult as a young adult and has never made any strides toward changing her mindset. I—like Imogen—still have this stupid hope that one day my mother will wake up before it’s too late to have any kind of relationship with me, but that hope is a small candle flame that flickers dangerously in tornado force winds. I often find myself after interactions with my mother thinking, “Dear God, why do I do this to myself?” End context.
What we know of Liliana for a fact (and not necessarily in chronological order):
She left Imogen and Relvin when Imogen was small because she had her magical awakening, and she went off to learn what the fuck was up with that.
She began an intellectual, scientific pursuit of what the fuck is up with her gifts.
She met Ludinus and he told her she was special. He made her feel something that science and study didn’t evoke. Ludinus encouraged her to use her gifts and not be afraid.
Ludinus gave Liliana a place of authority within a burgeoning organization he was creating special for people like Liliana.
She has a unique—as far as she knew and as far as Ludinus knows—gift and can walk into the dreams of every other Ruidusborn.
Liliana was chosen to carry Predathos into the Material Plane.
If Liliana steps out of line, this gift can be granted to another.
Ludinus has been using physical violence to awaken his Exaltants. Of which Liliana was likely one of the first.
Predathos makes Liliana feel welcome, at home, at peace.
Now let’s take what we know of Ludinus based on what we’ve seen of him across campaigns:
Image is second to power.
Only the most special are deserving of his time or attention.
The fucker has machinations for the machinations that he has machinations for.
He thinks three steps ahead of everyone he’s ever come up against.
For 300 years he has been plotting with the Weave Mind to release Predathos.
Whatever means justify his ends.
With charisma for days, even Jester was utterly charmed by this man.
Punishes those who do not keep their darker deeds hidden but does not necessarily have a problem with vile means being used as long as it’s kept plausibly deniable (See Delilah v Trent).
I mean that’s a good enough place to start. So now let’s start making a handful of suppositions based on what social science teaches us about the way cycles of abuse work and how cults create and keep power over their members. Here’s a quick and dirty “how cults work”:
Find someone the cult wants to bring in.
Find out what drives that person at their core, what are they looking for most in the world?
Shower that person with affection and adoration and show them that they can have what they’ve been looking for most in the world.
Cult crafts their version of what the world is like and why only they know how to help the person navigate it and what they need to do to be successful.
Begin “true abuse”, rather than “simple” manipulation, of breaking down a person emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
Convince the person that their new cult family is the only family they need and keep them from their former family/friends who would never understand.
Cultivate complete dependency on the cult leader.
Leave no room for criticism of the cult.
That is ridiculously basic, and this sort of thing works over years and years of tearing people down and building them back up again until up is down and down is up and you have no clue how to exist in a world where anything is less than your ideology’s black and white.
Okay, y’all are smart folks, you can see how based just on what we know definitively about Liliana how Ludinus used all the cult building techniques to recruit her to the Vanguard. So now for some supposition time based on what I know about cults and what we know about these characters. I’m going to assume that prior to meeting Ludinus, Liliana absolutely intended to return to her family once she figured out how to control her powers. I’m basing this on her delusion that they could still be a family when this is all done, which she stated to Imogen recently.
In Liliana’s mind, this quest has a definitive ending: Predathos is freed. After that is done, everyone can go back to their lives as they lived them before starting this journey. (Which no cult leader would let his disciples believe that unless there is no actual end that leaves the members alive. Which is a different theory all together and not relevant to this conversation, but I don’t think Ludinus intends for any Ruidusborn to survive this, otherwise he would be telling them about their elevated place amongst a new world order.)
So, if you’ve never been in a cult or cult adjacent, you may not realize the extent to which there is a false sense of safety and comfort if you do exactly what the cult asks of you and believe exactly what the cult asks you to believe. You are willing to divest all of your personal agency and freewill to whomever is your cult leader to protect your own personal comfort. Since challenges to the cult’s beliefs result in abuse or worse, you learn to trust that your leader has the absolute best for you in mind, regardless of the truth or untruth of that statement. Who you were before you joined has been so thoroughly suppressed that extreme internal intervention would be the ONLY thing to pull you out of the cult. It is nearly impossible to TALK someone out of a cult. They have to be forcibly removed from that space for some reason.
For Liliana, it doesn’t seem to me that even Imogen’s death would pull her from the cult. At the Malleus Key when the Bloody Bridge was created, Imogen begged her to help and she fully looked her daughter in the face and attacked Imogen’s allies. Liliana was ready to come murder her daughter herself had Imogen not convinced her that she knew NOTHING about the failed assassination attempt.
Based on what Matt role played when Imogen reached out to her mom and asked for help, at what she thought was the end of her life during this last Otohan attack, Liliana had a very “I’ll try...” attitude. There was no roleplayed desperation to get there in time. In the conversation that followed when Liliana got to them after the fight was over, Liliana was desperate, in the way she should’ve been to get to her daughter in time, to be told that it was just fine to stay on Ruidus with Ludinus.
When Bells Hells kill Ludinus, Liliana will fight them and while she will cry when she kills all her daughter’s friends, she will believe with her WHOLE being that it was right to kill them. And when that is done, she will allow someone else to kill Imogen because she is too chicken shit to do it herself. At her core, she probably still believes she is a good mother because she is so fucking deluded.
What will pull Liliana out of this cult before it’s too late? I’m curious what other folks think because I cannot for the life of me think of a single thing that will accomplish that. She is DEVOUT.
*Edited to add: at some point Ludinus became irrelevant and Predathos directly replaced him as the cult leader she follows but he was the open door...just before someone comes along and "but she doesn't even seem to like Ludinus very much."
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