Far-flung loved ones reunite around a dead body in a loving home. Something goes wrong. A ritual is interrupted by unceremonious magic—the soul moving on is not a smooth process. And a tall, dark-robed figure walks from the road onto the property with a score to settle, bringing literal night along with them.
Aabria should sue Brennan for emotional damages because why was she put through that twice
I grew up in a very religious community. I am queer. The opening of this episode is giving me exvangelical hives.
The sense of your parent(s) who love you but are willing to break and wound you to make you into who they think you should be. That idea of love as control. Love as molding you into a corrected shape. Because that's what they believe truly is the loving thing to do.
Also there's something around white ladies with Black kids trying to mold them into a conformity that even if they succeed will never quite fit. (A unfortunately common thing in evangelical communities what with the adopt kids to raise as good Christians being a thread through history that is consistently genocidal and persistent.) Not a thing I have experienced, but a thing that was definitely present in that community growing up.
Anyways, I love to see the full scope of Aabria getting to explore what is the lie in such a fucking epic way.
ame casting protection from evil and good to help suvi sleep without nightmares when they were kids, sleeping in a pile of pillows on the floor of grandma wren’s cottage.
stone helping steel when they were that same age by crawling into bed with her and saying “something magic that was gonna keep [steel] safe.”
"I promised a witch that I would be at her door in one year's time. That means that door must stand for that year's time. A promise to a witch is never lightly broken."
God if Suvi dies in the next ep.......I genuinely am afraid they will fight to the death now! Like Suvi Just found out her mom did that to Steel and she wouldn't do that for no reason and I dont think shes in a spot to wheel and deal her way free! So theyll fight! And Suvi will die, either physically or she will be so controlled she might as well be dead, and I will need to take off work to grieve. I love Suvi so much she was just starting to escape!! She wanted one good thing before leaving........but she cant have a good day :( no looney tunes for her :(
What I'm going to say is this:
We've spent 50+ episodes with Suvi. And we've seen her in a variety of encounter scenarios. For example:
~ Capt. Emliss.
~ Port Talon.
~ Hakea's Grotto.
~ The Shroud Mountains.
~ Abassin.
~ Reedport.
~ Twelve Brooks.
She has yet to assess a battle incorrectly. And she always adapts her strategy to the scenario (sorry to those who characterize her as a loose-cannon forever on the edge of popping off due to poorly interpreting her actions episode 10, because they missed everything.) So let's look at her assessments and responses:
~ Winnable fight. Employs direct, decisive force to end the combat before losing her numbers advantage.
~ Unwinnable fight. Redirects Orima's wrath to minimize civilian casualties.
~ Fight forbidden by arcane oath. Only takes support actions.
~ Winnable fight. Hard call: catches near-death Wizard Sully in AoE to prevent beasts & shapeshifter damage output from eventually overwhelming everyone else still fighting.
~ Winnable fight. Leverages environment to cut off camped reinforcements downriver.
~ Unwinnable fight. Tactical surrender to Keen to minimize harm to Ame & the fox and provide support (Vandal) to Eursulon.
~ Unwinnable fight. Tactical surrender to Citadel forces to secure the objective: A & E's escape with the children.
Suvi is a tactician.
If you think she'd lose a fight to the death with Steel, what makes you think Suvi would start that fight at all?
And I was going to stop here and bury more thoughts in the tags, but I'll resist the urge for once. Yes, Suvi tends to have the worst luck (heh) and toughest road, but bad luck isn't bad choices.
But even if you're leaning on her last words in the episode as insight into her next steps in the finale, she said "I'm going to kill her" not "I'm going to fight her." Let's be clear, there is no one in this story with a stronger case for squaring up on Steel than Suvi, and no one that better understands what Steel's capable of.
And the reason I'm hopping on this soapbox at all is because we're now one episode away from the finale of Book One, and I worry that people believe that Suvi's arc was about deprogramming from the Citadel. That's what happens; that was never the point. A story about a young woman losing everything (except for two of her friends, and their stories are about stepping into their power and purpose) isn't just a sad story, it's an actively bad one.
It feels like quite often the forest was missed for the trees of their interpersonal conflicts throughout the book. Because people assumed her position in the trio was "villain to be reformed before the point of no return via proximity to their inherent goodness" (the Zuko analogy) every disagreement was evaluated as a conflict of philosophy/morality with Suvi refusing the call for redemption.
But looking for the underlying cause of their arguments almost always yields a version of Suvi's position as "you've come to a conclusion (and often an action) I do not understand, give me more information" that is overlooked or dismissed as an arrogant (wizardly, for some fucking reason despite witches and spirits being as openly condescending as any Empire mage) distrust of the instinctual wisdom of witches and spirits.
But the arc is about Suvi's growth as a tactician. The rows are about Suvi's struggles when she doesn't have enough information from her friends to make confident assessments. The battles are about proving her core competency when she has enough information to work from. The field experience with Sworn is about learning leadership and adaptability. The in-game level up is about confronting the paradigm that was redacting past truths and inhibiting the intrinsic curiosity that would gain her more and better intel in the future.
But her ability set is clear, if you're paying attention. And yes, it's absolutely correct to worry about Suvi's current situation. But it's the end of the arc - it's time to show you what Suvi's got now, after everything she's learned. Let's see what a tactician can do with a fight this asymmetrical, because this is actually when she shines.
Because y'all are my favorite (and no one can stop me from yapping here) - a couple loresels/insights on the construction of Sworn's letter:
- the first section is Suvi back in her pattern of leading with her formal (and therefore more distant and academic) foot because she's always been self-conscious about her age and authority in the field with Sworn. The struck sentence is her clocking the behavior and actively stopping. The point of the letter is to connect - lock in, girl
- part 2 is about trust, a HUGE theme across Suvi's story in Book 1. As of the writing of the letter, Sworn was the closest relationship she had that had not suffered a crisis of trust. It had to be acknowledged, along with his good work (a leadership lesson learned at the end of Chapter 1) and importance to her, personally
- reminder for part 3: Suvi doesn't know Sworn's backstory or even that Ame knows it from their conversation at the end of ep39. And here, she reaches the sentiment at the heart of the letter: her desire for closeness, plainly stated
- Now, if you clocked a ~vibe~ in/by part 4, consider that Suvi loves people she has struggled to trust. Having said that, whatever undercurrent is here has yet to be processed consciously (hence the struck "you")
- And now, the end. The earliest version of this letter was *just* the question
It was so important to me that this letter not be an impassioned challenge to his worldview or treasonous trauma-dump (learned that lesson with Eza in Bracken). So yeah, in what Suvi believed might very well be her last words to Sworn, she wouldn't ask anything of him beyond considering the answer as she shared how she felt.
Feels like a good time to remember the end of Arc 1 and Steel’s insistence that Ame *not* break the curse without the citadels aid, so they could “discover who placed it” and “research the origin”
Intro of the very first WBN episode (main campaign):
"Snow falling over endless white sand and a tower made of glass, [Thunder rolls] in the image of night and day, as spells fire across the sky. For a moment the sun, captured against the horizon while stars gleam as the heavens cannot seem to agree, in the face of endless magic what the truth of this world should be. These images are captured in the mind's eye as memory, perhaps of dream, or perhaps of waking life, or perhaps of something in between. By Suvi."
AAAAAAAA HOT THEORY
Ok so the most recent episode and listening to the prelude again got me thinking: When Soft and Stone discover the free magic, we see the sun and it turns into snow and music and lots of stuff. This seems somewhat similar to the description above where we also get sun and snow and endless magic.
Also "the heavens cannot seem to agree what the truth of the world should be". The heavens as in the sky, or maybe more like the Sky. I feel like we already lost our minds over this line when it got called back to in an episode a few weeks ago with that bit about the world having a hard time remembering the truth. But this makes it specifically tied to Suvi, and it would sort of metaphorically line up with Suvi having a hard time finding her way back to who she was and what she liked before the citadel.
Ok so that's one side of it. Then we have that room in the archive that Ame and Eursulon visit, that I feel ties into this. They go to this particular room because it contains the information on that massive interdisciplinary project of a plan to curse Grandma Wren and Ame, using Suvi to deliver it. (Huge. Wtf.) And in this room we have a bunch of special objects in the alarmed bubbles. The set of dream magic keys, creyon drawings, scrolls and that twirling ribbon wand are mentioned. What if these are all things taken from Suvi's home (or the apartment that we know was cleaned out):
Dream keys to the near-spirit that Soft would have had. Drawings that Suvi made, that are perhaps like the ones mentioned in the secret study in the apartment (maybe of things she saw in the near spirit or in her dreams?). Scrolls I suppose could be for all sorts of things, but maybe they are of non wizard or null clef spells. That twirling toy feels so whimsical, in my mind it would fit in well among the song and dance of the spirit world. (of course only guessing)
And we know Suvi is an unusually gifted wizard, from when she cast a 2nd level spell during the arith incident. Plus she was put on the leadership track immediately, in a very safe role away from combat and other risks to her. There is such an emphasis on keeping her in the citadel, they must know she is somehow very valuable to them.
So.
What if Suvi, in her connection to the Sky, has exceptional abilities to traverse the spirit world and the real world. What if the separation of which side is dreaming and which is dreamed of gets fuzzy with her:
"These images are captured in the mind's eye as memory, perhaps of dream, or perhaps of waking life, or perhaps of something in between. By Suvi."
I swear, if it's all right there in the first few minutes of the story.. idk.
(and I don't mean necessarily in a sort of chosen one way, I feel like if you grow up in a family where mingling and playing with magic in a free and curious and close to the near spirit way is normal, you may get attuned to magic in a very intuitive way, and then that forms part of your identity as you grow into yourself)
And I think this may explain Suvi's relevance to the Man in Black as well. If Suvi represents incredible connection between these realms, her stepping on the road may allow for a path for the Man in Black to travel out of the area that Grandma Wren trapped him in.
Anyways. The Sky is always there, day or night, dreaming or awake. I love this story so much.
(very curious to find out if any of this ends up being right, Brennan and Aabria spin a mysterious web) :)
Wizards don’t like to get their hands dirty when they can avoid it, and Inflict Wounds is a messy spell. You gotta get right up close and feel the pain pass from your hand to the target’s body. Very dangerous to get into melee distance as a wizard, especially when your target has a sword and is very good at using said sword. And with a world to save, and more importantly, a daughter to get back to? That kind of risk could only be preluded by an intense, blinding amount of grief and rage.
Like the kind one might feel seeing your friend standing over your husband’s dead body.
Soft never took the proper protections. And seeing him dead, Stone, for the first time in her life, threw caution to the wind to avenge him.
Steel easily cut through Soft. But faced against Stone, she wasn’t going to walk away without a chip or two.
“No Loose Ends” as an episode title means someone is gonna die, but Silver???
The episode title definitely implies to me that it was Steel who ordered it. He’s a loose end for her and nobody else, really. At first I thought something in the letter inspired it, somehow. He had time to read the letter and go on a suicide mission. But what could Suvi possibly say?
I don’t think it’s a geas though. That wouldn’t work for a suicide mission. I’m not sure of any compulsion spell that would work on a suicide mission. Brennan could be home rulesing that part, of course, but I doubt it. So I think somebody convinced Silver that killing the archmage was a good idea.
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