do you think there could be a link between the ritual lucien was trying to do and the dodecahedron?
HO BOI DO I EVER! I hope you’re ready for a big ol’ crack theory because my inner English major really ran off with this one and went and pulled out the Textual Evidence and everything. This is gonna be so long omg I’m sorry.
Let’s start with what we know about the dodecahedron, shall we? The assassin said that this weird gray SAT-word-thing was “sacred” to Xhorhas. It—or they, since he implied there were more than one—(apparently???) lets the Xhorhasian people be reincarnated upon death as souls in new bodies, memories intact, and thus effectively live for as long as they have these beacons and continue on some sort of quest to become more “perfect” (whatever that is).
When Caleb tried to identify it, Matt described the feeling as opening up into an “endless infinity of nothingness” that was terrifying but also something that Caleb could learn something important from if he only tried to dig deeper into it (which homeboy was too terrified to do and honestly I would be too). And then from Caleb’s dream, we know that it showed him “a grayish, familiar light” and a flickering flame that hypnotized him (callback to the thousand-yard stare he had after the manticore fight, anyone?), both of which I’d be willing to bet represent something about how the dodecahedron can access—and potentially preserve across bodies, perhaps?—his past memories. And then, of course there were the other Calebs, the different versions of himself that may or may not represent something to do with how this dodecahedron interfaces with souls to keep them bound to one plane through numerous bodies. WHAT IS THIS THING MATTHEW I AM DYING TO KNOW!!!
This part with the multiple selves strikes me as really important here, especially in light of Molly’s insistence that he is a fully and thoroughly different person (a different “self,” if you will) than whoever Lucien/Nonagon was and that the two merely share a body in common. That sounds a little too close to what we know about the function of the dodecahedron to strike me as coincidence, ESPECIALLY because, come on, it’s fuckin’ Matt. But according to the assassin, the dodecahedron did the opposite of what happened to Molly: it restores one soul across multiple bodies, not replaces multiple souls into one body. So… what gives?
The Xhorhasians call these things “beacons,” which are quite literally guiding lights. My theory is that, in some way, they guide the souls from one body to another to let them continue existing on the material plane. And while no one has explicitly said as much (yet), I’d be willing to bet that this spiritual guidance has some sort of ritual involved with the process of it. After all, if there’s no ritual and it’s just, for example, a proximity thing, then why weren’t the people of Zedash getting reincarnated left and right while this thing was in their tower?
But what if you tried to undertake that kind of ritual WITHOUT having the actual beacon present? Can you imagine if it kind of worked, and ejected the soul of the person undertaking the ritual (maybe some reckless purple fuck named Lucien) into a great endless space like the one Caleb felt, but without the beacon there to anchor and guide it, and there was nothing there for it? If, without the beacon, the ritual meant to go with it just sent the soul somewhere… empty?
And maybe that would be the kind of terrifying, traumatic thing that would make a person repress an entire life’s worth of memories just to forget about it. Or maybe the emptiness of the void would seep into that soul and hollow it out so there were no memories left to repress. Or maybe the soul would get a little too lost without the beacon’s guidance, and one of those other selves would find its way back to the body instead. Maybe that self would prefer to be called Molly.
