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for asks meme: please meta about Ravel Puzzlewell? I don't think I've ever seen you talk about her at length.

Ravel is amazing in sheer grandiosity of her figure. She is proud and sharp, powerful and vast and wise, but that’s not the greatest things about her. In a world where even gods have to obey the laws of the universe, Ravel sees them as challenges - puzzles to solve, toys to remake. Despite the eventual result - be it wonder or tragedy, and it’s tragedy so much often, the core - is that no matter how it ended, Ravel transcended the Impossible.

Ravel am I, a maker and breaker of puzzles, a solver of what *cannot* be solved, a mind raveling and unraveling until the threads of thought are tied up like knots in a drunken man’s hair. It is enough, enough it is. I am but a woman who has sorely… soarly? Soarly missed her beloved creation. Some have named me crone, gray lady, Yaga sister, night hag – but MYSELF is my name, Ravel, Ravel who puzzles well, providing conundrums to decipher and laying impossibilities low.

In an interview about Ravel, Avellone said “Ravel was a branching creature whose life resembled a great tree (or bramble) stretching across the planes”. And this is who she is, a woman who sees the universe as a puzzle and who not only solves it, but extends the reach of her mind and power - like branches of a grand tree, into the patterns she uncovered, claimed them as her own, twisted into new puzzles for her amusement. This combination of brilliance and pride that turns into very unique kind of greed, of wanting to not only understand how the world works, but learn how to make reality twist into whatever form you want, to take impossibility as a personal challenge - and beat it, to accept no limits, to see no borders.

“so many threads and branchings, so many Ravels… always stitching and mending and growing are my forms.”

The power of her brilliance was the ever-growing great tree whose branches grow through laws of the universe she tamed, like through the cracked patterns of a puzzle, with barbs piercing the very Planes and stitching them into new forms and shapes as she pleases. To quote Avellone, “I always saw Ravel as an incredibly powerful legendary figure, so she could have left all sorts of relics, offspring, and perhaps other unfortunate events and historic tales across the planes. She’s made a real mess of a lot of things.”

Indeed she had. But her greed for knowledge and challenge is only one part of her driving force, the most obvious one. But I’m going to, perhaps, go on a limp and say that another important cornerstone for Ravel is freedom.

“once and again, you come a-fore me with a problem, to challenge me for a solution to an IMPOSSIBILITY. Beautiful, *ungrateful,* beloved man! Such fire in your eyes, enough to stir a Gray Lady’s heart… passion to be free.”

This is why she was so fascinated with The Nameless One - his passion to be free, so great that he refused to accept the limits - the laws of death itself - and dared to challenge her with IMPOSSIBILITY. All of her most favored things combined at once, of course she fell in love. I won’t go on about her and TNO relationship here, it would be too long of an off-topic, but I can’t escape mentioning the interesting dynamic of twisting both Pygmalion and Frankenstein together - Ravel is both in love and regretting her own creation.

But back to freedom. Freedom is not a lack of connections or just flailing through the life like a wind-blown bag. Freedom is an ability to make choices.

When TNO tells Ravel that his companions chose to come with him, she has a lot to say.

*Chose?* Ahh… a dangerous word. Is it so? Is it *choice,* gith? Is it? Or is it a matter of two skies? What of the cog-box? What does IT know of *choice?* There is only obey and obey, hmnnn? Skull, skull, skull… Your expression is difficult to read without the skin wrapping, but I feel your FEAR from here. Coming here was *not* your choice. The succubus…Did she have a choice? Mayhap in her smooth-skinned mind of soft silks and hard truths, MAYBE choice… tchhh. But no. A Sensate MUST experience all, and to refuse to come - NOT a Sensate would you be. Still no choice! The *tiefling*. The FIERY one. No choice. At. All. When you *feel* instead of *think*, there is little room for choice.

No one is completely free. It’s impossible to be able to take all of the choices and not only because some of them directly contradict each other. Our identities itselves limit our choices. Fall-from-Grace is a Sensate, which is a philosophy about embracing all experiences the universe has to offer - which means that if she refused the incredibly unique experience of joining TNO on his quest, her identity of Sensate would be violated.

In many cases, our identities limit not only the choices we can make, but even the possibilities we can consider. For example, most people that identify as “men” technically have an ability to wear dresses, but most of them would not even think of it as a choice that they can make. They don’t see this choice, because their identity prevents it.

“Ego enwraps us like a prison.”

In so, freedom is not free-for-all do-whatever-nothing-matters lack of identities, but the ability to make choices that let you self-actualize in a way that you want. The ability to grow as a person in a way that you chose. So the matter of “Can I do this” becomes “Why would I do this.”

Why stay when one can leave is your question to me? I turn the question upon its head and send it a-scurrying back to you. The answer lies not in the staying or leaving, but in the causes and reasons, my precious half-man. It is *a* want, a once-want, but not a now-want, and more and more a not, naught, knotted-want.

Ravel can leave her garden in any moment, but she chooses not to. She was trapped here by Lady of Pain after storming Sigil with armies of Hell. And why? Again, passion for freedom.

My offering of help was unwelcome. I *tried* to set her FREE; Sigil is the CAGE, a City of Doors and Locks, is a prison for her. It must be, mustn’t it be? Why else call the city of Sigil ‘the Cage?’ And who is caged? The Lady! A prison so small for one so great. Unjustness, wrongness, intolerable to torment a woman thusly! I tried to break the Cage, let the Lady go free. Shoo, shoo, o pained woman, let Sigil’s ring be broken so you might fly far from its filthy streets and the stupid dabus that dare not speak in words for fear their thoughts would be overheard!

For Ravel, Lady of Pain is another being that denies the laws of the universe, just like herself. But Sigil is what anchors The Lady to choices that she repeats over and over, which means she doesn’t grow, doesn’t expand, doesn’t exercise her potential to transform the multiverse. Which is for Ravel, whose many forms are “always growing”, is the most terrible thing to imagine.

I’ve seen some people say that they pity Ravel for losing her mind, which is kind of funny. I mean, have you read the dialogs, even the quotes I pulled here? She’s still sharper than an entire arsenal of Blood War. Of course, she peppers her speech with bizarreness and twists it into *puzzle*, which is, you know, her THING? She’s playing with you, making mazes as always. Look at this bullshit. “ I am but a woman who has sorely… soarly? Soarly missed her beloved creation.” and the next sentence “Ravel who puzzles well, providing conundrums to decipher and laying impossibilities low.” This is pride, barely, almost coquettishly, covered with fake modesty. “But a woman” who conquered the impossible, did what no one else could even dream of. This is the woman who created immortality and led the armies of hell into invasion of Sigil, which even gods dared not to visit.The greatest victories of others are nothing compared to the grandness of even her mistakes.

And this is where lies her real tragedy. When Lady of Pain split her into many… “shards”, she torn away identities that Ravel could have no longer. For her, proud, vicious, limitless, “always growing” to have the branches of herself denied, to not be able to grow in these directions anymore, to suddenly see horizons you cannot reach is a real punishment. The loss of being able to grow unstoppable through Planes in any directions. The loss of freedom to be herself.

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