So we all agree that Mor is a witch, right?
The evidence seems pretty irrefutable...
Mor came into her power during her 'first bleeding'.
“The witchlings who were your age at the time,” the sentinel went on, “never even had a chance to fly. The power doesn’t set in until their first bleeding...”
But then I began bleeding a few days after I turned seventeen. And the moment my first blood came, my power awoke in full force, and even that gods-damned mountain trembled around us. But instead of being horrified, every single ruling family in the Hewn City saw me as a prize mare. Saw that power and wanted it bred into their bloodline, over and over again.
She was tortured and literally pinned down with iron to control or 'chain' her (or tether her to that realm?).
“You know, men have always hated and feared our kind,” Asterin went on. “It’s rare for them to catch us, to kill us, but when they do … Oh, they delight in such horrible things. In the Wastes, they’ve made machines to break us apart. The fools never realized that all they needed to do to torture our kind, to make us beg”—she glanced down at Elide’s legs—“was to chain us. Keep us tied to the earth.”
The damp, earthen scent of rotting things beneath the leaves and roots she lay upon. Had been thrown and left upon. Everything hurt. Everything. She couldn’t move... They had spiked nails into her. Had pinned her down as she screamed, pinned her down as she roared at them, then begged them. And then they had taken out those long, brutal iron nails. And the hammer. Three of them. Three strikes of the hammer, drowned out by her screaming, by the pain.
Legend had it that all witches had been gifted by the Three-Faced Goddess with iron teeth and nails to keep them anchored to this world when magic threatened to pull them away. The iron crown, supposedly, was proof that the magic in the Blueblood line ran so strong that their leader needed more—needed iron and pain—to keep her tethered in this realm.
The wind calls her to foreign lands.
Asterin’s black eyes seemed to devour her whole. “You would hear that wind, girl,” she said with expert quiet, “because anyone with Ironteeth blood does. I’m surprised your mother never told you. It’s passed on through the maternal line.” Witch-blood. Ironteeth blood. In her veins—in her mother’s lineage.
“You’ve never heard the wind calling your name, Elide Lochan? Never felt it tug at you? You’ve never listened to it and yearned to fly toward the horizon, to foreign lands?” She’d spent most of her life locked in a tower, but there had been nights, wild storms …
How far away the continent seemed, Rhys’s request with it. To go, to play spy and courtier and ambassador, to see those kingdoms long closed, where friends had once dwelled … Yes, her blood called to her. Go as far and wide as you can. Go on the wind.
Her family heirlooms, the Veritas Orb and the Ouroboros mirror, are likely witch mirrors.
"You can see the future, past, present. You can speak between mirrors, if someone possesses the sister-glass. And then there are the rare silvers—whose forging demands something vital from the maker."
Then the reveal of that witch mirror in some nondescript stone chamber, a black-haired beauty with a crown of stars standing before Elena and Gavin, explaining how the witch mirror worked—how it would contain these memories.
“You have seen yourself the power of witch mirrors... Who do you think taught the witches such power? Not the Fae.” A small laugh..."There are mirrors to spy, to travel, to kill...I can show him what he wishes to see.”
Her love of wild, untamed things and feeling the wind on her face mirrors Asterin in ToG.
Ellia took the hills with unfaltering grace, flowing fast as the west wind. Mor hadn’t been raised to ride. Not when winnowing was infinitely faster. But with winnowing, it never felt as if she were actually traveling anywhere. As if she were going, running, racing to the next place. She wished it, and there she was. The horses, though … Mor felt every inch of land they galloped across. Felt the wind and smelled the hills and snow and could see the passing wall of dense forest to her left. Alive. It was all alive, and her ever more so, when she rode.
She had always been drawn to the untamed, wild things of the world.
Behind, Asterin whooped, and Manon turned to watch her Second fling her arms out and lean back in her saddle until she was lying flat on her mount’s spine, her golden hair unbound and streaming. Such wild ecstasy—there was always a fierce, untamed joy when Asterin flew.
That wildness, that untamed fierceness … They weren’t born of a free heart, but of one that had known despair so complete that living brightly, living violently, was the only way to outrun it.
Rhys hints that Mor can perform the yielding.
There was enough rawness in the words that I instead asked, “And Mor—what does she do for you?” “Mor is who I’ll call in when the armies fail and Cassian and Azriel are both dead.”
And miscellaneous breadcrumbs...
She wished she could grow claws—grow claws as Rhys could—and rip out that pale throat.
Mor smirked at them. Part of me wished she’d rip their throats out instead.
Dark fire simmered in Morrigan’s eyes.
But I shifted my eyes, made them night-seeing. As I had done in that Illyrian forest, when I had first drawn Hybern blood. Mor, I think, was born able to see in the darkness.
ACOMAF, Ch. 40 (constant references to her wearing red, like the red capes of the Crochan witches):
Mor stalked toward us, her crimson gown floating on a phantom wind.
Mor opened the lid of the black box. The silver orb inside glimmered like a star under glass. “This is the Veritas,” Mor said in a voice that was young and old...her eyes not wholly of this earth. The hair on my arms rose. “You know I speak truth.”
