yes, i'm very sweet!

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6

Like, how fascinating it was to see Caleb move from one survival instinct to another trained survival instinct–to go from presenting himself in a way that will be deliberately overlooked and underestimated, to presenting himself in a way that shows his power and skills and his determination to court this new alliance and strengthen their connection to the powers of the dynasty. It’s so interesting, because I think before this, the only time we see him pull out this tactic and this way presenting himself is when he was cutting their deal with Ophelia Mardun in the aftermath of episode 25. It speaks of Caleb being so desperate to keep his friends safe in these new precarious circumstances and desperate to help Veth, since they had just found out her entire situation. (I also forget that the table was convinced they had burned every bridge to the empire. I’m still thinking of Travis being like, THIS ENTIRE PART OF THE MAP?? WE CAN NEVER GO BACK HERE. Hilarious.)

And it makes the early shadowgast dynamic still absolutely fascinating to me, because all the careful charm that they aimed at each other was completely underlaid with this wary, sharp-edged maneuvering for position and favors. Especially since it later became apparent that Essek was also frantically trying to collect leverage over the M9 to be able to deal with them as necessary and cover his tracks from the beacon heist.  Even after all this time, I feel as though I’m still teasing apart what exactly Essek’s objectives were at this point in time, or at least what he thought his plan was–because it certainly wasn’t to be befriended by this bunch of chucklefucks and turn his back on everything he’s worked for up to this point. Like, why give spells, why teach these bits of highly-classified knowledge, when there were so many other things that he could offer them in terms of connections to the Kryn ruling class, which Caleb was himself trying to forge? (I mean, there’s the Doylist explanation, which is Matt giving Liam cool dunamancy spells to play with, haha. And there’s the explanation that Essek had no fucking clue what he was doing and was just frantically trying to collect favours and see it he could shape it into something to his advantage.)

Yasha Nydoorin, art by Robson Michel

Warm star,he protects…and helps