I'm trying to think about whether I would have preferred it narratively if Brennan and Aabria had saved Thaisha's L5 level up for the scene at the intermission of KoTher'ai and I do think that even knowing this moment was coming down the line I like the placement of the L3-L5 level up.

I think as much as the return of the Rungjani afterlife and the call for them to walk the Path is a climax for Hal and Thjazi's story arcs in this chapter and for the Rungjani as a whole, Thaisha's narrative arc climax is at that moment where she recognized something was wrong with Thjazi's lack of presence on the Path and tapped into a deeper connection with it in order to find him.

Calling the Corners seems like such a cool spell (I would love to get the wording for it and what it does in more detail) and it seems to be a spell Thaisha gets at L4 (since Aabria leveled up to use it before Brennan gave her the option to go to L5 as well) so either way it would have been a spell she had access to for both scenes.

The Path is such a vital center to Thaisha's character arc. She ends the overture trying to lead Occtis back down the Path to Safety even as his father and grandfather are trying to forcefully pull him off of it from their side.

There is a safe path through the woods but there's too many monsters in the trees around to proceed, follow the safe path back!

It is both the right decision but also one that calls into question her role in regards to the Path.

Was it good to call Occtis back? She helped save him yes but he can't walk the Path ever again. And then she's traveling with him and he, even more than before his death, seems to be anathema to her duties to the Path. He freezes over a river in a sacred Druid grove, he is conducting thought experiments about bringing back a god who dominated nature, who had Druids of her own people hunted down and killed.

But then they are in the eternal dark of Tanessar and he is helping them understand his family's plans and fight them. He is committed to helping her find her son. He is recognizing that his family's Path and her's are not opposites or enemies by nature but, because his family have decided that theirs will be the Only Path, they have been made so by circumstances.

Returning to Dol Makjar, through the work that Thaisha, Hal, Thjazi, Shadia and all the Rungjani and their Druids have been able to do she returns to her original duty of shepherding these souls who were originally barred from the Path down it.

In the graveyard she is able to recognize Thjazi's absence and in her quest to understand and search for this spirit of her family, this spirit she read the rites for (she showed him the Path-where has he gone?!) she taps even more deeply into that purpose. Into the call that 19 year old Thaisha with her jewelry business plans had been shutting the door on. It is this scene that answers the question of whether she is in the right place, doing the right thing. And the answer is Yes.

The scene of the rebels coming back is beautiful but it is a continuation of an answer that is established by that scene in the graveyard. Additional evidence to add to her file that this place, this moment needed a Druid.

I missed last episode so i was SO CONFUSED at the start. And I didn't get to draw too much from the play because i was C R Y I N G

and I spent half of the dungeon part HIDING IN MY SHIRT OH GOD THEY IN DANGER

Good news! This has already happened to Julien! After the fight on the bridge in E14, Julien's Haste wears off while they're sprinting away to avoid Petra and Ryah, leaving him incapacitated for a round, so Vaelus just scoops him up and keeps going.

Øks: an axe

Occtis Tachonis has granted a fairy access to the manor grounds Occtis Tachonis has opened the door to the vassal crypts Occtis Tachonis has granted the protection of the family to Thimble of the Golden Orchard Occtis Tachonis has opened the Undercroft door in the vassal crypts Occtis Tachonis has closed the Undercroft door in the vassal crypts

luis carazo is winning at dnd (hugging and kissing his homies goodnight)

bonus:

Primus claimed he was only after Aranessa and Occtis, but Julien knows very well that 1) his mother and sister are homeless and his sister cursed because Primus was staging an attack on the Golden Orchard at the same time, expecting backup from their shiny new Celestial, and 2) Callowyn Royce was killed by Tachonis forces before the attack on the Orchard. Primus wouldn't need a simultaneous attack on the Orchard if the goal was just to take out House Royce and at some point claim the Golden Orchard, because he already lured the sole surviving Royce to Dol-Makjar. If the Deva Vindicta was supposed to be enough to threaten all the other Sundered Houses into submission, then there should be no rush to attack the Orchard--the Deva Vindicta should have been plenty to bully a few non-sorcerous vassal houses of a dead Sundered House out of the Orchard at Primus' leisure.

He said "Davinos was an improvisation, but wherever the Lady Royce and Occtis first met, I would have been waiting in the shadows, or enough of Lady Aranessa's retainers to speed the Deva's journey to the underworld." To me that implies he's claiming they didn't plan/need to kill all three (Aranessa, Occtis, and House Davinos) and would have settled for either just Aranessa and Occtis (two Sundered House nobles) or just Aranessa and "enough" of her vassals to provide the noble blood for the candle ritual (implying they could substitute multiple "lesser" nobles like the Davinos for one Sundered House noble). But that's just bogus according to what the Seekers discovered: The limitation on the Deva Vindicta ritual wasn't the amount of sacrifice, per House Tachonis's own notes/correspondence; it was needing a member of the priestly houses without sorcerous ability, i.e., Occtis and only Occtis.

Also, if killing House Davinos was unnecessary "improvisation" around killing Aranessa and Occtis, why was Primus downstairs personally hands-on murdering Raimond Davinos while his screw-up middle son did the ritual on Occtis and failed to kill Aranessa? Why wasn't Primus either doing the oh-so-important ritual or killing the sorcerer who was the alleged target? (Honestly, even if killing all the Davinos was the plan, it's still pretty weird that they left Aranessa as a side task for Ethrand and his ghouls when there was another Tachonis sorcerer on-site. From a game perspective, it functions to make this personal for Julien, and maybe that's all it was, but in-universe it implies that either Raimond's death was important or that Primus considered him enough of a threat to need to take him out immediately.)

Aranessa is a woman who is acutely aware of her responsibilities as the scion of a noble house. Aranessa would have expected- and, probably hoped - for her life to look a certain way, when she married, and that would have included children.

Aranessa was probably picturing a bunch of little half-orc kids with her eyes and Thjazi’s smile, running around the Golden Orchard and growing up under her loving eye and the protection of Faerie. Probably with Thimble as a kind of fairy godmother- Thimble, who was expected to remain forever appearing about 8 years old, but who is a warrior - who would have made the most wonderful playmate and protector.

And then Thjazi goes off to right wrongs and be the hero the common people deserve, and she knows she’s never going to get that with him. But she loves him too much to divorce him, so even though they are estranged indefinitely, she’s never going to have that with anyone else, either.

And her brother-in-law has children and even though he and Thaisha never married, Thaisha still calls Aranessa “sister,” so she was clearly a part of their life, right? She got to be an aunt, at least, to Alogar and Shadia? And then Hal has a daughter with a human woman, and you know Hero must look very much like what Aranessa would have dreamed a daughter of her own might be. And Aranessa has to hold her niece and know this is the closest she will ever get to seeing that, now.

And then there’s Occtis, who is such a good kid, such a sweet boy, who bonds with Thimble and right away becomes a dear friend to her. Whose family doesn’t pay him any attention, but who Thjazi has, for some reason, sort of taken under his wing. Who Aranessa has to look at and know that if things had gone the way she dreamed, would have been right around the age of her own children. If only, if only.

And now Thjazi is gone, and she hears that Occtis, who she must know was hoping to help him, is being sought by his family. And she knows if they found any hint that he was trying to help Thjazi, he will be in danger. So she invites him into her dearest friend’s home to try to offer him safety and protection, because she is confident that this place, here in the middle of the city and filled with the loyal bannermen of her house, will be a safe place for him.

And then not only is the Palazzo Davinos attacked, not only are all of her people slaughtered, and all of Julien’s people slaughtered, but this kid is brutally murdered by his own family, in the same room as her. She is right there, helpless to stop it, forced to watch him die- just as she watched Thjazi die just one day before.

So much to love about the Termina and Bolaire scene this ep, but one of my faves is that Brennan and Taliesin are playing with the laws of robotics, Isaac Asimov style.

Isaac Asimov was hella misogynist and it makes a lot of his writing worse, but his best work are his short stories set in a universe where robots are programmed to obey three laws of robotics:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The short stories set in this universe explore the nuances of these laws, how they conflict, and how different robots might interpret those nuances. For example, there's one story in which a robot interprets the First Law to mean that it should start manipulating people on a massive scale in order to reduce their harmful behaviors toward each other. After all, if the robot didn't do this, it would be allowing human beings to come to harm through inaction.

From Taliesin interviews and what we saw in this episode, the Laws of Robotics for the Panto masks appear to be:

Kill the gods.

Love your siblings.

Bolaire interprets the First Law to mean that he should also kill people who aspire to become gods, or who behave like the Shapers did. Termina interprets the First Law to mean "kill the gods, and once you run out of gods to kill, make more so you can keep killing them."