Courage, dear heart

Like the man who treated him with complete disdain, blackmailed into doing his smuggling, and referred to him as “it” fully intended make him nothing more than spell component.

And then Mara said, after learning he’s one of the missing Panto masks, one of the “ploughshares” who struck down the Trickster Shaper, she’d die before letting him go in the box. And this is not reassuring at all because she’s basically saying, I’ll do anything to keep you intact BECAUSE you will eventually be used in a ritual, regardless of what you want.

He’s PISSED because everyone is acting in awe of the theater, calling it beautiful, and no one is acknowledging it is beyond miraculous it worked out and actually succeeded. The Cloak’s plan was purely experimental and the chances of it failing spectacularly were extremely high. As Bolaire points out, they were using god-killing and antique artifacts pretty haphazardly without fully thinking through the consequences; like such as releasing a sentient god-killing weapon in a massive city or attempting to bridge into a missing afterlife at a theater filled with thousands of people.

Bolaire was trying to tell them why this is extremely dangerous when the talk is that they should try this again with the halfling afterlife and everyone keeps dismissing him. He’s also saying the life he has built is over, his sister is freely running around wearing a powerful sorcerer of a Sundered House (challenge-level of a dragon mind you), and tired to outright kill him, and all of their responses to this is “Yes, and?”

Explains they shouldn’t just trust Thjazi blindly; Hal says he needs to just needs to let go of his brother.

Family is trying to murder him; Occtius just acts exasperated by.

His sister needs to be stopped and Bolaire needs to find the rest of his family, Kattigan asks “You say you lost everything when you still have family?”

He is all but begging Thimble to at least acknowledge that Thjazi treated him terrible and regarded him as just another tool to be used; Thimble just says she’s always trusted Thjazi.

So what can he do? Well, fall back on to old programming, the only thing he was created to do.

Spends years excavating Tannesar to reverse engineer the instructions of how to make a Celestial in order to modify the ritual so it only serves them

Hunt down a member of their own family in order to cut out his heart to use as a component and remotely try to complete this possibly decades long plan

Fail due to their own shotty work and because they rushed it at the last minute

Get reprimanded by the other Sundered Houses after they discover this and have to shell out millions of gold pieces and offer lands as recompense (which they don’t have)

Thaisha Lloy:

Fingerprints with the souls of some recently manifested leaders of a centuries past revolution

Miraculously, and unintentionally, creates multiple Celestials out of the pure desire to help their finally freed descendants

Examples:

Tachonis trying to complete the ritual with Occtis off site rather than taking him to Tannesar

Einfasen taking over and then dismissing more than half of the Revolutionary Guard to consolidate more power, however this resulted in more than 350 people (most of who were former guards) allying under Azune/Schemers, ready to strike back

Lady Cormoray being way too heavy handed with her desire to take the Pariah Blades and then getting eaten by a mask because of it

Now we have house Halovar trying to 1) assassinate King Gus, 2) destabilize Timmony to spread the Creed, AND 3) faking the resurrection of Photarch Yanessa, all at the same party. And while they succeeded with the staged resurrection, they now will have King Gus opposed to them and the Creed once the Schemers give him the full report of what happened.

Like if they had just focused on killing Gus, they totally would’ve succeeded. But once again they got too greedy and now they could potentially have an entire kingdom openly against them due to attempted regicide

because the only place I think people are seeing it is in the dragon itself, maybe the red in its accent color? that’s just like the dragon’s spell coloring/aesthetic, making the water in it look like veins

like Qifrey turns the water golden and has it bloom into a flower when it splashes down, he totally would make it appear as if his dragon had translucent veins, man knows the importance of theatrical presentation of magic, seeing as how it was a pre-drawn spell