do you think there could be a link between the ritual lucien was trying to do and the dodecahedron?
HO BOI DO I EVER! I hope youāre ready for a big olā crack theory because my inner English major really ran off with this one and went and pulled out the Textual Evidence and everything. This is gonna be so long omg Iām sorry.
Letās start with what we know about the dodecahedron, shall we? The assassin said that this weird gray SAT-word-thing wasĀ āsacredā to Xhorhas. Itāor they, since he implied there were more than oneā(apparently???) lets the Xhorhasian people be reincarnated upon death as souls in new bodies, memories intact, and thus effectively live for as long as they have these beacons and continue on some sort of quest to become moreĀ āperfectāĀ (whatever that is).
When Caleb tried to identify it, Matt described the feeling as opening up into anĀ āendless infinity of nothingnessā that was terrifying but also something that Caleb could learn something important from if he only tried to dig deeper into it (which homeboy was too terrified to do and honestly I would be too). And then from Calebās dream, we know that it showed him āa grayish, familiar lightā and a flickering flame that hypnotized him (callback to the thousand-yard stare he had after the manticore fight, anyone?), both of which Iād be willing to bet represent something about how the dodecahedron can accessāand potentially preserve across bodies, perhaps?āhis past memories. And then, of course there were the other Calebs, theĀ different versions of himself that may or may not represent something to do with how this dodecahedron interfaces with souls to keep them bound to one plane through numerous bodies. WHAT IS THIS THING MATTHEW I AM DYING TO KNOW!!!
This part with the multiple selves strikes me as really important here, especially in light of Mollyās insistence that he is a fully and thoroughly different person (a differentĀ āself,ā if you will) than whoever Lucien/Nonagon was and that the two merely share a body in common. That sounds a little too close to what we know about the function of the dodecahedron to strike me as coincidence, ESPECIALLY because, come on, itās fuckinā Matt. But according to the assassin, the dodecahedron did the opposite of what happened to Molly: it restores one soul across multiple bodies, not replaces multiple souls into one body. Soā¦ what gives?
The Xhorhasians call these things ābeacons,ā which are quite literally guiding lights. My theory is that, in some way, they guide the souls from one body to another to let them continue existing on the material plane. And while no one has explicitly said as much (yet), Iād be willing to bet that this spiritual guidance has some sort of ritual involved with the process of it. After all, if thereās no ritual andĀ itāsĀ just, for example, a proximity thing, then why werenāt the people of Zedash getting reincarnated left and right while this thing was in their tower?
But what if you tried to undertake that kind of ritual WITHOUT having the actual beacon present? Can you imagine if it kind of worked, and ejected the soul of the person undertaking the ritual (maybe some reckless purple fuck named Lucien) into a great endless space like the one Caleb felt, but without the beacon there to anchor and guide it, and there was nothing there for it? If, without the beacon, the ritual meant to go with it just sent the soul somewhereā¦ empty?
And maybe that would be the kind of terrifying, traumatic thing that would make a person repress an entire lifeās worth of memories just to forget about it. Or maybe the emptiness of the void would seep into that soul and hollow it out so there were no memories left to repress. Or maybe the soul would get a little too lost without the beaconās guidance, and one of those other selves would find its way back to the body instead. Maybe that self would prefer to be called Molly.
