#in a way it feels very fitting that bells hells didn’t manage to permanently banish delilah

[nellasbookplanet]

With Marisha mentioning on last 4SD that Laudna went to that dinner with the Briarwoods thinking it might be her in to leave Whitestone and go study/train her magic abilities, I wonder how much this early trauma has impacted how she talks, or rather doesn’t talk, about being a sorcerer.

Because Laudna doesn’t really talk about what it was like growing up as the only sorcerer in town with abilities she didn’t understand, nor does she seek to learn more about them now (but she wants to give Imogen all that she never had, and the first thing they try to do in the campaign is figure out Imogen's magic). She may talk about her death, sometimes almost flippantly, but not about how it feels knowing that it was her magic, that one part of her that made her special, that she wanted to use to get out of her simple life, that made Delilah choose her as her undead puppet, or the inverse in knowing that if it wasn’t for said magic dooming her, she would just be dead-dead, like the rest of the people in that tree.

And I wonder, is part of Laudna scared to explore her own abilities and self? Is it part of her compartmentalization, where doing so would force her to face a part of her own trauma that she’s been trying to ignore? Did dying trying to reach for something Bigger ironically remove the magic from it all, reduce her sorcerer abilities to just another thing that was used take control of her life away from her? Does leaving herself in the dark feel like taking part of that control back?