Guild Wars 2

I was waiting to see if someone else would post this on the forums and so far I don’t think I’ve seen it discussed. In the final instance, Prosperity’s Mystery, there is a paper written by Snaff. I think a lot of players miss it because it’s not required reading to progress the instance (seriously guys, there is a lot of stuff in that room, if you haven’t spent some time in there, poke around a bit).

“A Treatise on the Mental Puppeteering of Golems” by Snaff.

Some scholars theorize that magic flows through all things, that we swim in magic as fish swim in water, or as we ourselves live in air. This magic is said to ebb and flow via currents called ley lines.

Magic infuses everything in the world. The building blocks of reality are held together by magic. With the right connectors, manipulating magical elements with the mind becomes possible.

The mind is a powerful and fragile quantity in the world equation and the Eternal Alchemy. It can move mountains, or it can be shattered like glass.

My research has found a thread between magic and the mind. The two are linked. Where there is one, there must also be the other. The igniter is belief.

There are several references in Prosperity to an exposed ley line somewhere in the mine. Scarlet was looking into it, one of the miners in town mentions it and another miner in the mine talks about it. So there seems to be unusual exposure to ley line magic in Prosperity (unlike in Lion’s Arch where it was buried deep).

I don’t think Scarlet’s exposure to ley lines triggered her behaviour – she was defiant of the Pale Tree from birth, rejecting her mender’s aid and forging her own path. It wasn’t until she interacted with Omadd’s device that she began to change so considerably.

I think there is some weight to the idea that Aerin could have changed due to proximity to the ley line in Prosperity. Snaff’s paper seems to explore connections between magic and the mind, and I think Angel did an interview a long time ago where she talked about secret mesmer techniques for delving into the minds of others, people think Aerin’s mind was manipulated in some way. Snaff’s paper talks about controlling golems with magic, but if magic is connected to the mind, is it a stretch to control a human (or sylvari) mind with magic? For the record, Angel was the one who worked on the Prosperity’s Mystery instance (revealed in the livestream).

Also note that the pages that (presumably) the Master of Peace (un)intentionally left as a trail for us to track him down, cover mind magic as well. I think it’s also implied the Master of Peace is the author.

11 Season of the Scion 1320

They forged an alliance with her and let her into their minds. They guarded her legacy for as long as they could, but sadly, their race was not to live forever. Destiny decided otherwise, and thus the torch was passed to my ancestors. We hid ourselves away for hundreds of years, helping her as we could and keeping her secrets.

Read the full short story these pages come from on the wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Short_Story:_The_Trek_of_the_Zephyrites

So we have a dragon champion who was entering the minds of her dwarven followers, and the Zephyrites who “guarded her legacy” and were “keeping her secrets” after the dwarfs transformed. The Zephyrites also harness Glint’s powers in the form of the aspects – but they have a secret, is it possible there are other powers of Glint’s they can use that we don’t know about? Glint also had the power of prophecy (the Flameseeker Prophecies come from her don’t they?).

We’ve seen Scarlet influenced by the entity and now we’ve seen Aerin change from a Pale Tree loving sylvari to a defiant, seemingly crazy sylvari similar to Scarlet. We have a new paper covering magic’s relationship to the mind, a dragon champion that enters the mind of her followers and the Zephyrites who guard Glint’s legacy, keep her secrets, and use at least some of her powers.

Honourable Mention: Kasmeer’s “gift” to tell if someone is lieing. Sounds like it could be more than posture reading (come on, the Zephyrite was dieing, her posture would read “This sucks, I’m going to die! Ouch it hurts…” – it’d be like taking a lie detector test while going through an anxiety attack).

I think Scarlet’s case can be easily explained. Until she entered Omadd’s device, she had the protection of the Dream. Once inside the device, she lost that protection. Similarly, with Aerin, he lacked the protection of the Dream because he was soundless.

But in the end it was the Pale Tree herself that was the final barrier protecting Caera. It was only when she pushed past her, that she lost her mind.

In contrast, the Soundless might block themselves off from the Dream, but it’s also stated that the Pale Tree can still contact them should she want to. I think it’s questionable that being Soundless immediately removes any form of protection from you.

Whatever the Master of Peace did to Aerin broke his mind, not becoming Soundless. The whole mantra is a red herring imo.

But why would a paper exploring the links between magic and the mind be found in Scarlet’s room?

Was Scarlet trying to figure out how the entity got into her own mind so she could somehow protect herself or undo it?

Was she trying to figure out how to control the mind of an Elder Dragon?

Some people think the entity that messed with Scarlet’s mind was Mordremoth, but even if it was, she didn’t show the traditional signs of dragon corruption. If Scarlet wasn’t corrupted, if Aerin wasn’t corrupted, what did happen to their minds? Is it related to Snaff’s paper?

I think the purpose of Snaff’s paper in Scarlet’s room was to hint that exposure to high amounts of magic could potentially effect the mind, and to in turn hint that Scarlet’s intelligence came from exposure to the ley line. See here.

My problem with your post over there is that Scarlet explicitly become Scarlet after entering Omadd’s device. Ceara enters, Scarlet exits. When she arrives at Prosperity she is already Scarlet (aka “corrupted”). Omadd’s device strips away her mind’s protection, and that’s when she encounters the Entity and sees the “Eternal Alchemy”.

By the time Ceara becomes Scarlet (before she arrives at Prosperity) she has studied at the asuran colleges, she has created the steam creatures, she has studied under a blacksmith, weaponsmith, hylek alchemists and Omadd, she saw the “Eternal Alchemy”. She was an established genius before ever reaching Prosperity, I don’t think her exposure to ley lines there made her one, she was already very accomplished before that.

Actually, to link to yet another one of my own posts, it seems that while she didn’t rent her room in Prosperity until she was Scarlet Briar, from the tone of the “What could it be?” note it seems that the initial discovery was made while she was still Ceara. The way that Toska talks about her, as well, seems to suggest that the conversation happened with a much less dark incarnation of her character.

Snaff’s book might be hinting at bigger things to come, but it’s right next to Omadd’s journal, which in turn almost explicitly says that he’s drawing on those ideas of Snaff in the concept of his device. I think that the book is just there to explain why Omadd’s device worked- the idea that you can somehow “open the mind” and view all of reality sounds a lot less crazy with the basis that the mind is inextricably linked to the fundamental force of reality.

There are two books next to other suggesting that (1) by connecting magic (ley lines) to thought you can tap into the eternal alchemy and (2) Scarlet set the controls of Omadd’s machine and came out seeing the eternal alchemy. My guess would be that she somehow opened her mind up to the flow of magic through the ley lines using Omadd’s machine. We know an elder dragon lives at the end of the ley lines, so perhaps the line connected the dragon to Scarlet as well.

DarcShriek.5829:

I think Scarlet’s case can be easily explained. Until she entered Omadd’s device, she had the protection of the Dream. Once inside the device, she lost that protection. Similarly, with Aerin, he lacked the protection of the Dream because he was soundless.

This may not be so. Per the discussion in this thread and my calculations on her timeline, it seems that Scarlet encountered the entity (known to be from 1321 to 1323 AE) first several years before entering the machine. So she still had the connections to the Dream at that point.

So the Dream isn’t offering protection. There are no barriers that introduced the entity to Ceara. It might have allowed the entity to get further into her, but it didn’t prevent it.

I greatly fear that if mind and magic are linked, we’ll end up with a Scarlet Elder Dragon…and such a plot twist would be most unfortunate.

Tamias.7059:

Actually, to link to yet another one of my own posts, it seems that while she didn’t rent her room in Prosperity until she was Scarlet Briar, from the tone of the “What could it be?” note it seems that the initial discovery was made while she was still Ceara. The way that Toska talks about her, as well, seems to suggest that the conversation happened with a much less dark incarnation of her character.

The townsfolk in Prosperity make note of her “hair”.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

DarcShriek.5829:

I think Scarlet’s case can be easily explained. Until she entered Omadd’s device, she had the protection of the Dream. Once inside the device, she lost that protection. Similarly, with Aerin, he lacked the protection of the Dream because he was soundless.

This may not be so. Per the discussion in this thread and my calculations on her timeline, it seems that Scarlet encountered the entity (known to be from 1321 to 1323 AE) first several years before entering the machine. So she still had the connections to the Dream at that point.

So the Dream isn’t offering protection. There are no barriers that introduced the entity to Ceara. It might have allowed the entity to get further into her, but it didn’t prevent it.

Up until Ceara entered Omadd’s device, the holograms sounded normal. Upon seperating from the dream in the device, the hologram’s voice changes. This is a good indication that the dream was protecting her.

I do not know if anybody noticed, but there is an interesting thing that Aerin sasys after the first encounter in “Cornered”:
“Unhappy times. Unhappy. Must find the master. Yes you are right. Must not let them stop me”.
It looks like he is speaking to someone, or something else. Maybe the “entity”?

Morkel.2039:

I do not know if anybody noticed, but there is an interesting thing that Aerin sasys after the first encounter in “Cornered”:
“Unhappy times. Unhappy. Must find the master. Yes you are right. Must not let them stop me”.
It looks like he is speaking to someone, or something else. Maybe the “entity”?

In the instance ‘A Study In Scarlet’, Scarlet was shown directly speaking to the entity that drove her insane, telling it to get out of her head.

I think you may be on to something, sir.

DarcShriek.5829:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

DarcShriek.5829:

I think Scarlet’s case can be easily explained. Until she entered Omadd’s device, she had the protection of the Dream. Once inside the device, she lost that protection. Similarly, with Aerin, he lacked the protection of the Dream because he was soundless.

This may not be so. Per the discussion in this thread and my calculations on her timeline, it seems that Scarlet encountered the entity (known to be from 1321 to 1323 AE) first several years before entering the machine. So she still had the connections to the Dream at that point.

So the Dream isn’t offering protection. There are no barriers that introduced the entity to Ceara. It might have allowed the entity to get further into her, but it didn’t prevent it.

Up until Ceara entered Omadd’s device, the holograms sounded normal. Upon seperating from the dream in the device, the hologram’s voice changes. This is a good indication that the dream was protecting her.

But she intereacted with the entity before entering the device by 3 years as I pointed out.

The device did alter her, but the entity was with her beforehand. Hence “what was in there was only that she took in with her”.

Unless we take the t-shirt that apparently dates Scarlet’s life as 1304-1327 AE as canon, which means she is in fact older than the Secondborn by 4 years, and would put her entering the machine in 1319 or 1320 AE, thus before the journal, but then we hit the whole “written versus not written” and the voice change issue. It’s much cleaner and less contradictory to ignore that silly stupid propaganda of a t-shirt.

There are three new books in the priory and one dates Scarlet 1304-1327 (it’s canon).

The holo recording device seems to be damaged right after Omadd machine. I don’t take the voice change as corruption, but her appearance/magic change interferes with the sorrounding area, just like the miner get’s a headache or the whole Zephyrite ship fell down comming close to the new area.

So….

Scarlet is older than the Secondborn, but younger than the Firstborn then.

Yeah………………………………….

Well, unless they decided to retcon Ree’s 3+ mentions of saying the Secondborn are 6 or 7 years younger than the Firstborn because, in quite all honesty, that didn’t make much sense when we take into consideration that Malomedies wasn’t returned after the First Asuran Contact until Cadeyrn was around. So I guess that’s the case.

Since the chances of devs reading this is likely, can we get some clarification on this conundrum?

If Ree’s multiple statements in interviews and the such about the Secondborn’s time of birth does end up wrong, then it throws the entire above calculations into the dumpster – but on the other hand, knowing when Ceara was born then gives way into proper timeline-ing her life via using 1304 as the base and going across What Scarlet Saw and the journals.

Edit: Found the three books.

The Waypoint one is interesting, and obviously is a foreshadowing. The ley line one is also obvious foreshadowing.

But what’s more interesting of the ley line one is this line:

“In 1316, a sylvari named Ceara (alias Scarlet Briar) found proof.” Which hints to her time in Prosperity to being 1316. Buuuut… this would put her comment of being 16 cycles old meaning she was born in 1300… sigh all sorts of clusterkitten confusion in lore.

The one on Scarlet Briar doesn’t make sense on two accounts. Along with the date of her birth, as noted above, there is her cycle. “Cycle of Day” – aka Cycle of Noon. These are warriors typically, not thinkers. One would suspect Dawn or Dusk (diplomats and scholars respectively). Looks like Scarlet’s trying to break all the barriers of commonality. >.>

Yeah….

Edit2: There’s actually four new books in the Priory.

The fourth one is written by Ogden, titled “A Dragon Primer” and it bulletpoints known facts about Elder Dragons. But nothing that isn’t known to players who’ve paid enough attention.

The proof for the ley lines doesn’t necessarily have to come from prosperity. It could have been discovered elsewhere. Prosperity may simply have been discovered later to have better access to ley lines.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

DarcShriek.5829:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

DarcShriek.5829:

I think Scarlet’s case can be easily explained. Until she entered Omadd’s device, she had the protection of the Dream. Once inside the device, she lost that protection. Similarly, with Aerin, he lacked the protection of the Dream because he was soundless.

This may not be so. Per the discussion in this thread and my calculations on her timeline, it seems that Scarlet encountered the entity (known to be from 1321 to 1323 AE) first several years before entering the machine. So she still had the connections to the Dream at that point.

So the Dream isn’t offering protection. There are no barriers that introduced the entity to Ceara. It might have allowed the entity to get further into her, but it didn’t prevent it.

Up until Ceara entered Omadd’s device, the holograms sounded normal. Upon seperating from the dream in the device, the hologram’s voice changes. This is a good indication that the dream was protecting her.

But she intereacted with the entity before entering the device by 3 years as I pointed out.

The device did alter her, but the entity was with her beforehand. Hence “what was in there was only that she took in with her”.

Unless we take the t-shirt that apparently dates Scarlet’s life as 1304-1327 AE as canon, which means she is in fact older than the Secondborn by 4 years, and would put her entering the machine in 1319 or 1320 AE, thus before the journal, but then we hit the whole “written versus not written” and the voice change issue. It’s much cleaner and less contradictory to ignore that silly stupid propaganda of a t-shirt.

I never said she didn’t interact with the entity earlier, I only said the interactions were protected. Think of the dream as a mental condom.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

So….

Scarlet is older than the Secondborn, but younger than the Firstborn then.

Yeah………………………………….

I fan-icially dub Ceara, also known as Scarlet Briar, as the first First(and a half)born! Long may she reign! Oh wait…

Konig Des Todes.2086:

“In 1316, a sylvari named Ceara (alias Scarlet Briar) found proof.” Which hints to her time in Prosperity to being 1316. Buuuut… this would put her comment of being 16 cycles old meaning she was born in 1300… sigh all sorts of clusterkitten confusion in lore.

Does the day she arrives at Prosperity have to line up with the day she made the holo recording?

Konig Des Todes.2086:

DarcShriek.5829:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

DarcShriek.5829:

I think Scarlet’s case can be easily explained. Until she entered Omadd’s device, she had the protection of the Dream. Once inside the device, she lost that protection. Similarly, with Aerin, he lacked the protection of the Dream because he was soundless.

This may not be so. Per the discussion in this thread and my calculations on her timeline, it seems that Scarlet encountered the entity (known to be from 1321 to 1323 AE) first several years before entering the machine. So she still had the connections to the Dream at that point.

So the Dream isn’t offering protection. There are no barriers that introduced the entity to Ceara. It might have allowed the entity to get further into her, but it didn’t prevent it.

Up until Ceara entered Omadd’s device, the holograms sounded normal. Upon seperating from the dream in the device, the hologram’s voice changes. This is a good indication that the dream was protecting her.

But she intereacted with the entity before entering the device by 3 years as I pointed out.

The device did alter her, but the entity was with her beforehand. Hence “what was in there was only that she took in with her”.

Unless we take the t-shirt that apparently dates Scarlet’s life as 1304-1327 AE as canon, which means she is in fact older than the Secondborn by 4 years, and would put her entering the machine in 1319 or 1320 AE, thus before the journal, but then we hit the whole “written versus not written” and the voice change issue. It’s much cleaner and less contradictory to ignore that silly stupid propaganda of a t-shirt.

Just because she interacted with the entity before she stepped into the machine doesn’t mean she wasn’t protected. Maybe Mordy was able to contact her, but not take control/drive her insane until she cut herself off. You can still talk to someone through an electric fence, but you can’t get to them as long as the fence is there. Same basic principal probably applies here.

This handwritten notebook bears the stamp of Omadd, Scarlet’s last mentor.
“The device works on the principle that the mind is connected to magic, and therefore, if properly opened, one should be able to grasp the entire Eternal Alchemy as a bird views the landscape far below. My sylvari assistant will try it next. I am hopeful that she, with her innate connection to the sylvari Dream, will be a better subject than those who’ve gone before. I’ve grown rather fond of her and would hate to have her mind broken as well. I’ve tweaked and twiddled the settings as described below. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

Combined with Snaff’s paper on magic and the mind, could that finally explain how the Dream works? A sylvari all the way in Orr experiences something and at that moment that experience gets filed all the way back in the Grove via magical channels. The Dream uses the magic pathways to receive information from the minds all the sylvari across Tyria (possibly being more likely to remember a sylvari’s experience if it occurs close to a ley line, kinda like getting better download speeds for your internet). It was something we took for granted up till now (how does a sylvari’s memories or experiences get stored in the Pale Tree or the Dream) but now there seems to be some kind of lore that explains that.

Just like a sylvari can send information along those pathways, so can something like the entity try to send information to sylvari. Keep in mind, a sylvari’s ability to receive information is very strong before they are born. While they still exist in the Dream they have a lot of experiences, but once they are born and leave the Dream it becomes a one way thing, they don’t receive information from the Pale Tree or the Dream any more (unless physically there or meditating – like Trahearne in the Personal Story) but they still send information. What if they don’t lose the ability to receive information, it’s just sealed or guarded.

As Omadd’s paper suggests, sylvari minds might be particularly suited to do this – more so than other minds – because of their connection to the Dream. All minds have the potential to open up to magic pathways (perhaps rarely, which is why we see the legendary White Stag with access to the Dream, and the Pale Tree can send Trahearne and the PC into Dream Arah), but because the sylvari begin life with a strong connection to something like that, they are naturally better at it (or more susceptible depending on what’s waiting on the other side).

Given that the Dream was able to give Trahearne fairly accurate visions of the future (Dream Arah and its events are remarkably like real Arah and its events), it might even be related to what Glint did with her prophecy powers.

It seems that ley lines are like magic plot-string that can hold anything together, no matter how disconnected.