THE WINTER LONG open thread!

And on a tangential note - is it just me, or is anyone else wondering if somehow, in some way, August isn't October's half-sister, but in fact is October herself? (Or the other way around, more accurately). Not sure how this would work yet, and just a hunch based on a bunch of random observations, but....Simon made it clear that Amandine was as obsessed with finding or regaining their daughter as he was. They just took extremely different views of how to go about that. Add to that the way Evening almost seemed to go back and forth as to whether she viewed Toby as mortal, a changeling, or full Faerie. Sometimes she was saying Toby was one thing, sometimes the other, but there was a definite thread of 'just how mortal are you, Toby, if at all' in there. Something that was supported by a couple of things said by other characters throughout the narrative too. And also Amandine's insistence that Sylvester leave her alone while she raised Toby with Toby's human father, that she wasn't to be interfered with until she was ready to come back to Faerie on her own terms....

Fact is, we don't really have any idea of what Amandine and Toby are actually capable of, and neither do most of the other characters I think. Plenty of characters remember Amandine being pregnant with Toby, Evening makes a point of saying she was at Toby's christening herself....but what if August did die, and Amandine somehow used her magic to retain the essence of August's blood and put it into her new unborn child? I'm not sure how that would work yet exactly, but I feel like maybe there's something there, like Toby was somehow meant to be August reborn, like while pregnant with her Amandine altered her blood (and blood magic according to this book is the magic of memory and theft) and mixed the essence of her lost child into her new one?