Myfanwy’s mind-control ability

Myfanwy’s mind-control ability is the power to disrupt or seize control of another person’s body. It first manifests through skin contact and pain, but later Myfanwy can exert control without touching her target. The ability makes the body both her field of perception and an instrument of force: she can immobilize individuals, interfere with their senses and movement, and subtly direct a crowd. Yet it is not a simple extension of will. Severe pain can trigger it unconsciously, and intense feeling can make it flare, leaving Myfanwy to negotiate the risks of a power that can protect her, threaten others, or escape her control.

First Manifestation and Physical Contact

The former Myfanwy explains that the power first appeared when she was nine. After falling from a tree and driving a sharp branch into her leg, she was taken to hospital in a tracksuit. Her parents apparently avoided touching her bare skin during the journey. At the hospital, a doctor brushed against her exposed skin and immediately lost control of his legs, falling and screaming. When another hospital worker touched her, that person lost her sight. The first recorded manifestation thus affected different bodily functions in different people, and made accidental contact dangerous even in a setting where others were trying to provide care.

The injury and the ability’s onset were bound together by pain. In a letter to her successor, the former Myfanwy assumes that the new Myfanwy has touched someone and disrupted their bodily control, reasoning that this would explain her choice of a particular box. She warns that unconscious activation takes a great deal of pain and hopes that nothing inside the successor has been broken or ruptured. The account establishes an important limit: the gift is not necessarily called up deliberately, but may be triggered by severe physical distress.

From Touch to Remote Control

After her powers change, Myfanwy can seize control of people without touching them. When Ingrid asks whether a man had discovered her memory loss, Myfanwy reacts by clamping down on Ingrid’s body and leaving only voice, sight, and hearing available. She then reminds Ingrid that she had made a man stab himself with a knife in front of the Court. The example serves both as a demonstration of the ability’s reach and as a threat: Myfanwy deliberately puts steel into her voice so Ingrid understands that she too could be made to harm herself. Ingrid’s muscles are frozen during the exchange, while she remains outwardly composed. The scene sets Myfanwy’s capacity for physical domination against the ordinary social poise of a conversation.

The power can also extend beyond a single target. At a club with Bronwyn and her friends, Myfanwy uses it to part the dancing crowd in front of her and let it close behind her as she walks to the bar. Those around her move without realizing that she has directed them. She briefly surveys the crowd through the sensory patterns she can perceive, including beating hearts and breathing lungs, so the ability combines bodily awareness with the capacity to alter movement. When she loses concentration after drinking, a man jostles her; the lapse places her face-to-face with Bishop Alrich, whom she fears may be the traitor trying to kill her.

Coercion, Threat, and Restraint

At the club, Myfanwy’s control becomes part of a contest with a dangerous stranger who threatens the women around her. She freezes his joints and warns that she could make him pluck out his own eyes with his thumbnails. When he gestures toward Bronwyn and her friends, she tightens her mental grip around his lungs. The threat works as an assertion of power, but it does not resolve the danger: the man continues to use the women as leverage, and Myfanwy cannot safely bind the moving dancers surrounding them. Her awareness of the crowd is not enough to guarantee control when Bronwyn and the others are in the way and Myfanwy is affected by a drink containing six kinds of vodka.

The encounter exposes the difference between being able to dominate one body and being able to control a whole situation. Myfanwy can immobilize the man, but she has to weigh that action against the risk to Bronwyn and her friends. Her power gives her a means to resist coercion, not an effortless escape from it. In another confrontation, she threatens a Belgian Grafter over the phone, promising to seize control of his body and force him to tear out his own guts if he moves against her family. The threat is a response to a direct danger to Bronwyn, and shows Myfanwy using the prospect of bodily control as a deterrent even when she is not physically present with her target.

Involuntary Flare and Bodily Connection

The power is not limited to deliberate commands. When Myfanwy is weak and asks Ingrid to help her to the office, Ingrid reaches out to support her. Myfanwy’s ability then surges through Ingrid: Ingrid’s muscles tense and abruptly relax, and for a moment she sees herself through Myfanwy’s eyes. Her lips burn and pain tears through her head before the experience snaps back. Myfanwy apologizes, but Ingrid reassures her. The contact turns assistance into an involuntary crossing of bodily boundaries, showing that even an ordinary act of support can expose someone else to the power.

A different kind of flare accompanies Myfanwy’s reunion with Bronwyn. When the sisters embrace, Myfanwy feels her abilities intensify as if fuel had been poured onto a fire. She senses their genetic ties and sees her own patterns reflected, to a degree, in Bronwyn. The narration connects this bodily recognition to Myfanwy’s struggle over identity: much of Thomas’s life feels inherited, but the sister is hers as well as the former owner’s, and the body belongs to the present Myfanwy too. The reunion helps her relax into a self she can claim. In this scene, power is not only an instrument for overriding another person; its intensification accompanies recognition of kinship and a newly felt relation to her own body.

Change, Secrecy, and Consequences

Myfanwy’s growing command of the ability does not settle the question of who she is or what others know. During a later debriefing, she deliberately avoids admitting that she has lost her memory, describing events in a way that leaves the Court without a full account and keeping the memory loss unmentioned. Her ability is part of this changed position: Ingrid has heard that Myfanwy can now take control of people without touching them, but did not witness the Court incident because she was choking and flailing in a cloud produced by Bishop Grantchester. The gap between rumor, direct observation, and Myfanwy’s own disclosure makes the power a matter of knowledge and threat as well as action.

Across these episodes, the ability changes from a contact-triggered manifestation associated with a childhood injury into a remote and versatile form of bodily control. It can disable a person, compel self-harm, threaten an attacker, or quietly redirect a crowd; it can also flare during pain, assistance, or emotional recognition. Its significance lies in that tension. Myfanwy gains practical agency through a power that acts on other people’s bodies, but the power’s involuntary surges and the dangers surrounding those she protects prevent control from becoming absolute. The story’s treatment of it keeps agency and vulnerability in the same frame: the body is something Myfanwy can command, something others can threaten, and a source of identity that she must come to inhabit as her own.