Vote withheld for now, but speculating about things we can't know yet:
- The "purple/blue" i.e. "shard" faction is the one using strange beasts (like the gargantuan bat and the four-legged skeletons we saw now), yet opposing soldiers around the remains of the beasts are the ones showing signs of having been exposed to supernatural heat and/or fire.
- This could mean that the "shard" faction is, somewhat counter-intuitively (if we stick to simple color symbolism in our interpretation of the arcane), the one using fire/heat magic. Of course, the blue flames could just be really hot magical flames and everything is in order; or the "red/orange/yellow" faction could also use fire/heat magic, just with a different color (and power source?) - it doesn't have to be faction exclusive, after all.
- The reason I'm nitpicking about this is my theory about them centipedes having been fried by magic - and if we're only seeing evidence of the "shard" faction using fire/heat magic, that could mean the centipedes weren't fried by latent 3rd House defenses, but by something belonging to the "shard" faction. This would be... interesting, considering we're at war with the centipede lovers.
- Another detail to consider: the centipede lovers have facial tattoos that
could be of Avarlos origin, and they were wearing red uniforms. Red, as in the color of the "red/orange/yellow" faction, which was the one in charge of the lovely fortress we're now exploring. I hope that's just a coincidence and me seeing patterns where there are none (forgot the name of that phenomenon), because otherwise we would be basing our defense against the centipede lovers on a fortress they are somehow related to.
- Sure, it could be that all magic uses the same language (like Draconic in some D&D versions), and it could be that "red/orange/yellow" mages also use fire/heat, and that 3rd house defenses detect all magic (talking about the centipedes now) as hostile - but why haven't those imagined defenses reacted to our shard then?
- Since Avarlos are said to have fallen in a single night, let's assume there was some kind of a magical cataclysm involved (empires do sometimes just fizzle out, but magical empires are another story). Could the centipede lovers be some kind of corrupted remains of the "red/orange/yellow" faction? Do the 3rd house defenses only react to "corrupted" magic, regardless of faction (color), and have fried the centipedes as such?
- And let's not forget that the centipede lovers could be using red purely by accident, since sometimes a color is just a color
- When that unnatural darkness and cold incident occurred, the sky briefly turned violet if I remember - yet, the hostile shadow beasts didn't show any signs of blue and purple flames. Was it caused by some corrupted remnant of the "shard" faction? Was Avarlos magic the reason for the shard to awake, or is all arcane magic essentially the same?
- Why am I getting so stuck up on colors and color schemes?