#nona speculation

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

What does Alecto want?

This is something I thought about while I wrote that post about Gideon's immortality.

When people speak about Alecto the book and Alecto the character, there is often an assumption that Alecto wants revenge for John turning her into a Barbie, and that our main characters want to kill God.

I'm not going to get too much into what I think the endgame might be for Jod (I'll leave it for another day) but I have some observations about Alecto!

First, people think Alecto wants revenge for the initial act of ripping her soul out and stuffing it in a Barbie body. I'm honestly not so sure that's her main concern!

Initially, Alecto's main fear is dying:

This is presumably what frightened her when in pain as Gaia, and what frightened her here, starting her life with John at the end of the world.

Of course, in the middle, there's her actual murder, and how she felt about it:

This fragment is so interesting. Most of this chapter the dialogue is in quotation marks, indicating it's not the memory of John and Alecto but current dialogue between John and Harrowhark.

John tells Harrow what happened. He is the one who asks her if she remembers what Alecto said. She (Harrowhark) said “What else did I say?”. And when Harrow says “I still love you”, Jod remembers that Alecto was also willing to love him despite what he'd done.

But Harrow is left without the answer to one question. “Where did you put the people? Where did they go?”

After this paragraph, she will say there are things she doesn't understand:

Apparently Alecto's memory isn't fully accessible, or she can't know Alecto's thought process, or there's bits of her memory gone for other reasons, whether it's John's intervention (unlikely, given how much incriminating stuff Alecto does remember) or because that's what was most traumatic to her and—unlike John's tale of apocalypse—nobody later reminded her. (Diegetically, of course, Tamsyn is simply saving that reveal for Harrow's arc in Hell.)

In any case: after being told the entire story about being killed and turned into a Barbie, Harrowhark still says “I want to understand why she was angry”. And that's seemingly tied to why John was terrified.

And the text directly relates that to the missing population of the Earth.

There are three things that very nearly make Nona fully recover the memory of who she was. One is when Pyrrha very nearly says her name, and Nona doesn't want to hear it. Later she doesn't seem to be lucid enough to react to Ianthe saying it, but she does react to this final line: Ianthe yelling “John loves Alecto!”. In the meantime, however, there's one more thing that shakes Nona deeply enough she has an actual heart attack:

And it's the sight of the Tower that makes Nona lose the will to live:

She also gets a couple passages where the sight of devils touches some deep, frightening memory. And we are given one last clue:

The River is dead.

We knew as early as HtN that the River is broken in some way. Its waters are described as brackish, salty, dirty, full of ghosts represented as rotting corpses. It doesn't seem to flow anywhere as rivers should. House religion says the dead wait as mad ghosts until John conducts his Second Resurrection. John of course has planted House theology with his idea to conduct “a flood” at some point and start over (“empty is just another word for clean”, etc.), once his revenge is done. He needs souls to not move on, in order to do that. We know through Abigail and Dulcinea that there is another shore, a Beyond that they've managed to exceptionally reach.

Alecto seems upset, above all, by what happened to the River, and that it remains unfixed.

Alecto states that she no longer fears death. She has experienced it (“I died once… no, twice”, and that's before her brief tenure as Nona).

She might be ready to leave John behind and move on, but.

What if she can't move on?

By which I mean: what if she—a Resurrection Beast, intimately acquainted with the spiritual dimension that is the River—what if she knows that she could never cross it as it is now, if she were to die? What if she knows that she would be absorbed by the stoma in the River's current condition, or float around insane forever? What if the sum of all necromantic transgression is that Jod committed ecocide on the afterlife and true death is no longer possible?

What if she needs the River to be healed in order to die?

To conclude, two other tidbits:

1. When Nona, trying not to engage with her Alecto consciousness, briefly considers just giving up and dying, she says:

2. Palamedes speaks of the Beyond (after briefly witnessing Dulcinea as she is there in TUG) right before he describes Paul as an end and a beginning. I don't think this is accidental?

[cicadascribbles]

Wait hang on you guys, you know when Nona dies in Ntn how her body and organs split at the seams and her skin kinda starts to slough away? That’s like strikingly similar to what happens to people with acute radiation poisoning i.e. nuclear weapons. Irradiated soul Alecto causing Harrow’s body to fall apart?

[elfieafterdark]

Does anyone else wonder if we're ever going to get any more information on the resurrection beasts?

They're so fascinating, and we know so tantalizingly little about them, and there's so many loose ends that already need to be addressed in Alecto the Ninth.

What with the devils, the actual plot, Alecto, the rebels, Harrow's quest, and all the romance to deal with... I imagine they might get left behind.

But I'd love to know more.

[tooturtly]

Did John give Alecto a uterus? (Discussion?)

I’m going back and forth on this personally.

We know that lyctors and necromancers as a whole have fertility issues due to the fact that they’re constantly feeding on their own thalergy. John we know at the very least is fertile. But fertility doesn’t equal body parts possessed. Alecto could be infertile and still have a uterus.

However, John made Alecto’s body, so it entirely depends on wether or not his idea of a Hollywood hair Barbie includes a uterus or not. Maybe he chose to keep the weirdly vaginalless appearance. He also compares her to Galatea and Frankenstein’s Monster, the latter is notably made with all the reproductive parts because Victor worries about him reproducing.

I’m however going to posit a crack theory, which is that Alecto has multiple sets of reproductive organs. This is because in Nona he says he made her “look like a Renaissance angel…I made you Adam and Eve…”(409). She looks like an angel, but IS both Adam AND Eve. But this is just a pet theory. It could be entirely metaphor about his first creation being female presenting. *shrug* Also because I think Alecto (the literal earth, the home of all reproduction) should get extra parts to create, as is her right.

This same logic also emphasizes the absolute tragedy of John having potentially reduced the entire fucking earth to a sterile shell.

[chilly-weirdo-in-a-tomb]

Alecto Prediction #11

We’ve seen through Corona that when people from the Houses join Blood of Eden, they receive a new Edenite name. We aren’t told who gave her the name Crown Him with Many Crowns in NTN, but I believe that we will find out that it was Pash. It makes sense if we think about which biblical figure Pash correlates to: John the Baptist. In baptism, a person is christened with a name, just like Corona was christened Crown. But John the Baptist is called the Baptist not just for baptizing the average Tom, Dick, and Harry. He also baptized Jesus. And we have a perfectly good lesbian Jesus ready in the wings to ask to be baptized.

This is why I believe that Gideon/Kiriona will join BoE and Pash will give her a new name.

[awakeindeath]

Given how things are going, with each book in TLT having an increasingly unreliable narrator, i can only assume that Muir will throw us a curveball and have the fourth book will be seemingly normal.

At least until the last chapter, where we will discover that, oh no, what we thought was straightforward first person narration by, Alecto, has in fact been a retroactive second person fourth-dimensional narration by Ianthe.

[mayasaura]

I'm very tentively guessing right now that Harrow's conversation with John happens before the other events of Nona the Ninth, and when she walks out at the end it's to do some more metaphysical snooping about the Resurrection. In which case the tiny section Tamsyn read for us from the first chapter of Alecto makes me think she might be heading for the Stoma.

Wouldn't it be so fucking funny if the first person she runs into there is Augustine?? She probably has no idea Mercy's dead, or that the Mithraeum has been destroyed. Last time we saw her, she didn't even know for sure if Gideon still existed. Imagine if she has to hear about that from Augustine. Imagine if he just. Neglects to tell her.

[jackayline]

my open locked tomb questions *spoilers*

the tomb is open and these questions are too! Can you help me answer them or speculate some wacky theories?

The River 

What exactly happened to the River at the end of Nona and why? What is the tower?

Where are the people who disappeared into the stoma? (Augustine, Ulysses...) What exactly is hell, metaphysically?

What exactly IS the stoma?

Is the King over the River who Abigail mentions in HtN a different entity from Jod?

What happened to Mattias Nonias and Ortus after they went the fight the RB? Did they just go into the River? What happens when people go into the River though

Metaphysics of the First House and the Resurrection 

What exactly happened with everyone's memories? Why does Pyrrha remember some stuff e.g. Gideon's original name (she calls him G-- near the end of NtN) but Augustine and Mercy don't remember John's original eye color?

So Jod can't die unless killed by Alecto? Can he actually be killed by RBs or is it really just a sham?

Can Jod actually resurrect people now or does he need Alecto? I mean we've seen him basically resurrect Gideon Prime but was he technically still alive, just... in bits? Can Alecto resurrect without Jod?

Did Jod repopulate the Ninth like he promised Harrow? What happened these people?

It seems like the people who were going to repopulate the Ninth were like... being suspended in cryoanimation. Who are these people? Are they like, people got put into cryo right after the Resurrection?

Would Jod have just killed everyone after the trials at Canaan house if they hadn't died, ascended, or disappeared anyway? Is it possible he's tried to make new Lyctors before and he just disappears everyone after they fail?

What exactly would happen if Jod went to the First House?

Why can't you send or receive transmissions to/from the First House?

Stole the eyes of my soulmate (Lyctor things)

Why does Nona have golden eyes if Kiriona is a revenant? Is it because she has Alecto's soul?

Where is Gideon Nav's soul? Is it still in Harrow or in Gideon's revenant body?

Was Nona three people in one body?

What exactly happened to Anastasia and Samael? What kind of Lyctorhood did they achieve?

Paul???? So many Paul questions, what is Paul like? Like what is their inner experience of selfhood like? Was Paul always there since Pal entered Cam's body?

House Histories

Why is Canaan house like that? Like it was built as a replica--a replica of what? Or was it more like an homage to Earth? How much of pre-Resurrection like... culture and history was kept?

Who founded the 7th house if Cyth and Loveday were already of the 7th pre-Lyctor? 

Resurrection beasts & Alecto

Did Harrow just hallucinate the Body or did Alecto somehow impart a fragment of her soul when Harrow was a child? I think it's really just that Harrow hallucinated the body...

Why were Alecto's eyes like that (creepy black all the way around)? Is it just Aesthetic?

Inconsistent resurrection beast count?

Unseen character dynamics

What were Ulysses and Titania like, exactly?

What exactly was the dynamic between Alfred and Cristabel? Like why were they a bad influence on each other?

Critical plot questions

How did Harrow get into Alecto's body? (My answer for this is that she travelled through the River instead of going back into her own body. But like... how did the body switch happen?)

How did Harrow's body (Nona) get to Cam+pal and Pyrrha? How did Pyrrha get to Cam+pal? Did I just miss something in NtN?

How did Gideon's body with Gideon's soul (?) which was in Harrow get to the Emperor? Because I thought BoE had Gideon's body? Was it that Gideon's soul DIDN'T get to the emperor but her body did?

What is the role of the Messenger? Who exactly is Aim?

What are the creepy monsters that invaded the Ninth and that Colum Asht turned into? Are they RB related? Heralds? Are they from the stoma? (I think it's the latter?)

What happened to the trillionaires? Are they actually out there or has Jod just been running from his own demons?

Are we ever going to see the Gang from school again?

[pancake-angst]

Listen. I am 90 percent positive we are still waiting on the Alecto the Ninth wedding, and also that it will be between some combination of Gideon and/or Ianthe and/or Harrow.

But also. John caught the bouquet at the last wedding ever. Sarpedon should start ring shopping

[susurra-el-arroyo-manso]

Finally convinced a friend to read The Locked Tomb, and the play-by-play of her read-through has been everything I wamted. I love the wild speculation & that she's coming to completely different conclusions than I did (if only until more information is doled out).

Ps. The boning in question in the first screenshot is of course the bone construct making its first appearance.

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

Hey, so I was just thinking.

About how Gideon's body didn't decay for months. Even though her soul was no longer in it. Because her body had limitless thalergy. Because it grew from God's sperm, which (like his blood) didn't decay in a Petri dish for weeks because every cell in his body is immortal even if away from him.

(I have questions about dandruff and body hair. If he sheds them. Maybe being a fountain of thalergy means he never sheds anything, every eyelash perfectly in place forever. Still, you'd expect some skin to flake out from sheer use? A lot of common house dust is human skin iirc. Unless… he's made his skin diamond-strong like Kiriona and we just didn't know because Harrow didn't notice and nobody can see Jod's magic anyway.)

Anyway, despite this… Kiriona looks dead? Did her body look dead when it was with BoE, or did it only look dead after Jod did whatever weirdness he had to do? Judith doesn't describe it, sadly, beyong saying it doesn't rot. So… were her body's tissues as freshly-dead, just caught in necro stasis at the exact time of death, therefore maybe easy to revive…?

Would Jod and Alecto's death render Gideon merely a mortal (provided someone fixes her heart and does away with the flesh construct trappings, so her soul can inhabit it normally)? Would, say, ripping Jod's soul out of his body (into Hell or somewhere else, like with that RB drawn into a black hole) mean his body stays alive but inert, therefore leaving Alecto and Gideon alive without them needing to die? (Though Alecto sounds like she's ready to die, if the River is restored or whatever, so I'm not saying this is the endgame—I'm not even a big believer in “they're gonna kill God” as an Alecto prediction.)

Speaking of—if the events of GtN had never taken place, would Gideon ever have… grown old? Would she simply have died a very old, very healthy woman, or would she have reached peak development and then sort-of stayed 25 forever, to the Ninth or the Cohort's growing bafflement?

@mayasaura @katakaluptastrophy opinions lol

[vengeful-horde-of-angry-ghosts]

You done fucked up, John. You taught Alecto how to die and Nona made her own peace with dying. It was the only thing she was ever afraid of.

[celestialhouses]

I'm v curious:

[elfieafterdark]

I'm trying a thing, we getting a happy ending and here's why.

Preamble

Okay, @locked-in-the-tomb has me thinking about this. So let me outline why as a writer, I believe we're getting a griddlehark ending.

Firstly, credentials. I have written over a million words, 70+ works worth of fan fiction over the last 2 and 1/2 to 3 years. Including some that got pretty popular. However I will admit that I am not classically trained, I have a computer science degree not an English degree so bear with my horrible layman way of describing these things.

Lastly, I could just be full of shit. This could just be a whole bunch of cope. Because by the tomb I am coping so hard for a satisfying ending.

Beginning

So let's talk about the ending of the locked tomb. And also the beginning. I find my best received works are the ones that don't trick people.

An example would be my fanfiction called There's No One Like You, it's the most popular one I've ever done, it is novel length, it's a combination of a high school drama with a mystery thriller.

And I very clearly telegraph what the mystery is in the very first chapter. I won't spoil it too much just in case someone wants to read it, but in the first chapter is a very clear hint of where the story is going.

It's classic setup, you set something up, you telegraphed that it has been set up, you let it hang there for a bit, and then you pay it off. That's how you create a satisfying element to a story.

Now I'm going to argue that the entirety of Gideon the Ninth is setup. The entire book is, at its core, about Gideon and Harrow coming to terms with how they really feel about each other. What is my proof for such a bold claim?

Well let me ask you a question, what did we all think when we realized that Harrow spent all the previous night burying bones just so Gideon couldn't escape? We all thought the same thing, who the fuck would do that? And, why the fuck would you do that? And then we all got it, ahh, these two are enemies to lovers. Gotcha.

And let me ask you another question about Gideon the Ninth. What is the one scene that sticks out to you the most? When you think of the book what's one of the first scenes that comes to mind?

The Pool Scene.

The pool scene is arguably the most important scene in the entirety of the book. It's the scene in which we get answers to most of this book's mysteries. Why did 200 children die in the 9th? Why didn't Gideon die? Why was Harrow so vicious to Gideon?

All of these questions are answered, The 200 children were murdered to create Harrow, Gideon didn't die because the nerve gas had no effect on her, Harrow was so vicious to Gideon because Gideon was a reminder of what Harrow is.

Notice how most of those mysteries have to do with Harrow and Gideon. Because whatever themes you can extract from the story,

I would argue that Gideon the Ninth is about their relationship. They both need to come to terms with the shitty lives they've had, and they need to come to terms with the fact that those shitty lives aren't their fault.

Gideon forgives Harrow, and all but explicitly declares her love for her. In that pool, and Harrow is so happy. It's the emotional crux of the story (heh)

And it's setup for the series

If you haven't noticed, this series is about two people. Everyone else is incidental to that story. The series is about Gideon and Harrow. It's about their relationship.

Gtn is about them actually coming to a mutual understanding and respect. The very instant the other is in danger all of the pretense is dropped and that goes both ways.

Htn is all about everybody and everything telling Harrow that she should give up and move on, and her resoundingly telling everyone to fuck off. It's about the sacrifice she made to save Gideon's soul.

Now I've only seen Harrow mentioned twice in Nona so far, and both of those times are her hanging out with who I suspect to be God? I don't know I don't want to analyze that too far. We haven't seen Gideon at all so I'm not going to talk too much about Nona.

But the pool scene very clearly sets up the endgame, and that end game is cemented by the letter Harrow writes to Gideon, knowing that Gideon survives being consumed.

One Flesh, One End. Aka, I love you. I've talked about how this phrase is really a declaration of endlessly devoted love before, but they come to terms with their relationship, they sleep in adjacent beds which is as close to sleeping in the same bed as you can literally get without doing it, and they fight like hell to save the other.

Subverting Expectations: the Devil's Writing Trick

It's a pretty compelling setup isn't it? Fate has cruelly ripped them apart, and neither of them is willing to accept that, to the point that Gideon willingly became a part of Harrow; not to mention the point that Harrow is willing to lobotomize herself to preserve Gideon's soul.

That's a big setup, with Gideon's death, we understand the emotional conflict for the rest of the series. A conflict that is only confirmed by literally every single page of Harrow the Ninth.

How are they gonna fix this and be together? Remove all the awesome world building, remove all the excellent supporting characters, remove all of the religious theming, carve away all of the gay shit; and I earnestly believe that's what you have left.

How are they going to fix this? How are they going to be together? These are the questions that keep us all coming back. These are the questions that have us chomping at the bit for Alecto.

Now imagine after all that setup, after all that telegraphing, imagine that the answer to this question was

"they don't fuck you."

Let me ask you all something? Is that a satisfying ending? Is pouring all of this effort into these characters who in turn pour all their efforts into saving each other worth it at all if they don't succeed in the end?

Now some people might say that there's a beauty in tragic endings. And there is. I just think most of the time they're cheap.

I think I speak for many people when I say we want a story where characters go through all sorts of Hell, get beat the fuck up, struggle mightily against impossible odds, and maybe they lose some stuff along the way; but then they triumph.

The setup in Gideon the Ninth, that is continued through Harrow and I suspect we'll also be present in Nona is that they're going to fight everything in order to be together.

And based on how Harrow blatantly refuses to look back at the end of Harrow? The obvious trajectory of those decisions and these character moments is that they're going to succeed.

They've come this far, they've defied death itself. I just can't see the books ending any other way. Any other ending is going to feel like muir is spitting in our faces.

You paid attention to all that foreshadowing? Go fuck yourself on an iron fence.

Like do you all see what I'm trying to say here? The setup is that they get together, and there better be a goddamn payoff otherwise I'm going to riot.

Anyway, I would apologize for the length of this but I had a lot of fun writing it. And that's all that really matters in the end.

Thanks y'all, more to come soon 💖

[tooturtly]

If Alecto’s body is made of John’s, what power does he have over her? Is that how he managed to entomb her in the first place? Because we know from the soup incident harrow was only able to get inside another Lyctor’s body with her own cells. So imagine John making her a body was not only an act of desperation but also ended up giving him even more control?

Can John sense Alecto? Is that how she knew how to find him in the epilogue? Is that how he put her to sleep? I have so many questions!

[chilly-weirdo-in-a-tomb]

Alecto Prediction #7

On the Ninth, there is a very specific face paint design that is only used when you’re gonna go fuck someone. Harrow wears this one day in front of Gideon. And the scene goes as thus:

Gideon: “huh. Never seen that design before. Lame.”

Harrow: “if you ever attended to your studies of the Ninth’s traditions, you would know that this, the Skull of the Penitent Taken to Church, has a very sacred and specific purpose.”

Gideon: “wow, so interesting. Maybe you go tell Paul about it and let me get back to polishing my sword.”

Paul, who recently read the Ninth’s new postulant hand book and has popped up out of nowhere: “it means she wants to fuck.”