#tlt theoryposting

[mellori]

I just can't shake the image in my head of Anastasia as a hyper-competent businesswoman (except the business is necromancy) with Samael as her hot young "personal assistant" type following her around fetching things she needs and getting her coffee (among, ahem, other things).

There's literally zero evidence for this mental image I've constructed of them, except that Jod killed Samael right fucking in front of her and still somehow assumed she cared so little about him that he trusted her to help him build not only literally the most holy and important tomb possible, but also the vault in which he planned to store his single source of power and immortality.

So as I was trying to reason out how the question of her loyalty never occurred to Jod, I guess I decided he just apologized for killing her assistant, offered to recommend some new hires and moved right on, totally missing the years long office romance they'd been carrying on.

[lockedtombbrainworms]

OK but, LOOK HOW MANY THINGS the soul permeability thing puts a new spin on! Loveday turned up to the First "looking like she wanted everyone shot", and Cytherea eventually ended up doing her level fucking best to actually shoot everyone (or stab them with big fuckoff bone tendrils, which is basically the same thing) How much of Pyrrha's dadmilf-ness is the fact she was always a bit Gender, and how much of it is ten thousand years of her soul and G1deon's mingling with one another? See also, that last post I reblogged about the two of them, I don't wanna steal any thunder from that so go read it. Was Mercy always interacting with John in the vaguely religious way we see in HtN? She was a staunch atheist before the resurrection, how much of the religious stuff being her chosen coping mechanism for the whole "ten thousand years of immortality at the head of a death magic empire" thing was just her, and how much was Cristabel's influence? I'm not an Augustine Rotator so I can't really think of anything that might have changed between him in the flashbacks and him in the present, but all the other lyctors we meet are on here so lemme try and come up with one. Something about the fact that his brother tried to mediate the big fight at the end of the flashbacks while he was telling John to "bum-rush the ships" - is Alfred's influence why he seems less, uh, bum-rush-y by the time he appears in HtN? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR JOHN AND ALECTO? WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR VARUN AND JUDITH? And echoing the sentiment everyone else is already coming in with: how much of this would've happened without the soul permeability thing? How much is just the fact that people change one another all the time? Can you even tell? Is there even a meaningful difference?

[lockedtombbrainworms]

Oh no yet more emotions about the duplicitous sluts...

Firstly, I think it's entirely possible G1deon could've figured out what the fuck was going on. If I'm honest, he's too clever not to, except I have a feeling Pyrrha was less "go]ing] underground, even from him" and more prodding G1d away from thinking about her.

Speaking candidly as someone who is actually sharing a body with several people (and who views G1d and Pyrrha as... if not a 1:1 map for DID, certainly a decent allegory for it), it is 100% possible for a sufficiently determined person living in your brain to make it so that every time you try to think about a certain thing, you experience a very strong mental "push" away from thinking about whatever the "thing" is. Most often, it's trauma, in my experience, but it can be a bit broader than that. In my case, before I had all this shit as well-figured-out as I did, one of the things I couldn't think about was the fact that I might not be the only one inhabiting my body, because someone in here found the idea of that utterly terrifying, and even non-consciously, they were able to deflect my thoughts away from thinking about that. That was a powerful enough effect that I knew and was friends with other plural systems for about six years before I realised that maybe "I" was one as well. As for whether Pyrrha could've pulled that shit off for ten thousand years? I honestly don't know - in my case, trying not to think about the plural shit was a maladaptive coping mechanism, but trying to stop your system host from thinking about being plural is a lot less maladaptive when there's at least some level of possibility that something horrendous will happen to one or both of you if the host figures it all out. We don't know enough about what happened with Anastasia and Samael to say for sure, but at least some of the lyctors might've come away from that with a very clear idea of how John would react in a situation where someone didn't consume their cavalier's soul entirely.

It's entirely possible Pyrrha didn't even realise she was doing it, most of it would've come while he was conscious and she wasn't, and a lot of it could've been subconscious. Of course the other possibility is that G1deon himself spent that myriad dealing with enough cognitive dissonance around the idea of Pyrrha being present that she didn't have to do anything to repress it herself. Would G1deon let himself think about something like that, something he knew he might have to keep from John? By the time the books take place he obviously doesn't care about keeping some secrets, what with the Wake thing, but "something else is going on with the lyctor process and maybe our cavaliers didn't have to die, and maybe you lied to us" is probably a bigger thing for him emotionally than "I'm banging one of your enemies".

Anyway he's far too tragic a character and I could make a pretty compelling argument for his character arc not quite being complete, so maybe we'll get more G1d in Alecto, or in a short story associated with either NTN or ATN, or something. I can hope.

Thinking about G1deon and Pyrrha on this fine morning. Like. Pyrrha implies that her necromancer wasn't aware that her soul was still around, but. He's not stupid. This man was an engineer who helped build spacefaring tech. I find it very hard to believe that over thousands of years, he experienced blackouts and gaps in his memory and didn't at least suspect that this was going on. Especially during his affair with Wake - there is no way she never dropped a comment even hinting at how there's sometimes another person inhabiting his body.

Imagine thinking your best friend and platonic (?) life partner is dead and gone, only to start suspecting your memory gaps and increasingly tenuous grasp on reality are really just her still being around - but before you can confirm or deny these suspicions, you just fucking die because none of your shitty siblings in lyctorhood thought it important enough to help you fight a goddamn RB.

[lockedtombbrainworms]

We still don't fully know how souls being anchored to bodies in TLT actually works, do we? Kiriona is able to pilot her body around despite it being lethally-injured, and Wake is able to possess Cytherea despite (presumably) a lethal injury there. Ianthe is also able to possess Babs' body, as is Palamedes, despite another lethal wound. All of those are chest wounds, notably.

On the other hand, a bullet to the head from Pyrrha frees Wake's soul from Cyth's body, possibly in a way Wake was unable to do on her own given how relieved she is at having it happen. Killing a person doesn't stop the demons possessing them, and nor does healing the injury the demons caused - Kiriona says you have to cut them up and burn them. That's "spirit shit" too, apparently. Lethal injuries (including a bullet to the head) don't expel Nona's soul from Harrow's body. Presumably she's special, being, y'know, The Soul Of The Earth (TM). While we're at it, Jod says decapitation kills a lyctor, and he's able to kill Mercymorn by blowing her up tae fuck and then snapping her neck (?), but it looks like Cytherea consciously chose to let a chest wound kill her given that G1deon and Pyrrha are able to survive a fairly gnarly stab wound to the heart, as is Gideon-in-Harrow once Harrow's body has its lyctor healing working.

There's some sort of Fuckery with souls and bodies afoot here and I can't work out what... Maybe we'll find out in AtN...

[mellori]

Im pretty sure Cam didn't want Pal to write that sweet hot erotica because she knew it'd be fire and would've felt obligated to edit it for him and just straight up didn't want to be getting horned up by her cousin that she's deeply and platonically in love with.

Which I mean yeah good choice girl. a good boundary to be setting.

[lockedtombbrainworms]

Next TLT question I hope we get an answer to: why does Gideon the First have an anti-necromancy field as one of his major tricks in a fight? Augustine literally says that the only reason you'd need Mercymorn's anatomist powers is for killing Lyctors, but why would you need to be a thanergy void and bleed any nearby necromancy dry in a setting where your side is the only faction using necromancy?

Pyrrha refers to what he (or they) do as "bleeding" the thanergy, and it doesn't seem to be used to bolster G1deon or anyone else around him, like second house necromancers usually do when they drain thalergy. Lyctors don't need to steal energy for that sort of thing anyway, they have basically unlimited thanergy to draw from.

Having all the thanergy sucked out of the room doesn't seem to actually harm Harrow, who doesn't have lyctor healing to protect her from any horrible effects it might cause, so presumeably it's not much use as a weapon against BoE or anyone else from outside the Nine Houses, because they don't use wards or constructs for it to destroy. It might have some use against heralds, but the Saint of Duty already has a very effective defense against heralds in the form of stabbing the shit out of them with his gigantic fuckoff spear, which is probably easier to do when you're suffering from Herald Brainfuck Shit Your Pants Syndrome than advanced necromancy. And besides, the lyctors themselves generally aim to be in the River when the heralds show up, leaving their non-necromantic bodies behind, so in terms of necromantic skills to perfect, there are probably more useful ones for taking down heralds.

Augustine says he learnt the skill John asked him to perfect. Did Gideon the First do the same? Was he John's ace in the hole against a faction within the Nine Houses turning on him?

I am ROTATING this entire series in my mind!

[lockedtombbrainworms]

More theory fuel: John can definitely tell something's up with the eyes - in GtN Lyctor!Harrow can tell that Cytherea's eyes aren't hers during the final fight, they're described as "stolen", or something similar. He almost certainly knows they're not Harrow's, if not whose they actually are.

My theory is that he's not necessarily trying to suffocate Harrow to death on the Erebos. I think he was trying to force her to absorb Gideon's soul instinctively/subconsciously/automatically. Or that he thought it was something she still had to actively maintain, and that if he got close enough to killing her, she'd choose to go full lyctor rather than die - coercing her into doing that would be his kinda thing! He might well have been willing to accept that she'd just die if it didn't work (or maybe he'd have brought her back from the brink), but I don't think that was his ideal outcome.

If he did know what those golden eyes meant, maybe he thought the best place for the soul they belonged to was burnt up to power a lyctor. It's Gideon's body that's the key to the tomb (specifically her blood), so he might not even care about the soul.

FWIW he seems genuinely shocked when Mercy and Augustine explain Dios Apate Major, so my personal take is that he didn't know who Gideon actually was until act V of HtN, but I could definitely also buy the way he reacts there as being yet more fakery, trying to figure out how exactly it had happened and let A&M think they had the upper hand.

My other question is. It seems likely he's suspected the truth about gideon + harrow's lobotomy for the entirety of htn bc he would have seen her eyes and he would have touched her and been able to tell what was up with her temporal lobe. But then, in the conversation where he's "noticing" her lobotomy for the first time, assuming he is just performing concern, why would he draw attention to something harrow isn't even thinking about in the moment? If he knows that harrow's cavalier might have his genetics, why would he go out of his way to win her affection or speak to her at all? He should want her killed asap before anyone figures out anything. His conversations with her don't seem to serve any real purpose aside from allowing him to play a sad father figure. Which I guess might be my answer. But still, a guy as careful as him? It just seems weird