#alecto predictions

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

This is VERY fun because I was JUST reading a post by @shanedoesstuff that mentioned “what if Augustine comes back from the stoma in Alecto and he's Changed?” and I was JUST writing about “soul memories”.

I like the idea that the dead og lyctors come back with their memories pre-apocalypse intact it would be a really fun exploration of "came back wrong"

That point about lyctors regaining their memories would make sense, actually, because—

Pyrrha retains her memories, right? And Pyrrha spent a lot of time in a situation much like Gideon's when Harrow had her soul. And Gideon spoke about “drowning” and “resurfacing” in the back of Harrow's head, and she seems to have been in Harrow's Tomb River bubble, and IIRC siphoning sends the cavalier's soul away (to the stoma? Augustine said the Eight sucked at the stoma like a grotesque teat) so the River's energy can flow through the gap and be available for the necro.

So.

What if souls that get absorbed through the stoma (where John's power means nothing) get the memory wipe undone? John knew “where memory lives in the brain”, but it's been pretty firmly established that memory is also part of the soul, which is why a character like Palamedes can retain his memories after exploding. So John might have erased brain memories but not the soul memories.

What would it mean for Augustine to remember pre-Res life, given John says he's become a very different man? What would Ulysses have to say if he remembers who he used to be before he became a necromantic puppet pal?

There's lots of very good posts about the complexity and layers to Kiriona Gaia's renaming

but like

y'all realize Jod's very first reason to rename her was “I cannot bear having a second Gideon the First”, right

[dammit-tazmuir]

For all the things this fandom refuses to believe and chalks up to John's lies, the thing that baffles me to see so many believe without question is the idea of Perfect Lyctorhood.

Guys. Guys, there is no Perfect Lyctorhood.

Or at best, if there hypothetically could be, it's nothing we've ever seen. Paul is the closest thing and I know a lot of you would not consider Paul perfect. John did not achieve Perfect Lyctorhood, and it wasn't even his idea to claim he did. A quarter of NtN extensively details that he didn't.

The old Lyctors didn't know what Alecto was. John definitely told them more than he would have liked to, because of course she doesn't lie and is too obviously inhuman to hide it fully. But if they knew everything, Mercy wouldn't doubt that Alecto ever had a genetic code; she would know she didn't, or that any genes she might've had were made from John's own blood and bone.

Because they didn't know what she actually was or what actually happened (foreshadowed too by Mercy's "if you had lied about anything else" lines, when actually he did), they drew the wrong conclusion. They assumed something different in his process allowed Alecto to persist. But we now know the truth is that Alecto was simply too big to consume. She didn't die because she was already limitless. This will never apply to another human. But he lets them believe their conclusion because he thinks it's better and easier to talk his way out of than them figuring out the real truth.

It does remain possible that Anastasia and Samael were genuinely on the cusp of that breakthrough, but I honestly doubt it. That was another conclusion drawn by the Lyctors as a follow-up to the previous wrong one, and when John answers, he visibly hesitates. It feels like he's once again going, "....Sssure, yes, let's go with that." I don't know what Samael and Anastasia WERE on the verge of. Maybe they would have become gestalt like Paul, and the possibility of just one dying was why Pal begged Cam "don't look back", and John was afraid of the power they'd achieve (could Paul have greater thalergy than a normal Lyctor?) and/or of just the others seeing a different process and getting mad at him.

AND/OR, ACTUALLY? Especially if their attempt was one of the earlier ones (around the middle rather than the end), but even if it wasn't: I think a Paul situation has a STRONG possibility of being exactly what happened. John's most outright lies are usually the ones other people tell that he just nods along with. When it's from himself, if it's not feigned incompetence, he usually goes for half-truths and misleading truths. He says Anastasia panicked halfway through and if he hadn't stepped in they would have both died. I think it's very possible that John panicked halfway through as he realized what they were doing, and that it's genuinely true they would have both died— in the same way Camilla and Palamedes both died, to create someone new.

And we know how much John hates change. How desperately John needs to keep his specific people close. What are the odds he was so afraid of losing both of them and being left with a new person he didn't know, couldn't predict, and couldn't easily control with them having a whole Lyctor's power and maybe more? Especially if Cyth and Loveday, Cassy and Nigella, Cyrus and Valancy, Ulysses and Titania, maybe even G1deon and Pyrrha— if any others hadn't undergone the process yet, and there was a chance they'd see Samastastia and decide that was the path they wanted too. If he thought this meant he might lose all his friends instead of only the less favored half.

Either way, though, based on everything we know, there is no simple soul swap that results in dual immortality. Even John and Alecto involve a fusion of megasoul. "You and she are one." (This is also likely how a seemingly real facet of John could talk to Harrow in Alecto's dream.) And we've seen through NtN, the soul longs for the body. The body longs for the soul. A body housing a different soul doesn't last long, even when those souls ARE semi connected. A body even temporarily renting space to a foreign soul is a massive strain, like Cam carrying Pal.

Lyctorhood inherently involves death and consumption and acting against nature. It is the indelible sin. It's possible that Grand Lysis avoids that sin by making it about mutual death, about giving instead of taking, but it's still bittersweet at best. I highly doubt we're going to see a perfect solution that fixes everything, at least via more necromancy, because that's not the kind of series this is. It's messy, beautiful in its flaws, embracing the understanding that life is change and things can never be exactly as they were, and can rarely be exactly what you want, and letting go and moving on are necessary parts of life eventually.

Don't misunderstand! I do think Gideon will either be resurrected (perhaps the last true one ever) or there will be another way for her and Harrow to happily be together. In Gideon's case, there was nothing natural about her death, and the decision to say "no" is a rejection of the system that led to it.

I just also think the odds of rewriting the laws of life and death entirely are more likely than Lyctorhood But With No Consequences. It always has consequences. There is no Perfect Lyctorhood, but there's something good on the horizon, whatever form it takes. After all...

"There are more worlds than this. Come with us. We are the love that is perfected by death, but even death will be no more. Death can also die. There's still time, Ianthe. Time for you and for Naberius Tern."

[pine-rhyme]

I think it would be funny in Alecto, if we spend more time on the Ninth, for the great aunts to, very affectedly, inform Harrow of her parents' passing during their silent practice to which Harrow barelly even manages to act either surprised or mournful (while Kiriona has a fit of laughter nearby).

"And that makes you, Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, our 311th Reverend Mother."

Freshly out of Hell and still dazed by whatever happend post tomb opening, Reverend Mother Harrowhark Nonagesimus, can urge no other reaction out of her but a slightly out of breath, shamefully informal "Ok."

Cue a pleathoa of mom jokes that everybody seems to get into.

"Reverend- forgive me Harrowhark, I cannot in good faith look at your face and call you-"

"Then please don't. Thank you, Paul."

"Oh, mother!" ejaculates Ianthe at her every movement.

"Oh, sorry mommy", Kiriona is already begging for it.

Worst things worst she is still, functionally, the last person ever born on the Ninth.

[skeleshancreative]

Look, we know Tazmuir likes to foreshadow in plain sight. Knowing that, how far do you think we'll get into Alecto before someone on the ninth takes a hammer to the oxygen -sealant machines?

[chilly-weirdo-in-a-tomb]

Harrow, at some point in AtN:

[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?

[derseprinceoftbd]

Gideon's book is material, because she is practical; her fear of the afterlife is that her bones work in the Ninth, which is to her eternal bondage; her book is the only one concerned with *swordplay*. Harrow is more metaphysical; she is concerned with the River, she dreams more, she does and sees and knows that which is not, strictly speaking, *real*; she is a great necromancer in the world of great necromancy. Nona, in turn, is small and strange and concerned primarily with the little things, and secondarily the really truly grand ones.

I can only wonder what Alecto will be like.

[unreachedgalaxy]

hey griddlehark nation! do you think that this random throwaway line in harrow the ninth may have something to do with the fate of our favourite tower prince who currently lacks a heart?

[mayasaura]

See, the ending I see for John and Alecto is. They're not going to both die. No one is going to kill Alecto just so they can kill John. Talk about reenacting the cycle of violence. Nah, I think they're gonna do the Paul thing. The lyctor thing. Complete the eightfold word. but instead of a merging of two equal souls, John will be subsumed by and become a part of something greater than himself. absorbed completely into the world he loved and fought for and changed and killed and resurrected. I'm not sure he'd even fight it. On some level, I think he's wanted it for ten thousand years, just as badly as Gideon wanted it from Harrow

[twoheadedoddity]

I keep hearing how tazmuir has mentioned there's a wedding in Alecto. Does anyone have where/when that was? Gotta know what exactly was said cause I'm rotating some things in my brain

[sweetandsaltycomplex]

ok so the main colour of the physical gideon the ninth was orange, harrow was blue, and nona was pink (unexpected but i love it) so do we all think alecto will be yellow? my only other guess would be purple, but i feel like it’s got to be yellow, for her hair, and the eyes, ya know? again maybe purple for the tridentarii and cause it’s a lovely color.

my dream is tazmuir will release a physical compendium of the short stories, and maybe some bonus content, and that will be purple. a lot of YA series do that, but i don’t know if it’s common for adult sci-fi/fantasy to release physical companion collections. i’d love it to have dr sex, the unwanted guest, as yet unsent, judith’s report of the canaan crew from the back of the first book, the little excerpt about necro-cav relations, etc, and also maybe some og lyctor tales! letters between anastasia and cassiopeia, pyrrha and g1deon’s shopping list, etc.

sigh that’s the hope… in the meantime i’m going to produce a miniature production of the unwanted guest featuring myself, in my bedroom, alone. possibly make some dioramas.

[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?

[dammit-tazmuir]

TLT Theory: Pyrrha was the Necromancer

No get back here, hear me out. I'm not saying Gideon didn't become one as a Lyctor. But I've been noticing a lot of things adding up weird here...

In Ch6 of HtN, when preparing for the first trip through the River, they call it Pyrrha's trial.

Much later, when Pyrrha is mad at Palamedes for the soul fuckery he and Camilla are doing, she refers to it as one they designed together, but that doesn't negate Mercy calling it Pyrrha's first and foremost. And...

She's worried about Camilla's brain, and okay, sure, they only have Camilla's body. But with Cris and Mercy, it was Cris getting cracked open. With Harrow and Gideon 2, it was always Gideon in danger, not Harrow. And with Gideon 1 and Pyrrha, it was Gideon's skull, Gideon's brain, getting the testing done. No mention of the same kind of testing or Mercy or Pyrrha. The principle of it is the necromancer's consciousness being overlaid onto the cavalier's brain, right?

But okay, maybe Pyrrha just doesn't mention herself, and Gideon's "a control variable" to compare herself to? But there's more.

Pyrrha fights with guns, prefers them. Gideon fought with not just a sword but a whole ass massive spear for an offhand, and has easily more physical prowess than any other necromancer we've ever seen. His stomach is still desiccated in typical necromancer fashion, he's dehydrated and not a scrap of fair fat on him, but he's a wall of muscle and sinew. Yes he looks "like an idiot's construct", probably because John regrew him from an arm when he was still getting the hang of using that level of power, but he's distinctly not built like other necromancers. If he wasn't a necromancer prior to being a Lyctor, his build might make more sense. Moreover, we've seen other cavaliers turned into sort-of-constructs, with both Protesilaus and Kiriona.

I also want you to look at the Saint of Duty and tell me that man isn't the walking essence of what it means to be a Cavalier.

And he rarely uses necromancy. He can travel in the River, and he drains thanergy, but he never really uses theorems or sets up wards. His necromancy is used pretty exclusively in passive ways or to remove obstacles between himself and his weapons. But Pyrrha is extremely knowledgeable about all kinds of necromancy. She tells Harrow fresh thalergy is harder to drain. She sees Ianthe's brilliantly inventive combination of wards creatively mimicking the effect of Mercy's trial and can accurately tell what they're going to do, as well as how to break them. Among other things. She also says she walked the Eightfold. Maybe that means being led willingly as a cav, but what if she was in control of the process?

With Harrow, Gideon was constantly in and out of awareness, watching from Harrow's subconscious, things that Harrow was fully conscious for. Palamedes doesn't have that with Camilla, and both of them being conscious is rare and dangerous, as detailed above. Pal and Pyrrha are frequently compared with their situations. How did Cam and Pal work out how to do the switcheroo, especially while Pal had extremely limited ability to move or perceive? How did they work out a safe time limit before too much irreparable damage was done? Could they have had guidance from someone who's done it? Done it with a necromancer's knowledge, letting him know where he can safely go under in the brain, how to come out at will, what to watch out for?

On a separate note:

Lyctor names are sacred, but the Houses were founded before Lyctorhood was achieved. Anastasia did not become a Lyctor, so her name was not removed from history, and became common in her House. Judith and Marta are part of the Dve Territorials, and while that doesn't prove anything or could even be evidence against, I feel like it would make sense to have named prestigious military groups after the House's "main" Founder, before there were Saints and the decision to erase the Saints' names.

On a more meta level, I think it would be weird to have "their names were meant to be forgotten", history knowing jack shit about the cavaliers of old, and even emphasis on the Lyctors forgetting each others' House names, only to have a cavalier's House name in active use somewhere, if that information wasn't supposed to be serving a narrative purpose. If we weren't meant to question why.

"But they call her his cavalier. She calls him her necromancer."

Sure. And maybe that's straightforward; this is a theory, I could be wrong. But switching titles after Lyctorhood doesn't sound too out of the question to me. What's a bit of revisionist history in TLT? John knows where memory lives in the brain, and on Pyrrha's end, at least after Lyctorhood Gideon was the necromancer, after all.

(Edit to add: Augustine calls attention to how astonishing it is that Pyrrha never divided opinions, that not one of them has ever had a single bad thing to say about her. She's great but we've met her. We've seen John rant about her calling out his bullshit, in the dream. Not one bit of annoyance or criticism, from anyone? I'm just saying, if Something Happened that led to John needing to tweak memories, making everyone remember her nothing but fondly feels plausible.)

"So why can't she do necromancy when she's in control?"

"He took more from me than got taken from you" feels like explanation enough to me. He got her aptitude and more. She's a partial soul. If anything, she could even still has an ounce of it, to retain the body's healing capabilities. If Gideon was fully giddy-gone and the soul that was left had zero aptitude, what would the furnace be burning? But if Gideon's consciousness is dead and what's left of his soul is in the furnace with a (partial) necromancer at the helm, well, that's not far off from Lyctorhood working as intended.

"Why though?"

And there's the part that gets really tricky but interesting. My best guess short answer is, one of them was dying, and it was an act of desperation.

Maybe Pyrrha was dying and so brutalized her body wouldn't have healed right even becoming a Lyctor, but given what they're like and the Cam/Pal parallels, I feel like an even more likely answer was that Gideon was dying. Cris and Alfred had already put Mercy and Augustine in that position, and they took their souls to preserve something, but Pyrrha would have seen how well that worked, assuming the third ascension wasn't immediately after the first two. So perhaps in her own desperation, with endless adoration for the man so willing to burn for what he believed, she said no. You don't get to throw your life away. If you're going to keep throwing yourself on things, I will make sure you can survive it and keep surviving it, even if it kills me instead. And then walked the path in reverse, pinning her own soul to his instead of pulling his into her.

I've seen a post around here pointing out how when Pyrrha tells Nona about her first tantrum, she's laughing with her mouth but not her eyes, and it looks like it reminds her of something her brain doesn't want to bring back, and the post proposes maybe Alecto killed Pyrrha. And I do think there's a solid possibility it was Alecto's tantrum that mortally wounded whichever (or maybe even both!) of them and prompted them to ascend. If Pyrrha didn't blame Varun for Gideon recently, I doubt she'd hold it against Alecto either.

Either way, wouldn't something like that more than earn the title of Duty? Wouldn't it be beautiful that they both fit the title if both had in ways been the cavalier? Wouldn't it be fitting to allow the name Dve to stand in the military as a monument to such a woman?

I know this might still be a long shot, but I definitely think there's enough little things sprinkled around to at least to warrant some solid suspicion. And it honestly would explain a lot.

[tooturtly]

Bad Alecto prediction:

Harrow and Gideon will use the same skill developed in the transference/winnowing room (of stepping inside each others minds, like they did to fight swordish wielding skeleton) to systematically dismantle John. Because what is the emperor undying at this point if not a complex series of necromantic theorems which regenerates?

[elfieafterdark]

Everybody who thinks the wedding in Alecto is going to be between Gideon and Ianthe must have forgotten the part where, from Ianthe's point of view Gideon just BETRAYED THE EMPIRE BY OPENING THE TOMB!

Guys I don't think they're going to be friends after that.

I may possibly be coping, shut up.

[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.