#g1deon seeing him in the river all

[phalangemedes]

Matthias Nonius with a tonsure to prove his humility as a Cavalier Primary of his house, and his devotion to the Tomb

OR

Matthias Nonius with a fuckboi undercut and a top knot because he's Ortus' blorbo and it's a canonically historical haircut

[onthecrescentofthehill]

g1deon and pyrrha + gideon and harrow throughlines scattered in all of tlt continue to drive me insane.

the initial investigation scenes post the 5th deaths where the 2nd house tries to pull cohort rank control of the situation, gideon & harrow immediately sneak away to learn that the winnowing trial was developed by the second house and cohort founders, g1deon & pyrrha. winnowing as incorporating the other, refusing distractions for the sake of true control, loyalty and duty.

gideon is wearing his sunglasses, rifling through their things. she doesn’t see it as a real place someone would live in, only a stop along the way to somewhere else, more whole.

she sees a gun on the wall that her mother's ghost will use the river memory of to try and kill harrow in the dream of cannan house:

It took Gideon a long time to realise that she was looking at something goddamn ancient: it was a blowback carbine gun. She’d only ever seen pictures. ….. The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck had risen when the lights came on, and they hadn’t gone back down, as if her intrusion might well tempt time back to claim its grave goods. GTN chapter 19

Carbine rifle, read the key. For a moment she pitied Judith Deuteros’s last seconds. To be killed with this ancient piece of grave goods! It would have been like being set upon by a ghost out of time. HTN chapter 18

gideon reads "one flesh, one end" for the first time. she tells harrow these people were living in each others pockets, the same phrase she'll later use to describe the two of them. pyrrha spent nearly 10,000 years locked in a drawer in gideon the first’s mind bc he couldn't bear to let her go. gideon tells harrow how they feel like strangers despite growing up together.

harrow cant stand the thought and in less than a month harrow will lock gideon in a drawer and gideon the first will relentlessly try to kill harrow in her waking hours to spare her the agony he'll never learn is closely parallel to his, and when she fails to hear his real name her brain starts bleeding:

And he had said: “Ortus, have pity.”

“This is my pity, Lord,” said the Saint of Duty. HTN chapter 20

g1deon was john’s oldest friend, he carried that suitcase in his loyalty to him. then he becomes an amnesiac, immortal thanergy void, absorbing and nullifying the echoes of that catastrophe. founding the cohort that flips planets in the exact mirror to the ecological tragedy they all sacrificed everything to spare earth from. over and over again.

He didn’t even ask me to explain. That was the kind of guy he was. He and I had grown up on the same street. I’d spotted him for mince pies all the time as kids, so stands to reason he let me cut off his arm and carried a nuke for me. John 1:20

in g+p’s room harrow says that theyre all the ninth house has ( = you’re all that i have). gideon firmly says shes "NO ONE'S son or daughter"

but in less than a year gideon’s mother, sitting opposite her father, will recognize pyrrha with a sense of profound relief before her revenant is unceremoniously killed. gideon will watch through harrows eyes, in hiding:

Harrow, I will never forget the look on her face as long as I live, or as long as I die. (…) It was the smile for your old cellmate who’d just landed back in prison, the one that told them at least you were in it together—or more correctly, the smile of someone stepping out of jail after serving a very long sentence, having seen someone there waiting for her. Someone whose presence meant total reprieve, someone she hadn’t expected. It was a little bit mocking. It was deeply relieved. HTN chapter 50

i don’t have a conclusion to this rn i’m just……much to think abt. the displacement of grief, the loyalty through control, how it just happens over and over and over again and they just bear witness as tools or trapped souls or revenants, clinging to anything they can even if they don’t remember it.

[paradoxcase]

Harrow the Ninth audiobook, Act 3

Harrow's memory of Crux giving her advice about her hallucinations just does not hit the same with the Moira Quirk Crux voice. When I was reading, at this point I was like, hmm, maybe I should reevaluate Crux slightly, but with the audiobook, the voice just sounds very incongruous

When Harrow talks to Ianthe about seeing G1deon with Cytherea's corpse, no precise description is in the text of the book, but it sounds like Ianthe expected something a lot worse than Harrow described, and then later Harrow tells John that she saw him "kissing" the corpse. Did Harrow actually just get all morally outraged about just a kiss?

I can't remember if I commented on it before, but Harrow says about G1deon that it was "as if he'd carried the name of a dead family pet" and I can't tell if this is some reaction that has something to do with Gideon or if she actually just thinks of Ortus as a "dead family pet"

John talks about G1deon killing Wake as if he were actually there when it happened, but he can't possibly have been, could he? If he wasn't there when Wake died, and had no idea that G1deon was having an affair with her, what does he actually know about how G1deon felt about killing her? He's not exactly a talkative guy. Mercy and Augustine knew that talking about Wake would get him to leave later on, too, but I don't think they were sharing a lot of info on her - he didn't know why Wake had a baby with her, for example

At some point a biscuit that was given to Harrow is described as a "repeatedly uneaten biscuit" which is definitely something

I can't remember if I noticed this the first time, but Harrow intentionally put all of G1deon's least favorite vegetables in the Trojan Soup so that he would eat more of the broth, haha

"The First Reborn" is used as an epithet for John at one point. Is John meant to have resurrected himself in the mythology?

After the Soup Incident, Augustine is looking "as if he had seen the ghost of someone he did not particularly like" which make me wonder what kind of stuff Anastasia got up to at Canaan House

Mayonnaise Uncle is in Harrow's River bubble, and he's acting just like himself, which I realize now must mean that his soul did not actually get consumed or corrupted by a devil thing after Colum's death. If they can really just infect anyone they injure, as is implied at the end of Nona, I wonder how he avoided that, since devil!Colum very much did fatally injure him

I pointed out before that later on in the River bubble they wind up congregating in the Second Lyctor lab, which seems to be relatively safe from Wake possibly because it belonged to G1deon and Pyrrha, but in this earlier part of the book they are also taking refuge in the quarters given to Judith and Marta as being the least leaky, and now I sort of wonder if they were given those rooms because they also had something to do with G1deon and Pyrrha and that's also why they're the least leaky in Harrow's bubble

Magnus, on the bad weather in the bubble: "It'll be a damned sight worse in the River." You know he's just extremely disappointed that Harrow is not able to see the joke, since I'm pretty sure both he and Abigail know what's up by this point

On Corona's "death" Abigail says "If she's gone, then perhaps that means--" and never finishes. I wonder if this is Abigail figuring out that Corona may still be alive

Ianthe says, "I wish killing [Naberius] had given me his needlepoint, too." I am actually kind of curious why it didn't, unless she means like, the actual physical pieces of clothing he embroidered or whatever and not the skill?

Harrow thinks she looks like her mother in the dress Ianthe makes for her, and then immediately says "I look like am imbecile." I know most people don't usually have positive thoughts about their mothers' senses of fashion, but even so this seems a little harsh

Augustine claims to be helping Harrow kill G1deon "for reasons of my own" and says that "he has caused me more pain over this past scant 40 years than I care to admit." When I read this originally, I just figured, of course Augustine dislikes G1deon, all my homies hate G1deon, because he'd said like three total words of dialog the whole book and done nothing but try to kill Harrow, but now I'm actually curious about this. Since they've known each other for 10,000 years and it's only the past 40 that have been a problem, this can't just be Augustine and G1deon not getting along for personality reasons the way that Augustine and Mercy don't get along (and also, Augustine never actually conspires to kill Mercy) so now I'm curious about what sort of falling-out happened between Augustine and G1deon in the last 40 years. I don't think it's just that Augustine was plotting with Mercy to kill John and G1deon was loyal to John, because I think Augustine and Mercy have been plotting to kill John for a lot more than 40 years. Was 40 years ago maybe when Wake first started to become relevant? Maybe Augustine and Mercy secretly conspiring with Wake to kill John at the same time that G1deon and Pyrrha were secretly fucking Wake caused some encounters between them that Augustine misinterpreted, honestly there could probably have been some hilarious Shakespeare-level dramatic irony here

Augustine says that Cristabel was a fanatic, which seems accurate to the account in Nona, but what was the object of her fanaticism after John resurrected everyone with no memory of Christianity? Although... Cristabel did help found the Eighth House, which honestly might sort of explain some things

John thinks BOE finding out about resurrection beasts must have been "an intelligence effort" since the resurrection beasts are classified information within the Nine Houses, which is hilarious as a concept after reading Nona, and G1deon does in fact correct him here that the only piece of actual intelligence they would have had to learn was where the fuck they came from

Ianthe goes on while drunk about being Harrow's sister, and it seems clear that she really wants Harrow to be like a replacement Corona

Harrow is mystified about why there is an incinerator on the Mithraeum and this question is ultimately never answered, although I guess it's possible that there will be an answer in the fourth book

When Pyrrha says "ba--" when talking to Harrow, it is not pronounced like the first syllable of "baby", which is kind of odd, since that's definitely what she was going to say. And she does definitely say she can feel Wake near or in Harrow, even though Wake is clearly in Cytherea's body at this point, furthering my suspicions that part of Wake's soul may still be in Gideon's sword even after Cytherea's body was shot at the end of the book. The voice also isn't different yet, but she is pretending to be G1deon here

[g1deonthefirst]

character game: our girl g1deon obviously because I'm obsessed, but if someone else has sent him, then I submit hot sauce

favorite thing about them:

augh what's not to love. im a massive fan of quiet and stoic characters in general i was a sucker for g1deon right off the bat. similar to wake, i love his loyalty — the way he never could choose between john and p—, the way he sticks with what he believes in, the way he does what he thinks is right no matter what the people around him think of him.

least favorite thing about them:

the fact that he's loyal *to john* LMFAO. 10,000 years of basically being in charge of the military of the violent imperialist empire for a man who doesn't even respect him. and then he died for him!! embarrassing.

favorite line:

"I sometimes forget." the sheer amount of horror contained in that one sentence. ten thousand years of occasional memory loss has to do a number on you.

brOTP:

g1deon and anastasia! in my heart i believe that both of them and cassiopeia were working together on a better form of lyctorhood. maybe g1deon abandoned the possibility of it working, or maybe his compartmentalization of pyrrha wasn't as accidental as she believes. also g1deon and matthias nonius i know they have something fun going on in the river.

OTP:

g1deon/pyrrha/wake once again. g—'s loyalty toward p— pre-resurrection really gets me (even if as with john he really does NOT know how to pick em) and i think all the time about g1deon and wake; what he must have felt when she kissed him not knowing that he wasn't pyrrha, and the fact that he pursued an affair with her after that speaking to a desperation to be seen and the passion of their attempts to kill each other. lives in my head 24/7.

nOTP:

g1deon/augustine that man is fully racist i do not see it even a little bit.

random headcanon:

i imagine he's a he/him transfem butch and i like to think that he was a climate activist pre-resurrection (even if i think the probability of that actually being the case, given what we know about him as an aerospace engineer on john's project, to be slim).

unpopular opinion:

everybody should care about g1deon way the fuck more! he's the most interesting lyctor! he was a genius of a necromancer! and frankly i think the fandom's total sidelining of him and the theories that he's the cavalier speaks to the fandom's racism.

song i associate with them:

funny you ask because i do have an entire playlist.

favorite picture of them:

oh god i can't choose. i love this g1deon's nose ring. and the shape of this g1deon's face. but notedchampagne is the only one going hard enough with the facial hair that i've seen.

[iviarellereads]

Nona the Ninth, Chapter 27

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For detail on The Locked Tomb coverage and the index, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

(Second House icon) In which someone who shouldn't be able to talk, talks again.

The thundering crack noises keep increasing, with no rain in sight. We Suffer deploys her soldiers to their mission, and sighs that the first step of the next iteration of Wake's operation involves freeing House citizens from another BOE wing. Pyrrha says Wake wouldn't have done this, and WS says she knows Pyrrha makes these comments about what Wake would or wouldn't do for some reason, but it accomplishes little besides annoying her. Pyrrha says, maybe she just likes talking to people who also knew her.

At this Pash says to shut up or she'll kill Pyrrha, not even joking. Pyrrha says she recognizes Pash from the photo Wake carried with her always. She describes the photo, and the circumstances under which Wake showed it to her. Pyrrha says Wake was proud of Pash, and called her flesh and blood. Pyrrha asks how they were related, siblings? No, Pash says, Wake was her aunt(1), not that it matters to the Houses. Pal points out they have a concept of family too, and Pash says, well, then it doesn't matter to her, and shoves on a helmet to hide her face.

Nona found a sigh escaping her chest. All her noises seemed to surprise her now; it was as though her body were capable of shocking her by doing things that did not seem connected to Nona.(2) Pyrrha reached over and touched her hand gently, and said, “How’re you holding up?” Before Nona could answer, there was another high-pitched whistle—far closer to them now, outside their truck, shockingly close—and a dull thud, and a huge pattering of stone.

The truck stops abruptly, lurches forward, stops again. It's a testament to how life's been for this crowd that they don't freak out. WS gets a report, and tells whoever's on the other end not to reroute or engage with anything other than staying together. Pyrrha makes her way to the back of the truck, and sticks her head out where a corner of the cover has come loose. When she leans back in, her posture upsets Nona. Pyrrha is never afraid of anything, but she looks at Nona and Pal with an expression Nona's never seen on her before.(3)

She says it's game over. Varun is manifesting, the first wave is here. The adults in the room assume it's looking for Lyctors. Pyrrha says she'd assumed it would go dormant after killing G1deon, and Pal says if it were after Ianthe Naberius, it would have responded days ago.

“It doesn’t matter why. There’s Heralds out there,” said Pyrrha impatiently. “If Number Seven’s blown, it’s blown. We’d need a Lyctor to lead it away—a fully instantiated, experienced, serious Lyctor, who’d need a start point halfway across the galaxy, preferably with two other Lyctors to engage it in the River … and if we had all that, we’d hope to God it rerouted the Heralds the moment it found better prey. You want Cyrus, Augustine, Cassiopeia … You want Gideon the First, and Gideon the First is dead. He’s not coming back. Oh, God, Gideon,” said Pyrrha, suddenly. “Gideon … G—,(4) you died for nothing.”

Judith starts trembling. Nona stands up and walks to where Pyrrha is. When she pushes Pyrrha, Pyrrha falls over, flat on her back. Nona feels bad, but there's no time to argue. Nona holds out her hand to Crown for her sword. Crown falters, so Nona grabs at the sword, cutting it out of its scabbard with its own blade.

Pash has trained a gun on Nona, but WS is calling her off, and Pal is asking Nona to tell him what's going on.

Instead, Nona pushes the flap aside, sticks the sword in her hip,(5) and climbs up on top of the truck. Blobs are falling from the sky like massive mucusy raindrops, pods containing things, flexing and pushing at the skins.

Nona looked at the truck ahead, which was about one truck length away, and the truck behind, which was about one truck length behind. She walked forward to stand on the hard shell driver’s cabin, and with a little run-up she jumped forward and sailed through the distance to land on the truck in front. This hurt her feet briefly—it also hurt the thin metal shell on top of the truck, which dented. She looked up at the sky, and she bellowed: “You said you wouldn’t do anything weird!”(6) Nona unsheathed her sword from herself, and nearly wept from fury. She put both her hands on the hilt. She did not know how to hold a sword, and she didn’t care.

She can see the main drag(7) leading to the fisheries and the harbour. She looks at where the Building ought to be, just as the truck veers into a left turn. She watches the terrible raindrops hit the buildings, can hear yelling, screaming, and the air siren going off in the distance.

Nona turned around. On the truck she had emerged from, someone was now standing where she had stood, on top of the driver’s cab. It wore tattered old trousers and a thin old shirt, and it was the Captain. The Captain opened her mouth and said, “Get him. Get him. Get him. He flees.”(8) “I can’t,” said Nona. “I can’t do anything. I don’t want to do anything.” The Captain moaned, sharply. “All for nothing—you asked for help—you asked … and all for nothing, only pain. You asked … I gave you blood for blood.” Nona, grief-stricken, hollered— “Not like this. I love this place.” “Do you love?” said the Captain’s mouth. Nona struggled. “Yes—no—yes,” she said, then: “I don’t know what it means. I say it, and I don’t know what it means … Did I ever know what it meant?”(9) “Green thing,” said the Captain. “Green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? Where will your body go? What did he do to you, to make you this way? You eat yourself. I gorge on unliving marrow.”

Nona tells Varun to stop this, don't hurt Judith, the poor captain doesn't know what it's doing.(10) Varun asks if Nona cries mercy, and Nona says yes, mercy. Varun says it has crossed the universe, and its grief should be met by its surroundings. Nona says maybe it should take a break. It offers to stop for eight thousand souls. Nona says absolutely not, but Varun continues.

“They concoct their own vengeance,” said the Captain. “Their justice is not my justice. Their water is not my water. I came to help. I am made a mockery. The danger is upon you, and you do not even know … they are coming out of their tower,(11) salt thing. There is a hole at the bottom of their tower. I will pull their teeth. I will make it blank for you.”

Nona says Hot Sauce never did anything wrong, none of her friends did, except Honesty who doesn't know any better. Cam and Pal never did anything wrong, Pyrrha did but she knows it. They don't like Judith, but they pity her. One more time, Nona asks it to stop hurting people, stop hurting Judith. She admits she's ready to die. Varun says nothing is ever really ready to die.

Nona jumps as the truck rounds another corner, but misjudges and lands awkwardly, knocking Judith over with her. She asks Varun to help her do what she's doing now, and maybe soon, it might be different.(12) She looks into the sky, sees the dark shapes still falling… but are they thinning out? Next to her, Judith has opened her eyes, the whites blown out with burst red veins, one hand to the back of her neck like she's soothing an ache.

“Harrowhark?” said the Captain doubtfully.(13) Nona looked up at the sky. She was very tired—or at least, there was a tiredness happening to her: a huge, neighbouring exhaustion that lived, when she sought it, beneath her neck. It was hard understanding how her body fit together. She had to deliberately think about its different parts, when she wanted to feel a sensation.(14) She closed her eyes. “No,” she finally admitted. “And I never was.”(15)

=====

(1) At long last, the further context for Pash's comments around Wake. And her reaction to Kiriona. Her cousin. (2) Nona is becoming increasingly disconnected from her sense of self in the background and it's very interesting to watch Muir play it out. (3) I almost wanted to quote this passage but it's not actually a great quote and there are much better ones in this chapter. I just love how Muir is leaving part of the conclusion to the reader. Pyrrha's not afraid of anything. Nona's never seen this expression before. Some authors would just say Pyrrha looked afraid as she never had before, but Muir says, you do some of the work, you invest your heart and your time in figuring out what I'm saying. Just like with all the messy allusions and explicit rehashes of colonialism. Just like with the implication of the feelings between Kiriona and Harrow. She does it so much and I just need to take a minute to admire and congratulate her on it. (4) Now here's a real puzzler. Pyrrha remembers G1deon's dead name? The name he carried before the Resurrection, if Nona-Harrow's John-dreams are to be believed? We haven't seen any indications, to this point, that the Lyctors did or didn't remember the pre-Resurrection. It hasn't been confirmed either direction, to my knowledge. I feel it was implied during Harrow, on reread, that they do not remember pre-Resurrection, because they tell the "official" House-history tale, more or less, to Harrow and Ianthe. And, I'm obviously taking at least some of the details of John's recitations as given, in my assumption that it's the "real" pre-Resurrection story. If Mercy and August remembered the pre-Resurrection times, would they have had reason to tell the "real" story (if John's story is to be believed) to Ianthe and Harrow, or would they just tell the official one, even in private on the Mithraeum? Something to consider on your next reread. (5) It's not in her belt. It's not in her trousers. It's in the meager meat of her hip. As is the bit of shirt that goes with it. (6) I'm not sure that was ever part of the agreement. (7) The main street in a town. It's the sort of street that's either called Main Street, First Street, King or Queen Street depending on who was the monarch when the street was last named, that sort of thing. (8) Who is "him"? Who is fleeing?

(9) Sweet green breathing thing… Do you know what it is to love? There are so many different kinds and expressions of love in this series. The love of siblings and cousins. The love of a romantic couple. The love of parent for child, whether they're blood or not. The love of person for creature. Love is central to every movement of the series, every aspect and facet of the story. Nona says she loves everyone, everything… but does she know what love is? Can she understand it, being who and what she is when she's not in Harrow's meat? (10) I struggle, too, with pronouns for Varun. Is a Resurrection Beast a person? Does an RB have gender? Would an RB use "it" or "they"? Does the ghost of a planet need to be personified? As a low-key adherent of animism, if only in the sense of "treating things with some level of respect makes more sense than pretending I'm somehow entitled to exploit them to the breaking point", part of me really wants to use they/them for the RBs and part of me thinks of how they're referred to in the narrative with it/its pronouns and that's partly by the Lyctors who do feel better-than and entitled to the products of the planets they kill, and partly by people who don't know any better, and nobody asks… but the narration around Nona also uses it/its here. I don't think there's a wrong answer obvious within the narrative here so if I slip and use it/its interchangeably with they/them, please understand and bear with. (11) Tower? We've heard a few different mentions of towers in this book... Who's coming, and from which tower? (12) What is Nona trying to do? What would change things? (13) Varun let her go. She's not even suffering the madness. Did it agree, then? Will it help? Why would it listen to Nona? (14) The slow detachment as the soul and the body mutually reject each other. (15) An acknowledgement of the whole story. She's not just talking about the visit to the barracks. She has never been Harrow, never been any part of Harrow, and she knows it in Harrow's bones because her own... well.

[dammit-tazmuir]

It's also coming from a Pyrrha who knew Wake died with a baby that Pyrrha believed for two decades was hers.

Hers or G1deon's, I guess, but honestly? G1deon was "legendarily unamorous", and coupled with Wake's "later I kissed him before I knew what you were", I personally get the impression G1deon was aroace-spec of a recipro-variety, where the sheer intensity of Wake's attraction and confidence with which she acted like they were already intimate sparked something in him. (Even then, I have to wonder if he might have been more chaste than Pyrrha?) Point is though, from Pyrrha's perspective, there'd be a solid case to see any conceived kid as still hers regardless of who was fronting, even if the body sharing wasn't already enough to nullify any distinction.

Pyrrha spent nineteen years grieving a child she thought was hers only to find out the kid was alive (and now isn't, but kind of is, but it's complicated) but not hers, but she's still Wake's child and that still means something. And also, far more than Pyrrha realized, this kid is the thing Wake died for. The thing she and G1deon were ordered to kill Wake for. The Bomb with which she'd wanted to damn near literally rig the universe to explode, that she was so determined to procure she grew it with her own body for nine grueling months. Gideon is the single most Landmine People thing Wake ever did incarnate.

And then when Pyrrha does meet her (but she's not who she thought, but also not as dead as she thought, but also holy shit she's WHAT now? and JOHN'S?) they get all of a few minutes to actually talk as they're trying not to die (again for real this time, or maybe worse in the River), and THEN, for all Pyrrha knows, she might have lost her AGAIN, IMMEDIATELY. And she spends six months "playing mother and father" to a kid who does not look like Wake and is not the young woman she so briefly met but may or may not have part of the same soul? And it turns out she doesn't (unless), and she loves Nona as Nona even when she grows to understand she's Alecto, but Gideon is still around and once again sporting that fiery red hair.

AND FROM GIDEON'S PERSPECTIVE...

:/ Some dead chick who apparently could hijack her necro's body used that to bang her mom (who was not only apparently a huge dick but managed to betray Gideon's trust beyond anything she could have ever imagined despite having been dead for all but one day of Gideon's entire life) and for some reason thinks that gives her any kind of connection to Gideon. Like, okay??? Even her mom didn't see her as a daughter, why the fuck is this bitch trying to all of a sudden? Plus she just got one new parent and frankly he kinda sucks but he's God and he actually makes her feel special and important. At least he didn't know she existed! Pyrrha can't say the same! Hell, Pyrrha basically killed Gideon once already (or might literally have but ya know, Jesus). And she wants to, what, just be buddy-buddy now? Because she had the hots for Gideon's mom? Shut the fuck up.

As we the audience sit recognizing how insanely good and healing for each other they could be if they really got the chance and not knowing for sure if they ever will. I hate it here.

the miscommunication between Pyrrha and Gideon is killing me. when Pyrrha brings up Wake, she is saying "your mother was important to me, I wanted to be someone important to you too. I still do". but Wake is a sore spot for Gideon! the very first thing we learn about her is that she loves her mother, she goes down to talk to her bones one last time. Gideon survived the Ninth believing that at least her mother loved her

and then she is proven wrong! Wake had her just to kill her, didn't even name her, instead calling her Bomb! she is mourning the idea of a mother and every time Pyrrha brings up fucking Wake, an awkward way to show she cares, it's just another reminder that her mother never loved her. I need to hug her so bad

[beyoncesfiancee]

how did you choose the song choices you choosened in swim good!!! were that any that didn't make the cut?

thanks for your question!!!!! i was waiting on tenterhooks for someone to ask me :>>>>> because I put A LOT OF THOUGHT INTO THIS PART OF THE STOREY

the title song obviously was the originator of this ficcella, and I go more into my creative choices & the thought behind the song -> work process here. to expand on point number 4, of course g1deon ultimately dies in the river fighting something so impossibly bigger than him that he could never beat it, so "swim good" is perfect lyrically for him. I read g1deon as a burned-out shell of a person whose heart is only still beating for john and the memories of his dead loved ones, yet he's one of very few characters who never canonically considers or commits suicide. of course bc he's so faithful to john, and feels he belongs to him and owes him his fealty.

so that song, which is about suicide in the name of heartbreak and love, made me think, what if g1deon's death (offscreen UGHHHH) were in some way a reclamation of his personal agency? a suicidal surrender in defiance of john's ownership, to go into the arms of the two women he loved that (he believes) he'll never see again? (UGH im crying again thinking about how both of them were revenants/still secretly alive while he was alive and he missed his chance forever...) anyway... as we recall from the john chapters in ntn, "He only ever listened to two people." so obviously pyrrha was the other person. his love for her was the only thing that could have shaken his love for john...

that concept of g1deon's death as his freedom and moving TOWARD love rather than toward death, and the song being tied so strongly to those motifs and the river motif, made me think that it should be a songfic... corny... but then everything started falling into place. and then I thought that this could also be tied together with a thread of the lost musical culture that no one in the book seems to have???? the musical culture john robbed from the universe???? such as:

the love songs in the record crates at canaan house started out as just all my favorite love songs (all the english-language ones plus "quelqu'un m'a dit" and "me gustas tú"). then I was like ugh, there are too many english-language ones. then i cut some of those and added some linguistically diverse excerpts from this wonderful playlist put together by a world music publisher. even that playlist didn't have the linguistic and global diversity I was looking for, so I literally searched "classic hindi love songs" "classic brazilian love songs" and other random countries I felt weren't represented on the map, and read lyrics/listened to snippets until I found ones I liked LOL

I cut quite a few, mostly english language that I felt were too pop-y or would have been too easily recognized by the contemporary reader therefore too distracting (i.e., nothing from the last 5 years). like, I love "rather die young" by beyoncé, but apart from being painfully on the nose for TLT it's just too modern and distracting... I cut a couple songs that I felt were too similar in genre to already-included songs, like "the nearness of you" is kind of similar in musical genealogy to "baby I'm yours" and I wanted more diversity. I also had "thinkin bout you" frank ocean but that was like too weird to include a frank ocean song inside the universe of a story named after a frank ocean song...? idk. I had to include "absolute beginners" david bowie though as a shoutout to my wifeybear @bakapikananoda <3

the made-up tragic love ballad wake sings is very loosely based on the plot of tosca. tosca is one of my favorite operas, the bones of the story are simple and adapt well to the kind of story-song that folk songs often are, and I think that tosca as a character has a lot of similarities with wake. she's a passionate and emotional character with a major flaw that ultimately causes her to die because she believed in love too much: tosca's flaw is jealousy and naïveté, which causes her to accidentally betray her lover's hiding place to the cops and then believe that the chief of police won't betray his promise; wake's flaw [in my reading of her] is a self-destructive and self-deluding streak that lets her allow herself to be seduced by two of her most bitter political enemies and an object of her culture's horror. i simplified the story and changed some because the opera's full plot was too complicated to include (and also not really plausible for g1deon to understand the lyrics of in another language) but anyway that was the meat of it

pyrrha's favourite song is an even dumber selection method than the canaan house songs... i just searched "stars" in my personal music library, "stars" because of the motif of john's silhouette looming before the starry sky in that scene, and looked for songs that weren't too modern or pop-y and were something that you might plausibly slow-dance with someone to before you kill yourself so they can live forever and never be vulnerable again. ^_^

and when this is what you have...

you can see why I picked "corcovado" lmfao. "stars" by nina simone would have been a good one too in terms of mood but that's so overtly about fame and its discontents that it didn't make sense for the story

<3 THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST <3

[figonas]

I’m sorry but you all aren’t listening, lyctorhood itself is not the “indelible sin” and you can pry this theory from my cold dead hands, honestly, maybe not even then. TazMuir herself could not dissuade me until she explicitly tells me otherwise. My proof for this you ask? Pyrrha’s conversation with Varun in NtN chapter 9.

But let’s backtrack for a second. John has stated that the resurrection beasts are after him and the lyctors for committing the indelible sin of lyctorhood, and as such the lyctors can never return to the Dominican System for fear of drawing the RBs back to the Nine Houses. I’ve never believed this was true given the fact that John is always the greatest common denominator when it comes to the presence of an RB and there’s no mention of an RB going after a lone lyctor. Sure, lyctors have been killed fighting resurrection beasts but there’s a huge difference between being caught in the crossfire and starting a firefight. For me, Nona the Ninth only reinforced that what we’ve been told is the “indelible sin” is either John misunderstanding the RBs (doubtful) or lying for his own purposes (more likely).

In chapter 9 of NtN, Nona recounts the story of her disastrous beach trip and towards the end of this recitation Nona says that Pyrrha;

“…crossed to the taped-up window, bottle and glass in hand. To Nona’s awe, she twitched the blackout curtains aside—stood bathed in the hyper-blue light from the sky as Nona held her breath—and she said to the window, “Here’s to Camilla Hect, yet another of devotion’s casualties,” and knocked back the glass. Then she said to the light, quite gently, “No, I don’t blame you, man … He was always looking for things to throw himself on.”

Pyrrha stands in front of Nona, bathed in the light of Varun the Eater, and proceeds to have a conversation with it. We only get one side but based on the context of the last line, “No, I don’t blame you, man … He was always looking for things to throw himself on.” Varun seemingly apologizes to Pyrrha for killing G1deon. It’s proven later on in the book that Varun can speak to Nona, and while it could be argued that since G1deon is dead and his soul is gone the “indelible sin” has been undone this still begs the question; why would the punisher apologize to the sinner?

If Varun and the other RBs are hunting the lyctors to dole out justice for their sins why would they apologize for doing the very thing they sought to do unless that wasn’t their true intent. The “indelible sin” is not the consumption of another soul, it is the consumption of a specific soul. It is John taking Alecto into himself, not being able to house all of her and instead making an exchange. Housing a piece of her in him, and a piece of him in her. Splintering the soul of a great and terrible force into manageable parts. Which explains Varun’s ominous presence hanging over the planet in the first place.

If RBs are hunting Lyctors there are no lyctors on this planet. Palamedes has not consumed Camilla’s soul, G1deon is gone, Harrow is in the River, Gideon is thumbtacked to her dead body, the only soul of any significance to Varun is Nona. Later on in chapter 13 Varun, by way of Judith, says to Nona;

“…what they did to you and what they wrung from you and what shape they made you fill—we see you still—we seek you still—we murdered—we who murder—you inadvertent tool—you misused green thing—come back to us—take vengeance for us—we saw you—we see you—I see you.”

And in chapter 27,

“….what did he do to you, to make you this way.”

What did HE do to you!!! what did HE do to YOU!! To give John credit he doesn’t deserve he may not realize it himself but the RBs have been looking for Alecto this whole time. They don’t want the lyctors, they want what John stole, they want the piece of Alecto inside of him. Want to make her whole again, their misused green thing. She’s almost there. She has her piece back from harrow’s body, united with the piece of her hidden in the locked tomb. She only has 1 piece left to collect. And god knows what will happen when the green and breathing thing is whole once again.

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 29 of Nona the Ninth

There's a First skull on this chapter, but there's no one in it who's associated with the First, I guess unless you want to count Pyrrha and/or Kiriona, but neither of them have big speaking parts here

So Paul can do necromancy just fine, and doesn't seem to be affected by Varun the Eater at all. I guess this is because Camilla's body used to belong to a non-necromancer?

Honestly, why didn't John decide that the Lyctors should wind up in the cavalier's body instead of the necromancers? The pros are that their final body, that they'll have for all of eternity, is not made out wet noodles and can wield a sword that's not a rapier, and also they will be immune to the resurrection beasts' madness aura, and I don't think there are any cons, really. Ianthe could do necromancy from Babs' body just fine, so I don't think that would be an issue. It does mean that Ianthe would spend eternity looking like Babs, but that's ok, I don't have a lot of sympathy for Ianthe

I just realized that they totally abandoned Babs' body in the tunnels and it's probably going to get eaten by a Herald. Poor Babs, first Ianthe disrespected him by doing his hair wrong, and now he doesn't even get a funeral. He was kind of a dick, but I'm not sure he deserves all the desecration his body has been through

I guess because it seems like We Suffer is staying behind to hold off the Heralds and let the truck escape? This wasn't made super clear

So there is a messenger, and two parts of a message, and Aim is one of the parts. So is she three separate entities? She is sometimes saying "I" and sometimes saying "we" and the first "I" refers to the messenger, but Aim is the name of one of the messages. I don't know who "us" refers to in "when the message was passed to us" because previously the messenger was singular. And we have a new name Emma Sen, which doesn't seem to follow any of the naming conventions we've seen so far, though it does have some letters in common with "messenger". And I'm curious what it means for the message to be "too simple for human beings like us to understand". She hopes Nona will hear it, so maybe it is intended for planets? I guess this will probably get resolved in the next book, since there's not much time left in this one

Pash made a joke! I think she is learning how to be funny from Pyrrha. I think someone should write an AU where Pyrrha is married to Wake and is Pash's cool aunt, I think that would be fun. Maybe G1deon can be in there somewhere too

I wonder if she still thinks it would be super romantic for Harrow to eat her soul and is jealous of Paul now or something

Ok, but I'm pretty sure you're going to the Ninth to kill John and as we all know that will explode the sun and etc., etc., so I'm not sure that's actually true

I like how she talked to Juno Zeta for five minutes and she learned the names of all her family members and now is someone she has to say goodbye to

Interesting and sad that Paul refers to Palamedes and Camilla as "they" and not like, "we"

Gideon is just pissed that there isn't anyone she can call "Sex Pal" any longer. I wonder if they picked that name specifically because it would be hard for Gideon to come up with a funny variation of it

If We Suffer is staying behind, I wonder what Paul has planned here

Or do they just mean that she will die soon, and they will see her ghost in the River?

Since the next chapter is the last John chapter, I guess this means that Nona passes out after they enter the River

[katakaluptastrophy]

Oh, good catch! Yes, I think there's very much stuff going on here with agency too.

In The Mysterious Study of Dr Sex, Dulcie writes to Camilla and Palamedes about her convalescence at Pro's farm on Cypris:

Writing this from PRISON... To cut a long story short, I didn’t win the argument and I’m at Pro and Mia’s and ALL my worst fears are realised. If their poor kids even breathe loudly they are taken out back and summarily beheaded. They play in whispers and go around on tiptoe. This is the opposite of what I want, as I desire noise.

She explains how one of the children in particular brings her gifts: "mostly roses or cups of tea. I do not have the heart to tell him that I wish he were bringing me anything else."

When we meet Dulcie in Harrow's River bubble, she reflects on the constraints that were placed upon her life by saying:

"The only thing that ever stopped me being exactly who I wanted," she said, "was the worry that I would soon be dead… and now I am dead, Reverend Daughter, and I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge."

Tea and roses were symbolic of the restrictions under which she existed during her life, and she explicitly rejects roses - so otherwise tied up with Cytherea for the reader.

In GTN, Pal offers tea to Cytherea, who accepts it in a way we are led to believe the real Dulcie never would.

While searching for that scene in GTN, it brought up a few other tea references, and its perhaps not irrelevant to note that the other instances where we see people drinking tea are:

when they are all offered too-hot and awkward to hold cups of bad-tasting tea on their arrival at Canaan House

when Gideon is first approached by Magnus Quinn, where the emphasis is on her trying to drink the tea without spoiling the facepaint she doesn't want to be wearing anyway

Harrow's diagram of Canaan House is stained with what "could have been tea or could have been blood"

when the scions watch the skeleton servants clean up after the anniversary party (where Pal offers Cyth tea)

After the murder of the Fifth, where Jean is specifically described as not drinking her tea while she objects to Teacher's insistence that it might not be murder, and where Corona bangs down her tea mug to object to Judith trying to take control.

A teapot and two cups are amongst the objects found in G1deon and Pyrrah's study

Gideon is brought tea by Harrow, who also applies her paint, following the Fifth's murder.

Teacher sits drinking tea as the scions realise there are no rules and they could turn on each other for keys.

Gideon is invited to have tea with the Eighth, during which she discovers the truth about the Ninth

Gideon has a nightmare about Magnus dying while drinking tea

Gideon drinks three cups of tea with the Sixth after discovering Pro's head in Harrow's wardrobe

And then there's:

There's a lot going on with tea in Harrow the Ninth.

It's "overwhelming" and "too much" for Harrow, yet John regularly summons her to sit alone with him and drink it.

You did not understand why anyone ate these biscuits or drank this tea.

In the scene where John gets Harrow to admit what her parents did to create her - nobody has to know! - the entire exchange is framed around descriptions of how much John is enjoying drinking his tea and eating his biscuits, and descriptions of how much Harrow does not want to consume them at all and yet feels unable to do anything else. She understands herself as "required to drink it."

When John tells Harrow about the Tomb and the Body, we again get multiple descriptions of his enjoyment of drinking tea. Harrow is having a much less enjoyable experience: "you had not known you were shaking until God himself reached out to still your wrist, so that you mightn’t spill your tea over your knees." He asks her if she likes poetry or biscuits, and she makes it clear she isn't interested in either. He insists she eats two biscuits, and begins to recite the Poe poem associated with Humbert Humbert's first victim to her by way of reminiscing about who he buried in the Tomb.

In moments where Harrow tries to assert her own agency, tea is there too. When she tells John about the Saint of Duty and Cytherea's body, her tea is "stubbornly undrunk" and John's biscuit crumbles into his tea. John is drinking tea when Gideon finds him interrogating Wake, and when the game is up and Mercymorn and Augustine turn on him, they both smoke and tap the ash from the cigarette out into John's empty mug.

Conversely, we see John drinking coffee by himself in the Mithraeum kitchen when he's not interacting with anyone. Harrow is also offered coffee by Abigail Pent, and "accepted a cup, mainly to warm her hands." Despite Abigail being another powerful figure of whom Harrow feels wary, there's no sense of compulsion or discomfort in this offered drink (despite it otherwise being a situation of gentle compulsion). Harrow feels able to accept it on her own terms. Which brings it roughly in line with how Harrow feels about physical touch from both John and Abigail as well.

But Katakaluptastrophy, you might be saying, sometimes the tea is just tea! Yes, but sometimes the author was a secondary school teacher in the UK, where this is a popular video for explaining the concept of consent to teenagers:

[beguilingcorpse]

the interesting thing about the second generation of lyctors in the locked tomb is that so far, they've all gone about lyctorhood completely differently, and to different results.

ianthe, in the tradition of the original lyctors (and the megatheorem as it was written), CONSUMED babs. naberius tern no longer exists in any individual sense. ianthe took him and absorbed him, fully and completely (and sometimes even pilots his body around, which really drives the point home). this is the lyctor, classic flavor. see also mercymorn and augustine.

i'm throwing in pyrrha and g1deon here even tho they aren't second gen because their dual-consciousness sitch deserves to be talked about. it was completely unintentional, and g-prime didn't even KNOW that pyrrha was still conscious inside him. g1deon achieved full lyctorhood regardless, but pyrrha in his body cannot.

palamedes and camilla, the beloveds, circumvented all of this, by nature of pal dying before the lyctoral process could begin and then being bubbled in the river. their back-door lyctorhood mirrors the dual-consciousness of g1deon and pyrrha, but neither had ascended until they joined souls and created an entirely new consciousness, full send, go loud.

and then gideon and harrow, who started down the Classic Flavor path until harrow willfully fucked it up and stopped the process - locking gideon in brain while fully conscious à la pyrrha and g1deon. unlike g+p, tho, their souls all got jerked around pre-ntn, and with some help from Papa Jod and alecto, gideon-as-kiriona is now back in her megadead body and harrow is finally back in hers.

if i had to hedge a guess, i'd say that if harrow fully ascends to lyctorhood in atn, it won't be via a method that we've seen before. there's a lot of language in the books about kiriona missing something, something that harrow presumably took during her truncated ascension. and unlike any the other necro/cav pairs, gideon is (more or less) still here as kiriona, in (more or less) her own body. the only pair to model this kind of lyctorhood are john and alecto: the base, the blueprint, lyctorhood in excelsis. john and alecto prove that there IS such a thing as perfect lyctorhood, that both parties CAN survive, the lyctorhood is not about consumption or even absorption but about an equal give and take - and gideon and harrow are currently perfectly poised to follow that path.

[lockedtombbrainworms]

Some of my favourite TLT art is the stuff that really captures the vibe of the lyctors we get in the very first scene with Ianthe after she ascends, where she "seems to be more real than everything else" and looks "like she'd swallowed a handful of lightbulbs" (or words to that effect, I may be misremembering the exact wording).

It's not immediately clear if that's something specific to Ianthe, or specific to a lyctor in the process of consuming their cavalier's soul and ascending, or whether they all come across that way when they're not actively hiding it (which Cytherea seems to be capable of, aside from a couple of moments where Gideon sees something off about her before the big reveal). The narration in HtN is from the second-person viewpoint of someone who is at least partway to being a lyctor, and who's dissociating like hell for most of the book to boot, so it makes sense that they'd seem a bit less unreal there, but to an ordinary person they are fucking weird to look at.

And if you know something about what they're actually capable of they're even more terrifying to the average person, even someone familiar with necromancy. Sure, they're blisteringly fast, supernaturally strong swordfighters who heal almost instantly, withstand what should be lethal injuries, and have access to powerful necromancy of the sorts the Nine Houses are used to, but they go waaaay past just "bone magic, but more powerful".

Ianthe kinda… teleports both herself and Silas by dropping them into a pool of viscera on the floor and popping them both out at ceiling height, which is probably some sort of river travel at a guess, and she does it while she's also fighting Naberius and trying to eat him. Mercymorn can fuck you up a million different ways just at a touch. Augustine can drop a gigantic space station physically into the River with a gesture, when all most necromancers and even most lyctors can do is drop their souls in there. G1deon can sap the energy of necromancy, destroy constructs and wards and anything else powered by thanergy, and he doesn't even seem to have to consciously do more than maybe activate the effect.

The fandom calls them the Duplicitous Sluts and humanises them the same way the narrative does in HtN, because that's the whole point of them as characters, I'm not complaining there. I'm just saying that it feels like it adds some extra depth to remember that to the average person, a lyctor is an unimaginably powerful entity that, while superficially resembling a person, looks just off enough that it's clear they're so, so much more. Wake went toe-to-toe with them on multiple occasions, and she wasn't just fighting humans with supernatural power, from her perspective she was facing borderline eldritch abominations.

It's not clear if Paul has the same effect, but Nona doesn't seem to notice anyone treating them like they do, so I'm going with no for now. Is their version of lyctorhood somehow less "off" to the average person?

[toughtink]

some post-nona thoughts and questions in no particular order:

and this will be long and full of spoilers, sorry

so is silas coming back next time? because i have questions about wtf took over his cav especially seeing as those tongue eye things showed up on the ninth house. biblically, silas traveled with paul, so maybe paul will be related to his comeback? idk

what’s with the tower? “kironia” and ianthe are referred to as “tower princes,” the RB was yelling about a tower to nona via judith, and we got a big tower coming out of the river now?? and the whole “the tower has reactivated” cipher or whatever it said, too. the only tower that’s been story relevant thus far is canaan house + the facility beneath it. harrow estimated they only saw ~30% of that tower with the rest going deep under the ocean, which i always took to mean that it was originally a sky scraper that they built a temple/church/palace on top of. OH YEAh! and a tower is in the jod chapters maybe??? it was confusing. (gasp! what! confusing??? in this series?!)

so is nona translating a ton of people’s names when she hears them, and that’s why she calls corona “crown” and has that exchange with hot sauce where she gets corrected on born in the morning’s name? and this is a separate thing from the multi-sentence long names that seem to be BoE tradition?

speaking of weird name stuff, the jod chapters have him using intials to refer to his friends! that was annoying but implies that they didn’t all used to have their fancy mouthful names which makes some sense, especially since jod specifically mentions changing U— and T— to ulysseys and titania. however, i’ve seen a lot of folks under the assumption that he wiped his friend’s memories after rezzing them, but is there evidence for that? i gotta reread htn, but i know that mercy didn’t seem to realize that gideon’s gold eye color was jod’s before it was alecto’s and only put it together near the end—point in memory loss’s favor (tho i don’t think we can officially say it’s purposeful on jod’s part yet.) HOWEVER!! when nona & the gang are approaching the tomb near the end of ntn, pyrrha mentions gideon (the first) and after saying his name a couple times says “G—” like jod does in his chapters!! implying that pyrrha might just know gideon’s pre-resurrection name! so either jod’s friends did retain their pre-res memories OR that memory loss thing happened later, probably post lyctorhood if it could affect the lyctors but not the cav secretly residing inside still??? idk. EDIT: my frand ginny pointed out that on pg 433 jod talks about how his friends “won’t have to remember anything,” because he knows where remembrance lives in the brain, and this sort of mirrors harrow own attempt to alter her memories. i think with pyrrha remembering g1deon’s name, we can say these are likely altered memories rather than a complete clean slate.

i need people to realize that when nona describes “teeth” coming out of gideon’s speed holes, it’s most likely ribs and not literal teeth. also—the speed holes joke is maybe one of my favorites in this book and incontrovertible proof that kironia is indeed our gideon.

i want to know more about anastasiaaaaa! was she another married/romantically involved pair with her cav? did pyrrha mention something about painting a nursery on the ninth?? what if anastasia was pregnant when her lyctorhood went wrong????

what’s this with cassiopeia and the sixth house in communication? that was her house, right? also, cass is the C— mentioned in jod chapters that marries the artist N— (nigella) and has teeth flowers at their wedding. also, she had the tooth trial at canaan house. and the tooth secret message in the corresponding study. what’s with all the teeth? lol

that tooth secret message was about doing soul melanges to power the canaan house staff, including teacher! 6th house theorm was soul melange related, so paul makes sense!!! ;v; (it should be noted that everything with cam, pal, and paul had me in tears and i’m never getting over their recorded conversation.)

gideon is clearly missing pieces figuratively and literally (her heart!! 🥺). TM said that if gideon’s soul was a happy meal, harrow ate the cheeseburger, but that leaves the fries, sauce packets, and toy. so where’s the cheeseburger now? attached to harrow’s soul? or attached to her body? completely absorbed and essentially gone? something has to be powering nona’s lyctoral regeneration powers so i’m kinda team body. that and the fact that she’s wearing the cheeseburger shirt and that feels like TM trying to give us a giant neon sign of a hint?

as for harrow…i saw the icy tomb she climbed into at the end of htn as a metaphorical tomb in her mind, between the lobotomy slits i guess where she was keeping gideon’s soul, thus the nonexistent sexy magazine. ntn makes me think she was also in the actual tomb, aka fully swapped places with alecto? but i suppose either could be true. the jod chapters feel like she’s tapping into alecto’s memories and subbing in herself maybe? that doesn’t really say much about the literal placement of harrow’s soul, tho, just that she has a connection with alecto.

anyways, it looks like she woke up long enough for the epilogue and then promptly passed out again (woo go girl! give us nothing!). and we know that she’s going to be harrowing hell at the start of atn?? good luck have fun i guess???

oh yeah is part of the reason nona’s not all there because not only is she in the wrong body, but she’s dealing with harrow’s lobotomy brain???

gonna come back and add more laterrr—edit: i’ve come back SEVERAL times to add more. maybe i should just reblog or make a new post for more. 🙈 i’m at the end of my gtn reread so htn will be next. oof that one will take a while methinks! and then i can reread nona…which will be my first Proper read through for the final version since i’ve only read the ARC months ago and some random passages since it came out.

[dammit-tazmuir]

Man... I wasn't even considering time travel, intentionally, though yeah I'd trust Tamsyn with it too if it went that way. All I've been saying is more like... If we imagine Time as one continuous string, and it should normally just stretch out straight, it feels like the string in the TLT universe right now has a lot of places where it's tangled and knotted, places where a bit has been cut and poorly tied or burned or glued back together, places where it loops back on itself. Things like the lobotomy being 9 months 29 days ago, and weeks later the trip to the Mithraem being 9 months ago, and days after that Gideon attacking Harrow in the kitchen being 10 months ago, in that order. And the fact that Harrow took weeks to recover from the lobotomy, such that it was 9 months if not slightly less by the time she left the Erebos, but then G1deon said Varun would be there in just under 10 months, etc.

It just feels like it's Not Flowing Correctly, and that John has some ability to manipulate how it's flowing, or prevent it from doing so when it suits him. (And while, yeah, Harrow's is explainable, just like a lot of the stuff is explainable but still has a big pattern of being just a little questionable, it wouldn't be the first time Harrow didn't fully notice something because it overlapped with her symptoms. She didn't notice she was also being haunted because she was used to hallucinations, so why not also fail to notice that time is genuinely messy because that's expected for her in particular?)

As far as the River, it definitely feels like either Dulcie exists outside time now as you said, and maybe like everyone was meant to, before John created or did whatever he did to this version of the River.

And for Harrow, since finishing Nona I assumed it was vital for them to have an heir so the line of the tombkeeper would remain unbroken because of the vow between Anastasia and Alecto, which of course we don't have details of yet but will be sure to get. I'm not sure if that especially interacts with all this or not but I suppose it wouldn't surprise me for any plot point in this series to be interwoven thirty layers deep lmao.

But yeah, MAN... I wouldn't EXPECT Harrow being the orchestrator of her own conception but I could unfortunately see it now... "If I could do all these amazing things and achieve all this, OF COURSE I wouldn't be worth it" Yeah well what if your existence fixed the entire universe and spared billions? What then huh? 😤

(Also very tangential but LISTEN. Listen that particular thing in Homestuck was arguably the coolest thing it ever did and CANNOT be experienced in full if someone wasn't there for it. Most forms of media straight up could not do it. Because if you go back through the comic now his arm is just there sometimes. But it wasn't. When he put his arm through the retcon power artifact it genuinely retconned his arm into existence in real time across a stupid number of pages and it sounds simple to explain but I swear at the time it was so hype...)

You know re time, I kinda have this notion that the end of Chapter 1 of Harrow doesn’t end right as Harrow dies from being by skewered by Mercymorn. I understand that contextually she hears the resurrection beasts heralds, as well as sounds of steel clashing like swords, but that particular bit about hell spitting her back out?? Like yeah, this could be her returning from the river, and it probably is, but like. I don’t know. I feel like there’s something there with the fact that Alecto starts with Harrow in Hell.

Huh...

On one hand, it fully does work. (It's the Prologue rather than Ch1 but I know what you mean.) When she goes to "make war on Hell", that just being hyperbole / metaphorical to talk about dropping into the River to help with the RB works just fine. Harrow drops in, gets stabbed before she gets too deep, pops back out. It's fine... There's nothing about it that especially demands scrutiny...

And that's how Tamsyn fucking gets us, isn't it...

Because the other Lyctors never saw Harrow drop in with them... And "make war on Hell" / "Hell spat you back out" was said before we knew there was a literal entrance to Hell down there, too. Hell is capitalized there... When John says "give it hell, children" paragraphs before, it isn't, but the Hell Harrow goes to make war on is. When John describes the stoma as the mouth to Hell, it is.

And at the end of Ch39, which leads into the Prologue at John's "ten minutes until breach"... there's the separation formatting putting emphasis on the single last line:

And you walked to your death like a lover.

And what took place between "Ten minutes until breach" and "went to make war on Hell"? Ianthe's whole deal, and after she leaves, the last thing before dropping in, Harrow praying...

“I pray the tomb is shut forever,” you heard yourself saying aloud, and you could not bring your voice above a choked whisper. “I pray the rock is never rolled away. I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest with closed eye and stilled brain. I pray it lives … O corse of the Locked Tomb,” you extemporised wildly. “Beloved dead, hear your handmaiden. I loved you with my whole rotten, contemptible heart—I loved you to the exclusion of aught else—let me live long enough to die at your feet.”

You walked to your death like a lover.

And how does Harrow's side of things and the whole book end? With that... trippy scene that doesn't add up...

The chains in their great holes were snapped and broken. The ice crawled up the sides of the empty altar. Within that bed of ice and glass, on the stone-shaped pillow to prop the head, that final resting place of Harrowhark’s one true love, lay a sword. [...] Harrowhark had come home, and she was not afraid. She did not know why she did it, but she climbed inside that empty coffin, and she took the sword within her arms. She was filled with a drowsy, comfortable certainty, as though rather than an icy tomb she had been tucked into a bed with a pillow fluffed beneath her. Her eyelids felt as heavy as the chains that lay broken around the outside of the bier. The sword she embraced shamelessly; those six feet of steel held no fear for her now. Something rustled at her side. She had not seen it when she climbed in; it had been tucked to one side of the coffin. When she reached out to hold it in front of her face, she found a shiny mass of magazine flimsy. [...] “Frontline Titties of the Fifth,” she read, and found she was smiling helplessly to herself. She murmured: “Nav, you ass, that’s not even a real publication.” Then there was a huge, side-to-side rocking, in the manner of an explosion, or a cradle. Her eyes closed. Lying in the tomb that had claimed her heart, faraway in a land she had never travelled, Harrowhark Nonagesimus fell asleep, or dropped dead, or both.

And assuming it was genuine and doesn't significantly change, we know AtN opens with Harrow waking up to see the titty magazine, and is also called "Harrow in Hell."

I deeply deeply think you're onto something here.

How deeply Harrowhark would it be to keep her plans to herself, even from the audience? To see that she is certain to die fighting a Resurrection Beast, to know the others don't even expect her to show up to the fight, and to use the time instead to slip right down to the bottom and try to do some shit in Hell that we simply have not been privy to yet.

With the emphasis on the chains being broken, what are the odds that Chapter 53 takes place after Nona the Ninth?

Hell, given the epilogue setting up Nona is labeled "Six Months After The Emperor's Murder", and Chapter 53 is labeled "Half an Hour Ago", how much even higher are the odds that "Half an Hour Ago" is relative to AtN, not to the Emperor's Murder. Especially given we've only seen tiny snippets of Harrow since?

With all my other thoughts about Time being broken, could it even be that Chapter 53 was Half an Hour Ago before the start of AtN, yet for Harrow specifically was experienced before the epilogue of NtN, while to everyone else what Harrow remembers before came after?

There's something here... There's something...

(Tagging in @cemetegee and @thanergetic-hyperlinks for more time discussion too.)

[iviarellereads]

Harrow the Ninth, Chapter 52

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For detail on The Locked Tomb coverage and the index, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

(Fifth House icon) In which I struggle to choose just one thing to "in which", so I'm going full meta instead.

August and Mercy talk about how they could go back home now, as long as the undoing of the Resurrection isn't immediate. Ianthe asks what Mercy has done, and she admits she has killed Dominicus. It will form a black hole in a few minutes. August asks Gideon Senior if he has any retribution, to which he replies no, but there's something August should know…

Suddenly, white light blinds Gideon, and then she sees red. Particles emerge from everywhere in the room, turning the air pink, then cherry red, then scarlet. Powder becomes grit, grit becomes aggregate, and then bone.

Instantly, and in a laborious process, a body constructs itself, until the King Undying stands once again, behind Mercy. He kills her, a fist through the heart that explodes her whole chest, splattering it onto Augustine's. He says the sun has stabilized, and he hopes the Sixth wasn't destroyed in the flare.(1) He says he will ask them all a question, and if they give the correct answer, what happened to Mercy won't be repeated.

Augustine pressed his lips together; that was it. God said, "It was a lovely bit of work on Mercymorn's part. She must have been training for thousands of years, to bring that off. But I didn't get to where I am by being able to die, you know?" The Lyctor said, "The Resurrection Beasts--" "Can't kill me." "You acted afraid--" "Acted is operative. But this is not an FAQ.(2) Let's get a move on. Gideon," he said. Then he looked at us, gave a little crooked half smile, and said, "Gideon Episode One,(3) I mean. Gideon the First--third saint to serve me--my fingers and gestures. Mate, I'm not mad about Wake. I'm not even mad that you failed to either fix or put down Harrow. I just want your loyalty. Do I have it, or not?"

Without hesitation, Gideon the First says he does. John tells him to stand on the side of the room opposite the dead. Next, Ianthe, who says yes, he has her loyalty before he finishes naming her. He bids her stand with Gideon Prime. He despairs lightly that he can't ask Wake, though he knows what she'd say, because "why be an ass to the mother of your child?"

Which he takes as a prompt, to turn to Gideon in Harrow's body.

I said, "You told that bastard to beat up Harrow?" That was my job, after all. God said, "I was trying to save her."(4) Also my job. "Go to hell, Pops."

He says this isn't a question for Gideon, as his child. He won't give her an ultimatum on their first day together, and it's not her body so he'd hate to punish Harrow for Gideon acting out. She is tossed, gently, across the room to land next to Ianthe.(5)

He turns to August, who asks if he gets a chance to answer. Of course, says John. He's willing to offer August a clean slate, a fresh start. August says no, lifts his hand, and does something funky. He drops the whole station into the River, and wades out into it. Ianthe follows him, but G1deon drags Gideon the other way. The Saint of Patience says "Wish he'd given me the packet."(6) which Gideon finds rather irrelevant to anything.

They move through the station, as outside in the River, John and August fight, and the whole lot of them are descending.

Gideon suggests they swim for it, but Duty says they won't last in the River, nobody knows what it's made of but it's breaking everything apart with the pressure, and the ghosts will be back soon.

The station listed again. I said, "Okay. You're a necromancer. Are you going to do something, or what?" "My necromancer is dead," said Gideon.(7)

Truly, this is not any sort of Gideon Supreme. All that's left is Pyrrha. Initial Gideon died after fighting RB7. He fought it alone for hours, and then the ghosts (sent by Harrow and Abigail) showed up. They almost had Number Seven, but in the end Duty could never walk away from a losing fight.

Pyrrha introduces herself formally, and explains that she was able to hide her consciousness, even from her necromancer. Both she AND he had been having affairs with Wake, ahead of Gideon's conception.

At any rate, Pyrrha sees what August's plan is.

A hole had opened. It was big enough to swallow up the whole of Drearburh and have room to spare. It was a huge, hideous, dark expanse, and it had seething, weird edges; it took the lights pattering over them for me to see that the edges of the hole were enormous human teeth. Each one must've been six bodies high and two bodies wide, with the dainty scalloped edges of incisors. The teeth shivered and trembled, like the hole was slavering. And that hole had nothing in it; that hole was blacker than space, that hole was an eaten-away tunnel of reality.(8)

The stoma has opened, probably thinking John is an RB. Augustine has lashed himself to the Emperor, somehow, and is dragging him down toward it. God is making no apparent move to disengage or get away, even as the tongues emerge from the stoma.(9)

Pyrrha has a loaded gun, she and Gideon could end their own struggles quickly. Gideon watches John, Augustine, and the Mithraeum station get dragged down into the stoma. She thinks, really hard, about what dying was like the first time, and what to do now. She wants so badly to say that she was thinking of Harrow in those moments, but everything was literally and figuratively crashing down around her.

As I dithered, Pyrrha sandblasted me with the calm, "Your mother would've picked the bullet." "Yes, well, jail for Mother."(10)

The River rushes in, and she forces her way out. When she has some control over her direction, Gideon watches Ianthe break August and John apart, pull John to safety, leave August for the tongues emerging from the stoma.

Gideon thinks Ianthe did it wrong, she should have saved August, not the man who lied to everyone he ever loved.

And then, Gideon feels Harrow's chest cave in, from the pressure of the River-essence. She asks Harrow if she knew that your life is supposed to flash before your eyes. She doesn't know if dying like this, in Harrow's body, will cause them to merge, will make her see both their lives blurred together.

But as everything went black and I died the second time round, I didn't see you. I didn't even see me. The final thing I saw was a great sunshiny light: a blurred figure, hazing in and out around the edges. At first it looked to me like a woman--a grey-faced, dead-eyed woman, with a face so beautiful it almost went out the other side and became repellent; a woman with my eyes, dimmed dark yellow in death, whose hair fell in wet leaden hanks. I realized with exhausted indignation that, at the end of everything--after all I had been through--after the last word, the last strike, the last drop of blood in the water--your bullshit dead girlfriend had come to claim you. And she said in the wrong voice twice removed:(11) "Chest compressions! I know her sternum's shattered; ignore it. We need that heart pumping. On my mark." Hands pressed. We died.

=====

(1) So, it wasn't a lie that he's connected to the Sun somehow? Or at least, he gets to claim it wasn't for this. (2) What a curious turn of phrase for him to use. But then, he was the Resurrection, his world was our world, so he would remember phrases, wouldn't he? (3) Muir is playing with this one, as she seems to have fun doing. In this case, Star Wars Episode 1 came out after the original trilogy, despite being set before. So, John referring to his G1deon this way is a joke because we knew our Gideon first and the Lyctor showed up later for us, despite his time technically taking place before. (4) Why would constant attempts on her life be saving her? Was it a form of training? Was it trying to make her access power he thought she'd hidden, maybe from herself? Or is it all a lie? (5) I'm not sure John's making the first impression he might want to with Gideon, though given the end of the chapter… how much does that matter? (6) Like an information packet you'd get first day on the job. Pyrrha could use the operating manual for G1deon's body and life. (7) You know, there's something ominous about this statement. I know that it's G1deon, not Gideon, but it feels… weighty. (8) No wonder there's theory that the stoma could found another entire school of necromantic study. (9) Ew, with a side of ack. (10) Miette! (11) Who? How? What's going on here? What do you think the odds are we find out in the final two books? How about the one additional book that's been published?

[iviarellereads]

Full TLT series to date thoughts on rereading Harrow the Ninth, chapters 16-20

A probably semi-regular weekly bonus to my reread blog, since sometimes you realize things on reread that just make you need to yell in a full spoiler space.

So, do we think the creaking in the mortuary is G1deon or Pyrrha with Wake, defiling Cyth's corpse? Or is Wake just moving around and getting used to the unfamiliar flesh before she starts going on her rampages?

And I can't help but think Ianthe lied to Harrow about hearing anything. We know she lied later about seeing Cyth in the room. Why not here?

Augustine's mastery of the River is unparallelled, eh? Could throw half a city in at will, eh? I love, love, LOVE seeing the foreshadowing so much more intensely.

I love seeing the River bubble Canaan House play out as it does. The still-living or otherwise indisposed have to be the first ones to disappear, because their spirits aren't there to hold up the illusion. But WOW is it fun to see first-time readers theorize on what's going on and why the deaths are different.

It just hit me that Pyrrha and G1deon's Lyctorhood was nearly perfect. Harrow found their room and their theorems first, and her and Gideon's Lyctorhood could have been nearly perfect. Just… I can't actually put into words what this is making me feel but it's a big feeling.

I'm not commenting in the regular post about Harrow smelling burnt toast when Mercy calls G1deon's name to stop him attacking Harrow, but KNOW THIS: I can't obviously be totally sure because Muir is from New Zealand, but Canadians who grew up watching TV will remember the heritage moment about brain surgery to treat seizure disorders and the iconic line, "I smell burnt toast!" I don't know how common it is to know, outside of Canada, that that's a surprisingly common seizure sign. But I see Harrow's poor lobotomy'd brain throwing up warnings when Gideon comes up in any way. I see it and I acknowledge it where it won't draw even more undue attention than I already bring in my regular non-spoiler posts.

I'm not NOT saying I put a hint about G1deon and Pyrrha's connection to Gideon in the summary for chapter 19. But I mean… oxytocin while looking at G1deon! Muir had to have known what she was doing!

Mercy insisting that Jod will be upset if Harrow dies, when Jod's the one who gave the order. Mwah! Beautiful chaos.

But then, John's explanations to Harrow… Always evading admitting to the direct command to keep trying to kill her, just encouraging her to keep facing him down. And the discussion between him and G1deon, calling this method ham-fisted and suggesting he have pity. We know that he gave the order to keep trying to kill her, though I have to admit I don't think G1deon or Pyrrha put their all into the effort because Harrow's still standing.

And then, of course, the infamous Annabel Lee quote. We still don't know Alecto's real name. We have so many names people have called her, but we don't know what she started out named, or what name she would choose now. Well, I suppose in some way the title of book 4 answers the latter, at least.