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8-0mph · 1 year ago

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Forbidden Dream

This is all of my Adventure Time AU in chronological story order. Thanks to my friend for proof-read.

Act I: Prismo and Betty

This takes some time after the events of F&C. Prismo and Scrabby inhabit the TR(TimeRoom) and Golbetty has gotten restless with her time in space. She decides to reach out to other multiversal beings, but no one wants to associate with Golb. She finally finds someone that puts up with her ..that being the Wishmaster.

Prismo is scared of Golbetty at first, especially Scrabby since he has a little bit of history with her. He scurries off or hides behind Prismo when she is in the TR. To Scrabbys surprise, Pris and Betty hit it off and become good friends. They find they have something in common, which is their “human” past. Theyre both mortals turned to immortals.

The duo start off by drinking and making fanfics together, but then Betty proposes the idea of making these fics “real”. Prismo is hesitant at first but lately he doesn’t mind breaking the rules.

At first they visit universes that Prismo considers safe. They treat them like vacations, and a lot of these worlds do not have the typical AT characters. Theyre peaceful docile places. Prismo gets daring, telling Betty that he wants to feel alive again. The two of them agree to visit a dangerous world, the Vampire Kingdom.

Notes:

- Betty chose her physical form to look like magic Betty because she felt it would be strange to appear as she normally did in the past.

- Prismos physical form is what he looked like as a younger human. He thought it would be more fitting for the “adventure”. Also.. He hates how clothing feels on him, so the see-through garments suffice.

- Scrabby is not happy about their friendship. He feels that Prismo has gotten even lazier, foregoing his Wishmaster responsibilities and even worse, ignoring him. The scarab thought he found someone that was happy to spend time with him for the first time, But feels like he has gone back to being the “forgotten” one.

EP II: Vampire Kingdom

Once Pris and Betty teleport here, theyre immediately caught off guard by a group of vampires that whisk Prismo away and the two are separated. Betty gets surprised by a starved vampire!Simon, who at first doesnt recognize her until he gets a good look at her face.

He refuses to believe its actually Betty and rather a wizard attempting to play tricks on him. Marcy calls his name and he flys away, leaving Betty stunned.

The vampire world is an AU where Vampires take over, but Simon never died and was able to stay with Marcy. Marcy isnt evil here. Simons crown was stolen before he could make a complete transformation into IceKing, and his sanity was kept in part to Marcy turning him to save him from a group of hungry vampires. One curse was replaced with another.

Marcy was turned at a younger age by the VK, but Simon saved her by scratching at the VKs eye (his face scar). Even though the King is furious at Simon for this, he thinks it is more amusing to keep Simon alive and suffering from vampirism. Vampires are starved in this world just like “The Star” episode, but Simon proposes the idea to wrangle human (and animal) survivors and keep them on a reserve to supply the Vampires with a food source. He inevitably becomes the person in charge of the Blood farms. Keep in mind, Simon did this to save humans, otherwise they would have been hunted to extinction.

Unlike the safe worlds PrisBetty visited, this world has most of the original cast in them. Finn is a survivor of the Blood Farms, swearing to kill Simon who he believes imprisoned him in there (which.. is true). The farm is surrounded by booby traps all around the perimeter, no one can get in or out without some level of flying.

Finn always managed to get close to escaping But eventually gets caught in one of the traps. The last attempt caused him to cut his own arm off to be freed and helped by Huntress Wizard. She is one of the few wizards to help the freedom fighters, a band of humans and candy people led by Commander PB. Wizards are hated by Vampires since theyre the few beings that can overpower them. They try to stay out of each others business But huntress is an exception as she feels that the vampires are disrupting the balance of nature.

The Candy Kingdom is fortress walled with wooden spikes and garlic (I thought it would be silly Lol). PBs armor consists of wooden stakes and reminiscent of Golb who she is a follower of. She has access to the Enchiridion and sees Golb as a being that she should harness the power of if the vampires happen to overwhelm her people someday.

The end of the story would involve PrisBetty helping Simon overthrow the VK after Marcy discovers the vampires ability to “drink red” instead of blood. They team up with the help of PB and Huntress. Simon never truly reconciles with Betty as his defense mechanism is to push any feelings of his past away. But he does have a newfound respect for her and tells her to visit him again. Simon will assume the role of Vampire King and free the humans afterward.

Notes:

- Simon is the only vampire dressing in traditionally “Dracula” clothes. Because hes a nerd and thinks its fitting.

- Marcy is raised by Simon here instead of VK, so she is a lot kinder and sympathetic to the humans and candy kingdom (even if she doesnt show it for a while).

EP III: Winter Kingdom

After the Vampire world, Prismo and Betty decide their adventuring is “complete” and attempt to teleport back to the Time Room with Prismos magic. This doesnt work out. Turns out, their human forms have been draining their magic slowly, making it so that they need to find a magical item to recharge. This being the Enchiridion.

This is a totally different world than (Canon) Winter Kings as obviously he is alive here.

Ooo has been mysteriously frozen over and put into an eternal Ice Age. There is hardly any life (apart from immortal beings and those resistant to the temperatures) so hardly anyone lives on the surface. Prismo automatically assumes WK is responsible, but Betty refuses to believe Simon would be the cause of this destruction. WK has a much larger kingdom with a variety of ice people, a lot of them more human-like in appearance. It seems like he is trying to mirror a human society.

Here WK has Bettys skeleton and attempting to use the cloning machine he has in F&C to clone a “real” Betty (which is why he doesnt have an ice clone of her).

The backstory of this WK mirrors my au version of him.

Prismo and Betty are briefly separated and I wont go into too much detail on the story. Betty gets the “safe” tour of the kingdom by WK and Prismo is left to wander in search for the Enchiridion. He starts to see things that point to a darker scene (fire people fighting ice soldiers, lack of any plant life, and ice clones of people who no longer exist). At the same time, Betty is off-put by WKs controlling nature. He reveals to her that he has been in a 100-year war with the Fire Kingdom “who destroy everything” with their flames, while ice “preserves it”. Betty is shocked to see the extent of destruction the Ice Kingdom has caused to Ooo and manages to slip away to do her own investigating. She eventually ends up in the room Bettys corpse is kept, which is the only place that WK allows plant life to grow. The Enchiridion was sitting on skeleton Bettys lap.

The two of them engage in a fight where he details his plan for her and Ooo.

Prismo manages to save her at the end of it. Up until this point hes been a pacifist in the story. They use the Enchiridion to teleport home and they end up.. not there.

Notes:

- I had a bonus page where Scrabby is reacting to PrisBetty not arriving back in the Time Room. He thinks they didnt teleport back on purpose.

- This page also has WK grabbing Bettys ankle right as she teleports. I was going to have WK teleport with them so there was some kind of threat. I am not sure yet.

- The fight scene was supposed to be a lot longer with Betty having the upperhand at first, But I didnt want to draw all of it.

- Winters appearance slowly turns back into Simon when separated from the magic crown.

EP IV: Back Home

They end up in Ooo where the magic teleported them into the sky, making them fall a great distance. They are a little injured, but Betty is mostly shaken by her experience in the Winter world. She redirects this into frustration at Prismo for not teleporting them to the correct place and that they would need to search another “sucky universe”.

Prismo is frustrated and goes off on his own to find another magical object. Betty stays put in the forest. When looking up, Prismo realizes the universe they teleported to was actually the main Ooo upon seeing the floating human city. He rushes back to where Betty was sitting, telling her to go find her Simon here in Ooo, that he knew that he had the Enchiridion in his closet. Betty refuses, knowing that she already said goodbye to Simon years ago and him seeing her again will only hurt him.

Prismo is annoyed at this but walks off, and Betty wanders around the forest until she encounters one of the transport boats that take people up to the city. In her reluctance, she hitches a ride. Meanwhile Prismo reaches a graveyard on the outskirts of the woods, he hides in the bushes and sees a familiar person, Finn, walking up and leaving a bouquet of flowers at the grave.

When Betty makes it up to the city, she explores for a bit before approaching Simon (who is signing a childs book). Before she could say anything, she covers her face with her hat and speeds off. He is at first confused by this but is immediately distracted by the kid again.

Betty is in shock and retreats onto the boat leading her back down to land. She eventually catches up to Prismo, who is kneeling over Jakes grave. She attempts to comfort him, but the words fall short. He asks her if she visited Simon, but Betty says she couldnt do it. At this point Prismo feels like he wasted his time in the Time Room when he could have been spending it in his human form visiting Jake. He remained trapped in the TR unable to spend time with the mortals he built connections with. He feels that Betty is going to suffer the same regret he feels after Simon inevitably dies.

In a turn of events, Prismo places his hand on the grave and it teleports them back into the Time Room. They are amazed by this, Jakes grave acted like a magical object would have. They temporarily celebrate before Betty is impaled by an angry Scrabby.

Bettys human form is heavily injured as Prismo and the Scarab fight in several rooms. Scrabby tells him that he alerted the auditors about their misdeeds. That they will both be locked away for thousands of years or perhaps forever just like he was trapped in the Time Room.

Prismo temporarily subdues Scrabby and goes back to the main room where Betty is. This is where he turns her into a fox to keep her hidden, and promises that her memories are all stored in her body dormant in Golb (Like how Prismos form is dormant in the Time Room).

Fox!Betty wakes up in Ooo, no memories, a feeling of disconnect from her body, and hungry.

End of Act 1

Act II is all about Bettys life as a fox in Ooo. Its a lot calmer and slow burn in comparison to Act I. Upon landing in Ooo, fox!Betty encounters posters advertising Simons* sci-fi series Casper and Nova. She is convinced he is knowledgeable about space because a talking dog told her he was.

*EDIT: Someone pointed out that C&N was written by Astrid (it is implied heavily). Pretend the posters are the two of them working together, maybe Simon helping Astrid write them since she is just a kid.

She starts pestering Simon at one of his book signings and he already dislikes foxes because earlier in the week, a band of them stole his draft for an upcoming book. Betty proposes that she will find the notes and return them to him if she can have a place to stay (Even though he says no, she crashes at his place anyway).

I thought about Simon giving Betty a nickname so that she isnt just referred to as “fox”, so she is “Sunny” since she really likes when he makes sunny-side up eggs. She really likes eggs as a fox that is her quirk.

Update 1/21/24: Sunny encounters Simon after breaking into his home and snooping around for clues. Simon ambushes her in the Golb ritual room, assuming she has come to steal the Enchiridion. Sunny explains herself and claims that she can get Simons draft back from the fox thieves. They go on an “adventure”. It is revealed that fox!Betty can transform into Betty only when unconscious/sleeping. Simon wakes up next to her but assumes he is hallucinating..

Post about Simon and fox!Bettys dynamic.

I couldnt fit all images into this post as there is a 10 photo limit. I decided to link additional photos to underlined text. If you want further context, check those out. I love reading others AUs and was inspired to do my own. Any questions can be left in comment. Thanks for read..!

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dammit-tazmuir · 1 month ago

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A basic timeline if it helps:

(ALSO, if you haven't already, please also read the short stories The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex and As Yet Unsent before Nona the Ninth!)

In the epilogue of GtN, Harrow wakes up in a hospital bed on the Erebos, the Emperor's flagship, and meets John. She begs him to undo her lyctorhood and "give me back the life of Gideon Nav" (she says the full name), but he says he can't. They talk and she agrees to follow him.

Three days later ("Epiparados" in HtN), Harrow instead has Ianthe help her lobotomize herself, sealing away all her memories of Gideon, so that her brain won't know what to keep absorbing and she won't eat any more of the soul than she already has. Several agreements are made about this between her and Ianthe, and we still aren't privy to all the details, but Harrow leaves her post-lobotomy self all those letters. This also results in her Lyctoral power, while still present, being greatly limited, and her not having a cavalier auto-pilot mode.

Because she can't simply erase memories of Gideon without knowing something's wrong, she instead replaces necessary memories with false ones. With her immense power and grief, she subconsciously pulls most of the ghosts of people who were involved at Canaan House (including Dulcie and Pro) into a river bubble, and they play out false memories like an improv stage play. Whenever Harrow is unconscious, the "play" resumes. This means all the false past stuff "didn't happen" physically in time, but was real within the River, involving real ghosts of real people.

Among the ghosts, both Babs and Colum are conspicuously absent, only implied to have something vaguely resembling them in their place at the beginning. Cytherea makes no kind of appearance. The characters who are still alive and also Palamedes (because his ghost is sheltered in his own bubble) also have basically constructs taking their place, and they die off first. Silas's real ghost seems to be there and to have figured out what's up, and he eventually "kills" the Corona construct and then exits the bubble by his own choosing into the River. Some of the other ghosts figure out what's going on faster than others, and when Abigail realizes she helps Jeannemary and Isaac move on to wait out in the River. The other ghosts stay til near the end.

It takes her many more weeks to recover after the lobotomy, but eventually she starts becoming coherent again. John visits her and shows her the not at all concerning reserves of resurrected humans he has, all of whom have been alive but in stasis for 10,000 years. For the first time, he's waking up a new wave of them to send to the Ninth House to help shore up their numbers and give them the ability to keep passing on their culture and such.

He also teaches her about Resurrection Beasts: the vengeful revenants of murdered planets. He says there were originally nine: they've killed five, and there are three more out there. Harrow notes the math doesn't check out but doesn't bother asking.

However, part of what Harrow did to herself was setting it up so that if anyone even tries to say Gideon's name to her, she will physically hear it as "Ortus." In the course of talking, John says "Ortus Nigenad will not have died for nothing", but what he actually says is "Gideon Nav"; Harrow just hears it wrong, and notices that his mouth doesn't move quite right when he "says" Ortus. She starts bleeding and eventually falls unconscious, establishing a trend of bleeding + maybe other complications any time things threaten to remind her of Gideon. Since she said Ortus in return, the last thing she hears is John wonderingly repeating it.

She also did not consider that there could be more than one person named Gideon, but that's the name of the Saint of Duty. In Chapter 1 of GtN, Gideon described how her mom's dead body floated down to the Ninth's surface in a parachute, dead on arrival, with a day old baby in a bio container. When the nuns finally wrangled her mom's ghost back by force, all they got out of her was screaming "Gideon! Gideon! Gideon!" three times before running. They assumed this was a mother desperate to protect her child, and that Gideon was the baby's name, so they called her Gideon.

In fact, her mom was Commander Wake, full name (yes really) Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity. She was a woman who roughly 25 years ago rose up as a demagogue among Blood of Eden— the rebel faction among non-House humans that actively tries fighting the Empire— and united and organized them more than they'd ever been before. And we'll come back to her but she was killed by the Saint of Duty, and was just screaming in anger at him.

Harrow and Ianthe are eventually taken through the River to the Mithraem, the space station that serves as an empire base of operation and the personal home of the First.

They meet Mercymorn the Saint of Joy, whose anatomical skills through sheer memorization are just batshit stupid (Augustine says the applications are too narrow, because one would only really need it to kill Lyctors); Augustine the Saint of Patience, who "was a spirit magician like the Mithraem was a box with some bones" (and who John says could submerge half a city into the River if he wanted); and "Ortus" the Saint of Duty, who fights more like a cavalier or an attack dog than a traditional necromancer but can rapidly drain thanergy from others' theorems.

Augustine and Mercy hate each other and at one point Harrow catches a confrontation in the hall where he warns her to "stop playing this dangerous game, the one you said you'd stop." This is later show to be in reference to her conspiring with Blood of Eden, something both of them did in the past, but Mercy was always the "face" while Augustine stayed more distant and eventually backed out. He's confronting her because he's afraid John will kill them both if they find out.

Duty tries to kill Harrow many times. (There's an interesting discrepancy that the first time he tried to do so was "10 months before the Emperor's murder", but it was a few days after arrival on the Mithraem, which itself was 9 months before. I personally have a theory time is physically a little broken but yeah. It is also, notably, not 100% clear who first tried to kill Harrow on the Erebos.) The attempts are later revealed to be kind of on John's orders, though the full order was to fix her OR kill her. Even to John, Lyctors are very difficult to read, so he could tell something was dangerously wrong but not what.

What exactly he was sensing is a little hard to say. Because Harrow is schizophrenic and has had hallucinations since she was pretty young, she straight up didn't notice she was also being haunted, likely by multiple sources. She is never sure if the visions she sees of The Body are at all real, though she wants to believe there's something to them. A common interpretation (though technically debatable) is that when Harrow entered the Tomb at age 10, a piece of Alecto's soul just kind of latched on and haunted her from there on. But also.

Harrow's sword, as in Gideon's two-hander, fucking hates her. As in it literally physically burns her to make direct contact, at least early on. This is later revealed to be because Commander Wake has been clinging to it as a revenant for nearly twenty fucking years. She was in the sword the whole time Gideon had it. What seems to have happened is she clung to something else(? her bones? Gideon herself?) first and then when Gideon was given a sword as a kid Wake latched onto that, but she's been there for so long. (This is also why Harrow even in GtN says she always hated Gideon's sword and felt like it was judging her.)

Then, in Chapter 11, which is only 7 sentences long in total, Harrow "sleepwalks" / is dragged to where Cytherea's body is laid out and wakes up having impaled the body with her sword. Wake's ghost is split, a part still haunting Harrow's mind in the River, a part having moved its physical anchor to Cytherea's body so she can puppet it. This is why the corpse starts moving.

Unbeknownst to possibly anyone alive (it's ambiguous if even G1deon ever found out), G1deon's cavalier (or so we're told but that's a whole extra theory) Pyrrha was never fully absorbed, compartmentalized like Harrow has done to Gideon, though theirs was by accident, "and he took more from me than got taken from you." Pyrrha fronts sometimes and G1deon just blacks out when she does. At one point, Harrow walks in on the Saint of Duty "kissing the corpse" but Duty doesn't turn around and orders in a voice very unlike himself for Harrow to leave and close the door. This is because it's actually Pyrrha visiting Wake; she doesn't turn around so Harrow can't see the eye change.

Harrow spends time bonding with John and being taught how to kill planets and also avoids many death attempts that make her a nervous wreck. Eventually she stays awake for six days to keep vigilance and hatches a plan to murder Duty with soup, but John won't let anyone kill each other in front of him, yikes. He forces Harrow to go get some rest and she starts sleeping in Ianthe's room for safety instead. Ianthe has been trying the whole time to play bad boy love interest but forgetting the part where the bad boy is actually nice to the girl, so she doesn't mind too much.

What she does mind is her stupid fucking replacement arm. It's not perfect so she can't bring herself to accept it no matter how much that's messing her up, and she's actively frustrated with herself. Harrow wakes up in a state of zen clarity after a very long rest to see Ianthe stabbing at her arm, because Augustine gave her a few days before he's giving up trying to teach her and she's having a breakdown. Harrow casually decides to remove the old arm and grow her a new one, which apparently counts as sex to Ianthe (I'm only like 10% joking), and Ianthe loves her new arm and is able to function as a full proper Lyctor. As thanks, Ianthe helps Harrow try to set up an opportunity to kill the Saint of Duty.

This involves going to Augustine, who sets up a fancy dinner party. He doesn't tell Mercy why they need to distract John, but promises to keep her BoE activity secret if she helps, and swears on his brother's sword, so she agrees. (Underappreciated bit: He also says he can make sure Duty leaves on cue, and "Trust me, when I want Ortus to go, he'll be giddy-gone." Narration follows "(This did not make sense to you, as a joke.)" But it's. "When I want Gideon to go, he'll be giddy-gone" lmao.) Augustine and Mercy get incredibly drunk and eventually start making out and then pull John into it: Dios Apate, Minor. As casual as everyone is later Harrow gets the sinking but distinct feeling this has happened before. (Because it has, at minimum in reference to Dios Apate, Major, and strongly implied they've just been a messy ass polycule for way longer.)

When Harrow goes looking for Duty during this distraction, though, she finds a trail of blood leading her to the incinerator, and Duty injured and trapped inside. She considers just leaving, even when Wake-possessing-Cytherea activates the incinerator, but "he" looks to her with (dark, but so is the room) helpless eyes and she's too much of a bleeding heart, so she pulls "him" out. It's actually Pyrrha at this point, and once she's out she keeps her eyes closed as she tells Harrow how to effectively ward herself; "You'll be safe from us." She then speaks out into the hall, to Wake, saying this is fine, Wake can kill her, but please just tell her, after all this time, back then, why did Wake bring the ba—

John and co arrive after hearing the incinerator alarms, cutting her off, but she was asking why Wake brought the baby, who Pyrrha firmly believed to be hers/G1deon's and has been mourning over for the past 20 years.

In the River bubble dreams, the plot has diverged significantly as "the Sleeper" haunts Canaan House, starts killing people, and the weather turns to shit and stays that way. The Sleeper (who Ortus grimly joked should really be called "the Waker") is in fact Commander Wake, wearing the orange hazmat suit she died in. Gideon's sword is seen in the coffin because it was her physical anchor for so long (or may still be one anchor).

Eventually Harrow kills another planet trying to prepare a perimeter to face the approaching RB, and runs into Camilla there, who is this far out looking for Harrow. Camilla examines her and says “Nice intercranial haemorrhage. Kills most of us non-Lyctors.” (In reference to the lobotomy.) Harrow doesn't remember her except as a faceless corpse, but Cam has Harrow examine a piece of Pal's skull to confirm that he's still a revenant, and she meets him in his River bubble, but accidentally brings Wake with her. After a short talk with Pal, who she also doesn't remember, Wake starts threatening to break his bubble and he makes her leave quickly, but asks which bone Camilla has so he knows where to focus his essence, and asks Harrow to remake it into something with mobility, so she turns it into a hand once she's out.

As Harrow leaves the bubble, though, feeling overwhelmed and mixed up, narration for the chapter ends: "But you were always too quick to mourn your own ignorance. You never could have guessed that he had seen me." For the first time, Gideon, who has been the first-person narrator the entire time, directly references herself. Prior to this, though, she did have a lot of parentheticals or other asides, and a running gag of harping on Harrow for not knowing what a pommel was. She's been able to hazily watch everything from Harrow's subconscious.

Outside, Harrow learns the Camilla is now traveling with Coronabeth and Judith, and that all of them are with BoE, though Judith (who is in bad shape) does not appear to be staying by choice and begs Harrow to warn the Emperor he has a traitor in his midst. Harrow does not end up warning anyone.

Everyone gets ready for the RB's arrival, and to fight the Heralds, which look like external creatures but are in fact extensions of the RB, like fingers on a hand.

At one point in this last stretch, Harrow sits and talks with John, and he makes the mistake of telling her she'd be a hell of a daughter and he sometimes indulges the wish that she'd been his. She breaks violently and throws herself down to confess that she opened the Tomb as a child, and asks if she killed two of her fathers that day. As far as John is aware, that shouldn't be possible, so he assumes there must have been other burial chambers added in all the outer parts of the Tomb and that one of those is what Harrow stumbled into. Harrow is on one hand betrayed and pissed that he doesn't believe her, and on the other now questioning if she hallucinated everything.

John tries to comfort and absolve her of further guilt, apologizing that she endured so much based on a misunderstanding. But as he tries to brush some hair out of her bleeding face, the act of touching her head makes him more able to see the immediate area and he gets much more serious as he suddenly asks, "Harrow, who the hell has been tampering with your temporal lobe?" and she panics and runs without fully understanding why. He calls after her but doesn't pursue and doesn't bring it up again later, but the last thing she hears is him cursing himself. "Dammit, John! Dammit!"

Eventually, the night comes, and where Chapter 39 has John telling everyone "ten minutes to breach", it chronologically goes into the Prologue. Ianthe comes in and begs Harrow to let her help undo what she's done, because she doesn't want Harrow to die here. "Just turn around" bc the Orpheus vibes weren't strong enough lol. But Harrow tells her to fuck off and Ianthe does.

"And you walked toward your death like a lover" (39) / "you went to make war on Hell." (Prologue) (With the noted time breaks here and the capitalization of Hell I have recently been alerted to a theory that Harrow was never trying to fight the RB, but straight up doing some offscreen shit in Hell, but we'll see in AtN I guess.)

Hell spat her back out because Mercymorn stabbed her and left her to get eaten, although she did disable her pain receptors and hadn't intended Harrow to wake up for it. Harrow was left too strong to die quickly and too weak to save herself.

As she blacked out, she started rapidly reinventing the scenarios of her false memories, and we got three chapters of AUs. First is Harrow Nova, where she was born a failed experiment without necromancy and instead became cavalier to an adopted necromantic heir (Gideon). Second is a royal ball where many Houses are sending heirs to try to court and win the favor of Her Divine Highness (Gideon, which is a wild thing for Harrow to subconsciously clock). And then the beloved Coffee Shop AU, where the BARI Star is of course Gideon. Each time, Abigail tells her again, "this isn't how it happens", and the last time "Absolutely not", because that time was threatening to pull the Fourths' ghosts back into things.

When Harrow "wakes up" in the normal River bubble, Abigail helps explain what's been going on, and Harrow remembers and cries for Gideon.

Outside, with Harrow's consciousness awol and the dam holding back her essence broken, Gideon wakes up fully in Harrow's body and takes over. She starts fighting Heralds and it's specified that she dies several times while doing so, she just keeps getting better. One Herald also bites off her thumb and she instantly regrows a new one, which is not normal for Lyctors; they'd normally heal whole sections lost as stumps, like Ianthe's arm.

Eventually she runs into Mercy, who sees her eyes and pieces shit together, but Wake shows up and shoots Mercy with a bullet made from Herald carcass and leaves. Gideon has weird feelings and then runs off to find Ianthe. Augustine finds them, sees Gideon's eyes, and runs off. Ianthe gives Gideon Harrow's letter for her, including her sunglasses.

Eventually, Gideon and Ianthe go to John's room, but find him interrogating Wake, so they hide in a coatrack/closet area near the door. The Augustine and Mercy show up to confront John. Then Duty shows up, and stops by the coat rack first, and looks dead at the baby Lyctors, and takes Gideon's sunglasses off her face to wear before ignoring them and moving on, because it's Pyrrha and she needed to hide her eyes from the others. Wake is immensely relieved to see Pyrrha, who immediately shoots her (freeing her ghost).

The worst episode of Maury ever plays out, and at first it seems like Gideon might have been Wake and G1deon's kid, but instead, it's that Augustine and Mercymorn twenty years ago seduced John to acquire a genetic sample. He very specifically tried to avoid any risk of that but Mercymorn's anatomy skills are stupid and Augustine providing extra distraction probably helped. Mercy initially set up several "dummies"/"dolls" using her own eggs, and Wake was intended to use vat womb technology to grow at least one of those into a baby to sacrifice, but "THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME, SO I DID THE IMPLANTATION MYSELF." (This means Gideon is a sort of immaculate conception in that her parents never even directly met in life, but it also involves no less than six different people having sex lmao.)

Their intention was to use blood of a close enough genetic match to John's to break his blood ward on the Locked Tomb to wake Alecto and try to kill him and end the empire. The original plan was to evacuate the citizens of the Houses, too. This is also how Harrow finally got into the Tomb as a kid; "my face was under your fucking fingernails." (This fight and detail was also mentioned in GtN.) This comic by Naomistares beautifully illustrates the explanation.

John appears to have not quite pieced together everything and be pretty shocked. He knew there was something up and playing dumb, but when the seduction part comes into play he gets more thrown off, and then accuses "Did you two just pretend to hate each other?" (Extrapolation: The implications of Dios Apate Minor and Major both— and the fact that Major took them 500 years to successfully plan and pull off, and Minor was the first time they've been with him since— seem to be that neither of them alone could have pulled it off, because the only thing John wanted badly enough to let his guard down was both of them. This is supported by the first time Mercy mentions Augustine near the beginning, he immediately drops his argument and his face lights like a sunrise at the idea they're talking again, to her immense frustration. So when he learns about the conspiracy he is fully willing to believe they just put on an elaborate act all this time to make him more desperate, smh.)

Gideon of course is also very overwhelmed by this revelation, and comes out of hiding to announce, "I'm— I'm not fucking dead!" And of course John looks her over and replies as his first words to her, "Hi, not fucking dead. I'm dad."

This whole confrontation was because when Mercymorn and Augustine each saw Gideon's eyes, they recognized them as Alecto's eyes, Alecto being The Body, A.L., Annabel Lee, the woman buried in the Tomb. But there was no way a random child of the Ninth would have Alecto's DNA, and there was absolutely a way John's DNA would end up on the Ninth, because they worked very hard to put it there. They come to the conclusion that Alecto wasn't just John's bodyguard, as he'd always told them, but his cavalier, and their eyes swapped because he'd done Lyctorhood a better way than everyone else did, letting Alecto survive. (This leaves a lot of unanswered questions, not least of which being why the fuck would Alecto's eyes look like John's now do, and there's reason to suspect that the Lyctor's may have ultimately used the wrong formula but still got the right answer re: Gideon being John's kid, but that's a topic for after NtN.)

They had already been plotting to kill him, but this revelation makes them think that he just casually let them kill and eat their cavaliers with full knowledge there was another way, and that's their tipping point to go from secret plotting to openly "fuck you." (The "we might all die tonight anyway from this RB" might also be a factor.)

Back in the River bubble, everyone confronts Wake as the Sleeper, and Abigail and Ortus are able to summon the ghost of Ortus's historical blorbo Matthias Nonius to fight Wake using Ortus's sheer passion as a revenant link. (Ortus brought fanfiction to a magic undead gun fight and won, and we love him for it.) When Harrow sees Wake's face up close, she knows she's never seen her before, but something really bothers her, especially in the jaw (basically identical to Gideon, and they look very alike in general) and the eyes and brows (the most different from Gideon; this isn't said until NtN but it's very offhand, those features she got from John). This very subtly implies that the Divine Highness AU had been inspired by Harrow subsconsciously clocking the slight resemblance between Gideon and John.

Once Wake is gone, the bubble starts collapsing. Ortus, Matthias, and the other soldiers head off to help against the RB. Magnus and Abigail urge Harrow to return to her body, and believe she's just clinging to Gideon's memory and needs to let her go. Harrow begrudingly agrees, but Abigail and Magnus head out into the River (to look for Jeannemary and Isaac and maybe others, and then try to cross it, which Abigail theorizes can be done but people simply don't anymore because they've been taught to wait for a Second Resurrection and most have waited so long they've gone mad). The real Dulcie stays, though, and tells Harrow she has something to tell her.

With the confrontation, Mercymorn eventually tells John she'll forgive him if he can look her in the eye and swear to her he loved Cristabel and never wanted harm to come to her. Instead, as she walks into his arms, she slides her hands inside his body and turns him into mist. This does kill him, and there's a solar flare as the sun starts to destabilize, but he Gets Better and kills her instead. He gives everyone an ultimatum to join him or die. Not Gideon though, they just met, yikes, besides that's Harrow's body and he'd rather not punish Harrow too, Gideon can just be rebellious in the John corner it's fine. But finally Augustine asks if he gets a choice, and John says yes and begs him to come back, and Augustine tells him no and then submerges the entire Mithraem to the bottom of the River, near one of the stoma openings. Augustine basically asked if he got a choice just to set up to tell him to go to hell and then physically drag him directly there.

(On the note of literally yes dying but then getting better, this is how Gideon died several times earlier fighting Heralds, and also why she "survived" the nerve gas as a baby. And after the Avulsion Trial in GtN: "'Ha-ha,' said Gideon, 'first time you didn't call me Griddle,' and died. / *** / Well, passed out, but it felt a hell of a lot like dying. Waking up had an air of resurrection"... 😌)

John and Augustine end up wrestling over the stoma, with Ianthe above them. Pyrrha introduces herself properly to Gideon and informs her G1deon just died fighting the RB tonight, so she's alone in the body now. They debate what to do but ultimately end up out in the River too. Gideon thinks to herself that Ianthe could probably help make sure John is swallowed by the stoma but Augustine survives, but instead Ianthe does the opposite. (And. You know. Based on everything Ianthe knows, John dying has a high chance of meaning Corona dying too, along with the rest of the House citizens including the rest of her family, so there's that.)

Gideon finds herself passing out in the water, and then the last thing she sees is Harrow's bullshit dead girlfriend coming to claim her, as Alecto(?) says "in the wrong voice twice removed" something about chest compressions and not losing her. Gideon dies. (Again. But will it stick this time...?)

We cut back to Harrow in the River as Dulcie tells her she's certain she can sense someone intentionally moving Harrow's body, meaning there's a high chance Gideon is alive and in control. Dulcie appears to be crushed by falling debris afterward, but had been fully accepting of that risk in interest of the truth here.

Harrow chooses to pull herself out of the River not to her body, but into the Tomb. Nothing about the scene makes sense and it's not supposed to. She crawls into the empty(??) coffin and curls up with her sword and Frontline Titties of the Fifth, then she falls asleep, or dies, or both.

Six months later, we follow a girl about her daily life in a city that looks much closer to a modern day settlement than anything we'd seen thus far, albeit a dangerous and wartorn one. She lives with the person who goes to work for her, the person who teaches her, and the person who cares for her. She heals unnaturally quickly and for some reason when other people start to notice that they avoid those people after that. At the end she asks the person who cares for her if she's figured out who she is yet, and Camilla answers, "Not yet."

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BUT YEAH. I'm happy to answer specific questions if you have them as well. It's my favorite book and VERY worth a reread, but this should be enough to understand what's going on enough to be more confident moving into Nona. (Unsure if you actually meant to reread or were being hyperbolic, but clearing up confusion can't hurt either way!) And then once you finish all three books and all three short stories, you can read ALL of them again together and unlock all the layers of bonus content. >:3

(That is, I encourage reading NtN before rereading HtN unless you wanna reread HtN multiple times, because the added context from NtN and even from a later reread of GtN will enrich the HtN reread all the more.)

Good luck!

I finished Harrow the Ninth so now I need to reread Harrow the Ninth so maybe I will know what happened in Harrow the Ninth

#guide post

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