#kiriona would be such a bitch to harrow the first

[ridrawsart]

Thinking about Kiriona Gaia and Harrow the First. Thinking about an AU where they met. Thinking about how tragic of a dynamic that would've been. Thinking of what it'd be like to be in love with a girl that can't even remember you and respects you because you're prince to the empire but hates being around you because every time she is she gets massive headaches and starts to bleed from her ears.

Just girly things.

[bazaarwords]

in spite of war [6/? | griddlehark | post-canon]

more suffering—enjoy!

first | prev

🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴

We got to the next planet, which was the opposite of the last one.

By that I mean it was the nicest place I’d ever been.

It had water, like the First, stretching out further than I could see. I squinted, hand over my eyes, trying to make out anything at all in that blue nothingness. The water just churned, glinting in the light of two yellow stars, hung high in the sky. There was black sand and strange curved trees with huge, wide leaves. 

Along that sand: cushy chairs, squat houses made of bark and wood, and the friendliest people I’d ever met. They thanked us and thanked us for our work, told us to please sit! Rest! Enjoy our home! 

This all in opposition to my mood, which was terrible and bad, made me feel even worse. If such a thing were possible (it was.)

The cherry on top? Ianthe wanted to talk to me.

She was wearing a sun hat, which looked so fucking stupid I was this close to laughing. If I had felt any better I would have been reduced to hysterics. I would have rolled around in the sand and I would have howled. This thought in its simplicity made me realize how much I missed laughing. That thought made me feel worse. (See? I said it was possible.)

But when she came sauntering over, I just stared at her, arms crossed over my empty chest. I wanted to look intimidating, but if she was, she’d never show it. It was a stupid game of chicken we played, and neither of us was good at it.

I was sitting in one of the chairs, and the height difference didn’t really help my intimidation tactic.

“You look incredibly stupid, Kiriona, you know that?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything, but since you mentioned it… I guess we match. One of us has to go change.”

She sneered, which made her uglier. No, that’s unfair. She wasn’t ugly. She was horrible.

“I’ve no interest in prolonging a conversation with you, so I’ll get to the point—”

“Thank god—”

“You’ve done something to Harrow.”

The beach was so, so beautiful. I was a fraction of an inch from decorating it with Ianthe’s intestines. I could put her head on the flat rock closest to the water… maybe rip her hair out and stick it in the sand like sea grass… I could be the kind of landscaper any Ninth House nun with cataracts would adore.

She continued: “She’s gone bare-faced the past three days. I hate looking at her like that. And if I were a betting woman, I’d wager it has something to do with you.”

I could make designs on the backs of the cushy chairs with her teeth and nails. Maybe stick her eyes to the back of my head for a laugh.

“Well?” She pressed. I thought maybe if I pressed hard enough I could extrude all of her organs.

“How about you fuck off and die?”

She rolled her eyes. “Your comebacks were never good and somehow they’ve gotten worse.”

“How about this one: your mom.”

That lifted my mood. A your mom joke. Understated and yet? Elegant. Simple. I felt like a fucking comedian.

I saw the shift in Ianthe’s shitty tutti-frutti eyes before I could brace myself for it. I knew the kind of bitch she could be. The zero to a hundred she could pull at the drop of a hat.

“I get the impression that you’ve hurt her. Perhaps irreparably.”

Cool as I might have imagined myself being, I couldn’t contain it. I leapt and I swung.

She dodged me like I was a child. Looked at me like I was smaller still. I advanced on her, and she walked backwards like she had less-funny eyes in the back of her head.

“Seems like the gray matter’s rotted away like the rest of you. You can’t answer a simple question.”

“I have dreamed of killing you thousands of times—“

“And yet you can’t, can you?” She stopped, feet in the surf, and let me get right up in her face. 

There was no one around. I could have tried. I knew I was stronger. I could have drowned her, I could have ripped her head off. They just would have been inconveniences. It might have been fun to do, but it wouldn’t have meant anything.

My rage flew around in my chest like a caged animal. I’d sewn it up. It had nowhere to go.

“She’s done with you and yet you still manage to upset her like this. I think it’s because you have the kind of grating demeanor not even a mother could love.”

I wasn’t breathing. I mean, I didn’t need to, but I thought if I had I would have exploded. Which, honestly? Would have been the best thing I could have done. At least gore in her hair and on her white clothes might have annoyed her more than an attempt on her life.

“You know you have the nastiest laugh I’ve ever heard? Sounds like you trapped a rat in your throat.”

I didn’t get a reaction, which was lame. Ianthe just looked me up and down like I was a rotten piece of meat. I guess I was.

“It was pity, hm? That’s what it was.” She mused after a pregnant pause. “Like a lame dog. You’re pathetic.”

We stared at each other—a stupid faceoff no one could win. I think she must have gotten bored, because she breezed by me, making sure to elbow me with that goddamn arm you made her.

You never made me anything, I thought.

You made me suffer, I guess. Made me feel the way I did.

I went back to my chair, stumbling through the sand. On it, made of leaves from the weird trees, was a visor. I picked it up and realized that it had been fastened together with knuckle bones.

Pity, I thought. I’m pitiful.

I slipped the thing on my head. It wasn’t well-made, but it kept most of the light out of my eyes when I sat and watched the waves roll by.

My eyes smarted, and I couldn’t even blame it on the suns.

[spending-life-pretending]

Idk if it’s been said before, but I think there is something really interesting about the fact that Gideon/Kiriona knows who Nona is. Like, pretty much as soon as she realizes it’s not Harrow in there (“Who is this literal goddamn infant?”) she starts assuming it’s Alecto (“Different question: Do you love her?”) and it’s not that she understands the implications of that, she doesn’t seem to know who/what Alecto really is, but it’s pretty clear that as soon as Gideon realizes Harrow isn’t in her body she also realizes that the Girl in the Tomb is.

Which is interesting for a lot of reasons, but mainly because 1) it’s Gideon. Gideon, Harrow’s cavalier, who has had experience driving Harrow’s body when Harrow was absent. She sacrificed her life for Harrow (“Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life…”) but ultimately believes that Harrow botched her lyctorhood rather than live in debt to Gideon (“…and you didn’t even want it”). So of course Gideon figures it out. Because Gideon died with the expectation that it would be her in Harrow’s brain forever, but Harrow wouldn’t let that happen, and so Gideon assumes there’s only one person Harrow would give up her body for. The person Harrow loves. And that’s (not Gideon) Alecto.

And this drives me CRAZY because 2) Gideon doesn’t seem to care about the revelation that it’s Alecto. She accepts it as a reality Harrow would make possible, and the only place she pushes back on is what that revelation means for Harrow. In the van, when Gideon confirms she knows who Nona is (again, “Do you love her?”), she also reaffirms her devotion to Harrow (“I just need to know—where”).

Which means that despite Kiriona’s apparent loyalty to John, despite the fact that if it’s Alecto in there, it only confirms (to Gideon’s mind) that Harrow will never chose Gideon the way Gideon chose Harrow, she still puts Harrow first. Because one flesh, one end, bitch—she’s Harrowhark’s goddamn cavalier, and even when she might want Harrow in hell she needs to know she’s there.

[with-my-murder-flute]

Further adventures in TLT brainrot

(Like, hyuuge spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Go read them, then report back here for indoctrination.)

I've got a theory about the missing days between GTN and HTN, why Harrow instructs her future self to use blood on the sword, and how Blood of Eden ties into everything.

Two puzzle pieces that have been rotating in my brain nonstop since last September:

We Suffer saying they had thought Wake's mission to the Ninth House was a failure, "Until the posthumous contact a year ago."

Pyrrha saying, "Why the hell did John let her bring the kid’s body? He must have known that Blood of Eden would go apeshit the moment they saw it."

So here's my theory:

Wake hitched a ride to Canaan House with Harrow and Gideon, in the sword Gideon put so much effort into smuggling there. (I also have a theory about Wake and Gideon before that, but that's its own post.) Much plot happens, and Gideon's soul ends up in Harrow's body.

Wake has, I would argue, strong thanergetic ties to Gideon's body. She was the thing Wake died for; her survival killed Wake. They fell together, Wake dying, Gideon living. So going by Revenant 101 from HtN, one of the most sensible things Wake would go back to is... Gideon.

So, what if Wake, in the sword, suddenly goes, oh look! Gideon's body is empty! And she possesses Gideon's body. Gideon "wakes up", which Harrow would absolutely 100% know is not her. But Wake-in-Gideon goes and finds some form of communications device (maybe that Cytherea brought, since she warned BoE that the lyctor trials had been announced), and contacts Blood of Eden.

Blood of Eden that lost her twenty years ago, being contacted by someone who is the spitting image of Commander Wake, and was convincing enough that Blood of Eden came to the First House with some kind of transport vehicle.

In the time between Wake making that call, and the shuttle arriving, Harrow took her steps to keep Gideon partitioned in her brain, but she also orders her future self: Wipe [the sword] down with your arterial blood nightly. Coat the blade in the ash which regrows. Do not cut flesh with the naked blade. Do not cut bone with the naked blade. Even this may not prove enough. Treat the sword as your promised death, and act according to the first guideline.

What that says to me is: Harrow (and maybe Ianthe or Judith) worked to yank Wake out of Gideon's body, and stuff her back into the sword. When they split up, Harrow took the sword, and offered it blood on a regular basis, the way Abigail would when calling a spirit. Or maybe "offered" isn't the right word--she might have been forcibly binding Wake's soul to the blade to keep it out of Gideon, which fed some of Wake's enormous fury towards her. (Along with like. Years of Gideon telling her dead mother all about Harrow being a giant bitch to her.)

And then, I feel like it's practically textual that Wake begins haunting Harrow, then makes her sleepwalk in her first night at the Mithraeum and drive the sword into Cytherea's body, so that Cytherea and Pyrrha can have their little trysts.

But meanwhile Blood of Eden showed up and grabbed the three non-lyctors and Gideon's incorruptible body. Not Cytherea's, which was presumably easy to find; just Gideon's.

Blood of Eden aren't experts on weirdo zombie wizard shit, and their new captives probably weren't eager to share information. What if they just thought: this body was Wake, Wake was somehow alive in this body, but she isn't now, and if they only woke her up, they might get their leader back when they desperately needed her.

(Some of them might also have known about Wake's pregnancy, and have interest in Gideon as herself, since she is related to some of them. Thus Pash's extreme repugnance towards sitting in a truck with Prince Kiriona)

[ninthhousedyke]

Nona the Ninth Live Blog - The FINALE

Wow so I’m finally finishing Nona after Jod knows how long since I started it because I’m an awful reader and I accidentally left the book at home when I moved back to college after break….oopsie! Anyway we’re starting at John 5:4 and going straight to the end even though I already know most of what happens but I love my girls and wanna catch any details I missed from reading spoilers.

John stop making sex jokes I SWEAR THIS IS SERIOUS!!

Ooo there goes the façade! John just wants revenge on Blood of Eden for being the descendants of the escaped trillionaires when the trillionaires have been dead for thousands of years. He can’t let go of his anger because it’s the only thing keeping him alive or else he’ll have to feel that guilt he’s so insistent on removing from everyone.

Harrow calling The Body a God is delicious.

Harrow is on her way bitches!!

Chapter 30:

Is that a TOWER icon?! Have we seen this before?? Harrows walking toward a tower in the River and Nona plus company are in the River…is Harrow finally going back to her body!?!

Still not used to Paul, never will be.

“It takes more than this” oooo fuck I love Kiriona.

Paul’s eyes are weird….

Kay so there’s the tower that Harrow went after in the River, but wtf is it for?? Is it another manifestation of a Resurrection Beast? Is it part of the River falling apart? Is it something holding the River together? Varun is still talking through Judith and he says that John and Alecto left “them” too long. Is “them” the tower(s)? The resurrection beasts? What is HAPPENING? Harrow is clearly returning to her body with how Alecto’s mind is scattering.

Fuck all the people; we’re choosing to live for a dog. Is now a bad time to mention I’m a cat person?

All jokes aside, the line of reasoning that “everyone I love is either gone or will never be the same again, and I will never be the same again so it would be best to die here” is such a relatable feeling? Not just as someone who was suicidal for years, but just any huge transitionary stage of life means you’re leaving behind who you were and who the people around you were for a new chapter, and sometimes you just don’t want that? Like I hardcore relate to Alecto’s feelings here because even she, the literal embodiment of Earth, is just tired of losing people.

Chapter 31:

Kiriona calling the Ninth “home sweet home” is so eerie to me but more importantly I am frothing at the mouth to see what has become of the Ninth since our girls left. Like shit had to have gone down right? John sent souls to replenish it but who tf is in charge?

Okay so if Pyrrha says the tower wasn’t a resurrection beast then I believe her but if Pyrrha doesn’t even know what tf the tower was then I’m very scared.

Aaaaand there goes Kiriona charging into the darkness. Glad to see John kept the dumbass parts of her personality.

WAIT if they landed at “top tier, shuttle field” does that mean they’re at the same shuttle landing Gideon tried to escape from in the first book??? Tamsyn did you leave that extra kick in the nuts just for us?

“She always said the skull was the least interesting bone.” Okay but now I NEED to know what was Anastasia’s favorite bone.

Oh my god could you imagine the Ninth with fairy lights strung everywhere?

Crux is here….yay

Okay but like he’s really just not questioning Gideon in Cohort and royal garb like…at all?

WTF WE FOUND THE REAL ZOMBIES OKAY THEN

This does not feel like we have one book left in the series because how is Tamsyn hitting us with both a brand new tower AND brand new zombies which are apparently soul corrupted people? It’s also so weird for GIDEON to be the one to know things. Fuck the Ninth rebuilding because these zombies are just clearing them out.

This Aiglamene reunion is everything I need

“That’s where my heart used to be” I WILL NOT CRY I WILL NOT CRY

I WILL CRY OHMYGODDDDD! Why is the end of this chapter so damn emotional? Alecto knows she’s going to comeback different and she doesn’t want to! She wants to remember the love she hasn’t had before! Pyrrha promising she’ll never lose that love! You can’t take away loved ahhhkjhsgdjssj

The moustache ride shirt holy shit now I’m laughing and crying simultaneously

Chapter 32:

The open tomb symbol ITS HAPPENING

“The Reverend Daughter has no cavalier living” oh just step on my heart Tamsyn

IANTHE APPEARS

Ianthe has been on page for exactly a page and already her tension with Kiriona is delicious,her attitude is delicious, and she is delicious. Creepy rat with hygiene issues but a baby nonetheless.

Gideon calling John “Dad” is both heartwarming and depressing. She’s never had a Dad in any sense but he’s JOHN and therefore not doing his best on a good day. There’s a desire for love in that word but Gideon isn’t getting any love from John Gaius.

Gideon doing massive 180’s from doing what Ianthe wants to doing what she herself wants is so funny. She’s got her own agenda and it just so happens to sometimes help Ianthe but no matter what Gideon has her own agenda.

Friendship bracelets….bantering…laughing….touching one another….”good to see you” (quite kindly) oh jod, these two are fucking.

“You overgilded doorknob” my baby I love you

Oh baby…Gideon you want so badly to belong to someone that you’ll do anything, even for a man like JOHN??! Even Ianthe sees it. Ianthe is sympathizing with it which is scarier.

“The good son” I love the gender of the locked tomb

Both Ianthe and Gideon rushing to Harrow’s body as it begins dying is so strangely cute because it’s so obvious how whipped these two are.

“Wake made that for me…Or I stole it from her…same difference.” Pyrrha I love you and I want a whole spinoff of what your relationship with Wake was like because hot damn.

Gideon offering to die AGAIN for the thanergy bloom to save Harrow….girl, baby, sweetie, just write love poems like a NORMAL PERSON

Oh jod Gideon’s in so much pain that not even killing Crux, telling him she’s the daughter of the emperor, can make her feel better. She’s so empty and cold. Harrow come get your girl!!!

Anastasia’s bones casually guarding the rock to the tomb….ooo girl that’s gonna come back to be important later.

The idea that Alecto doesn’t remember first entering the tomb as being forced tells me that maybe there’s something more to the tomb and her imprisonment than we’ve been led to believe, which is the case for literally everything in this series.

Epilogue:

Just yeet Ianthe into the River, hell yeah.

Not Harrow immediately asking Alecto to kill her for not being worthy. Girls, therapy is a Thing and you all need some like last year.

Aaaand there’s the weird bite-kiss

Gideons like “only I offer my weird dead services to Harrowhark, and I will fight the literal soul of earth and source of God’s power to prove it.”

*gets stabbed* “oh hey babe, good morning.”

“Hell will break loose in Alecto the Ninth” okay but considering there’s an ACTUAL hell in this world, I’m taking this literally. WAIT what if the weird possession zombies are from hell?? That would make a little sense. Okay okay no theorizing here.

Wow so…it’s done. That was a wild ride. I’ll miss Nona a little but damn am I happy to have Harrow and Gideon back (ish). Whole gang is here to either fight God, fight some zombies, or whatever Pash is doing. Still can’t believe Harrow has kissed Ianthe and Alecto, but not fucking Gideon.

Alecto The Ninth is gonna break us all……

[incorrect-house-of-nine]

Gideon: *introducing herself*  I am Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia the First, Her Divine Highness, First Lieutenant of the Cohort, Emperor’s Life Guards, heir to the Emperor Divine, first of the Tower Princes. Harrow: *clears her throat* Excuse me! You’ve forgotten something. Gideon: ??? Harrow: First Flower of the Ninth House. Cavalier Primary to the Ninth Saint Undying.  Paul: Scoffer of Two Dinners. Pyrrha: Royal Pain in the Ass.

Ianthe: *bubbling from the saltwater* Worst Crafter Ever!

Alecto: Saddest Fucking Bitch in the Universe. *they all glare at her accusingly* Alecto: What?? Are we not calling how we see it?  Everyone: *continues to glare* Alecto: Jeeez Louise. I’ll been on ice for 10,000 years. Give me a fucking break, would ya?  Alecto: *grumbling* Ana would’ve found it funny.