#like. not even with harrow and gideon. putting them to the side for a bit

[ifyourereadingthisblinktwice]

every time i think about the locked tomb series i just circle back to “you can’t take loved away” and “life is short, love is long”

[lady-harrowhark]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Gideon’s blood and the Tomb. I’ve got two points here that dovetail somewhat…

Let’s review some key events. I realize these probably seem a bit all over the place, but I do believe they come together. I’ve tried to put these in roughly chronological order.

John attempts to consume the soul of the Earth, and then creates a physical body for Alecto: “I ripped half my ribs from my body and made you from the dirt, my blood, my vomit, my bone.”

Ten thousand years later, Gideon and Harrow duke it out. The initial recollection of the fight says that “Harrow had scratched until she’d had half of Gideon’s face beneath her fingernails.” The more candid HtN version has Gideon telling us, “You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails.”

Harrow opens the Tomb with Gideon’s (read: John’s) blood on her hands.

Harrow sees Alecto, falls in love with her, and decides to live. 

At some point while in the Tomb, Harrow apparently kisses Alecto: “She hadn’t come on purpose; the scrap of black-eyed meat had asked for it—the chain of a kiss: the ice that burnt the flesh of the mouth that had stuck to the mouth that was frozen.”

At Canaan House, Ianthe ascends and tells the others that step six of the process is to “consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you.”

Harrow’s letter tells her she owes Ianthe “the favour of the chain”, which extends “into the House, but NOT into the Tomb.” The agreement takes precedence over any oaths sworn to others, including John, except for the Holy Corpse.

Harrow kisses Ianthe to inspect her jaw and re-swears the oath.

Harrow’s Nova AU has her retrieving the chain of Samael from the Anastasian. This is considered a sin severe enough that the Reverend Father whips her, but she is allowed to keep the chain. Denied the role of Reverend Daughter, Harrow tells Ortus that she is “the unfulfilled vow and the bloody teeth of the unkissed skull.”

Alecto kisses Harrow, bites her, and recognizes her by her blood - the blood of Anastasia’s line. Alecto tells Harrow that she is very sorry about Samael, and she vows the favour she had promised to Anastasia to Harrow.

We see over and over this theme of consuming another life, whether body or soul: we get two sides of this coin when we compare Gideon’s “All I ever wanted you to do was eat me” to John’s statement that “it’s the human instinct, to take.” Consuming the flesh is, per Ianthe, one of the steps to taking in a cavalier’s soul and becoming a Lyctor, directly paralleling John consuming the Earth, both physically when he eats dirt and spiritually when he takes in her soul. Thus far, though, we don’t know how or if Harrow consumed Gideon’s flesh in the interim between chapters 36 and 37 of GtN. 

But here’s what I’ve been wondering: assuming Ianthe is correct (and telling the truth) about the steps to becoming a Lyctor, to what extent does the order and timing actually matter? I think there’s a distinct possibility that Harrow had consumed Gideon’s flesh years before they even came to Canaan House.

Because Harrow had Gideon’s face under her fingernails. And Harrow bites her nails.

HtN, chapter four:

You held your left hand up before your face, before the light, the even white light with its hot tungsten filaments. The thumbnail was whole and even. Too even? Were you wont to chew your fingernails still, that unattractive tic of your girlhood?

And again in chapter twenty-one:

She took off her gloves, and with the edges of her fingernails - bitten to the quick, and never much help - she started to prise open one wrinkled corner.

If the steps do not have to be completed strictly in order, Harrow may very well have already checked off step six if she were biting her nails with Gideon’s flesh and blood still clinging to them.

The other thing going on here is that we get these repeated connections between chains and favours and kisses. I don’t feel like we have quite all the pieces yet to draw any definitive conclusions, but it seems that the favour of the chain may have something to do with the Reverend Family’s vow to protect the Tomb. Particularly, Harrow describing herself, sans Reverend Daughter title, as “the unfulfilled vow” as she wields the chain of Samael lends itself to this interpretation. I also find it very interesting that this unfulfilled vow is paired with “the bloody teeth of the unkissed skull” given that upon waking, Alecto kisses Harrow, bites her, and draws blood which then allows her to recognize Harrow as one of Anastasia’s descendants.

Before that kiss, though, there was another. Alecto describes being called back by Harrow’s kiss, presumably when she broke into the Tomb as a child. I have to wonder if blood was playing a role here too. Alecto says that Harrow’s flesh stuck on her frozen lips, that the ice burned her. If this kiss also drew blood, it could be that the blood of Anastasia’s line was the key to calling her back. However, there may have been someone else’s blood on Alecto’s lips that day. If Harrow had been biting her nails, which she’d earlier used to claw Gideon’s face, she very well may have had Gideon’s blood in her mouth as well. As John’s daughter, her blood was able to open the Tomb. Was it able to call Alecto as well? Could “the chain of a kiss” be referring to Harrow transferring John’s blood between Gideon and Alecto?

Overall, it seems like we’re circling something akin to a blood oath or living blood ward. The thalergetic nature of blood certainly aligns with the symbolism of life and light that we see connected to the Earth and Alecto, in contrast to the thanergy that John cultivates. Alecto’s physical form is derived from John’s blood, and his power is derived from her soul. If indeed a kiss and a few drops of John’s blood, shepherded into the Tomb by Gideon and Harrow, are enough to call Alecto, I cannot even imagine the pyrotechnics show that we’re in for now that he’s had a run-in with the business end of her sword.

[starberry-cupcake]

I shouldn't be making another one of these because I didn't even give you enough time to catch up and I'm sure you're tired of me (I'm probably losing mutuals over the length of these) BUT I FINISHED ACT II and I think this is the right place for an update recap. I'm so sorry.

previously, in harrowlana the ninth (reference I might explain one day):

this happened

currently, chapters 20 - 22 (END OF ACT II!!!):

we start with a killer epitaph from harrow for her own grave that I absolutely 10000% need in a tshirt yesterday

"Here lies the world's most insufferable witch"

alleged gideon the first, here known as ortus the first (but I am so sure about this one) has tried to kill harrowbeanie 14 times

I honestly don't know how harrow is going through this without outright telling emperor johnny man to go and insert this entire planetary situation right in the center of his bolthole

we're over here working overtime for you and your sorry ass of a plan that is probably terrible for everyone who isn't you

and we have to put up with zombies (we'll get there), the terrible attitude of your remaining lyctors, very questionable food, very questionable decor, very questionable non goth fashions, and also a man who tries to kill harrow at every turn

this is the worst

at least in canaan house we had gideon's humor and camilla's perfection

ANYWAY

emperor john tells alleged gideon the first (if I'm wrong about this, these are going to be embarrassing looking back on) "she's your responsibility, not your punching bag" to which alleged gideon the first answers "I find the responsibility a hard one"

I'm not sure if this is alluding to baby lyctors in general or harrow in particular, or if anything related to the gideon-involvement narrative I'm imagining has anything to do with it

emperor johnny boy tells harrowbean that this guy's problem is that he made a pact with an "authority he has no power to gainsay" to protect emperor johnny john and that alleged gideon the first thinks harrow is a danger to the emperor

I SURE HOPE SO

I SURE HOPE HARROW KILLS THIS MAN

I HOPE ALLEGED GIDEON THE FIRST IS RIGHT

harrow then mentions how she's "lyctor lite" and emperor john of nottingham says he doesn't think harrow fucked up the lyctor thing

he says only one person fucked it up and it was nasty

it was the ninth lyctor, Anastasia (and a song someone sings, once upon a december)

the vacant room harrowbean has taken residence in was meant for her, but she never made it there

she asked emperor john the asshat to kill her and he said no because he's that kind of a person

"she had much more to give"

I hate this guy

he also says "I had a body and I needed a tomb"

harrow asks the question everyone is asking themselves

aside from where tf are gideon and camilla

"God, who did you bury?"

he gets all vague and cryptic so he can avoid taking about what the fuck he's doing

and he quotes Annabel Lee

edgar allan poe's Annabel Lee

this is a bit more in my wheelhouse than shakespeare

to which harrow notes "Who was A.L.?"

now, I have SEVERAL THINGS TO SAY

first, and most importantly, I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS

THAT ICE CUBE BARBIE MIGHT BE A.L.

I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS, FAM

here's more magic knight rayearth art of the vibes I get from them to celebrate

second of all, Annabel Lee

I do have Annabel Lee in one of my EAP books, but not the one with the pretty Lacombe illustrations

so here are some Ligeia illustrations from it that have the vibe we're going for, as a treat

now, not to be all ortus over here, but I'm gonna be reciting some poetry

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea.

gonna put that in the 3d model

in the middle of it, like a centerpiece

let's bring back the barbie

this man is doing the whole wife/madwoman in the attic gothic trope but instead of an attic it's a tomb in pluto

another madwoman archetype to add to the list, we've got a whole collection

CHAPTER 21

we have summoned ortus by reciting poetry, because we're back in the gideon-less version of canaan house

so, the sixth is dead in this version

the sleeper or random rifle carrying person shot them in the face a bunch of times

what I wanted to do to not!dulcinea

harrow mentions not having seen camilla or palmolive much in this gideon-less version

devastating for her not to have met camilla

so then protozoa and dulcinea come in

notice I didn't say not!dulcinea

that's because this is the real deal dulcinea and the alive non zombified protozoa

we can know this by their descriptions (especially the hair), the fact that dulcinea knows who tf palmolive is, that she has a breathing tube that palmolive designed for her (this guy istg), that she can identify them and calls them "cam" and "pal"

I was so caught up on this book I forgot to read the short story that came before it btw

anyway, we also know this because protozoa speaks, but we'll get to that

before that, ortus calls the sleeper "the waker" and it's giving me the vibes of the citadel deck

wait, I'm gonna take a pic of some of the cards that give me the correct tlt vibes, so you know what the hecko I'm talking about

(I'm going on unplanned tangents but maybe someone appreciates them)

(we've moved from 3d models to me fetching books and decks from my shelves, what has palmolive done to me)

so, as previously established, protozoa speaks, which is how we know he might be the real one and not the zombie version

he then proceeds to recite poetry

ortus is feral about this

I thought initially that they were gonna have to make room for protozoa in the polycule ortus is in with the fifth, but he doesn't like protozoa coming for his gig

abby says "we're all in this together" which reminds me I did make a high school musical connection with magnus before, so it's funny that it turned out that way

abby asks real dulcinea, aka "dulcie" to her, to bring in mayonnaise uncle because he'll listen to her

why is everyone always into her in all the aus, idk

this one is less bad than not!dulcinea though, but the bar for that was on the subsoil

magnus (who is very much in love with his wife and he's pointing it out every chance he gets) is in charge of looking for martita

harrow is in charge of regina george twin (and yandere twin)

abby thinks regina george twin is the most relevant one

apparently also they're flooded with the rain

which was me last week, so I feel you fam

and we get our traidtional quote, this time by real dulcinea

"Is this really how it happens, Lady Pent?" "No. It's not" "Does it get—better than this? Do you know?"

real dulcinea is saying goodbye to palmolive and the love of my life, who I refuse to accept is in any way harmed in any timeline

and harrow "felt something in her core, though she did not know precisely what it was"

palmolive had a filmsy and we love flimsies because they have what I have started to call "harrow texts"

or "texts which can only be read by harrow"

OP is still ranting, a continuation of the egg rant

I'm gonna transcribe all of it and bold the new part, for my own access, even though everyone who has me in their dash will hate me and block me

The eggs you gave me all died and you lied to me so I did the implantation myself you self-serving zombie and you still sent him after me and I would have had him if I hadn't been compromised and he took pity on me! he took pity on me! he saw me and he took pity on me. And for that I'll make you both suffer until you no longer understand the meaning of that goddamned word. Him I'll kill quick because she asked me to and because that much he honestly deserves but you two mummified wizard shits I will burn and burn and burn burn until there is no trace of you left in the shadow of my long-lost natal sun

could the self-serving zombie be emperor john? could gideon the first be one of the people alluded to? has Annabel Lee anything to do with any of this? since OP mentions a long-lost natal sun? who's "she"? has gideon's mom anything to do with any of this? is this totally not related? is this the actual present? does 'mummified wizard shits' stand for lyctor? because I kinda live for that

ortus, on the other hand, sees an S

ortus in this timeline knows how his dad died, apparently

and we end this part with harrow and ortus finding rusted pipette needles

CHAPTER 22

harrow has killed 13 planets in this practice, which is insane and nobody's asking any questions about it

she was dreaming with ice cube barbie annabel lee and she told her to wake up

harrow mentions the sword sleeping next to her in a loverlike position and it reads like a gideon body pillow to me

remember when I said we should have flushed not!dulcinea into space?

GUESS WHO WAS RIGHT

nobody ever takes the not!dulcinea threat seriously but me

I have to do everything around here

she's a zombie now, which is protozoa's revenge from behind the veil

there's a moment in which she trips but still looks at harrow and it's very creepy and well narrated but I can't help but think of the dracula dead and loving it scene with hypnosis

"it was as though a magnet were stuck in the meat, a magnet that craved some polar force within you" wonder what THAT is about

much like the sleeper/waker, not!dulcinea can pass through wards apparently

harrow goes to wake up yandere twin and says "septimus is walking"

yandere twin doesn't understand at first "the name that had never been cytherea's" and later says "tell her I want my arm back"

which relates to the fact that I've been thinking

if real dulcinea is there in the gideon-less ver

how was not!dulcinea even involved?

because harrow seems to have memories of killing her, of fighting her, of her doing damage in some way, of her being a threat, of her doing it to lure emperor johnny boy to canaan house

so we have some big missing link between the gideon-less canaan version and the emperor's bolthole timeline

she can't be the sleeper/waker, because harrow wouldn't call her "septimus"

so harrow remembers not!dulcinea posing as real dulcinea, which does not happen in the gideon-less version, as far as we can tell atm

AGAIN, DON'T TELL ME ANYTHING, LET ME BE IN DISTRESS

last but not less important

remember not to hint me anything at all and thank you for being patient with me all this time ♥

[docholligay]

LOVED Mercymorn. To the point that I know I will think of her long after every other bit of this book has passed from my mind. I don't know if you saw my post, that I made while I was reading the book, about that monologue, but I understood her so keenly in that moment, i have had this EXACT experience standing in front of the city council or whatever. I will be sitting in my Purim committee next week, and I know the phrase 'I have learned not to do any of these things, because I hated the acid you put on me' the whole thing makes me laugh, 'I often think about this' echoes through my head in such a specific way that I cannot describe to another person.

But when she DESTROYS for me is at the end, when she kills God, and you see all grief that has been converted into anger, and resentment, and it's this clear, beautiful, rage that burns so hot it's not even ANGER anymore, it's been clarified into a simple, clam, need to destroy, paired with this knowledge that is not now nor will ever be the best loved of anyone. I love her SO much.

I definitely do not like Gideon at all, and it made the first one basically unliveable for me. I would consider reading on if I knew for sure that she was the real kind of dead and I would never have to hear her stupid memeing bullshit anymore ('I often think about this') This one, I don't like Harrow, but I don't hate her anymore. I don't have deep emotional feelings about her. I like reading about her! But I don't...cherish her or anything, but I actually don't feel like I had to, in order to get something out of the book. So in that way, it was a really different experience from the first one.

I haven't read the whole series, obviously, so i can only speak for these two books, but: Not liking Gideon and not being the slightest bit inclined to feel bad for Harrow hurt my experience of the first book. I mean, it made it not work for me. Not liking Gideon annoyed me minorly in this book, and the narrative seemed fine with me not being inclined to feel bad for Harrow...which ironically made it easier for me to feel something for her. So, I can't speak to the whole series, but for me it's a little bit of a coin flip, whether you need to feel for them or not.

I am interested in, and do like, the idea that this is a story about devotion and what that can look like, and what it drives us to do. I would have to reread these with more intention, now that I have the storyline itself, but I don't dislike as an idea, and i don't see any reason off the top of my head that doesn't work (excepting my lack of knowledge about the third book, obviously). As always, I am more interested in the side characters than the main ones here, but there's a lot of good possibilities.

Also, I think it is a kind of violence you do that we will never see that.

[dwarfsized]

10 characters/10 fandoms/10 tags

the always amazing @aevallare tagged me <3 sooooo:

Astarion Ancunin (Baldur's Gate 3) - getting the obvious one out of the way early. you put a character in front of me who gets mad at you for being good and kind because no one has ever been that to him, who is a bitch and that's a feature not a bug, and im not supposed to become deeply obsessed with that? he is everything. to me.

Gideon Nav (The Locked Tomb) - tamsyn muir WHEN will my wife come back from the war? Devotion even when you hate it. Being a weapon in more ways than even you are aware of. Love when you don't know what love is, really, getting it wrong and right at the same time. Gideon @ Harrow is just "its rotten work. especially to me especially if its you. i'll fucking do it but christ alive."

Murderbot (The Murderbot Diaries) - i think i am one of the only people who thinks that Murderbot is on the fem-presenting side of androgynous but i do think that and i'm right. I haven't read the latest book yet. Being forced to interrogate an in-between space, Murderbot's "dont look at me" in combination with vulnerability, the desire to cut and run and figure yourself out and then, like. not actually figuring yourself out much. did the running help? did escaping do anything? or should you have stayed?

Stede Bonnet (Our Flag Means Death) - Cringefail fuck-up pirate my beloved, i hate watching him do things it's like looking in a mirror. Theater kid playing dress up, steeped in self-doubt and trying to get everyone to talk about their feelings. In season one he looks at his own life and says "is anyone going to ruin this?" and doesn't wait for an answer. I want to kiss him in the moonlight. Every time I think about him I want to throw up. <3

Keyleth (Critical Role) - The weight of the world on her shoulders because she's been raised to lead her people, and all that simmering rage she tries to keep under wraps, and then she only gets a tiny bit of time with the person she loves before she has to live for years and years and years and watch everyone she cares about leave her. Archdruids with timeless body are an existential nightmare.

Alex Louis Armstrong (Fullmetal Alchemist) - okay listen. when i rewatched fmab in college, I was fully ready to fall in love with Riza. I was very surprised when I realized that it was not the badass with the gun I was fixated on, but the. big muscle-y guy who cries a lot and gets used for comic relief 60% of the time. but. im here. i love him. the ishval flashbacks got to me.

Blue (This is How You Lose the Time War) - Loving someone enough you're willing to let them close enough to kill you. The inherent rot beneath blooming things. Taking the slow path. Not leaving well enough alone. Love, but with teeth. I'm so normal about her (lying)

Cora Sabino (Noumena Series) - I wish I could tell everyone to read Axiom's End because I loved it, but I cant because the sequel fucked me up so bad. Its good! but god the atmosphere is so oppressive and Cora's struggle with depression is extremely real for an alternate history story that asks the question "what if we found out aliens were real during the bush administration?" I was legitimately unwell.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars) - I just think he's the funniest guy with a laser sword. so repressed. had one of the most grey-jedi masters to ever do the damn thing. bitchy. the chosen one is his padawan. honestly he had to know anakin was sneaking out to canoodle with padme and just decided it wasn't his problem. calls himself fucking ben on the hell sand planet. why was he like that.

Spock (Star Trek) - this is the most "i just think he's neat" of all of them. i inherited this blorbo. this blorbo was handed down to me from my mom. he was hers first, im just picking up the torch. "guy who acts like he has no emotions but every seven years enters a fuck or die frenzy" im sorry but that's. that's too good. i have no choice but to rotate him in my mind.

I cannot tag 10 people but i will tag @asterordinary and @werewolfnobody and if anyone else wants to do it go for it! tag me so i can read your response!

[griseldagimpel]

Okay, but what is The Locked Tomb about, actually?

You’ve probably heard of The Locked Tomb series, but also you’ve probably heard it described as Lesbian Necromancers IN SPACE! And that’s true, but it doesn’t really tell you what the book’s about. And it might not give you enough information to decide if it’s up your alley or not. So what’s it about? Well, avoiding major spoilers, here goes.

It’s a sci-fi/space fantasy series, but it also owes a lot to the mystery genre, as each book has one or two central questions that drive the narrative. It can be rather on the gory side, but it doesn’t have any graphic scenes of sexual violence. As you can probably guess from the bit about necromancers, it deals with death, like, a lot. There’s a bit of not-too-graphic cannibalism and some light necrophilia, although neither was so intense as to put me off the series, even thought neither of those are my Thing. Finally, there’s a character in the second book (the Saint of Duty) whose characterization is definitely a bit in Racist Stereotype territory, so head’s up about that. (I can elaborate on this point if prospective readers want more details, but I’m not interested in fighting with anyone about this point. If you feel differently here, fine, but this is my post.)

While I don’t know if the author was ever in the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom or not, the series very much strikes me as having a strong Fullmetal Alchemist influence. Seriously, if you liked Fullmetal Alchemist but wish it had more female characters and was queerer, you’re going to love The Locked Tomb series.

The first book is Gideon the Ninth. It’s about a necromancer (Harrow) and her indentured-servant-turned-cavalier (Gideon) who are summoned to [big, creepy, mostly abandoned] Canaan House at the behest of the God-Emperor of the Nine Houses to undergo Lyctor trials, Lyctors being quasi-immortal super-necromancers. Each of the other houses has also sent candidates, and there’s very much competition between them.

Gideon and Harrow have a bad history between them, and their evolving relationship is the emotional core of the book. If you like enemies-to-lovers, it’s a variant of that. The central mysteries are “How does one become a Lyctor?” and “Who’s killing the necromancers and cavaliers at Canaan House?“

The second book is Harrow the Ninth. It follows Harrow after she has become a Lyctor in the service of the God-Emperor. But something’s not right, and Harrow’s forgotten about Gideon. Further, there’s a plot against the God-Emperor, and a corpse that won’t stay put when it should.

This book introduces the Resurrection Beasts, which are the big cthulhu monsters that Lyctors fight. The central mysteries are “Why doesn’t Harrow remember Gideon?”, “What’s the plot against the God-Emperor?”, and “Why does that corpse keep moving around?”

The third book is Nona the Ninth. It’s about a girl, Nona, who’s being raised on the planet New Rho by three characters from the previous two books. The central mystery is “Who is Nona?”

As Nona plans her birthday party, New Rho slides toward full scale societal collapse due to a combination of the conflict between the Houses & the Blood of Eden and the Resurrection Beast that is threatening the planet. In parallel to this, we get the God-Emperor’s backstory, which does not disappoint in the slightest.

The fourth book is Alecto the Ninth, but it isn’t out at the time of me writing this.

[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?

[uten4]

Informal Thoughts Post-Reading Gideon the Ninth

WHATTTTT THEEEEEE HECKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT!!!!!!! OH MY GOD!!!!!!! WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Style

This book has a style that will not let you forget that you are reading a book. It's one of the most styles ever. Tamsyn Muir keeps using words in ways I never thought were possible; it genuinely is impressive. And even when her words are normal, her prose is very clever. The pages are crawling with life...

...which won't appeal to everyone. Some people want a straightforward style, and this is not that. For me, it was an acquired taste, and even after I acquired it, it was still hit-or-miss sometimes. Muir's word choice illustrates things in ways that may have been impossible if she hadn't gone all-in like this, but there were plentyyy of times where it jarred me out of the story. Either because I just couldn't buy a particular phrase, or because I was being sent to the dictionary often enough that it started thinking I was putting the moves on it. The latter isn't so bad to me, but the former is a bit problematic.

Also, Gideon has a lot of quips, which I mostly got used to, but it did annoy me when she broke them out even in some of the most serious moments.

Plot/Concept

I was worried at first because I was told this book was a slow crawl at the beginning, but it actually wasn't so bad at all in that department. Maybe it's just because I was prepared for it, however.

The plot was enjoyable. I was really excited for the "And Then There Were None" style mystery, but I was not prepared for how the deaths were going to hit. I'll go into it more in the Big Spoilers section at the end, but while the first set of deaths was like "aww, that's pretty sad" to me, the second set was heart-wrenching, the third individual was whatever, and then I really felt every death from there. The ominous change in the atmosphere as the cast dwindled more and more... it was really something.

The fight scenes and necromancy scenes were very good. Some of those bone fights were breathtaking, and they got really crazy at the end (hence my screaming in the beginning of this post. Also a result of the plot twists, which were cool).

My favorite scene overall was the dinner table duel (ft. Dyas and Camilla but the other characters' presences and reactions were AMAZING too). The entire scene was just a 10/10 on action, physical drama, and character drama. It was amazing, it was heart-pounding. I loved it.

I also liked Ianthe vs the Eighth House. Oh gosh... the brutality of necromancy, especially the self-brutality, is captivating, and I think this scene really exemplified that.

But even though necromancy was such a wild subject to watch in action throughout this book, there's still a few tiny but very important things I still don't understand about it. Like how did necromancers sometimes prevent others from moving physically? What part of that is necromantic? I may have just missed the answer to that one somewhere lol.

Characters/Relationships

And speaking of Ianthe, I wish that we'd seen more of Ianthe, Naberius, and Coronabeth's inner workings. Maybe I'll notice more details about them if/when I go back and reread scenes with them, but like... I don't know. We see Ianthe's confidence, but we never see with our own eyes the side of her that made her do what she did, without any remorse. It would have been cool to understand the Third House more.

I really like Harrowhark. She's so smart and powerful, but also kind of Just A Teenage Girl... I love the dichotomy of how she looks powerful, decisive, confident, etc., etc. to so many of the people around her, but we also end up seeing a lot of vulnerability in her. And I feel so, so, so bad for her...

I also think it's grimly cute that in that one scene near the end where she's talking to Gideon and it's unclear whether it's really Gideon speaking or just Harrow's hallucination, Gideon is very flirtatious. More flirtatious in speech than she'd ever been to Harrow prior. And Gideon quotes something that I'm assuming is part of the necromancer-cavalier oath, which she'd never heard before. So I read it as being Harrow's hallucination, and because she has a gay crush on Gideon that she probably hasn't come to terms with yet, she imagines Gideon talking to her the way she wishes she would deep down ;~;

I LOVE Palamedes and Camilla so much. I love their collaboration with Gideon and Harrow so so so so so much it was SOOOOOOOO fun to me. I LOVE THEM. I love that they're some freaking medical nerds, and that they're also REALLY SKILLED. And REALLY NICE!!!!!!!!!!! 😭 And I love their relationship with each other it's so deep and beautiful and fun.

Gideon... Gideon, Gideon. My big problem with her is that she has no larger motivation whatsoever after she leaves the Ninth House. Nothing drives her through the story. She never (or barely) even thinks, "I need to survive this so I can go be free when the Lyctorhood stuff is over." She's actually a very passive protagonist; she has few opinions on anything in the plot. This leads to countless scenes where everyone is really invested in the topic at hand... except for Gideon.

The only thing that drives her into action is a threat of danger to someone else, so... basic human morality. And even then, she barely thinks about it; it's just automatic for her. And then her arc ends the way it passed, with her not having any big motivations of her own or any value of herself. Actually, does she have a formal character arc? If someone who read this book actually reads this, please feel free to lmk how Gideon develops as a character in this, because I can't think of anything.

And the book is named after her. Poor Gideon.

Homosexuality

I really liked how Gideon's crush on Dulcinea was written. A very slow sinking into a beautiful woman with a magnetic personality. Her crush on Coronabeth was also pretty good.

I think Gideon and Harrow's relationship is extremely interesting, and definitely sweet for Harrow, but... I don't know... if I can get behind a romance with them... I feel complicated about it because even though Gideon forgave her, Harrow has just tormented her so much, and prevented her from having freedom for so long. I really really loved their teamwork at the end though. Maybe if I reread stuff and ponder it again and ponder life I will Understang...

Oh, but overall, this was NOT a romance book lollllll. That was disappointing to me personally (PERSONALLY, obvs not a flaw. Except maybe that exaggerated advertising on the cover cough cough) cuz I was looking for sapphic action And romance, but I'm still very glad I read it.

Discussion of some Big Spoilers

AHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! PALAMEDES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! HE FREAKING DIED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's so sad, guys. U_U Obviously I should have expected it because everyone was dying, but I loved his character so much, and now Camilla is alone... It's so sad.

And I don't super like how he died. We knew he had a crush on Dulcinea for a large part of the book, but then we were kind of just told how important the crush was to him (and how he went into the medical field solely for her... uhhh... that's so horrifyingly sad, but I'll choose to believe that even though he went INTO it for her, he found a lot of joy in it otherwise! Relatable actually! And plausible since he's clearly obsessed with it) and then he immediately went and killed himself for her.

Even though we had way more show-not-tell evidence of how deep his passion was for other things. If he died for Camilla for example, that would have been more satisfying because we've seen time and time again how deep his feelings were for her. We don't know anything about why he loved Dulcinea, which just makes it more sad :(

The only thing that redeems it is the fact that he was also trying to keep the Emperor and everyone else from dying, but it looks like his sacrifice didn't even work in the end ;~; He died for nothing? Poor, poor, poor, poor Palamedes.

I'm really happy Camilla survived though :D I was thinking how awesome it would be for Muir to subvert expectations and keep her alive, and she did!!!!!! Great move for writing and great move for my heart. BUT WHERE DID SHE GO? WHERE DID CORONABETH GO??!?!! God. This is bait to get me to read the sequel and it's pretty good bait.

And. Now baby girl Harrow has to live on like this :( Another tragedy added on to her pile of tragedies. At least she got to experience someone loving her, and she was able to show them some love back. Ooouuuuuuuuu....

[abigail-pent]

About G--'s Arm

This is very weird. I still do not understand why John took off his arm. Someone in the comments of a previous post suggested it was so he could use it to resuscitate G-- later, but there's something still suspicious about this, because it requires John to be able to grow a whole new body from a piece that does not even have a brain. And we've been hearing this whole time -- lots of times in HTN and I think also in one of the earlier John chapters in NTN -- that John cannot regrow limbs. So how can he regrow a whole body from an arm?

And on top of that: in the sequence where he takes G--'s arm *off*, he GROWS HIM A NEW ARM:

"He said, He didn't feel any pain, and I grew him a new one then and there. Bit of a gamble, but I was sure I could do that by then. I wanted his arm . . . his material. He didn't even ask me to explain. . . . Should still be around here. The arm, I mean. I stuffed it in the morgue so nobody would find it. I've got plans for that arm." (NTN p. 399)

So at this point, pre-Resurrection, John absolutely does know how to regrow limbs; and if the commenter on my previous post was right and the 'plan for G--'s arm' was to regrow Gideon, then John knew he would keep that power post-Resurrection. But that also doesn't quite make sense, because even though at this moment John says he had a bad feeling, he doesn't know about the soul yet, and so even though he's aware that nuclear armageddon is likely, it can't be within the scope of his plans to understand that there's going to be an 'after' the nuclear armageddon. He doesn't yet know he could ensoul a new G--, even if he could create him a new body.

And then post-Resurrection, a myriad later, who can regrow limbs? Not Lyctors, except for Gideon-in-Harrow. John says he can't, but this is maybe a lie -- I think a fair amount of his lies exist to cover his culpability in the death of Earth and the fact that he has achieved perfect Lyctorhood/Grand Lysis whereas he let the others kill their loved ones to achieve only imperfect Lyctorhood/Petty Lysis. (And his culpability in setting Gideon to kill Harrow in HTN.) It's simple to say 'oh, he lies about everything' but I just don't think it's true; I think he lies for strategic reasons, and those strategic reasons are so fundamental to the world that he just ends up lying a lot. If this is true -- what strategic purpose would it serve for him to lie about being able to regrow limbs? It would show that he's different from the other Lyctors, but he wants the other Lyctors to think he's different, and they already think he's different. So did he lose this power, or what? And what does it mean that Gideon can regrow Harrow's thumbs? Does that come down to the fact that thumbs don't qualify as a limb in terms of the nervous system (as I think @dr-dendritic-trees pointed out)? Or does this point to Alecto as the source of the regrowing ability, and something about Harrow achieving perfect Lyctorhood -- or maybe just Harrow losing her thumbs -- triggers these powers from Alecto lying dormant inside her? Powers which John cannot access because of putting Alecto to sleep, or because of Alecto's pact with Anastasia?

If Alecto is the source of the regrowing ability, we actually get into some interesting themes. It points to a sort of cosmic duality: Alecto as source of life, and John as source of death, compartmentalized in a way that they should not be; a highly unnatural compartmentalization. They ought to be intertwined -- two sides of the same coin -- and intertwining is exactly what John did with their souls at the time of the Resurrection; but he tried to separate them when he put Alecto to bed. And they can't be separated, because when death is conquered, what meaning does life have? When you can't die, when you live ten thousand years... we see what that does to Mercy and what it does to Augustine. It's unnatural. You lose yourself. Death and life have to be together to have meaning.

[ryttu3k]

It’s Nona time.

There are many spoilers ahead! Not enormously in this first bit, given that all but the very last section has already been released, but otherwise, spoilers abound.

Ready? Ready!

Nona the Ninth - Day One

Dramatis Personae Guest List

I would still die for Noodle and Stop It (name assumed)

You told me, Sleep, I’ll wake you in the morning.

I asked, What is morning? and you said,

When everyone who fucked with me is dead.

When everyone we loved has gone or fled,

That’s morning. Empty’s just another word for clean.

Let’s put this first-draft dream of mine to bed.

In the appointed hour

I’ll pull up your sheets. I’ll kill the light,

Lie down beside you; die; and sleep the night.

This time will be the time we get it right:

Forgiveness not so hard, nor anger long;

Our graves will be less deep, our lies less true.

You held aloft the sword.

I still love y

*eyes emoji*

John 20:8

IN THE DREAM, he told her the words about where he took his degrees, his postdoc, his research fellowship. They were his noise and not really for consumption. More like meditation; like even his mouth knew the pointlessness of it, and just wanted to recite. Dilworth. Otago. Auckland.

a) Still so jarring to go from the Nine Houses to suddenly reading names like Otago and Auckland. I've been there! I've seen those places! Jod isn't Just Some Guy, he's a Kiwi! b) Looked up Dilworth, it's a private boys boarding school in Auckland. What a snot.

He said: We just wanted to save you. You were so sick.

'You'? I know he's talking to Harrow here (in a dream), but if Alecto is the Earth, that works.

He said, It was me and A- and M- at the start. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the money for a bigger team; we were simply the only ones capable of what they were asking. M- for medical, A- because he was the glycerol-6 genius. He could’ve gone anywhere but he stuck with me... and thank God for that, because he handled all the shareholders. I was there for everything, but those meetings were like dying. I’ll never love meetings. C- was brought on by the oversight execs for contracts, you know, checks and balances, but look where that ended up, she was on our side before the first year was over...

Augustine and Mercy, I assume. C might be Cristabel or might be Cassiopeia.

The Mark-R cryo cans had room for eleven billion people, easy. We’d got the procedure down to five hours per person with a trained team of four. Assuming an existing medical degree, that training could take as little as weeks, manpower wasn’t an issue if we started now. Sure, the maternity stuff wasn’t totally ironed out, but we were nearly there, and the packing was perfect. Of course they bitched about the timeline, and they bitched about the money, but they were always going to bitch about the money. Our rule was, nobody knowingly left behind.

And then they got left behind.

IAF were involved, Pan-Euro Astronautics gave it their blessing, it was all so benign. We even lent them G- at the time because they wanted to talk about coating. M- said that she didn’t like it, she smelled a rat, and you know what I said? You know what I told her? I said, Don't let it get to you and I said, Don't get paranoid! I fucking looked her in the eye and said, This is the way we’re getting out, and you know that the moment half a dozen trillionaires realise it, they’re going where the oxygen is. That’s what I always told her. They’re going where the oxygen is. Wealthy men head for the exit.

He said: When they called me up and said the cryo project was over she looked at me and she just said, There they go, John.

a) G is Gideon, I assume. b) If BoE is descended from the people that left instead of sticking with the cyro project, yeah, no wonder he's bitter.

In the dream, she was sat next to a bundle of meat he’d cut, thighs mostly, for when they felt hungry, which happened rarely and always simultaneously. When it did happen they would be side by side, eating until their stomachs were sore. They would drink from the sea like dogs.

Oh I hate the sound of that.

He said after a pause: You know the worst part? She cried. She and A- both cried. In each other’s arms, like babies. They were so fucking scared. And I was right there, and I couldn’t do piss.

Don't blame them tbh

He was quiet for a long time. The sea ate at the sand. The waves glowed a little even though there was no sunshine, only thick yellow cloud.

She prompted: So what did you do?

He said: A damned thing, didn’t I.

She said: When is the part where you hurt me?

He said: Soon. It’s coming up.

She said: I still love you.

And in the dream he rubbed his temple with his thumb and said: “You always say that, Harrowhark."

Oh yeah these sections are going to be interesting.

Day One

REGARDING NONA—HOT SAUCE IS WATCHFUL—THE CITY HAS A BAD DAY—NONA GETS A BEDTIME STORY—FIVE DAYS UNTIL THE TOMB OPENS.

Here we go!!

1

There's a little picture at the top - a cave with a rock in front, skull above it, two chains crossing it. I bet that'll change with each day.

LATE IN THE YEAR of nobody she really thought about that much in particular

Hehe.

“The painted face is on top of me. I’m in the safe water—I’m lying down, I think. Something’s pushing at me. The water goes over my head and it’s in my mouth. It goes up my nose.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“How do you feel?”

“I like it. I like the water, I like her hands.”

“Her hands?”

“They’re the things around me—maybe they’re my hands.”

The confusion here definitely leads a reader to think this is the pool scene. Is she Gideon or Harrow? Both? Neither?

She wrestled out of her nightshirt with her arms and stretched on her trousers using her ankles, in the move that Camilla called worm with problems.

<3

It was incredibly important that she not get upset like that again. She had only ever had two tantrums in her life, but it would be humiliating to have a third.

Humiliating or dangerous? I'm going to say that she will probably have a third by the end of the book.

She hedged cunningly. “At least please can you write down, I love you, Palamedes, please, from me? At least write, I love you, Palamedes, from Nona.”

This Camilla Hect did unblushingly, though Nona had to take it on trust. When she squatted down on her haunches, following the strokes the pencil made, she could not make out a single word. She could not even make out a letter, not of any alphabet she’d ever been shown, which interested everyone except herself. But you could always trust Cam. When the pencil stopped and the message was obviously discharged Nona leant into her and said, “Thanks. I love you too, Camilla,” and: “Do you know who I am yet?”

“Someone who’s late for breakfast,” said Camilla.

But as Nona straightened, she turned and smiled her rare brief smile, the one like the sun catching the glitter of a car on the motorway. Cam smiled so seldom now that Nona immediately felt it was going to be a good day.

She loves so much ;_; I love this illiterate amnesiac mystery so much <3

“Same as normal,” said Nona, reluctantly taking another bowl. “I wish I could dream something different for once. Do you dream, Pyrrha?”

“Sure. Just last night I dreamed I had to give a briefing, but I wasn’t wearing pants and my backside was hanging out,” said Pyrrha, hacking the shocking orange curds into clumps with the edge of the spatula. During a pause in Nona’s gurgles of mirth, she added solemnly, “It was no fun, my child. I knew I’d be okay so long as I was hiding behind the podium, but I didn’t know what I’d do once I had to sit down again. Die, I guess.”

“Are you being serious or joking with me?” Nona demanded, once this fresh pleasure had subsided.

“Deadly serious. But go put another mark under ass joke anyway.”

I also love Pyrrha.

“Can I get one big braid and two little braids coming off it at the sides?”

“Sure, if we’ve got time.”

“They don’t come loose and the plain plaits do.” Nona added in the spirit of truth: “And I can’t help chewing the ends with plaits. I want to steer clear of Temptation.”

She's adorable. Also, pain. Pain ;_;

“Don’t start the secondhand smoke argument again,” said Nona in alarm, but then, figuring she’d been harsh: “Anyway, they’re bad for you and I love you, Pyrrha.”

“Prove it,” said Pyrrha, which meant she had to eat the eggs.

It's been how many pages? And she's already said she loves everyone she lives with ;_;

Cam’s was dark brown and bobbed off sharply at the chin and it felt nice against your cheek, and whenever Pyrrha didn’t shave her head quick enough she got a little flat cap of dark terracotta, the colour of wet red earth at the building site. Most of Pyrrha was the colours of the building site: deep dried-out browns, dusty hunks of clay, rusted metal. She was raw and ropy and square-shouldered, and Camilla was long and shadowy and lean. Nona thought they were both exquisite.

We love a body positivity queen.

The easiest way of telling who was who was in the eyes. Palamedes had soft cool eyes of brownish grey, like bare ground in the cold mornings when Nona had been little, and Camilla had the clearest of clear grey eyes like storybook ice, not like normal cloudy ice at all.

Perfect Lyctorhood! Albeit in a shared body, so not Perfect Lyctorhood at all. Pyrrha also has G1deon's eyes now, and Nona... appears to be Harrow's body, Gideon's eyes, but who knows what's going on there yet?

Pyrrha continued, “Anyway, you’re paying for the meat roulette. The stuff the butcher’s keeping back is only ten percent upholstery, the rest is livers and gristle.”

Nona wanted to know. “What part’s the upholstery?”

“A very nutritious part,” said Palamedes.

“The part that hung out in my dream,” said Pyrrha.

That set Nona off again, so she had to get up from her eggs to make another mark on her tally sheet. Palamedes stared, distracted, and said: “Dear God, two in a day? Why are we even remotely in doubt? Forget the meat, I was being facetious. We wouldn’t have upholstery money even if I wrote hardcore pornography for a living.”

Pyrrha said, “Wish you’d try. These nicotine patches are killing me.”

“If that’s meant to make me feel guilty, I feel nothing, thank you,” said Palamedes. “Cam’s body is a temple. She’s the one who’s banned me from a life peddling poor-quality erotica. Says she doesn’t want our last gift to the universe to be tales of people mashing birthday cakes beneath their bottoms."

a) It's okay I giggled too. b) There is absolutely at least one AU of Pal as an erotica writer, right.

There is so much politics here and I've read this part so many times and I still don't know precisely what's going on other than it sucks for people right now :(

"BoE are making that choice, Palamedes... We Suffer’s lost. The Wakers and Ctesiphon Wing can’t protect us. Merv Wing’s got the glue, which is a way out. The Hopers call the shots now... and I’ve met leaders like Unjust Hope before. They’re the guys who come to the fore when people want leaders who don’t count the costs. We’re heading for a purge, Sextus. This is the Blood of Eden who don’t give a fuck."

Okay, so the Wings mentioned in the BoE memo were Tartessus, Merv, and Suva. Merv's mentioned, I guess the Wakers follow in Wake's memories. Unjust Hope seems to be a potential antagonist? We Suffer doesn't seem to be doing great right now. Wonder if Corona and Judith are still with her?

Nona loved the clean, bright smell of shaving soap, and to see Pyrrha swiftly and expertly scrape the dark russet-brown stubble off her cheeks and from around her mouth, and the little wet red marks that appeared. When she reached over to touch one freshly smooth cheek, the marks were already wrinkling up and disappearing.

lmao sweetheart if she's cutting the shit out of her cheeks, that's not 'expertly' shaving XD

Big blue thing that's periscoping? Oh dear, that's number seven, isn't it.

Pyrrha turned her eyes up to the ceiling in mute appeal. Her exhalation rasped loudly against the vent in her mask. “I used to run the whole Bureau,” she said, and she didn’t sound like she was addressing either of them. “Now I’m up against wannabe heroes and hairy dogs. This is the punishment she would’ve wanted for me. God, she must be pissing herself laughing... Let’s go, kids. Like hell am I walking in this heat.”

I'm assuming 'she' is Wake. Oh Pyrrha XD

2

Image at the top - the Tomb again.

When she looked in the mirror she had skin the colour of the egg carton, and eyes the colour of the egg mixture, and hair the colour of the burnt-out bottom of the pan. More to the point, Nona thought she was gorgeous. She had a thin, complicated face, and a mouth too easily unhappy and too easily discontented; but she had nice white teeth in a smile that looked sad no matter how happy she was, and arched black brows like she always wanted to ask someone a question. Nona talked to herself in the mirror even now. When she had been earlier born, and less self-conscious, sometimes she would rest her face against the mirror’s face, and try to reach her reflection. Camilla had caught her kissing it once, and had written about six pages of notes on that, which was humiliating.

a) I love her colour descriptions. b) Yeah I feel that's definitely Harrowbod, especially given that Pyrrha was the last one with her.

“You see,” Palamedes had said to her, “the eyes are a dead giveaway. When you give yourself to someone else, their soul shows in yours by the eye colour; that’s why you’ll never see me looking out of Camilla’s face with my own eyes again.”

“So someone’s inside me, then? I mean - I’m that somebody?” She always stumbled over this.

Hashtag Just Lyctor Things.

“Maybe yes, Nona, maybe no. Eyes can also show that a soul is in someone else’s body temporarily. Your amber eyes could mean that you’re like Camilla and me, or it could mean something else. But you seem to have had... a big shock.”

“Maybe I’ve just lost my memory,” said Nona dubiously.

“It happens,” agreed Palamedes - not convinced.

It's complicated, for sure!

“They wanted to see me naked,” said Nona. “It was a sex thing.”

Camilla had made a sound, and then pretended it was a cough, and drank a whole glass of water. After the glass of water, she said, “How did you know?”

“That’s just the way people look when they want to see you naked and it’s a sex thing,” said Nona. “I don’t really mind.”

After a moment, Camilla had told her it wasn’t a great idea for Nona to let people she didn’t know see her naked, and not to encourage sex things. She said sex things were right out. She said there were enough problems in the world. Camilla said it was bad enough that she had used to help Nona in the bath. Camilla had also written down a lot more notes.

Camilla is having such a time.

It seemed like there was nothing Camilla couldn’t do after a few tries - the laundry, or starting up a truck, or opening a door when she didn’t have the keys, or telling the drunk man at the bottom of their hall that none of them liked it when he hit his partner, in a mystical way that caused the man to move out of the apartment forever.

Cam. Cam did you murder the abusive guy. Honestly, fair.

In the beginning she hadn’t been able to do much for herself at all, but over time she had remembered how to button her shirts, and tie up her laces, and soap herself in the bath, and pour water into a glass so that her hand didn’t tremble and the water didn’t slop out. It shamed her, remembering how little she could do at the start. She had been so frustrated, in those slow early days. But now she could do nearly everything. She knew important facts like what was expected and what was unexpected at different parts of the day, and that people’s ears weren’t so interesting that she had to put her fingers inside them. In those early days Palamedes and Camilla and Pyrrha had often looked at her in a sort of stupefied shock; now they were still stupefied but they were not so shocked, and often she made them laugh.

The two main theories for Nona is that she's either an amnesiac Alecto or the combined souls of the 200 kids, I think? Both of those would work, then - a period of amnesia and needing to relearn everything, especially given that a lot of the kids were actual babies. The interest in sex could be from the fact that a lot were also teenagers. I have a thing talking about the amalgam theory here.

And now they touched her, sometimes not even by explicit request. Pyrrha would roughly hug her in one big suddenness, or sweep Nona up in her hard, wiry arms before setting her down on the sofa; Palamedes would pull the blankets up over her if she was getting into bed and tuck them in softly at the corners. If she slipped her hand into Camilla’s, when they were walking down the street, Camilla would hold it. Nona didn’t understand how the others could walk around and go through their lives only touching each other as much as was necessary. When Nona asked, Camilla said that this was because they needed to get the washing-up done.

Honestly no matter who this is, they were probably touchstarved as hell so. That is nice <3

Nona understood everybody, and could speak back to them so that they understood her, and nobody ever said she had an accent. This confounded Palamedes. When she first said that she could speak back by watching them talk and making her lips look like theirs, it confounded him so much more that it gave Camilla a headache.

Yeah, this bit I still can't explain XD;;

This had been the case for Nona’s entire life, which would be six months next week, and Pyrrha had said as a treat she would take everyone for a birthday trip to the beach (if nobody was setting up a mortar on it).

Nona was so grateful to have had a whole six months of this. It was greedy to expect much longer.

;_;

3

Ooh, new icon! This is a tree with a fruit hanging off it. That might represent Blood of Eden?

When the nice lady teacher turned up one evening and told Pyrrha and Camilla how wonderful the school was and how it had almost twenty other children and reading and writing at all the levels and an hour of the sciences every day and games, and talked about how it was even more important for children in the refuges to have a routine so why didn’t they want that for Nona, Cam had to tell the nice lady that Nona was nearly nineteen.

The nice lady was totally foxed.

“But she’s such a dot.”

Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?

a) Harrow turned eighteen in chapter 24, which was four months before the Emperor's death. If Nona has been around for six months, then yeah, her body would be two months off nineteen. b) Heehee she tiny.

After Pyrrha saw the nice lady teacher out, Camilla, who had been pacing around the kitchen, looked up and said coolly -

“What was that?”

“Getting us out of hot water, my naive beauty,” said Pyrrha, collapsing into a chair with an appalling creak. “She paid you and junior the compliment of thinking you were working girls, and that I was your pimp. God knows I’d have had better luck pimping out Augustine and Alfred.”

Nona wanted to know: “What’s pimp?”

God that's probably... not uncommon. Made ickier by the fact that the teacher absolutely assumes Nona is either very underaged or has an intellectual disability. I can definitely understand why she'd want to get Nona out of that environment, if it was true!

In fact, she only loved the Hour of Science because that was when she was allowed to look after Noodle, the science teacher’s dog, who was a dirty white creature with six legs and a gentle disposition.

I love you Noodle.

It was just as hard to make Nona learn any facts as it was to make her learn the sword or the bones - harder, probably; as she explained all the time, as sweetly as she could, her brain simply wasn’t interested in them. It was as though someone had probably told her everything before and she had already forgotten it.

That's leaning more towards Alecto, I think, but could also be teenagers from the 200.

Hot Sauce was the oldest child, at fourteen, but would have been the authority no matter her age. She was queenly for her years and spoke very seldom. She had burns on most of her body and had got to hold a gun in a war. If you were new to the school her group always eventually found you and said, “You have to come and see Hot Sauce,” and took you to Hot Sauce, and Hot Sauce would lift up her shirt and hoick up her shorts and show you the burns. This was intended to instil a sense of reverence in the fresh meat, not disgust, but the group was just as proud if the new child broke down crying or didn’t want to look.

Hot Sauce herself was blank and unmoving in her moods and did not seem to have many strong passions, except that she was violently disdainful of every subject but the Hour of Science.

Hot Sauce seems... deeply traumatised.

Trying to work out the name meanings! She hears names like Corona as Crown, so she's probably translating all of them? 12-year-old Honesty, the lieutenant, could be Atsushi (Japanese), Liêm (Vietnamese), Nazih (Arabic), or Tam (Hebrew). Can't find any names that mean 'Beautiful Ruby' in combination. 'Born in the Morning' could be Akinyi (Luo). ...I really hope Hot Sauce's real name is Sriracha XD Kevin is. Kevin. And The Angel... could be a lot of things.

“Is his name really and truly Honesty?” Palamedes wanted to know. Nona struggled.

“That’s how I hear it. Anyway, he shouldn’t be called Honesty at all, he tells huge lies and he’s trying to teach me too."

Nona longed to lie, but didn’t know how to stop her body from showing the truth; at first, she had triumphantly caught every one of Honesty’s lies, until he took her behind the bike sheds and said he would give her a cigarette a week if she stopped. He was lying, but she could see how much it meant to him, so she stopped. And when she did get a cigarette, she slipped it to Pyrrha.

The sheer inability to lie is fascinating!

But she never quite got over that little shake, that tight vibration of the stomach when the Convoy was near, how it excited her somehow. It was like she could feel something wonderful in it.

What's the Convoy carrying? Hmm.

And Honesty, who had been very nice since the cigarette arrangement, said: “When we leave school, we’re going to kill zombies, we’re gonna kill necromancers.”

lbr necromancers sound fucking terrifying to most people!

Born in the Morning protested, “I did throw a rock and it did die,” and Nona said, “What, the rock?” at which the others paused in order to jeer at her. Then Beautiful Ruby explained that the rock had been thrown at one of the cages and the necromancer had been almost all the way on fire, and the question of whether or not the rock had even hit the necromancer or the bars was still a live one, but the rock could have helped. A rock hits you in the head you’re going to die, aren’t you.

While the others litigated whether or not the rock still counted if the necromancer was almost all the way on fire, Hot Sauce, sitting with her legs dangling over the side of the broken floor, had gone very still. Nona always noticed when Hot Sauce was still, because her stillness was peculiar: it wasn’t the stillness others got when they were thinking about things in class, markers paused as their brains furiously combed over some answer. It was the stillness of someone rejecting thinking.

PTSD. Poor kiddo.

“I watched Nona eat a pebble,” Kevin volunteered, bending one of his doll’s legs into position. Then: “And a marker top.”

“Don’t squeal, Kevin,” said Nona, offended and on her dignity; she had just learnt squeal and therefore used it constantly. “And Honesty, don’t call me a dumbass. At home they said if you called me a dumbass again I should tell you that they know what you look like and they’ll beat you up.”

“Okay. I don’t want to piss off your folks, you live with a pimp,” said Honesty.

By that point Nona knew what pimp was, and was so annoyed she knew she was on the road to a tantrum.

Kids are mean :-\

“The necromancers will come back. They may already be here.”

Everyone subsided into reverent silence at Hot Sauce’s proclamation, even Nona, who took the opportunity to do five breaths in and out like Camilla had shown her.

Eventually Beautiful Ruby broke the silence and said, “What about Varun, Hot Sauce? What about Varun the Eater?”

“It’s here for them,” said Hot Sauce.

They looked up through the big crack at the blued sky respectfully.

Varun the Eater = number seven, I assume?

Nona whispered, “Join what, Hot Sauce?”

Hot Sauce didn’t answer her. When she did say anything, she asked a question instead, which was irritatingly like Pyrrha. “You like it here?”

“I love it here,” said Nona sincerely. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

“You’re sweet,” said Hot Sauce.

She is ;_;

Eventually, when it got dark enough, all their families would come looking for them - Cam always came horribly early - except for Hot Sauce, who had nobody to come looking for her, and Honesty, whom nobody ever remembered about. But even with this flaw in paradise, Nona could do nothing but hug her knees to her chest and feel fantastically, wonderfully lucky, luckier than anyone else who had ever had the pleasure of being born.

Oh that's. Oh that's sad ;_;

4

A familiar image, here! The Seventh House skull.

Once they were out of the park and out of the crowd, Pyrrha kissed the top of Nona’s head and said, “Be good,” like she always said.

Pyrrha is so soft <3 I’m glad she gets to be a Mum.

“I’m worried about her, living alone. I’ve tried to tell her about the sheltered accommodation, but she’s too independent...”

She's a traumatised fourteen-year-old, I can understand why the teacher is worried :( The teacher feels like a good sort, like she wants to make things as right and as secure as possible for the kids in the settlement.

Once Hot Sauce said that she would do something, all you could do was wait for Hot Sauce to do it. She would not invite you to help, or ask your opinion. Hot Sauce’s failure to ask anyone’s opinion on anything she did was probably the reason she was the unquestioned authority in the school, over and above the teachers. Nona had told Palamedes about it and Palamedes had said, Lead researcher material, certainly.

*snort*

It was such a relief to be pretty, and to have the braids that Pyrrha had given her look so dark and juicy and glossy. Cam said her hair was drying up and she had white spots on her nails, but Nona couldn’t see it.

That sounds like malnourishment bbygirl. And I wonder if there is a reason for her vanity?

The Angel looked less like an angel than ever that morning. Nona always liked the science teacher’s face, which was sort of snub-nosed and thin and crinkly around the eyes, but that morning she was frankly untidy. She was a gallant little person of fortyish who gave the impression that she had learnt a lot early in life and discovered late that it was no real good to her or anyone else. This lent her teaching a weightless, secretive feeling, like it was really all for fun at the end of the day. She liked to wear button-up shirts, often with suspenders to hold up the trousers, and a dust jacket to keep her clothes neat walking through the city; but that morning her shirt looked like yesterday’s shirt and her face looked like yesterday’s face - careworn, with her freckles fading into the background of her skin. All of the Angel was tinted in soft greys and browns, but she had delicious reddish freckles scattered on her cheeks and nose which added life and vivacity to her face; not so much today. As Nona led the tiny by hand into the classroom, Hot Sauce had paused on integers to say, “Good morning, sir,” which caused a reverberation around the classroom of equally respectful Good morning sir - Good mornings; but the Angel’s answering “Good morning, everyone” was distinctly pallid.

Not a description that rings a bell, but that doesn't mean much.

Sometimes Pyrrha went out late at night and came back smelling like alcohol, and Camilla would say nothing at all, but if Palamedes was there he would say, “Really, Pyrrha?” and Pyrrha would just say, “Really, Sextus,” and then the next morning she would be walking in that same rumpled, weary fashion - though Nona thought she exaggerated it for effect. Nothing Pyrrha drank could really hurt her. She had even drunk the contents of the bleach bottle once. When Palamedes had asked why, Pyrrha said she had realised she wasn’t used to being tortured while immortal and wanted to get a head start, and Palamedes said bullshit because he thought Nona had not been listening.

Oh Pyrrha ;_;

Beautiful Ruby, perhaps buoyed by being that day’s fruit recipient, held out cupped hands for the foodstuff in question and said: “Hey, you don’t look so well lately, Nona. You look kind of sick.”

Everyone turned to look at Nona, who writhed beneath this judgement, and they agreed that she had not looked well for, like, weeks. “I do,” she said indignantly. “Look at my braids—I look wonderful,” which thankfully replaced their worry with a group effort to squash her vanity. They often took it in turns to squash Nona’s vanity, which never worked. Beautiful Ruby, the best-looking out of them all and therefore the authority on looks, had once said, “You got the face of a rat and the body of a dead person,” but Nona knew she was beautiful and was complacent about it. Even if they all assured her that she was nothing to write home about, she could say, “Who cares? I can’t write,” and then they had to switch tack and squash her for being proud that she was so goddamned stupid. Nona quite liked this really; it made her feel like she belonged. They were all proud of her stupidity, in the same way that they were proud of Honesty’s rampant crimes and of Hot Sauce being the most important person in the universe.

Kids are mean :-\

When the class teacher clapped her hands together and announced the Hour of Science, which meant Nona was about to get the Hour of Noodle, Hot Sauce dawdled behind. She looked Nona dead in the eye, the ripples of her burns making pretty ridges up and down one cheek, and she said - “You’re right.”

“That I’m beautiful?” said Nona.

“No. About the Angel. The Angel’s worried.”

“Okay,” said Nona.

“Stay on the grounds today,” said Hot Sauce. “When you take Noodle.”

Yeah, something going on for sure.

5

Chapter image - Ninth House skull.

The pencil had been put down. The eyes had shadowed into earthen greys. “Crown,” said Palamedes pleasantly, “isn’t our friend right now. Okay, take that smallest piece there and try rolling it in your fingers. Feel all the little indentations in that scooped-out portion.”

“I love Crown,” Nona protested, giving the smallest bone a desultory grope.

“Why do you love Crown?”

Nona thought about it.

“She has lovely hair. And when she hugs you she smells like cinnamon, and her breasts feel nice, and she’s so big and pretty.”

Palamedes looked at her, and then he took the notepad out of Camilla’s capacious pockets. Nona despaired: there was always a tick somewhere if she mentioned breasts. “That’s not exactly love as I would classify it,” he said. “That’s simply a list of things most red-blooded human beings like about Crown. How do you know what cinnamon smells like, Nona?”

Hey, I wonder if the list is a fake-out? We see Nona referring to 'Crown' and assume that's Corona, and we see the BoE name 'Crown Him With Many Crowns', and assume that's Corona too, but is it actually? (Or am I just overthinking? XD)

“Do we still like the Captain?” (Even Nona couldn’t quite love the Captain.)

“I pity the Captain to the very depths of my heart, and never did like her much,” said Palamedes. “I pity Crown not at all, and like her terribly; that’s the problem. Why don’t you try to make that end smooth?”

Poor Judith :-\

“Why is it that the blue light in the sky hurts - other people,” said Nona, “but not you and Cam?”

She had asked this upward of a dozen times, especially lately, but Palamedes always answered unhesitatingly no matter how many times he had been asked before. “She’s got the wrong kind of body. She and I can cheat... for now... draw on me, not her, for the unusual kinds of things that I do, with the downside being that our time is very limited. If I was in her body for too long, I’d hurt her and the blue light would start to hurt me. But in summary, nothing will hurt Camilla so long as I stick to the time limit. Make sense?”

So Cam-Pal are immune to Varun because Cam's body isn't a necromancer's body, and Pal isn't in control long enough for it to pick up on his soul.

“I think so,” said Nona, and deciding: “Yes. That’s a relief... I wouldn’t want anything to hurt Camilla. I love Camilla.”

“And why do you love Camilla?”

Nona struggled with this a little. It was like asking why you breathed air.

“I love the way she moves,” she said pitifully.

He said, “Me too.”

“Do you miss seeing her?”

“Dreadfully. But the recordings are nice.”

Babies :(

“Is the blue light going to start hurting Pyrrha, Palamedes?”

Another question she had begun asking again. Camilla said it was anxiety. Palamedes said gently, “No. She’s immune to the blue light and it’s not going to start hurting her. She’s got the right type of body to be hurt by it, but the wrong soul. She was made to be immune to the blue light.”

Other way around for Pyrrha. She does have a necromancer's body, but a non-necro's soul permanently in the driver's seat. She's fine.

“So do I have the wrong kind of body, or the wrong kind of soul?”

This was the only question Palamedes ever hesitated on.

“We don’t know. We were worried that the blue light was hurting you when you first came to us, but you’re fine. This could mean that you’re like Pyrrha, and that you’re immune because your soul is protecting your body. But... there are a lot of factors, Nona.”

“Is that why - Blood of Eden don’t want me?”

“Oh, they want you,” said Palamedes. “They want you very badly. Look - are you scared by the conversation Pyrrha and I had this morning?”

“Not really. I mean, I know things are getting worse,” she said, wanting to sound worldly. “I know I’m not fixed and we only have a few more months to fix me, and who knows what’s going to happen in the meanwhile. But I’m not scared of We Suffer. I like We Suffer.”

Palamedes quirked Cam’s eyebrows in the way that meant he was amused.

“Just because the commander gave you a sweet the once?”

Lots of questions still there. Hopefully Varun leaves her be!

“In another time and in different circumstances I would also have liked We Suffer,” said Palamedes. “Hell, I might have liked all of Ctesiphon Wing. Right now though... Tidy up the bones, let’s stop for today.”

Ooh okay, We Suffer is Ctesiphon Wing. So we have: We Suffer, associated with Ctesiphon Wing, the Wakers (presumably associated with the memory of Wake), Merv has 'the glue', and Unjust Hope leads the Hopers. And mentioned in the extra-stuff memo but not in the book so far, along with Merv, are Tartessus and Suva.

“Sometimes,” she found herself saying, quite meditatively for her, “I don’t like it when you do - the necromancy word -” (“You just said it,” said Palamedes) “- but it feels nice at the same time. It’s mixed up. It’s like when you do that, it makes me sad - not sad that you did it, but sad that you can do it. Did I say something wrong?” Nona added in a rush, seeing Palamedes’s face.

“No,” he said, gently, after a moment. “I don’t understand yet, that’s all. Not even a little. I have so much to learn in the ways of not understanding.”

I get the feeling he doesn't like not understanding. Also, ow.

“Time’s up,” he said. “Give this to Cam for me, will you?”

And he spread Nona’s fingers like he always did, and he quietly kissed the second right-hand knuckle.

Nona always paid so much more attention to the lessons of the hand and the mouth than she did to the lessons of the bone and the sword: they were significantly more interesting. With the bone and the sword she faintly got the impression that she was being read a boring bit out of the newspaper, or one of the two-for-one books Pyrrha sometimes bought from the back of somebody’s truck. Whenever she was read to from one of these she was asleep in minutes. But she was good at this, whatever this was; she didn’t even know; nobody would give her the words, and she didn’t have them herself. The first time Palamedes had asked her to do it, quite a long time ago, and the first time she had raised Camilla’s hand to her mouth and done it—pretty much exactly as Palamedes had, making the same shape as his mouth had done like she did when speaking languages, and touching the same way as his hands had touched—Camilla had looked at her, and then she had gone away to sit in the bath by herself in the dark for almost an hour, even though there hadn’t been any water in the bath.

Now when Nona waited for Camilla’s eyes to clear, and she lifted up Camilla’s hand to press her mouth to it, all Camilla said was, “Thanks.” And she almost didn’t flinch.

;_; Here, have an art.

6

Chapter image - Seventh House skull.

Down at the local dairy

They were mentioned before but I do love the mention of the dairies. Really grounds this as being from a Kiwi writer XD

“Is there anything you’re not telling me?”

It was the first time ever that Camilla had asked that question. It was such an abundantly awful question to ask. The silence drew out between them in a way that made the tips of Nona’s ears feel hot. It felt as though it lasted a very long time.

Then - “Yes,” said Nona, faintly.

Poor kiddo.

“You haven’t wanted stories in a while. Said you were too sophisticated.”

“That was because Beautiful Ruby made fun of me when I said what I did to get to sleep,” said Nona.

That had been early on. It hadn’t even been that Beautiful Ruby hurt her feelings; it was that the others had shushed him immediately and Honesty had said in a much louder voice than was necessary, “Shut up, lad, Nona can do kiddie things if she wants to,” which was a much better way of letting her know she was being an appalling baby. And Hot Sauce had looked at her in a way she really hadn’t liked.

Yeah, I feel the kids are definitely working under the assumption that she has an intellectual disability or trauma-related repression or something.

Camilla’s curt, sweet, low voice took on the tones of recital: “We met you when the Warden saved you, after you were hurt.”

Nona supplied, “And it was the first time he showed he could do things like that because he didn’t have a body, and you were amazed,” and Camilla said, “Who’s telling this, me or you?”

Nona subsided. Camilla said, “It was the first time. He and I... were trying to talk. He was stuck, not having a body that talked. At the time we knew you were in trouble. You’d disappeared. We’d been trying to get you. We found you and Pyrrha. You were hurt. Pyrrha helped us escape from an attack. We lost people. Ships. Something very important. But we got you away, and we wanted to keep you. Other people said no. But you didn’t know what was happening. You weren’t a threat to anyone. Neither was Pyrrha. But not many people believed me, or the Warden. Many people said you were too dangerous.”

So, after escaping the River - Pyrrha emerges with Harrow's unconscious body straight into the midst of chaos. Pal, at this point, is probably still just in his hand bones, but is still able to use necromancy enough to heal Harrow's body. What they lost, 'something very important' - Gideon's body, maybe?

Nona said, “And everyone paid attention to We Suffer, who said, ‘I trust them. They will not betray us.’”

“Yes... back then We Suffer trusted us. We Suffer even let Pyrrha live. Pyrrha talked fast. Then I found a way for the Warden to come back. That was a relief. He wanted to evoke the break clause... which means, he wanted his family away from the Houses. You weren’t awake yet. You only woke up for very short periods and you couldn’t speak properly. We looked after you. The Warden convinced the Oversight Body, convinced the Sixth House to come with us. We showed them the secret of the installation. We helped them find a stele that would anchor such a big thanergy transition... which means, we helped them move. Then the Warden picked sixteen people to talk with Blood of Eden. To discuss the future. You were waking up. You met me for the first time.”

Nona said, “What did you think of me?” knowing the answer.

“I thought I didn’t know you at all. You were new.”

We Suffer steps up. She already knows Cam, Corona, and Judith, so once Pyrrha talks fast, We Suffer might let Cam take custody of them, maybe? Cam and Pal work out Perfect Lyctorhood, as much as they can, and try to evacuate the Sixth. Nona starts to wake up.

“And we lived here and I got better and Pyrrha went out to work and you taught me how to speak. And then things went wrong.”

That had been a hideous time.

Camilla said, “Yes. Then things went wrong. The light appeared. We found out Blood of Eden had lied to us... or at least, didn’t have the power to look after us anymore. That’s it.”

Got to the settlement. Varun shows up, things with BoE go south, possibly with the Sixth.

“I don’t understand why We Suffer hates Pyrrha.”

“Pyrrha’s best friend killed We Suffer’s boss.”

We Suffer might have had some sort of... intense relationship with Wake?

“Why did you want to take your families away from the other place?”

“We didn’t feel we could be there anymore... not until we really understood what we were doing, morally. The Warden is our leader, and our families listened to what he had to say. We voted on it... made promises we couldn’t keep.”

Camilla’s voice was bitter. Nona was sorry.

BoE broke promises to do with protecting the Sixth, probably. Didn't help keep them safe.

She heard Camilla breathing and felt nearly completely at peace, happy despite everything. Sometimes it was hard not to be happy; sometimes it was so difficult when everyone else had that hard, hurt look at the corners of their eyes that meant they didn’t quite know how to carry on: the men at the dairy, Pyrrha, Palamedes, the nice lady teacher at school, Kevin.

;_;

When she was 90 percent asleep, she heard the door very quietly unlatch and close. Then she counted, and at the end of five counts there was Pyrrha at the door saying, “Ah, my darling hearts, my sleeping babes, Daddy’s own treasures,” and Camilla saying without opening her eyes, “Go to bed. I just got her to sleep.”

Nona fell asleep and was happy.

<3 An art!

John 5:20

On to the new stuff!!

IN THE DREAM, she said, “But that’s it? They shut you down - it was over?”

[...]

He sat down on a patch of brown grass and laughed a little, and said, “Beloved, it wouldn’t be over - it wouldn’t begin - for a year.”

The 'Beloved' is pretty interesting.

A- was panicking because our kill-fee money was suddenly worth nothing and what if the banks crashed and that nothing went too? C- was panicking because with the project over she was getting recalled to England and didn’t want to go, she’d got N- and didn’t want to leave her, refused to admit they were dating even though we all knew. M- was panicking because we had a health board and someone from Energy coming to talk about shutdown and what the hell were we going to do with all the dead bodies we’d collected to test on?

Oh yeah, C- is definitely Cassiopeia, because her cavalier was Nigella. Also I kind of love that Augustine is panicking over the economy, Cass is panicking over being separated from her girlfriend, and meanwhile Mercy is just, "SHIT, GOT TOO MANY CORPSES."

I didn’t have to worry about the public or the media—we had a pet cop, P-. She’d made detective by that point; was going on to big things in the MoD. Knew G- from way back, and G- and I were both hometown boys, so P- kept the heat down for us. We got a lot of attention at first because they wanted someone to blame, wanted to rubberneck, wanted to write up think pieces about it. Wanted to know who we were. M- and A- could’ve walked into new jobs in a heartbeat but I was irradiated, I’d never work in the industry again. I sure as hell wouldn’t be allowed to work on anything else to do with you. I told M- and A- to go and that I’d shut up shop, but they wouldn’t leave me. None of them left me.

Pyrrha, you were a cop? :( Gideon was also from Auckland. "I sure as hell wouldn't be allowed to work on anything else to do with you." You = Alecto = Earth = climate science?

The only way out was to dump the population on an exoplanet. The cryo cans would have let us get everyone to Tau Ceti in my lifetime.

Tau Ceti is the same class as the sun, and only twelve light years away. You could reasonably get there even with (still blindingly fast) sublight transport.

He said: I wasn’t panicking with the rest of them. I know I should’ve been. But I wasn’t. I kept working on the plan even without backing. Kept refining the canister mixture. It was like I knew more every day about how it should work, what the little niggles were. I was having six breakthroughs a day. They’d all expected me to go nuts. A- kept saying, Are you sleeping, are you okay, are you taking any Class As, you know you can tell me. But I wasn’t taking anything. I was sleeping like a baby. I was looking at those guys on the slab and something in me was like, I know you, I know this.

He said, Told M- that. Huge mistake. She was like, Oh my God, you’re drinking, aren’t you. You’re on amphetamines. You are on coke. You are on amphetamines and coke. I was all, Yeah... Coke Zero. She didn’t laugh. I laughed.

He said, I guess I’ve always thought any pun was automatically funny.

I hate that I find that relatable. Anyway. Emerging necromantic abilities?

I went around to everyone, talking to my favourites - I know it was weird having favourites, but let’s bloody face it, I’d gone weird -

And how XD;;

not even saying goodbye, just saying it’ll be fine, hang on for me, kia kaha, kia māia.

'Be strong, be brave.'

No dice. They shut down our power to the vats one night, one minute after six. We were all there, waiting, when they turned them off.

He fell silent, and she prompted - “What happened, Lord?”

He smiled out over the hillside, over the flat plains and the twisted rubbish, a strange fleeting thing with teeth.

“Most of the bodies got the melt, like we thought they would,” he said. “Damaged beyond repair. Their brains liquefied almost immediately. But, Harrow... all the ones I touched, all the ones I loved... they stayed incorrupti

That's it that's where the chapter ends. He's a necromancer!

[burningdarkfire]

books i read in july 2022

[these are all short + casual reviews - feel free to msg me and ask about individual ones if u want a full review or ask for my goodreads!!] 

not gonna lie rereading gideon & harrow put me into a reading slump because simply nothing else could live up!! we are deep in august and i am STILL thinking about them 🤠

comfort me with apples - catherynne m. valente ★★★★☆ (horror)

this is just a short novella so it’s kind of hard to talk about without spoilers but i do think that valente is my fave author in the fairytale/storybook style and this was no exception! an interesting little mash-up of ideas that was right up my alley personally

harrow the ninth - tamsyn muir ★★★★★ (scifi)

the gideon reread was mostly fun for me but the harrow reread destroyed my soul 💀 it’s so different reading it and actually understanding it and i just literally have not stopped thinking about it. i can’t recommend enough just reading it again if you didn’t “get” it the first time!!

more than this - patrick ness ★★★★☆ (YA scifi)

patrick ness has got to be one of my fave YA authors. very classic YA emotional core, which is very nice to read sometimes when it’s pulled off well (as this was). slow at times but the scifi concepts really push you to think, and i love how he never gives us easy answers

the angel of the crows - katherine addison ★★★★☆ (historical fantasy mystery)

this is literally published sherlock wingfic. the added supernatural elements are interesting but not the focus, so it really is about reliving the ACD sherlock mysteries - extremely fun for me but i suspect this is not a book for everyone. this “watson” was interesting as both a standalone and an adaptation

the deeper the water the uglier the fish - katya apekina ★★★★☆ (contemporary)

i don’t want to be the guy in my friend group who’s always the only person excited by the fucked up contemporary litfic but like .. yeah this is that and i liked it 🤷‍♂️ fucked up families where you get multiple POVs and learn how their shared family history leads to their individual personal struggles are my jam

the mysterious study of doctor sex & as yet unsent - tamsyn muir ★★★★☆ (scifi)

read (dr sex) and reread (ays) of the two locked tomb short stories. i liked as yet unsent quite a lot more but I’d never complain about more sixth house

delilah green doesn’t care - ashley herring blake ★★★★☆ (romance)

the romance was fine for me but this book does have a very uptight perfectionist bitchy side character whose name is astrid and i LOVED her. i am actually excited to read the second book in a romance series because she is the protag for the next one!!

a master of djinn - p. djèlí clark ★★★☆☆ (historical fantasy)

a book that was truly The Most 3 stars. so completely fine that i kind of wish i’d DNF’d it. the actual plot/mystery was poorly constructed but the world-building was beautiful and generally made up for it

night sky with exit wounds - ocean vuong ★★★☆☆ (poetry)

ehh, i just didn’t connect much with this one personally. some good wordplay and i highlighted a few lines but it was just alright

the vegetarian - han kang ★★★☆☆ (horror)

this book was so hard for me to a) finish and b) meaningfully review. there are three segments that are pretty distinct from each other and i found the first two brutally miserable to read for different reasons, but the book definitely does cohere, so i’m sure other people would get a lot from it

the flatshare - beth o’leary ★★★☆☆ (romance)

i’m a bad romance reader and i’m sorry to all of my friends who thought this was the cutest shit ever. the female main character had no genuine personality traits and the male main character didn’t grow a single bit and i have no clue why they even like each other beyond each of them being an upgrade from their exes. but i do see the concept and understand why romance likers would have fun with this book. it’s just not me tho!

wider than the sky - katherine field Rothschild ★★☆☆☆ (contemporary)

the blurb lured me in with promises that it was about an adult polyam relationship and how that relationship changed the family but instead i just read a terrible YA contemporary with a super unlikable main character who was just dealing with “normal” high school shit the entire time and for some reason even though her dad was polyamorous i still had to deal with an awfully written love triangle

unprecedented: canada’s top ceos on leadership during covid-19 ★★★☆☆ (non-fiction)

i got this book for work and read a couple of sections before donating it. mostly it was just similar to internal messaging but it was more political than i was expecting at points. ehhh

[gveret-fic]

A lil fic in which Gideon showers with her clothes on, changes in the dark, applies her face paint out of a manual, and doesn't touch herself ever. Well. Hardly ever.

HtN spoilers ahead!

---

A bit anticlimactic, if you ask me, after slaying brain melting horror bees and swimming right out of hell, for my next great big challenge to be trying to figure out how to take a dump in a prudish little nun’s body without compromising its modesty.

Not to put too fine a point on it or anything, my sombre bathroom break micromanager, but you really didn’t stick the landing on this one. You had a letter for basically every contingency, like you had one for if God sneezed really hard and blew out the sun, I’m pretty sure, and then mine was basically just ‘fuck you, return to sender’. You just went and parked your porsche in my landing pad with the blasters still on and didn’t even bother to leave the DRY CLEANING ONLY tag on the upholstery. I had to come up with a virtue-preserving game plan all on my lonesome, you know.

And I've been such a good girl, Harrow, you'd be proud. Well, at least you'd be such an unexpectedly small, tiny, miniscule, astonishingly negligible amount of pissed off that it's basically pride at that point, right.

Don't get me wrong, it was a logistical nightmare. Ever tried to shower in multiple robes plus what I must assume are, like, pantaloons? The sonic flaps it all the fuck around, and let me tell you, getting spanked by heavy Ninth vestments is now officially off my kink list. Now, the other option is wet dog trapped in straightjacket, and I'm not too keen on that one either. But I stuck with it. It takes like 20 minutes, no joke, to struggle out of all your stupid layers in the dark, with my eyes closed, without touching any of your most hallowed skin. But I've got a knack for it now, you know? If I ever get the chance to get a lil frisky, maybe with a hot ghost or something I don't know, I can totally impress her with my wild 100% contact free striptease skills.

What I'm saying is, I've been such a super duper chaste and meticulous and ephemeral little make believe nun it's like I was never even here. So you gotta take that into consideration, Harrow, when you pass your terrible judgment once I tell you how I've sinned.

So, it happened when I was putting your face paint on. It wasn’t half bad, either. Really, it was half good. I’ve been practicing. I found this horrible little book full of the gnarliest, creepiest, just most hideous skull faces, and they all had these pretentious titles like The Palm of the Storm or The Young Boy’s Booger. Just your style, basically.

But I was looking at your face in the mirror—that’s the way paint application goes, Harrow, don’t pout—and I got stuck on your pinched, bloodless lips for some reason, and I forgot for a moment that it was me in your muscles, and I just thought, wow, you looked so sad. You always looked so goddamn sad, and no one ever did a fucking thing about it, least of all you, and in that moment I was so angry about it, I could smack you.

So naturally I reached out and I brushed your knuckle gently over your cheek. And lo, I wasn’t struck down on the spot. That gave me a bit of a confidence boost, I suppose. I ran your thumb under your eye, just a little avuncular half circle while thinking just the purest fucking thoughts, and it came away wet.

Really got you going, that one little barely there swipe. You needed this real bad, Nonagesimus. I needed this, too. We were gagging for it. We were crying for it. I needed you to be touched gently, so bad, and I needed even badder to be the one doing the touching. I knew you wouldn't want that, of course, don't feel the need to defend your honor. This was my best compromise, okay? I didn't have a lot to work with. This way you wouldn't really be touched and I wouldn't really be touching, but maybe we'd both get a little something out of it anyway.

This is maybe a good time to confess those thoughts weren't so totally super pure. They were maybe a little muddier, a little earthier, you know. Harrow, listen, I've been thinking a lot about your body, what with living in it for months and having only the one made up magazine to look at and being balls to the wall in love and all. Sorry. So when I tell you I've been thinking about running my fingertip over your eyebrow from glabella to sphenoid, what I'm saying is I've fantasized about the texture of each one of your big black goddamn eyebrow hairs so much my finger's never not tingly anymore. And when I wiped your eye with a tiny knuckle and ran that smooth little fingertip along your real ass eyebrow, Harrow, there was a definite fucking tingle, and I didn't fucking stop.

I traced the smooth plane of your frontal bone, the proud arch of your brow ridge. I dragged your fingertips over your temple and into the mass of your sweaty, overlong hair. The side of your finger grazed the shell of your ear, and you shivered—your ears are so sensitive, Nonageaimus, I thought this stuff only happened in porn—and I felt the full, terrifying shape of your skull in my hand. I cupped the back of your sore-ass neck in a palm and I squeezed just a little, just to let us know we were held, and I worked our fingertips into those nonexistent traps that still somehow managed to be clenched tighter than a stoma that's munched down on one too many emperors. I kneaded them good until they loosened just a bit, and we were still crying like a little bitch.

I squeezed your shoulder, the clavicle pressing sharply into our palm, and I stroked down your bicep, which did not deserve the name, by the way, and I brushed the inside of your elbow and I dragged the underside of your bitten fingernails up your forearm and over that terrifyingly delicate wrist and your doll sized soft palm and then I held your fucking hand.

Yeah, I laced our fucking fingers together, Harrow. Eat me.

I could feel your heart beating in our interdigital folds, I was holding your hand so hard and so intertwiney. And we were definitely feeling some kind of way just then. I had to sit down on your bony ass, your eyes leaking, your shoulders shaking, as I was having just the most mortifying little breakdown over holding my own hand.

I'm sorry, Harrow. I wanted to hug you a lot, these past few months. There were so many moments I wanted to reach outside of you, all like blerghgrgh sudden gorgeous beefy arm bursting out of your stomach to smack Shittier Gideon in the balls or give Shittier Tridentarius a purple nurple. I wanted to give you a pat on the head, tell you've been a good good doggie and you can take a lil break now. Wanted to rub your shoulders and arms all over, force a bit of warmth into em even if I've given up on muscle. Wanted to brace the heel of my palm at the small of your back, squeeze your hips and pull em back, run a hand along that spine to make it proud again, just to give you some support, just to see you stand up straight. Wanted to rub the frown right off your brow, poke your lil cheeks and make you snarl, give you something nice and tough to bite on. But mostly I just wanted to hold you.

I wanted to wrap you tight, so that you'd become a compact little package with well defined edges and maybe then you could open it all up and let it out. Only in my big stupid arms, I'd think selfishly, like some sort of grand duke of self delusion, would you finally feel safe enough to cry.

Nah. Who was I kidding? It was me who was crying. It was me who wanted to be comforted, to be touched kindly, to have her hand held, and it was only me who was getting anything out of doing this stupid weird creepy bullshit. I wasn't giving you shit, Nonagesimus. I just wanted to hold your hand.

I didn't let go, though. Again, Harrow, sorry. Your body didn't care that it was only you, only me. Your skin and your flesh and all those bits you didn't care about wanted this too, probably. The pressure, and the warmth, the illusion or the weird roundabout reality of another person who cares about you. Maybe I'm making excuses again. But I care about you, Harrow. You'll believe that much, won't you? I care about your body. I care about all the non-skeleton parts of you, even. Baffling, I know.

So I sat on your ass, and I bent your head over our joined hands, and I cried, and I didn't let go.

[aeondeug]

Ok so I made a post about why I didn’t like Gideon initially and I’ve talked to others about it. And I’ve seen a lot of people having the reverse experience. Which is cool, I think. And one I’m not surprised by if I think about how the two characters are introduced initially. Like, maybe Gideon’s humor is dumb but also she’s not the one being like “Oh man, it is time to systematically destroy this woman’s hopes that she has finally done it and escaped from me and my hell planet,” at the start of the book. Harrow is though. Harrow’s intro is very...Harrow. It’s very fitting for what is learned about her later on.

Anyway. I feel a desire to like. Write about the other half of this equation. And why it was that I instantly latched onto Harrow so hard. So like I said in the first post. Harrow’s got STYLE. She’s got like bone jewelry and wears all black and has skull face paint. She uses her own blood as ink for her fountain pen (it being a fountain pen matters) and she gets said blood by stabbing herself in the cheek. Also she’s a necromancer, which is just icing on the cake. Harrow’s entire fashion statement appeals to me as someone raised by a goth who ended up like...Never goth fashion or subculture wise, but someone who was a kid that Dreamed of being goth fashion wise. Alas, I went to a boring uniform school and also was too nervous of such things.

Harrow just LOOKS cool. Harrow is the sort of person that a dumb 13 year old me would have found the coolest and have viewed as like. An Aspiration. Even though she’s kind of a dumbass and also a dick. I was an edgelord of a kid and an edgelord who knew who Bauhaus were before I could read.

So Harrow’s instantly got fashion on her side. And she’s got her attitude. Which is also important. She does things for style and looks. The narration, which is from Gideon’s perspective, describes the fountain pen filling thing as “one of Harrow’s favorite party tricks”, I believe is the quote. When asked about why there are suddenly skulls all over their room her sole answer to this question is “Ambiance”. And she clearly cares about how she looks. Her paint is often described and a point is made that Gideon’s is not as well put on hers. Also? Her outfit? She’s got like. The bone wrist circlet thingies and her bone studs and her bone choker and the fucking bone chest thing that I am forgetting the word for right now. Harrow cares about appearances.

Which also shows in like...She makes a good show of how well read she is. Takes pride in that fact not just privately, but lets people know it. She runs off and tries to stubbornly do a puzzle on her own. The thing to wake her up from her near death stupor from failing in that is something insinuating they are better than her. And she’s still half dying but takes the time to state that, no, SHE is the best necromancer. Harrow’s got an ego and that shows from early on. Through things like how she dresses, how she talks, how she treats Gideon...

And I saw that and I just kind of instantly latched on. While reading early in the book and seeing her do a bitchy thing, I once joked that “Has anyone ever hugged Harrow?” and then jokingly decided that “No. No one’s hugged Harrow before.” This was a joke that I had made as someone with a rather neglectful family in several respects. And as someone whose general well being in their home was decided by how good I appeared in comparison to the other kids. In that sort of situation, not having much else, I took great pride in my being well read. In being Smart. This eventually made me insufferable as hell and that was crushed into the dirt. Either way, depressing story time aside. I made a joke that indicated that, early on, I had pegged Harrow as someone similarly neglected. As someone with a similar lack of anything going on.

Turns out I was right. Her situation’s very different from my own because of course it is. This is a book about space necromancers, after all. But she was a neglected child. One who had to grow up far too fast and who had a very strict and overbearing religious upbringing. Does that sort of thing cause that sort of concern for aesthetics and bitchery? I dunno. But I made a guess, as a joke, and the guess appeared to be right.

Another thing that I made a bet on with this early on was like...The nature of the relationship. They are the only two of their generation on that planet. Gideon is made out immediately to be like an indentured servant of the family. While Harrow is immediately revealed to be a high status fancy nun queen with a fancy title. Harrow’s parents are dead by that point and had been dead for a while. But, I knew, that theoretically they were not dead at some point. A point which Gideon had to be old enough to remember, given some of the comments made. Based on their antagonism towards one another and this set up...

A part of me wondered if like they had in fact had like a Favorite and Unfavorite dynamic as kids. Or I guess not actively wondered but like. The thought was in mind. Because I had grown up as The Favorite in a terrible home which had an Unfavorite. And this makes you a terrible person as a kid. So I saw these very small signs at the start of a book which hides most of the cool Harrow facts and interactions in its latter sections. And was like, on some level like, “Ah. You’re a bitch to her because you’re The Favorite. In part.”

I am kind of always looking for abused and neglected Favorites in fiction. One of my favorite characters is Azula. And I’m very fond of Gamora. I have a tendency to find them and latch onto them because like...I am still working through things. A lot of things. Sometimes seeing it in the things I read makes the stuff I am working through less terrifying. Sometimes it gives me a sense of hope. Either way, seeing a thing that is at least somewhat similar helps. And I look out for it. And Harrow apparently just gave off. The Aura. From the very start.

Because lo and behold, she was neglected as fuck and, indeed, the Favorite while Gideon was an Unfavorite so unfavorited that she was viewed as basically cursed and horrifying. And then Harrow was a mean bastard of a child towards her. And then it turns out that Harrow has like 10,000 weird guilt issues. Some of which involve her treatment of Gideon now because...How on earth could you even like her when you grew up with her? Like. How.

But even before those reveals later on...I had been making my guesses. Enough so that one of my earlier jokes about the book was about how no one ever hugged Harrow and how she is out doing this shit for some sense of fucking acknowledgement for once. Because maybe if you’re acknowledged that like...Will count. As your Actual True Affection quota for the day. Harrow was not just stylish and mysterious. She also had little bits and bobs, either that she revealed herself in her few appearances in the early portion of GtN or which were revealed by way of how Gideon talks about her and acts about her, which hinted towards the basic idea of what Harrow’s deal even was.

I did not guess the exact specifics of Harrow’s deal because who the hell could divine that from the first act of the first book. But I did guess at the core idea laying behind the specifics of that deal. And the deal was that she was the neglected but favored child in a really shitty home, who has ended up with an ungodly amount of guilt issues for her behavior and general existence. And it made her mean, guarded, and protective of her image and it gave her an ego sky high. Which you can all see in the first portion of the book to an extent. Even though she is very scarce in said first portion. Which I think is either a tantalizing mystery of “What the fuck is even your problem, Harrow?” or like just enough info in just the right way for people with a similar experience to go “lol no one hugged you when you were a kid” with a knowing prescience.

[whoopseydaisy]

Harrow goes home

Or what I think is happening in Harrow’s last chapter.

(and by that I mean the last chapter with Harrow the character, not the last chapter in Harrow the Ninth)

 SPOILERS AND A LOT OF WORDS UNDER THE CUT 

I posit: Harrow is deep within herself, much in the way that Gideon was, throughout HTN. That in the deepest parts of Harrow, there is the sepulchre of the Locked Tomb, and in the deepest parts of Harrow, there is Gideon.

I’m in a perpetual state of re-listening or re-reading bits of both novels and in HTN in chapter 2 when Jod is showing Harrow the bodies of the to-be renewed Ninth House (where sidenote: there is no coffin for Gideon? Even though there is coffins for those they could not find a body for, like Camilla and Corona. BOE has it, but did Jod just not notice?? I’m sure this isn’t going to come back to haunt us in Alecto) Anyways so Jod is showing Harrow the bodies, and the Body says to Harrow

“You are walking down a long passage,” said the Body. “You need to turn around.”

“I am standing in the dark,” you told her. […] “I lost it. It’s gone. There’s nothing there. I must have misapprehended the process. I am half a Lyctor. I am nothing, I am pointess, I am unmanned.” pg. 45

Harrow has started her started her walk towards the tomb, which led me to think of the last chapter in a bit more of a hazy metaphorical sense.

Then in Act 5 when Harrow’s bubble is crashing down around them, we get this exchange.

“What’s my role in this exodus, Pent?”

“Spirits always wish to return to their bodies, and pine without them. The only exists for you now are the River, leaving your body completely- or you can simply go home, and wake up.” pg. 459

The options Pent gives to Harrow the River and leaving her body completely, or going home and waking up. But as Dulcie tells Harrow, something is in her body and moving it around and it is much more than a fragment. Gideon is as she says keeping the home fires burning. And this changes the game… what if Harrow goes home and instead of waking up, goes to sleep?

“The River means madness,” said Abigail immediately. “You’ve never been there was an unanchored soul. You don’t know what it’s like. I haven’t the faintest idea of what would happen to the secondary soul in a Lyctoral bond if the host soul abandons the body…You are alive, Harrowhark- that does mean something where souls are concerned. Your soul longs for your body, and without something else to inhabit, I could not even promise that in your madness you wouldn’t somehow find your way back, rendering all this moot.”

[…] “Is there nothing I can do before entering the River that might mean I stay put?”

“No,” said Abigail. “It’s the River. It moves. You’d have to pick the revenant’s path and travel along a thanergetic link, and that’s just madness again. […] And as I said your soul longs for your body.” pg. 460

What if Harrow exists out through the River and creates and thanergetic link made of pure passion back to her body? (I think Harrow also has the passion necessary to create a link back to the Body, but souls longs for their bodies…that being said Harrow promised and devoted herself to the Body of the Locked Tomb long ago but Gideon’s magazine is there which would not entirely make sense if Harrow was in the Body.)

“She stood before the coffin of The Sleeper, and gathered those white, soft, solid rips in her hands, and she popped the bubble, and the River came rushing in.

It came down around her in shreds, as light insubstantial as drifts of spiderweb. The water sprayed through white holes, rushing in with a pounding roar: that brackish, bloodied water that only existed within the River. She was buoyed up by a spray of ice water and filth- but she wasn’t; she seemed to be walking down her long black corridor again-

---[meanwhile Gideon is also ~drowning~!! “I thrust my sword into the whimpering plex. It gave. Both of us got knocked flat on our asses by the gush of foaming, filthy, hideous water-I had to hit the deck-and that whole corridor deformed: it was like a popped balloon. The world went dark. I went under before I could take a breath.” […] “Then the pressure closed its hands around your wrists, and your chest pounded inwards.” pg. 498-499]---

Then Harrow was back drowning in salt water. Gideon’s arms were around her. They were in the pool of Canaan House, and she had just been ducked by her cavalier. […] Harrow’s head broke the water […] They were all undead: revenant creatures and watchers, shifting restlessly forever on the rock of the Locked Tomb. Harrow was home.” pg. 502-503

Harrow’s body is referred to as home several times leading up to the end. Her soul longs for her body, and Harrow longs for the Locked Tomb, so of course it would appear to be so in this liminal, magical, saltwater place.  Because home means both of those things to Harrow. We also see this overlay in the experiences between Harrow and Gideon. They are both in the dark and drowning. Gideon sees a bright sunshiny light, probably of a thanergetic signature (which is probably Alecto and not Harrow but I don’t have the answers to what Alecto is doing right now but there’s some sort of body switching and ghost sword business happening in the polycule)

“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, Harrow Nonagesimus fell asleep, or dropped dead, or both.” pg. 504

Abigail tells Harrow she can simply go home and wake up. But someone is already keeping the home fires burning, so Harrow exits out through the River and keeps herself in place by following a thanergetic link, ensuring she gets to where she longs to be without waking up, goes home and go to sleep instead.

Spirit magic is the oldest magic we are presented with in the series. Augustine and Merymorn, the first Lyctors, both made created houses built around spirit magic. We’re also told by Jod that magic used to be less scientific and seemed much more instinctual. I think Harrow is performing some deep spirit magic here, without entirely realizing it.

Anyways these books rock.

[ghost-in-the-hella]

If you are still taking prompts, and were so inclined, 47 for Gideon the Ninth!

I am always so inclined. Enjoy this... this thing. Gets a bit rude because, well, Gideon.

47. “You look like hell.”

---

“You look like hell.”

Gideon startles at the sound of Coronabeth Tridentarius actually speaking to her. She sounds more intrigued than judgemental, as if hell were an exotic travel destination she’s not yet been to but is eager to learn more about. Gideon is, not for the first time, grateful for her affected vow of silence as all possibility of coherent thought abandons her tongue. She would surely be a stuttering gay mess if she tried to speak to a woman as beautiful as this particular princess of Ida. With her feigned vow, she can still pull off the “strong but silent” affect and at least somewhat salvage the impression of being a suave badass who’s great with the ladies.

Or she could if she weren’t currently a panting, heaving, sweat drenched, bone dust coated, blood smeared, tattered mess.

It figures that Harrow doesn’t even have to be in the same room with Gideon to have completely ruined her game. Gideon draws herself up to her full height and squares her shoulders - fighting the urge to slump into an exhausted heap on the floor - and straightens her crooked aviators. She hopes that her face paint is still a badass skull and not a runny mess of gray; they’re not big on mirrors down in the facility. Her spine stiffens as Coronabeth steps toward her, smiling like they’re sharing a secret, and brushes one perfect hand lightly at each of Gideon’s shoulders, scattering fine chips of bone onto the floor.

“Poor thing,” Coronabeth purrs, locking Gideon in place with intense eye contact even through her shades. “Your necro’s really running you ragged, isn’t she?”

The last thing Gideon wants to talk about while a beautiful woman is touching her - actually touching her! Okay, touching the shoulders of her robes, but still! - is her screeching ferret of a necromancer. Her distaste must show in her expression even through the caked on layers of sweaty paint because Coronabeth chuckles prettily and squeezes her shoulder - Gideon tenses her sick delts reflexively, desperate to please - and gives her a conspiratorial smirk. “That’s alright. I won’t ask you to divulge any forbidden secrets about the Ninth House or the trials.” She runs clever fingers around the hem of Gideon’s hood - a rumpled heap around her neck, having fallen down as she heaved herself up the ladder from the facility in a hurry to get herself to a sonic - and winks suggestively enough that Gideon swallows hard. “She really must be putting you through the ringer. You know, I feel quite sorry for you cavs sometimes. So much is asked of you, and you get so little in return…”

Gideon has passed out. Surely, this must be what has happened. She’ll wake up in her nest of black blankets with a dirty magazine glued to her face by skull paint and drool, completely covered in sticky notes blackened with Harrowhark’s vitriol. Because it sure as hell feels like Coronabeth - Coronabeth Tridentarius, crown Princess of Ida, hottest necromancer this side of the funny books - is flirting with her. With her. Gideon Nav, indentured servant of the Ninth, perpetually demeaned cavalier primary to her lifelong nemesis, hottest cavalier in history to never touch a boob that wasn’t her own. With her stupid, itchy black robes that still smell faintly of Ortus Nigenad’s flop sweat no matter how many times they’re laundered, with her overgrown and uncombed hair all full of cobwebs and bone dust, with her half-melted face paint of a creepy fucking skull not quite concealing her latest acne outbreak. So there’s no fucking way that this isn’t some delightful dream inspired by too many titty mags before bedtime.

Coronabeth’s hand slides down from Gideon’s shoulder, gliding down the length of her arm - trailing over the firm roundness of her deltoid, the jaw-dropping perfection of her biceps, the corded extensor muscles of her forearms - down to seize her calloused hand with her own surprisingly strong one. “I think you deserve something in return. Don’t you?” 

Okay. New thought. Maybe Gideon hasn’t passed out, but she’s probably going to if Coronabeth keeps touching her like this.

Gideon nods very carefully, trying not to let any drool drop from her mouth.

Coronabeth’s smile is as bright as Dominicus. She tugs Gideon’s hand and leads her down an unfamiliar hallway. Gideon follows obediently despite her necromancer’s warnings ringing in her head, shrieking at her to trust no one. Well, Gideon figures, if she’s a lamb being led to the slaughter, at least she’ll die happy. A girl’s holding her hand! Flirting with her! Smiling at her! Touching her muscles! 

Much to Gideon’s surprise, she is not promptly jumped and flesh magicked to death upon entry to the Third’s quarters. In fact, as far as she can tell, she’s alone in them with Coronabeth. Sure, she had to offer up a bit of blood to the gross ward on the door, but she’s already bleeding a little bit from her adventures in the facility anyway so that’s no biggie. 

She’s relieved to note that there are two big, ostentatious beds in addition to the smaller (but no less ostentatious) cavalier bed at the foot of one. If by some miracle she does get laid today, she’d really rather it not be in a bed that Ianthe Tridentarius has also slept or - God forbid - boned in. Coronabeth hustles her past the beds (dang) toward a large and opulent bathroom. “Here, get washed up.”

A fluffy purple towel is thrust into Gideon’s hands, there’s a gentle shove at her shoulders and the click of a door shutting, and suddenly Gideon is alone in the fanciest bathroom she’s ever seen. It’s even more ridiculous than the one in the Ninth’s quarters. She catches her own reflection in the mirror and finds that she looks every inch as confused as she is. “What the fuck?” she mouths to herself.

“I don’t hear washing happening!” comes Coronabeth’s mellifluous voice sing-songing through the door.

Gideon Nav fancies herself a remarkably strong person, the kind of person who could move mountains barehanded if she set her mind to it. Apparently, she has one fatal weakness: a beautiful woman telling her to do, well, literally anything. So Gideon obligingly scours the paint off her face - Harrow’ll be furious, but Harrow’s always furious and her paint’s a mess anyway - and inspects herself once more in the mirror. Sexy. Hot. Gorgeous. Little bit of acne at the hairline and around the left nostril, bit ruddy-cheeked from over-scrubbing, but still a flawless masterpiece of hotness. 

She sniffs her armpits. Pretty sweaty. Are chicks into that? If they’re going to bone (please, please, please) then won’t she get sweaty again anyway?

Wait, are they going to bone? They are, right? They’re alone in Corona’s quarters, her terrifying sister and their insufferable cav have clearly been sent away, and Corona’s super hot and bossing her around and dragging her into her bedroom (well, through her bedroom to her bathroom, but still). If this were one of Gideon’s magazines she'd already be up to her wrist, or at least majorly winning at tonsil hockey. This is literally a textbook scenario for boning.

Okay, then. It’s on. So now what? Should she brush her teeth or something? Her breath’s probably pretty rank after the morning she’s had. Should she, like… shave stuff? 

“You may draw a bath, if you like,” Corona calls through the door again. “Ianthe and Babs will be gone for hours. And something tells me that you have never been pampered.”

And so Gideon ends up taking the first ever bath of her life in the gilded bathtub of the Third. She can’t bring herself to fill the tub more than a couple of inches, even though from her skin mags and her comics she knows a bath is usually filled until the person in it is all but drowning, or at least until the bubbles are tastefully covering the good bits (comics) or just barely not covering them (skin mags). She does throw in several of the weird perfumy things hanging out around the tub at Corona’s urging. By the end of it, she’s pretty sure she’s dirtier than when she stepped in except that now she’s filthy with scented soaps and salts and glittery “bath bombs” (surprisingly not that violent but also surprisingly messy) instead of sweat and blood. She scrapes and scrubs at herself and then gives her body and her clothes a good shake out in the sonic for good measure. She borrows some toothpaste and uses her finger as a toothbrush, then rinses with borrowed mouthwash. 

There’s a fluffy purple and gold robe that smells a bit like Corona’s perfume and seems the right size, so even though it’s a million miles off from her usual aesthetic she consents to shrug it on. It’s impossibly soft and warm and smooth. Stops a bit short on her thighs, but presumably that won’t get any complaints.

When she steps back out into the Third’s quarters, Gideon feels strangely vulnerable without her protective layer of filth. She smells like a stranger, and her fingertips and toes are wrinkled in a weird way that she assumes has to do with the bath bombs or maybe with how hard she was scrubbing. That, or she’s picked up some freaky skin disease from the Third’s bathtub. She hopes she’s not about to die or something.

Corona looks beyond delighted to see her emerge, ruddy and steaming, from the bathing chamber in her ludicrous little bathrobe. It’s a shame that it’s short on the leg coverage and heavy on the arm coverage, since Gideon’s legs are fucking awesome but not nearly as impressive as her guns. She wants to ask what Corona has planned for her now, but her stupid oath to Harrow stays her tongue. If all goes well, Coronabeth might have a better use for her tongue than words, anyway. So instead she stands there trying to look impressive rather than panicky and overstimulated.

“Come here,” Corona beckons with an elegant finger, her eyes glittering like shards of polished amethyst. Gideon’s pretty sure that Corona’s not using any necromantic tricks on her - she knows what that shit feels like by now, and it’s vastly unpleasant - but she follows her gesture as inexorably as if Corona were looping a leash of thanergy around her throat and dragging her closer. 

And then Coronabeth Tridentarius is touching her. Like, pretty much everywhere. “Hmmm, let’s see,” she murmurs thoughtfully as she palpates what feels like every trembling inch of Gideon’s being (apart from the good bits, but maybe this is what foreplay is? she’s heard of it, but her magazines usually skip straight to the main event). Instead of trying to think, Gideon focuses on feeling, which is much more in her wheelhouse.

Corona’s nimble fingers carding through her damp red locks (they could stand a trim), fingernails sending tingles through her scalp as they scratch gently against skin that’s never been touched in kindness before. Fingertips trailing down the strong line of her jaw, gently seizing her square chin and turning her face to every possible angle, her gaze as palpable as her fingers. Strong hands (how does the Princess of Ida have actual calluses on her fingers?) testing her muscles, examining her hands and paying particular attention to her fingernails (they could also stand a trim).

“You look good in my robe,” Corona announces, taking a step back and allowing Gideon to breathe for what feels like the first time since she set foot in her quarters. “Gold suits you.” She locks eyes with Gideon and quirks her lips into a subtle smirk. “Gold suits you very well.”

Gideon swallows hard, trying not to gulp audibly and concentrating on not sweating through her borrowed robe.

“Much better than black. Not that you look bad in black, mind you, but there are other colors that would be much more flattering for your lovely complexion.”

She takes Gideon by the hand and leads her over to an over-decorated table that Gideon observes is overflowing with cosmetics. “For example… Hmmm… Plum?” Corona holds up a tube of something that’s a deep, bruised purple, examining its contrast with Gideon’s skin. “Or perhaps mauve…”

Coronabeth is insatiable. Gideon is left exhausted. When she finally emerges from the Third House’s quarters (very much not laid), hours have passed and she feels as if she has run a marathon. Not from any outward exertion, but from the effort of holding still and keeping silent throughout the whole ordeal.

She is perhaps the most sexually frustrated she has ever been in her life, having never been touched by a woman (and what a woman!) so much before, or really at all before unless she counts herself or the shriveled crones of the Ninth.

She is also… well. Made over. Her hair has been combed and styled, and it reeks of hair gel almost as badly as Naberius Tern’s does on an average day. Her nails have been trimmed, filed, and buffed smooth before being painted a soft lilac and accented with shimmering gold. Her face has been rendered utterly unrecognizable; Harrowhark would likely envy the sheer amount of makeup on it if only it were in the design of a skull rather than whatever peacocky nonsense Coronabeth’s done to it. She is, at least, in her own black robes despite Coronabeth’s best efforts to get her to borrow some of Babs’s gaudy frippery.

She suspects she has, in fact, been fucked by the Third after all.

She slinks down the hall as stealthily as she can manage, thanking her lucky stars that her necro is probably half-dead in a bone or buried up to her pointy little goblin ears in ancient books or possibly both rather than being a normal, decent human being who might give a fuck where her cavalier has vanished off to for hours on end with one of her greatest rivals. She’s hoping that everyone else in Canaan House will be equally preoccupied and that she’ll be able to return to the safety of her chambers with her dignity at least partially intact when she rounds a corner and nearly faceplants directly into the solid mass of Camilla the Sixth.

Gideon draws herself up to her fullest and most imposing posture and tries to mask her humiliation as best she can. Camilla observes her cooly, but Gideon swears her fellow cav is just barely holding back a laugh. 

After a small but excruciating eternity in limbo, Camilla steps aside to let Gideon dart gratefully past. Camilla casts a few words over her shoulder as Gideon passes, and they follow her burning ears all the way down the hall and back to her quarters: “You look like hell, Nav.”

[badbookopinions]

Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

Featuring...

Obviously, lesbian necromancers in space. This is what everyone hears and it’s a fantastic concept. But the execution is so much better than you could have dreamed

First of all, no one mentions it’s hilarious. It’s hilarious. Gideon is amazing and immature and makes stupid jokes at the worst (read: best) possible time. Everyone else delivers great wisecracks and the narration is witty and clever

Second, no one mentions its emotional beats hit like a punch to the gut. The freaking emotional connections these characters have to each other (not just positive ones, not just romantic ones) - even the side characters, how so much lives under the surface but is so fascinatingly illustrated I’m losing my mind just thinking about it 

Speaking of punches to the gut, there’s a mystery at the centre of this - of Gideon and Harrow’s past, of how to become a Lyctor, of a dozen twists and turns that made me so excited for every single one of them. For a few I had to physically put the book down and take a walk around the room to collect myself

A+ world- and magical system-building! I love an original concept, especially one further expanded upon.

Also these characters!!!! Gideon and Harrow are fantastic (Gideon in particular has my undying love) but even the smaller side characters are all so interesting and charming I would have read a book about any of them. Well. Maybe not, like, Ortus. But most of the others.

Plot: those twists, though. Just - everything about it! It’s a gradually building mystery and the payoff is fantastic. Strangely enough, though, this doesn’t mean the rest of the book is unbearable before we get to the reveal - I was still enjoying myself seeing Gideon and Harrow work through trials and interact with people, not wanting it to hurry along so I could figure out what exactly was happening. 

Characters: Gideon please marry me. She’s just... funny and strong and caring and I love her. But if she married me she couldn’t marry Harrow and their relationship as they grow to trust each other is one of my favourite parts of this book that is one of my favourite books. I don’t as a general rule like enemies to lovers - I don’t see how you can forgive someone who’s hurt you and let them into your life like that. But this one works - this one works so beautifully. Even Harrow - I liked her at the start of the book knowing that there was more to her than tormenting Gideon and the more that there was to her made me adore her by the end. (Seriously, these two: “One flesh, one end, bitch.” “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it.” I love them.) But I got attached to the side characters as well - Isaac and Jeannemary, Palmedes and Camilla, Magnus (I have a soft spot for characters named Magnus), Dulcinea. They’re clearly and cleverly drawn and each of them have so much going on under the surface - even ones we don’t spend much time with like the people from the Second and Eighth house. And the relationships between a necromancer and their cavalier - it’s about the devotion and the fealty and the different ways that can look. 

 Setting: love me a good magic system. Love me a good war being fought at the edges of the empire. Love me a good spacefaring civilization. Love me, most of all, a place with history - uncovered and waiting to be. I’m so excited for Muir to explore this more in the next book or two. We got a little bit in this book, enough that the middle of the map was nicely coloured in, but Muir made us aware of the edges and I’d love for those to be filled as well. 

Prose: I laughed a whole lot. And then I wanted to cry a whole lot. It’s as funny as it’s been billed as. Both in narration and in things Gideon and other characters actually say, Muir’s wit shines through and it’s so much fun to see. She’s also a good narrator of action - so much of this book, especially the latter half, isn’t dialogue, but is people running from place to place fighting and uncovering mysteries. My attention span means if those paragraphs aren’t interesting I’ll skim them, but I was invested the whole time. And the emotional beats - bro.

Not-great things: honestly, this might just be because I’m still hyped up with what a good time I had, but I don’t have anything to concretely warn I didn’t like. I was a bit confused in the first half of the book as to who was who - the cast of characters at the beginning helped, but not enough until I got into the rhythm of it. 

Five out of five stars.