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Harrowhark: Ianthe hasn't mentioned the fine dusting of bone powder I put on her clothes so my traps won't eviscerate her, which means probably she's doing worse to me. She's quite skilled in her way-- I can't even sense her wards and defenses. Ianthe: *doesn't notice the bone dust* *hasn't done anything to Harrow* *hasn't laid any traps at all* I think I'll call her 'Harry'. That's cute and she'll hate it.

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Before I die I want to find that one tumblr post that was like Gideon should have been fishing. Harrow should have been on tumblr discussing religious themes in Steven Universe. Palamades should have been there arguing with her. Camilla should have been at the club.

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big if true

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Hello, dear Fifth House overthinker.

I was thinking about how Abigail is considered one of the greatest living historians, and we know she's got a special interest in pre-sovereignty era history (not coincidentally the period of the Nine Houses the narrative has so far hinted the most at without showing us directly).

She studied in the Third, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth, and published ten books.

I can't stop thinking—what do you think she's known for? What subjects has she covered, and become famous for covering? Could Cytherea have known she was a threat from her publishing history, if she'd done her research? Where did she learn about the River Beyond?! What did she write about the Cohort that made Judith consider her anti-military?

I was wondering if you have any thoughts on this!

Thank you for making me consider aspects of Abigail's academic work that aren't just feeling somewhat jealous that she gets to do ancient history without having to learn multiple dead languages...

Most of what we know about Abigail's work comes from her conversation with Cytherea:

We have so little that survived from the period post-Resurrection, pre-sovereignty and pre-Cohort, except in second hand records. We have transcripts of those from the Sixth, though they're keeping the originals... I spend most of my time studying those, writing commentary mostly. But being here meant almost more to me than the idea of serving the Emperor. Canaan House is a holy grail! What we know about the Lyctors is tremendously antiseptic. I've actually found what I think are unencrypted communiques between-

So it would seem that Abigail's work is primarily concerned with studying texts from the very earliest period of the Dominicus system. The HTN pronunciation guide says that "Gaius" is a name John chose circa Y100 of his reign. I've nothing else to base this on, but assume that this might be the beginning of the sovereignty period - that this was something of a regnal name, as they moved from being a group of disciples living in the very house of god to understanding themselves as an empire, ruled by a man who was not just god but emperor. Presumably the Cohort dates from a similar period.

Abigail is studying a very early and heavily mythologised period of history, for which most sources seem to be later (but still fairly early in the grand scheme of things) sources that quote or refer to now lost earlier material. We know that there are also a some rare primary sources from this period - perhaps one of those early sources she complains about not being able to see in person is the Lyctoral letter discovered in The Mysterious Study of Dr Sex.

Cytherea would certainly have known that Abigail was deeply interested in the few details of this early period if she had bothered to do her research.

I suppose the main question is whether there's sufficient material, both in terms of primary sources from that period and secondary early chroniclers, to write 10 books and 86 articles, or whether her particular interest is in that pre-sovereignty period, but she writes more broadly on ancient history. She says she writes commentary, but if she's also frequently working with "second hand records", is she doing something akin to historiography, trying to tease out what might be accurate in highly hagiographic texts, or texts that simply have a very different understanding of what it means to write history?

This is something I wonder about a lot. Because on the one hand, House as a language seems to be preserved entirely unchanged: they are happily reading the Lyctoral documents they find in Canaan House. But on the other hand, John may not have been all that concerned with ensuring the survival of modern concepts of historiography. We don't know that what Abigail is doing would be comparable to contemporary conventions of historical research, and we don't know what kind of sources she's commenting on, beyond the few Lyctoral scraps we see in the books.

But fundamentally, writing about that early period before the formation of the empire and the Cohort, she is writing what, for lack of a better term, I'm going to call ecclesiastical history. It's notable that one of her degrees is from the Eighth. She lives in a fascist theocracy, and the historical fact of that early period is not going to be licitly separable from the doctrinal or theological significance of it. Which is why it's so interesting that Abigail holds a heretical belief that, according to Harrow, "no one has bothered to believe for thousands of years." Which suggests it may be something that came to the fore for her in her research.

If she's mostly writing about pre-Cohort history, then I suspect Judith's questions about her patriotism aren't primarily due to her academic work. But we know she's intervened through official channels to keep the Fourth out of the Cohort, and that they mysteriously became ill when that failed. Her then recently-ex-boyfriend was also refused in-House when he tried to enlist in a fit of disappointment. So I suspect Judith may be speaking with her military intelligence hat on, suggesting that Abigail should be investigated not for any views she has actively articulated, but for what her actions suggest she may believe. Obviously the granddaughter of an admiral should have more patriotic fervour!

Coming back round to what Cytherea might have surmised if she was aware of Abigail's publishing history, the most intriguing possibility is that had she been just a bit more measured, she might have realised that Abigail was likely someone who would have been interested, above all else, in learning about what really happened in Canaan House a myriad ago.

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You know what, despite the horrors, at least there's still butches.

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non-exhaustive list of things i want to show to ianthe tridentarius:

- airpods

- blue raspberry flavored vape

- roblox pay to win games

- hitachi magic wand

- hgtv

- those panera drinks that killed people

- famous tumblr scandal/drama coverage videos

- cybertruck

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Camilla Hect dog subtext my beloved

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that awkward moment when you get forcemasc-ed by the vengeful spirit of your flamboyantly heterosexual bodyguard, whose soul you consumed by force after your twin sister (allegedly) stabbed him because she was jealous you didn’t want to consume her by force instead. that awkward moment when you’re trying to uphold space fascism but god keeps shagging all his subordinates and making your job very difficult. that awkward moment when your only friend in the universe is gods girlfail bastard child who is a literal corpse and also has the same ex-that-you-never-dated as you (who, as far as you know, did not actually want either of you on account of you not being one very specific corpse.)

this all happened to my good friend, ianthe tridentarius naberius

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i sorta love how we’ll never truly know if ianthe’s written to be objectively unattractive or if harrow and gideon are both just so incredibly disgusted by her existence that they physically cannot be reliable narrators and accept that she MIGHT be somewhat sexy maybe sometimes

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Her eyes closed. Lying in the tomb that had claimed her heart, faraway in a land she had never travelled, Harrowhark Nonagesimus fell asleep, or dropped dead, or both.

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You know, when i think about it, the actual worldbuilding and linear narrative of the locked tomb is pretty straightforward. It’s just that Tamsin Muir chose to tell this story as confusingly as possible.

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something that came into my mind while I was laying with fever

without text

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marrow

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update:

@dryingink

i win

crow get tumblr

crow get tumblr

crow get tumblr

crow get tumblr

crow get tumblr

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i promise my about is a quote 🙏

📦 … crow, they/them, somehow an adult

🪝 … media enthusiast & dungeon master

🫙 … i will eat rules lawyers who use their rules lawyering to make things less fun for everyone

💡 … @waiting-foratrain finally managed to get me onto the hellsite to look at tlt posts and i have no idea what im doing so. be nice 😭

🐕 … multifandom! (tlt, she-ra, httyd, epic, rf kuang, tma, musicals, dr who, pjo, bg3, etc…)

✏️ … @thecrow-nest is my art sideblog

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im convinced tazmuir got hit with "You're a nice girl. I had a nice girl as a cavalier too... once. She died for me. What can you do?" like a bolt of gay lightning and then had to come up with a whole story around that line