#(Alecto)

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

The way that she is absolutely gorgeous but she looks like she knows this isn't her face and you shouldn't see her like this.

Alecto the terror and the sublime

[toughtinkcosplay]

oh hey remember that time at katsucon last year that i rolled around on the floor of the gaylord in my AL couture look?

the saltwater creature is hereeeee. 💔

photo by @shmaba, editing & cosplay by @toughtinkcosplay

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

I know we had a convo over whether or not Harrow saw the body/was « insane » and having just finished the htn reread, I’d like to reopen this discussion. I truly believe she saw the body (she was being haunted ffs) but I don’t believe she had (« other ») hallucinations. This is based off of her conversation with Ortus in the bubble when she’s lucid. Anyways, would love your opinion on that, and also, what do you think happened to Harrow?? I think she completely switched places with Alecto, creating the opposite of harrow in control with Alecto latched on.

Yeah, I agree with you on almost everything. Some of it is only fully confirmed after Nona (I will annotate those clues at the bottom of the post under a cut, to avoid Nona spoilers), but this is the way I understand it, and I'm going to detail it all in case anyone finds it interesting to compare notes:

I think the conversations about spirit magic in Harrow are key. HtN tells us in detail about thanergetic links and revenants and the River, which is vital to the River bubble plotline and the revenant Wake plotline. But we also learn among other things that Harrow kissed Alecto as a kid and her lip froze at the touch and they mixed blood. Alecto then shows up in Harrow's childhood hallucinations.

Harrow is in a really bad mental health state after her parents' death. This triggers her psychosis. By which I mean, Harrow does have schizophrenia, and it works the way the illness works in real life—trauma can lead to really bad episodes. Ortus later suggests “the mind forms indentations” due to trauma (he mentions his own PSTD flashbacks about his father being an abuser, hearing him when he was already dead) but he's not saying that her illness is solely PTSD after her parents' suicide or the Canaan events. And ultimately, Ortus is just suggesting one read of the situation. He isn't an authority on whether Harrow had a preexisting condition. Abigail will kindly to tell Harrow that she is being haunted, but that doesn't mean she's not also insane. Harrow's experience is only her own to define. None of these conversations confirm or deny that Harrow's only being haunted. However, the fragility of her state is implied to make her more likely to see what isn't there… and what is. Madness bringing you closer to What's Beyond The Veil is a common trope in horror stories, too. Abigail is a medium, she'd be unsurprised by this.

The Body in many ways acts like a total hallucination—she seemed to have different personalities depending on Harrow's age—but then we learn that in the Canaan bubble the ghosts had to improv over a certain script/situation, so spirits definitely can show different sides of themselves according to the limitations or needs placed by the summoner. Harrow also only hears the Body speaking with other people's voice and sees her eyes as Drearburh black but that's logical given she never heard her or saw her eyes.

The Body, like most of Harrow's experiences in this book, is carefully written to have multiple readings, for instance as a red herring for Gideon: is she dreaming bits of Gideon through the vessel of the Body, which now has suspiciously golden eyes? Even some of the stuff that only the Body could know, like ��I died once… no, twice” could be attributed to Gideon by a determined reader on first read. In the end, however, it doesn't hold up, because later we

learn Gideon has already been poking out through the narrative voice,

see Gideon doesn't think of herself as having died more than once (she hasn't figured out that being God's daughter makes her immortal and brought her back during Avulsion, etc.)

discover that Alecto's eyes were really gold in life, which means this time her hallucination might be even more real than in Harrow's childhood, if there's a difference,

(1. Nona spoiler, check at the bottom).

So my take is that the Body really is Alecto's spirit/consciousness, venturing a little outside the Tomb through the thanergetic link established by Harrow's kiss (2. Nona spoiler, check at the bottom), that she nevertheless is summoned with certain limitations (her own dead/dreaming state, Harrow's knowledge of her appearance and voice, Harrow's needs) and that she finds Harrow available as a conduit because/while she's having psychotic breaks.

Now, did Harrow have other hallucinations? I think she might. The main one is Cytherea's body! Mind you, most of the time we see Wake-in-Cytherea, she's legitimately there, I think. Like the scene in which she walks in a terrifying way towards Harrow's door, like someone who doesn't know how to pilot a corpse yet (but will eventually). No, I'm thinking of the scene with Cytherea's corpse under Harrow's bed. Yes, the one Gideon is mad about, because she saw it through Harrow's eyes and brain. But you see, it's the one appearance of Cytherea that makes no sense whatsoever: she's under Harrow's bed, non-animated, not having triggered any of Harrow's wards, and then after Harrow locks her with bone, when Ianthe looks, the bone is still there and Cytherea isn't. This makes no sense. Wake is not an adept, cannot move Cytherea's body through the River, cannot cross Harrow's bone or blood wards, or leave behind perfectly intact bone cuffs. Ianthe was right: there was nothing there. (There's a post somewhere I tagged as #Ianthe where someone explained Ianthe's psychology in this moment.)

Now, the end scene. It's narrated in a very confusing way cause our three POV protagonists are kinda rubbing souls as they change bodies (that's why, later… (3. Nona spoiler, see at the bottom), but what happens is:

Harrow decides she won't go back to her body cause Gideon might be piloting it.

Harrow takes a Third Option and travels to what looks like the Tomb—but Harrow travels there *in spirit*.

Traveling along the same thanergetic link Alecto rode to her body, Harrow goes to the Tomb—or rather, to the River Bubble of the Tomb where Alecto has been, sleeping—remember, Harrow has no body so she can't be physically travelling through or out of the River. The Tomb is Alecto's own bubble. That's why the chains are broken and the Body is gone, even if in real life Alecto is still there bodily.

In this mind-version of the Tomb, she sees a trace of Gideon represented by a magazine—this Tomb might have been where Gideon's soul was *literally* resting while lyctorized, or it might simply be a representation in Harrow's mind of the fact that Gideon was inside Harrow and she left a bit of herself behind.

Harrow swims to the center moat and lays on the stone bed. By placing herself in the same equivalent space of the bubble where Alecto's body is in the actual Tomb, we're being told she fully inhabits Alecto's body (4. Nona spoiler, see at the bottom). She is, as you said, haunting her back. Because Alecto isn't there but inside Harrow, however, and because River pressure briefly killed Harrow's body until Alecto got in, Gideon is unfortunately yeeted out to the spirit realm, or possibly even back to her own uncorrupted body.

… I am a little concerned I've written all this from memory.

(1) We learn in Nona from Crux that Harrow used to “go away” as a child and claim not to be Harrowhark, so we get confirmation that her psychotic breaks from childhood were real and not just a post-lobotomy new memory—and also possibly she was being possessed then too?

(2) Alecto pledged some kind of vow to Anastasia, and part of it is that Harrowhark is a direct descendant of hers. Alecto realizes this in the Nona epilogue simply from “kissing” Harrow and tasting her blood a second time. Could Alecto have partly awakened, and therefore found a way to haunt Harrow in childhood, precisely because she already exchanged blood with Anastasia in preparation for her needing to haunt her way out of the Tomb in the future through one of her descendants?

(3) Nona regularly dreams of seeing herself come to Harrow's body through Gideon's eyes, but also possibly is mixing it with the Pool Scene?

(4) Alecto describes the stone bed as comfortable when remembering her first lying down on it, because she finds it very hard to have a spine (as I lay in bed with a TENS machine on, I fear this is very relatable). Harrow experiences the stone as infinitely confortable, like a welcoming bed. This is because she's connecting to Alecto's psychical body's perception, I think). Of course, in the John chapters of Nona, we see that Harrow is accessing Alecto's dreams. In these dreams, John seems to be not a fiction but the real bit of soul he put in Alecto. The dialogue is devoid of quote marks when the memories play as they originally went, but quote marks appear when John and Harrow break the script to have impromptu digressions, with John seemingly confused about who he's talking to in a sort of dreamlike way, leading to the “J+H” moment, and the final chapter happens on the River bank exiting the dream, in present time, no longer inside Alecto's mind.

[ukrainian-groove-metal]

I love the "came back wrong" trope but from the opposite side.

Imagine you are dead. And then you are RIPPED from the embrace of decay into the world of the living again. Your memories are hazy and you don't recognize any of these people, but they act like they're close to you? Like they love you? So you try to get your memories back, to act like you belong here, but everybody tries to forget you died. And you can't. It is omnipresent. And just trying to grapple with that fact pushes the people who "love" you away, and they're incapable of understanding, and they're so confused, what's wrong N̶̄̀O̶͛͗T̷̉́ ̷͋͝Y̴̎̌Ȍ̴̈U̸̓R NÄM̴̃͑E̵̾̇? And you just need them to understand, you aren't that person! You aren't! You don't know who that person is! You don't know why any of this is happening, but they're unwilling to bend, they keep insisting you are that person, your memories will come back, everything will be normal again, and you want to scream and cry and claw yourself open to show them you're different. Your existence as a being wholly separate from whoever you "used to be" is a sin unto itself. All you can do is scrabble for life and to them, you're killing whoever they loved to do it.

just. lots of fun in that concept, you know?

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

Oh, but they do, in a way:

Alecto behaves exactly like a cavalier should. After all, as Mercymorn and Augustine find out… she was he first cavalier.

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.

[sableeira]

2025 sounds like the perfect year for the release of a fourth and final book in a sci-fi fantasy tetralogy with lesbian necromancers in space and a beautiful, strong, and angry barbie titular character

[crtki]

gideon as a pirate / sailor

[raeyxarte]

Come on Barbie let's go party

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

This is particularly fun because there's several hints in Nona that she would prefer to be in an elephant body, or at least some other animal:

Some things I can’t get out of my head — and I’m hoping others are with me here! I posted on Reddit earlier, but need your input!

-Alecto’s original eyes are those of a humpback whale, based on the description. Black with a white circle and more black.

-Jod’s original eyes are those of an elephant, based on the description. Beautifully gold.

-Alectos screams are truly terrible! Humpback vocalizations have been recorded at over 180 decibels. 160-170 bursts eardrums, 177 causes joint damage and erratic breathing. Anything over that can be lethal to humans! Whales are also able to tell members of their pods from others based on dialect and communicate accordingly.

-Jod is intelligent, his memory is long and he knows how to hold a grudge. As do elephants. They are both also chronically full of shit.

-Varun calls Nona Salt-thing and The Drinker, we know at least part of Alecto is Nona’s soul.

I know there’s a lot more comparison to be made between our Jod and Alecto and two of the giants on earth, but those are some I just can’t get out of my head.

[butch-gengar]

[fluffehwuffeh]

murderous barbie ✨

[trueblueboygenius]

this would catch a lot of you

[maalidoesart]

u have asked u shall receive 🫶🏻

[the-velvet-worm]

has anyone in this fandom ever acknowledged the fact that harrow believes with 1000000% certainty that she was able to unlock the tomb because she's a Super Special Magical Girl (she is, not the point) and has no idea that it's only because she had gideon's blood/skin under her nails when she opened it

like what the fuck is learning this going to do to her chopped up little brain. it's going to destroy her. it's going to completely ruin her sense of self. the only reason she kept LIVING was because she was able to open the tomb and look upon the girl inside it. and to learn that it's NOT because she's The Necromancer Divine, that it's actually her life-long feud with gideon that allowed it to happen? that gideon is the biological child of the Emperor Undying? never mind all the other information we learn at the end of HtN while harrow is fighting gideon's bio mother in the river (she also doesn't even know that wake gave birth to gideon lol)

anyway I think harrow is going to feel very normal about all of this (she's absolutely not)

[homeofwyrm]

Homework but...you know

[addamii]

Feeling very normal about Anastasia so here’s this

More outfits under the cut

My headcannon is that harrow is just a little taller than Anastasia and has a squarer body type. Also I wanted to give Alecto a crazy Barbie body horror body.