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iviarellereads · 2 years ago

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Gideon the Ninth, Chapter 23

(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.)

(Second House icon) In which things really start to fall apart.

Dulcinea is confined to bed, and her cavalier remains missing. Everyone else is accounted for. The ashes in the incinerator have been raked out and confirmed for human, comforting nobody.

The necromancers, except for Coronabeth, are examining the cremains for clues. Ianthe says they're older than they should be, they feel about three months dead. Palamedes says she's out by about eight weeks, but even then, it predates their arrival at Canaan House. Ianthe says either way it's not Protesilaus, and asks Teacher if anyone else has died recently. Teacher says that they haven't had a funeral in a very long time, and they would hardly have consigned "them" to the incinerator.

Ianthe holds up two fragments and says it's funny that Teacher would use that particular pronoun, as there are two sets of remains in the ashes. Palamedes says the date of death is consistent throughout the remains, though. Ianthe wishes him a happy birthday at the gift of the puzzle of how they died at the same time and were both put in there today.

Deuteros says tersely that the incinerator is curious, but it's obvious that Protesilaus wasn't in there, so where is he? Teacher says he's set the servants to find him, they'll look in every space except the House-assigned rooms, which he asks them all to search for themselves just in case, and the facility.

The group discuss what might have happened. Jeannemary proposes that something from the facility has killed him, and nearly killed Dulcinea, just like it killed Abigail and Magnus. Naberius says they should "drop this insane monster theory" but is cut off by Teacher saying it's not insane at all.

Deuteros says Septimus and her cavalier had accessed the facility, but asks if they had any keys? Yes, responds Silas Octakiseron from the door, she did. Gideon hadn't noticed him leave, but she now sees him coming back. Palamedes asks what Silas has just done. Silas says he felt a responsibility, and he's the one who demanded satisfaction in the duel that obviously can't continue. Palamedes says he hasn't answered the question.

Silas pulls a key ring out of his pocket, with one grey and one "familiar white" key on it. He found her conscious, holding the keys, and she surrendered the ring to him for safekeeping. Deuteros finds that suspicious as heck, and formally asks that Silas surrender them to her as a show of good faith. Silas says he cannot, until they know the fate of Protesilaus the Seventh. Anyone could be guilty. He tosses the keys to Colum Asht, and as he connects the rings together, Gideon notices that their ring has a facility key and another, "black wrought iron with curlicues".

Naberius shouts that Silas just "heavied a nearly dead girl"(1). JEannemary shoots back that he's just jealous he didn't think of it first. Deuteros tells them both to shut up. She reminds them that she said the Second House would take responsibility for proceedings if nobody else could, and that begins now. Silas asks if that's a challenge to him, and she tells him "You'll keep."(2) Instead she "thrusts her chin"(3) to Palamedes and tells him the Sixth are "the Emperor's Reason", and asks him to hand over any keys he has for her safekeeping. He tells her, with respect, to piss off.

Dyas finally speaks to ask that the record state that she was forced into a challenge. She throws a white glove down on the table before Palamedes and says she declares the time, he can name the place, and the time is now. Jeannemary squawks that this is unfair, and a "perfect babel"(4) erupts.

Teacher says he will not be part of this, and leaves. Corona slaps her hands on the table and tells Judith to pick on someone her own size. Isaac says this is what happens, isn't it, with Magnus and Abigail gone. Ianthe snarks back at him about Magnus issuing "a strongly worded memorandum" but is cut off by Corona telling her she's not helping, and declaring that the Third will represent the Sixth, calling Babs to arms. Ianthe tells Naberius that he is not under any terms to unsheathe his sword. Corona asks what she's doing, and Ianthe says she wants to see this play out. Naberius is obviously torn between his princesses as to whom to obey.

All this time, Palamedes has been watching Judith Deuteros, who finally suggests that Palamedes default, he doesn't want to put his cavalier through this. Palamedes abruptly says, no, they're doing this, here and now. He doesn't even stand, he just crooks a finger at Camilla, who starts to limber up, as if to dance, then steps up onto the table in one clean movement. Marta Dyas vaults up on the other side, and draws her weapons: a bone-sharp knife and her plain, polished rapier.

Camilla stares at her for a moment, and draws both her weapons at once in a way that nags at something in Gideon's brain.(5) She wields an incredibly old- and delicate-looking rapier, and a knife that looks meant for hunting rather than duelling. She looks rather amateurish, in fact.

Corona steps up to adjudicate, and tries to declare the legal sword-touch areas, but Deuteros interrupts her calmly and forcefully, declares "Hyoid down, disarm legal, necromancer's mercy," and asks if the terms are accepted. Palamedes says he has no idea what they mean, and Gideon leans in to hear Corona explain to him in a whisper:

"Warden--that means she can hit your cavalier anywhere below the neck, and it ends only when you give in. She's being an absolute cad, and I'm not even slightly sorry for pantsing her when we were eight." "Nor should you be."

Corona adds that he shouldn't let her make an example of him. She's picking on him because he can't fight back, to hurt Camilla badly and scare off Octakiseron and Nonagesimus, adding that she means no offence to Gideon. Palamedes clarifies: so under these terms, her cavalier can do almost anything to his cavalier, in the name of making him call it off? Yes, confirms Corona.

Judith gets impatient, and demands an answer: default or fight, and Corona should arbitrate properly if she's going to. Her "exquisite eyes" could have convinced a stone to roll uphill, but find nothing to grasp in Palamedes. Corona calls the terms again, and Marta answers. Camilla asks Palamedes, and he says she can't hit in the head, but he thinks that's it. She tells him to tell her how to play it, and she answers the call to duel as well.

Gideon moves back to her necromancer, silent all this time. Unlike most in the room, she seems eager for this.

Corona tells them to pace off, as best they can on the table. Palamedes tells Cam to "Go loud," just as Corona tells them to begin.

It takes Dyas less time to realize she's in trouble than it took Gideon, when she fought Naberius. She's a soldier, and fights like one. Camilla fights like a hurricane. She shortly leaves a long red gash down Dyas's front, bashes her knuckles with the hilt of her rapier, and kicks her knee "for good measure." The kick is the only mistake, setting Dyas afire with adrenaline from the pain instead of debilitating her.

The fight continues, Camilla leaving too many openings, but eventually grabbing Marta's wrist and twisting her arm until the shoulder pops. Dyas doesn't quite scream, but it's a near thing. Judith cries "Mercy!", Corona confirms the match to the Sixth, and then a silence falls over the group. Jeannemary breaks it with an exclamation of "Hot dog."

Both cavaliers drip with blood, but Dyas is much worse off. Palamedes sets the shoulder back in its joint, making her scream for real, as Deuteros watches. Then, he demandes her keys. She says she has none, but he says he'll take her facility key, then. When she protests that he has an exact copy, he says maybe he'll throw it out a window, just to keep her out of things she doesn't understand. She picked on the Sixth thinking them weak, not knowing their capabilities, not knowing how many keys they or anyone else hold. Deuteros hasn't paid any attention to anything but herself since the shuttles landed, and then she assumed Camilla was the weakest, best target to take out to prove a point, and he just hates people who assume things.

Judith says she had cause for all those things, but Palamedes doesn't care. She's the one that's stuck a target on everyone with a key, she's the one who's made it a free-for-all, and she'll pay for it. She protests that he misunderstands her intention, but he roars for her to give him her key, "[or] is the Second faithless, as well as dense?" Dyas, having finally mopped up most of the blood from her face with her red kerchief, fumbles in her jacket and provides Palamedes with the key ring. Camilla is sitting on the table, applying pressure to her own wound.

"Missed the bone," she said. "Remember that you're using a rapier, please."(6) "I'm not making excuses, but she was quick as hell-" A voice interrupted: "I challenge the Sixth for their keys. I name the time, and the time is now."(7)

=====

(1) Can't find a clear definition on this one because I can't get it to properly exclude results for "heavy", but the implication is that Babs thinks Silas beat up Dulcinea to get the keys, or overpowered her physically in her weakened state at least. (2) Not a phrase I see often so in case anyone's unfamiliar: more or less, "you, I can deal with later". (3) I would think of this as more of an upward nod toward, but the description of thrusting the chin changes that from an acknowledgement to a command, VERY Judith in this moment. (4) So many fascinating phrases today! A babel is a scene of much confusing noise, particularly with voices. Relating to the ancient tower of Babel, where it's said in some belief systems that God caused the single world-language to fracture into many, so that the workers building the tower couldn't communicate with each other anymore, and thus couldn't finish and reach heaven. Which… you know, is looking like a surprisingly apt metaphor for what's going on here with the Lyctorhood trials, I'm just sayin, except, God's the one who invited them… so what's causing the fracture between them? (5) What do we think? I'm personally under the impression that Camilla isn't used to wearing these weapons. That, like Gideon, she trained primarily with something else, and learned the rapier last. Gideon's just not used to seeing that flicker of unfamiliarity from the outside. (6) Definitely uses another weapon by preference. (7) Oh, who could this be, causing trouble?

#the locked tomb #tlt #gideon the ninth #gtn #gideon the ninth spoilers #gtn spoilers #gideon nav #ianthe tridentarius #palamedes sextus #teacher (gtn)#judith deuteros #coronabeth tridentarius #jeannemary chatur #silas octakiseron #colum asht #naberius tern #harrowhark nonagesimus #marta dyas #camilla hect

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quantumcartography · 11 months ago

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Deeply in love with this take because it adds a subtextual explanation to my own theory about thanergetic vs thalergetic beings. I had arrived at this exact same conclusion about how it was only Wake who could carry The Bomb because Jod was still a thalergetic human same as she was. And it's partly because of the the books and stories frequently reference things that make it clear that fertility is a big issue in the Houses. I want to provide some specific examples to support their point:

Opposite, Dulcinea murmured to Abigail: “I think that is a perfect shame.” “Thank you. We’re over it; it simply wasn’t in our cards,” the necromancer said, a bit bracingly. “My younger brother’s the next in line. He’ll do well. It gives me more time to collate the manuscript, which I’ve been married to longer than I have to Magnus.”

It's mentioned both in Gideon the Ninth and in Harrow the Ninth, that Abigail Pent, Necromancer of the Fifth is infertile or otherwise unable to have children.

Isaac Tettares, born on Tisis. Resurrection-purity family, the eldest of eight. As is normal on the Fourth, children were a mix of vat-womb and XX carry. Father killed by terrorists out on [REDACTED] nineteen years ago: all of his children have been posthumous and the title held in stewardship.

The Cohort Intelligence Files make note that vat-womb (what I assume is artificial growth of humans) is common in the Fourth and that Isaac, at 13 years old, was born six years after his father died. And he isn't even the youngest: Jeannemary said that he had "three younger brothers and four younger sisters" This implies that fertile necromancers, or at least ones of "Resurrection-purity" are so rare that they will cryogentically store their genetic material with the assumptions that they will die for use at least a decade after their demise.

Bloodline requirement in the Sixth would be a waste of time. Consanguinity tables get narrower year by year. I was born with four kids in my generation eligible to produce children with me. Palamedes had two.

The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex shows that the Sixth House is so interbred that they have tables where they track who is related to who and how. That's not a sign of a healthy and fertile population capable of growth.

And of course there's Harrow:

“It’s important. My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fill the role of true heir to the Locked Tomb. But as necromancers themselves, they found the process doubly difficult. We hardly had access to the foetal care technology that the other Houses do.”

“My mother miscarried multiple times before I was born; I don’t know how many. ”

And more than that, Harrow the Ninth offers even more clean cut examples:

It was an uncomfortable thing, to remove the soul of a dead planet like this: it would be the first time you had done it, and the first time you had killed any planet alone. The creatures would not die immediately when the planet did. But they would��slowly—come to change, and in the end they would be thanergy mutants who could not reproduce. A rather Ninth House death, and the death that came for all flipped planets in the end.

All of these are small ways that we are shown that necromantic ability is not a powerful boon, but a curse that slowly strangles the life from those who use it.

You know how it goes: through some incredible circumstances, God and a young woman living under the shadow of an oppressive empire have a metaphysically unusual baby who grows up to be a general nuisance, won't stay dead, and sports a few additional holes...

It's the third Sunday of Advent and I'm a little concerned Bible studies for weird goth kids might be turning into a series... Let's talk about the Blessed Virgin Mary and Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity.

Wake was probably never described as "gentle", "meek", or "mild", but there are a few similarities: distinctive outfits, snazzy shrines, commitment to putting down the mighty from their seats, and of course babies with great and terrible destinies niftily conceived without sex.

On the topic of conception, let's clear up a common, uh, misconception: the term "immaculate conception" does not refer to Mary becoming pregnant with Jesus. It's Mary's own conception.

Why are we talking about how Mary was conceived and what does this have to do with lesbian necromancers?

To answer that question, we have to go back further still, way before Mary's conception. Back to these guys and their unfortunate snack cravings:

Remember how last time we talked about the concept of being in a state of grace? Well, the Christian read on Adam and Eve is that a state of grace was, as it were, the factory setting for humanity. They were fully in tune with God, there was no sickness or death, there was no sin. Until, that is, the whole unfortunate business with the apple. The first sin. The world is fundamentally altered. Humanity is expelled from paradise, burdened with sin, death, disease, patriarchy, and work. Worse, this sinful human nature turns out to be sexually transmissible: every human being is born tainted by this "original sin" of Adam and Eve.

This is why Catholicism is so big on baptising babies: even if they're many years off being able to commit any sins themselves (a sin has to be something consciously chosen and understood), they're still contaminated by that original sin of Adam and Eve. Baptism is understood to erase original sin, wiping the slate clean.

Bear with me, we'll be back to necromancers soon I promise. Have a picture of Mary beating up the devil while an angel holds baby Jesus:

OK, but what does Adam and Eve's danger snack have to do with Mary's conception?

The "immaculate conception" refers to the idea that unlike every human being between Adam and Jesus, Mary was conceived without the contamination of original sin. The rationale for this is complex, but essentially boils down to something like the saving power of Jesus not being bound by piffling things like time and space and thus saving his mother before her own conception and allowing himself to also be conceived and born sinless.

But the important bit is that something specific about Mary means that she is uniquely able to be pregnant with Jesus.

You may be starting to guess where this is going...

Because while unconventional pregnancy seems to have been the plan from the get-go for Jesus, it was not with the artist formerly known as The Bomb:

“I had the baby,” said Wake. “The baby I’d had to incubate myself for nine long fucking months, when the foetal dummies these two gave me died.”

“Oh, God, it was yours,” said Augustine, in horror. “I thought you’d used in vitro on one of Mercy’s—”

“I said they all died,” said Wake. “The dummies died. The ova died. Only the sample was still active, no idea how considering it was twelve weeks after the fact, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“So you used it on yourself,” said Augustine. “Anything for the revolution, eh, Wake?”

We have to assume the foetal dummies plan was hatched by Mercymorn, a brilliant scientist with a myriad of experience. If the problem encountered by Wake were as simple as Lyctoral infertility, I suspect Mercy would have spotted that long before.

But what do Wake and John have in common that Mercymorn or any of the other ova-having residents of the Mithraeum did not? They are both (to some extent at least) factory setting humans: unlike everyone else in the Dominicus system, they never died and were resurrected, nor are they the descendants people who were. John's abilities, while macabre, are not straightforwardly the necromancy otherwise practiced in the Houses. That necromancy is a direct result of one specific act of taking that resulted in the very nature of the world changing: a thanergetic system, inhabited by human beings who, necromancer or not, are fundamentally tainted by thanergy and by the after effects of that action of John's. You might call it a sin. An indelible sin. He does.

It's not an exact parallel, but necromancy certainly occupies a space not dissimilar to original sin: the result of a single action, tainting every descendant of its progenitors regardless of their actions of abilities.

And then enter Gideon, born in space away from the thanergetic energy of the Dominicus system to a mother lacking the 10,000 year intergenerational burden of the resurrection and necromancy. The child of Jod, born to die.

#commander wake #jod #gideon the ninth #the locked tomb #tlt spoilers #gtn spoilers #htn spoilers #harrow the ninth #tlt meta

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artbyblastweave · 2 years ago

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Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 11

We are now on Day three at Canaan house. This work does interesting things with time. Sometimes you get a chapter like chapter 6 that’s basically the equivalent of a training montage taking place over months; sometimes you get a three or four chapter run covering like an hour; here you get a chapter that officially begins to stretch out and volumize the total amount of time that the cast have canonically spent at Canaan house without much happening. I’m harping on this because of my ongoing conspiracy theory that this was a book written to maximize opportunities for fandom engagement; around the ring distribution scene in chapter 8, when I realized that this was like a very weird boarding school plot, I developed the theory that Muir was going to do some time jumps, leaving broad holes in the timeline where canon-adjacent stuff can be crammed in. This isn’t as drastic as what I was thinking of, but it fills a similar role; the rest of this chapter shows that while Gideon was sequestering herself, the tertiary cast spent two days getting at least somewhat acquainted with each other.

Also; as much as Gideon is ragging on Harrow for her chronic truancy (and I’ve read a couple of chapters ahead so I know her complaints are grounded) Gideon is, from the perspective of everyone else at Canaan house, exactly as opaque and inaccessible as Harrow.

“It was in this abandoned state....“ Okay, Gideon, as much as I ragged on Dulcinea for objectifying you in the last chapter, I assess your current state as more than slightly self-inflicted. Dulcinea wants you around. Harrow- the main functional constraint on your behavior, or at least the one you blame everything on- has no leverage here because she isn’t around. This whole dueling sequence indicates your ability to carve out a niche fairly easily. And really, you aren’t adequately questioning the idea that sticking like glue to Harrow’s charade is the only way out of your situation on the ninth. You could cheat! There are people around who might help you cheat! To the degree that you’re abandoned and without prospects, it’s because you’re hiding away!

....As I write from my lightless bedroom. Hmm.

Okay, enter Coronabeth. Alright. Listen. Somebody must have at least floated the idea of a Canaan-house dating sim, right? I can’t be the only one whose mind went here at this point, with the knuckle-kissing.

Jokes aside, I get the impression that Gideon is astoundingly attracted to Coronabeth and extremely susceptible to her charisma, but it’s unclear to me if she actually likes Coronabeth. The descriptor “an expression like an artillery shell mid-flight” indicates a level of discomfort; Gideon feels less in love and more ensnared, off-balance, following Coronabeth because she succumbed to Coronabeth. Coronabeth is in general treated by the narration of having a gravity that makes everyone defer to her like this.

I’ve decided that I like Magnus, at least in part because Gideon clearly does. This sequence is full of a lot of little signifiers that he’s actually a decent guy; he’s the only person in the room actively friendly to Gideon when she walks in, he’s fiercely but deftly protective of the fourthlings when Naberius is being a dick, he’s humble, he’s a wife-guy, he’s a fun-uncle, he cracks puns and immediately endears himself to Gideon by doing so. I think I called the Hammerlock thing; he’s like the empty, goofy, sanitized signifier of Empire, the fun aesthetic parts, the nobility and sportsmanship, but at a distance from any of the genocidal sausage that goes hand-in-hand with the real-life version. He’s very pointedly not good at being a cavalier- a teen with three months of training thrashes a grown man who self-identifies as the boy toy of the competent person in his dyad. He’s never seen real combat. My read is that he’s either going to die ineffectually (thus removing a voice of reason from play) or be secretly evil, but in the increasingly unlikely scenario that this turns out to be a takedown of his archetype, I am gonna say that he feels believably likable in the way such a person would need to be to have the social power associated with the gentleman adventurer role.

Also, to briefly revisit the AU logic from earlier- I’ve got this guy pegged as the “cool teacher.”

“Three Moves, Magnus!“ I love these little assholes. I love how these little pesterings are structured as intrusive asides rather than as part of the ebb and flow of the dialogue.

Alright, if Gideon’s implicit.... thing with Dulcinea is rooted in an aesthetic fascination and acts of service, Gideon’s impending.... thing with Coronabeth is rooted in the fact that Coronabeth is apparently aroused by Gideon’s massive capacity for violence. Nobody on the rock is capable of desiring Gideon for hinged reasons or being at all normal about it.

Can’t tell if Magnus’s “Am I getting old? Should Abigail and I divorce?” is a good-natured face-recoupment bit, or if the Fifth actually does have a “divorce your spouse if they’re inadequately martially competent” norm. Or if it is a joke, but a joke contextualized by that norm. And where is Abigail, anyway?

Also: Interesting that Gideon clearly has some residual affection and respect for Aiglamene. Heart growing fonder, et al, et al.

Okay, the whole Babs sequence adheres like glue to a lot of. A lot of high school and sports movie tropes. Scrappy underdog on the back foot until she breaks protocol, and then being lauded for being the more practical combatant even if her well-bred opponent is more skilled within the rules as defined. Preps vs… Goth-nerds? Gerds? Spiced up, however, by whatever deranged under-the-hood dynamics the thirds have going on. Is Naberius, like, a sibling to the twins, a boyfriend, an unholy fusion...? Also interesting is that Coronabeth seems interested in defusing Naberius rather than providing solidarity to him; her approach to the aftermath of the fight is definitely based around keeping in both Babs and Gideon’s good graces.

Also; Naberius is suspicious of Gideon. He knows enough about the Ninth’s MO that Gideon actually being good at Cavaliering is not usually how the ninth plays things. And he’s right- Ortus, martially incompetent Bone Donkey, should be there in Gideon’s place. This is another example of the dynamic present his introductory scene in chapter 9; he’s vastly more insightful and observant than the elitist prep snob archetype normally is, but he deploys that insightfulness basically purely in service of playing his archetype to the hilt by being a classist, self-absorbed dick.

And we leave off on the reveal that Harrow saw everything, after three chapters of total non-presence. Dollars to donuts that she’s gonna be pissy about Gideon doing things rather than politely tucking herself away like a piece of unused equipment while Harrow was AWOL. This is, incidentally, close to what I was predicting would happen as a result of Harrow siloing herself off from Gideon.

I should probably say something about the second cav, Dyas (first name unremembered) whose job in the story is basically to provide the above-validation that Gideon is the more practical fighter. I strongly suspect, given how little I’ve seen her name come up, and the fact her uniform is a literal red jacket, that she isn’t long for the narrative. I’ve seen chatter about the 2nd house necro, though. I wonder what she’s up to.

And, to round out, This chapter features the second or third time that Nonius, ninth-house founder, is referred to as some particularly-badass badass, anomalous in comparison to his descendants. I’m curious to see why said particularly badass badass set up his house in the middle of nowhere....

#gideon the ninth liveread #gideon the ninth #gideon nav #harrowhark nonagesimus #naberius tern #coronabeth tridentarius #magnus quinn #the locked tomb #tlt #the locked tomb liveread #thoughts #meta #blastweave livereads

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drastrochris · 2 years ago

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Chapter 27. “You are still convinced by your....megatheorem idea, then?” This is why I think Palamedes is the smartest one there. He’s sorted out the system, he just doesn’t like what the results would be. “I don’t know how the hell they did it.” “I do.” This is why Harrow is the best necromancer there. Palamedes needs things written down and solved, but Harrow can basically just make things happen.

It’s great that Gideon and Camilla get a quick conversation, with another hint at Palamedes and Dulcinea:

“The last thing the Warden needs,” said Camilla, “is an introduction to Lady Septimus.”

And then:

Without another word, Camilla moved to bookend her adept as he paused before a large, gilt-framed picture: the gilt was mostly brown except where it had gone black, and the picture itself was so faded that it looked like a coffee stain. It was a curious image: a dusty expanse of rock, cracked into an enormous canyon running down the centre, a sepia river winding into flaked-off nothingness at the very bottom.

If only any of them knew about the River. I’ve read this book three times already, and I completely forgot about this painting entirely. It’s also a bit sad thinking about things when Palemedes tells Harrow, “It’s not good theory and it’s not good morals.” knowing that he ends up doing the same thing in Nona.

Chapter 28. I continue to hate the Mayonnaise Uncle. I sometimes wonder what Mercymorn would say about the Eighth. I don’t think her opinion would be much different than mine.

#full reread #gideon the ninth #gideon the ninth spoilers #harrow the ninth spoilers #nona the ninth spoilers #spoilers

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thunderon · 4 years ago

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I noticed something in my reread of GtN and i have not yet seen any posts about this so i would like to ask if you know more about this. (You have many smart insights I thinn)

(Chapter 10)

So Cytherea sent protesilaus to check on something. And he comedy back to verbally report it to her. This confuses the shit out of me because

1) if protesilaus is an empty vessel he should not be able to tasks on his own, let alone talk. So maybe he is not empty but possessed?

2)this could be a set up by her moving protesilaus around and using his vocal cords somehow??? (Wich would mean she would also need to move certain muscle for him to get air moving inside his trachea) wich seems a bit much tbh

3) ??????

ooooh i love this ask. not gonna lie, my knee jerk reaction to your ask was 'no way he was possessed', but then i actually sat and thought about it and went 'well, wait a second'. so let's look at this.

She hadn’t executed it very well—her parents were fine from the shoulders up, but from the shoulders down they were bad

so if harrow improperly executed the diaphragm/lungs she would be unable to control them to speak, especially considering her specialty is bone magic and not beguiling corpses. but does this mean cytherea wouldn't be able to accomplish it?

so we know the bitch is a lyctor and has powers far beyond what harrow could have accomplished pre-lyctorhood, and that appears to extend to puppeting pro. here’s another snippet of him speaking:

Every so often she would say something terse to Protesilaus, who would take sixty seconds to think about it before making replies so uninflected and curt that they made Harrow sparkle by comparison.

so his speaking wasnt super chatty and animated, but was that cytherea controlling him or not? was she really carrying on two conversations at dinner at one time? i mean, maybe. in addition to being a lyctor, cytherea is of the seventh house. beguiling corpses is their specialty as said here:

The Seventh House have been perfecting the way of the beguiling corpse for years and years and years. It’s just—not entirely allowed... And it’s not unholy—it’s entirely useful and blameless; just not when you do it like this, which is the very old way. The Seventh aren’t just soul-stoppers and mummifiers. ”

now this tracks nicely but harrow, who has an unexpected knowledge of beguiling corpses, still insists that it still shouldn’t be possible three times.

That doesn’t add up.” Harrow was stiff as concrete.

“It’s not possible,” insisted Harrow, words hard and clipped in her mouth.

Harrow said to him, slowly: “Undoing the cavalier’s bodywork should have killed her. It would have been an incredible shock to her system.”

i can imagine harrow sitting there like:

cuz like,,, what the fuck? harrow, a necromantic powerhouse, has puppeted her parents around for years and doesn’t understand how ‘dulcinea’ managed to control protesilaus for that period of time and survive the shock (which has interesting implications for what would have happened if someone would have been able to necromantically probe at harrow’s parents, but i digress).

obviously we find out cytherea is a lyctor and we all chalk it up nicely to “it was all in her lyctor abilities and House necromantic specialty”. but is this a closed case? here’s this little excerpt in harrow the ninth. if anyone hasn’t read it, stop here (although it shouldn’t contain any major spoilers just to be safe):

Harrowhark was bemused all over again by Protesilaus Ebdoma, whom she had never seen alive; if anyone had seen him alive, they never would have mistaken that shuffling zombie for his real self. Cytherea was a Lyctor and could have easily done better; she simply hadn’t bothered.

that's what actually made me think 'hmmm you may be onto something with your possession theory'. so as choppy and uncoordinated as cytherea puppets him, voice and all, HARROW SAYS SHE COULD HAVE DONE BETTER. and she just... didn’t? and was the scene you attached pro seemingly having autonomy (via possession), or was that cytherea giving the appearance of pro having autonomy? that also has interesting implications.

if we choose to look past the neatly wrapped up storyline, if we want to start asking questions like ‘did she really just not give a fuck?’ and ‘was protesilaus actually possessed?'. i think we can. i mean, the descriptions would match up very well with how cytherea’s body was possessed by wake (as opposed to how colum was possessed). as to who or what would be possessing pro? i have no idea. but it’s definitely a fun little theory, if more on the conspiracy side.

tl;dr: pro's body probably talked because cytherea was both a lyctor and an expert in beguiling corpses, but i think there's enough wiggle room to speculate pro's body could have been possessed.

#asks #this probably came out very rambling and incoherent #which is just my narrative style tbh #also i seem to have fooled all of you into thinking that i have actual intelligent commentary to offer #which i do not #but this was very interesting to think about #the locked tomb #also tumblr for some reason cut out half my response and isn’t letting me edit this

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dude1818 · 3 years ago

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Before I get into this liveblog post, I want to revisit some previous comments.

One, I said the Emperor in the first few chapters reminded me of Hohenheim. I adjust that slightly: he’s like if Hohenheim actually was Father, with the Lyctors (way too powerful; get into petty fights) as the homunculi.

Two, I’m pretty confident Gideon’s soul is in the two-hander. One piece of evidence was the “five lights” that Harrow saw as they left the River on the first trip to the Mithraeum. However, there’s a lower chance the fifth light was Cytherea, since something is still funky about her corpse. Theoretically the fifth soul could be Cytherea’s cavalier’s soul, but I don’t even know how that would work.

Three, this theory is more something that I think would be funny rather than reasonably expect to happen. We know that the name of Ortus the First is traumatizing to Harrow, based on how the narrator in the second-person parts refers to him only as “the other Lyctor” and that she fainted when she first learned it. There was also a person named Gideon among the first batch of Lyctors. Based on the scrap about them in the first book, that Gideon was probably a Lyctor, but imagine: what if the topic of cavaliers comes up again, and Ortus says that his cavalier was named Gideon. That would probably irreparably break Harrow, and she doesn’t even know why.

Chapters 17-38

We learn Ortus’s cav’s name in the very next chapter, so so much for that

Harrow keeps stressing how much she doesn’t have an interest in touching Ianthe’s boobs, huh

“Harrow regretted not making him take a solemn pledge of silence, to walk the place as the mute and intimidating bulk his father had been; but only a very obedient idiot of a cavalier would have stuck to that.” 😆

I had been spoiled that something was trying to kill Harrow and making her live in fear. I definitely didn’t expect it to be one of the other Lyctors, even though they hate her.

The imagery of her bones exploding outwards in attack formation was very cool though. Felt like a Dark Souls boss or something.

Ooh, I wonder if this is what the real Dulcinea and Protesilaus were like. Not sure how Harrow would be able to conjure that up in her what, hallucinatory rewriting of history?

The “cool S,” really

SOUP. That’s exactly how I wanted that scene to go

I had seen fan art of Ianthe’s arm. Knew it looked like Ninth handiwork

I think it’s interesting to contrast Gideon’s horniness in the previous book with Harrow’s insistence that’s she’s totally not horny for Ianthe’s bones

I don't remember at what point I started to suspect that Ortus wasn't even the Saint of Duty's real name. Before Mercymorn asked Harrow what his name was, at least. This confirms that it's the full twist (that I had almost guessed at the top of this post): "Just believe me when I say that when I want Ortus to go, he’ll be giddy-gone."

Whatever happened to dios apate minor? 🤣

Camilla and Palamedes are back, yay! And the first pronoun in the first person, ooh

It's interesting that all the people who are alive in Harrow's memory of Canaan House are the ones who died in reality

I love Teacher. He's the fun kind of immortal

Harrow's gonna be the traitor, huh 😔

"You were always such a little bitch when you were angry." Oh how I miss you, Gideon. (See also this post)

#harrow the ninth #The locked tomb #tlt

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random2908 · 4 years ago

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Ok, it's time for my crack Locked Tomb interpretation that I've promised... the two people I've been reading these books with. I will say first, the theory isn't itself a crack theory--in its general form I actually stand by it as a serious prediction. But some of the textual evidence I'm going to use is way out there, so don’t take this too seriously--I certainly don’t. Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth behind the cut. Sorry it’s long.

Ok, first, the theory, simply put: I think Alecto/AL is a Resurrection Beast. Personally, I found this "insight" fairly uncontroversial the moment the thought occurred to me, but one of my two friends who've been reading these books with me disagrees on the basic evidence; the other friend has embraced it wholeheartedly, though. So, ymmv, I guess.

The basic evidence starts with: well, what the hell else could she be? She's not human. The older Lyctors call her a monster. There is a missing Resurrection Beast: nine were born, five were killed, three are loose, and the narrative actually calls attention to this numeric discrepancy while glossing others (e.g. the number of Lyctors, which does eventually get explained). John presumably can't just kill Resurrection Beasts himself, or he would have (maybe?? who the hell even knows what his abilities or grand plan are at this point). There aren't really other monsters that have been presented other than revenants (of which Resurrection Beasts are the biggest) and heralds (which are spiritually part of Resurrection Beasts), and the third book of a trilogy isn't really the time to introduce them. (This, by the way, is also my argument that it wasn't aliens who destroyed the solar system in the first place--even though everyone else seems to have come to that interpretation (where by “everyone” I mean my two friends who have read this book). Being Doylist, it's kind of a cheap, lazy argument on my part, but whatever, I still stand by that as a prediction: no aliens.) And Alecto must be something much more powerful than a human because John is so much more powerful than a Lyctor. Finally, the stoma opens for John, and it only opens for Resurrection Beasts--it opens for him because he holds part of Alecto's soul and she is a Resurrection Beast.

The potential counter-evidence is the older Lyctors are confident they know her origins (but that doesn't necessarily make her not a Resurrection Beast), and the [other] Resurrection Beasts are drawn to her as much as to John according to Mercy (although in that case why haven't they attacked the Tomb? and also, again, that doesn't preclude her being a Resurrection Beast--we don't know their relationships with each other, and anyway, their attraction to her might have something to do with the Lyctorification process).

Ok, all that's fair enough. Let's delve into the crack interpretations now. I'm going to start with an irrelevant introduction, though, to explain my frame of mind when I came up with this. In the Appendices of Gideon the Ninth, Muir mentions that Isaac is named as foreshadowing for Gideon's sacrificial death, as in the Christian interpretation of the Bible, the Biblical Isaac foreshadows Jesus. My copy of the e-book did not have the Appendices, but my best friend's did, and she shared screens with me. It's slightly embarrassing that my best friend and I, reading this together, did not even guess from this, not even as a joke, that Gideon's father might be God. I mean, it's not... generally embarrassing--no one reading this should be embarrassed for themselves--it's only embarrassing if you know the two of us, know how good my best friend is at this sort of thing (she guessed the entire murder mystery in GtN a little more than halfway through, including that Dulcinea was dead and had been replaced by a Lyctor in disguise who had philosophical problems with God and was rebelling), and know what sorts of in-jokes and ridiculous speculation we tend to bandy around with each other--know just how often we, respectively and together, joke that some character or other is Jesus. And here it was right on the page, we read it out loud to each other and discussed it, and we didn't even see it. We were both completely taken in by the Gideon Episode One red[-haired] herring (as was, to be fair, Gideon himself). This speculation that I'm about to present came right on the heels of the two of us debriefing over this, because I was primed to read way the hell in too much into Biblical references.

The key line is something my best friend caught, not me. She wasn't even done with the book yet, but the line was bothering her (I'd completely glossed and then forgotten it--never let it be said that my bad grades in English Lit were undeserved). Page 327 (and I'm so glad to have an ebook so I can do word searches), Teacher is talking to Harrow in the dream bubble...........

To their silence, [Teacher] added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time.

"Saltwater creature" stuck with my best friend. She had no idea what it meant, other than that nearly every mention of saltwater (or salt water, two words, the text is inconsistent) in Harrow the Ninth is alluding to Alecto in some capacity (we confirmed this by searching--again, I love ebooks for this kind of thing). But I was like... wait, I might know! This is my favorite Bible lore!

Muir is working from the King James Bible (based on the quotation at the end of Gideon the Ninth) which is impenetrable and also is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is mostly a translation of the Septuagint, which doesn’t even have an extant Hebrew version, so ugh all around. But for this purpose it’s close enough, so I guess that's what I'll use for my English version. Here is how the KJV starts:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Ok, that word there, "the deep." What it says in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew Bible used by both Jews and Protestants) is "tehom," which is not quite a hapax legomenon, but neither is it a word that shows up very often, and importantly it only shows up in very few contexts that reference each other. It is certainly not the usual Hebrew word for sea, and importantly, in the Hebrew there is no "the"; it actually says "darkness was on the face of Tehom" like it's a proper name [capitalization mine for illustration, since Hebrew doesn’t capitalize]. Notice also how on the second day basically the only thing God accomplishes is cutting this thing, this "Deep" made of water, in half, sending one half up into the sky. This is a quick retelling of the defeat of Tiamat (linguistically cognate with Tehom) in the Enuma Elish. Tiamat, the Goddess of the Saltwater Deeps, Mother of Monsters and Dragons, is justifiably angry with the other gods and sets out to kill them; Marduk, the aspiring new head of the Pantheon, cuts her in half. Half of her he leaves on Earth to create the oceans (or just the Earth itself? been a while since I read it), and half of her he throws up into the air and it becomes the sky.

There is a lot of old Jewish writing, some of it predating Christianity, that just starts to touch on this, without daring to delve too deep (...as it were) and pull on the pan-Middle Eastern polytheistic roots of Judaism. (They had enough problems with people still worshiping Asherah, who in southern Canaanite tradition was the sea-and-mother goddess who was the wife of Yahweh the storm god, and who gets mentioned in the Bible a whole lot, without also bringing Tiamat into it.) The Gnostics really latched on, though. They said that this "deep" obviously in the text there predates God's creation, and used that as the foundation of quite a lot of their theological argument: that God (who they call the Demiurge) didn't create the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) but rather that there was a being even more powerful that came before. And they named this more powerful, older being Bythos (among other things), which means "depth" in Greek. They changed the gender, but they brought Tehom the saltwater goddess back as the most primordial and powerful of all beings.

Bringing this back to Harrow the Ninth... Insofar as it's Biblical allegory (which isn't much--less than Narnia and even Narnia doesn't strictly adhere to Biblical narrative), I think we should take the Resurrection committed by John to be the Biblical Creation not the Biblical Resurrection. First of all, John becomes God by performing the Resurrection, which is a much better parallel to Genesis than to Isaiah or Revelations or whatever. Second of all, after the Biblical Resurrection, everyone who gets to be resurrected is supposed to live in eternal peace in Eden. In contrast, in Genesis, after the creation, people start out in Eden but are quickly expelled and then bad things happen. This matches the story much better, where the expulsion from Eden is due to Lyctorhood--the Resurrection Beasts come for the Lyctors and they have to leave Eden; in this respect, I guess John is really the snake as much as he's God, lol. (Worth noting that in some parts of Christian tradition--although I can't remember about Catholicism specifically--the snake is supposed to be Satan. This also ties back to Gnosticism where the Demiurge is malevolent; John, insofar as he did not actually create the universe on his own, is a much better match for a demiurge than a true god.)

So, anyway, taking John's act of Resurrecting all those people as the initial Creation rather than the Resurrection (the fact that Augustine doesn't remember his pre-Resurrection self, is effectively a new person, also points to this being effectively an initial Creation), the Resurrection Beasts actually come before Creation. They come from the dying of the planets. They predate John becoming God. Furthermore, Alecto is a “saltwater creature,” and she keeps her body after she's Lyctorified, meaning she's split in some way between John and her old body; she is Tehom. Back to the Gnostic idea, Tehom is a more-powerful being who predates God, and the only creatures predating God in Harrow are the Resurrection Beasts who must be comparable to him in power to create such fear: Alecto, then, must be a Resurection Beast.

The problem with this theory is it's a little Jewish and it's very Gnostic but it isn't Catholic. In the Gideon and Harrow, Muir draws references in her language from practically everywhere. But as far as I can tell she only draws allusions and allegory from two mythologies: Greco-Roman and Roman Catholic. And although Jews and Gnostics are drawing on a lot of the same source text, the understanding is different, and the expansive side stories are different. Although, then again, who am I to say that Muir isn't also drawing on Gnosticism and this isn't our big clue; I've half convinced myself as I wrote this, with the whole John-as-Demiurge thing. It's a fun theory, anyway, and so I thought I'd share it.

(I'm aware that I've completely ignored any connection to Greek mythology, despite her name being Alecto.)

#locked tomb trilogy #locked tomb spoilers #harrow the ninth #harrow the ninth spoilers #harrow spoilers #hopefully that covers the important tags people might be blocking #I learned while writing this that I don't know how to spell 'resurrection'#I tend to put too many letters in #it seems like whenever I make theories about books it's always some weird religious thing #this write-up is SO much more Gnostic than what told my best friend over the phone a few weeks ago #(now that I've done more reading on it)#I knew there was bound to be at least one homestuck reference in these books but I did NOT expect it to be dream bubbles

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theskyexists · 4 years ago

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ive bought harrow the ninth and am now attempting to reread act 1 so that i may understand it better

ianthe clearly proposes that Harrow not get herself killed trying to bring Gideon back - reading it over again. instead to take the future and somehow?? be really powerful together and forget about their cavaliers. but harrow says no

im once again struck with how offhand this book introduces the concept that the empire goes out to deliberately kill planets over a couple of generations

now im not sure....there also seems to be an implication that there’s no aliens - because they say only humanity has a soul - but client planets were said to rebel - i guess the human colonisers rebel against central solar system command sometimes? but then what enemy does the Cohort fight? possibly it’s just bigotry that they think aliens dont have a soul

but like - they find LIVING PLANETS and then - kill them slowly. to the extent that they need to move the entire population. WHAT? why do they do that??? just so they can do some bone tricks???!

what the fuk

so how did the planets get murdered again? and which solar system planets could really have been said to have had enough life to have a soul?? cos like, only one of them is really known for that

why did God give Harrow the choice to go back home TWICE if he was never going to let her?

once again, why mess with the Hand candidates if God was always gonna come for Cytherea? just to mess with him more?

yeah - harrow keeps hearing and saying ortus ninegad but the rest of the world remembers gideon.

Harrow truly is totally mentally shattered AND time is totally fucked up

but sometimes in the fake-ish timeline Harrow remembers but doesn’t remember Gideon - like how she notes that there were two womb-bearing members of the Ninth who were the right age...but only elaborates on herself

for some reason - Harrowhark remembers Ianthe’s arm ripped from her by Cytherea - but now it’s whole. for some reason

that letter is still so what the fuck

‘like you did the last time’ - hm harrowhark sewed Ianthe’s lips shut? how did she come by the power?

is ianthe - calling Harrowhark God?

throughout the first act, they keep referring to time, having too much time, or not mastering time, or not having enough time, ‘this time’ etc.

the eggs you gave me all died - that’s DIRECTED at Harrow, is my theory

ok but the planet revenants come after Lyctors and also God (- God became God when? at the Resurrection) before the Lyctors happened - God was still at Canaan House - despite the Revenants already coming right...

is Teacher criticising god and lyctors for leaving Canaan House lol?

ok so yeah Canaan House WAS part of a ‘last sacrifice’

ok so - Harrowhark is a little resurrection miracle. This implies that God killed a lot to resurrect the Houses.

wow God is being a very dad to Harrow

Blood of Eden - BOE - they turned their back on the solar system. now they hate necromancy. in other words - when the solar system died, God resurrected it - but before that point some humans had fled - lived. and they can see what absolute fuckin horror necromancy is ACTUALLY

so what im getting is...maybe...god resurrected humanity by killing the planets...?

i just realised that Ianthe has taken Gideon’s place as the smartass in the room - the counterweight to Harrow’s portentousness

what the fuck do augustine’s comments to Mercy mean???? why is she unloveable? why would he say that God doesn’t need her? and why is it obscene that Augstine calls God John? What is the dangerous game she’s playing? What was the foul implication??

‘Then that is your downfall’ OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Harrow BURN!!!

what i don’t get is - the Cohort is an army - when they land they die because they’re being killed by an enemy at the front - NOT in pure sacrifice for thanergy. so why does only the death of humans and planets produce thanergy. why is the death of the enemy not good enough? they don’t have fuckin souls?? they MUST be complex life. and doesn’t a planet produce a constant stream of thanergy? but i guess it’s not dying enough - generally its life maintains itself in ecosystems.....unless a fuckin lyctor ‘makes the juice flow’ i guess!

sometime in the next book there IS gonna be a ‘are we the baddies’ meme. muir loves memes and she stuck skulls on absolutely EVERYTHIGN. Like WHY THE FUCK would you colonise planets if you gotta kill them for it? LOL????

huh? augustine just said that they can’t use necromancy when in the river - but mercy mocked harrow for having hypothermia ? implying her fundamental failure was not being able to necro while in the river? Harrow’s inability was what was wrong partly right?? oh no ok it’s how Harrow tried to compensate for her body going lights out while in the river. alright. that was written confusingly

how and why is this a completely different story???

The Sleeper.......is Harrowhark? the suit is too close to what she was wearing killing the asteroid. and the sleeper is lying on ‘something’. oh they just straight up say it lololol

ortus got into trouble 19 years ago...hhmmmmm wasn’t Gideon 19??? huh? which is why Mercy started at Harrow’s peculiar YELLOW eyes that Harrow can’t see herself i think

‘i do things face to face’ ortus says after stabbing harrow. HUH? why go for a stab if decapitating would have done the job? just to give her a small chance to fight back? (face to face?)

why not tell God that ‘his’ attack dog is trying to kill you?

why does Ortus the First want me dead? ‘who?’ ---uh. has she forgotten him completely (time shit) or is she saying the wrong name? mercy wouldnt reply like that then right?

she told him and he’s like - oh well guess you gotta just get through repeated almost-successful attacks on your life. ???? THANKS GOD!!!

‘you, with your unfortunate memory for poetry’ HA! i love how we are reminded that she knew all the fuckin damn books nearly by heart which is insane!

Teacher suggests his dying at least three times a day?? hahaha what?.........................is this purely a meme reference. is that meme the mental image im supposed to have of Teacher??????????? is this trying to say that this meme was preserved in the amalgamation of human life that is Teacher?? oh my god....

no.....palamedus and camilla....did old Harrow really kill them.....

seems like all the murders were consensual maybe?

it’s probably too straightforward that Harrow created and alternate timeline and made for a Harrow Lyctor without Gideon dying and kicked her to the original? maybe she took Ianthe and Coronabeth with her bc she needed Ianthe’s help

is this Cytherea or Dulcinea? Pro seems real this time. why does Dulcie call Pal and Cam strands and cords?

did muir put in a fuckin secondary school S - muir’s just like - im gonna put in all the memes as a nod to ancient human culture

still no idea what the messages are that Harrow is getting

This Harrow is so goddamn sick. I mean she was sick before, but at least she had Gideon. Really do feel that that helped her. now she didn’t have that -- AND she’s getting slapped with trauma another five times

if ortus can undo the thanergy of her own bone then why not simply crumble HARROW into dust? cos there’s a core of thanergy fusion in her that he can’t undo?

FLKJDFKLJSDLFSD fucking IANTHE ‘Wow! Not how I imagined this happening, at all.’ FUCKIN HELL

Harrow with her fucking fucked up dramatic inner monologues about weakness and Ianthe comes in with this shit. she really is doing Gideon proud here.

Did love Harrow’s musings about how only a truly idiotically obedient Cavalier would be the only one to keep to a vow of silence. HAH! nice one muir

‘have you taken the time to rest lately?’ asks God, YOUR FUCKING SAINT IS TRYING TO KILL HER IN THE FUCKING BATH YOU IDIOT AHAHAHAHA

JEZUS FUCKING CHRIST - try and be normal Harrow! try and make some soup and read a book! Harrow: *does and then hyperventilates hidden under her bed after 86 hours of zero sleep*

she was trying to remember what cutlery did. why is this so goddamn funny hahahaa. this book has ONLY been Harrow being in extreme states of misery ALL THE TIME both mentally and physically to the point of death

GOD IS HAPPY THAT SHE MADE SOUP AND DOESNT EVEN FUCKIN NOTICE SHE’S NOT SLEPT FOR A WEEK SOMEHOW THIS IS THE MOST HILARIOUS SHIT

thats what you fucking GET you piece of shit god! you push a prodigy teen to the brink and she fuckin explodes your lyctor and feeds you her fuckin marrow. maybe you shouldn’t have ignored her goddamn fucking understandable distress

SHE FUCKIN HITS HIM WITH THE FUCKIN TRUTH what an IDIOT of a God. he truly doesn’t understand mortality anymore huh

I LOVE HOW MERCYMORN CONTINUES TO MAKE HARROW YOUNGER IN HER HEAD AHAHAHAHAHAHA she’s only nine years old!!!hahahaha

naturally God focuses on how - wait- actually harrow is truly an INSANE necromancer - INSANE

still no idea what the fuck is going on in the not-past

aww. ianthe’s scent soothes harrow now. begrudgingly of course.

i thought this was gonna be lovely angsty harrow/gideon but naturally that did not happen

harrow is comfortable! first time in the whole book! one moment of comfort!!!

‘love my twin, also murder’ tridentarius pffjlfjdljf

‘how i crave your honeyed words’ hah

wow this scene sure is weirdly sexual with these similes lol ‘as though she had shyly undressed for you’ ok there Harrow you about to chop her arm off calm it probably sex repulsed thirsty teen

i do love how....there is this theme again that’s everybody underestimating the main character - who is actually a prodigy. Gideon had that with the sword and Harrow also has it with being a Lyctor now

it’s so telling that these Saints would rather be shits to these babies than help Ianthe grow a new fuckin arm

i dont see why Ianthe can’t work off this bone construct which is her own stuff and put some flesh on it since SHES A FLESH NECRO?

Ianthe that’s super gay

wow muir really never delivers on full gay does she??? i dont mind but i think it’s so striking hahaa

how are Harrow and Ianthe still hung up on the Saint of Duty? i mean, if they dont have him against the RB they’re dead anyway

why is the First going through rain and ice?

Harrow haunted? naawwww

i cant help but like mercymorn though - she cares. it’s soured ages ago but she cares.

awww Harrow needs Ianthe to sleep

Ianthe constantly poking Harrow for her prudishness is so goddamn funny.

‘It’s the type of energy i wish to take into my future’ AHAHAHAHAHAAH IANTHE MY GOD

‘i always forget you were an honest to go nun ... and six years old to boot if you listen to mercymorn’ HAHAHAHAHAHA

‘you look good enough that im proud of my handiwork but not so good that i’ll be consumed with lust and ravish you over the nut bowl’ fpdfjsdfkjsd this is what harrow means with crude japery and yet....

mercymorn has started to call harrow three years old. i will NEVER tire of this gag

all of the blood of eden stuff happened in the past 25 years??? god was on the erebos, but he also remembers ortus kicking the commander out of an airlock? that was in the last 25 years??

Ianthe‘s carressing the nape of Harrow’s neck. hmmhm

its honestly super weird if you think about it for more than 10 seconds that theyre talking about their cavaliers whom they murdered (im still not sure if all consensually) ten thousand years ago (!) and how hot they were that just seems.....fucked up

Harrow is like WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!! basically all the time but especially now. yep well that was to be expected i guess lololol

Harrow being painfully frozenly fascinated by (god having) sex and deeply repulsed is very Harrow

oh nooooo well that was a perfect kiss between them really

the funny thing about Harrow is that though she is so completely fucked up - just like Gideon - she is fundamentally a helper.

why wouldn’t Harrow have thought of blood wards! she knew he could only bleed thanergy! it;s the first thing i thought - just use not bone wards then!

ortus thinks anastasia is in Harrow - which makes me think - why does he think that’s possible?

mercymorn now calls Harrow a two-year-old. i am waiting for embryonic genius

so did they use the river to get to the planets theyre killing?

Harrow feels the peace and pleasure of a stroll through nature that she has come to kill

oh my god - Harrow somehow saved Cam and Pal is still attached to the mortal plane!!

Harrow helps Cam risking herself entirely just like that. yknow as she does

i wonder if Pal has realised that Harrow is not who he remembers

i think he realised once he realised haz mat suit was Harrow also...

ianthe xo’d harrow.....lol

im sad that original harrow is definitely dead.... :( loved her. guess gideon’s not coming back either. not sure how the second adept survived. she didn’t survive in the original timeline either. but she was ‘killed’ in the other - just like coronabeth..so that means soemthing

this whole ‘flashback’ stuff to Canaan House is Harrow being in the River the whole time. the cold temperatures, the blood, the creatures theyre fishing from the sea that apparently abominations

after all, we’ve just learned about river bubbles and a haz!harrow that can change their parameters.

all the people ‘dead’ she’d not spoken to much or at all beforehand. like they’re NOT real, in the River. the only one not like that is Dyas...

the fact that the narrative keeps calling Dulcie, Dulcie means she’s really Dulcie.

there’s giant organs falling from the ceiling. this is definitely the river

they talk about time AGAIN

the Body is the devil who let herself be used to complete the work of Teacher and the Lyctors in his mythology....hmm. and when they realised the price (AFTER? the work was done?) they wanted her dead but he buried her....SHE allowed them to become Lyctors?? I still don’t understand why the heck that was necessary

the king is dead, long live the king. hmmmm

Harrow comes onto a hallucination of the devil who was her first crush with the voice of her parental figures and the eyes of a love interest she can no longer remember - which is actually not precisely a hallucination probably - and gets summarily rejected lol OUCH (the Body didn’t mean it that way ofc)

Harrow is so repressed on every single front but definitely sexually

I love Mercy

so there is death beyond death. does everybody go into the river and become a mad horrid ghost? like - is that everybody’s fate? how awful

ok so God DID resurrect the planets also. ? but like. then why are there resurrection beasts?

what does resurrection mean? and who killed the planets in the first place?

BECOMING NONE HOUSE, LEFT GRIEF

oh.....my god.

ARE YOU AND IANTHE BEING SAFE!!?!?!?! HHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

HIS BODYGUARD IS THE DEVIL??

so the destruction of Earth somehow made God? as though it was something that simply followed from it

A.L. was destroyed in the first assault? Of an RB

so the RB’s were happily running off in the other direction until they decided to fuck around and kill their mates to become immortal and powerful - then the RB’s turned around and came towards them - which meant leaving the planets God had resurrected forever.

what the fuck god??? hahahahaa

God always seems so likeable goddamn.

Harrow is such a dramatic bitch. Affection??? JUST KILL ME!!! KILL ME!! LET ME SMASH THE GLASS SO I CAN KNEEL IN IT AND BLEED ALL OVER THE FLOOR!!!!

Harrow goes into her fun kid's game of not dying to traps.

But she instantly calls him father. OH MY GOD

HE DOESNT BELIEVE HER!!!

'then that will be your downfall' - is what Harrow said to Augustine AND IT WILL BECOME TRUE FOR THEM ALL

to be dismissed like that where it hurts most - to have God Dad dismiss her only slip of comfort her only pillar of truth in this crazy old world

'nobody had watched you leave'

SOMEBODY HAD - I love all the deliberate references to Gideon

Temporal lobe!!!! Again the temporal lobe!!!

So why was it again that Harrow refused to be locked in with the Emperor?

So isn't God gonna check out Harrow's temporal lobe? He's just gonna let that mystery go to its death?

WHAT THE FUCKKKKKKKKK

Muir what the fuck??!!!!!!!!

Oh it was.....a hallucination?

Always love how this dips into genuine horror sometimes

What's weird is that Lyctors seem made for the task of going into the river and killing Resurrection Beasts - instead of the other way around.

So say - that the sword somehow holds Gideon's soul (we've just learned that that's possible from Pal and also Ortus trying to get Pent to summon his grandma by his sword) - does it not make sense that Harrow 'for some reason' stabbing Cytherea's corpse with it transferred it to her? Or maybe it's SOMEHOW Anastasia if Ortus was macking on her. But Ortus thought HARROW had/was Anastasia.

IANTHE WANTS TO MARRY HARROW - HAHAHAHAAHAHAHA

Every fucking chapter doesn't make things any clearer. This is worse than Gideon the ninth

Hello???? Am I reading a canon alternate universe roleswap au??? What the FUCK is going on. This is like - if they hadn't gassed the 200 and her parents instead adopted Gideon for her clear necromantic gifts which nobody noticed somehow the other time round

I do love how Aiglamene was the sole source of slight comfort in Gideon's life. And Crux was Harrow's - apparently in any sequence of events.

Harrow is tumbling through timelines. But how can you do that just by messing with the lobe?

WHAT!! WHAT!!!

Is this...is this what I think it is??? Is thi

The fanfic roots are STRONG in this one. In fact I believe I've READ this fanfiction

Harrow's temporal fever dream (in the river?) HAD HER (Decidedly Not) VYING FOR 'HER DIVINE HIGHNESS' hand, which is either the Body or Gideon or both lololol. Seeing as the previous had Gideon as the main unnamed titled character - I bet it's Gideon ahahaaga

A fucking. COFFEESHOP AU. OH MY GODDDDDDDDDDDDD

We've had roleswap, 'ball' au, and coffee shop au populated by the ghosts of the dead LOLOL,

I knew it!! I knew that they were ghosts and that they were in the river!!

Ok so but when did Harrow shoddily create the bubble? When she adjusted her memories at the start? When is this. Ah Harrow has the same thought hahaa

So the stage is a - she was building her memories while sleeping?

Why is that she cannot access her lyctorhood like this...

I just realised that Harrow's mind made the party food taste like SALT based on Ianthe's cooking!!!! Hahahaha

THE NARRATOR IS GIDEON. But it doesn't sound like Gideon though

There's more to the work than simply preserving Gideon's soul though. There are next steps that Harrow prepared for that Harrow doesn't know about yet

Who was the sleeper and why was it in Harrows riverscape of memories that she ACCIDENTALLY??? made

Ok she sounds like Gideon NOW

Gideon no it's not because she didn't want you! It's because she wanted you to live!!!!!

And she succeeded....your soul is INTACT in her body!!!! You're protecting her with full consciousness!! How the fuck. And why didn't that happen before when she went to the bubble?

Are the ghosts of the contestants happy that they got pulled out of the River briefly? Or were they so briefly in there they couldn't remember?

She returned them to the RIVER???? is that really such a kind fate????

Something has gone wrong in the River - yeah because why r all these ghosts going insane and stoppering it up like slib

Do love how Muir has found a way to give these characters more screentime

I actually said 'oof' when Harrow screamed at Ortus - oof that really is embarrassing. GodDAMN Ortus you stepping up with the emotional support!

I've EVEN read the damn fanfic in which they switched bodies. My god.

A. L. apparently is thought to wander about still. I think she's the body....I do believe she's the body. That's why the Lyctors are scared of her

She thought - what. Mercy is talking about blood of Eden's commander. What is going onnnnn still!!!! Mercy is the traitor I guess. But how is blood of Eden connected to the ninth house and the body?

Why is Mercy awake on the mithraeum and not in the River anyways?

Gideon.... And the commander were in cahoots? So did A. L. and Anastasia an the body and the commander all have the same eyes?????

What the fuck is going on indeed.

Cytherea seems to have had a plan B for getting revenge on the Emperor. Or something had a plan B with her corpse as the main weapon.

If guns are so effective against people why aren't they still used.

The messages are from the commander. I.e. Gideon's mother. I.e. Anastasia? We never explicitly did learn how she met her end no? Gideon was convinced that Anastasia had taken the baby. It just seems incongruous how the Emperor spent like 80 years on the Erebos and the Lyctors were faffing about - meanwhile there was this drama going on in the last half century?

I love Abigail Pent. Love that I got to see more of her.

I'd honestly forgot that Judith was alive by the end of all of that shit

The sleeper is -the sleeper is Gideon's mother. Also. She's haunted by her mother. SOMEHOW. what the fuck? They couldn't drag her spirit back from the river they said!

'you wizards never learn' there's a whole modern regular sci fi world and culture out there! Or maybe it's just a. L.

Is it? Or is it Anastasia? Or is it the commander? Or are they the same thing?

The sleeper wants Harrow's body. Somehow invaded it - probably from the river? - which means its Anastasia or the commander. Which means that whatevers possessing Cytherea is someone else.

In retrospect - Harrow's coldness to Ianthe talking about - to what her - seemed nonsense at the time - in the very first part - doesn't quite fit.

Oh my fucking GOD Gideon is fighting Ianthe for messing around with her fucking girlfriend - who is HARROW, who actually, Ianthe wants to marry.

They just went from ramping up to a serious fight to Gideon dropping Corona's name and suddenly they're like - ah we got more important priorities actually.

Augustine's first thought at thinking a.l./the body (?) is in Harrow is John - and the Second is Joy!(mercy?)

'How I was gonna have to take showers with all your clothes on.' fuckin Gideon hahahaha

Wonder if Ianthe truly believes what she's saying - that Harrow was trying to rid hersel of Gideon. It's preposterous. It's just hurtful talk.

GIDEON REALLY THOUGHT THAT LOOK TO MEAN THAT HARROW DIDNT LOVE HER??? THIS IS A CONSTANT BARRAGE OF ALL THE ANGSTY DRAMATIC SHIT IVE BEEN YEARNING FOR

Oh my fucking god Gideon calling Ianthe out for being in love with Harrow in the most iconic way ufsojdjdodnd 'she wants the D - the D stands for dead'

Crazy brain-mutilated Harrow sure made it seem that way I can tell ya that!!

Hahahahahaha Ianthe remembering Harrows prudish Ortus/Cytherea shit. Amazing

Aw Gideon really went and fell right into the cavalier/bone mistress shit huh. And trying to shield Harrow - well as noted before - very necessary because harrow has been having a godawful miserable time - mostly because of herself.

Gideon appreciating Ianthe's pun xD

Love how neither of them position themselves as the love of Harrows life but instead as inexorably attached to her by the sheer role they play in her life - they don't dare aspire to what they think they can't get.

Muir realises this is gonna end up as a Gideon/Harrow(/theBody)/Ianthe ship right?

Oh WOW THIS IS AMAZING. nonius the legendary nonius!!! Come to protect Harrow!!!

For some reason the Sleeper can manipulate the rules of this River bubble and doesn't seem surprised about it

If all her cavaliers were this excited for death, she was definitely the problem.lololol. somehow Harrow, you inspired undying loyalty in even a person that you treated abominably

Yeah Harrow you slowpoke. If the Sleeper can adjust the rules - so can you

If the sleeper was not Harrow's invention - but planted itself - then they're very lucky it got to the ghosts that weren't actually there - first.

So it was the commander....a portrait in a shuttle of blood of eden - can only be the commander. And redhaired? There are too many red haired people in this book!!

It's nice how all these ghosts got to have lasting impact from beyond the grave

NONIUS KNEW ORTUS/GIDEON?

Ok so ....there's the bed of the River with stoma. But there might also be the other side.

Did Harrow really not account for steps beyond her plan to mutilate her brain?

Is this book really gonna go: fuck you Gideon will die anyway ?????

But.wait. the sleeper had a two-hander. Where did that go???

I don't get it. If they go into the river - won't they also go insane?

SO NYAH!!!!!???

Ok but - what? The Commander ALSO -somehow - took over Cytherea's body?

'did the ten billion give you that too' I KNEW CANAAN HOUSE HELD EVEN GRUESOMER EXPERIMENTS AND SACRIFICES THAN LYCTORHOOD. God is made of ten billion souls. I think they killed humanity on earth to spare it 'slow inexorable apocalypse' and used the power to make the Empire from the resurrected. There was an extremely vague implication by Teacher to the amount of souls violated in Canaan house in the first book.

So God knows the commander went for the ninth house? Firstly, how. I don't understand how Anastasia fits in here!!! It would explain though how the commander

So the commander found the ninth house - and she died right? They tried to call her spirit but couldn't. But she became a revenant?

Ah. God THREW the bomb.

A fuckin wake me up inside joke jskdjskdnd

So Mercy and Augustine ( not Gideon ?) had all turned against God? And they were working with the commander to -... Make a baby????? And then evacuate the houses???? (For when God dies - there being a risk that Dominicus would go out I guess)

Make a baby/body to lever the one who lies in the tomb into....?

Love how the book foreshadowed Mercy and Augustine manipulating and lying to God - and turns out they did that on much bigger scale

They....meant to kill the baby to break the blood ward?

'The woman who I was pretty sure was my mother, wearing the body of the woman I'd had a crush on, who in turn had been wearing the identity of a woman she'd murdered -' KSNFKDJDKFJJFC

So why did they want this consistently characterised as kindly and humane god dead?

GIDEON THOUGHT IT WAS HIS!!!! But he called Wake Anastasia then????

They really are the same???

Oh my god I know what they're gonna say. Gideon is the daughter of God. WHICH HARROWS FUCKIN ROYALTY AU FEVER RIVER DREAM FUCKING FORESHADOWED HAAHAHAHAHHAA

Isn't it fucking ironic that God told Harrow that - HE WANTED HER TO BE HIS??? WHILE GIDEON HIS ACTUAL DAUGHTER WAS SPINNING INSIDE HER CHEST LIKE A LITTLE NUCLEAR FUSION REACTOR

They've been trying to kill him for more than 500 years???? Did mercymorn actually genuinely learn the extremely fine knowledge of the body for THIS purpose? How many thousands of years ago did they decide to kill god?

A fucking DAD JOKE

GIDEON REMEMBERING HOW SHE USED TO TELL HARROW HOW HER OTHER PARENT MIGHT BE THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD SO STOP PICKING ON HER

I am fucking DELIGHTED I AM SO GODDAMN OVERJOYED

It segues into a reminder of how shit their childhoods were and how their suffering had them lash out at each other endlessly and how it made Harrow suicidal and shit though - which is great

ALECTO'S EYES. THE A. FOR A. L.

A. L. The cavalier of God....but she walked. She had a body.

Ohhhhh. That's why they betrayed him. That age-old hurt. Ten thousand years old but still the bane of their existence, the seed of their madnesses. The loss of their cavaliers. Oh how did they manage to keep that from him?

I honestly thought - is Mercy saying she knows he killed humanity? But that's not what she couldn't have forgiven?

But why did he hide it? Why did he hide the perfect way? ('it would be easier' why???)

Ah. Yes. The expansion, why would the Emperor do that?

Uhhhhh. Couldn't Mercy have done that all along??????????????????????? Couldn't Mercy have killed God all along? That was both a trick and utterly sincere.

Augustine and Mercy were trying to do the right thing..... Mercy.... :'( Augustine was right. God is much less sentimental than he seems.

'im not even mad that you failed to either fix or put down Harrow' hm guess the constant kill quest HAD come from God after all. What a goddamn bitch of a man

What was the original plan? Unleash a. L. ? And then what? How would that help with the whole Dominicus going out problem?

Had God ever really thought to make up for all the bullshit he put his Lyctors through. He seems so affable and human but he's caused so much suffering. He's as good at manipulation at them - better!

The resurrection beast can't kill him, but he let his Lyctors die to them one by one anyway. So why??

Why are they punching each other in the River? They can use theorems right? God could blast Augustine to pieces same he did mercy?

Yes! It's true! Pyrrha and Gideon both exist in the same body - foreshadowed by his cavaliers build. There was something so fishy about it.

I love how Gideon has exactly the same response as me: what the fuck. Pyrrha??? Gideon??? What the fuck??? Why did they BOTH have an affair with their enemy??? So ok. Pyrrha stayed underground from Everybody for the thousand years. SOMEHOW their compartmentalisation let her pop up in his body regularly and not just when Gideon remembered her - because the hadn't fucked up his brain. But then how did THEY do that.

This absolutely galactic balsiness

The stoma thinks John is a resurrection beast. Might it be.....because he's..... A revenant. A 10 billion souled kinda- revenant ? A bit like.....Harrow is? Which is why he felt kin to her? Which is why he compared her creation to Resurrection?????I've really gotta reread those messages from commander wake.

A fucking jail for mother meme. Jail for one thousand years. Gideon how do you know this one????

I KNEW Ianthe would do that. Knew it. She doesn't want the system to die. Coronabeth is still out there. Well guess what - she's on the opposite side babe. Ok I realised that Gideon's mum apparently stuck to Gideon and then the sword? But also did Harrow manage to break the blood ward because of of her proximity to Gideon? Did Harrow uhhhh get put into a pocket in the river? But the emperor wasn't murdered!!! Fuckin chapters kept lying. They're on a hold planet. Finally - we meet the people. Alecto and Camilla and Corona? And Judith.? Did Alecto somehow do a time twisty around to come save Gideon at that moment in the river? Once again nothing much more is clear.

#my stuff #harrow the ninth #gtn #ninth

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