#also thinking about how we actually DON'T KNOW what happens to lyctors' souls after death (IMO the stoma)

[adolin]

Spinning the Concept of Paul in my mind. The Conception of Paul. Basically: do we know for certain that none of the original Lyctors ever considered pulling a Paul, and ended up rejecting it as a viable alternative?

Palamedes and Camilla seem to think they have stumbled on something unheard of. Ianthe absolutely never considered an alternative; but the again, she followed the instructions she had been given and didn’t think about it much after that. On the other hand, we know the original Lyctors were researching immortality for 200 years, and were doing soul fusions on the regular (Teacher, etc). I think there’s actually a good chance they DID stumble on the same theory that Palamedes considered, and didn’t go through with it because they perceived it as the worse alternative.

Or: “It takes a very specific kind of codependency to do that kind of mutual death.”

When Palamedes and Camilla came together to create Paul, it was an ultimate act. They didn’t expect to retain any individual awareness, even after death — for all intents and purposes, they both ceased to exist the moment Paul was born. Compare that to traditional Lyctorhood, which kills the cavalier to fuel the necromancer’s power, but the necromancer retains their individuality: yes, the cavalier dies, but when doing a soul fusion like Paul is… both cavalier and necromancer die.

To someone like Palamedes, dying together to create something new is preferable to killing Camilla and living on. From what we know of the original Lyctor/cavaliers dynamics, I think some of them, maybe all, would’ve found it the worse alternative, not necessarily an improvement like Palamedes did.

(Of course, there’s also the possibility that yes, actually, Palamedes and Camilla were the first ones ever to consider a soul fusion as a Lyctorhood alternative. tbh, I thought that a month ago. But the more navel-gazing theorising I do, the less plausible it seems to me that Palamedes, who’s scary smart but also 20 years old, would’ve figured in a few weeks in Canaan House something that eluded many brilliant minds collaborating on that same research for decades, many of them also brilliant necromancers.

Some of the things Palamedes says to Cytherea in their confrontation in GtN IMO don’t match up with what we know of Lyctoral abilities, so I’m inclined to believe he doesn’t know everything rather than taking everything he says as face value. Maybe Paul is one of these things, maybe they’re not. I don’t think Pyrrha’s reaction in NtN is necessarily telling, especially not in front of a BoE audience and through Nona’s confused POV, but I think any future interactions she has with Paul will make it clearer).

[starberry-cupcake]

Alrighty, here we are again

previously, in harrowcita the ninth:

this happened

currently, after ch. 2 (once again, I wanted to read more but realized these notes were too long):

first off, I need to point out something very important

reading the first part of gideon, this was how the dynamic of her and harrow felt like, from gideon's pv in the first chapter or two

this is what it actually was like, now that I have harrow's pv

so, now that we've cleared that up, let me tell you about the emperor

I don't know about this guy

something's not adding up for me

I feel like he's either lying, telling half-truths that benefit him or he doesn't know what he's doing

and none of those options are very god-tier

he's also constantly going like "harrow, I'm gonna let you choose" and five minutes later he's "oh, actually, you never had a choice to begin with, I'm so sorry about that"

I don't think you're sorry if you've done it like 3 times since we've met you

maybe say what you actually mean, unless you're full of lies

he takes harrow on a walk through the clown death star ship he's got going on

and takes her to his coffin hangar

shows her coffins of the people he made to send to the ninth

the new ninth people

aiglamene is gonna have to work overtime

(I can't believe I've never forgotten her name)

and then there's coffins for all the little friends we made in canaan house

:) ♥

except there are a bunch missing people

let me just note the info we got

the second says "no human remains inside"

last we saw them, martita was KO and judith was bleeding to death

nobody from the third as well, and we already have suspicions about wtf is happening with these parsley and cilantro twins

from the sixth, one is empty because CAMILLA ISN'T DEAD GODDAMMIT

the other one has little pieces of palmolive in it

me picking up the pieces of palmolive from the decor of canaan house

there is one coffin for not!dulcinea

the emperor guy says he's taking her with the other lyctors

as long as he flushes afterwards, it's fine

we are, by the way, trying very hard to not mention gideon ever, apparently

just wanna point out real quick that THERE'S A LOT OF PEOPLE UNACCOUNTED FOR and this guy is GOD so he's doing a terrible job

or he's not saying all he knows

or both

all this time, ice cube barbie is tagging along

ice cube barbie is harrow's babadook, which I stan tbh

since she's here to stay, let me show you another pic of that doll because it's my favorite from the haunted beauty collection

so, the emperor starts telling harrow what they're fighting against (or escaping from) and where they came from

this man explains what he wants and leaves out what he wants

at one point, when harrow asks something like "how will you explain all the dead people?" he goes like

he asks harrow about death and the process of it and she says, at one point:

"In cases of apopneumatic shock, where death is sudden and violent, the energy burst can be sufficient to countermand osmotic pressure and leave the soul temporarily isolated. Whence we gain the ghost, and the revenant."

this is important for the later conversation about revenant beasts, which are the things that the emperor is having trouble with

but I highlighted it because I am adding it to my notes of "reasons why gideon could be not dead forever"

I am holding on to all the hope I can get

because if sudden violent death can leave the soul temporarily isolated and not do the due process of transitioning to the river or whatnot

and gideon isn't within harrow or whatever

maybe

maybe she's somewhere else

I don't know, let me have this, don't tell me anything, just

LET ME HAVE THIS

so yeah, basically the story is that the emperor is running away from nine revenant beasts, which were created during the resurrection, when a planet was blasted off

nine beasts like nine houses

there's three left now

I don't know about all of this, you guys

I don't have enough context and I don't trust this guy here

how do I know where we stand in all this?

what if he's not the good guy and what he did was some planetary bullshit to begin with?

what if the other side is the good guys?

what if he's killed by one of our heroes? like harrow or gideon or camilla?

because he's actually a false god jerk?

what if I kill him????

and then we have two last important things

first, barbie ice cube speaks now

love that for her

then, very crucial

the non-gideon mentioning seems to be a Thing

I don't know if I'm understanding correctly but

the emperor mentions ortus

ortus, the one we knew, our old pal from the ninth

and I got the feeling, idk if I got it, that he just assumed ortus was the cavalier she had with her

because 1) he didn't go down there and 2) no body was recovered

and then harrow also mentions ortus, but she says he "died thinking it was the only gift he was capable of giving" and that she "wasted it" and idk if she did that because she's blocking sad memories, she's confused because she's Not Doing Great Mentally Right Now, she doesn't wanna tell the emperor what actually happened, or all three

there's stuff about ortus I don't know, but that sounds to me more like what gideon said than what ortus "Got Blown To Bits With Mom In Ship" did

and then the emperor says his name again with suspicion and I'm like

I think this clown doesn't know

I think he doesn't know about gideon

I think he doesn't know about gideon or who gideon actually is

which we don't know yet either but it's probably important

because she's hercules, as previously established

I think maybe gideon is an outlier

an important planetary outlier

I have hopes

also, another day without camilla

god (not this one) I hope I can make shorter recaps but there's so much happening, I'm so sorry

[going-loud]

what is the cost of resurrection?

okay so. im going to preface this with a caveat that this question is likely answered already in the existing tlt books, but if it is, i do not know where! and also i'm going to be discussing this per my interpretations of the books, and that might not be totally accurate. if anyone as input on any part of this post please chime in! so i'm asking/discussing it here because... what is the answer...

throughout the series, John regularly says that he cannot (or will not) perform Resurrection again, because the cost is too high. but the only repercussions we know of are revenants, and Revenant Beasts in the case of planets. however, it's my understanding that revenants are the result of violent and quick death, not Resurrection. we also know that John likely did not Resurrect the planets or the people he murdered during the apocalypse immediately; the flashbacks in NtN seem to be taking place after the apocalypse, but before John Resurrected any of the OG Lyctors or just the population in general. (side note: did John Resurrect the planets? or did he simply flip them to thanergy planets by killing them? is that the same thing?)

so that leaves me with the question, what exactly happens when John performs Resurrection? does it have something to do with the creation of the River, and the place souls go after death? it is mentioned multiple times in HtN and NtN (i think, im not referencing text rn) that there was a discrepancy between the original number of souls versus the ones that John Resurrected. he also has some Resurrected corpses on retainer, apparently, as he used those to refill the population of the Ninth House in HtN. i don't know if this discrepancy is only related to the number of Revenant Beasts (when Harrow notes the math isn't mathing) and how Alecto was the reason for that discrepancy, or if there are references to the number of human souls that were brought back in the original Ressurection (again, i'm not referencing text and it's been awhile since i've read the series so if there isn't anything about this then you can ignore this lol).

anyways, that's all to say that i don't actually know what happens after Resurrection. John refuses to actually Resurrect Gideon, even though he is capable, or anyone else for that matter. is he just lying about the cost, the way he lied about Lyctorhood? or are there implications of what that cost is somewhere in the text that i missed? or maybe it will be explained in AtN? if any of you know or have theories, please share because i need to know if i missed something important lol

TL;DR: is the cost of Resurrection ever actually stated in the TLT series? do we know what it is, and did i miss something? or is it still a mystery?

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 20 of Nona the Ninth

I suspect Hot Sauce will be back. I don't think her only contribution to the plot will be to headshot Nona. We also haven't learned why she's called Hot Sauce yet, which I feel is still a loose string

Ok, so they just thought that Nona was going to chill unconsciously for a while and I guess them shooting at her was just a reaction to hearing her beat down the door? And obviously they shackled Camilla and Palamedes because Palamedes did observable necromancy on Nona earlier

Is that the secret she told Hot Sauce? Hot Sauce thought it could be solved with organ transplants, but maybe she was just speculating. Palamedes thinks the problem is that her body is rejecting her soul, so not actually a physical problem. But wouldn't Pyrrha also have been having the same problem? Or is her situation special because G1deon became a Lyctor and she was just tagging along for 10,000 years? And Harrow went half of her life with Alecto haunting her, but maybe she didn't get kicked out because she wasn't the primary person in control of her body, sort of like how Palamedes isn't getting kicked out of Camilla? And Wake was stuck in a sword for 18 years, but maybe inanimate objects aren't opinionated about what soul they're being possessed by

And also... Ulysses and Titania were already dead before John ever knew them, and it sounds like we don't actually know whether or not John found their original souls when bringing them back to life, or if it was two random other souls - wouldn't their bodies have rejected the new souls if they weren't the actual original souls, if what Palamedes is saying in this chapter is true? If I remember the timeline right, they didn't become Lyctors for like hundreds of years after the Resurrection

This is a great point that I don't think has been explained yet - Lyctors' bodies are invisible to other necromancers, even to other Lyctors, but Palamedes did something to Cytherea's body back in Gideon the Ninth that helped kill her. So how did he do that? Even Harrow as a Lyctor wasn't able to do anything to G1deon's body without getting him to eat her own bone marrow

Ugh. I don't get like ~~feelings~~ about the whole Palamedes/Dulcinea thing because I feel like it was kind of awful and not a fun way, but still

So this obviously isn't going to happen now that he's spelled it out, but that honestly is exactly what I'd expect out of this story at this point

Is "water bottle" a reference to something?

I mean, we already have several examples of Lyctorhood that can't be described as "half-dead cannibals" or "a mutual death" - we have G1deon and Pyrrha who were both alive in the same body, and they were supposedly an actual Lyctor and not like Harrow was, and then there was John and Alecto, who both survived in different bodies and may have conditional immortality supported by the other person. But Palamedes thinks that "true Lyctorhood" is when both people die? Or does he think that all the existing Lyctors are just at an incomplete stage of a longer process that results in the death of both people? Did John and Alecto both die during whatever happened to them? I mean, obviously Alecto died at some point, but I'm very muddy still on what are the exact conditions that cause a planet to die other than it being flipped with necromancy

I hope Camilla/Palamedes and Nona do go to visit Gideon soon, since that seems to be where most of the other interesting characters have wound up as of the end of this chapter

So in addition to being the Angel, and also "Aim", which is probably the first word of a BOE name, they're also "the Messenger". "The Angel" was the name the kids gave them, and angels are messengers in Christian theology, but it's really not clear to what extent Christianity or Christian theology has survived in any population in this book, and if John imported the idea of angels into Nine Houses theology, that hasn't been mentioned anywhere in any book yet, so it's not clear what "angel" actually means to either the Nine Houses characters or the New Rho characters or the BOE characters. If we go with the idea that people are still speaking Modern English somehow, then I guess it's possible that "angel" survived as a word meaning "messenger" in House/English, although that seems unlikely to me since in most vernacular contexts it just means something along the lines of "being of supreme goodness" these days. But are we meant to conclude that the kids heard someone call the Angel "the Messenger" in some language and translated that into "The Angel" in House/English? And again we have they/them pronouns, and no explanation of why they are important or the reason for all the special rules around them

Also I do love that We Suffer's reaction to chapter 19 was "you're the most horrifying thing I've ever seen. Lots of blood and guts, very impressive, 10/10"

I guess the "key" is Gideon's body, because it open the Tomb? I'm curious as to what exactly We Suffer knows about that

Hmm, I guess from Corona's perspective, it would have made sense for Harrow to tell people about meeting them, Camilla extracted her promise to not tell anyone when Corona couldn't see or hear them

Funny that this is the version of this they play. I love how Corona has been trash-talking Judith for ages, but I honestly think this is just how the twins express affection for people? When we're first introduced to Ianthe she's trash-talking Corona, and they both trash-talk Babs despite the fact that I think Corona at least liked him, but for some reason Ianthe assumed that when Corona was trash-talking Judith it was because she didn't like her

It's pretty funny that Judith described Corona as having been "radicalized" in As Yet Unsent, but now it's Corona who takes the risk to rescue Judith from BOE and bring her back to the Nine Houses. I don't think Corona is actually loyal to any side at this point, she just wants to save Judith, and possibly be with Ianthe, although I'm not sure about that, either - if Ianthe keeps insisting that the best thing to do with Judith is mercy-kill her, I think Corona may switch sides again in the future. She seemed genuinely swayed by what BOE told her in As Yet Unsent, but I think she's ultimately more like Pyrrha where she thinks it's all fucked and just wants to protect her loved ones, rather than being like Palamedes who wanted to go be a big damn hero and find a way to save all the people in the cages and all the people in the barracks. Or maybe Corona is still loyal to BOE, and just thought she could deliver Judith to safety and continue relaying information back? But she had to know that stealing Judith would be considered a betrayal regardless

Who is John's "real" enemy if it isn't BOE? There are the resurrection beasts, for sure, but I'm not sure they actually have the ability to keep fighting them now that it's just Ianthe and John

I'm not sure why Camilla seems to telling We Suffer not to kill (presumably) Ianthe (or, I guess, Naberius's body)? I don't think Camilla has any love for Ianthe and probably Babs getting headshot at this point would be at least a little inconvenient for her

It sounds like John is not in a good place right now, between "mid-dismyriad crisis" and "I've been on-call as Teacher's whipping girl"

I'm curious what exactly Pyrrha told them. It definitely wasn't everything, because Ianthe is referring to "Harrow" and not "Nona", and also Ianthe didn't know anything about Judith being alive and a prisoner, and Judith was a major tactical element since they were using her to work the stele on their ship

[beedreamscape]

THANKSSS 🖤💕

Favorite house(s): 5th and 8th, initially because of Mercy and Augustine, they astound me in different ways...

Favorite book: Harrow the Ninth, though the book could've been a lil shorter...

Four favorite characters: John Gaius, Mercymorn, Palamades, Harrowhark (I like characters with things I don't possess e.g. a working brain and intelligence).

Favorite ship: Mercistine. It was a Mercy/Augustine smut from an author I admired that actually convinced me to jump the boat and read the books 🙈. (And Jodybeth and Campal [yes, i know, no, i don't care]).

A favorite scene: Laboratory 8 scene with the siphoning trial. Gideon's readiness to agree to participate, Harrow's confidence in her abilities, descriptions of pain, how humorously the scene ends *chef's kiss*.

Another favorite scene: I'll have to agree with you and mention the kneeling on glass scene. The feelings I felt when Harrow broke that glass, when she confessed, how he could tell from one touch her brain had been messed with. It almost makes me blush.

A favorite quote: I'll cheat here: one for being beautiful, one for living in my brain like a bug.

“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”

And

“I merely want to put you in a jail,” said his Lyctor, now meditative, “and fill up the jail with acid once for every time you made a frivolous remark, or ate peanuts in a Cohort Admiralty meeting, or said, ‘What would I know, I’m only God.’ Then at the end of a thousand years, you would say, ‘Mercy, I have learned not to do any of these things, because I hated the acid you put on me.’ And I would say, ‘That is why I did it, Lord. I did it for you, and for your empire.’ I often think about this,” she finished. The Emperor of the Nine Houses said, “I ate peanuts, discreetly, the once.”

Favorite ATN theory: I wouldn't call it a theory as much as I think to actually kill John, Alecto will have to merge them into one person which will smother his soul and bury herself/themself into the earth to try and restore its soul. I got this idea from what John says in NtN about not being able to take Alecto's soul without burning then creating her vessel, also because it's a lot more poetic and tragic than just stabbing his heart.

And while that happens, the necros will have to work out a way to keep the sun from exploding through some sort of life magic. And that after John's death, necromancy dies with him.

Whoever sees this and wants to play, feel free!

While we're waiting for Alecto to come out, I thought we could have some fun in the tlt fandom :)

I'm not sure if anyone's done this before, but I haven't seen any so I thought I'd make a tag game. just for funsies.

there's absolutely no pressure to tag or to even play, I just wanted to compile all my favorite parts of the series and I thought it'd be fun to share! so without further ado...

_____________________________

My TLT Favorites

Favorite house(s): 4th and 2nd

Favorite book: Gideon the Ninth

Four favorite characters: Gideon Nav, Teacher (Canaan house), Jeannemary Chatur, John Gaius

Favorite ship: Jodybeth

A favorite scene: Nonius vs Wake fight

Another favorite scene: Nona's 3rd tantrum

A favorite quote: "Won't you say one real thing to me? Won't you show me one single solitary human thing? Or are you going to die talking to me like it's just another party you wish was over already?" (HTN pg. 546)

Favorite ATN theory: Alecto is a hideous corpse. (not sure what this entails yet, but I love Teacher so much, and I don't think we spent that much time on him for nothing)

_____________________________

Thought I'd keep it short and sweet, but please, please, feel free to make it your own :)

I was intending for this to be a tag game, so I nominate:

@onefleshoneend0 @transbutchbluess @orionsystem6 @koshertaako @susurra-el-arroyo-manso

but like I said, no pressure! just for funsies!

[beyondthetemples-ooc]

Jod vs The Collector who would win

I actually exhaled a soft but excited ''OH MY STARS"

I very much want to say The Collector. I very much HOPE it's The Collector. Kick Jod's Ass For Us All, Please.

Let me think more like viciously overanalyze...

Jod has canonically been absolutely DISINTEGRATED and was able to re-integrate after being turned into pinkish mist. That's FREAKY powerful.

The Collector probably has similar abilities because he had to be imprisoned (and fan theorists think he's been imprisoned at least once before), indicating he probably Cannot Be Killed by regular mortal means.

But like. The Collector WAS imprisoned. In BOE (I'm sure there are canonical details I've missed, but I'm pretty sure they have existed in opposition to Jod for 10k years), nobody has figured out how to stop Jod. Or even, from what I can tell, slow him down. (If As Yet Unsent is anything to go by, this might be out of a refusal to engage with and learn about necromancy moreso than a lack of weaknesses on Jod's part.)

Jod has his armies, which are loyal to-the-death. Somebody nearly died just to put a ghost ward on his ship. Willingly. Didn't even bother to say "Someone help me", just. Totally accepted dying in the service of This God. Could Jod "phone a friend" and get his Lyctors/etc. to join the fight?

But on the other hand, Jod hides from the Heralds and needs his Lyctors to fight the Resurrection Beasts.

Doesn't he say it would be the end of Dominicus if he were driven crazy? Could The Collector, theoretically, do something that causes this?

Apparently The Collector helped slay Titans (if not did it entirely on his own). I feel like The Collector could take a RB single-handedly, which is not something Jod can do. Especially since, if I may extrapolate wildly here, I'm thinking The Collector's greatest powers could be over celestial things! (Being "a child of the stars"? So like, Power Over Planet Souls too, maybe?)

I wonder if, to match Jod and his armies, The Collector could get the remaining Resurrection Beasts on HIS team. That would probably screw Jod over pretty hard.

Jod powers the entire thanergetic solar system (or at the very least, the sun), but The Collector "boop"ed away an entire solar eclipse. I'm thinking The Collector could mess up the celestial forces that keep the planets working in his favor? But that seems like it'd be more of a concern for necromancers helping Jod than the false God himself.

If The Collector could corner Jod somewhere he'd be without thanergy, I wonder how Jod's necromancy would fare...

But we don't know just HOW MUCH a "perfect" Lyctorhood with A.L can power him if there's no "death juice" to "suck up", to use Gideon's words! Jod's Lyctors seemed able to use necromancy just fine without being in thanergetic environments...

But then, what happens if Jod is somehow made Not a Lyctor? Would The Collector be able to break Jod's "Perfect Lyctorhood" with her if he did to Alecto what he did to Muck Monster Belos? (Sidenote: Can this be done? Does she also have immense Lyctorhood-based necromantic abilities? Alecto the Ninth, hurry on your way!)

The Collector's power seems innate, not built up or based on something. That's definitely a point in his favor.

How long, exactly, has The Collector existed? Because Jod has been around for millennia. He probably didn't take Cohort meetings very seriously if he was eating peanuts and saying "What do I know, I'm only God" during them, which indicates he was probably arguing with the Combat Experts. But 10k years is a LONG time to (potentially, if he's willing to get over himself and Learn From Mistakes) learn how to kill something powerful.

I'm inclined to give the fight to The Collector, just because, from what we know, he didn't seem to need to link up to any other power source. Jod's Lyctorhood could be exploited as a weak point, and though I'm certain it's due to time constraints moreso than lack of extant lore, I feel like The Collector doesn't have any such weak points he could figure out how to exploit.

The "Plot Twist" ending would be them teaming up for some reason. The Collector probably wouldn't strike a deal with him after the way his deal with Belos went down...

Followers, tag-dwellers: comments? (If there exist anyone else amidst you who happen to be in this very specific intersection of fandoms!)

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 36 of Harrow the Ninth

I've spent most of Saturday entering 145 of my ~200 sims into a new family tree program, which is sort of like the mental equivalent of stimming, but I think it's time to take a break and do more Locked Tomb liveblog

The symbol on this chapter is, I gather, meant to be a Herald, or possibly something else that's resurrection-beast-adjacent. Also, we are at one week before the prologue, now, if we can trust these chronological notes

Harrow has an absolutely massive case of Former "Gifted Child" syndrome, but she's only 18

She's one week away from probably dying while fighting a resurrection beast and she's way more worried about who is betraying John. It's also interesting how she compares her various experiences to decide whether or not something was a hallucination

I kind of wonder if at some point she is going to come to the conclusion that BOE can perform resurrections, since she saw three apparently resurrected (based on her memories of them) people, who claimed to be with BOE, or if that would be too sacrilegious an idea for her

First of all, what does "G" stand for in "J. G."? If John has a cavalier, I'd expect it to be A.L., or possibly the soul of Earth, not someone whose name starts with G

Second of all, why do they have callsigns? The purpose of callsigns (at least in ham radio, anyway) is to uniquely identify each individual radio geek, communicate their position in the radio geek hierarchy (and thus what frequencies they have access to, etc.), identify where they are from, and be relatively short because Morse Code is pretty verbose. But they are communicating in spoken language here, there's no reason for them to use Morse Code or a similar system, so there's no reason for them to shorten their names. Also, if this really is meant to be English, enunciating single letters over radio in English is notoriously prone to miscommunication due to how similar a lot of letter names sound, and for the purpose of being clear while doing this the NATO phonetic alphabet was invented, if you're actually going to do a radio thing in spoken language, you should be saying "Juliet Golf" instead of "J. G.", etc. Anyway, in addition to all this, this system is not even guaranteed to create a unique callsign for each Lyctor, it happens that all of these are unique, but that's just an accident. Goddammit, this pisses me off and I'm not even a real radio geek, I was just raised by radio geeks

So I'm guessing the resurrection beast/herald fear aura is directly related to guilt over the indelible sin, which makes sense if they specifically pursue people who committed the indelible sin. I believe when they were discussing how BOE hunted down a herald in order to make it into herald bullets (which I now retroactively realize means that BOE must use guns) they said that it affected all necromancers, so I wonder if it's more generally about gaining power from death

Also "it knows what you did to its kin", maybe referring to John consuming the soul of Earth? Or locking it in the Tomb? I'm not sure anymore

I mean, I think the Body going away probably has to do with the resurrection beast and not with Harrow, but haha, poor Harrow

You know, I've heard non-Americans complain that saying "Not!" after a sentence in this way is an Americanism, so I'm surprised to see this here. Or maybe it's only here to emphasize how grating Mercy's lecture is?

Is this a reference to the "it's for a church, honey, next!!" lady?

I know this is supposed to be a "Mercy is not fun at parties" thing, but honestly I feel this

I was curious how far that actually was, it turns out that is 33 and a half astronomical units. Yeah, that's pretty far away

That 2,000 kilometers is a mere 1 2.5 millionth of the total distance of 5 billion kilometers, though. I would think just covering that whole distance in a reasonable amount of time would be harder? Supposedly they don't have access to the stele system out here

This is the "Sex Pal" moment of this book, isn't it? I have no actual idea if John is lying about the peanuts or not, but I love the idea of Mercy just fuming over this one peanut incident for a significant part of 10,000 years

Also, the way describes this fantasy exchange between her and John feels like a bible story to me. Is it just me?

Ok, so this is interesting, because Number One has been mentioned, which means that if the beasts are numbered according to the way the Houses are numbered, then Earth can't be the missing beast. Previously we had only heard about Two, Six, Seven, and Eight, now we are up to One, Two, Four, Six, Seven, and Eight, which leaves Three, Five, and Nine. John said at the beginning of the book that there were three left to defeat, one of which is obviously Seven, and I guess the remaining two are Three, Five, or Nine. I wonder if the beasts are instead numbered based on their order from the sun, which would make Earth Three? That would make Seven actually be Uranus, which does match up with the 50,000 kilometer in diameter number from earlier, but I thought the point of that number was that the resurrection beast was supposed to be bigger than the original planet?

Does north/east/south/west even have any meaning in space, or in the River, without the presence of a magnetic field? I mean, the resurrection beast is a planet, so it might have a magnetic field, but we've established that they will not be attacking its actual body

Is this actually some missing information about what the fuck Mercy's powers even have to do with the rest of the Eighth House, or is Augustine just saying things to be saying things?

I wonder if it actually turns out to be something different, seeing as John literally has no intel on it

Also, you definitely do believe in sin, like, I don't think the concept of sin is necessarily universal across all religions, but it's definitely a big part of this one, necrophilia has been mentioned as a sin, we also have the indelible sin, and Mayonnaise Uncle definitely seemed to feel like some things were sins back in Gideon the Ninth