#emperor john gaius

[yuck-pfaugh]

While I was brushing my teeth last night it occurred to me that, one time when I've always assumed Jod was telling Harrow a cruel and heinous lie, he was just... deeply mistaken.

She pressed her forehead down onto the cold, clean tiles. "Please undo what I've done, Lord," she said. "I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav." "I can't," he said. He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle. "I would very much like to. But that soul's inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I'd take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What's done is done is done. Now you have to live with it." (GtN, p. 441)

He doesn't know about, he can't begin to envisage, the flat-out balls-to-the-wall lunacy of Harrow's lobotomy — because she hasn't done it yet. And even if he guessed she was desperate enough to try something of the kind, something that might leave Gideon's soul only partially digested, he doesn't know that the Kiriona Gaia construct — absent the cheeseburger, but propped up by the fries and soft drink and tie-in-toy — will be an option later on, because he doesn't know that Harrow's dead cavalier is his child and that she inherited some of his... special qualities. He must at this point assume her corpse is decomposing normally, and besides, it's vanished, so what would he even put her soul back into—? There's not so much as a leftover arm available from which to grow a replacement. He's telling the truth as he knows it. He just has no idea who he's dealing with here. It's a consistent theme. He doesn't believe Harrow when she confesses that she opened the Tomb. I just re-read the beginning of HtN and he's convinced she's about to die. Again and again he underestimates Harrow, or Gideon, or their powers combined. *steeples fingers* Looking forward to seeing how this trend develops in the future.

Harrow said, "But you're God." And God said, "And I am not enough." (GtN, also p. 441)

He wasn't lying about that either. :)

[puffywiz]

"It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.”

- Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

💝 Thank you for 1k. Special thanks to my lovely friend @sessjudoodles for helping sketch the line work for the Albertaceretops :)

[floweroflaurelin]

Huevember day 6: Emperor John Gaius

—

The only splash of colour was an enormous portrait of the Emperor as Kindly Master, with an expression of beatific peace.

As seen hanging on the wall of the Eight House’s quarters in Canaan House ✨⚔️💀⚔️✨

[mayasaura]

Obsessed with that bit where P— told John to be a bad wizard. That they could write the history books later to say he was good, but what he needed to do now was to scare the shit out of people. What he needed was leverage.

Because that's what he did! That's exactly what he did. He got his leverage, he played the bad wizard, he scared the shit out of everyone. And then after the dust settled, when he was the last man standing, he wrote the history books to say he was good.

And like. The thing that gets me is. After all that, he named her Pyrrha.

They won. It wasn't worth it.

[turtletotem]

Everyone makes a very big deal out of Jod having a crown of baby finger bones, and as an aesthetic choice it certainly says… something. But there’s no reason to assume the bones came from actual babies. Harrow can take a chip of bone the size of a BB and accordion-fold a 10-foot skeleton out of it. I’m pretty sure God himself could make a couple dozen baby fingers out of any random scapula from the hundreds of donated adult skeletons sitting around the Mithraeum.

[hug-kiss-marry-kill]

[dapurinthos]

i know that, before the nuclear apocalypse he caused, at least one of the 'john is god now' gang put together an amv of his appearances (voluntary or not) on the news and his livestreaming to boney m's 'rasputin'.

[spookyscaryfox]

reread the epilogue of gideon. god. the desolation. harrow throwing herself down to her god's mercy. harrow asking — harrow, the nun! — how dare you ask me to live with it?

how

dare

you

and he doesn't kill her even though she wishes he did. note the emphasis: you, the god i worshipped along with my beloved, how dare you. you, the emperor who is supposed to be almighty? you, the king, who is supposed to be kind? you, the scourge of death?

the entirety of harrow the ninth is set in stone the second john says "i can't".

[poetic-mac-n-cheese]

Why is Gideon not a necromancer even though her dad is literally the necromancer prime (tm)?

My unserious answer is Wake’s body would have physically rejected a necromancer pregnancy - she’s just that stubborn.

My real answer is Wake was pregnant in space. Space is famously devoid of thanergy. My understanding is that the reason the houses have necromancers and the colonies don’t for the most part is not some coincidence or cosmic gift - it’s a consequence of the resurrection. The houses are thanergy planets and so the people there are soaked in death energy even pre-conception. Also they all have previously dead, then resurrected ancestors, so that probably fucked with their reproduction for ages - literally every one of them came originally from an egg that died and then was resurrected. Harrow is a necromancer because her parents somehow infused her embryo with the death energy from 200 kids - so there is definitely a relationship between thanergy presence around conception and necromantic ability.

I even wonder if John can pass on necromancy genetically (I guess necromancy isn’t fully genetic but w/e), since his necromancy is the only one that didn’t come from dying and being resurrected/coming from a thanergetic line/planet, but was instead apparently just bestowed upon him by the soul of the earth herself (?). And Wake, presumably, comes from the billionaires that escaped from the earth before the apocalypse/resurrection/thanergy bloom, so it’s extremely unlikely if not impossible for her to give birth to a necromancer. But in any case, I’m pretty sure she spent her entire pregnancy, from fertilization to ill-timed delivery, in space. Why didn’t she land on the ninth before giving birth? She could have cosplayed as a pilgrim and had a much easier time of it I would think, but instead she stayed in her ship the whole time. Gideon wasn’t exposed to any thanergy (unless you count the presence of lyctors from her mom’s fucked up polycule lolll) from conception to birth, and that probably negated any potential she had to be born with necromancy.

I’m pretty sure Wake knows all of this though, which means that my serious answer is in fact that Wake physically refused to birth a necromancer - she’s just that stubborn.

[gracerings]

never meet your heroes except it’s harrowhark nonagesimus, most devout lil nun, meeting her god and he does nothing when his bestie tries to murder her, he nearly has a threesome in front of her, he tries to give her paternal sex advice and, on top of that, his biscuits fucking suck

[yuck-pfaugh]

      "Let the King Undying, ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death, look upon the Nine Houses and hear their thanks. Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him. Let those across the river pledge beyond the tomb to the adept divine, the first among necromancers. Thanks be to the Ninefold Resurrection. Thanks be to the Lyctor divinely ordained. He is Emperor and he became God: he is God, and he became Emperor."

— Gideon the Ninth, p. 81

Because via his unprecedented lysis with the divine soul of Earth, who ordained that he should share in her power, Jod became the first Lyctor. It's... it's right there. *head in hands* New AtN prediction, lads: whatever the endgame, later on we're going to discover massive spoilers for it within the first 100 pages of GtN.

[puffywiz]

tlt doodles (her divine highness au)

I wanted to add more but I ran out of steam 😔

[saddest-girl-in-the-whole-world]

I think one of my favourite parts about the locked tombs worldbuilding is that an impressive amount of its holes can be explained by going "yeah John was just kinda being weird here" like.

Why doesn't everyone just use guns??? Why is there a space monarchy??? Why didn't ANYONE figure out how to make paper??? Are there cows??? why are we using human leather, John you can FAMOULSY do necromancy on cows SO WHY HUMAN LEATHER?? It's been 10000 years since the whole nuclear disaster, surely by now one could have cleaned up earth, maybe even reversed climate change using their absurd god like powers??? We know that John's magic goes further than what we've been shown, he made (admittedly fucked up) flowers grow before, he can keep the sun running, HE CAN CONTROL THE COWS, even Abigail says that there could be branches of spirit magic we don't even know about yet just because nobody was given the chance to research them like.

John Gaius you stupid motherfucker ARE YOU EVEN A NECROMANCER OR DID YOU NOT BOTHER TO CHECK IF YOU CAN DO MORE???

[mayasaura]

When Varun speaks, only Nona can understand it. Everyone else just hears screaming.

And that makes me wonder....

Was Alecto trying to speak to John, back then? If so, I wonder what she was saying. If maybe things could have ended very differently, if he'd been able to understand her.

[wofworld]

this is why john locked her in the tomb btw

[tiny-blackbird]

"if you knew the full story—you might strike me full in the face instead"

I hope this is a flashforward. I want to see Harrow punch him in the face lmao