#emperor john gaius

[floweroflaurelin]

Lyctor? I hardly know her!

I painted Jod and his duplicitous sluts in the style of Byzantine art!! I believe we are approaching my annual reread of the series... ✨⚔️💀⚔️✨

Closeups and print link under the cut!

Prints are 10% off for the New Year!

[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 :)

[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]

[yuck-pfaugh]

"I understand why cavaliers primary carry their House titles," said God. "It makes sense. But it is a corruption of the original. D'you know why you're really the First? Because in a very real way, you and the others are A.L.'s children ... There would be none of you, if not for her." (HtN, p. 347)

*deep breath* Corruption of the original, my left foot. House cavaliers are styled after Alecto the first because she was not only the first resurrection, but the first cavalier. John is smugly volunteering but at the same time deflecting from his most damning secret, believing himself so much cleverer than all the people around him — even his own Lyctors, his own fists and gestures — that he can just flirt with the truth like that and nobody'll ever catch him out. The arrogance of that man. He makes me want to, I don't know, slip my hands into his chest and take him apart molecule by molecule.

[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'.

[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

[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???

[chillyweirdoinacoffin]

Nona the Ninth (2022)

[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 ✨⚔️💀⚔️✨

[puffywiz]

tlt doodles (her divine highness au)

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

[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.

[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

[nibblette]

The fact that Jod has hopped in and out of the head military ships of the Nine Houses for like 9000yrs is a trip for me. So like if your grandpa survives his time in the Cohort he comes home and was like…. “I saw God eating peanuts in an admiralty meeting, once.” And that is like the family legend/brag for like hundreds of years.

Even worse (or better?) if your ancestor banged Jod. Does he let those people survive? Or does a Lyctor or high ranking officer find a way for them to conveniently die a “heroic death in battle”?

It’s got to be so weird for people of the Nine Houses who worship a god who hasn’t come back to their solar system for 9000yrs but your random cousin of a cousin of a friend’s uncle saw God and the Saint of Patience making out in a broom closet during his time on the Erebus.