#i am doing milo-from-atlantis-at-the-chalkboard right now

[july-19th-club]

AGAIN i am only halfway through the book and im gonna have to go back and reread some chapters i skipped because this is what happens when im very excited to read a book so if you know whether i’m right or wrong here DON’T LOOK AT ME but listen. okay. so. as i understand it, ideal lyctorhood, the lyctoral state achieved without human sacrifice, which has never been successfully done, is basically like extreme drift compatibility, with the goal/main benefit that of having a constant flow of living and dead energy between the participants such that they fuel each other and reach this powerful physical equilibrium that allows them to do all kinds of sick things with their bodies and magic, share their mental resources, and also not age.

working from the assumption that a strong connection and understanding is a step toward making this easier, the candidates closest to ‘drift compatibility’ at the outset of the trials are magnus, abigail, pal and cam. which is why pal and cam are the first to spot the thing that feels off about the process as interpreted by all of the other candidates. they avoid any trial room that involves stuff where you have to deplete your partner to finish the task, and less than halfway through seem to have decided that they’re only here to get to the bottom of the murders. he says, “i don’t like how many of these spells are about sheer control,” and out of all the cav/necro pairings, he and cam (and mangus and abigail from what we saw of them) have the most even balance of power -- more like two disciplines in concert rather than a leader and a follower; a boss and an employee; a damsel (gender neutral) and a protector as we see with other pairings. cam, notably, is one of the few cavs who can hold a professional conversation re: the nuts and bolts of necromancy -- he clearly doesn't shy away from sharing his research with her, and while pal isn’t so up on swordcraft that he knows the best way to learn it, he still is familiar enough with cam’s fighting style to have a little code with her describing attack patterns and moves she does. so he’s primed not to think of achieving lyctorhood through consumption (most necromancers, like harrow, DO think of their discipline as ‘control’) and more readily through partnership.

of the ‘megatheorem’ (which he turns out to be right about) he says “it’s wrong...there’s a flaw in the underlying logic. the whole thing is an ugly mistake”. so he’s already convinced that the original developers of the theorem missed something big that has never been revisited. and based on his conversation with harrow inside his bubble in HtN, we can assume he’s been working on this question since they last talked. he says, “tell me you did it correctly...tell me you finished the work” now, he’s been dead for eight months. he doesn’t know what harrow refers to as ‘the work’ (erasing her memories of gideon). he can only be referring to ‘the work’ of complete lyctorhood, lyctorhood without resorting to messy, brutal soul-eating to drive the connection home. in this essay, i will explain why the team from the sixth house are the closest of all the characters, protagonists included, to achieving perfect lyctorhood with very little effort at all