#lyctor harrow my beloved

[cyanaidee]

This is my favorite creature…

[umbriva]

boneraiser 💀

[procrastinationaccount]

There is no way of softening this. Coronabeth Tridentarius has already been radicalised.

Camilla Hect's opinion is that the whole Tridentarii stratagem was the initiative of Ianthe Tridentarius. Though I was taken in by the twins' swindle I am not taken in by this. Coronabeth Tridentarius has never been party to anything she did not want to do, and never successfully carried out a plan she didn't think up first.

"In point of fact that's not actually Crown's boyfriend, Nona, it's her sister, but I don't think anyone could blame you for getting confused."

All four pairs of their eyes belonged to other people. Pyrrha's deep brown eyes really came from her dead best friend, and Camilla's clear grey eyes should have really been Palamedes's, and vice versa with his wintertime irises ... "You see," Palamedes had said to her, "the eyes are a dead giveaway. When you give yourself to someone else, their soul shows in yours by the eye colour; that's why you'll never see me looking out of Camilla's face with my own eyes again."

"He's going to know, Hect. You're killing each other."

"It's our choice."

"He's going to ask."

"Do what you're good at," said Camilla. "Lie."

"Hect, you're not listening. It's killing him too - ."

"It was good," said Camilla, and her eyes closed. "It was good. We were happy."

"I don't let go," said Camilla. "It's my one thing."

Thinking about the Lyctors and their cavs.

[twink-with-an-agenda]

"Cassy played long games"

Cassiopeia the First, Fourth Saint to serve the King Undying

[haggz-is-here]

these are just some other eye colors. i love being able to have fun with the eyes. i always imagined the golden eyes to be more glowy and such, but all the book covers that show the golden eyes, they are so dull and not noticeable.

i also have the pre lyctor eyes version cause those are soooooo freaking cool. this barbie girl boss deserves those eyes more than john 😤😤

[onarete]

ninth saint to serve the emperor undying

[drastrochris]

Ok, stick with me on this one:

Harrow is born, and Priamhark and Pelleamena are overjoyed. The Ninth is saved!

But there's this weird redhead baby who rudely didn't die. The horrible great-aunts don't like it, and over Aiglamene's objections, send the child up with Crux to the top of the shaft where he opens her protective suit and watches as she insolently continues to live. So he chucks her down the shaft, where she bounces a few times, cries for a bit, then eventually crawls over to a basket where she steals a leek to chew on.

A few years later, they give Harrowhark the bones, and she immediately can manipulate them, again saving the Ninth. They give some to Gideon too, and she uses them to drum on every surface, including Harrow's head. She's told "the Reverend Daughter is not a percussion instrument," before Aiglamene takes her away to start her proper Cavalier training.

"You can't die," Aiglamene informs her as she slides a sword through Gideon's stomach, "so you must do whatever you can to protect Harrowhark."

"This still hurts, you know," Gideon replies.

Instead of growing up hating each other, they're brought up as a team. They still go into the Tomb, of course, because they're kids, and have been told explicitly never to go into the Tomb.

Harrow can't understand why Gideon can't die, but as long as she agrees to sign off on delivery orders from the Cohort of "periodicals, misc" and "cookies, assorted," Gideon is perfectly happy to let her drain a bit of blood and feed her deadly poisons. Eventually, she's watched Gideon not-die from nearly everything she can think of, and picks up on a slight resonance that sings out when Gideon doesn't die.

The letter arrives, Ortus has no part in this story, and Harrow and Gideon arrive at Canaan House without incident.

Until they walk down the shuttle ramp and see everyone else staring at them. "It's like these people haven't seen an immortal hero before. Or maybe you're just too much of a butt-hurt nun for the other houses." Chaos erupts as the Seventh House cav and necromancer immediately attack them, but the body of Protesilaus falls apart quickly under Gideon's blade, and the Lady Dulcinea is subdued with only minor structural damage. Even when she screams out that she's Cytherea the First, and that she "will not be stopped by children," it's clear that she has been.

In the aftermath, Teacher is delighted. "May I call you Harrowhark the First, with your living cavalier, Gideon the First? The first perfect lyctor. No, the first lyctor of any kind to see these halls for a myriad?"

Palamedes is torn between "my beloved penpal is definitely dead" and "this angry scrungle rederived lyctorhood alone, on a planet with no resources, and with a cav who seems to be most interested in eating everyone's desserts."

Ianthe is furious, but can't quite identify why, other than she /hates/ Harrow the First's cav.

[katakaluptastrophy]

So we all know how Ianthe became a Lyctor for “ultimate power—and posters of [her] face.”

And I'm sure someone made a nice icon.

But you know who would have definitely gotten a poster of their face? Coronabeth.

Think about it: every House but the Ninth has lost a scion. In a culture that thrives on melodrama and the conspicuous consumption of death, there is a wave of hysterical funerary fervour to mourn their lost leaders. And the Third - the House of glitz, trendsetting, and political intrigue - has lost its beloved Crown Princess.

We don't know a huge amount about funerals in the Nine Houses, but we do know a bit about Third House funerals:

The front coffin is distinguished from its fellows by its gorgeous arrangement of flowers and wreaths. The flowers are all in hues of gold or violet, and are fake. The coffin is hinged open at the front, with its contents hidden from view by the flowers. A tray of meat is rested on the closed bottom half of the coffin. A queue of gaudily masked mourners process past the coffin, slowly, each one taking a strip of meat, then stopping by the head to lean within—kissing or feeding; we can’t be sure. - TUG

Apparently, a Third House funeral - unsurprisingly for flesh magicians - focuses on the physical. The reverence of/fear of/(lust for?) the body. A wake on steroids. But they received no body for Coronabeth. So I can only imagine larger than life posters of Corona decked with flowers, the weeping crowds surging through the streets of Ida, etc etc... Poor Ianthe, second place once again to a 'corpse'.

Moving past Ianthe to House funerary customs in general, and to the awful aftermath of the Lyctor trials in particular, it seems especially unfair that neither of the flesh magic Houses got a body back to mourn. Obviously Corona wasn't actually dead, but for those who believed her to be, the lack of a body for such visceral funerary rights must have been traumatic.

We don't have as many details of Seventh funerals, but the House famous for it's "beguiling corpses" likely also focuses much of its post-mortem ritual around the body. Dulcie suggests that the deceased might even leave specific instructions in their will about the appearance of their corpse:

That drawing looked nothing like me. I loved it. You don’t know this so it doesn’t help, but I included it in my will and put down that I wanted to look like that after I died. I thought maybe it would give you a laugh at the funeral, you know? - TUG

Meanwhile, the Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth receive their perfect pairs of "statuesque and incorruptible" bodies, preserved beyond the wildest dreams of the Seventh. These Houses are all spirit magicians. The Fourth, for whom thanergetically detonating oneself on a battlefield far from the rays of Dominicus isn't unheard of, almost certainly have funerary rites that don't presuppose a body. And the Fifth, whose necromantic practice is far more concerned with the spirit than the body, likely centre their most significant funerary rites around the ghost.

Y'know, the bit they don't have? Just as the flesh magicians of the Third and Seventh would have been unable to mourn their lost scions with rites around the body, the Fifth would have been unable to call their ghosts, trapped in Harrow's River bubble.

So amidst all the grief and awfulness, and the Emperor refusing to answer any questions about what happened (why are they all dead? Why are so many bodies missing? Where are the ghosts? Why are the bodies so creepily perfect?), half the Houses can't even mourn their dead in the way they normally would.

[elfieafterdark]

Fuckin hell, I'm trying to put together breakfast here but my brain won't stop.

The Second was right. Judith and Marta were right all along. When they started calling for an investigation after Magnus and Abigail's murders, it would have ended.

Sure, everybody might have died. Cytherea might have just killed them all. But... They all might have lived too.

Jeannemary, Isaac, those two eighth losers that I don't care to remember the names of, Palamedes, and my darling beloved Gideon.

To say nothing of Judith and Marta themselves.

All of the tragedy could have been solved, they could have radioed the emperor sooner and he could have told them that it wasn't a competition and nobody was supposed to die.

They could have worked together, contemplated and shared ideas, they could have come to rational and thoughtful decisions.

And I know that Harrow would have turned her back on becoming Lyctor. Whether or not her house was dying wouldn't matter, because Gideon is her everything.

It's a masterfully written book. And it's so loaded down with tragedy that I can't help but fixate on it.

[ultimate-marysue]

I know that all the names of The Locked Tomb Series have a lot of deep meaning but I just love the Seventh house. Like, the way you can figure out the plot twist just by reading the names. (Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth).

Dulcinea is named after Dulcinea del Toboso from El Quijote. The titular Quijote lives in a fantasy world due to reading too many books about Knights, so he starts imagining the world around him as the one from his books. He kinned too close to the sun. Dulcinea del Toboso is his lady love, the most perfect woman in existence. Obviously Don Quijote's "squire" Sancho Panza doesn't believe Dulcinea exists. She's part of Quijote's fantasy. So to try to snap him out of it he brings him a peasant woman named Aldonza Lorenzo, ugly and stinky, saying it's Dulcinea. Quijote assumes she must be under some curse and bows to free her (he never gets to). So obviously when I read Dulci's name in Gideon the Ninth and she turns out to be too perfect to be real...yeah, I figured out that wasn't the real necromancer from the seventh. Tbf, I'm from Spain so Dulcinea immediately triggers my second grade memories.

Protesilaus. This one's crazier and I didn't get it until the end of the book. You see the name sounded familiar and I was sure it was from some Greek myth or tragedy. Turns out in the Iliad the Oracle tells the Greeks that the first man to set foot on Troy would die. That's why Odysseus jumped on his shield to not "set foot on trojan soil". Protesilaus was the first one to actually disembark and, as such, was killed. Just like TLT protesilaus was the first one to die (protecting Dulci). Also in some versions of the story his wife, wracked with grief, asks the gods to see her beloved again. The gods take pity on her and allow her five minutes, after which they both die. This reminds me of how the real Protesilaus was brought back by Harrow's bubble, created by her grief for Gideon.

Cytherea is another name for Aphrodite and Gideon's very obvious lust aside, this tracks too. Not only is Cytherea described as really beautiful, she's a Lyctor which makes her godlike. It's also her love for her cavalier that makes her lose her head a bit. And even while she's Killing everyone in Canaan House she makes it a point to state that she still loves all of the contestants. She even admits to still loving John (much like Mercymorn). Also, the one that finds out she's not who she says she is is the man in love with the real Dulcinea.

Gotta love Tamsyn spoiling her book with names. This series is so fucking good.

[familyabolisher]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone say much about loveday before, if the mood strikes you I'd love to hear what makes her compelling to you!

oh god you can really pinpoint how long someone’s been following me based on whether or not they’ve ever seen me (or anyone) say much about loveday. i will try to make my handful of thoughts here brief—a lot of this is somewhat corollary to my fucking massive backlog of takes about cytherea, which i feel is fitting considering we can pretty much only get a sense of ms heptane through what we know about her terrible terrible girlfriend.

i think the main thing i find interesting about loveday heptane is her role as this kind of invisibilised governing structure that, like, scaffolds the discourse of gtn. if the core drive of the book is (as i would argue it to be) gideon “learning” cavalierhood, and by extension us as readers understanding what cavalierhood “means” relative to the discourse of the text, then part of how this process of elucidating cavalierhood-as-subject-position takes place is in this three-way interplay that happens between gideon, loveday, and protesilaus relative to cytherea. put simply, gideon, loveday, and protesilaus can be understood as cytherea’s three cavaliers, and placing them in this equivocal discursive position allows us to draw useful conclusions about how we might understand the nature of cavalierhood, and how that understanding might be informing the wider narrative.

because the narrative focalises gideon as our protagonist, we could argue that she takes primacy within this triad, so perhaps another way of putting it is that everything she does relative to cytherea (and, later, harrow, though i think it’s significant that cytherea acts as a catalysing force towards the creation of that cavalier subject position that drives the book) ought to be examined with reference to a) protesilaus and b) loveday. as i said, all three occupy a discursively equivalent position relative to cytherea—that of the cavalier. so when we see this kind of courtship unfold between cytherea and gideon, and take on the language of grooming, objectification, predation, etc., alongside this process of, like, subjugating her, subduing her into a position whereby cavalierhood becomes a coherent possibility, we can understand one dimension of cavelierhood as a subject position to involve a form of sexual subjugation made somewhat salacious by its being socially taboo. at the same time, protesilaus as functionally cytherea’s cavalier is a dead body being reanimated, wholly at the behest of cytherea’s will, and loveday as cytherea’s cavalier is long dead, mourned, batterised, and made into a symbol of devotional grief (‘cytherea loveday’). when gideon ‘learns’ cavalierhood, she is ‘learning’ how to become the reanimated corpse and the beloved battery and the site of sexual availability. all three are then operating in tandem to make the nature of cavalierhood legible to us.

(i think this is at its most salient in the avulsion scene, which is one of the few moments in the book where we see cytherea make a fairly straightforward reference to loveday with “I’m sorry. We take so much. I’m so sorry.” there’s also this—

She said abruptly, “Why did you want to be a Lyctor?” [...] The older woman was leaning against Protesilaus’s arm. She looked extraordinarily sad, even regretful; when she caught Gideon’s eye, a tiny smile tugged on the corners of her mouth, then drooped again. Eventually, she said: “I didn’t want to die.”

—preempting her much later and more straightforward claim to palamedes that she & loveday went through with the lyctoral process because she “thought it would make me live.” this alongside the suggestion that she looks ‘regretful’ and the attention paid to gideon in a sentence that seems to be covertly about cytherea’s grief imo makes a fairly solid case for reading this exchange as another passing reference to loveday; there’s an emphasis, however covert, placed on cytherea’s grief and guilt in this chapter that hasn’t thus far made itself especially apparent. & it’s significant that these references crop up alongside a scene which has gideon acquiesce to being subjected to a brutal process of batterisation which serves as a fairly efficient metonym for the entire lyctoral process, and arguably by extension the entire state of cavalierhood, and also sees cytherea use language like ‘darling,’ ‘good girl,’ ‘poor baby,’ ‘i’ve got you,’ &c. &c. specifically to facilitate that process; these complex, overlapping networks of sexuality & subjugation & death & grief & lyctorhood are being put to pretty significant work in that chapter.)

re. loveday specifically—i’m really interested as well in the fact that, like, the seventh house seems to have this specifically chivalric culture attached to it (more so than some of the other houses, though it’s seemingly present across the whole internal body of the empire to some extent). we see this in, for instance: cytherea and dulcinea are duchesses when a duchy is a medieval apportioning of land; protesilaus and [presumably] loveday’s title is ‘the knight of rhodes’; dulcinea’s name references don quixote, which examines and parodies the conventions of chivalric literature and culture in spain. gideon and cytherea’s relationship is conducted rather like a courtship between a knight and a lady; though this speaks more to empire-wide social conventions around cavalierhood as a whole, i think it’s interesting that the narrative focalises cytherea (of venus!) when drawing attention to dynamics of love & sexuality within the relevant social order. all this is to say that i think cytherea and thus loveday by extension fit pretty coherently into the chivalric cultural narrative that muir is working from, and i think this gives us a lot of scope for thinking about what the two of them are ‘doing’ wrt gender.

& i think it’s fairly plain that the text is, among other things, interested in interrogating contemporary articulations of ‘lesbian gender’ abstracted through the various lenses that allow for diegetic consistency. what i mean by this is that, for example, we as contemporary readers who attach meaning to ‘butch’ as a descriptor know that gideon is a butch and we are to make sense of her character as such, but that’s not a gender framework that she has available and thus not a meaningful diegetic descriptor; we can’t say that gideon says or does X or Y or Z because of extant cultural norms around butchness, because those cultural norms don’t exist for her. we can, however, notice how the attention paid to rendering her as legibly ‘masculine’ in-text run parallel to (among other things) a particular kind of masculinity articulated in the language of chivalry, knighthood, &c.—which is legibly present in the text as cavalierhood, and is thus explained, historicised, problematised, all while acting as a vector by which we can think about the legibility of butchness in an imperialist social order.

(i feel like a proper reading of what tlt “does” with gender is its own post—real aveheads will remember—suffice it to say that i think the above is part of the fabric from which that discourse unfolds itself.)

i bring this up because i think loveday is something like the ur-text for this specific reading—which is why i’m so interested in her and the force she exerts over the narrative in gtn. most people seem to lean towards reading her as a butch (as a character we ought to understand as a butch &c.), and i would agree; i think it’s significant, however, that we can draw that conclusion based on cytherea’s demeanour/preferences (lol) and a handful of characteristics attributed to her in the very sparing accounts of her that we have in-text. however reliable or otherwise the accounts we have of her might be, i think it’s noteworthy that her lover remembers her as a ‘nice girl [who] died for me,’ clearly agentive in the decision to effectively sacrifice herself for cytherea (“i didn’t want to do it at all [...] she and i thought it would make me live”), memorialised in what to me reads as a symbolic marriage (‘cytherea loveday,’ the taking of the partner’s name—this along with the fact that john misremembers cytherea’s surname as ‘heptane’ and we never find out her functional ‘maiden name’ means that i think my reading of it as a gesture to marital conventions is more than fair), whereas eg. mercy and augustine remember her as ‘looking like she wanted every one of us beaten to death,’ seemingly generally unpleasant and antagonistic. this idea of someone who comes off as aggressive, unfriendly, standoffish to outsiders, but is loving, self-sacrificing, devotional to an excessively servile degree in romantic relationships is very much—not stereotypical, necessarily, but archetypal, and especially archetypal to the ‘chivalrous butch’ that i think muir is employing. add to this the things i said above about the seventh house seeming to operate on a culture of chivalry, her title being that of a knight, the kind of necromancer-cavalier relationship that cytherea solicits from gideon closely resembling a chivalric courtship, and i think there’s a case to be made for loveday as a stand-in for this archetypal ‘chivalrous butch’ that the text then probes and problematises. 

this is interesting to me because i think it allows us to read loveday and her presence in gtn in particular as something of a discursive signifier rather than a fully fleshed-out “character”; i mean, crucially, she’s not fleshed out, she’s entirely subsumed by cytherea! if (and i realise i’m going a little crazy here; blorbo from my autism, &c.) we read the version of cytherea and loveday present as disciples at canaan house as representative of how butchfemme negotiations of gender can be subsumed into an imperialist social ordering via the conditions of chivalry, we can think about loveday then being collapsed into a signifier for a discursive position such that her presence in the text governs how gideon navigates cavalierhood and how we as readers understand and interpret it (cf. how i opened this piece, talking about the gideon-loveday-protesilaus triad), and how by extension the imposition of subjectivity via subjugation eschews the agency of the subject in favour of transforming them into a set of signifiers, symbols, representations, &c. (this is—i have to say it—this is the crux of the argument i make in salolita, and, as we all know, lolita is a huge part of the scaffolding of these books.) it also allows us to read cytherea as we receive her in gtn as a kind of unravelling or destabilising of that signifying dynamic, which we can of course extrapolate onto the destabilisation of the necromancer-cavalier-lyctor thing as a whole that gtn introduces and articulates through her.

and i guess i just—i’m interested in this! i think the gender angle and the subjugation angle are my two preferred ways of approaching these books, and i think it’s pretty easy to eke out some v compelling readings by kind of throwing loveday heptane at the frameworks and seeing what happens.

[nitadraws]

Harrowhark Nonagesimus

Harrow my other beloved, she deserves the world and to get 5 minutes of rest (and also to kiss Gideon and kill God)

They were all so lucky she did the whole lobotomy thing, could you imagine just how powerful she could be with acutal lyctor powers? Gideon (the dude) wouldn't even had stood a chance

(but as always you can get this and other stuff in the redbubble)

[grievingbovine]

Nona the Ninth is one of my favorite books of all time. Not just because it's Locked Tomb, but it is the purest form of one of the big messages the series is trying to divulge.

The price of love is grief. We will never be free of it as long as we love anything at all. Our family, friends, our pets, even beloved media. Anything that connects that deeply to us that we love it will leave a gaping hole when it's gone.

But no one rejects loving to avoid grief. Every one of the characters holds on desperately to something they love, to levels that seem unhealthy to us. They want the perks without the cost.

John is holding on to a world and people that died 10k years ago.

The lyctors cling desperately to their cavaliers memories, to the point of being willing to end the 9 houses to honor them.

Cam held on to Pal, Pal held on to Dulcie. Harrow held on to Gideon so hard she disappeared her from her memory to avoid the grief she would pay for the privelege of caring for her.

But Nona loves indiscriminately. She loves the polluted sky, she loves the sad people, she loves the stray dogs and her friends and her teachers and Varun. She loves Pyrrhas lying ass, she loves Camilla and Palemedes, she loves crown and even cares about Judith. Nona isn't afraid of grief, because to her all that love balances it out. Nona is the only one in the end willing to pay the price for that 6 months of unconditional love. She knows from the beginning of the book that her own days are numbered, but she doesn't shy from it and avoid loving.

She loves all that much harder.

"If you could see your whole life, start to finish, would you change anything?" The movie Arrival (2016) approaches this same theme. If you knew what you'd lose, would you go back to avoid it? Would you keep away from the people and things you knew you'd lose? Would you shy away from experiencing love just because it hurts?

"Love and Freedom don't coexist, warden."

[lemon-natalia]

Harrow the Ninth Reaction - Chapter 33

oooh a random person in the clearing - maybe the Blood of Eden is finally making an appearance?

CAMILLA HECT MY BELOVED where have u been!!!!

and now Harrow is bleeding an awful lot, i am mildly concerned for the health of her brain at this point

yeah actually i didn’t register it before, but it is weird Camilla is in the neighbourhood forty billion lightyears from where we last saw her, given Harrow had to do Lyctor!travel through weird blood soup to get here

she has a piece of Palamedes's skull!!! oh i am not okay rn

PALAMEDES!!!!! ❤️❤️❤️

if i had to read the same bad romance novel for eternity i’d get bored so quickly. Palamedes has the right idea, what better hobby to take up when you’re dead than writing fanfiction?

ahh they’re arguing about the semantics of whats possible in necromancy again, how i have missed this. you don’t know what you have until you lose it

also, if the limits of this bubble are what Palamedes could see at the point of his death - could he see Gideon who was listening in from where he was in the room? because if so…

Palamedes reaction to Harrow becoming a Lyctor, him knowing what she would’ve had to do is just ... heartbreaking. she can’t even explain what actually happened & that Gideon volunteered because she doesn’t know herself. they’re having two very different conversations here.

wait the Sleeper is here, Harrow’s fake memories are imposing on Palamedes’s bubble somehow?! also this is our first real description of them, but unfortunately the Sleeper is dressed all in high vis orange with their face conveniently covered smh

‘You never could have guessed that he had seen me’ WHAT. WHAT. what in the hell is that supposed to mean??? the narrator in these sections isn’t technically Harrow? the fact that they’re in her head, and talking about how Palamedes had 'seen' them really makes me hope that this is somehow Gideon, or at least whatever's left of her?

[llovelyclouds]

notes on cassiopeia the first

here's all my notes on cassiopeia (my beloved) that i thought seemed relevant during my tlt reread!

(you can find the rest of my posts from this project here!)

CASSIOPEIA THE FIRST

titles:

Fourth saint to ascend, (??) gen, founded the sixth

notes from harrow the ninth:

Name origins, from the pronunciation guide at the end of htn: "NOTE: Cassiopeia's most famous namesake is the vain queen of Greek mythology who chained Andromeda to a rock, but this does Cassiopeia the First a disservice, as she was honestly just a universally beloved and clever human being who made beautiful meals with the occasional finger error. The evolutionary pressure of Lyctorhood has, alas, selected for jerks."

Came up with the magma metaphor for the river that John later uses (htn. pg. 94)

The only lyctor to last seven minutes in full physical submersion in the river (htn. pg. 97)

Died trying to lure an RB through the current of the river. It followed her, but the spirits killed her, and the RB emerged unscathed 20 mins later (htn. pg. 97)

Had a ceramics collection (htn. pg. 105)

Was able to perform necromancy her first time in the river (htn. pg. 156)

For some reason, the fact that Harrow was also capable of this was part of what gave John the idea that something was up with her birth… interesting!! What does this say about Cassiopeia?

Specialised in studying the river (htn. pg. 171)

Coined the term "periscoping" in regards to the RB's (htn. pg. 173)

Was great at cooking, but once cut off a finger that fell into the food and didn’t mention it until everyone had eaten it (htn. pg. 231)

was a lightweight lol (htn. pg. 268)

Died fighting the seventh RB, Varun (htn. pg. 333)

Brought the RB into the river alongside its brain (htn. pg. 337)

was the person to tell Mercy that blood wards can be bypassed with the genetic material of a close relative (htn. pg. 474)

notes from nona the ninth:

was originally brought on Johns team by oversight execs to handle contracts as their lawyer, but was "on their side before the first year was over" (ntn. pg. 13)

"C- was panicking because with the project over she was getting recalled to England and didn't want to go, she'd got N- and didn't want to leave her, refused to admit they were dating even though we all knew." - John 5:20 (ntn. pg. 73)

specifically worked in contract law (ntn. pg. 99)

when she found out about the cow wall they had to lock her in the kitchen so she could throw up in private for a while (ntn. pg. 192)

"C- kept saying, Pick one. Are we more invested in proving this new plan is bullshit, or in saving you? I was like, It's both, how can it not be both. C- was like, It can't be both. Pick one and stick to it. Decide what you give a fuck about." (ntn. pg. 280)

"'Does God know why the Sixth House left?' 'I'm assuming some grisly moral reason that you're about to impart,' said Ianthe, 'and I want to warn you against sounding like a tract.' [...] 'Cassiopeia the First left us instructions years ago,' said Camilla. 'We left for a lyctor.'" - Ianthe & Cam (ntn. pg. 335)

"Cassy played long games." - Pyrrha (ntn. pg. 336)

"C- had been saying, Can't we gin up an act of good wizardry? Any way to stabilize the North America glacier? Any way to trap the atmosphere over the Northern Territory, show them we can fix things here?" (ntn. pg. 397)

“C- admitting out of nowhere she’s dating N-. All of us like, What? We've known for a year? Go ahead and get married already, we've got a nun. N- was all, That’s not legal. C- of all people said, Who cares. That’s how bad it was. [...] C- and N- got married right over there, you can’t see it now ‘cause of the rubbish. I made flowers grow for them out of the garden, but they came out… weird. Some of the roses had teeth. C- and N- thought that was hilarious. [...] The dome meant we hadn’t had full sunlight in a while. It was beautiful anyway. I cried the whole service. I couldn't remember the last time I’d eaten food.” (ntn. pg. 400)

“At this point my people were like, John, what the fuck? What the fuck is happening? We were all yelling at each other. First time I’d ever seen C- angry.” (ntn. Pg. 401) 

 “C- said, John, your problem is that you care less about being a saviour than you do about meting out punishment. I said, C-, I was just your best man! C- said, You still are. That doesn’t change the fact that you can be quite the most appallingly vindictive person I have ever met.” (ntn. pg. 401)

“They’d shot C- first… and right in front of my eyes they shot N-. Bubble wrap. I don’t know what happened to them..” (ntn. Pg. 406)

“Cass and Mercy and I worked on cell thanergy- we need thanergy, fresh thanergy, to activate…” - Pyrrha (ntn. pg. 471)

[harrowharks-iliac-crest]

Ianthe, Coronabeth and the Blood of Eden

Characters

<< Previous: Harrow | Masterpost

-

I gotta be perfectly honest here, I'm not overly fond of Ianthe. I can see why people love her. I appreciate her as a character construct. I don't like her though. Her attachment to Coronabeth is her one (1) redeeming quality, in my eyes.

And Coronabeth is now with the Blood of Eden.

Again I find myself really wanting to be a fly on the wall in that crucial little time at Canaan House between Cytherea's death, Blood of Eden arriving and taking all survivors sans Lyctors, and the Emperor arriving to collect Ianthe and Harrow.

Ianthe and Coronabeth have been plotting with each other their whole damn lives. There's no way they didn't have some kind of agreement with each other before splitting up. Something perhaps communicated in code, so neither Harrow nor BoE would have known what they were talking about. Perhaps they both decided then and there to join Blood of Eden, and that Ianthe would be a spy for Corona. Perhaps they've both been with them, or at least sympathetic, since before Canaan House. No idea if/how they would have kept up communication while Ianthe was at the Mithraeum, but maybe she was meeting Corona in secret while out killing planets? We know that after a while the old Lyctors didn't supervise their charges all the time when out killing planets, and there were lots of planets to kill.

Alternatively, could Ianthe have somehow managed to form some kind of BrainRiver Necromantic connection? That would be deep spirit magic almost akin to Lyctorhood - perhaps she did take a tiny bit of Corona without killing her, and then took Naberius instead - maybe she wanted to take Corona, but realised this would have killed her beloved sister, and killed Naberius instead? Maybe she figured out the secret to perfect Lyctorhood, and it is only taking a minuscule amount of your Cav - letting her take a minuscule amount of you - and as such, you can communicate with each other even when apart?

Would be a banger if so. Mad props to Ianthe if this is true. Might even be her 2nd redeeming feature.

Actually, no, it's still just the love for Coronabeth. If Ianthe had cared about Corona a little bit less, she could have taken and killed her. But she wouldn't.

So anyway I'm deeply sure that Corona and Ianthe are either already communicating, or both working very hard to get back together again.

Are they with the Blood of Eden, though?

Coronabeth, at this point, seems to have been taken in by them, according to Judith's journal; she could be a double agent type, or just doing whatever will keep her alive with the best chances of seeing Ianthe again. She also gets to keep Judith and Camilla alive. Coronabeth actually cares about people other than Ianthe, or at least it seems that way.

The epilogue suggests that either the three of them escaped from BoE alongside this random girl, or found her after escaping. Either that - or they're in BoE's network and maybe even under their protection while the three of them are off on a little side quest involving this girl. Either way, they're a united front of sorts, working towards the same goal (looking after this random kid, and finding out what her significane is, probably).

One who looks after her, one who teaches her, one who goes to work for her.

Camilla is revealed as the one to look after her. Teacher must be Judith, and Coronabeth got herself some kind of job to sustain them. Is it enough? One income for four adults? What kinda economy is this please? I guess she's a princess so she's probably demanding damn good pay, but still.

(Wait, is there money? I don't remember ever seeing any references to it - which would have caught my attention...)

Just checked -

(The nice thing about having the pdfs is that I can ctrl+f this stuff)

"Pay" is only really used metaphorically,

"Money" is Gideon hoping to be given some, Harrow imagining some in the Cohort being paid for someone's rank, and the idiom "[giving x] a run for its money" a couple times. No direct references to money as far as I can tell - there doesn't seem to be any needed in the Ninth, Canaan House, or the Mithraeum. The concept of money seems to be around. Maybe it's something only non-necromancers have to worry about?

"Loan" is mentioned only once, as something Harrow could have gotten to keep her house alive, so money in some form is around, or debt at least, but there's very little idea of what form it takes.

Sorry, let's get back on track. We were talking about the Tridentarii and Blood of Eden. And actually, I think I've said about what I can on them. I wanna move on!

>> Next: Camilla and Palamedes