#maybe they were made of plastic like Ortus' sword!

[mayasaura]

sorry if someone has asked this before, but is there a canon explanation on how Wake ended up revenant-bonded to Gideon's sword? and if not, do you have any theories? trying to figure this out after my reread of harrow

No one ever explains exactly how it worked in the books, or at least they haven't yet, but they do give us enough general information about revenants to come up with a theory.

Short version is that she probably first formed a connection to the sword while Gideon was visiting her bones, and was called to it by the blood offerings that naturally happen when an energetic child is first learning how to use and care for a blade.

Longer analysis of what we know about revenant theory and how it relates to Wake under the cut, because of who I am as a person.

So here's how I've pieced the events together:

When Wake died, the first thing the nuns of the Ninth did was call her spirit back to ask her "what the fuck?". In chapter one of Gideon the Ninth, Gideon says that the shade of her mother "could not be tempted back for fresh blood or old," and describes her soul as having been "too far gone" for conversation by the time the nuns "had tethered her by force". That's obviously what the nuns told Gideon, though knowing what we know now about Wake I'd guess it was more a refusal to participate than faded strength. Either way, they did manage to force her back, if only briefly.

It's established in the Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex that calling a spirit can be enough to create a revenant bond, even if the spirit doesn't make contact. The nuns briefly trapping Wake's soul is how she initially became a revenant.

Okay, cool. So that's how she stuck around on the Ninth, but how did she get from her bones to Gideon's sword?

To have a revenant bond, she needs to have first had a thanergetic connection. None of the specific examples Ianthe suggests in the lesson with Augustine apply to Wake and the sword. It's a standard-issue Cohort sword taken straight from the still-wrapped box eight years after Wake's death. It wasn't used to kill her, it wasn't buried with her, and she had no connection to it in life. So there's no ready-made explaination to find there.

The important thing from that lesson is the concept of how those connections form: all it takes is exposure to a strong source of the revenant's thanergy. Usually that's something to do with their death, or something buried with them, but it doesn't have to be. If the person was murdered, just having come in contact with the murder weapon could be enough to form a weak connection. Seeing as a revenant has a much stronger connection with its corpse than it does to its murder weapon, the same is probably true of something that has touched the bones of the deceased.

That might be enough on its own to explain how Wake got there, but I think it being specifically a sword she was connected to helped strengthen the connection. It's mentioned several times that ghosts are hungry, and that revenants feed. The first offering made to tempt their hunger is always fresh blood. The most reliable source of fresh blood on the dried-up Ninth was probably Gideon and her sword, while she learned how to use it. Fumbles while learning drills, a slipped hand while sharpening or cleaning, that kind of thing. With Wake already having a connection to the sword from exposure, fresh blood being regularly applied to the blade could have tempted her revenant to take up residence.

The funeral niches of the Ninth House aren't closed; Gideon just chucks a rusted sword into one to get rid of it in chapter four of GtN. The bones are just chilling on little stone shelves, out in the open-ish air of the catacombs. All it would have taken for Wake to form her initial connection would be for Gideon to lean the sword against the edge of Wake's niche so that it brushed against her bones. It could have happened accidentally. Kids also do weird stuff sometimes, especially when they're trying to process big shit like dead moms and neglect. Maybe Gideon laid the sword in the niche with Wake to share her prized possession with her mother.

I'm going to be a little more speculative here, going into the whys and hows of it all. Why blood? What is it that revenants eat, and how did Wake sustain herself for almost twenty years on the Ninth?

Augustine gives us part of the answer in his comparison of Resurrection Beasts to revenants:

Resurrection Beasts feed like revenants: they find thalergenic planets and guzzle them up wholesale, crack them open like clams, and take the soul for meat.

So revenants feed on thalergy, which is something living bodies produce and what living souls are made of. Feeding them blood does make sense, then, because blood contains thalergy. We learn that from Pyrrha, when she advises Harrow to use fresh blood wards on her room to keep herself safe from the Saint of Duty. He can drain thanergy, but not when it's mixed with the thalergy of fresh blood.

If revenants eat thalergy, that means Wake has most likely been subsisting on Gideon's thalergy, either from the blood she spills on her sword or through a direct connection with Gideon herself. Good thing Gideon's slightly immortal or that could have become a problem, depending on how much energy Wake needed. If Augustine is being entirely literal about revenants and resurrection beasts feeding in the same way, she may have even been snacking a bit on Gideon's soul.

And I don't really know if this means anything, but I noticed something interesting about the timeline.

Gideon started visiting Wake when she was seven, and Wake's skeleton was taken from its niche to be processed and added to the rotation when Gideon was eight. I'm guessing that's when Wake ditched the bones and changed her address of primary residence. The interesting part is that Gideon first started training with a sword around the same time: when she was eight years old.

But... the average height of an eight year old is 128 cm, a couple inches over four feet. The sword's six feet of steel would have been half again Gideon's height. There's no way she was being effectively taught how to fight with it at that age. I guess she could have had it anyway, to learn how to care for it and as a goal to aspire to while Aiglamene graduated her through more child-sized training weapons.

So Wake jumping directly from the bones to the sword only works if Gideon started training with a full-sized sword at the age of eight. That's not impossible, knowing Aiglamene. It's also not impossible that Harrow, who signed the order to give Gideon the sword, was already helping administer the House at the age of six or seven. Her parents don't seem to have ever imposed very firm oversight. Harrow may have had the legitimate power to do that, or maybe she started forging her mother's signature well before she died.

That's the most likely explanation, especially given how there's nothing in Harrow the Ninth to suggest that revenant can fully anchor itself to an occupied living body. Wake must have needed to possess something exterior to Gideon herself, or she wouldn't have had a reason to set up in the sword at all. But a revenant can haunt a person. It can create a link, and chill in the subconscious without anyone knowing it's there. I wonder if she did that with Gideon.

Edit 11/9/22: Changed some wording for clarity and added a bit on the sword's origin to the body of the post.