#my thought process is this: i know we all thought at the end of gtn she was going to be a sexy dom

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

5

Another third person, flashback chapter. Skull cleaved in two. Ortus is with her, as her cavalier, now clearly in some kind of alternate reality, of sorts.

Oh, I have half a mind to get Gideon out again and cross-reference the corresponding scenes. Since this is probably not the last flashback we will get.

If things get too much for my brain to process, I'm also SUPER not ruling out pausing my read of Harrow and rereading Gideon before I continue. That might be very interesting indeed. I'm still early enough in Harrow that I could just start again from the beginning after re-reading Gideon without too much turbulence.

But for now, let's just see if we can cross-reference.

In Harrow:

“Please,” a voice was saying. “Please, my Lady Harrowhark. Be—be peaceful. What can I do for you? What must be done?” [...] “Am I making the sign?” she managed. “Am I giving you the signal? No? Then I will remind you that anything else is none of your business, and hope I do not have to remind you twice.” [...] “Where are we?” Harrow added, in another sudden welter of nervousness. “I thought—perhaps—” “We must be four hundred kilometres above the surface now,” he said, mistaking her question. “They are securing our clearance to land. We shall leave orbit soon, I trust.”

The same scene in Gideon:

It was incredible. It was exquisite. She wanted to throw up. It seemed stolid insanity that Harrowhark’s only reaction was to slide up the plexiform barrier and hold down the communication button to ask: “How long must we wait?” The navigator’s voice crackled back: “We are securing your clearance to land, Your Grace.” Harrow didn’t thank him. “How long?” “They are scanning your craft now, Your Grace, and we’ll move the moment they have confirmed you’re free to leave orbit.”

In HtN, Harrow is discombobulated, sweating, nervous, her entire state prompting Ortus to check on her, which she dismisses, but with difficulty. In Gideon, she seems barely moved. This is a COMPLETELY different girl. This is a completely different reality, timeline, or whatever.

Gideon would have noticed if Harrow seemed at all like this in GtN.

Harrow was crying when she boarded the shuttle with Gideon. She's positively ill when on the shuttle with Ortus. This just gets curiouser and curiouser.

... She has the voile still, to tie around her head, as she did with Gideon.

Yeah, still, this is SO different. I don't need to check GtN to know it.

She was surprised again. “Nigenad, what would be the tragedy in living for a myriad? Ten thousand years to learn everything there is to know—to read everything that has ever been written … to study without fear of premature end or reckoning. What is the tragedy of time?” “Time can render one impotent beyond meaning,” said Ortus unexpectedly. He made his eyes downcast again, and said: “I would not expect you to—be crushed by the weight of that particular comprehension, Reverend Daughter.”

I mean, he's right. She IS a baby of seventeen. Oh Harrow.

It was coloured all over with thin blue ink, scribbled so hard that the termination of each letter pushed holes into the surface, and it read: THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME [...] “It’s blank, my lady.” “Fuck,” said Harrow.

This just gets weirder and weirder.

[gallpall]

canaan bubble redux as a womb for story/character arcs

I’m sure most of this has been posted about before but: ever since my initial read I’ve been obsessed with the gross bodily/gorey stuff in the Canaan redux and I wanted to organize some of my constant+chaotic thoughts!!

TM has said that a lot of the motifs/events in the bubbles are actually “Silent Hill stand-ins” for story elements and she hopes we pick up on stuff, so here’s my Attempt!

At the same time that Harrow’s mind is being made a tomb for Gideon Nav Wake’s subconscious is pulled in to act as a womb for certain plot elements right alongside it. The chronology/time period of HtN mimics a full nine-month gestation. There’s a lot of very literal imagery here (which is below the cut), but I also think we’re meant to see it as metaphorical: we’re able to glean some things about character arcs based on how everything in the bubble goes down.

I’m particularly interested right now in those ‘side’ characters in the bubble who aren’t actually dead, who barely appear in the bubble at all except to get summarily offed, all in very distinctive ways. Judith, Camilla, Palamedes, and Coronabeth.

(cw below cut for some pregnancy/insemination imagery, canonical body horror and gruesome bubble deaths rehashed)

First of all just some quotes showing some of the imagery that I’ve attributed to being Wake manifesting pregnancy trauma stuff (there’s possibly some of Harrow’s conception trauma here, too) seeping through, for the purposes of this line of speculation. 

This isn’t nearly all of it, but some things that stood out to me as possibly comparing Canaan House 2.0 to a functioning reproductive system:

(ch. 21) a “collection of large, rusted pipette needles” -- turkey basters?

(ch. 35) “great, slithering, pulsing tubes” which contain “whitish-pearl bubbled globules”-- this perhaps recalls ovaries/fallopian tubes, with the ‘globules’ being follicles produced by superovulation for insemination, or corpus luteum that supply progesterone to maintain a pregnancy.

(ch. 45) “stretched webs of organ [...] like nets of sticky venous spiderweb” --uterine walls, maybe; it’s all over the windows, totally encasing them in Canaan’s rooms, and arguably even contracting like a uterus would: “every so often they would tremble uncertainly and erupt in floods of bloody, foamy water.”

in the next pgh we get some more of the tools Wake would have used to conceive/upkeep the pregnancy: “pipettes, broken glass-fronted containers filled with dark fluid,” skeletons sitting atop piles of “capsules or pills” perhaps hormones/supplements. (also holding Drearburh tools, the way Wake’s skelly would have been doomed to do)

(ch. 43) “from that hole emerged a clattering pile of plex scope slides, the type you would preserve a cell sample between“ -- Wake would’ve had to carry out the IVF process for implantation, this also seems like apparatus for that

(ch. 47) there’s the “libation” Abigail uses to summon Wake which is... well. It’s a “thin, milky, whitish liquid pooled at the base, sluggish in the cold,” and the summoning involves a bunch of ‘come’ commands, which I think might be Muir making a very elaborate jizz-adjacent “silly buggers with the emissions” joke. 

Just a note, cause I’m hopeless about Pyrrwake: the Seconds’ quarters are almost completely preserved from the leaky body horror (though it’s still cold in there)--as if they represented a sanctuary in Wake’s subconscious. There are also letters in the nonagonal coffin room which spell out an anagram of “PYRRHA” (ch. 47).

So with all that in mind, I’d posit that the fake-ghost deaths are all metaphorical “rebirths” of various characters arcs for ATN. I haven’t delved into what this imagery might mean for Harrow or Gideon specifically because I know there’s a LOT and it’s probably above my theoretical paygrade (I would love for someone to tack on with that though!!) but I can talk about ‘side’ chars on a very big-picture level.

Judith’s simulacrum gets knocked off first (ch. 18); shot through the heart (both atria) while she and Marta’s ghost are trying to complete the winnowing trial. The Sleeper shoots her 7 more times after that, I guess partly just ‘cause she can, but Ortus notes that it seems like there was an element of "Anger” to it. It’s possible Wake wasn’t pleased to have someone messing around with Pyrrha’s lyctoral trial, infuriated that anyone would be attempting to replicate G1d/Pyr’s original downfall. She then ignores Marta entirely and climbs back in the coffin (now with the sword) once Judith’s out of the way.

[Marta’s] scarlet necktie looked redder too—by the time they’d gotten hold of Judith Deuteros the blood had dried hers nearly black.

Cohort red-and-whites being stained black with blood, like a certain high-collared BOE uniform... could be another little clue to Judith’s "heart” for the Emperor (and for Marta, and pretty much everything else she knew) being lost and her realigning--though not willingly, at least at first--with the other side.

Cam and Pal’s simulacrums are plainly executed (ch. 21), they have their “faces obliterated” each by a single gunshot, and it’s as if they just stood there and let it happen. In the bubble, “Harrow had never seen Sextus or Hect except from afar.” These simulacrums totally avoid having their features revealed to Harrow. I’m willing to bet their faces being obscured and then exploded is one of the clues we get to their eyes being swapped around the next time we see them in the epilogue and in ATN.

Regarding the twins: They are essentially non-extant in the bubble. Ianthe never appears because she’s still kicking and, in her own words, “doesn’t live alternate histories” (GtN ch. 15).

Coronabeth’s simulacrum scene (ch. 37) is SO vivid and cryptic. It fascinates me because it definitely is, in part, trying to tell us something poignant about the initiation of Corona’s “worse twin” arc in ATN.

[Corona] was turned away from Harrow, and her riot of hair—half-caught in a fillet, half-escaping—was soaking wet, a dark and crinkling amber in the rain. She was not fighting or arguing. She was still as a statue, and ready and waiting as a dog.

Sounds like the fake ghost preparing for that major shift in allegiance. Silas is the one to ‘dismiss’ her, with his “may the blood of your blood suffer,” which perhaps is a really Templar-y way of saying ‘now go wreck ianthe’s SHIT.’ When Harrow accuses him of sending Corona to her death, Silas asks “Death?”--as if he sees that what’s really just happened, at least metaphorically, is (re)Birth.

[Harrow] thought she saw, absurdly, a sudden gush of watery blood, as though the fog itself had been knifed; but it was gone almost as soon as she had seen it.

Sounds a bit like amniotic fluid/water breaking? Coronabeth doesn’t ever seem to hit the ocean (bodies of water=necromancy and that’s not her deal), she instead just kinda poofs, and Silas says she would have ended up “on her feet.” Coronabeth is ditching her family ties and is out for blood, and I think her charisma, willpower, and sheer desire for revenge will move her a long way in the ranks of Eden--probably even to the point of echoing Commander Wake’s ambitions and actions. I could delve into that damn portrait mirroring Ianthe’s obsession w/ Cyrus’ paintings on the Mithraeum... but that is a whole other post!

So all of these are fairly baseline observations and I think there’s a LOT more to be expounded on, if y’all wanna reply/reblog/DM with additions I would freaking love that, every time I open a page of this book I find something I missed before and it’s such a delight. Thanks for reading if you got this far!!

[darlingofdots]

Which is a list of reasons that I believe Harrow and Gideon will get a Happy For Now, at least:

it’s thematically set up this way. GtN was about the two of them figuring out how not to hate each other, HtN is Harrow rejecting a world without Gideon with every fibre of her being and starting to learn that love is not acquisitive, as Ianthe says, and that sacrificing herself for Gideon the way Gideon did for her isn’t the right way, either. HtN was not Harrow’s journey through the stages of grief, culminating in acceptance, it is Harrow refusing to accept that the choice presented to them at the end of GtN – the choice of Lyctorhood or death – was the only choice available. HtN is all about choices, from the false one God gives her when he says she can be his Saint or return to the Ninth despite the latter being impossible, the choice to lock her memory of Gideon away to protect her soul, to the final decision whether to stay in the River and fade or return to her body and complete the Lyctoral process. In her letter to herself, pre-homebrew lobotomy Harrow says ‘Look upon me as a Harrowhark who was handed the first genuine choice of our lives’. Gideon didn’t think she had a choice when she died for Harrow and Harrow didn’t think she had a choice when she consumed Gideon’s soul, because the universe/God/the narrative did not present an option other than Death. Everything in GtN said ‘this is how it has to be’ and HtN is Harrow saying ‘not if I get a say’. Thematically, the only way this story can be concluded is by the two of them getting to decide what the options are, and I don’t see either of them not choosing to be with the other.

The bubble sequences in HtN allow characters who were wronged in GtN to make their voice heard. The reader comes out of GtN sad, and frustrated, and probably finding it all quite unfair, and then we get to see some of the characters who were unfairly killed again and this time, they have agency and power over their situation. I’d say Dulcie is the strongest example of this: she was killed off without a thought, off-screen, but in HtN she gets to be a person who gets to actively participates in her own narrative. I choose to read this as a continuation of the theme about choices and inevitability; just because the narrative/the universe/God treated you unfairly before doesn’t mean you won’t get to have your say.  

The pieces are all there. I would say at this point it’s established that there is a way to achieve perfect Lyctorhood in which the cavalier doesn’t have to be consumed, namely because:

a) in chapter 33 of HtN, Camilla’s previously dark brown eyes are ‘neither grey nor brown but both’, a mixture of her own and Palamedes’ eye colours, which we have established is a ‘symptom’ of the bond between souls that occurs in Lyctorhood, and Palamedes’ reaction to Harrow showing up in his bubble suggests he’d figured out how to do it, made provisions for him and Camilla to do it, and fully expected Harrow to do the same

b) the whole Gideon Prime/Pyrrha situation which suggests an albeit imperfect version of the Lyctoral process can occur in which both souls survive (this is most like what Harrow ended up doing to herself, I’d say)

c) Augustine and Mercy’s theories about God’s connection with Alecto, including the eye switcheroo, sounds very plausible to me, and God pretty much admitted that the reason he killed Samael was that Anastasia was too close to achieving perfect Lyctorhood and he couldn’t risk the others either finding out that it would have been an option and resenting him for the deaths of their cavaliers (fair) or figuring out where he actually got his power from

So here’s a way for Harrow and Gideon to both be alive, fuelling each other’s power (I’d say for the final showdown against God but that’s mostly unfounded). It has also been established that Gideon’s really hard to kill: she didn’t die of the nerve gas on the Ninth and the siphoning challenge, which Palamedes calculated would leave most cavs who weren’t bred to be human batteries with brain damage at least, just knocked her out for a couple of hours. And on top of that, we know for a fact that Blood of Eden took Gideon’s body from Canaan House because it wasn’t there when the Cohort arrived and Mercy saw it. If you put all these pieces together, that looks to me like it’s setting up Gideon returning to her own body and achieving perfect Lyctorhood (which I would say symbolises perfect cooperation, perfect togetherness, perfect partnership) with Harrow. Camilla’s actions in HtN also indicate to me that she is confident she can somehow restore Palamedes in some capacity, as long as the bone she restored has his soul attached to it, and the fact that Harrow transforms the bit of skull into a hand because ‘he specifically requested movement’ suggests that there’s something to it. Admittedly Palamedes is a revenant at this point and we’ve been told they don’t really tend to stick around for too long and usually lose cohesion of spirit eventually, but I’m willing to discard that in this instance because Harrow also said he’d be mad already after eight months in the river, and she was clearly impressed by the way he’d ‘preserved’ himself in the bubble on the Riverbank. The parallels to Gideon’s soul being stored away in a kind of bubble in Harrow’s memory are, in my opinion, too strong to ignore.

Tamsyn Muir does not strike me as the kind of person who writer spend two books setting up the bond, the relationship between two characters the way Gideon and Harrow have been set up only to go ‘lol no’ at the end of it.

Bringing all of this together – obviously most of what I’ve said is ‘just’ foreshadowing and doesn’t mean it’ll actually happen this way. But there’s an awful lot of foreshadowing in both GtN and HtN, ranging from subtle to fiendishly subtle, and it’s the kind where the reader gets to a big reveal and either goes ‘oooh I was right, I knew x would happen because of y and z’ or, alternatively, spends their first reread gleefully pointing at bits of dialogue and cackling ‘Tamsyn Muir, you legend, I should have known’. It is not the kind of foreshadowing that leads the reader down one path only to go ‘ha, idiot, you really thought you knew where this was going’. Of course, sometimes you don’t know where she’s going (especially if you’re like me and just accept the wildest shit on face value the first time around), but it’s still all there if you know where to look. I think when people say they’re scared of Gideon and Harrow not being endgame or the whole trilogy just leading up to tragedy, it’s because the ‘ha, gotcha’ attitude to foreshadowing has become more prevalent in the last couple of years despite being really frustrating for audiences and, in my own opinion, not really Good Writing. Yes, the ending of GtN was a punch in the stomach, and I understand that people might not be so ready to trust the series after that. But you can’t really read HtN, which, again, is a complete and utter rejection of the ending of GtN and instead sees Harrow accepting help and care and advice from others and starting to grow into a more whole person who does not try to do everything by herself because that’s the only life she knows, and not see that bleak tragedy is not where this is going.

[thunderon]

who wants to read my take on Camilla Hect, Biblical References, and the Implications for Alecto?

i am not waiting for an answer so i typed it all up and it's below the cut. i tried to make it easy to follow for those with zero background in christianity while adding context to muir's references, so hopefully it’s good.

before i get into the cam meta, we need to back up and lay some groundwork for context. i’ve said this before, but i believe gideon’s death at the end of gideon the ninth represents the crucifixion of Jesus. i think it’s fairly straightforward and this analogy is a general consensus in the fandom, but im going to break it down in case anyone reading this wants a proper explanation:

- both Jesus and Gideon are the ‘child of God’

- both Jesus and Gideon predict their own death three times

- jesus was pierced with a spear during the crucifixion, gideon was pierced with a railing

- jesus and gideon both were resurrected

now here's some biblical context for all my non-christians. the purpose of the crucifixion of jesus is partially explained in the bible verse John 3:16. in the verse, it is stated that jesus died on the cross to forgive humanity's sin so that whoever believes “shall not perish but have eternal life”.

in gtn, gideon verbally forgives harrow and then dies for her in order to help her attain lyctorhood, literally saving her from perishing and giving her eternal life.

okay, so that establishes gideon as our jesus and her death as our crucifixion. now why do i say camilla is mary magdalene and why is it important?

tamsyn has made it overtly clear that camilla's storyline is paralleling a lot of mary's biblical experiences. i think by following this string of theory, we can get a rough grasp on what we're going to see in alecto the ninth.

i'm going to walk you guys through my thought process on where i started with this. it came to me on my very first read of htn when camilla is speaking harrow and she says:

“The Cohort took the rest of him away. And I don’t know where they have put him.”

due to being a former good christian, i immediately knew it was Mary Magdalene's line when she is looking for Jesus' body after the crucifixion. camilla's line is taken directly from that line in the bible verse John 20:13! here's the exact verse for comparision:

“They have taken away my Lord's body and I don't know where they have put him.”

muir said "copy+paste" and went with it. respect. but that line made me sit back and think "why?" because muir has shown that she doesn't put in biblical references for no reason. her biblical references usually foreshadow plot points. so why does muir use this line, in this situation, with camilla hect?

earlier i said mary is important, and i wasn't kidding. in the bible, mary magdalene is a witness to three major biblical events. she witnesses:

- the Crucifixion of Christ

- the Resurrection of Christ

- the Empty Tomb

in gideon the ninth, camilla is there to witness gideon’s death, which i established is our tlt crucifixion. what about the other two?

we don't know for sure what happened at the conclusion of gtn. the cohort took palamedes, but john told harrow that gideon’s body was never recovered. we know mercymorn was working with BoE and DID see gideon’s body. she saw gideon’s corpse, and apparently gideon bears enough of a resemblance to commander wake that mercy immediately knew gideon was her child. mercy did lament that she never checked the eyes, thus didnt know that john was gideons father. theoretically BoE could have known the true parenthood of wakes kid and took the body. or not. we really don’t know.

but if BoE took gideon's body along with camilla, judith, and corona, cam theoretically could have kept track of it. ive said here why i think the narrator in the epilogue is in some form gideon. if im right, this would make camilla the witness to the resurrection of gideon. which means we have one more parallel for camilla to see. The Empty Tomb.

the tag line at the end of harrow the ninth is

“The tomb will open in ALECTO THE NINTH”

that's obviously mysterious as all hell. but if muir is continuing her parallel of camilla and mary, i'd be willing to bet camilla is going to be the witness to the empty tomb, whether it's the tomb on the ninth, harrow's river tomb, or the speculative tomb on the first.

i'm currently workshopping a theory on cam and pals lyctorhood, what state gideon is in narrating the epilogue in (and why), what's going to happen in atn among other things. as always, i am frothing at the mouth to answer questions or hear everyone else's opinions/theories/feedback. my ask box/dms are always open!

[seventhstar]

does perfect lyctorhood exist?

okay so these are just my Thoughts, off the cuff, no sources. I would love to do a Real Meta with quotes and shit but uh. maybe after the boards lol

1. Imperfect Lyctorhood

Okay, so we know imperfect lyctorhood, aka spiritually voring your cavalier for fun and profit, exists. We have multiple lyctors walking around onscreen: Cytherea, Mercy, Augustine. Ianthe ascends during GtN, plus we see Harrow and Pal and Co. solve the mystery during GtN (and to an extent, again during HtN).

Imperfect lyctorhood = your cavalier dies, you take in their soul, it becomes a continuous source of power for your necromancy.

2. Somewhat imperfect lyctorhood

We then have examples of the above process going...less wrong?

Harrow is able to thwart the process by lobotomizing herself so that she doesn't remember Gideon exists

Gideon 1.0 and Pyrrha appear to have done this accidentally--Pyrrha is still around, however many years later, able to take control of the body

John states that Anastasia got close but it went wrong, so he killed her cav

This is in line with Mercy and John's convo at the end of HtN: John lied to them, the process they underwent was not the only way, the deaths of the original lyctors' cavs was unnecessary.

But crucially, in all the above cases, the cavalier is still dead in the sense that their bodies are (possibly) dead! Now, Gideon's body is MIA so who knows. I think we can assume Pyrrha's body is dead for now. And what happened with Anastasia is up for debate, because we only have John's word for it.

There's a fourth possible example: Camilla Hect, who has what appear to be Pal's eyes in the HtN epilogue. But as above, I submit to you that unless Pal is also now alive (which, I'm not ruling it out until I've got AtN in hand) then this is still technically an imperfect lyctorhood in the sense that it's still two people, one body.

3. John is a liar

I don't believe anything John says! If John lied to his lyctors about the process then, he can still be lying now. We have two sources of proof of perfect lyctorhood: John's word, and the existence of Alecto. Except that pretty much every account of Alecto in the book makes her sound monstrous, and angry, and terrifying, and inhuman.

I've seen meta that posits Alecto is the ninth Resurrection Beast, which makes sense to me. but I submit to you that if John got his powers by trapping an RB in a human or something, that's still not the 'perfect lyctorhood' where cav and nec both remain alive. And in fact we have no examples of that happening at all.

Which definitely makes me curious about what Harrow and Gideon are going to do in AtN. Gideon's body is still missing, and I don't think Muir would have done that unless it was going to turn up again and be plot relevant, so I do think it's possible that she'll get her body back and she and Harrow won't be stuck doing whatever Pyrrha and Gideon 1.0 are doing.

I guess my question is then...does this process exist somewhere in universe? Are they going to back to Canaan House to uncover whatever remains? Or is this something they're going to have to invent?

[little-chattes]

Ok so I’ve done a complete re-read through and one thing that kept nagging at me was how little Gideon and Harrow’s relationship makes sense given its quite frankly abusive origins. Harrow spends her whole life making Gideon’s a living hell and Gideon just… forgives her. Total and complete forgiveness for an irredeemable girl.

At first I took the sudden shift in their relationship as lazy writing to rush along the end of the story, but that didn't make any sense either. Muir strikes me as an intensely purposeful writer. Then I remembered that Muir is also an intensely Catholic writer and it hit me. Muir isn’t writing a story about a healthy human relationship, oh no, she’s writing a story about Christ’s relationship with The Church… if Christ was a sword toting butch lesbian and The Church was a sardonic bone witch. Call it tender blasphemy. 

Now Gideon’s role as a Christ figure is fairly easy to parse out given that her dad is… God. But for the sake of self indulgence (I have to put my 15 year long flirtation with Christianity to use somehow) I’m going to go through all the parallels anyway. There are a LOT of them.

Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).

Miraculous Conception

Luke 1:34-38

34 But Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I [e]am a virgin?” 35 The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; for that reason also the [f]holy Child will be called the Son of God. 

Gideon is conceived by artificial means when one of God’s own servants (Mercy) delivers a sample of John’s genetic material to Wake, a ‘normal’ human woman who chooses to carry Gideon in her womb. Notably, the sample lives far beyond its point of expected viability, thus making the conception somewhat miraculous (“Only the sample was still active, no idea how considering it was twelve weeks after the fact” HTN 441). 

The Cuckold

Matthew 1:18-25

18 Now the birth of Jesus the [a]Messiah was as follows: when His mother Mary had been [b]betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, since he was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her, planned to [c]send her away secretly. 

Gideon the First decides not to kill his lover, Wake, and releases her out the airlock (AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE SAW ME AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME” from Harrow’s vision of Wake’s note, HTN 124) just as Joseph took pity on Mary, his betrothed, by deciding to divorce her quietly instead of making her infidelity public which would condemn her to death by public stoning (Deuteronomy 22:21). Gideon the First knew that Wake was pregnant and didn’t tell John because he thought the baby was his. Similarly, Joseph goes on to raise Jesus as his own son.

The Birth

Luke 2:7

And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a [f]manger, because there was no [g]room for them in the inn.

 Neither baby Jesus nor baby Gideon were given a proper cradle, one being laid to rest in a manger where the animals ate and the other stuffed in a transplant bio-container (GTN 23). 

The Dead Children

16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

King Herod intends to kill the prophesied King of the Jews and instead of finding the specific baby, he just has a bunch of them slaughtered. However, Jesus escapes the slaughter of the innocents by Herod when his parents secret him away to Egypt.

 When the great aunts gas the nursery and kill the 200, Gideon is meant to die along with them but escapes her fate.

Now this event has a completely different biblical connotation for Harrow. 

Firstly, the murder of the 200 children represents Original Sin. In the bible, Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, and as their descendants, all of humankind is doomed to also bear the weight of that sin from the moment we are born until the day we die. This is a fact that is drilled into Christians as soon as we’re able to understand it, we are born wretched and unworthy sinners, and there’s nothing we can do ourselves to fix that. 

“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”

Harrow is a multitude, she is 200 children, the entire future of her house. Shes not just one human being,, she’s the whole damn church.

Naz/Nav

he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Although Gideon is not from the Ninth, she is given the Ninth name Nav when she arrives as a baby. Similarly, Jesus is known as Jesus of Nazareth, though that is not where he was born.

The Poor Bondservant

Jesus' role as a servant is emphasized many times in the bible. He was a carpenter's son born in a stable 

Philippians 2:5-8

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.

 Gideon is described as being made “a very small bondswoman” (GTN 24)

The Sword

Matthew 10:34

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

The Wretched Sinner

Harrow is wretched, self loathing, and cruel. 

She is in thrall of the enemy of god, a figure who was once gods most favoured warrior, cast into hell.

She is like the depiction of the sinner who loves the devil

It's important to note that Harrow isn’t a single person, she is a multitude, the entire future of her people condensed into one body. 

The Enemy of God

20 Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, nholding in his hand the key to othe bottomless pit1 and a great chain. 2 And he seized pthe dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and qbound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into othe pit, and shut it and rsealed it over him, so that she might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.

Before the fall, Satan was described as a “guardian cherub” who resided in the garden with God (Ezekiel 28:14) 

(a funny aside, in the bible the devil is known as the great deceiver but in HTN Muir specifies that Alecto is incapable of lying)

A Life of Abuse 

Isaiah 53:3

"He was despised and rejected by mankind,

    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces

    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem”

They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff" (Luke 4:28–29).

Gideon lives a life of mockery and is abused by Harrow.

An Unlikely Savior

Despite the fact that Gideon does not fit the expected image of a Cavalier, Harrow chooses Gideon to be her sword and protector.

Despite the many openings Gideon has to make Harrow pay for the pain she caused her, she remains loyal to her

Trust

Harrow realizes that she cannot face the lyctor trials without Gideon, and places her trust in her

Christians are told they must place their trust in jesus in order to reach salvation

Purifying Water

Acts 2:38

Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Harrow confesses her sins to Gideon and puts herself at her mercy

Gideon forgives Harrow totally and completely, she baptises her

One Flesh

Mark 10:8

and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh.

“The imagery and symbolism of marriage is applied to Christ and the body of believers known as the church. The church is comprised of those who have trusted in Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and have received eternal life. Christ, the Bridegroom, has sacrificially and lovingly chosen the church to be His bride” (x)

Ephesians 5:25-26

25 gHusbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and hgave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by ithe washing of water jwith the word,

They take the vow of necro and cav, one flesh one end

Gideon’s forgiveness of Harrow is reaffirmed

Harrow risks her life to stay and fight with Gideon, even if it means her death and thus the destruction of her death. Her love for Gideon is now greater than her love for the Body.

The Sacrifice

John 19:34

Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.

They will look on the one they have pierced'" (John 19:36–37).

Gideon chooses to die for Harrow, death by piercing

and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

In order to complete the lyctor process, Harrow both physically and spiritually consumes Gideon

Because of Gideon’s sacrifice, Harrow attains eternal life at the right hand of god

The Tomb

The Resurrection

1On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women came to the tomb, bringing the spices they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus

Harrow turns her body into a tomb for Gideon, a tomb fashioned after that on the Ninth

Resurrection on the Third Day

Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. Luke 24:46-47 

“So many months had passed: and yet, at the same time, she had only lost Gideon Nav three days ago. It was the morning of the third day in a universe without her cavalier: it was the morning of the third day—and all the back of her brain could say, in exquisite agonies of amazement, was: She is dead. I will never see her again.” (HTN 374)

Just in case you missed this important piece of information, Muir repeats it three times.

Go, and tell them, then, that he that was dead is alive, and lives for evermore, and has the keys of death and the grave,"

[random2908]

Ok, it's time for my crack Locked Tomb interpretation that I've promised... the two people I've been reading these books with. I will say first, the theory isn't itself a crack theory--in its general form I actually stand by it as a serious prediction. But some of the textual evidence I'm going to use is way out there, so don’t take this too seriously--I certainly don’t. Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth behind the cut. Sorry it’s long.

Ok, first, the theory, simply put: I think Alecto/AL is a Resurrection Beast. Personally, I found this "insight" fairly uncontroversial the moment the thought occurred to me, but one of my two friends who've been reading these books with me disagrees on the basic evidence; the other friend has embraced it wholeheartedly, though. So, ymmv, I guess.

The basic evidence starts with: well, what the hell else could she be? She's not human. The older Lyctors call her a monster. There is a missing Resurrection Beast: nine were born, five were killed, three are loose, and the narrative actually calls attention to this numeric discrepancy while glossing others (e.g. the number of Lyctors, which does eventually get explained). John presumably can't just kill Resurrection Beasts himself, or he would have (maybe?? who the hell even knows what his abilities or grand plan are at this point). There aren't really other monsters that have been presented other than revenants (of which Resurrection Beasts are the biggest) and heralds (which are spiritually part of Resurrection Beasts), and the third book of a trilogy isn't really the time to introduce them. (This, by the way, is also my argument that it wasn't aliens who destroyed the solar system in the first place--even though everyone else seems to have come to that interpretation (where by “everyone” I mean my two friends who have read this book). Being Doylist, it's kind of a cheap, lazy argument on my part, but whatever, I still stand by that as a prediction: no aliens.) And Alecto must be something much more powerful than a human because John is so much more powerful than a Lyctor. Finally, the stoma opens for John, and it only opens for Resurrection Beasts--it opens for him because he holds part of Alecto's soul and she is a Resurrection Beast.

The potential counter-evidence is the older Lyctors are confident they know her origins (but that doesn't necessarily make her not a Resurrection Beast), and the [other] Resurrection Beasts are drawn to her as much as to John according to Mercy (although in that case why haven't they attacked the Tomb? and also, again, that doesn't preclude her being a Resurrection Beast--we don't know their relationships with each other, and anyway, their attraction to her might have something to do with the Lyctorification process).

Ok, all that's fair enough. Let's delve into the crack interpretations now. I'm going to start with an irrelevant introduction, though, to explain my frame of mind when I came up with this. In the Appendices of Gideon the Ninth, Muir mentions that Isaac is named as foreshadowing for Gideon's sacrificial death, as in the Christian interpretation of the Bible, the Biblical Isaac foreshadows Jesus. My copy of the e-book did not have the Appendices, but my best friend's did, and she shared screens with me. It's slightly embarrassing that my best friend and I, reading this together, did not even guess from this, not even as a joke, that Gideon's father might be God. I mean, it's not... generally embarrassing--no one reading this should be embarrassed for themselves--it's only embarrassing if you know the two of us, know how good my best friend is at this sort of thing (she guessed the entire murder mystery in GtN a little more than halfway through, including that Dulcinea was dead and had been replaced by a Lyctor in disguise who had philosophical problems with God and was rebelling), and know what sorts of in-jokes and ridiculous speculation we tend to bandy around with each other--know just how often we, respectively and together, joke that some character or other is Jesus. And here it was right on the page, we read it out loud to each other and discussed it, and we didn't even see it. We were both completely taken in by the Gideon Episode One red[-haired] herring (as was, to be fair, Gideon himself). This speculation that I'm about to present came right on the heels of the two of us debriefing over this, because I was primed to read way the hell in too much into Biblical references.

The key line is something my best friend caught, not me. She wasn't even done with the book yet, but the line was bothering her (I'd completely glossed and then forgotten it--never let it be said that my bad grades in English Lit were undeserved). Page 327 (and I'm so glad to have an ebook so I can do word searches), Teacher is talking to Harrow in the dream bubble...........

To their silence, [Teacher] added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time.

"Saltwater creature" stuck with my best friend. She had no idea what it meant, other than that nearly every mention of saltwater (or salt water, two words, the text is inconsistent) in Harrow the Ninth is alluding to Alecto in some capacity (we confirmed this by searching--again, I love ebooks for this kind of thing). But I was like... wait, I might know! This is my favorite Bible lore!

Muir is working from the King James Bible (based on the quotation at the end of Gideon the Ninth) which is impenetrable and also is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is mostly a translation of the Septuagint, which doesn’t even have an extant Hebrew version, so ugh all around. But for this purpose it’s close enough, so I guess that's what I'll use for my English version. Here is how the KJV starts:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Ok, that word there, "the deep." What it says in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew Bible used by both Jews and Protestants) is "tehom," which is not quite a hapax legomenon, but neither is it a word that shows up very often, and importantly it only shows up in very few contexts that reference each other. It is certainly not the usual Hebrew word for sea, and importantly, in the Hebrew there is no "the"; it actually says "darkness was on the face of Tehom" like it's a proper name [capitalization mine for illustration, since Hebrew doesn’t capitalize]. Notice also how on the second day basically the only thing God accomplishes is cutting this thing, this "Deep" made of water, in half, sending one half up into the sky. This is a quick retelling of the defeat of Tiamat (linguistically cognate with Tehom) in the Enuma Elish. Tiamat, the Goddess of the Saltwater Deeps, Mother of Monsters and Dragons, is justifiably angry with the other gods and sets out to kill them; Marduk, the aspiring new head of the Pantheon, cuts her in half. Half of her he leaves on Earth to create the oceans (or just the Earth itself? been a while since I read it), and half of her he throws up into the air and it becomes the sky.

There is a lot of old Jewish writing, some of it predating Christianity, that just starts to touch on this, without daring to delve too deep (...as it were) and pull on the pan-Middle Eastern polytheistic roots of Judaism. (They had enough problems with people still worshiping Asherah, who in southern Canaanite tradition was the sea-and-mother goddess who was the wife of Yahweh the storm god, and who gets mentioned in the Bible a whole lot, without also bringing Tiamat into it.) The Gnostics really latched on, though. They said that this "deep" obviously in the text there predates God's creation, and used that as the foundation of quite a lot of their theological argument: that God (who they call the Demiurge) didn't create the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) but rather that there was a being even more powerful that came before. And they named this more powerful, older being Bythos (among other things), which means "depth" in Greek. They changed the gender, but they brought Tehom the saltwater goddess back as the most primordial and powerful of all beings.

Bringing this back to Harrow the Ninth... Insofar as it's Biblical allegory (which isn't much--less than Narnia and even Narnia doesn't strictly adhere to Biblical narrative), I think we should take the Resurrection committed by John to be the Biblical Creation not the Biblical Resurrection. First of all, John becomes God by performing the Resurrection, which is a much better parallel to Genesis than to Isaiah or Revelations or whatever. Second of all, after the Biblical Resurrection, everyone who gets to be resurrected is supposed to live in eternal peace in Eden. In contrast, in Genesis, after the creation, people start out in Eden but are quickly expelled and then bad things happen. This matches the story much better, where the expulsion from Eden is due to Lyctorhood--the Resurrection Beasts come for the Lyctors and they have to leave Eden; in this respect, I guess John is really the snake as much as he's God, lol. (Worth noting that in some parts of Christian tradition--although I can't remember about Catholicism specifically--the snake is supposed to be Satan. This also ties back to Gnosticism where the Demiurge is malevolent; John, insofar as he did not actually create the universe on his own, is a much better match for a demiurge than a true god.)

So, anyway, taking John's act of Resurrecting all those people as the initial Creation rather than the Resurrection (the fact that Augustine doesn't remember his pre-Resurrection self, is effectively a new person, also points to this being effectively an initial Creation), the Resurrection Beasts actually come before Creation. They come from the dying of the planets. They predate John becoming God. Furthermore, Alecto is a “saltwater creature,” and she keeps her body after she's Lyctorified, meaning she's split in some way between John and her old body; she is Tehom. Back to the Gnostic idea, Tehom is a more-powerful being who predates God, and the only creatures predating God in Harrow are the Resurrection Beasts who must be comparable to him in power to create such fear: Alecto, then, must be a Resurection Beast.

The problem with this theory is it's a little Jewish and it's very Gnostic but it isn't Catholic. In the Gideon and Harrow, Muir draws references in her language from practically everywhere. But as far as I can tell she only draws allusions and allegory from two mythologies: Greco-Roman and Roman Catholic. And although Jews and Gnostics are drawing on a lot of the same source text, the  understanding is different, and the expansive side stories are different. Although, then again, who am I to say that Muir isn't also drawing on Gnosticism and this isn't our big clue; I've half convinced myself as I wrote this, with the whole John-as-Demiurge thing. It's a fun theory, anyway, and so I thought I'd share it.

(I'm aware that I've completely ignored any connection to Greek mythology, despite her name being Alecto.)

[swordsandskelebones]

some wild and mildly incoherent speculation re: the narrative voice choice in the final uhhh 25% of nona the ninth because that’s what’s most on my mind at the moment—

i don’t think i’m anywhere near the only person desperately wishing for a non-nona POV on pretty much everything post-Palamedes’ Great Body Heist, both because of Nona’s limited understanding of the people/relationships that we the readers are at this point very familiar with and because of Nona’s deteriorating state nearing the end of the book. I’m not entirely sure I’ll actually fully comprehend what was happening there without a few rereads on more than four hours of sleep—and even then, maybe we won’t know exactly what happened until Alecto comes out.

It’s not even as though an eleventh-hour POV switch is unheard of in this series, either—on the contrary, it’s almost expected (it would be a lie to say I didn’t hold out half a hope for the return of our beloved Gideon Nav Narrative Voice throughout the book). But the absence of such a POV swap, almost to the detriment of the narrative’s coherency, begs the question of why not?

And this is where I have Thoughts

(under a cut because HMM I SURE CAN RAMBLE)

First, to establish the rules of Locked Tomb POV Characters. Ostensibly, the POV character is the one in the title—or at least, this is what the reader is led to believe the first time around. Even, however, in Harrow the Ninth, where most of the non-River narration is fully outsourced to the unnamed-yet-still-aware-enough-to-be-critical-of-Harrow’s-lack-of-sword-knowledge Gideon, Harrow still gets her moments of narrative POV in the River bubbles. As far as I can recall, within the main texts of the series (excluding bonus stories and content), the only narrative POVs followed are Gideon’s, Harrow’s, and Nona’s.

It’s also important to establish here that these POVs are almost always maintained even through the physical incapacitation of the POV narrator, with a fairly unchallenged hierarchy: when Gideon’s soul is present, she takes the narrative reins; when she’s not around but Harrow is, Harrow takes over narration (GTN epilogue, River bubbles in HTN), and when they’re both out of commission post-HTN, Nona shows up.

Except—technically, that’s not true, is it? Because Gideon—or rather, Kiriona—is much more than just a walking corpse when she shows up halfway through NTN. By all rules of previously-established narrative hierarchy, she should have at least jumped in and taken over for a bit. Unless—

She can’t, because narration powers require that the narrator be a complete soul, and Kiriona Gaia isn’t quite a complete soul-glass full of Gideon Nav

and that would give the whole game away, wouldn't it?

And our secondary narrative voice POV prospect—Harrow—complete with her whole intact soul which at least makes her more capable of narrating everything than not-quite-Gideon (which, kind of her fault anyway tbh) has decided that it’s a great time to take a nap in her idolized-corpse-gf-the-first’s inaccessible body, so she’s not contributing anything to the narrative understanding anytime soon. So the narrative voice responsibility stays with Nona, even as she falls apart (literally and figuratively) and goes through the mildly traumatizing process of remembering that time she was kind of a planet, and kind of everyone, and kind of one person all at once. (or at least!! that’s the impression i’m getting here!!)

anyway uhhhh i genuinely don’t know if i have a point to make here whoops. also i just remembered about six other things i need to scream about regarding stuff that isn’t meta-narrative-voice-analysis. i just kind of needed to get a handful of thoughts down about why the end of the book was Like That when it really would have been easier to parse what was happening if the pov character had maybe not been three seconds from dying horribly and also regaining all her memories of being something incomprehensible to most people

then again. when has this ever been a series one might call easy to parse

[wifegideonnav]

ok so i don’t have this super solidly, it’s more of a “hey what if” but:

when gideon’s first described in htn, there’s this weird parallel to how protesilaus is described in gtn. pro is “uncomfortably buff” and looks “like a collection of lemons in a sack.” Gideon’s “frame carried nothing but muscle.” he’s described as being weirdly devoid of fat or softness. this similarity was something I caught on a reread. gideon is even compared to “an idiot’s construct, bones that had been slippered in meaty fibrils to keep them moving.”

one thing that’s still unclear is how pyrrha “survived” the ascension. we know vaguely that she was compartmentalized, and that it was an accident, but we don’t know anything beyond that. it kind of seems like pyrrha doesn’t know much else either. but she says she was able to “go underground, even from him.”

gideon takes over harrow’s body after harrow is killed. harrow’s soul is already partially in the river bubble, and it moves there fully with her death, shifting all of her consciousness.

as we know from nona, two souls cannot inhabit the same body for long. now, lyctorhood absolutely impacts this, but: 10000 years is a long, long time for a soul to be in another’s body. why didn’t gideon’s soul “crush” pyrrha’s in the way that Alecto’s soul was crushing harrows?

so that brings me to the thought: what if they’re not exactly living in the body as much as haunting it, in the same way that wake haunted the two hander? I’m not exactly sure how this would work, since unfortunately there’s no Wikipedia for necromancy and everything we know is scraped from the text through a dozen layers of metaphor and incomprehension from the narrator lol.

my theory is this: gideon dies during the ascension, but in such a way that he and pyrrha end up jointly tied to his body. in the same way that harrow’s soul jumps back to her body, his soul returned to his body (and that’s yet another thing where we don’t know what the repercussions are) but in the interim pyrrha’s soul was able to get a foothold, disrupting the rejoining process so that his soul isn’t fully connected to his body. his body continues to function (even without him in it - and that’s another tally mark for “the lyctors aren’t dead/can’t be killed) because of the lyctoral connection/the power generated by it, but neither gideon nor pyrrha is exactly “alive” in the in-universe-defined way of a soul being joined with a body.

so I don’t exactly have a solid textual basis for this theory, just a couple of clues that could be red herrings. i just think that something doesn’t add up about pyrrha and gideon’s lyctorhood, and I think that it’s yet another version of lysis, distinct from all of the others we’ve seen.

Something I'm hoping to maybe get an answer to in Nona is what actually happened to Pyrrha, way back then. How did Gideon the First ascend? She was the first sacrifice that wasn't involved in the fanatic suicide pact that defined the culture of the Nine Houses for a myriad. What prompted that escalation to murder?

We have second-hand from Wake that she asked Gideon to kiss her "before she was killed", an intriguing use of the passive voice. Who killed her? How willing was she to die?

She says to our Gideon:

Was her survival really an accident? It seems like she would know. Our Gideon knew exactly what Harrow had done, she was only confused about why.

Why did Pyrrha go underground? It was obviously the right choice now, with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time she was hiding from her grieving friends and colleagues. The lyctors were never exactly scientific about their approach to the Eightfold Word, but that's a hell of a factor to keep hidden from them if she had any trust left for them, for her Gideon, at all. If she was a willing sacrifice, what broke her trust? If she wasn't a willing sacrifice, what prompted that betrayal?

What else happened in Canaan House the day that Alfred and Cristabel died?