#nonalecto

[createacamillahect]

camilla hect stabbing jod to death because he hurt nonalecto (they kiss on his corpse after)

YES you get it anon. you get it.

Turns out the secret to killing Jod is love. His birth as God was filled with disregard for others, so when Camilla stabs him for Nonalecto, he eventually stays down. He regenerates just enough that the stabbing is brutal, bloody and satisfying. She kicks him and stabs him several more times after he's stopped regenerating. Nonalecto might forgive easily but she does not.

She's dripping sweat and covered in blood not her own when she turns around and pulls Nona to her. Camilla kisses her fiercely and Nona bites hard, still working on bite control. Camilla's so riled up at this point though, she just moans hard into the kiss.

Camilla breaks away and sits on John's ribcage, as a final fuck you for his entitlement to Nonalecto. She pulls Nona into her lap. Nona settles down ontop of her thighs and Camilla continues the make out. She starts to leave marks down her neck, paying attention to her wants and needs in the way John never did.

[yellowmagicalgirl]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Locked Tomb Series | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav & Nona, Gideon Nav/Nona, Pyrrha Dve & Gideon Nav Characters: Gideon Nav, Nona (Locked Tomb Series), Camilla Hect, Palamedes Sextus, Pyrrha Dve, The Body | Alecto | The Girl in the Tomb, Harrowhark Nonagesimus Additional Tags: Character Study, A Gideon says “fuck that noise” and goes to find Harrow after the River AU, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Unrequited Love, Complicated Relationships, Meme References Abounds, Body Horror, (mild), The Pool Scene (Locked Tomb Series), you think you’re whipped? This girl just abandoned godhood for her ex!, Banter, Humour, Kissing, the lesbian experience of watching ur crush swear her love for Some Woman after u legit died for her Summary:

(please, hurry, leave me, i can’t breathe)

*

“Cam said you used to be my cavalier." Nona gives her a beseeching look. “Why did you stop?”

The hole in her chest that used to house her heart screams for absolution. “Because Harrow didn’t want me.”

The first Fic Rec Friday of the year is the last one in this batch. Anyways, I’m reccing this bc this fic made me ship KiriNona, the least likely side of the love triangle to become canon.

[annabelle--cane]

nona. nona come back to me. nonalecto "AL" "annabel lee" "annie laurie" "earth" dve hect sextus of new rho the ninth please come back to us all. please.

[familyabolisher]

do you have any favorite quotes or passages from the locked tomb series?

mmm i don’t really think about prose in terms of “quotes” (not trying to sound like a snob i just find it difficult to make value judgments about a piece of writing when it’s isolated from its broader context!) but i think some of my fav bits of prose in the series are:

like, the whole of john 1:20, but especially the creation of alecto—’from my blood and bone and vomit i conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in, i was terrified you’d find some way to escape before i was done,’ ‘adam and eve, galatea, barbie, frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair,’ ‘i hid you in me i hid me in you’ etc. just a really really good sequence lmao.

the couple of parts of the john chapters where tm drops the monologuing conceit to have john & harrowlecto do some like rapid-fire dialogue (‘“[...] i couldn’t do a damned thing” / “so what did you do” / “a damned thing, didn’t i” / “i still love you” / “you always say that, harrowhark”’; ‘“do you remember what you said to me once i had done it? when we stood here together? / “yes” / “you said, i picked you to change and this is how you repay me?” / “what else did i say?” / “you said, what have you done to me? i am a hideousness” / “what else did i say?” / “where did you put the people? where did they go?” / “i still love you” / “you said that too”’) are really good.

the final few pages of nona before the epilogue where alecto’s memories start bleeding through into the present-day action (and the splicing of kiriona killing crux with the entry into the tomb + alecto’s memories of entombment … Screaming and throwing up) have some good turns of phrase—’the scrap of black-eyed meat had asked for it—the chain of a kiss: the ice that burnt the flesh of the mouth that had stuck to the mouth that was frozen. the teardrop on the hand. the hand that john had fashioned.’; ‘most human voices sounded alike, after all. they were not beautiful. the waters parted for her and it became possible to walk, crunching through the bones at the bottom. the bones at the bottom; what did they make her think of?’ ‘the terrible face with the terrible arms and legs and the terrible middle part, the terrible hair, and the terrible ears: the nose too short, the ears too brief. [...] her own edge had been pushed out, her swinging edge, her toy.’ walking a VERY fine line between lyrical and overwritten and actually landing it. 

really fond of varun the eater and nonalecto’s exchanges—’green thing, green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? where will your body go? what did he do to you to make you this way? [...] they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. i will pull their teeth. i will make it blank for you.’ REALLY goes. ‘what did he do to you to make you this way’ immediately after asking nona if she ‘loves’ and nona saying ‘ i don’t know what it means, did i ever know what it meant?’ and ‘john loves alecto, john needs alecto’ as the thing that forces alecto’s ‘return’ of sorts … every day i get emails

‘the shimmering white figure of the dead kiriona gaia’ is a very satisfying turn of phrase. i am fond of it

nona epigraph poem (‘you told me sleep, i’ll wake you in the morning / i asked what is morning and you said / when everyone who fucked with me is dead’ etc)

some of the language used in gideon to describe canaan house sets off my little fictional house sensibilities so bad. ‘castle that had been killed,’ ‘the look of a picked-at body [...] a beautiful corpse,’ ‘abandoned and breathlessly waited to be used by someone other than time.’ horrid horrid house i love her so much.

arm scene, obviously. incidentally—and this is present throughout harrow but i think i notice it more in scenes like the arm scene—i really enjoy how much harrow moreso than the other two is written in a voice similar to that of lolita, wherein you have a protagonist with an incredibly affected pretension which the narration pokes fun at them for but which also enables a kind of indulgence in pretension even whilst painting it as such. anyway—'an exquisite conglomeration of bone beneath skin and meat, pocketed in the middle with soft treasures of parenchyma and muscle [...] you were able to see her skeleton as though she had shyly undressed herself for you, as though in the orange hues of the daytime light she’d sloughed capillaries and glands off the budding rose of her scapula’; ‘prayed for a woman you loved to assist you in disrobing a woman you did not’ (insane line sorry); ‘the lovely cup of the radius, the forked embrace of the ulna.’ cowards will call it overwritten but not ME i love sex scenes

& finally, the descriptions of alecto in harrow (which, incidentally—something to be said for the text of harrow referring to alecto predominantly as the Body and the text of nona referring to kiriona pretty heavily as the corpse prince—anyway) but especially the ‘that night the body consented to embrace you’ bit spliced in with john bringing up annabel fucking lee for the first time. deranged.

[sarah-ankh]

My brain has supplied the following:

The grand unity,

Griddlehark Nonalecto.

That is all.

[queenmeve]

Rereading the arrival at Canaan house with the knowledge that the first is literally just the ruined post-nuclear shell of earth and the literal dead body of nonalecto

[ultimatemilvesbracket]

Actually heartbreaking that Eve Polastri wasn’t on here😭😭

What made you guys decide against her?

LISTEN WE UNDERSTAND...while sandra oh herself is absolutely a milf, the council of homosexuals had a long discussion and decided eve didn't match our criteria for Milvery versus Super Hot Older Woman. there were brawls in the video chat last night because it can very hard to differentiate, but to quote tumblr user nonalectos in the server chat right now "she just didn't have the vibe."

[obeetlebeetle]

john gaius 🤝 the ancient people: nuking the world in the face of environmental devastation in hopes of somehow persevering his/their ideal form of humanity... living without dying for thousands of years in pursuit of a goal fed by the death of civilizations

& there isn't an analogue to nausicaa in tlt, but there are shades of her in harrow during the ntn john chapters, wake and much of the boe, his lyctors in dios apate major, possibly even nonalecto (remains to be seen)

the nausicaa ending...... time for ME to make tlt kiss other stories

[strangesmallbard]

imma cheat and do two. alicent/rhaenys and wynne/morrigan

send me a ship and i’ll reply with one (1) image

[peachdoxie]

I love how we got precisely zero information about how Gideon, Harrow, and Nonalecto ended up in the bodies they did. Like thank you for delaying the answer for an entire other book, tazmuir.

[yellowmagicalgirl]

A girl, you yellow-eyed moron.

Rereading the pool scene and I am howling at the dramatic irony. Which girl is the yellow-eyed moron (it's all of them)

[obeetlebeetle]

"Being unexpectedly loved is so wonderful or terrible, isn't it?" “Hot Sauce, forgive me-- forgive me so I can know what it feels like.” “Here’s to Camilla Hect, yet another of devotion's casualties.”

& every passage between Nona and the Captain, or where Nona screamed.

honestly the true essence of a tlt girlie is just sitting there thinking about the books and feeling insane. like the way we post is so funny, half of the posts on here start with “forever thinking about” or “it makes me insane how.” we’re really all just go down each page feeling indescribable emotions about each successive sentence

[winepresswrath]

One of my favourite things about the locked tomb is the way it depicts love in the context of other people. Harrow loves Alecto loves John who feels some kind of way (tbd) about Gideon who loves Harrow, who is John's favourite. Nonalecto thinks Gideon is overrated but wants to be kissed enough to be kissable and Gideon makes friendship bracelets with Ianthe who wants to marry Harrow and whose sister is the other half of soul and her sickest obsession and her Barbie doll in a tower. Coronabeth is in love with Judith, who went to all their birthday parties. Judith is too sensible to have great loves, but the only people who really get to love in isolation are Gideon and Harrow and they mostly choose not to at the time. They're too busy being choked by trauma and duty and the miserable grind of isolation and loneliness. It's when we see them in the context of other people in Canaan house that the love becomes obvious. Love in the ecosystem of community. Ten thousand years of polycule hell. The most loyal man in the world being constantly torn between his two best friends, only to end up in a love triangle featuring bestie #1 and a woman desperately trying to kill bestie #2. There's no one it's safe to kill because everybody loves somebody. There's no vengeance that only targets the deserving.

[horsehead-nebula]

I support Nonalecto rights and, crucially, Nonalecto wrongs

[pridepages]

Crude Matter: Nona the Ninth

I just finished Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. I have thoughts...

Here there be spoilers!

In the world of the Locked Tomb, the only thing you can safely expect is the unexpected. Which is why I never bothered to theorize too much about who Nona might be: better to just let the experience wash over me and enjoy the ride than to try to predict the unpredictable.

True to form: I never would have guessed, but it makes perfect sense.

Trying to sum up the plot would be yet another losing battle, so let’s cut to the chase: “Nona” is Alecto. And Alecto is the embodiment of Earth-that-was’s life force.

Here’s why that’s fabulous:

1. Nonalecto is a spirit of true love and treacherous power. 

2. Nonalecto finds and appreciates beauty in all living forms.

Much like the Earth itself, Nona seeks to embrace those around her exactly as they are. Whether in Camilla’s severity or Pyrrah’s roughness, Nona is able to celebrate the people she loves. Her descriptions of them dance on the line between romantic and platonic, and they are always highly physical. For example, her description of Coronabeth “Crown” Tridentarius: “She has lovely hair. And when she hugs you she smells like cinnamon, and her breasts feel nice, and she’s so big and pretty.” 

And yet, despite being a very physical being, Nona is untroubled by the fact that her loved ones inhabit bodies that don’t match their gender identities.

Pyrrah Dve, readers of Harrow the Ninth will recall, lost her original body when she died to become the Lyctor Gideon’s cavalier. When Gideon’s soul died while out of body, Pyrrha emerged in tact to take up residence in the shell he left behind. Neither Pyrrha nor Nona exhibit any distress, discomfort, or strangeness at the fact that Pyrrah is a woman by gender occupying a body that was assigned male at birth: “Nona always felt soft and tender when she saw Pyrrha with her shirt off, and liked to rest her head on her back, between her prominent shoulder blades.”

Similarly, fans rejoice at the return of Palamedes Sextus. However, his return is conditional upon Palamedes and Camilla treating her body like a timeshare: when one is in residence, the other must disappear. Nevertheless, Nona never has difficulty distinguishing who is ‘at home’ in any given moment. Nona distinguishes them both in how they carry themselves, how they speak, and how they act. Each is a unique, beloved individual to Nona--both a part of and apart from the physical form they bear.

Most critics and readers will celebrate Nona the Ninth for its critique on late stage--read death throes--capitalism as well as its biblical commentary. But what may consequently pass under the radar is Nona’s unblinking, unapologetic position that gender identity is a matter completely separate from physical form. It’s a fact that’s so obvious to all parties that it doesn’t even merit comment.

Like the Earth itself, bodies are crude matter. They are the house for the entity we call the Soul that is the amalgamation of forces that create our very Self. Maybe for some of us the house is a part of that Self. But it doesn’t have to be. What is most important about us, Nona urges, is our ability to see into the Self of another person and love that person wholly. Which isn’t to say that’s easy. So many of our identities are inextricably tied to our relationships with bodies. To be loved only for the Self--the Soul--within? A rare, surprising, and beautiful miracle.

But love transcending that relationship is as miraculous as it is completely and joyfully queer. As Palamedes observes “Being unexpectedly loved is so wonderful or terrible, isn’t it?” 

To which Nona rightly replies, “Wonderful, I think.”

[lesbiantriphosphate]

troia cell -> troy, all the cells are named after cities and we can assume that tamsyn intended them to mean something because she’s like That. troy could mean lots of things but it’s safe to start with the horse. is the trojan horse alecto (the quote unquote enemy) in harrow’s body? or is it the actual operation of infiltrating the barracks using corona, cam, harrow and judith?

if it’s the latter then it’s one of two operations or both. the literal horse could be the van/truck/whatever it was they used to bring crown/corona and judith inside, and the greek soldiers are the mic on judith’s body/pyrhha pretending to be g1deon. (also. pyrhha is a classical reference in multiple ways but we don’t need to get into that here.) the horse could alternatively be cam and “harrow”, carrying palamedes and nonalecto.

better classical scholars than i (and less tired ones who aren’t procrastinating their reading for a greek history class) should add their thoughts. what am i missing?