#other things: i have rough notes on who the necro/cav pairings would be

[littlecactiguy]

Cavalier Yang

@yellowmagicalgirl on your theory about Yang being the Second's Cavalier in my recent Qrow fic in the Locked Tomb AU, I have some Ideas

(I have have thoughts on Maria/Alecto, but they'll have to wait bc this got long)

there is a nonzero chance I end up writing a fic set at Canaan House from Yang's pov at some point but I really really do need to sit down and sort out all the things I'm writing

Yang, by birth, is the first daughter of the Ninth House, and so should have been its heir. Except, she isn’t a Necromancer.

As a young child, she was raised on the Second, with Raven and Tai coming in and out of her life between missions (and Tai likely spent longer periods at home with her until his duties as Cavalier called him away). Thus, there was always a degree of separation between Yang and the other kids on the Second. They, and she, were constantly aware that she was a child of the Ninth (not truly one of them).

Then, Raven became a Lyctor, and the reason for Yang being on the Second—her parents keeping her relatively close while they where on missions—stopped being valid. Tai was gone, and Raven could no longer return home. Yang loved the grandmother she lived with, but she also fully expected to be called back to the Ninth (even as a child, being on the Second would instill a sense of duty in her, and the Ninth was her House).

Except the summons from the Ninth never came. Yang, so soon after losing her parents, felt rejected by the last family she had left.

In truth, politically, the situation was a bit more complex than she was aware of (due to being a kid).

At the time, the Ninth was going through a transitional period. It was slowly realizing that Qrow would be the Head of the House permanently, since Raven would never return, and begrudgingly coming to accept that.

Additionally, the Second saw an opportunity to exert power over the Ninth in Yang. They could withhold her from Qrow until he gave way to their demands (something like ‘we want to be sure the conditions on your house are suitable for the Child of a Lyctor, who we’ve been raising, so we won’t give her to you until you do x, y, and z’).

Qrow, who was already dealing with the Ninth truly recognizing his authority, considered what it would mean to bring a non-necro child, whose homecoming would be accompanied by the Ninth’s loss of autonomy to the Second, into the mix and claiming her as the heir, and decided against it.

From his perspective, Yang had her grandmother, probably friends, and an entire life on the Second, it would be cruel to drag her away from everything she’d ever known, just to force her into the center of a politically tumultuous situation. She probably didn’t even want to come to the Ninth anyway.

Except Yang did, and that rejection stayed with her as an unresolved hurt as she grew up. Especially as, a couple years later, news would reach the Second that the Ninth had declared its Heir, a girl child that Qrow adopted.

(I have the idea that Qrow would try to pass Ruby off as his bio kid, who he claims he didn’t know about for the first years of her life. He had a reputation for being somewhat promiscuous, so there’d be enough plausibility that, outside of the Ninth, where everyone knew the truth, it would be hard to challenge. The other Houses suspected but never saw enough reason to make the contestation.)

As a tween/young teen, Yang definitely would try to make a challenge. It hurt immensely that her uncle not only had refused her (that she wasn’t enough for him), but accepted some random kid as his own. Reaching those angsty years, Yang would realize she does have a valid claim to the Ninth. However, her efforts would never make it far. Though she had the bloodline, she’d still be a non-necro challenging a necromancer who could potentially claim that same bloodline. The support she’d need to succeed never materialized.

Back to those those first years after Raven’s Lyctorhood, Child!Yang would decide that she wants to train as a Cavalier. Her reasoning being that it’d be a way she could still go home to the Ninth. She could never be her House’s Necromancer, but she could do this one thing instead.

Except then Penny arrived on the Ninth, so that never panned out for Yang either.

So, Yang would grow up and be trained as a Cohort Cavalier. Her combat skill (as well as her status as a Lyctor’s daughter) would allow her to become the Cavalier Primary and travel to Canaan House when the summons come.

After some thought, I’ve think I’ve decided that the Second’s Necromancer will be Cordovin. Yang won’t be her first Cavalier (Cordo has extremely high standards for what she expects from them and isn’t afraid of demoting anyone from the role if they don’t meet them), but she will be her last.

Yang is vehemently against Lyctorhood. She doesn’t know the specifics of how Raven and Tai achieved it, but she does hold it as the thing that took her family from her. Yang goes to Canaan House not to achieve it with her Necromancer, but to stop everyone there from achieving it.

During her teen years, Yang’s reputation as being hotheaded at times and socially isolated from her peers (who also never forgot she’s of the Ninth), caused her to be targeted by the Blood of Eden to potentially turn as a spy/informant. The person they send to recruit her is Blake.

At Canaan House, Yang secretly works with Blake (off-planet, but who she maintains a covert line of communication with) to try to ensure no one comes close to becoming a Lyctor.

Cordovin finds out, and blames Yang for everything that’s gone wrong at Canaan House (including some mysterious deaths), but before she can act, Cinder makes her final move.

(I haven’t quite figured out Cinder, and, by extension, Salem, but they’re definitely A Threat similar to Cytherea).

Cordovin dies in the fight against Cinder (largely because she refuses to work with Yang at that point), while Yang and Blake manage to get the survivors off-planet.

They witness Ruby becoming a Lyctor from the sky, where they see her, in her grief over losing Penny, use a massive amount of necromancy to kill Cinder.

(Yang has feelings she can’t quite describe about it. A personal motivation for her coming to Canaan House was wanting to meet the girl who replaced her in the eyes of the Ninth, but she wouldn’t wish Lyctorhood on anyone.)

[ghostmartyr]

/clears throat/ so, Immi, I hear you like the locked tomb, which is fantastic! from one person also escaping the snk series into TLT to another, what did you think of the characters and plot in HtN? are there any things you're most excited to see when Alecto comes out in 2022?

-pats lifeboat- This baby can fit so much trauma.

SPOILERS, naturally.

With another paragraph informing the curious that unspoiled is the way to go into HtN, since if you aren’t lost and confused, are you really reading Harrow the Ninth?

I read it all in one day, and that was a choice. It does mean my memory and understanding of what all went on is slightly dependent on someone else on the internet exploding over a particular set of paragraphs and explaining their significance to me, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it.

HtN disappointed me on one front in that I was hoping seeing more of Harrow 1.0 would help out any future fic endeavors. On everything else, like the first one, being told the story is such a good time that I’m willing to wait on a full comprehension of where it’s going.

I also really like second person.

What I loved most about HtN is how even without Gideon mentioned until very, very late in the book, you can feel her absence everywhere. In the wrong bubble flashbacks you’re commanded to examine the strangeness, but even in Harrow going about her day, the isolation and the wrongness of it decorate her every action. She’s alone, and she shouldn’t be, and the loss she’s unaware of bleeds into a constant echo of grief.

I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated absence as a narrative tool so much. Obviously griddlehark hours go hard once they start in HtN, but even before then, there is so much power to their connection that looking into a world where it never exists still manages to punch you in the heart with how much each one inhabits everything the other is.

The whole series is amping me up with a few thoughts on loneliness, honestly. Gideon and Harrow grow up alone on the Ninth, save for each other. It takes leaving for that to be any kind of good thing. The first book is tag team Among Us with everyone in their little clusters, slowly learning what other people are about as they all drop dead.

The second book has a different vibe and different plot things going on, but it’s similar in that the protagonist gets thrown into a world they don’t fit and have to put on a show. Only now there are even fewer people to familiarize with, with that number correlating directly to how they all killed the person closest to keeping them from being alone.

Lyctorhood is taking the person dearest to your heart and trapping them there forever while they’re stripped of everything that made them who they are.

...Also Ianthe is there.

Gideon, Mercy, and Augustine are the last Lyctors standing after 10,000 years. There were only seven, starting out. Sixteen acolytes who came to the First. The only pair who didn’t succeed in condensing themselves is separated from the pack and sent to live away from their peers on a tiny planet that no one has anything good to say about.

Alecto is John’s -- who even knows, past A Lot, and he puts her to sleep and locks her in a prison no one but he can get past.

God has seven friends. More if you want to count the people in the Cohort, but realistically, he has seven friends. Then they keep dying.

Harrow spends HtN in a spaceship with five people.

One is trying to kill her.

One ordered that one to try to kill her.

Two could not care less about the useless baby Lyctor.

One is Ianthe.

There is no real endgame. There is surviving life, and life has become a game of running as far away as possible so you don’t share your ruin upon your inevitable death.

It’s bleak and sad.

Harrow’s healthiest relationships are with dead people, and some of them she didn’t know at all in life.

Reiterating it, the most plot significant bit of the world is finding someone else in the world, swearing yourself to them, and smashing your souls together until you’ve lost the connection entirely.

My brain’s not in the best place so I can’t do more than gesture loudly at it, but a few people have mentioned that the series’ thesis is a counter to Ianthe’s statement that love is acquisitive.

Harrow tightens her hold around Gideon until Gideon would rather she just strangle her and get it over with, all things considered. It fucks them both up, and when they start working to get past it, circumstance wraps a chain around both their throats.

The necromancers who become imperfect Lyctors have all acquired their cavaliers, and besides the cav, it kills that bond.

Harrow’s rejection of that is why Gideon’s soul is still in the world of the living (and John blood).

She has spent her entire life eating pieces of Gideon to keep herself a horrid imitation of whole, and when she is finally offered that, she refuses.

Grief and how Harrow just can’t are active elements of the book, and Magnus gives her more therapy in five minutes talking about it than she has ever had in her life, but the reason why that isn’t the end of Gideon is because, unlike all the other Lyctors, Harrow turns the offer down.

With the exception of Babs and Ianthe, the relationship between cavaliers and necros about to do the Lyctor thing is cavaliers promising to burn for an eternity while their necromancer lives off the fumes.

Fuck that is Harrow’s response.

Cytherea says, in the aftermath, that they had the choice to stop.

Harrow stops.

A lifetime of doing exactly what Gideon is telling her to do with her death, and Harrow chooses to stop.

Harrow remembers Ortus’ poetry. She regularly sees her congregation off to their deaths. She keeps Gideon’s glasses. She views Palamedes, head exploded and all, as an infinitely better person than she is because of the quality of his exemplary character. She pulls Gideon the First from the incinerator on the night she plans to kill him.

Kiddo has so many fucking issues, but somewhere, she has learned to respect people for being people. That’s why she and Gideon are the heroes of the story, ultimately, and Ortus saying that they’re heroes worthy of the Ninth doesn’t fall flat. They’re actually trying.

Where that puts us for Alecto, I don’t pretend to know.

Since the first book is the temptation of an end to isolation, only to have it snatched away, the second book is the continuation of isolation with a few promising sparks of human connection that pave the way for hope...

That leaves the third book to shed the isolation and allow the connections to thrive.

With Gideon and Harrow MIA.

I know that the books kick things up into high gear in the final acts each time, but if they’re both gone for the majority of the book, no matter how much fun it is, I’m going to miss them. They’re the core leads, and I don’t want to be without them in the final part.

The 2022 release date has aged my soul. I deliberately planned my GtN read to land a month before HtN came out, then suffered when that was delayed. When really that was nothing at all. I hate waiting.

(Insert note that I’m very glad they aren’t forcing Muir to rush anything out. It’s been a rough time, but also, just in general authors should have the opportunity to create the best versions of their art they can, so the extra time hurts, but it’s obviously for the best.)

What I’m most excited for is probably the cover art. The first two have been awesome, and the artist said he’d likely do print sales for all three when the third’s revealed. My wallet cries but my heart does not.

What I dare not be excited for is the potential for Gideon and Harrow meeting again and perhaps hugging. In their own bodies.

I’d take other bodies, but ideally, y’know.

Also I would love for Harrow to finally meet her popsicle girlfriend.

I doubt it would be a wholly positive experience, but by golly I want it. Maybe they could hug too. It would probably kill Harrow again, but who doesn’t expect several people to die again in the third book?

However it plays out, I’m expecting to enjoy AtN. The writing’s the sort that I’ll happily follow wherever it goes. For everything else, there’s fanfic. The only real worry I have is the whole book will be narrated by Ianthe, and while I mentally groan at that, I actually find Ianthe’s commentary delightful, so even in the worst case scenario I’m having a good time.

Thank you so much for the ask.