#when we see people - judith with varun and harrow with wake are my examples here - 'resist' possession

[countingnothings]

my spouse has moved on from “nona is the soul of a dog” (true, valid, what nona would say about herself) to “if varun the eater possessed judith deuteros, but everyone except nona just sees her as having the same issue as all other necromancers in the presence of a resurrection beast, then every necromancer in the presence of a resurrection beast is experiencing possession by said beast via a thanergetic link. the resurrection beast’s soul is travelling along that link innately and is too large a soul squashed in too small a body, so of course shit gets unhinged. also tamsyn loves literary foils, and what is nona if not the soul of a planet in a human body, a body that has an expiration date because it physically cannot contain that much soul?”

which you know what? i’m here for it. i hate it, but it makes a twisted kind of sense, especially since we know that revenants can possess bodies when the souls of said bodies are sent away (see: eighth house shenanigans; whatever is happening on the ninth at the end of nona), or there is some kind of emptiness (see: wake possessing the parts of harrow where the memory of gideon should be; alecto possessing the parts of harrow that harrow has abandoned to curl up in her river bubble), and we know that resurrection beasts are revenants of planets. and we see in the river travel at the beginning of harrow the way souls seem to be magnetically, automatically attracted to living bodies - even john’s, which is arguably a unique body, and even those of lyctors, whose empty spaces are filled with dead cavaliers. perhaps the revenant of a human does not have the “weight” needed to muscle into a mostly-full space, hence why necros aren’t walking around getting possessed by every two-bit ghost they come across, but the revenant of a planet might just be heavy enough to press in. to make emptiness by compression, something along these lines.

what is number 7 trying to communicate when it screams through mercymorn’s mouth? christabel (dead, not a necromancer) fills up her body when mercymorn is in the river, or perhaps by virtue of being dead is not attractive to the revenant number 7, or perhaps by virtue of being not a necromancer can’t have a thanergetic link with anything, or perhaps a combination of all three is the magic formula that is a side effect of the lyctoral process (or an intentional outcome; who even knows with john). but when mercymorn surfaces into her body, suddenly that body is again attractive, or capable of necromancy, or riddled with empty spaces, or all three, and number 7′s herald is close enough to send the saint of pfaugh!! into a gibbering tailspin. gideon, of course, doesn’t speak planet the way that nona does, so she hears only screaming, but what is number 7 trying to tell her?

and this is also why john has to hide from the resurrection beasts and the heralds, as possibly the most attractive and necromantic body out there. he already has (most of) a planet’s soul inside of him. he cannot possibly fit another one - there isn’t the space (or, says my spouse, he is worried that the beasts might travel along his thanergetic link to alecto, a body built to contain a planet, and who KNOWS what would happen then). and if somehow even john’s fullness can be compressed by the weight of a resurrection beast’s agonised soul, what might it try to say through HIS mouth?