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cursedwithgloriouspurpose · 4 years ago

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(More) Locked Tomb Alecto Meta

OK SO. I semi gave into temptation and started re-listening to the audiobook on my commute yesterday. Anyway, I already did a half-assed explanation of this idea a long while ago, but on a re-read I'm even more convinced that I'm on to something, here.

Again, while I could be wrong, this could also be right and therefore if you don't want potential spoilers for the mysterybox of The Locked Tomb, please don't read this or that linked post.

Gideon's eyes (and body, to an extent) are a red herring.

OK, we all know the scene where at the end of the book where Mercy states that she thought Gideon was Alecto at first, and there's some stuff about Cytherea having thought the same before she realized that the Golden eyes are a product of John's blood, and therefore Gideon is the illicit child she helped to create rather than Alecto incarnate.

I'm pretty sure that this is meant to make us go "Oh, then Gideon can't be Alecto. Alecto has a body, and it's in the locked tomb, and Gideon is just Gideon. Because the Lectors said they ruled this possibility out."

But here's the thing: characters are unreliable. In general with this series, but especially with characters who consider themselves highly intelligent and all knowing. Harrow spent most of the first book swearing that things weren't possible until it turns out they were and she was just thinking about them in the wrong way. Similarly, in book two, everyone dismisses everything about Harrow and her condition. They (the Lyctors most of all) constantly dismiss things as "impossible," and then get annoyed when those things are merely improbable.

So the thing that I keep going back to is... Gideon is just Gideon, then why did she live through infancy?

How did this infant survive not one, but multiple murder attempts as a child?

Because it wasn't just the once. Yes, she was initially gassed with the rest of her generation because if they were gonna murder all their own kids to create Harrow you know damned well that they weren't going to just let the fucking weird, creepy founding live.

She was gassed. She survived.

They thought that was fuuuuucking weird, so they poisoned her food.

She lived.

Now, like, personally I don't know that I would have stopped there (assuming I was a person already committed to killing children in the first place,) but it's implied that they decided to live with this unkillable baby because of their own guilt over the other murders and they were also fucking terrified of the whole thing.

So what does that fucking sound like I wonder?

It sounds like a lyctor. Lyctors resemble living people, because they sort of are and aren't. They still need things like food (or at least, they indulge in them, we aren't really told whether it's a necessity or not,) still breathe, still bleed, and all the other things that might convince you that they're alive, really. But they live for fucking ever because they're also not alive, and they survive mortal wounds all the time on the power of pure belligerence. Hell, half their shtick is purposely wounding themselves on the presupposition that they can use their own body parts to kill their opponent before they run out of belligerence-fueled self healing.

But how the fuck could a baby be a lyctor?

Well.

Alecto wasn't a lyctor, but it was implied by the end of HTN that in a "perfect" lyctor ascension it wasn't just the necromancer who ascended, it was the pair: necro and cavalier together. There's... some other interesting logic issues here, but I'm not going to get into them right now. Instead, I'm going to point out that Alecto clearly had some of the Lyctor's powers. They never say whether Alecto could use or sense thanergetic energy (and I'm willing to say this was probably a no,) but it's clear that Alecto had some version of the same healing ability given that the healing ability has thus far been tied to the extended lifespan of the lyctor, and we all know that Alecto's body is as much alive as the next lyctor's, right? At least, it was the last time Harrow saw it.

(Also it's implied that John can't kill Alecto because doing so would also kill him, and which could explain his ability to shrug off his undoing.)

We also know, thanks to the first experiment chamber in GTN, that some powers are tied to the soul, not necessarily to the body. During that experiment Harrow learned to piggyback off Gideon's soul and see through her eyes. When she did, her necromantic powers came with her, allowing her and Gideon both to see the thanergetic energy in the room. However, in HTN, when Gideon is stuck in Harrow's body without Harrow's soul being present that is not the case. Gideon is merely a cavalier in a body unsuited for a cavalier. This is backed up by the repeated warnings at the beginning of HTN about the fact that once Harrow's soul was in the river, her body would be defenseless because all her necromantic ability -- INCLUDING HER SELF HEALING -- would be gone.

Except it is present when Gideon uses her body at the end, because Gideon brought it with her.

Now, I'll poke a hole in my own theory: this could be because Gideon is the second half of Harrow's perfect lyctorhood which was slightly tainted by their losing Gideon's body in the House of the First. It's possible that's all this is implying: that Harrow is as much a perfect lyctor as John.

But I think her previously stunted-not-stunted powers (everyone says she's broken and "half a lyctor" because her self healing wasn't working properly, however she also managed feats in this state that even God thinks are impossible--ie, the soup) could be indicative of something else:

Gideon's soul is also Alecto's soul. They are literally the same person, but no longer remember this. That lack of memory could be attributed to a lot of things. My favorite is the idea that it could be the literal myriad she spent buried and alone, and potentially wandering the Ninth House has a ghost gradually forgetting whatever humanity she may have had to begin with before finding and shoving herself (purely by instinct) into the fresh body of an infant with her other half's blood in it (that blood-pact being the thing which drew her to the infant in the first place.) Or it could have been that she took the body on purpose, and then lost herself in the years spent helpless inside it's form in combination with the gassing and poisoning processes.

Either way, Harrow's lyctordom appeared stunted not because she did it wrong, and not because of her self-performed libotomy, and not because Gideon's corpse was lost, but because she and God are sharing the same cavalier. They are attempting to share the same connection that God himself doesn't even seem to remember is a Thing because he isolated himself from his cavalier so very long ago.

There is a line at the beginning of HTN when John/God has walked into the infirmary to speak to Harrow and The Body (presumably Alecto, but given the libotomy possibly Gideon) is present with her. Gideon, narrating, points out that "the man you call God" looked directly at The Body and "You thought for a moment that he could see her."

This could be a throw away line. It could simply be meant to illustrate that Harrow is seeing things... but I would point out two things: A) At this point Harrow had already admitted to the reader that she was hallucinating, and B) So very many things in this series that seem to be innocuous are later proven otherwise. In fact, I believe John actually looks at The Body in other passages (I just haven't quite gotten back to them, but I'm going to keep an ear out during my re-read for particulars) and Harrow, through Gideon's narration, continually dismisses it.

What if she shouldn't, though? What if John was also dismissing the specter he very much did see? What if he looked as this necromancer from the Ninth House and thought that Alecto was following her around because she comes from the planet that Alecto has been buried on? What if Gideon being the narrator should have been fucking obvious from the start because The Body is literally Gideon watching the entire thing play out as she reports it? (Granted, the rest of my theory doesn't have to be correct for this one to be true. Lobotomized Harrow doesn't allow herself to recall who Gideon is or what she looks like, and I don't believe there is ever any particular description of The Body given that directly contradicts what we know of Gideon.)

This could also go a long way to explaining why John asked Gideon Prime to assassinate Harrow despite his fatherly treatment of her. He knew that something was wrong, but wasn't entirely certain what, meanwhile his dead cavalier keeps following this girl around for some fucking reason and it's getting on his nerves.

As to people dismissing this by pointing out, again, that Mercy and Augustine both state that Alecto was a "monster" and "inhumane:" please consider the sources. We don't actually know what Alecto was like. It could simply have been that she was antisocial and they didn't understand her, or she had some kind of personality disorder that made her seem "off" to them, or she simply didn't like them (and I mean, fuck, have you met Augustine? I'd be hostile to that, too.)

Or maybe--and most likely--God still hasn't told us everything about how he became god in the first place, and Alecto truly wasn't human to begin with.Or that she was a LOT of humans attempting to be a singular person but didn’t have the side benefit of infant years to figure herself out like Harrow did.

Either way, this doesn't preclude the possibility that Alecto, as Gideon, learned to be more human through watching and doing. She had a myriad as a potential ghost to wander the halls of Drearbur, which weren't necessarily always as stuffy and cold as they are in the modern era. And even if she didn't, being raised in a human body, and brought up (however begrudgingly) by people is still a good way to learn. Gideon may not be an asshole, but she's not exactly going to win awards for Sociability.

In fact, given Muir's penchant for taking very common fandom tropes and plot lines and twisting them on their head (the woman literally wrote canonical fanfic AUs in HTN!!!!) the idea that she's taking a monster-learns-to-be-human story, OR a the-monster-wasn't-really-a-monster-all-along story, and writing it as a lesbian necromancer beauty and the beast isn't all that far fetched.

Anyway, it all comes down to the ending of HTN where Harrow's soul traps itself in a bubble in the river styled to look like Alecto's prison, and goes to sleep not with the alleged corpse of Alecto, but instead on a bier with Gideon's things.

Again, I'll argue against myself and say it's equally likely that last part is just an allusion to Harrow's own torn heart: her love of Alecto's corpse, and her love for Gideon at war with themselves... (or an acknowledgement that she loves them both equally.)

But it could easily be an allusion to the fact that, in her heart of hearts, Harrow knows on some level that they are the same person. That her love of Alecto has always been tied up with her love-hate relationship with Gideon, and separating one for the other is impossible. Particularly as she may have already figured it tf out before the lobotomy.

#harrow the ninth #the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #alecto the ninth #speculation meta #the meta is real #i galaxy brained this

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