#you are forgetting. when someone in the locked tomb says “oh my god” they're talking about him. and there's a reason for that

[thermodynamic-comedian]

three pseudo-gods and a first mate walk into a bar...

John battle who wins

John Gaius vs Jonathan Sims vs John Doe vs Jon(ny) d'Ville

You can either vote for your favorite blorbo or consider the information I have provided beneath the cut (spoilers ahead). No results button pick on pure vibes if you have to

John Gaius, Necrolord Prime

- the first necromancer, created the 9 necromantic houses by resurrecting the solar system

- 10,000 years old

- immortal

- was a twitch streamer

- incredibly powerful necromancer (bone, flesh, and spirit magic), once reformed himself after getting vaporized

Jonathan Sims, the Archivist

- the specialest little guy of the Ceaseless Watcher, a fear god surrounding eyes, knowledge, and being perceived

- avatar, the Eye heals him supernaturally quickly, functionally immortal

- has vaporized multiple people with his mind

- asexual

- canonically greying in his late 20s, has so so many scars

John Doe, the Undefeated

- piece of the King in Yellow residing in a 1930s private investigators eyes and arm

- purple prose, says Arthur's name a lot

- tenacious, stubborn, determined, survived the dark world and the dreamlands for quite a while

- the survivability of a cockroach

- supernaturally wooden finger

Jonny d'Ville, First Mate

- mechanical heart that regenerates and resurrects him

- immortal steampunk space pirate C̶a̶p̶t̶a̶i̶n̶ First Mate of the starship Aurora

- unfathomably old through time shenanigans

- permanent death that is foretold (bar fight)

- loves guns and blowing things up and violence

- played by Jonathan Sims who wrote and voiced Jonathan Sims the Archivist

- narrator, dramatic, too many belts

For the purposes of this exercise:

- the Resurrection Beasts are nowhere near J. Gaius for the entirety of the battle

- they are nowhere near a bar fight for the entirety of the battle

- J. Sims has his full Archivist powers

- J. Doe has Arthur, is able to manifest as in part 40, they have their bag and whatever the hell is in it (glass, stone, mask, books, etc), and they have a gun and as many bullets as they would reasonably carry

- J. Doe and Arthur will not be receiving help from Kayne for the duration of the battle, but they start with no serious injuries and are not currently fighting with each other

- teamups are allowed, through there can be only one left alive at the end

- no one has access to their allies (the other Mechanisms, the Archives crew, the Lyctors, the Mithraeum, or the 9 houses)

[iviarellereads]

Harrow the Ninth, Chapter 2

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For detail on The Locked Tomb coverage and the index, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

(Ninth House icon) In which Harrow starts to get some time upright and on her feet.

God tells Harrow she needs to take better care of herself and spend less time throwing up, she's losing her already meager muscle tone. Harrow appreciates God's visits, because he always knocks and waits for a reply, proving his divinity. She asks what use she has for a sword, and he says he's not going to debate philosophy with her before she's rinsed her mouth out.

While she's in the bathroom, she overhears God and his entourage talking. One mentions that the "Saint of Joy" issued an order, which God says should normally be followed in his absence, but not when he's specifically there and countermanding it. He suggests making static noises if she keeps trying to give the same orders.

In the mirror Harrow sees the Body, wearing a hospital gown just like her own, with a sword strapped to her back.(1) For a brief moment, Harrow thinks God can see her, too, but it's a trick of the eye.

God asks Harrow to come with him. His entourage try to get him to attend a meeting, but he declines, as he needs time with Harrow, and tells them to meet him in ten minutes. Harrow is afraid someone will steal the sword if she leaves it, but she can't lift it herself. She contrives to lay next to it and roll over onto it, so she can strap it to her back that way.

The narrator, by way of speaking to Harrow, tells her she looked ridiculous, wearing a bedsheet robe over a sword, a hospital gown, and flaking blood for face paint.(2)

Harrow asks on the walk if this happens to all new Lyctors. God replies vaguely, "Some of them," which doesn't offer much in the way of relief. She says she's tired of her convalescence. God says he'd rather it could take months, not weeks, but they haven't the luxury of that kind of time. He wishes he'd mastered time, not death. Still, he might have something to help Harrow's progress along.

God brings Harrow to a room like a warehouse, full of boxes. He's kept a number of people in stasis for his myriad of years, and now he will wake them to restore the Ninth House, as promised. Five hundred or so, a third necromantic.

"Oh my God," you said, forgetting that the deity in question was right there.

Harrow asks if he's committed another Resurrection. He says no, but he set some aside, and has felt a little bad about "just keeping them as insurance."(3) Harrow asks to go with them, long enough to introduce them to her seneschal, but God says they need to have a conversation before she asks him that.

They walk through the cargo hold, and Harrow comes upon some corpses she's felt from a distance: the bodies of those that could be retrieved from Canaan House. God says he intends to get answers about those he couldn't account for, but for now, they're declared dead.

"Call me premature, but I'd rather the Houses weep now, Harrowhark, with room for later rejoicing."

Harrow stares at one coffin, with a rose on it,(4) until her nervous system shuts down from trying to process her emotions. The Body appears again and turns her face away. God says she has to go home, but when Harrow assumes that means the Seventh House, he says no, home is with her sibling Lyctors. Harrow wants to feel relieved, but isn't quite capable of it on a glandular level.

Harrow asks why he won't resurrect the fallen of Canaan House. He tells her the cost is too great. Harrow falls to her knees, not quite fully aware of the action, and asks him to teach her how to count that cost. God, or perhaps now better the Emperor, helps her stand, and asks her not to kneel to him or worship him until she understands the full story.

The Kindly Prince tells Harrow that the Erebos will be departing soon with the passengers for the Ninth and the corpses of the other Houses. He offers her the choice, again, to join him or go back. Harrow says she already chose, but he says that was done in ignorance, it doesn't count.

He asks Harrow what happens when someone dies. Harrow goes into the mechanics of death and necromancy. The Emperor asks her to think past the mechanics of a human death: what is the role of a Cohort necromancer? Harrow hasn't really a clue at first, until she logics it through: kill the planet, enable necromancy. Only, she doesn't quite think planets can have souls.

He asks her to bear with it as a hypothesis: if a planet could have a soul, what would happen during the same death process? Harrow points out that the Cohort does the process very slowly, it takes generations before the population needs to be moved to complete it, but nothing really happens. Then, the Emperor asks what might happen if that transition were completed all at once. Harrow asks that he tell her, since he was present for the Resurrection.

The Emperor tells her that it's the difference between dying of illness and murder. The shock was immense, and created revenants. Every planet. They call them the Resurrection Beasts. At first, they ran off into the universe to hide from their deaths, as many revenants do. And all the Lyctors who have died, died to the RBs.

Harrow asks how many there are. The Body raises its(5) eyebrows when he tells her, three remain, of the nine that were. They took out Number Two(6) early, Eight cost a man's soul,(7) Six died because one of the Lyctors, Cyrus, "drew it into an ultramassive black hole,"(8) and Six had better be dead because Cyrus isn't coming back.

Before Harrow can respond or even question his math, which does not add up in the slightest,(9) The Emperor pushes away from Cytherea's coffin to face Harrow in front of the Third's, and he tells her the choice he offered was a false one. The RBs can feel and follow him, no matter where he goes, and to a lesser degree they can also sense and follow those who have committed the "indelible sin" of Lyctorhood. No Lyctor has ever chosen to go home, once they knew of this problem. None, but one, who knew he would come because she went home.

Harrow asks if he intends to teach her how to fight the RBs. Not before he teaches her to run from them, which is the even harder lesson, one he's been learning for ten thousand years. The Emperor lays his hands on Harrow's shoulders, and she looks up into his ordinary face.

"What he is saying," said the Body distinctly, "is that you have to learn that sword."(10) You looked at her, over his shoulder. The Emperor instinctively followed your gaze, but he could never have seen what you saw:(11) the weals where the chains had passed around the other girl's wrists, neck, ankles. He would not perceive that long hair hanging wetly over her shoulders, that resinous colour that in death might have been anything. He could not have heard the voice--low, husky, musical--or its dry and uncanny echo of other voices you had known: your mother's, Crux's.

He wouldn't know other things. That the Body hasn't spoken to Harrow since the night of her parents' deaths. That she had only walked with the Body for a year, and then only seen her in dreams. That in Harrow's youth, the Body's eyes were black, but since she'd become a Lyctor, the eyes had become a yellow that makes Harrow dizzy to see.(12)

Harrow converses a little more with the Body, telling it that she has failed, she is only half a Lyctor, and useless. The Emperor, confused about who Harrow is talking to, puts his hands on Harrow's shoulders. She looks at him, and he says "Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing." But something about his face looks wrong as he does, and Harrow feels a hot line of pain in her head. She says Ortus Nigenad died thinking it was the only gift he was capable of giving, and she's wasted it. The Emperor needs a minute to process this,(13) looking like someone working out a very strange anagram, and says "Ortus" again. Harrow experiences another stab of pain and falls to the floor, senseless and out of control of her body.

"Ortus Nigenad," said the Emperor again, almost wondering; but then you knew nothing more, except that you hadn't thrown up on God, which had to count as consolation.

=====

(1) Now why would the Body suddenly have a sword, in the presence of God? (2) None of the text implies that Harrow is aware of looking this way, or that she cares, but the second-person here really implies that someone's saying it for a reason. (3) Insurance against what? (4) Ah, Cytherea's. (5) What a curious pronoun change. (6) I wonder, do the House numbers correlate to the order of the Beasts? (7) Well that's fuckin grim. (8) Confession: every time black holes come up in fiction I think about the Nightmare/Atmosfear VHS board games, because one of the "host" characters says "BLAGOL!" a lot and it's really funny. The Loading Ready Run crew has played all of them, and the vods are available on their streams channel, if anyone's curious. A+ entertainment. (9) Yeah, if there were nine of them, and they've eliminated five, but he only lists three dead… Something's fishy here. (10) The Body is the woman who was in the Tomb, who has been described in the legend of the Nine Houses as the Emperor's greatest enemy. Why is she helping Harrow? (11) So, if he's a necromancer, presumably he's attuned to the dead and their haunting presences, right? So, does this mean the narrator is implying that the Body is only a hallucination, or is there something funkier going on? (12) Now why would the eyes change colour, at the point where Harrow achieved Lyctorhood, and further… why would those eyes make her feel dizzy? (13) I could play coy and say that it's odd for him to need a second to process someone saying the same name back to him perfectly normally… but this was where I started to suspect something was really Going On on my first read. Can you see why? Can you see my guess? Do you think I was right?