The Locked Tomb Lore: Gideon the Ninth
Here lies a compilation of TLT lore I painstakingly unearthed exclusively from Gideon the Ninth. These are but the bones that I am working to reconstruct into a full skeleton in the hope of Lyctoral understanding. Like the books themselves, it took much blood sweat, focus, and tears to compile. Enjoy hours of thorough, bone-cocooned research because unlike my own Gideon (girlfriend) I must understand and suffer as much of this series and its lore as possible. Reconstruct as you please, and keep in mind that there is overlap and I have simply organized into categories the best I can for now. Further analysis and more developed personal conclusions to come, as well as a similar treatment of Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth.
What Happened at/to Canaan House/The Facility Below/The First House
The First House is long dead and unkillable with tumbled-down cities and temples. A sleeping throne. (66)
The planet of the First House is a grave and brings Harrow both pain and pleasure to behold as they approach on the shuttle. (68)
In the facility, there are Labs 1-10, Pressure Room, Preservation, Mort, Work Rooms 1-5, and Sanitiser labeled for certain. Harrow thinks Control Room, Console, and Dump Room may be labels for the others. It's a very old facility, older than the rest of Canaan House – pre-Resurrection, or made to look pre-Resurrection. Palamedes is obsessed with dating it, but Harrow believes it's more important to figure out the function. She doesn't know what it is yet, but is convinced that if she did, she'd be a Lyctor already. Also, whoever left the facility left the majority of their work behind and intact – not in books or theorems, but more so in terms of tests that can be triggered. Theorem models meant to challenge talented enough necromancers to understand what they were doing. (148-149)
There's a symbol of an animal's skull with two long horns that curve inward and almost touch that both Harrow and Gideon had seen, Gideon on the hidden hallway down by the cavalier's training facilities, Harrow from an uncertain other location. (150)
In the facility resides the sum of all necromantic transgression. The unperceivable howl of ten thousand million unfed ghosts who will hear each echoed footstep as defilement. They would not even be satisfied if they tore you apart, and the space beyond is profoundly haunted in ways Teacher cannot say and by means Harrow won't understand, and they may die by violence or simply lose your soul. (152)
Upon seeing Magnus and Abigail dead, Teacher could only get down a few rungs of the ladder. He seemed wildly terrified, saying Silas couldn't siphon Colum and in doing so empty him because that could make Colum a nest for something else. He urges them to get their bodies upstairs quickly by any means and says that he can't guarantee the safety of any of them down in the facility another minute despite Camilla saying they're safe down there and investigating. (191)
The facility is the most dangerous place in the system of Dominicus and there are monsters there, according to Teacher. Whatever was done to Abigail and Magnus isn't something he believes was done by the living, but by some malevolent force within the First House – like vengeful ghosts born of some necromantic act – as the Second cites him as saying. (194, 197)
The facility also includes Transference/Winnowing.(/?) Datacenter. This is where they come from after seeing the auras around the construct and successfully defeating it. (183)
Dulcinea is enthusiastic about the idea that something is lurking in Canaan House, that something could linger for thousands of years and therefore make it so that after death is when you really live. Harrow points out, spikily, that a spirit comes at invitation and can't sustain itself. Dulcinea looks tired during this exchange. (213)
In Lab 8, they find #14-8 Diversion, Procedural Chamber with “Avulsion!” written below it. Lab 2 contained Imaging and Response. (217-218)
The Second claims that the First House falls under Cohort jurisdiction, but Teacher denies this, saying that it's sacred and that imperial law is based on the writ of the Emperor, and since the Emperor is the only law on the First planet, there's no interpretation (and no other rule than presumably the not opening doors without permission one). There aren't even natural laws against murder and theft. (238)
There were bone fragments in the Fifth's wounds from different osseous sources, but Sextus doesn't get to actually say what that's indicative of before they learn the Fourth were eavesdropping on them and drawing their own conclusions about a bone construct. (245, 258)
Jm is still troubled when they go down to the Facility because technically they still didn't have a key. Gideon says she's been down without permission and that it was fine. (277)
Teacher randomly tells Gideon he hates the water, including fountains and the pool downstairs, and says “it's a terrible portent.” She points out that Canaan House is surrounded by sea, and he laughs. They both laugh hysterically before he apologizes to a “poor child,” at first seemingly referencing Gideon, then seemingly referencing someone else, saying “we never intended this to happen, none of us.” (325-326)
The Emperor believed that soul-siphoning was the “most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up.” (340)
Palamedes investigated the tooth in another challenge room, which he determined was from an male in his 60s who lived and died in the self-same tower having never left the planet. He tried to track it and found absolutely nothing, meaning the soul had been removed from it entirely. So he looked around for a skeleton servant missing the same tooth and found him upstairs. He was a revenant, the opposite of what Dulc called the beguiling corpse – a ghost inhabiting a physical shell, a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body. They aren't constructs because they move too well, and they would've needed someone to control them if they were. Instead, they power themselves. However, this still doesn't explain why there isn't an energy signature on the bones. When Harrow unfurls the tooth, tiny letters read
There's also a board on the wall with rainbow pins with clusters around white pins and string attaching them to said white pin. The smallest ones had 3 pins around 1 white one, the largest more than 100 around 1 white. There are hundreds of pins on the board, which Palamedes counts after seeing the picture of Teacher and the others. (365-369)
A note in the molar room reads
CONFIRMED INDEPENDENTLY HIGHLIGHTED
P. S GIVE ME BACK MY CALIPERS I NEED THEM
And a binder right beside it contains mugshot-like pictures of people, including Teacher. Palamedes is shocked, implying the impossibility of a beguiled corpse without someone controlling him, and the unlikelihood of him being independent. Then he turns to counting the pins around the white pins, searching for a way for the corpses to be self-sustaining, presumably using the thanergy of the other souls. (368)
A fire alarm interrupts their investigation of the pins and picture-filled binder, and they run out to see that all of the skeletons have collapsed into dust and sashes while doing their usual duties. They run to Dulc, who says that Teacher left an hour ago “to lock a door.” (369)
When they find the Second are responsible for the skeletons collapsing and calling the Emperor, the Captain's left arm is “wizened and crumpled… like it had been put in a bog for a thousand years,” implying some necromancy on Teacher's part, as he lays at her side. He had initiated by attacking Dyas and taking out her eye, saying Cap had “betrayed the Emperor” and put him at risk. (372-373)
Teacher was a “shell filled with a hundred souls” according to Harrow, but just a prototype. She says something more dangerous than the old experiment that created him and the rest is still around Canaan House. (373)
Teacher was scared of Canaan House and the facility most of all. (376)
Silas's draining of Colum makes him a husk to what seem like 6 people who had never “been inside a human before,” his eyes pitch black compared to Ianthe's pure white ones from before. (391)
Colum's strength greatly increases with this transformation, but he lacks a cav's coordination. He kills his necromancer. After Ianthe breaks his wrist, his eyes transform into mouths ringed with teeth and tongues. His original tongue grows long enough to wrap around Gideon's neck before Ianthe steps in and breaks his neck. When he falls to the ground, he appears as he did before the teeth and tongues. (393)
Nav is a Niner name that she was given, but Gideon doesn't know where she was born. Eighteen years ago, her mom had tumbled down the shaft in a dragchute and a battered hazard suit that was already out of power. She had landed brain-dead for that reason, because the battery power for the suit had been sucked up by the bio-container that was attached to the suit that held one-day-old Gideon. It had been out of power for about an hour prior, and she couldn't have cleared gravity from a drop above the planet or her haz would have exploded. However, the Ninth claimed she wasn't an escapee from their prison that holds the House's worst criminals. All the nuns could get from her was her screaming “Gideon!” three times before she fled. (23)
Gideon wants to go to Trentham on the Second to join the Cohort. (25-26)
Dulcinea describes Gideon's golden eye color as “singular” and “lipochrome… recessive.” She seems pleasantly surprised by them, and they tell her a lot about who they belong to. (106)
Inside the room with the horned skull symbol on the front, Gideon and Harrow find 2 rapiers, a training floor, and ancient blowback carbine guns, which Gideon had only ever seen pictures of. The wood leading up to the beds that were quite close to one another wasn't so degraded as the rest of the Canaan House. (205)
The theorem from the trial room for transference (utilizing a living soul, the whole experiment) was inscribed on stone in the same room Gideon found the old crimson and white emblem of the Second House. Beneath the inscription was a line on its own: “In the hope of attaining Lyctoral understanding. All glory and love to the Necrolord Prime.” The Second cav and necromancer were responsible for creating the theorem and conducting the experiment. (206-208)
In one of the books in the same room, Gideon reads “One flesh, one end. G. & P.” (207-208)
The torn and crumpled note Gideon picked up in that room (X-203 btw) read
“ut we all know the sad + trying realit
is that this will remain incomplete t
the last. He can't fix my deficiencies her
ease give Gideon my congratulations, howev”
Camilla is stunned that Gideon is fine (as she takes notes on her vitals and all) and not in a coma (like Sextus said she'd be) after that because although she and Sextus could have completed it, they would've had to accept caveats like her permanent brain damage if he didn't get it right immediately. Although the Eighth breeds batteries and Colum probably does have brain damage because of it, it's not the brain a necromancer needs. It's something that's in a trained and true (figuratively speaking for Gideon) cavalier. (234-235)
Dulcinea tries to comfort Gideon as Harrow walks and draws on her energy. She talks about how young Gideon is and how none of this is worth it, calling her vital and apologizing for saying that they take so much. She also claims responsibility for this individually and calls Gideon a poor baby. (226-227)
Dulcinea says “Nice hair” to Gideon after her hood came off during the whole thing. (229)
“Bodies were brought into here – a long time ago. A lot of bone matter” said Isaac about Sanitiser, the place where Gideon had originally found Harrow. He also doesn't totally agree with Gideon that the research seems self-contained and is sweating buckets. (280)
Even after Isaac's really good wards, a motion-sensor light comes back on behind them as they start to exit, revealing a super fresh message in blood: DEATH TO THE FOURTH HOUSE.” They are confronted with the biggest skeletal construct Gideon had ever seen that had to have assembled itself in the room by no visible means, since it couldn't have fit through any of the doors. It contains a skull in its core, which has closed eyes and lips, “as though locked perpetually in prayer.” (281-282)
The blood message over Jm's head in the bed at the hideout, X-203 or whatever, reads SWEET DREAMS. Huge bone staffs speared her shoulders, thighs, and ribs to the bed. Gideon is untouched and was napping for only like 15 min. (288)
Dulc gives Gideon a strangely tender smile after G admits to being a fake cavalier, “as though they had always shared some delicious secret” and says “I think you're a cavalier worth of a Lyctor. I want to see that, what you'd become. I wonder if the Reverend Daughter even knows what she has in you?” (295)
Silas knows her last name is Nav because he talked to Glaurica on her return to the mother house as she died. He claims she's the tool of her oppressors and the lock on her own collar. (297-299)
Gideon has a recurring dream of her mother, “alive now, overlapping with her life in a way she hadn't in reality, shrieking Gideon–Gideon–Gideon! while, as Gideon watched, crones of the Ninth gently levered her skull from the rest of her head with a big crunchy crack. (300)
Silas knows that Gideon's mom had the same hair phenotype and muses that perhaps she was Third because he'd asked Glaurica, a revenant, about Gideon's mom. He doesn't say why, but it seems as though it was partially Glaurica's doing in steering the conversation when he probed about the 200 lost children of the Ninth. (317-318)
Gideon was meant to die along with the other kids, as she inhaled nerve gas for ten whole minutes just like the rest of them, even though she was two cots away from the vent. H's parents were scared of G for the rest of their lives. (353)
Cy says she'd meant that Gideon was wonderful, and that she “would have made that little nun such a cavalier,” so much so that she “almost wish[es] she'd been hers.” (411)
Cy says that Gideon is brave like another Gideon she used to know, but that Gideon is prettier in the eyes. (424)
Cy asks Gideon to cry mercy, saying “Please. You don't even know what you are to me… You're not going to die here, Gideon. And if you ask me to let you live you might not have to die at all. I've spared you before.” (424)
Dulc/Cy claims she wanted to be a Lyctor because she didn't want to die. Harrow shares her dislike for Dulcinea and Pro. (230)
“At least two people” were put into the incinerator with consistent time signatures that indicate corpses three months dead. For some reason, Deuterous is convinced Pro isn't one of them, though he's been missing. The Fourth says it's because they saw Pro go into the facility last night. Palamedes believed them. (256-272)
Dulc claims to be a “walking thanergy generator” because of the cancer and that she'll “probably live forever… worse luck.” (294-295)
Teacher had realized that Dulc was Cyth and went to head off the Second. He doesn't name her, though. (374)
Inside the previously gummed up door, the walls “had been painted lovingly” with flowers and clouds and birds. But one of them was marred by foot-tall black words that were freshly painted:
I'm guessing this was written by Cy and that Teacher had tried to lock the room to hide it? (380).
Pal confronts Dulc about not being Dulc and asks why she killed the Fifth. Dulc confesses that since Pent had such a keen interest in history, she should've swept the whole place of letters, pictures, etc. before they'd gotten there, but she'd been nostalgic. She also admits underestimating his “ghost-within-the-thing” and "Sixth psychometry” mastery. (399)
Dulc says she put the key in Pent to obscure its traces in her flesh, giving her time to gum up the lock. According to her, it should've been almost impossible to remove, and she's impressed by the Ninth for it. She thanks goodness that the Emperor would never get hold of Harrowhark. (400)
Cyth is Seventh just like Dulc. The real Dulc is in the furnace, but she wasn't placed in there until Harrow took out Pro because she'd held on to her body. (401)
Dulc says she knew that if she ruined the Emperor's Lyctor plans, killing the heirs and their cavs, she'd draw him back to the system – but subtle enough that he would come without the remaining Lyctors. He'll only sit beyond the system of Dominicus while trying to figure out what's going on, which is exactly where she wants him. She wants to shatter his Houses one by one and find out how many of them it takes for him to break and cross over before he “sees what will come when I call… and then [she] won't have to do anything. It will be too late. (401-402)
Cy says she doesn't hate the Emperor and has loved him, worshipped him, like a god and a brother. But she says that Lyctorhood is neither life nor death and that it's something nobody should ever ask you to embrace, not even him. Pal says he wouldn't have done that to Cam. Loveday was Cy's cav and that Cy hadn't wanted to do it, either. “You can't do that to somebody's soul.” She adds that Teacher was nearly demented and even kind of scared her because of the process the Sixth of her generation had done to him. (402)
Pal “tied the noose” on Cy, buying time to speed up her severe blood cancer and its side effects as they talked. Pal claims she'll die spewing her own lungs out of her nose. She coughs continuously but doesn't seem impressed until Pal brings up radical thanergetic fission: when a necro disperses their entire reserve of thanergy very quickly. He then explodes the sickroom into white (but cold) fire and Gideon's restraints (made by Pal originally) release. She describes him as a “god-killing star.” But Cyth lives, wounds sewing up and lungs getting vomited up. (403-404)
Cy says she's come back home to kill the Emperor and burn his Houses, starting with Gideon. (405)
Cy traps Cam with bones and begins to drain her before Harrowhark shows up and creates a sea of bones at Cy – and tosses Gideon her two-hander. Cy responds by forming the construct that killed Isaac, but Harrow is exhilarated to face her (“its natural predator, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House”), and Gideon gets up to her rightful place before her necro to fight perfectly together. (407-409)
When Ianthe shows up and stabs Cy through the stomach, Cy is excited – or at least surprised – about a baby Lyctor (“always wanted a little sister…I have so much to teach you”) despite the fact that they immediately fight. (417)
Cam throws one of her knives at a delicate swollen mass next to Cy's shoulder and gets her off of Ianthe. Black and yellow liquid flows from the wound when she yanks the blade out. (422)
Cy was out to kill God and yet he says she was the most loyal and had the most capacity for kindness. He wishes they could've just fought it out because she was upset over her Lyctorhood. After all, he had wanted Lyctorhood to have been contemplated and accepted bravely rather than forced on anyone. (443)
Who the Other Original Lyctors Were
The Fifth don't have a lot of post-Resurrection, pre-sovereignty and pre-Cohort, records, except for secondhand ones – like the transcripts they have from the Sixth's originals, which they aren't even allowed to look at through glass. Pent found what she thought were unencrypted communiqués between two people (Lyctors or those who later became so) that Gideon doesn't care to listen to.
Palamedes confirms that the note from X-203 with G's name on it is real, aka 10 thousand years old. (336)
The Girl Inside the Locked Tomb/How the Emperor Came to Be
"The Locked Tomb's meant to house the one true enemy of the King Undying… something older than time, the cost of the Resurrection; the beast that he defeated once but can't defeat twice. The abyss of the First. The death of the Lord.” Opening it would basically mean the apocalypse, according to H's parents. The Ninth House was supposed to just die there with the corpse and was never meant to be, as Silas had said. (354)
Behind the doors of the tomb, there's a rock and a tomb surrounded by water, along with the other locks and wards. “There's a blood ward bypass on the doors which will only respond for the Necromancer Divine, but I knew there had to be an exploit, a way through for the true and devout tomb-keeper. I knew in the end it had to open for me. The water's salt, and it's deep, and it moves with a tide that shouldn't exist… The tomb is stone and ice… and inside, in the dark, there's a girl… they laid a sword on her breast.” Seeing her frozen face made H want to live forever just in case she ever woke up. (357-358)
The Emperor believed that soul-siphoning was the “most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up.” (340)
Ianthe has always specialized in large-scale energy transferral and had studied what it had taken for God to restore their dying Houses back then, the price he'd had to pay. She implies the price is the soul of the First planet. She also has interest in the River. (382)
The Emperor is a sentinel that hasn't been back for over 9000 years and can never return but protects his House from afar anyway. (66)
Harrow never liked the “cursed thing anyway,” referring to the two-hander, because she always felt like it was judging her. (165)
Necromancy/Lyctor Theorems
With Harrow seeing through Gideon, they could both see the differently colored coronas that wreath the construct. Harrow is shocked to hear that Gideon could see them too because she thought she knew what the experiment was doing. (180-182)
After completing the transference experiment, Harrow could ride another living soul but was more interested in what she'd learned from the theorem behind the construct: how to make a construct regenerate. (212)
Palamedes refused to siphon Camilla, and Harrow initially refuses to siphon Gideon, too. But it's not soul siphoning, not quite, according to Dulcinea, because the soul wouldn't be sent elsewhere and the space it left behind exploited; it would be drawing on Gideon as a power source outside of the entropy field that would otherwise drain Harrow's reserves of thanergy immediately upon crossing it. Harrow can't draw from Dulcinea, according to the Seventh, because you can't move thanergy from place to place like that. It has to be life to death, or death to a sort of life, like the Second do. She would have to take Dulcinea's thalergy, which wouldn't get her far because she's dying. Thalergy from Gideon would turn into thanergy for Harrow. (221-223)
The Second House does something similar, in reverse, as mentioned, as the Second's necro gift is to drain dying foes to strengthen her cavalier. Thanergy into thalergy. (223)
Palamedes tries to recreate the key ring based on thanergy lingering on Magnus's wedding ring that had touched it, but there's too much jumble, so he takes some of the pockets Magnus may have held it in for a longer period of time instead. They don't find evidence that he had any other key other than the facility key, which is odd because others had that key too. (243-244)
There's 8 parts of the megatheorem, 1 per House. Presumably, this either excludes the 1st or 9th house. I'm thinking 1st because nobody questions whether the 9th should be there/was there and there's evidence that the 1st house and Emperor already existed back then, thus they wouldn't have had a Lyctor (?). But ACTUALLY since the Ninth was never meant to exist, I'm going with 9th now. Also cuz the 8 theorems seem to correspond with the house numbers 1-8. (271)
According to Dulc, “Once somebody dies, their spirit's free forever, even if we snatch at it or try to stopper it or use the energy it creates. Oh, I know sometimes they come back… or we can call them, in the matter of the Fifth… but even that exception to the rule shows their mastery of us. They only come when we beg. Once someone dies, we can't grasp at them anymore, thank God! – except for one person, and he's very far from here, I think.” (293)
Ianthe defines the megatheorem of Lyctorhood as
Preserve the soul, intellect and memory still intact
Analyse it, understand its structure and shape
Remove and absorb it without consuming it
Fix it in place so it can't deteriorate (like with the sword she used, presumably)
Incorporate it in a way that doesn't overwhelm your own soul
Consume the flesh, even just a drop of blood will do
Reconstruction, making the spirit and flesh (of the cav) work together the way they used to in a new body
Hook up the cables and get the power flowing
After a bit, every time Ianthe landed a hit inside the blood cage she'd created around them, Cy's earlier wounds start to unravel and reopen because she hadn't healed for real, just shallowly fixed it. She needs thalergy – life force – to really heal, and she grabs Ianthe to take that from her, noticing that Ianthe is tiring because she isn't completed. She tells her that it would take centuries at the least, and more since Tern hadn't gone willingly like Loveday had for her. (420-421)
“Someday you'll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then.” – Gideon to Harrow (437)
Harrow begs the Emperor to undo what she's done, swearing she'd never ask anything else of him again “if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.” He says he can't, even though he “would very much like to. But that soul's inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I'd take yours with it and destroy both in the process.” (441)
Harrow has an angry outburst about what the theorems are even for, saying they gained so little from that and that she should've walked away like Sextus but that she didn't have the luxury because she needs to become Lyctor now, before something happens. (231)
There are stories about the Ninth House that Jeannemary dismisses as “probably bullshit, anyway” and agrees to go with Gideon to look for Pro. (274)
Silas accuses the Ninth – via Gideon, including Harrow – a house of liars. (321)
“The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there I will be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee,” said Gideon. “See you on the flip side, sugarlips.” (438)
Harrow says “We can't go home again” when the Emperor offers it as an alternative to being one of his Hands. However, she says she will have to go back eventually” in reference to Canaan House because she “needs to find out what happened to [her] cavalier's body.” He says he knows that she will have to. But she accepts being his Lyctor “for now.” (444)
Naberius interrupts Corona fighting and seems terrifically afraid, saying “you can't.” She collapses into his arms and bites his arm, and he promises her not to tell her, implying Ianthe is the “her.” (328)
Palamedes gets upset that his timing was wrong, saying the Fifth had gone down and completed a challenge in the facility but that he hadn't checked Abigail's body in time to notice that a key had been stored there by someone, who we later learn is Cy. The Third had then taken it. (377)
Corona is in the fresco room crying while Ianthe is adjusting to having killed/absorbed Tern. (380-381)
Ianthe has had to be two necros since she was 6 to cover for Corona's lack of abilities. (385)
Corona is upset that Naberius had been eaten and not her. (394)
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