Gideon's Powers and the Nature of Kiriona
I've been having many thoughts about Kiriona lately, and I've shared some of my older ones elsewhere recently, but one big newer one I wanna talk about most is: I don't think Kiriona "should" be mega dead, actually! Like she is, I'm not saying she's not; I'm saying it doesn't make sense so we should be asking why.
So let's recap older thoughts real quick first because I do stand by those. I do think Kiriona looks like this because she wants to, not by John's choice. John's a perfectionist with a history of wanting pretty perfect dolls but is also a horrible people pleaser who's just lost nearly everyone close to him, and he's been handing her everything else she ever wanted on a silver platter; he'd absolutely cave if she asked.
I think she wants to see the look on Harrow's face for herself, to force her to remember and confront Gideon's sacrifice after Harrow had forced herself to forget. Possibly to pettily go at least one of us wasn't so eager to forget, possibly to have Harrow romantically restore her missing heart (right in line with her Sleeping Beauty ass rescue fantasy she and Ianthe set up), she'd have to decide for sure depending on Harrow's initial reaction. Though ALSO. Someone pointed out to me a few days ago: She thinks Harrow's into dead girls. She wants the D and the D stands for Dead. Making herself like this on purpose just in case Harrow finds that hotter... She'd do that too, you know she would lmao.
With that out of the way though, when I say "looks like this" and "in case it makes her hotter", something we do NOT talk about enough is:
Kiriona looks significantly WORSE than her literally lifeless corpse did.
Her corpse as we see it in As Yet Unsent is entirely incorrupti, just like any corpse near John stays. It was not rotting At All, yet Kiriona is waxen and discolored with foggy eyes. There's of course also the implication that her heart has been 100% removed, as opposed to how the iron railing only would have shredded it but at least some of the viscera would still be there. But we already knew there's been active work done, her being indestructible and all. Which brings us to the heart (hehe) of the matter:
There is literally no reason based on all the worldbuilding we have why Gideon shouldn't come back to life yet again. Our problem should not be resurrecting her, but making her ever stay dead.
She CAN'T stay dead. The closest she came was when "her soul" (more on that in a moment) was locked inside the mausoleum of Harrow's mind, much like Alecto locked in the Tomb, and the moment that body was empty, she woke up inside it. "But SG," you say, "that's just possession," and sure it could read that way, except Harrow's body dies four times while Gideon is piloting it, and while the last time in the lowest depths of the River is left questionable, the three times fighting Heralds result in Gideon's soul instantly reviving Harrow's body. You have to be alive to be capable of dying, and Dulcie also says from a place of expertise that Harrow's body is moving but not being puppeted.
This does necessarily get into the theory that Gideon is part of the Holy Trinity with John and Alecto, and I won't go too deep into the many many many points of evidence for that here, but the main part: with the exception of Harrow holding onto her, Gideon has always come back to life, both in her own body and someone else's. Just like John and just like Alecto/Nona, she can technically die but CAN'T STAY dead. So first we have to ask why that happens in the first place.
John's power doesn't come from nothing. John and Alecto explicitly share a soul, both he and Harrow-with-Alecto's-memories tell us that and this isn't something ALECTO would be wrong about. So we know John can't stay dead as long as and because Alecto is alive, and Alecto can't stay dead as long as and because John is alive. Immortality never comes from nothing. There is always an exchange, always another soul involved, this isn't a vague divine god power.
So where would Gideon's come from, and just as importantly, why would it suddenly stop?
Well, John and Alecto are also their own people with their own thoughts and feelings and experiences, even if memories do also bleed between them. The line is extremely blurry but there are distinct facets of their soul that are "just"(/mostly) them, they're obviously not the same person. So I'm positing that just as John and Alecto are two distinct facets of their shared soul, so is Gideon. "He said, Make it quick, but kill her, said me with my blood could do it—said me with my blood, I was the only one…" and "Dad won't be immortal anymore, but he said he doesn't care about that." And I mean there are tons of implications John doesn't intend to survive his endgame plans here and 'no longer immortal' doesn't necessarily mean 'alive' so there's that, but. Even if we ignore that, and even though we don't have the full details of how this conversation actually went, and even though John 100% wouldn't give her the full details regardless...
Even with all that, the fact that there's directly been implication Gideon CAN hurt her AND it would destroy their otherwise unbreakable two-way exchange kind of inherently implies she's part of this, even before you look at the mountains of other evidence; that it's a three-way exchange now, that another facet has splintered off from the same soul. So that would absolutely answer why Gideon can't stay dead: because John and Alecto are alive. Does that mean all three have to die at once, or if two of them died (or fundamentally changed, a la pulling a Paul, because I still hope John and Alecto will do that), would it genuinely leave the other alive but mortal? (I DOUBT the two-can-die version, mmmaaaybe on the fundamental change.) But WHATEVER the details, whatever the motivations, it DOES seem extremely likely those three are intertwined. There's been no OTHER explanation that would suit Gideon coming back to life from nerve gas as a baby and also be in line with how immortality as a whole works or anything else we know about the worldbuilding.
There's literally no reason why she shouldn't pop back to life in any other empty body, especially her own, especially when it hadn't rotted even a little bit. If she revived Harrow's body repeatedly, I don't see any reason a delay getting back to her own should suddenly make her (facet of the) soul stop having that ability.
Which further implies, while again I do think it would have been her own decision, John would have needed to do something to actively keep her dead, would have needed to make Kiriona look like this, look more rotted and more dead, on purpose.
And well, Pyrrha does directly suggest the body could be a copy. Given her apparently having some pre-Rez memories and now inhabiting the body that was regrown from a damn arm, it's possible she'd have a particular level of expertise and familiarity there, but whether she does or not, I'm inclined to believe the theory, specifically because "If it's John's copy, it's going to be exact" but GtN Chapter 1 mentions extremely offhand that Gideon was chipped as a baby, which would make for such a good Chekhov's Gun as a way to confirm which body was her original.
And if it IS a copy, if she's now a construct made to House her as a revenant, then perhaps the body she's in now isn't actually capable of being alive? 🤔 Like, it's not A Human Body, it's a literal construction of meat and bone that's made to Look Like That. Her soul won't heal it because those aren't technically wounds. It's made to look gray and dead with a gaping chest. Like, that's not the only explanation for how to keep her dead, it could also just be John putting an active time-pausing theorem on her body the way he froze a lot of the stuff in Canaan House, or otherwise just kind of doing a manual override. If I'm right about souls then her power is his power on a fundamental level, so he'd probably have a good idea of what he was working with. The copy part would just be a particularly interesting way of going about it imo.
BUT YEAH. The important part is:
Unless something happens to break the immortality loop before then, I don't think we'll actually have any trouble at all reviving Gideon. It's literally a matter of just letting it happen, or at least, getting rid of whatever is in place to stop it from happening.
What we should be worried about is, are we going to get her back once again only for us to learn she needs to die alongside John and Alecto to help fix everything? Who knows. There could be a million ending possibilities we haven't even begun to conceive, and I mean, "death can also die" still haunts me every day. But hey! At least we'll probably see her back on her feet for a little bit longer before our hearts get ripped out again! :3
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