Can I talk a little bit about one deeply horrifying detail of what happened at the Palazzo Davinos this episode?
When Hal and Bolaire and Murray and Azune arrived after seeing the house go dark, there were no bodies. They had to ask that above the table, because their characters have no reason to know there should have been bodies. So many bodies. It makes a spectacularly creepy atmosphere, and then it kind of gets glanced over again because Occtis. But I just want to sit with it for a second.
There’s a couple of layers of horror here. The first is the obvious, that a bunch of necromancers just slaughtered an entire manor of people, and then an hour later there are no bodies. So, uh. Here’s hoping they were destroyed to cover up the crime, and not … well. Currently raw materials.
Second there is the covering up of the crime. House Tachonis just wiped out an entire vassal house, possibly the parent house as well, and there is no proof. Beyond Aranessa and Julien themselves, if they can manage to tell anyone without promptly getting killed for it. Tachonis can just wipe out a whole house, in the dark, in the quiet, and leave no one to know. Like. When you think of the threat House Tachonis poses. If you piss them off, they will kill you, kill your entire family, kill everyone you know, and nothing will stop them. No name, no blood, no force of arms, no level of personal importance. They will just kill you. And in the aftermath, they will wipe it away. And no one will ever know, not for sure. It’ll just be a story of the bogeymen who come for you in the darkness and the silence and wipe you away. Jesus fuck.
And then … In terms of Julien. I just.
We started this series at Thjazi Fang’s funeral. We got to see what funerals look like, what they’re supposed to look like. We got to sit with a family and their grief and the ripple effects of one person’s death on everyone around them for the whole first two episodes. That was what death was supposed to look like.
Thjazi Fang was a criminal who was executed by the state, and he still got to come home. He got to be carried into his brother’s home by someone who loved him, got to be laid out in state, bedecked with small treasures, surrounded by family and friends, mourned freely and openly. We got to sit with it, with the grief he inspired, with the love and resentment and anger and grief that comes out, naturally, at a funeral. Yes, he died a death he shouldn’t have died, but he still got to come home.
No one of House Davinos will get that dignity. No one who was in that house will ever come home. They will not get to be laid out for their families, to have small treasures laid around them, to have the people who loved them spend one last little bit of time with them, to grieve and to remember and to sit with them. No one’s going to get to eat cranberry rolls while trying to break up stupid fights at their funeral. No one will know. No one will get to look into their faces one last time to make it real, to get to look and see and understand that they’re gone.
Especially with the theme Azune hammered home this episode, mending and healing and remembrance. House Davinos will not get that. They weren’t just killed, they were erased. They do not get to be remembered, they do not get to be mourned. They were just wiped out. Leaving nothing but a dark, empty building behind, with no sign that there were ever people there, let alone that they were brutally murdered. Not just the lords, but the servants, the couriers, everyone.
I just. The contrast. Thjazi is still there in Hal’s house, lying in state, his family and treasures around him. And Julien had to basically loot his father’s mutilated body as he fled to have anything to remember him by.
So much happened this episode. We started it with a light spot of serial killing, passed through Occtis being butchered alive by his own brother, then the circle of death and the massacre of the house, before the episode ending on the horror of Occtis’ revelations from the afterlife. But in all of that, that one little detail hit me so hard. Hal and the others rush to the manor, knowing something is desperately wrong, and there’s nothing there. Nothing. No one.
House Davinos wasn’t killed. It was erased. Physically erased. There are no bodies. No one will ever get to bring any of them home.
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