I had assumed you had picked this battlefield deliberately, and raised an army to fight alongside you. I didn't quite know why you'd chosen us. Now I know, but it seems you did not. (HTN ch 43)
What a rug pulling out moment this must have been: the realisation that she had not been summoned as some act of Lyctoral mystery to assist in Harrow's battle against a ghostly invader, but that she was there because a frightened teenage girl - who had met her once at a dinner party - had instinctively reached out for her help.
I understand you didn't ask on purpose, but I like to think that there was a grain in your soul that saw yourself in need, and perhaps thought to itself, I wish I had Abigail Pent. It takes a great deal of ego to be a psychopomp. Thank you for letting me by yours." (HTN ch. 47)
I think Abigail is meant to call to mind the classical psychopomp Hecate, associated with ghosts, keys, pomegranates, and the liminal transitions of girls (whether into death or adulthood). Harrow at this moment is literally dying, but her AU dreams are also all explorations of what a transition into some kind of adulthood that didn't involve ascending to Lyctorhood and losing Gideon might have looked like. But staying in those dreams means death.
Also...there's a tendency to assume that Harrow reached for the Fifth because Magnus was kind to Gideon, but a through-line of HTN is very much Harrow processing her feelings about Priamhark and Pelleamena in relation to the respective parental figures of John and Abigail. After all, like Pelleamena, Abigail is a brilliant necromancer with a complicated relationship with both motherhood and the demands of leadership, and a willingness to use other peoples' children to her own ends. But unlike Pelleamena, Abigail demands that Harrow live, rather than asking her to die.
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