#after htn

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Ianthe spends all of Gideon lurking in the shadows being mad she's a secondary character, then she briefly gets to have her villain reveal and cunty little speech, only to be immediately upstaged by a much more impressive villain. Like, she finally gets the spotlight for one chapter and an hour later she's getting her ass beat to dust, and that's so funny to me.

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Do you ever lie awake at night thinking about how Mercymorn was fully aware of what Harrow had done to her brain and why, to the point that in this scene she's startled by Gideon in like three different ways, but none of them are the fact that Gideon is intact and surfacing, because she already knows about “the cavalier that she stuffed in the back of her brain”?

And she felt “a misplaced sense of affection” for Harrow?

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so

when Pal tied his whole soul to his own skeleton

that was derived from Seventh magic…

the skeletons at Canaan might have been an inspiration too, he might have known he could turn himself into “what I'll term the hideous corpse”—but the art of attaching a shred of spirit to a corpse to keep it fresh or animated is thee school of magic practiced in the Seventh

he even draws the parallel in that same paragraph, when they figure out the skeleton servitors:

The beguiling corpse is a remnant of spirit attached to a perfect and incorruptible body—that's the idea, anyway—whereas what I'll term the hideous corpse is a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body.

I know it's obvious, it's just something I hadn't fully contemplated—how much did Palamedes learn about Seventh necromancy, talking to Dulcie and knowing her corpse would likely be exhibited this way? what did Camilla think when they came up with the plan?

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—Harrow the Ninth, prologue

—chapter 2

—chapter 33

—Tamsyn Muir for In the Margin (link now dead, regrettably!)

—chapter 49

—chapter 53

and of course the imagery of the long dark corridor reminds me of:

There is a parallel being drawn here, I think, between Harrow's Orpheus-like choice to preserve her dead lover at the cost of never turning back towards her memory (turning into a gothic heroine archetype exploring her haunted mansion's hallways candelabra in hand, doubting her own sanity), and the Ninth House keeping watch over Alecto “through sin and iniquity” even though, a myriad later, Niners are unaware of who is entombed there and what Anastasia's intentions may have been.

By the time Harrow made her choice, she knew what it was to make horrifying choices and pay a high cost to drag a beloved woman out of the refrigerator.

(Of course, Alecto seemingly returns to this image the moment we get to Harrowhark's POV, from what we know from that first paragraph Tamsyn read.)

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Hello! Just saw your addition to a post about the sixth house where you say that Cassie fed each one of the other lyctors a piece of her finger. I don’t remember that at all and I’m hoping you can point me in the direction of the source material on that one. Thanks!

This is just one of many insane bits of what is either foreshadowing or red herrings about Cassie. For instance:

And when Abigail is thinking of an example for “what if I anchored my soul to an object”:

Which could mean nothing!

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Who the fuck set up the trials at Canaan House?

If the lyctors had to leave Canaan House in a hurry after the first assault of the Resurrection Beasts… how did they have the time to set up Canaan House like a videogame dungeon?

My thinking is,

“in a hurry” might still mean they had like, years after the detection of the first Beast to organize Canaan, put together the Mithraeum and yeet it through the River. After all, the RBs are slow as hell.

The problem with this is that the lyctoral studies are very much presented as if (and implied to be?) frozen right as they were when they had to leave. GtN presents them as if they had been left in a hurry on the very day that lyctorhood was achieved.

They had already gamified their investigation into challenges, and they had made nice lyctoral iron doors with unique keys for their studies, so it took minimal effort to set it all up like a necromantic escape room in case they wanted future people to earn their lyctorhood. (I'm still fascinated that this might have been a dormant backup plan for 10,000 years.)

Maybe there's just some time fuckery going on? And it was revisited and the theorems engraved into the slabs, etc. after the OG Canaan Crew scrambled. Maybe they left the priests and skeletons to set some of it up?

I don't know. It just doesn't quite gel together. Canaan always feels wrong to me! Or, as Palamedes put it, as if “I'm being lied to on a molecular level”.

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A lot has been said about Jod's petty remark that Augustine and Mercy “do tend to go overboard on the foreplay”.

I do have to point out that the one important time they fucked, they had to keep him distracted enough they could steal his sperm through flesh magic. I'm pretty sure they DID go overboard with the foreplay, which is extremely funny to me! Augustine trying to do the freakiest shit possible and drag it out long enough that Mercy can pull off some microscopic Mission: Impossible process inside Jod's ejaculatory ducts while completely blinded by lyctoral invisibility and possibly feeling a very strong taste of citrus all the while.

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Can you imagine an AU where Crux's bomb malfunctions, so Ortus doesn't explode, but instead must begin life anew in the EIGHTH?

Ortus the Ninth, immigrant from “a foetid house of betrayers and mystics”? Ortus Nigenad, the repressed gay man (with PTSD from what's hinted to be parental CSA), now living in Planet Tribunal Vatican?

Like… my god. If anyone's ever wanted to write fanfic exploring what living in the Eighth is like, I think this would be a very good thoroughline. He'd be the perfect fish out of water, but you could still get a very nice bildungsroman thing (about a man in his early thirties).