#lyctor

[foldingfittedsheets]

My friend absolutely loves this joke and wanted to use this slogan for con badges. I already had the font and added a cute little skull for good measure!

You can also sport this silliness by finding it on Redbubble, Threadless and Teepublic!

[crying--cryptid]

Here’s a [ ] the first for the road

[gideonnah]

Had to inform my dad that he's currently trying to find concrete answers to things in HarrowTN that not even harrowhark will get answers to, and canonically she's dealing with untreated schizophrenia and what are basically wizards with super OP powers and mana

[nightmaskart]

Day 5: Breakdown

[gheycowboyespressokell]

I don’t think John brought anyone back from the dead.

I think the Resurrection is a lie.

I think John fancied himself a god, and realized he could use his powers to exert his ultimate will - killing everyone. Which he did, snap, bang, all dead.

What he wasn’t expecting was the absolute terror of being alone after his snap decision to kill everyone. So he tried to bring them back.

But he can’t.

He can’t reconnect a soul to a body. So he took all the bodies and their pieces and made new ones. He knew how much of a drain on his focus and power it was to pilot around the Dead President, and he didn’t want to do that for thousands, millions, billions of people.

So he gave them free will.

And he’s hated them for exercising that free will ever since.

He slapped together a dozen bodies that looked like what he remembered his closest friends to look like; they weren’t them, but that doesn’t matter, they’re close enough. He gave them free will, and they used that free will to love and worship and hate and defy him.

And he resents them for it.

Then, he needed to give them something to do. So he brought back planets worth of people. Peons, he thought, they will have no relevance except for as peons to populate my dream. So he gave them free will and they used it to love and worship and detest and rebel from him.

And he hates them for it.

So he decided he needed a military. Spaceships with guns and cannons and nukes and faster-than-light (ugh) travel. So he created a military and, not wanting to deal with it and still so sure of his absolute power, gave them free will. And they used this free will to love and worship and decry and defect.

And he hates them for it.

Okay, then, fine. A palace, he decides, I’ll build a palace, forty billion light years from these squabbling, incompetent morons. And I’ll bring my best friends, and they’ll use the power of the death of their own best friends to get there, and together we’ll worship and fuck and watch over the perfect galaxy that I hate, he thinks. So he brings his best friends to his perfect palace forty billion light years away from the universe he’s created, and he celebrates in the free will that he game them.

They use this free will to love and worship and fuck and kill him.

He lives in a universe that he built, that he hates, with billions of people that he built, that he hates, hiding behind the only half-dozen people who know what he’s done, that he built, and oh how they hate him.

[applejuicewerewolf]

Why did it take me so long to make the Lyctor = Lich connection.

[onegreasygal]

[summergoodwife]

Thinking about how our current understanding is that Pyrrha and John are the last ones around who know Alecto from before.

And I keep wondering: what would Mercy and Augustine be feeling now if they had survived? What would Cytherea be feeling? How would they interact with her? They hated her so much, we know at least that Mercy and Augustine were the two who pushed hardest for her entombment, but 10,000 years have passed, and as hard as they all try to pretend that radical emotion renewal begins at the point of soul absorption, they have changed. Cytherea seemed to imply that she was planning to wake Alecto using Gideon. Sure, it seems that was about using her rather than becoming her friend.

But just how much can someone use Alecto before coming to the inevitable conclusion that her rage is justified? That she isn't a monster, or that her monstrosity doesn't make her lesser than humans? I feel like this is what soul permeability, as described in "The Unwanted Guest," was about. You can't choose to be unaffected by someone. To a very real extent, you can't choose how they affect you.

Maybe God's lyctors would find themselves, 10,000 years later, much closer to the monster than to the man. Who knows if this would breed forgiveness, further hatred, or something else entirely?