#resurrection beasts

[margo-mania]

What's rotating in the brain microwave today

[ourg0dsal]

So i just had a thought and this might be horribly misguided. But- in Nona the ninth the big question (oh BTW spoilers ahead) was "who is she?", is it Gideons soul or Harrows soul. And the big confusion around it was that Nona shared personality attributes that ether Gideon or Harrow had. And yet.. (again SPOILERS) it ended up being alecto. Which as we can kinda assume was sorta subconsciously aware, like when she talks to Varun.

Soooo my actual thought is, if its alecto. And never was Gideon, never was Harrow, then why does Nona seem to have been imprinted with these characteristics. Welll- for Harrows it seems obvious, its her body, there are certain attributes of a person not affected by personality or soul, but rather by the DNA of a person, allergies, sicknesses, ect. So that makes sense.

But as for Gideon's, well the body- or alecto- is who Harrow is in love with, alecto knows this, and yet Gideon has shaped Harrow's entire life, Harrow is obsessed with Gideon in every way of the word. What if alecto took this knowledge and shaped her personality around her impression of Gideon to keep Harrows love and attention. And in her sort of defensive amnesia, what is left behind are the attributes alecto has deemed make her lovable and, therefore, what would make others care for her and keep her safe.

Idk it's been a while since ive had a proper reread and even had to look up Varun's name.

But anyways

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

… the Eater.

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

ok rereading nona the ninth and i can't believe this never occurred to me but. the kids know about resurrection beasts. they know varun the eater by name.

but like. of course they do. this is what people are constantly being "resettled" over, isn't it? it's not just the war. the lyctors move people off populated planets to flip them. of fucking course beautiful ruby knows what a resurrection beast is. even if he doesn't understand it, even if he doesn't know it by that name, of course he would know what it is. of course these people have names for them.

i can't believe i never considered this before. the children of the nine houses are raised not even knowing about them. harrow, with all her appetite for learning, with an entire library of nasty, forbidden little books at her disposal, had never even heard of them until she became a lyctor. but fucking kevin knows what a resurrection beast is. he knows their names, because he has to.

john has spent ten thousand years keeping them off his precious houses, and he did that by leading them straight into the path of populated planets. this isn't even subtext. we knew this. this isn't new information. i had just never really thought about it in those terms before.

jesus christ, john.

[again-thepommel]

I sort of suspect Resurrection Beasts hunt the Lyctors not because the "indelible sin" that marks them as targets is committing Lyctorhood, but because the sin is killing all those baby planets

[commanderbabyboy]

with all the heralds on new rho at the end of ntn i think it’s very likely we’ll get a lot of herald weapons in alecto. we don’t know how rare herald weapons are since i doubt boe would tell troia cell about them but i bet however much they had they have a bunch more now. can’t decide if i want/if it’d make sense for herald weapons to work on the zombie/soul/ghoul things. like one: nona’s at least a little scared of them (and it seems like the fear is alectos) so like you could argue that they wouldn’t work on them. but two: ghosts don’t like rb’s they run from them and the spirit-ghouls have at least something in common with ghosts it’s spirit magic so like the herald weapons could work on them.

follow up question how does a herald weapon affect necros & lyctors. for both mercy and ianthe they had to be shot by them before it affected them. but just being close to a herald freaks them out. idk if it’d be the same for regular necromancers or not. like they’re either effected less then lyctors because they’re not being targeted, the same as lyctors, or more because they don’t have lyctoral protection.

[notedchampagne]

do you think john was lying about how RBs make heralds, or at least letting the lyctors come to false conclusions?

in htn the explanation is that they're old and 'clever', but if that were true (aka any revenant can manipulate thalergy/thanergy to the degree that they can create constructs, given time and/or resources) i feel like wake, given her grit would have done something similar by now, if not nonius because of her morals.

maybe varun and the others can make them because they're specifically planetary ghosts, and can wield necromancy (kind of) because they can gift it to smaller souls like earth did? and perhaps this is somehow connected to why necros can only be born on the Houses?

i dont think he was! revenants can inhabit anything they have a connection to, including things thanergetically connected to their death. this includes burial implements, possessions they’ve kept, a murder weapon and things that touched it, and things they kill (htn 172) RBs first add to their corpus anything theyve killed (htn 172), which means they can inhabit the dead matter attached to them.

following this i think the heralds are just the RBs body that it inhabits in bite-sized pieces, since 1) the appearances of the heralds and corpuses vary depending on what parts of death the RB has collected (htn 173) and 2) the herald appearances arent the same! (htn 388-9, 405-6) it makes sense if the RB detaches parts of its own armor to send out en masse - and in their case specifically theyre allowed to do this because their souls are much larger than a humans.

unfortunately, wake could not have killed a guy and attached him to her body because 1) she doesnt have necromancy 2) wake is not in her own body, and shes only able to possess cytherea poorly through a thanergetic link. body possession works much better with biological compatibility (shown in dr. sex and ntn) and she simply doesnt have the reach to possess multiple, non-biological bodies at once.

hope this helps!

[howverychaotic]

Rereading Nona the Ninth and just saw Judith/Varun's speech to Nona and.

Oh.

Oh.

They love her.

The resurrection beasts have been searching for her, for ten thousand years. They want her back. They love her. They're not crazy monsters, they're trying to get their sister back. They call her green thing because of all the plants on Earth.

And they're all intelligent. They're sapient. They're seeking vengeance. They're being entirely reasonable. They're being almost human.

And when Mercymorn saw Varun she said "it knows what we've done to its sisters" or something like it - I don't have the quote at hand.

That's going to be the plot of Alecto the Ninth, isn't it? About understanding the planetary revenants. About maybe making peace with the resurrection beasts. And that can't happen until Jod dies.

And Jod can't die unless Alecto dies. Alecto is going to kill Jod.