TLT Mega Theory - The Holy Trinity (+1) and the Flow and Role of Time
ALL RIGHT, OKAY, I talk about these all the time but I have FINALLY compiled the majority of my evidence all in one place. Talking about both at once will make this longer but there are some points where they're relevant to each other, so please bear with me as I try to explain a few things that have become fundamental to my read of the series so far and where it's heading.
The core of each main point is:
1) Gideon IS God just as much as John and Alecto are; they share the same singular massive soul. Because souls are permeable and Harrow has been carrying a fragment of Alecto for years, all four sometimes know things they shouldn't because the others do.
2) Time is physically broken, the River is the same thing as or built out of FTL's "chrono well", and John's ultimate goal is to very literally "start over" by turning back Time.
A few smaller tangential theories to these that aren't strictly necessary for the main two to work but would add something and have become big parts of my read are also:
Steles used dead languages to draw power from the ancient dead to warp Time and shorten journeys, hence "less to do with travel than they are to do with transmission."
John's eyes are still gold, and Alecto's always were; the gold was always from her, it doesn't make sense no one has his brown eyes anymore; the solar eclipse eyes are literally being eclipsed by other souls John draws power from, likely The Ten Billion, who are also likely the specific power source of steles.
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Table of Contents
Souls and Identity - An Establishing Point
Gideon: Lesbian Jesus, God the Daughter
The River, the Chrono Well, and TLT's Non-Linear, Non-Synchronous Time
Permeability of the Soul: Evidence of Overlap and Things They Shouldn't Know
(Because this post is around 9,000 words. A lot of that is book quotes of course, but yeah there's a reason I've been working on this since August. Here's a Google Doc version if that's easier to navigate/read in chunks! Feel free to only read part, if you're only interested in one side or whatever the case may be.)
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Souls and Identity - An Establishing Point
First, let's talk about Identity in TLT, and to what extent it's tied to the Soul. At a glance, they seem one and the same, but there's evidence it's more complicated than that. We the effects of permeability in Lyctors, pieces of their cavs bleeding into them, yes, but... In this interview with Tamsyn Muir, she talks about Mind vs Matter.
Minds in The Locked Tomb lose to matter nine times out of ten. (This is linked, not coincidentally, to my experience of psychosis.) Gideon’s mind is constantly in danger of being sucked away into the storm drain of Harrow’s matter. Revenants are minds that have temporarily anchored themselves to foreign matter, but over time the matter exerts itself, and the mind starts to fall apart. So when you get a mind that’s big enough not only to resist the matter it’s attached to but actually to start burning that matter up…well, what kind of mind could possibly be so powerful?? (Significant looks at camera.)
And we see that kind of distinction drawn directly in the text, too, like this line from the beginning of HtN Ch6:
Your clinical brain rose to the fore as your meat brain shied and ran around and barked like the badly behaved animal it was.
And then particularly with that line about revenants, we can look at Wake, who's managed to keep herself together for 20 years, and Pal, by whom Harrow was astonished for lasting [6-or-8] months, and who ultimately made it over a year and could have held on longer. They prove it's doable! But we have to look at how exceptional even Pal, let alone Wake, is, and how most human revenants don't last long.
And once they're not anchored to anything, we have to look at ghosts. Unanchored souls. And while the ghosts in Harrow's River bubble seem perfectly reasonable, well, they ARE still also revenants. They're anchored through Harrow and/or the bubble, as is Matthias when he's called in.
HtN Ch43:
“But you are—” “A ghost,” said the woman smilingly. “A revenant, more precisely.”
HtN Ch49:
“I find myself in the astonishing position of having created a revenant link through—well—sheer passion.”
But once any human soul is unanchored? Also HtN Ch49:
The House of the Fifth always skinned itself over with such airs of civilisation, with so many manners and niceties, but they were spirit-talkers, and speakers to the dead. And the dead were savage.
And there's consistent stuff about tempting ghosts with blood, including with steles, so I won't quote it all, but this bit in HtN Ch10 is especially interesting, when theorizing about calling a Lyctor's ghost:
“You would need something for it to feast on,” said Harrowhark, and not to Magnus. “Yes.” “A ghost that old—the feeding—” “It would be unprecedented,” said Pent. She was talking a little bit too much, too fast. “I mean, there’s the issue of whether the Lyctor in question is even dead. That’s the first thing to consider. As a speaker to the dead, I really am at my best when people are not alive … If they are in the River, whatever the depth, I can only hope that a handful of minor relics and the new blood of my beating heart will tempt them to the surface.”
So the physical meat brain is a significant component. Revenants make due with other anchors, but struggle to hold together for long; they're unstable and gradually lose themselves, and yeah, waiting in the River so long adds to the madness, but Wake, Magnus, and Abigail were all difficult to tempt back even when freshly killed. Abigail never gives any indication there are any easy clients with her job, either, only some less difficult than others.
Add to all this the unique case of Nona, who lived a whole six months as this unique person. But when Alecto was switched off, she said, "I still love y", and when she woke up, she finished, "You." The piece of Alecto that Harrow carried was one piece, and while the part that was Nona is now within her and will surely be important—you can't take loved away, after all—for Alecto as she consciously exists now, that jump in time was seamless, despite also existing elsewhere.
All this establishes that, while very deeply connected, while identities often latch onto and travel with souls, a sense of identity IS separate from the spiritual energy component of a soul.
Which validates the read that Harrow (with Alecto's memories) is being literal when she says in John 5:4:
Your energy is limitless and you can sustain your theorems without a thought—forget about them—because she is so enormous, and you and she are one.
And that John is truthful saying the same thing in John 1:20:
As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you … I hid you in me. And when we were together … once the shaman had claimed the sun … I became God.
I'll go ahead and add a bonus theory I have that the solar system is a system, too. Short version: Dominicus could effectively BE their soul or its primary manifestation, and every true RB's. "There's no life on the sun or most planets", sure, but the energy for all life on earth comes primarily from the sun, or more rarely from the planet's core. It'd be a true "communal soul" like John described planets having, with each individual planet being alive unto itself but an extension, like a Herald is to an RB, but all of them connected; those connections would just be less direct that John and Alecto's. It would certainly explain all the sun imagery for both John and Alecto, too! As well as add something to the eclipse eyes, with solar eclipses like that, with that iconic rim of light, being a phenomenon that as far as we know is unique to earth. But I digress. Anyway!
Their connection is ALSO why the John in Alecto's dream recognizes Harrow and is aware of things happening in the waking world. That's not exactly fully guarded waking conscious John, but it is real John, overlaying his memory self in the same way Harrow is overlaying Alecto in the memories.
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Gideon: Lesbian Jesus, God the Daughter
SO, now that we've established people can have separate identities, thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and still share a soul, we can accept: Gideon can share the same soul still be herself (mostly).
We're going to use, to my delight, a magma metaphor. Imagine the literal Earth, where the surface land is John, the ocean is Alecto, and everything from the deeper crust to the core is a melted jumble that's equally both of them. Now imagine as DNA gets messed with, it triggers a volcanic eruption that forms a new island. That's Gideon, and because everything else is so big, no one notices at first.
The planet is God, and they're all part of it. They are the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Daughter, and God the Holy Corpse. (Harrow is the Church, who will become the bride of Christ, and well, you know. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”)
Harrow couldn't consume all of Alecto any more than John could; Nona is a fragment, and so much of Alecto was still slumbering in the Tomb, and Alecto still existed in John. Similarly, we know she didn't consume all of Gideon, but it's possible that although she pulled in Gideon's identity, she never could have pulled in all of the spiritual energy she was attached to. This could also be why the body fails to rot. Either way, her consuming Gideon is chomping on (most of) this island. Of course the sleeping ocean and the bigger faraway lands don't notice, especially when she's already swallowed up a few big gulps of the ocean years ago. Gideon gets lost in the jumble. Anything that happens to that island barely grazes the ocean and wouldn't affect the rest of the land at all; you could fully destroy it, crush it down into the ocean, and it would only affect it, but it would still always be part of the whole.
In this, I would argue that while Alecto's mind was enough to start overpowering Harrow's matter, both Gideon and John have weaker minds, which is to say, human minds. After all, we can see extremely similar effects on pre-God John that Nona had on Harrow. Her mind, even with less direct connection, deeply harmed his matter, too, and even his mind still being present unlike Harrow's with Nona did little to deter it. His mind now has had 10,000 years of experience being bound to this soul, but Gideon had only had 18. Being unknowing headmates with that fragment of Alecto could also add something; similar to how a soul will snap to its body like a magnet, the spiritual parts of Gideon might have been trying to melt into Alecto even as her mind was trying to melt into Harrow's physical brain. This paragraph is all a little loose and speculative I know, I'm just saying there are multiple angles from which it could work, so I hope you won't take "shouldn't Gideon have been just as overpowering if she was tied into the god soul" as an immediate dealbreaker and will stick with me here.
With all this in mind, if separate souls in proximity are highly permeable, of course memories will bleed between facets of the same soul. And Harrow, having been in proximity to Alecto and then chomping on Gideon, should also be getting that bleed.
So I have a lot of lines marked as evidence of specifically them (and especially Gideon) knowing things that they shouldn't, and John knowing things he shouldn't about Harrow, and some other evidence of overlap and of Gideon having more power than we tend to realize, but we'll come back to that in the section after next.
For now, let's talk about Gideon's divinity. Her healing, the multiple deaths she came back from completely on her own. At minimum, before Harrow's Lyctorhood, there was the nerve gas as a baby and the Avulsion trial. Debatably, did she really survive every time Crux turned the heat off in her cell, etc, or did she just come back? The only time she doesn't revive is when her soul is tampered with, and even then her body fails to rot even a little—incorrupti, like the first corpses touched by Alecto's power, to a point the same thing happens in both cases where everyone is freaked out at first but then the tests they keep escalating trying to incite change just start becoming really funny.
And then the thing is, neither Gideon nor Alecto in the back of Harrow's mind is enough to help with her healing, but either of them fronting auto-revives, auto-heals rapidly, even in Harrow's body. Nona is shot in the head and her brain just fixes itself, let alone lesser injuries. Lyctors very specifically don't regrow lost extremities on their own, as seen with Ianthe's arm, but Gideon auto regrows Harrow's thumbs. She dies three times fighting Heralds and a fourth time in the River at the end. Her immortality is very notably tied to her soul, or at least more to her soul, not (fully) to her genetically inherited body.
Also, the fact that Gideon dies four times in Harrow's body implies she was ever alive in Harrow's body, and Dulcie says the body isn't being puppeted. I have another recent post about how Kiriona probably shouldn't be mega dead and it's weird that she looks worse than her literally lifeless corpse, and how here healing powers must come from somewhere, just being genetic doesn't fit the established worldbuilding, but I won't repeat more of that here.
Now, before we delve deeper into the ways the Trinity and Harrow blur together, it's finally Time.
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The River, the Chrono Well, and TLT's Non-Linear, Non-Synchronous Time
This is such a big thing and I feel like the conspiracy board meme seeing it everywhere since I started looking.
This theory kicked off with Ten Months Before The Emperor's Murder. While HtN jumps around and is made to be confusing, there is a very clearly labeled timeline marking where it's jumping. But Act 1 takes place 9 Months Before. Epiparados, which is stated to be 3 days after the events of Canaan and weeks before John talks to Harrow in Act 1, is specifically 9 Months, 29 Days Before the murder. Yet Ch19, which is explicitly after Act 1 and "a few days into your internment within the Mithraem", is labeled front and center at the top of the chapter as 10 months before. This doesn't make sense! But while it's the most glaring instance, there are a lot, lot, lot more. In Harrow the Ninth specifically, there's a consistent two month range of fluctuation.
In Ch9, G1deon says Varun will be there in 10 months, which would align with Harrow's arrival being 10 months before. HOWEVER, in Ch19, only a few days later and the same chapter labeled as 10 months before, G1deon says the Heralds will arrive in 8 months.
In Ch33, Palamedes is identified as 8 months dead with 6 month old bones on the same physical page, before it goes back to 8 months when she talks to Pal later in the chapter.
Ch36 is... maybe I'm just reading it wrong. It's labeled at the start as one week before the murder, but then it has an elided section that refers to right after Harrow killed her fourteenth planet a month ago, and then another elide before it says "by this time", it had been about two months since her fourteenth. And okay, her fourteenth planet is the one she's on starting in Ch32, and it's also labeled 2 months before, so maybe the "one week before" in Ch36 doesn't kick in until we get to the "by this time"? But it still feels odd to start with "in those last long terrible days" and "you prayed to live a few more weeks" before jumping to a point where it had been one month ago and then jumping again? The specific ways it's framed makes it feel shaky...
In Ch43, when Harrow remembers everything in the bubble, Abigail asks how long it's been outside, and Harrow says 9 months, the middle ground of that 8 and 10. (Also the estimate for how long human pregnancy lasts, so there's thematic stuff there with Wake, but yeah.)
But it's not just Harrow the Ninth.
Ages are finicky. Some of it could just be where birthdays fall, or Cam could just be wrong or lying for the sympathy factor / making BoE feel worse (though Six For The Truth so the latter seems unlikely) when she says Gideon was no older than 17. It's interesting that specifically that detail seems questionable so often, but sure, maybe part of that is just my own brain being bad at math.
But the big one is Harrow herself. She's 10 when she opens the Tomb, except when she's not. It says 10 nearly every time. But twice (that I've caught), it says she was nine, once in GtN Ch19 when Gideon recalls how she'd "walked in at just the wrong moment. She remembered that nine-year-old Harrow’s mouth falling slightly slack", and once in HtN Ch3, the closest-to-omniscient-PoV chapter in the series, which says, "She was nine, and she’d made a mistake."
But let's look closer at that. At when Harrow broke into the Tomb.
When Gideon confesses to Palamedes what happened in GtN Ch30, the narration says, "Just hours before, she’d wrestled Harrow down in the dirt, and Harrow had scratched until she’d had half of Gideon’s face beneath her fingernails." In HtN 51, she describes it as:
You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go you couldn’t even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven? Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?
Phrasing it as a question is poignant, but wouldn't it be just like Muir to do so to hide in plain sight that it's genuinely unclear...
Meanwhile, when Harrow talks to Gideon near the end of the Pool Scene of GtN Ch31, she says:
I won’t bore you with the magic or the locks, or the wards or the barriers: just know that it took me a year to walk six steps inside, and that it nearly killed me then.
In HtN Ch3, it says:
One very bad day—when it seemed as though everyone hated her, and as though this were a completely correct way to feel—with bloodied fists and a bruised heart, she wrote a note explaining her suicide then went and unlocked the door. Unexpectedly, this did not kill her; and what did not kill her made her curious. She was much older before she could cross the threshold.
Gideon says, repeatedly, that she caught Harrow the SAME DAY as their fight, that she didn't feel bad telling on her because of the fight earlier that day. Harrow says, repeatedly, that it took her a year to get through the Tomb. She was 9. She was 10. Was she 10? Was that the day she decided she wanted to die?
And while we're looking at HtN Chapter 3:
Afterward, she hated to sit in the apse during chant and listen to a weird, thuddering beat disrupt the prayers of the faithful, a distant striking at the back of her head that she had taken for someone being out of time.
Out of sync with the chanting, yes, but also very specifically chosen phrasing (in the same vein as things like "instantiate the Trinity" also referring to the first nuclear test, etc)?
The Body brought her total peace, but in its presence she lost track of time; she would sit with her hand very close to the dry, dead hand of her obsession, and when she looked up the hours would be eaten away. Or she would check the time and be astonished and discombobulated that it had been only a few minutes.
Not an unheard of way to feel, but especially interesting compared to the rest. (ALSO, there sure is the way this parallels how G1deon would "sometimes... forget" and lose chunks of time when Pyrrha fronted, and Crux looking at a visibly gold-eyed Nona at the end of NtN and deducing "You've gone away again, my Lady" and trying to coax her back. The odds that Alecto ever possessed Harrow outright in that first year are at the very least worth considering... But back on track.)
She was nine, and she’d made a mistake. She was seventeen, and she’d made a mistake. Time had repeated itself.
Interesting phrasing considering John's desire for a reset button...
So let's just go down the list of other time-related stuff that I feel strongly plays into this.
HtN 1:
In these digestions of time the Body would come. She would put her cool, dead hands on your forehead and close your pumping eyelids with her fingertips, so that you could not see the sword nor the people.
Weird way to phrase that, fascinating implications when comparing digestion to the phrasing of "hours eaten away" and all the themes of consumption present in the book. (I find the parallel between this and Alecto coaxing John to sleep in the period post-apo and pre-Rez by stroking his forehead interesting as well, but I digress.)
When the Body appeared time could be relied upon to work as it ought, rather than melting away like chips of ice only to reappear in unexpected places.
This is in direct contrast to how the Body worked previously, in the first year after her parents' deaths. Much speculation could be done about why. Given the Body's eyes only become their true gold by Harrow's perception after she eats part of Gideon / becomes a Lyctor, and various speculation others have done that Harrow in HtN is partly transposing the emotions of memories with Gideon onto the Body etc, maybe it's Gideon's presence that makes time feel more stable, or something? Or could be something totally different! But the one thing that's notable for certain here is once again the Body's presence is directly correlated with affecting the passage of time.
HtN Ch2, from John:
"I mastered Death, Harrowhark; I wish I’d done the smarter thing and mastered Time."
The capitalization is part of the direct quote, and the series is very particular about that. It only capitalizes Hell when it's very specifically referring to the literal place beyond the stoma. In the prologue, John says "Give it hell, children" and that's not capitalized. Even phrases like "Go to hell" with the loose concept of a place isn't capitalized, only when it's very specifically that place. Which raises some massive questions about Death and Time as John refers to them here.
Notably, all he says here is that he hasn't mastered Time, not that he has no control over it. If anything, wishing he'd mastered it implies it was ever on the table, doesn't it? And:
"Then time is against us," said Ortus. "Time was always against us," said Abigail. "Oh, time . . . time," said a voice from the doorway. "Time means very little . . . mastery does. This temple stood for ten thousand years untouched by all but time's clumsiest pawing . . . but then its master was the Master, for whom even the River will part. Time is nothing to the King Everlasting." It was Teacher.
Another reference to mastery of time, and pretty directly saying John has some sway over it! And:
"I hate to push you, Harrowhark, but we have so little time."
Why, exactly, John? Interesting too to compare with Aiglamene in GtN 4 saying "I used to think we were waiting for something … and now I think we’re just waiting to die." And with Doctor Sex's "crackpot theory" about how both thanergy and thalergy saturation in the universe were much higher right after the Resurrection, and how he was doing that research right around the same time Mercy and Augustine started planning for Dios Apate Major. Is time running out on a universal level, either because this system isn't sustainable or for a more esoteric and literal reason? Much to consider...
And now let's look closer at John. During the Soup Scene in HtN 25:
Half a dozen arms shattered him in the soft electric light from the overhead panels. You let out your breath, and coalescing scythes destroyed intestines—lungs—heart. Then you fired upward, toward the brain. And God said, “Stop.” The world slowed down. Augustine and Mercymorn stopped, arrested in the act of half-rising from their seats. Ianthe stopped, left arm paused, outflung, to shield her face. You stopped, sitting upright in your chair: your bones somehow rigid and still, and your flesh chilly and rigid around those bones. The shrapnel spray from the Saint of Duty did not stop—it cascaded across the table like the crest of a pink waterfall, pitter-pattering down on bowls and the tablecloth and the polished dark surface of the wood. But what remained of him stopped too, half man, half rupture—his prurient details hot and white, naked insides clothed with the sinus-drying burst of the power of God. [...] You stared down the table at him: at the blank, remote faces of your two nominal teachers—at the frozen ivory stillness of Ianthe, her hair now whitish pink—at space outside the window, where the asteroids themselves seemed to hang in tranquilized arrest.
It's interesting here that the viscera doesn't stop, but everything else freezes. Most importantly, even the asteroids outside freeze, a wild detail to include if it's not important. Looking at the people alone, you may say, "Didn't Palamedes also do this to Gideon?", except... It wasn't a full stop for everything, and the inconsistency alone implies something else. But also later, in HtN Ch50:
“Now it comes out,” said Mercy. “Now, I am afraid it all comes out. You would have, wouldn’t you? And when you swore that you’d help evacuate the Houses, you never meant that either, did you?” “Stop,” said God quietly. And everyone stopped. There was a flash of—I don’t know what. If it was necromancy, it was of a kind I’d never felt before. It was too sudden: more taste than theorem. There was this citrus taste in your spit. Everyone shut the fuck up, which, as spells go, was probably pretty useful.
Gideon experienced Pal locking her body, and this wasn't that. She says IF it was necromancy at all, it was unfamiliar, and, you know, John's not a necromancer. He wasn't born or Resurrected with a thanergetic nervous system, and necromancy is but one facet of his power. He has geomancy, we see him raise stone out of the sea in NtN. (I suppose you "could" link the asteroids to that, but still wild.) He has creation powers, he makes the tooth bouquet for C— and N—'s wedding (and, logically, probably the flowers in Augustine's room that it points out Harrow doesn't know where he could have gotten, most or all of the food on the Mithraem that others complain has a weird aftertaste (a citrus taste? either way possible duplicating original food the way he grew the cow wall etc), the others' tobacco, and so-on). And yeah, also Time powers.
And in HtN 50, when he reconstitutes:
White light. It bleached the insides of your nose and the back of your throat. It hurt coming out your ears. It bled out your eyeballs. It wasn’t a flash of light, more … a suddenness; when it was gone—as though it hadn’t even existed, but had been a luminous hallucination—time stopped. That light took colour from the room—everyone was a slow-motion cavalcade of greys, of eyes caught widening, of mouths parting in stone-shaded articulations of shock. I’d tried to turn us around like there was a grenade to fall on—and then, in that thousand-shaded grey, I saw—the red. [... ] First a softly tinted pale colour like a sunrise pink, [...] like dust motes beneath a ray of sunshine. [...] It happened in an instant. It happened over a myriad.
Again slow-motion, much moreso this time; he hasn't mastered Time, after all, so still not 100%. EXTRA fascination to me the way color physically drains out of the room, just like when Silas siphons in GtN. Clearly something going on with the stoma here, given how Augustine describes siphoning. (Given it's Gideon's PoV in both instances, it's also possible it doesn't look like that to anyone else, that her divinity provides that filter? But yeah.) Also included, there's a lot of descriptors used throughout his reconstituting but the sun imagery is used multiple times, so that adds a bit to the tangential theories. But most importantly here, Gideon directly says "time stopped" and then describes it being both absurdly fast and absurdly slow.
She says it again afterward, too.
Augustine lifted his eyes to the Lord. They were the same grey as they had been in the stopping of time.
And of course!! There's the way all the Lyctoral Labs in Canaan have been preserved in time, and the way Palamedes in his intro notes how weird the time signatures in the building are, in GtN 12.
“Six readings,” the second voice continued. “Oldest is nine thou. Youngest is, well, fiftyish. Emphasis ish. But the old stuff here is really very old.” “The upper bound for scrying is ten thousand, Warden.” Yes, it was a woman’s voice, and not one Gideon had heard: low and calm, stating the obvious. “The point is here, and you are far over there. Nine thousand. Fiftyish. Building.” “Ah.” “Fiat lux! If you want to talk improbable, let’s talk about this”—a scrape of stone on stone—“being three thousand and some years older than this.” A heavy clunk. “Inexplicable, Warden.” “Certainly not. Like everything else in this ridiculous conglomeration of cooling gas, it’s perfectly explicable, I just need to explic-it.” “Indubitable, Warden.” “Stop that. I need you listening, not racking your brain for rare negatives. Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being systematically lied to on a molecular level.” “Maybe the building’s shy.” “That is just tough shit for the building. No; there’s a wrong thing here.
(And I mean, two things can be true, the building probably was cobbled together, but from stuff even older than the Resurrection and as far as we know not touched in around 9800 years, so there's that.)
John can absolutely manipulate time on some level. And with that in mind, given his intentions for a reset, as shown with...
The poem at the beginning of NtN:
You told me, Sleep, I’ll wake you in the morning. I asked, What is morning? and you said, When everyone who fucked with me is dead. When everyone we loved has gone or fled, That’s morning. Empty’s just another word for clean. Let’s put this first-draft dream of mine to bed. In the appointed hour I’ll pull up your sheets. I’ll kill the light, Lie down beside you; die; and sleep the night. This time will be the time we get it right: Forgiveness not so hard, nor anger long; Our graves will be less deep, our lies less true.
Magnus in HtN 45:
Magnus coughed in a genteel Fifth House way, and said, “Who wait for our Lord’s touch on the day of a second Resurrection.”
John in HtN 14:
God said, “I will shepherd your dead two hundred. I will take on their burden to mourn and cherish in more ways than you’ll understand right now. And I’ll remember your parents, who did such a godawful thing to my people and theirs. I will remember it until the universe contracts in on itself and wipes clean what they did, and makes blank such an indelible stain. I acknowledge to you and to infinity that I am the Emperor of the Nine Houses—the Necrolord Prime—and that their stain must be regarded as my stain. Consider it my crime, Harrowhark. I pledge myself to making it right.”
Which fully lines up with sentiments expressed in, for example, HtN 2:
“Harrow, you won’t kneel to me. I won’t let you, not until you know exactly what it means when you do it. It hurts me to see you perform obeisance when—if you knew the full story—you might strike me full in the face instead.”
Like he's never done a good job hiding his guilt. And in John 5:4:
“There can be no forgiveness for those who walked away,” he said. “Just as there can be no forgiveness for me—even though I rip the very fingers from my hands … throw them into the jaws of the monsters who hunt me … as I run from them across the universe, end to end. Something will satisfy them eventually, but nothing satisfies me. Nothing.” He drew his gaze away from her—his black-and-white, chthonic stare—and looked out over the dunes. He said, “But that’s the grace of it, Harrow. If I’m God, I can start over. The flood, you know? You can wash things clean. That’s all the end of Earth was … making things clean. It gets dirty again, you clean it again. Like those old power-washing ads. Spray and walk away, right?
The "kill the light" and "die" from the guy whose life is tied to the system's sun always makes me suspicious, especially when coupled with the "walk away" expressed here among other. I've begun to believe he doesn't intend to survive whatever he has to do to reset things, only live long enough to see it through, but that's more speculative.
Anyway, so we have a guy who 100% wants to Undo the sins of his past, to Make Things Right, and who laments never having enough time but has shown significant power over Time, even if not quite mastery yet. So yeah, I absolutely think his reset button plan involves physically rewinding the universe.
(Which, of course, sucks! Because You Can't Take Loved Away is a literal statement, and true of any feeling or experience ever, because that's how time works. You can never change that you felt something in the past, even if you can stop feeling it now. John's plan, if I'm right, very literally would take loved and everything else for the past ten thousand years away. ... Also. John. I'm... Okay graves less deep implies maybe trying to make a universe without death at all and that's interesting when coupled with Paul's "death can also die", sure, but. What the fuck does "our lies less true" mean. Is that not already how lies work. John what does that—)
And it all goes back farther, too. A problem with FtL, as denoted in John 19:18, was:
getting locked in the chrono well, you know, moving so fast you were stuck doing quantum wheelies. They’d come up with something where you could oscillate out so long as the ship was attuned to a prearranged spectrum outside. I still don’t understand the maths. It’s going to take me ten thousand years to understand it.
Awfully specific number there. Generally present asides are in quotation marks but I wouldn't put it past the unreliable narration to blur the two just a little. But yeah, so they had this very experimental tech to guide the ships out using an external signal, and until they are, they're stuck between time. This also means that ships could potentially come out staggered across time, meaning BoE could be largely descendants of some of those escape ships and there could still be a few left. (Perhaps two? The number of parts left in The Message? But that's another tangential theory.) It means Wake could have been on one of the ships, or the child or grandchild of someone who was, someone who personally remembers Earth or grew up with someone who did, to give her a much more personal investment in everything, AND John could also still be hunting down the actual literal guys who ran away, rather than caring so much about their descendants.
Spray and walk away, right? Sometimes I think the only reason I haven’t done it already is that I can’t bear the idea that I wouldn’t be able to touch them—that they’d still be out there
And they would, wouldn't they? If he reset time, but these guys were outside of time? If they're somewhere and some-when his power doesn't quite reach.
Incidentally, you guys remember in HtN 6 when John is explaining River travel for the first time and Mercy has the reaction "Teacher. It is the River. There is a perfectly good water metaphor waiting for you."
:') Yeah what John had said to prompt that was "I like to think of it as descending into a well."
Bonus points, Harrow describes the sensation as they first enter the River: "You filled up with water like a rubber doll dropped into a well." And the doll imagery specifically there, too...
ALSO? In John 1:20, in the very end:
The moment I found the fleet spinning up to enter FTL, it was too late … I could only grab one of them … and you and I held it in the palm of our hand. I was in there with them. All those frightened people. All those runaway rats. He stopped. She said, “Then?” He said, Then they were gone … lost to me in time, forever. That’ll teach me not to hesitate.
I absolutely think that wording is literal! Especially when there's. -looks up and down- so much else...
More, in HtN Ch33:
"You cannot build in the River! It is a dimension of perpetual flux—defined space is nonsense here—you might as well try to wall off time with bricks and mortar."
Yet there are rocks and plants and debris on the short, they do sort of build with it, and then there's the Tower.
Palamedes mentally duels Ianthe for 4-5 real world seconds and it's so long for them, and you can chalk that up to dream/mind time, but when he gets ahold of Naberius's body he specifically says "And now I have fought through time, and the River, and Ianthe the First."
And I'm STILL not hitting everything. There's when Abigail calls Matthias Nonius, "Time seemed to gel" and later "Glutinous time unglued." John talking about Cytherea with "I could’ve gotten through to her, given time. Time—it’s always time—she was overworked and underloved." Gideon with the teens in the basement, "Gideon could hear nothing but the sounds of old machinery running in the same exhausted way it had run for thousands of years, kept alive by perfect mechanism and necromantic time." When Nona gets shot in the head, "Time exited her body."
There's. SO many offhand lines like that. I'm leaving out many just that I have marked and I might not have marked them all.
And with the permeability and considering John's plans, in the fight against Cytherea, it becomes really interesting that Gideon's specific thought is feeling like if she could just fight hard enough, she could rewrite time and save everyone...
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Permeability of the Soul: Evidence of Overlap and Things They Shouldn't Know
That last section was so long and this one has so much too so thank you if you've stuck with me this far. This is gonna be a bunch of quotes, some more analyzed and some more rapidfire, either giving potential evidence of Gideon blurring with John or Alecto even before Harrow's Lyctorhood, Gideon's general divinity, and/or any of them knowing things they shouldn't through the ways their souls are tied together.
I'm just gonna go down my ebook highlights list somewhat in order, except when things need each other for context; first the big ones, then rapidfire short and/or more debatable ones.
(ALSO for full clarity: I absolutely EXPECT that SOME of these are nothing. There's just so much that could tie into this that it also feels unlikely all of it is wrong, you know?)
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In GtN Ch1, page 1, in the middle of the second paragraph:
This late in the equinox no light would make it here for months, in any case; you could tell the season by how hard the heating vents were creaking.
Speaking of time warping, this implies fucking Pluto has been made to have an orbital year matching Earth's??? But also, I love the implication that this is late autumn, given months of darkness rather than (relative) light, which means by the time Gideon has sulked a while and then done three months of training, arriving at Canaan House happens close to if not early spring, which: (A) given GtN is "in the myriadic year of our Lord" and HtN is "in the close of that myriadic year", means John made the other Houses run on standardized southern hemisphere seasons, which just pleases me, but also (B) makes the imagery used for her auto-revival after the Avulsion trial in GtN Ch20 all the better:
Waking up had an air of resurrection, of having spent a winter as a dried-out shell and coming back to the world as a new green shoot. A new green shoot with problems.
And yeah this is jumping but the way it mirrors Nona being "the worm with problems". The way this specific evidence of Gideon's divinity and immortality is subtly but directly associated with Alecto...
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In GtN Ch1, Gideon first "pulled her watch out of her pocket" and then "balanced her watch between her knees", and later "checked back on her clockwork" and uses "clockwork" once more later. She uses the terms interchangeably. She identifies "a very old watch" in the Second Lab in GtN 19. In NtN 1, in an exchange between Cam and Nona:
“I’ve got a clockwork.” “Cam, that sounds strange, nobody here calls it a clockwork, they say watch.” “Good to know. Stop trying to miss breakfast.”
Nona usually thinks "watch". Harrow thinks "clockwork watch face" once in the River, in HtN 21. No one else from the Houses ever calls it a watch.
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In GtN Ch4:
“‘Hello, I’m the woman who helped Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s fascist rise to power,’” said Gideon to nobody in particular.
Gideon, who lives in the Nine Houses and dreams of joining the Cohort and slaughtering the faceless enemy on the frontlines to claim territory and win wealth and glory and doesn't seem to have any problems or reservations with that setup, knows the word "fascist" and has a concept of it as a bad thing. Do we think John has kept that word and concept around? Do we genuinely? Or is it more likely he had that understanding but now tries not to think about it?
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In GtN Ch19:
When she was young she used to have nightmares about being on the wrong side of the door of the Locked Tomb.
This is so self-explanatory it could go in rapidfire but it deserves a highlight. Adding to the Gideon-Alecto parallels specifically: Much later Kiriona gets the line "no one locks me up anywhere", Gideon was interred in the mausoleum of Harrow's mind much like Alecto, etc. Not to mention Gideon's prodigious skill with a two-hander, Alecto's favorite toy that she was buried with.
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In GtN Ch37:
As they fought—and fighting was like a dream, like falling asleep—they could see Cytherea was made up of different parts. Her eyes had been taken from somewhere else, two blue spots of someone else’s fire. Within her chest another conflagration burned, and this one was eating her alive: it smoked and smouldered where her lungs ought to have been, bulging, dark, and malignant.
Dream imagery and. HEY. They should not be able to see anything inside Cytherea. Throughout HtN, Harrow alone cannot see past Lyctoral masking. By proper-Lyctor Harrow with Gideon there alongside her can make out some details. Even John can't 100% see through masking but references "the times I can see you clearly", he can see some sometimes, and they can here, too.
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In HtN 7, there's some interesting comparison of the River to the ocean, with "fish-eaten" bodies, as well as flesh specifically from someone's flank (the one period where John committed physical cannibalism 10k years ago was "thighs mostly" so that part's debatably of interest), but more importantly John says of the ghosts, "They're not as numerous as I would have expected." Mercy replies, "I don't like this."
Ghosts clear out in the presence of RBs. The fact that they expect any shows the same doesn't apply to John, but perhaps Alecto's presence within Harrow? Perhaps Alecto's and Gideon's and John's presence all in one place, all three facets of that RB...
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Almost-Memories and Stuff the Narration Calls Out
In GtN Ch11, when Gideon duels Naberius, "The Third’s main-gauche dagger was as gorgeously wrought as his hair: chased silver and Imperial violet, the arms of the hilt curved and hugging inward in a way that tugged on her memory but did not grasp the right file." This is never elaborated on. Maybe she's half clocking that it's a trident knife, but Ortus's sword was an heirloom passed down, so it wouldn't be out of the realm of plausibility for Naberius's to be, too.
More compellingly, Gideon entering the facility in GtN 20: "Gideon climbed down into the dark with the distinct sensation that she was still asleep: somewhere in a dream, a dream she’d had a long time ago and suddenly remembered." Especially compared to the Gospel of John chapters being shown in a dream!
In the GtN epilogue, Harrow specifically doesn't know how she knows immediately who John is. When he says he'll renew her House, the narration asks, "(How did he know about that?)" And in HtN 14, when he mentions knowing her parents are dead, "How he knew that—the secret you had broken yourself attempting to keep hidden from the rest of the Houses, from the rest of your own House—you didn’t know." In HtN Ch6, he talks about keeping their souls attached to their bodies, and:
“Physical transference past the liminal boundaries,” you said, and were surprised by the knowledge coming out of you, as though it weren’t your own.
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The Memes (and General Humor!)
Just. The memes. Yes, sometimes it's just the narration, or a mental picture it's painting where If You Know You Know. Sometimes it's Muir being cheeky on a purely meta level, where things can fly 100% under the radar if you don't know the reference because it's such a normal sentiment. "They died on the way back to their home planet" is a Simpsons reference but Silas Octakiseron doesn't seem the type to have told a single intentional joke in his life, you know? (I say this with so much love in my heart he is a good baby.)
But the ones that are really specific, the ones delivered as silly or sharp wit, the ones with wording that feels unusual at best if you don't recognize it, those are almost exclusively John, Gideon, and occasionally Harrow, who both carried Alecto's soul and grew up around Gideon. (If anyone has examples proving this wrong, by all means!) I don't have every meme I've ever caught marked, but things like "While the rest of us were developing common sense, she studied the blade" or "jail for mother!" Ones that sit next to or just below "none house, with left grief". Also the sheer saturation with Gideon, even when it's the lower key ones, like saying of her dirty magazines, "I read them for the articles."
The one really glaring meme I can think of outside of those three comes from Palamedes in The Unwanted Guest, where he does the Phoenix Wright Objection. This startles Ianthe and then also startles Pal, who isn't sure why he did that, "it just felt right." But there's another soul in there with them, one who quotes Shakespeare and when asked if it's from something says "it's complicated." Dulcie is no longer in the River and never will be again, she's crossed over and is reaching back to Pal, so it's implied she now knows things outside of time as well. This would also play right into him quoting the Bible as a description of her new appearance, and doesn't exactly hurt the idea that other anachronistic references have spiritual significance.
ALSO just. Gideon's sense of humor. Her love for ass jokes, just like Nona. She and John having almost identical wording with thinking puns are funny automatically. This "could" be a coincidence, her comic books (how many could she really have gotten through her whole life?) "could" be doing sooooo much heavy lifting. And the Ninth isn't a monolith; for all that the population's down to like 100 people tops and most of those are old and highly traditional, there's at least Aiglamene breaking the stereotype, there's probably a few more. But I just... have to strain suspension of disbelief reeeaaaaally hard to think GIdeon being raised in that chilly dark environment would end up not only Like This in general, but THIS close to John and to Nona. The flippancy, the bits of vanity, the humor coping under stress. "Like father like daughter" but that's not something that's actually genetic, it's at least suspicious...
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Animal References
LOTS of references to animals I'm not sure they'd still have, specifically and only from Gideon and Harrow. Like we definitely still have animals even in the Houses, Silas knows what a dog is to call Camilla one, etc, but I question if we'd have these animals, if John would've resurrected them or found them sustainable enough for thanergenic planets.
From Gideon, "one of the faithful decided to go the whole hog", "making her look like a roadblocking bat", "this horseshit idea", Colum "came down on Ianthe like a wolf on the fold" which also references not only wolves AND sheep but uses a term for a sheep enclosure that in modern times is mostly associated with the Bible; Kiriona says she was "playing possum".
From Harrow, "you're a hog", "His dark eyes were downcast behind their thick black lashes, the sort Harrowhark had always fancied you might get on some nice domestic mammal, like a hog", "the thanergy feeding on the thalergy as locusts fed on wheat" (another one not remotely exclusive to the Bible but that does have some strong association), thinking of Lyctor's cav-autopilot as fighting "like a highly disciplined tiger."
She (and/or Gideon) thinks of Mercy's brief tantrum as resembling "milking an invisible and giant cow." And come on man. All the better for that Gideon doesn't recognize what's probably a cow skull over the Second lab door. (The crux of the theory here is, to be clear, not that they know everything each other knows, but that inconsistent bits leak through.)
Harrow also notices Ianthe's (inherited from Cyrus) eiderdown, so I have to question... Do we still have eiders? Like, maybe, we definitely still have birds and they're typically easier to sustain a population of than large mammals, but would John have resurrected such a specific very-northern hemisphere bird? Or could that be a pre-Rez relic preserved in time that Harrow shouldn't recognize? Highly debatable ofc, but again, worth squinting at at least.
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Nona's Dreams
NtN 1:
“I like it. I like the water, I like her hands.” “Her hands?” “They’re the things around me—maybe they’re my hands.” [...] “The arms go really tight around me. They’re her arms, definitely.” “Is she familiar?” “Maybe. I don’t know.” “How do you know they’re ‘her’?” “I don’t know.”
NtN 7:
“I’m touching her hands. She’s touching my hands. But in the dream it’s always my hands, remember, Cam, I’m touching my own hands but they’re not mine.”
I know it's not surprising for her to conflate with both when she was sort of headmates with Gideon for nearly a year, but it's interesting just how much that confusion is emphasized, and how it's inconsistent whether she's certain or not.
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True Rapidfire
GtN Ch1, literally page 1 - "Then Gideon whistled through her teeth as she unlocked her security cuff, and arranged it and its stolen key considerately on her pillow, like a chocolate in a fancy hotel." - Maybe fancy hotels still exist and do that, maybe she's read about it in her comics, but like... Imagine that being a glaring hint on page 1...
GtN Ch2 - Gideon calls Harrow a "psychopath". Hate this, using it this way perpetuates and unfair stigma, I do advocate about that a lot but for the moment. Harrow doesn't have a word for her schizophrenia or her psychosis, she's just "insane." Has that word survived colloquially or should Gideon not know it?
GtN Ch2 in the skeleton fight - "More and more cannonballed her down to the ground" - It takes her a minute to recognize the gun in the Second Lab. Do we think the Nine Houses still have cannons?
GtN Ch4 - "which gave her the appearance of a marshmallow pierced with four toothpicks of differing lengths" - Toothpicks I'll buy. Wood is incredibly rare but they could be plastic. But marshmallows? Do they still have wetlands in the Houses?
GtN Ch5 - “I don’t have ten thousand years of tradition, bitch,” - Or do you, kind of? Hehe.
GtN Ch7 - "She had drifted out like a black ship in sail." - Where would they still have ships with sails?
GtN Ch7 - "Gideon was discomfited to find the gaze of the bloodless Third twin on her and Harrowhark both, her pale eyes like sniper sights" - Gideon later struggles to identify a gun. Why is sniper sights in her offhand lexicon.
GtN Ch13 - "Surprise, my tenebrous overlord! Ghosts and you might die is my middle name!" - Ianthe does also say "ghastly and obvious are my middle names", so that might just be a phrase that's survived in general despite House naming conventions not having middle names. But given Dulcie's knowlege outside time and the other theory I buy that Ianthe had a brief-death-experience at birth that fuels her fascination with "the space between life and death", I could... maybe see Ianthe also getting a little anachronism as a treat. Maybe. This is a shaky one. (Edit: Someone pointed out Magnus makes a middle name joke too, a little differently but still proooobably not this one.)
GtN Ch25 - "Gideon’s hand was still gripping the key ring with the facility key she had just now so frantically used, and the red key on it—and lightning struck." - Gideon had never experienced rain until Canaan House. Why is that metaphor in her lexicon?
GtN Ch26, Cytherea - "You weren’t trained in the traditions of the House of the Locked Tomb, and you’re nothing like a Ninth House nun. And you fight like—I don’t know." - The way she cuts herself off, especially given she clocked those golden eyes...
GtN Ch29 - When Gideon sees skeleton servants fishing, "Her brain registered this as making total sense," which is interesting phrasing.
Not that Harrow getting permeability is at all surprising but just as broader evidence of it, anything that's new-but-probably-accurate or otherwise from a real source in the River Bubble Canaan could be attributed to it, like the 'M says Nigella eats like a child' note or the infamous Cool S lol.
Not that we have any doubt Alecto would be connected to both by this point, but a fun thing in NtN 31 - "In her hands was a huge black-metal pike about the same height as her, with an edge that gleamed in the light. Nona couldn’t stop herself looking at that edge: for some reason it made her palms sweat, and the back of her neck itch again." Potentially her experiencing Gideon's feelings about the iron railing?
SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.
In conclusion Gideon is as much God as John and Alecto and time is Broken.
