Hey. Hey guys. I've talked about this before a bit but I just did some math, and... :)
Okay so you know how John talks about the cost. Harrow asks why he won't resurrect Cohort soldiers and he says “For the same reason that I cannot come back to the Nine Houses. The cost is too great.”
And when he learns the details of Harrow's conception, he says “To all intents and purposes, your mother and father committed a type of resurrection. They did something nigh-on impossible. I know, because I have committed the same act, and I know the price I had to pay.”
I've said before that alone implies Resurrection isn't an on-off switch but more specifically, if the point of Harrow was to keep the bloodline unbroken, to mortgage the whole House's future, it doesn't make sense to not leave even a few other kids. It wouldn't have to be a lot! Two or three boys and two or three girls so Harrow would have someone viable to continue the line with, assuming they weren't really really banking on Ortus (who would have been inappropriate even without the age gap by House standards, mixing the heir and cav primary lines like that); just a few so she'd have options and more practically spares if not all of them survived to adulthood. Surely the difference between 200 kids (including Gideon by their calculations, not including Ortus who was spared on purpose) and like 195ish kids couldn't have made that big a difference, could it?
So the ONLY way this maneuver makes sense is if they straight up weren't even sure 200 would be ENOUGH, or had very solid reason to believe it would but it would be risky to use any less.
Ten billion is the big number, right? John says ten billion near the end of NtN. Cytherea calls herself the vengeance of the ten billion. Wake implies John is getting some kind of power from the ten billion. Teacher says the depths of Canaan House are haunted by ten thousand million angry ghosts, which is another way of saying ten billion. There are definitely roughly ten billion murdered ghosts from the original apocalypse that John didn't resurrect.
But in John 5:4, Harrow says: “I want to understand why she was angry—I want to understand the mathematics, now that I have seen them for myself. I want to know how many of the Resurrection are left, and how many you began with, and what the discrepancies are. I want to know where you put them. They didn’t go into the River. I want to know why she was angry … and why you were terrified.”
Just before, she says: “You resurrect some of them. You wake up fewer still. You start out with a few thousand, then, later, some hundred thousand, then millions, but never more than millions.”
And in John 20:8, in the fourth paragraph of the whole book, John says "The Mark-R cryo cans had room for eleven billion people, easy."
And maybe it wasn't quite eleven billion. Maybe that's him saying there was room to spare. But to say eleven still implies well over ten. 10.5, 10.8, you know? But we know there HAD to be at least somewhat more than 10 billion because that's the number of those still hungry for vengeance and he did resurrect some. So lets say it was close to 11 billion originally. Let's say there are 10 billion left in the stoma/Canaan/wherever now.
ONE billion divided by two hundred is five million. :)
Did he never wake up more than millions because he didn't feel like it or because he didn't have many more.
500 people sent to the Ninth is a small village worth at best, not even qualifying for a town. Its cathedral alone had room to seat 1,000 people, so it wasn't just that that the Ninth itself was too tiny, or 'just' room for that population to grow. It's a little stingy a number for a miracle of God, isn't it? I'm definitely not saying he gave her all he had left, but maybe there was a reason he didn't want to give up 'too much' of his 'backup' supply.
Maybe the question we should be asking is what really happens to souls used for fuel like that? Was necromancy a side effect of the process? Is Harrow's case to still have so many energy signatures unique, or was everyone Resurrected, including some of the later-Lyctors and their cavs, very similar to her? It does feel like Harrow is special for how this affects her, doesn't it? A prodigy who can't yet imagine the scope other Lyctors work on and had a much more thorough archive of knowledge to build her own on rather than them having to figure things out from scratch, but whose sheer breadth of knowledge might in some ways rival or surpass even their experience?
So if every single person Resurrected DID require roughly 200 souls to bring back, and they didn't end up like Harrow in the process, what happened to those other 995 million souls? Because if Resurrection Beasts are pissed off about Lyctors violating the souls of their cavaliers, YEAH, I can sure imagine destroying, burning up, or permanently ruining hundreds of millions of souls would super extra get John on their shit list even beyond what he did to the earth, huh.
Bonus: "Teach me, Lord, how to count that cost" would hit so much different if we later confirm she's known that cost since she was old enough to know anything at all.
