zeph

yep . she/her/hers . I breathe on occasion

[xuanelle]

they may be doomed by the narrative but atleast they had gay sex

[midnightcrows]

“Ninth was my name,” said the new arrival. “Ninth was my hearth, and my homeland. Here have I come at your calling. None may return from the River unless he be bidden by blood-rite; tell me, why have I been drawn here?”

[z-gone-mad]

“None may return from the River unless he be bidden by blood-rite…” HELLO??? talk about a double meaning.

No one may return from the afterlife unless summoned by the oath of a warrior, yeah fine whatever.

Nona(Aecto) may return from the River because she is called to by blood(swapped bodies and anastasia’s line)???

someone please tell me i’m not A) reaching and B) just incredibly dense for not catching this on any of my rereads. anyway, old news atp but tazmuir’s writing never ceases to amaze me.

[babypears]

gideon & harrowhark commission

[z-gone-mad]

this post is more for my own documentation than anything but i have a feeling that this line may come into play in atn

[midnightcrows]

Commander Wake Me Up Inside

[taylachan]

“The whole place had the look of a picked-at body. But hot damn! What a beautiful corpse.” - Gideon The Ninth “He why nobody makes fanart of Canaan House? I should make fanart of Canaan House” I said before spending weeks painting this weird fanart idea while moving at the same time.  This is Gideon’s first time seeing Canaan House and it’s at its most beautiful.

[puffywiz]

Is this anything

[z-gone-mad]

no. it is everything.

[midnightcrows]

The Saint of Joy and the Saint of Patience

Based on the Leyendecker painting of course

[z-gone-mad]

courtesy of iris.studygram on tiktok (i think the video has been deleted) straight out of Melbourne, Australia.

[marceline2174]

Duchess Voltage, are you going to kill me

[marceline2174]

My Queen, are you going to kill me?

[z-gone-mad]

baru what the fuck. baru. what the fuck. BARU. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

[chai-penguin]

Thinking about this parallel today

[evilyoyo]

‘Harrow wouldn’t know how to complement Gideon because she is a wet rat goblin’

Wrong!!! Harrow spits out outrageously romantic compliments as soon as she lets herself not hate Gideon! The first compliment she says to Gideon is how good she is with her sword, the only thing Gideon might have enjoyed more than that is a compliment on her muscles!!

Harrow is the one that said “I can’t conceive of a world without you in it” and Gideon is the one that responded to that super romantic line with “sure you can. It’s just less sexy.” She’s the awkward one! Don’t let her hotness fool you!!

[z-gone-mad]

Awkward or avoidant and overly corny?

[mayasaura]

I love how Gideon has no idea how OP Harrow is. Like, she's fucking proud of her, at the end, but she just hasn't seemed to have clued in that her girl is not normal. By several degrees of magnitude.

Look at this, here:

Harrow calls bullshit on Dulcinea having turned Pro into a Beguiling Corpse because it should not be possible for a single necromancer to do it. Not even a necromancer in the prime of their power. And Cytherea considers this a fair hole in her story, and amends it to say that it wasn't her, it was all the heads of the Seventh House working together.

Harrow completed this spell twice, by herself, at the age of ten.

[special-lucky-chosen-one]

something that HtN only slightly touches on is that, even though the other lyctors think of her as an incomplete lyctor, she is VASTLY better than all of them at necromancy

[mayasaura]

Yeah!! Like @vassraptor points out in their tags, John loses his SHIT at Mercy after the soup incident for not spotting something up with Harrow.

She invents her own kind of necromantic healing by watching how it works for lyctors and figuring out how to replicate it intentionally. The only other necromancer we've seen with the ability to regrow a severed limb is John. I don't think it was a fucking coincidence that Augustine threw his lot in with Harrow over Gideon the First immediately after Harrow grew Ianthe a new bone arm. He saw who was more valuable as an ally by golly

[onefleshonepod]

i made a series of logical leaps loosely connected to this post about john's "price of resurrection." sorry to hijack the post but this struck me like a lightning bolt while i was in the shower and i had to write it all out as soon as possible!

1. yes, harrow has a very strong theoretical understanding of necromancy, but i suspect she was only able to create two beguiling corpses (and open the locked tomb) because she has thanergetic power most necromancers don’t have: she is carrying the souls of 200 dead children of the ninth.

2. harrow is sort of like a mini-lyctor – those souls are still inside her (abigail can see them, harrow sees them in the river, and john can see them too)

htn ch 10: “I say, Reverend Daughter, is it an ancestral Locked Tomb tradition for your spirit energy to be so diverse?” Abigail asked brightly. “I’ve counted up to one hundred and fifty signatures contributing to you, and there’s more…”

htn ch 14: John: “You have achieved incredible things. I understand your personality and your background, and I understand how they might turn natural talent into … you. But it doesn’t account for what I see in those moments when I can see you clearly.”

3. in the process of lyctorhood, a cavalier’s soul is consumed/killed and burns inside their necromancer forever – that’s the price of the power. (john and alecto are exceptions to this process, as is harrow with gideon, g1deon with pyrrha, and cam and pal, but that’s lyctorhood standard version.)

4. john called harrow “a type of resurrection,” and made a reference to “the price [he] had to pay” for the resurrection 10,000 years ago.

htn ch 14: John: “To all intents and purposes, your mother and father committed a type of resurrection,” he said. “They did something nigh-on impossible. I know, because I have committed the same act, and I know the price I had to pay. ”

5. we also know that the population of the nine houses is not at all the same as the 11 billion who lived on earth before the bombs. i can’t remember the exact numbers but people have definitely made posts on here counting it all up – iirc the population of the nine houses is around 1 billion if not less, so at least ten billion people or so died permanently and were not resurrected.

6. what if the process of resurrection was actually quite similar to the eightfold word of lyctorhood, but involved putting a soul into the correct, dead body instead of the incorrect, living body? what if the price of resurrection was basically the same as the price of lyctorhood?

7. based on all this, i hypothesize that when john resurrected people, he had to burn/kill a large number of souls in order to put one living soul back into a body and give it the thalergetic power to live again. given the population math, that might have involved killing around ten people/souls per person resurrected.

htn ch 14: “Harrowhark, nobody has the right to know,” he said fiercely. “Nobody has the right to blame you. Nobody can judge. What has happened, has happened, and there’s no putting it back in the box. They wouldn’t understand. They don’t have to. I officially relieve you from living in fear. Nobody has to know.”

is he talking here about harrow’s parents’ act, or his own act of resurrection, which only he and alecto know about?

also important to note (re the debate over whether john chose which of his disciples would be necros and which would be cavs or not) that in their process of resurrection harrow’s parents were able to control whether or not she was born a necromancer...

gtn ch 31: Gideon said, “You can’t just control whether or not you’re carrying a necro.” “Yes, you can,” said Harrow. “If you have the resources, and are willing to pay the price of using them.”

[mayasaura]

Not to contradict your point, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out the flaw in your math.

The Resurrection was ten thousand years ago. It's been over three hundred generations since the population was made up mostly of the Resurrected, and the numbers could have fluctuated massively in that time. The current population of the Nine Houses tells us almost nothing about the number of people John resurrected. But I'm sure he did only resurrect a small portion bc what would he FEED ten billion?

You're not wrong, tho. It's very plausible John might have used souls as raw material in the Resurrection. If not to resurrect people, then maybe to control who else became a necromancer.

[z-gone-mad]

We get a brief, vague, john-like breakdown of how many people he resurrected in NtN.

In the end, he ends up resurrecting millions, but no more than that. He also doesn’t wake a lot of them up.(again: brief, vague, john-like). I don’t have the exact quote on-hand but it should be on page 434 according to my notes. The following is under the assumption than John resurrected all & only Kiwis:

There would be around 7.044 million people living in NZ at the time of the bombs (calculated using the assumption that world population increases proportionally from 8 to 11 billion, because simplicity).

Let’s say a third of those people become necros, or 2.348 million people. Each individual’s aptitude comes at the cost of, say, 50 souls, totaling out to some 117.400 million souls just for necromancy. (assuming Harrow is 4x more powerful than average, which is underestimating tbh. I’m trying to be generous).

Even if each of the 7.044 million people cost 100 souls to simply resurrect (again, being generous), that’s only 704.4 million souls. The total cost of resurrection and necromancy is now 821.8 million souls. Not even one billion. Less than one tenth of the pre-res population.

Point here is, we can’t be sure if the “price” that John speaks of is literal. We have to keep in mind that he likely does not understand his power in metrics the same way that necromancers understand their power because his is intuitive: it’s not a science for him. I’m more inclined to believe that the price he specifically talks about was more moral than mathematical. Just reading the above quotes, he is still grappling for reason. A myriad later and he’s still trying to convince himself he has no guilt to bear by projecting onto Harrow.

I have no doubt that there was a literal price of the resurrection; that it is extremely relevant to AtN and the plot of the series as a whole, but the (janky) math seems to point to John being upset about the 10.178 billion souls he wouldn’t have used to recreate life.

[lady-harrowhark]

i may be the last person on this webbed site to put this together but… that “ah, ah, ah” thing that Nona/Alecto and Judith/Varun do a few times? like this?

and this?

and this one?

and this last one?

…do you think it has anything to do with… this?

[dendroculus]

at this point the house should just go for a new record. how many did they have to do in 1856? 133 rounds? we can beat that. it would be hilarious

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

[freknoidspeaks-deactivated20230]

I pray the rock 🪨 is rolled onto MTG, McCarthy, Boebert, Gaetz and the rest of these self-serving right wing idiots.

[z-gone-mad]

I pray that those who have been self-serving idiots cease to remain in perpetual idiocy, that they may open their eyes and un-still their brains.

[kangaruthi]