also the way kiriona/gideon reacts and withdraws when she sees cam and pal become paul. they are the love perfected by death. gideon was so mad in htn that harrow didn’t eat her because she couldn’t conceptualize that there could be a different way (harrow could not either, she didn’t have the time that cam and pal did to plan, instead of saying ‘no, there must be different way’ like them she just said ‘no.’) (no one could, not even god) — a kinder way, as pal said — but now it’s happened right before her eyes and she has to come to terms with that. at the end of htn gideon wondered if in death she and harrow would become harrowhark-and-gideon, gideon-and-harrowhark, and then months and months later after she has had her soul tied to a corpse alone she watches how in death cam and pal become cam-and-pal become paul, alive and new. and later in the tomb, when she yells at crux saying how dying is the only good he’ll ever do harrow, it’s the only thing any of the ninth ever knew how to give her, none of them knew how to live for her……how much of that is her berating the ninth, and how much of that is her berating herself. you know?