When you think about it, it’s kind of hilarious how shittily things have gone for Ianthe since becoming a lyctor. That was her big moment, she won! She got to do her dramatic villain speech explaining to everyone how she outsmarted and out maneuvered them. Everything was coming up Ianthe.
Cut to like two days later and she’s down an arm, her sister is MIA, and to add insult to injury her triumphant rise to lyctorhood is being upstaged by Harrow’s romantic lobotomy stunt. This was supposed to be her moment and no one actually gives a fuck about her.
It’s kind of tragic. She became an immortal demigod by sheer force of will and raw intellect and still no one will give her the time of day.
She then spends months being negged by Augustine, rejected by Harrow, and basically ignored by John. Her reward for saving god from certain doom is becoming his emotional punching bag and managing his downward spiral while dealing with a zombie apocalypse and playing diplomatic negotiator over corpse zoom.
And to top it all off The Third House made her birthday a memorial for Coronabeth. There probably aren’t even any posters of her face.
going insane thinking about the harrow and palamedes friendship. harrow, who has never met another necromancer her age forming a bizarro 3D chess rivalry while pal worries about her safety at every possible turn. harrow, who is up to her eyebrows in paranoia and secrecy, trusting the sixth house with gideon unconscious and hurt, letting them into the ninth house quarters unsupervised. if “i cannot conceive of a universe without you in it” is goth for i love you, “death first to vultures and scavengers” has got to be goth for i love you (platonic). pal’s first reaction when harrow comes into his bubble in the river is to scoop her up in a hug, and at this point she doesn’t remember anything about him because cutting out all her memories of gideon is impossible without cutting out memories of the sixth, but she still makes him a skelehand to inhabit anyway. when harrow’s memories are finally whole, she tells dulcinea she couldn’t face pal knowing that his pen pal girlfriend died on her account, but the next time she “faces” him, palamades’s soul is in someone else’s body and harrow’s body is full of nona’s soul. he spends six months protecting and caring for harrow’s body (and nona obv), believing in the possibility of bringing her back to it the same way cam believed in him. “god, do you know i miss harrow terribly.” and by the time harrow comes back to her body at the very end of ntn, pal is gone forever, fully pauled. the last time harrow and palamades see each other as their complete selves is in canaan house, alive and unlyctored. two of the smartest and loneliest people in the solar system meet each other in the worst of circumstances and spend the rest of the story dancing around each other as fragments of themselves, trying to care about each other in the interim but never fully meeting like they did the first time. a friendship made almost entirely of missing the other person. “do you know i miss harrow terribly.” god. i need to lie down
nona and pash funniest dynamic of all time. what if you were a perfect killing machine groomed by a violent insurgency organisation from birth with a very concrete and all-consuming hatred of your government and their species which has been drilled into you by everyone you know and care for your whole life. and then a member of said species shows up on your doorstep and despite the fact that you keep telling her how repulsive and inherently evil she is she won’t stop looking at you with these big dreamy lovesick googoo eyes
the sun is coming up and i’m awake thinking about the tragedy of pyrrha dve.
oh to have known nothing but someone else’s existence for ten thousand years. to seal your life away for all eternity in service of someone you love enough to make immortal even if it means never seeing them again. but one day you wake up anyway, in a body that isn’t yours, and you weren’t even supposed to be alive but you’ve been given a family that you must love tenderly with your dead best friend’s hands and your dead best friend’s voice.
coming back was not part of the deal. but you are alive and you cannot die a second time. and you will see gideon’s features wearing all the wrong expressions in the mirror. you will eventually forget what his own smile looked like on his own face. you will be called by his name and you must answer to it. you wear your clothes strangely, and your posture doesn’t fit his shoulders.
you are the only one who notices that there’s anything wrong at all.
and you will live long enough to forget the difference.
