I don’t have very deep Takes about this yet, but it Makes Me Think, how ferociously Harrow clings to her lobotomy when she has no idea why she did it.
Like. Listen. Original Harrowhark, kicking and screaming and clawing, and being ready to die rather than fully eat Gideon, I get that. But Lobotomy Harrowhark? Has no idea who Gideon is!
All she knows is that she told herself to Do This, and so she Does This. No matter how miserable it makes her, no matter how much scorn and bullshit and MUDER ATTEMPTS she gets for it, Harrow holds herself fast to her past self’s promise. When she doesn’t know WHAT it is! Why she did it! She has no idea why this was important at all!!
I can’t quite articulate What This Mean or What This Says About Harrow, but isn’t it… fucking something. She is naked on the floor after almost getting killed (again) by the Saint of Duty, she has no idea why or what she did to herself, but in no moment does she ever consider undoing it. Man. MAN. HARROW!!
Thinking about how Palamedes Sextus killed himself to to save his cavalier’s life, in a direct inversion of the Lyctorhood process. And how he thought it would only take a week or two for someone to find his soul. And how he thought he was leaving Camilla with Harrow and Gideon, that they were all about to be rescued by the Cohort.
Instead Palamedes comes back and finds out they’ve been separated for the better part of a year. He finds out that Camilla spent months as a prisoner of war where she was interrogated and electrocuted and held at gunpoint. That she watched BOE torture Judith and watched Judith almost die. How the first time in their lives they are apart Camilla goes through months of traumatic shit and all the while she’s trying to super glue Palamedes skull back together.
That is already so much guilt to unpack and process and then the only way for Palamedes to come back is to literally hi-jack Camilla’s body, after everything else she’s already been through. He needs to survive so he can make amends, so he can save the world, but he cannot hug Camilla or look her in the eye or even speak to her directly.
The goddamn tragedy of Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect, I am UNWELL.
the way john could have made a whole new society that cared about each other and helped each other out and spent time making relationships with each other so that what happened on the first house pre-resurrection would never happen again. and then the way he didn’t do that and instead jumped right back into the imperialism and war that he used his powers to stop in the first place :)
who wants to live so badly—not for herself, not because she thinks she deserves it, but because it is her duty. harrowhark who lives every day with the knowledge that she is two hundred sons and daughters of her house. harrow, who lives every day with the knowledge that she is the only hope the entire 9th house has for survival. harrow, who knows that she was engineered to be a great necromancer, and spends every waking hour studying and working to be the greatest necromancer of her generation.
harrow, who says “i am a war crime,” “i’m an abomination,” “of course i wouldn’t be worth it”
(also harrow, who at ten years old got tired of being an entire generation’s worth of dead children? who decided to die, and then decided to live, and then ended up losing her entire family in one fell swoop? oh my god)
honestly we’ll need to make it a holiday like it’s a Goth Easter
for a second i was so engrossed in the locked tomb fandom that i forgot christianity exists outside of the context of books about necromancy where the main character is a butch jesus. anyways Goth Easter is still on
ALT
