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:
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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.
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
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
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.”
Keep making Angsty!Kirionas, she is just a delight to draw. AAAAAAAAAAAAA
also known as : when you would love to get hot and bothered but you only get bothered becuase there is an eldritch-horror-hole where your heart used to be and no one wants to get near that (not even you), save ianthe (euck) (and maybe harrow, but she isnt here, ISNT SHE?)
Oh, you know. John never does mention having any family other than his nana. It does seem like she probably raised him. And she died when he was a teenager.
Kinda puts a new spin on how he didn’t see the need to put an age limit on the lyctor trials.
Got a kofi to draw what I want so I decided to do a comic! I always really loved this scene from Nona the Ninth for some reason (I love Wake) and so here’s an interpretation of it. I challenged myself to only take the same time on it as I would a single page kofi (tho I still went over a bit) so it’s more painterly than usual, but it was a cool thing to try and do :>
[id: a digital portrait of Aim from Nona the Ninth. they’re a light skinned person with a messy blonde bob, who looks suspiciously like Jodie Whittaker. they’re dressed in a crumpled white shirt, a blue tie, black suspenders and a gray coat. they’re making the sign of the cross with their right hand, and holding a small, six-legged white dog in the left. there’s an orange halo around their head, and tree branches spreading from behind it. there’s an apple hanging from one of the branches. /end id]
Detail crop of a WIP where I’m painting details no one will be able to see in the final piece because my brain does not want to paint clothing todayapparently. But it’s fine painting stitching and filigree and even enjoying the detailing.
hey uh, i have good news and bad news… we revived your girl. it’s definitely her she has the stigmata. she’s still mega dead tho. yeah she came back wrong.
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