first read i thought this was it, but after reading the novella it seems more likely to be gideon’s rapier so…… good question?
oh wait - maybe this, with alecto now?
or another thing is, gideon’s mum had the sword in harrow’s dream bubble in htn - maybe it has something to do with her? could explain how it ended up in the ninth, i don’t think wake’s completely out of the story so maybe it ties back to her in a way
rereading nona the ninth and. that absolutely devastating “nobody locks me up anywhere” line? that comes immediately after gideon expaining that the hallway was warded because a) she was, for obvious reasons, a liability and b) ianthe was pissed at her. that line isn’t even untrue in a subtextual sense. it’s literally not an accurate description of her current situation. maybe the bedroom door wasn’t locked but there sure was an entropy field in the hallway.
just. god, it’s fucking killing me. the most upsetting possible reason to want the life she has and it’s not even true. it’s not even slightly true.
first read i thought this was it, but after reading the novella it seems more likely to be gideon’s rapier so…… good question?
oh wait - maybe this, with alecto now?
or another thing is, gideon’s mum had the sword in harrow’s dream bubble in htn - maybe it has something to do with her? could explain how it ended up in the ninth, i don’t think wake’s completely out of the story so maybe it ties back to her in a way
i have become unhealthily obsessed with trying to categorise the Nine Resurrection Beasts
• In Harrow the Ninth, chapter two, John Gaius tells Harrow there are nine Beasts. He says that they have killed five and that there are three left. Harrow mentally notes that the maths don’t add up, but knowing that Alecto is an RB makes it compute (3 out there, 5 dead, 1 imprisoned). Although frustratingly, John only enumerates three of the dead (Two, Six, and Eight), leaving six RBs left to sort; one is Alecto, two are dead, and three are threats.
• In Harrow the Ninth, chapter thirty-six, the Lyctors encounter the Seventh RB, and in planning for this showdown recount some of their previous attempts at fighting RBs; the late Two, Six, and Eight, as well as One and Four. This confirms that Seven is alive, and that One and Four are not Alecto. In this same chapter, Seven is described as both “brood of [Six]” and “packmate of [Eight]”, implying some close connection between this string of numbers but nothing concrete.
• In Nona the Ninth, Nona/Alecto speaks with the Seventh Beast, and refers to it by name; Varun. With Waruna being the old Malay name for Neptune, and Varuna being the Hindu God of the seas, this pretty solidly points to the Seventh RB being the revenant soul of Neptune. Varun recognises Nona/Alecto as being the revenant of Earth also.
So all that tells us is;
Described as “a great and incoherent machine”.
Dead.
Unknown.
Described as “a humanoid creature with a beautiful face”.
Unknown.
Dead.
Alive. Revenant of Neptune.
Dead.
Unknown.
Two of 1, 3, 4, 5, and 9 are dead. My guess is 1 and 4; Mercymorn doesn’t explicitely say that they are killed but they’re mentioned alongside the three confirmed kills. One of 3, 5, or 9 must be Alecto. My guess is 9; simply due to the “the Ninth” suffix for Nona and Alecto needing to refer to something. Also, it’s plausible that her identity as an RB went unknown until after the other eight had been indexed.
So if you add some speculation (canon in bold, guesswork in italics), you get;
Dead
Dead
Alive
Dead
Alive
Dead
Alive (Neptune)
Dead
Alive (Earth)
The trail runs cold there. The only thing left to do is speculate wildly based on the physical descriptions of the Beasts let’s go!
The Second Beast “spewed quicksilver…”. Quicksilver is the planetary metallic name for mercury, so 2 = Mercury. The Fourth Beast had “a beautiful face”. Beauty = love and love = Venus so 4 = Venus. The First Beast had “swords for wings”. Swords are for war and so 1 = Mars. The Sixth Beast had “enormous sphincters”. So. 6 = Uranus. The Eighth Beast “was red, and it had a single eye”. Possibly referring to the Great Red Spot? So 8 = Jupiter.
And… I think that’s about as far as I can go.
Dead (Mars)
Dead (Mercury)
Alive (Saturn/Pluto)
Dead (Venus)
Alive (Saturn/Pluto)
Dead (Uranus)
Alive (Neptune)
Dead (Jupiter)
Alive (Earth)
If any of this wild speculation disagrees with yours. I fully believe that Tamsyn has left us enough breadcrumbs to connect the planets, the houses, the saints, and the beasts together and we just need to find them
…
oh, and what about the Sun?
But what are they numbered after?
Not the order of the planets (varun would be eight)
Not the houses that inhabit the planets (the seventh is usually speculated on venus)
Not the order in which john killed them:
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The one about houses is the weakest, as it is based on 2 unconfirmed speculations, whereas the other two only on one.
Anyways I have no answers, only questions.
More questions and numbers and lists to add to this confusion:
They are not based on the order of the planets, but I’m gonna list them anyway otherwise I’ll get frustrated.
1 = mercury
2 = venus
3 = earth
4 = mars
5 = jupiter
6 = saturn
7 = uranus
8 = neptune
9 = pluto
But that does mostly correspond to the order in which John killed the planets, first from the earth to the sun and then the rest in order. He says he killed the sun instead of the earth but I think earth makes a lot more sense.
Then there is the planets that correspond with the houses.
1 = earth
2 = Mars (God of war)
3 = Neptune (babs has a trident knife)
4 = Saturn (Greek god Kronos who ate his children)
5 = Jupiter (“I come from climes of sulphur gas/I shine in plasma sheet/Er-hem-er-hem-er-hem, surpass/My spot a crimson feat”)
6 = Mercury (“The whole of the Sixth was huddled on the polar caps of a planet so close to Dominicus that exposure to the light side would melt the House clean away”)
7 = Venus (“There were other Houses that made their homelands on planets closer to the burning star of Dominicus—the Seventh and the Sixth, for instance”, and 6 is already mercury)
8 = Uranus (assholes)
9 = Pluto
This does not correspond in any logical way to the order of the planets, the order of the resurrection beasts, the order in which the lyctors first died or the order in which the lyctors ascended. But those are also lists and for completion sake I’m gonna list them.
The order in which the lyctors & Cavs died pre-apocalypse
1 = the nun (cristabel)
2 = A_s brother (alfred)
3 = C_ (cassiopeia)
4 = N_ (nigella)
5 = A_ (augustine)
6 = M_ (mercymorn)
7 = P_ (phyrra)
8 = G_ (gideon)
9 = earth (alecto)
The order in which the lyctors ascended and their corresponding houses
1 = john = 1th
2 = mercymorn = 8th
3 = Augustine = 5th
4 = gideon = 2nd
5 = cassiopeia = 6th
6 = cyrus = 3rd
7 = Ulysses = 4th
8 = cytherea = 7th
9 = Anastasia = 9th
None of the numbers line up and it is very frustrating.
Honestly I think that one of the main reasons for the animosity between Mercymorn and Augustine, aside from what happened with Cristabel and Alfred and simply not having the most compatible personalities, is the radically different ways they handle their grief, their emotions generally and their immortality. Augustine is all carefully cultivated charm, hollow humour, a genteel mask of nonchalance and elegance. Very fifth. And as Harrow points out, its all farce!! This man is an empty shell!! He avoids any earnest emotion, any genuine affect, like the plague. Now, Mercy is the stark opposite - she’s all affect, all earnest emotion. She looses her composure, she says what she thinks. She’s almost painfully blunt.
And I think they absolutely hate each other for how the other handles their grief, general emotions and life situation. I think Augustine is repulsed by how terribly earnest Mercy is - she carries her bitterness, her immeasurable grief, her fury and hate, on her sleeve. No filter, no mask. Mercy who yells at John, Mercy who flies into a rage at the mention of Cristabel, Mercy who never even attempts a personable, charming facade. Augustine cannot stand this - perhaps he resents her for how cathartic her approach seems to be, compared to his. She can be a fine enough actress, he knows, so why can’t she put any effort into suppressing her emotions like him a normal person? Now, Mercy!!! She explicitly reacts upset at Augustines carefully crafted compartmentalisation, his fake cool composure. She’s irate that he has gone through the same pain and grief as she has and yet plays at being so cool and unaffected over it. How dare he! How dare he casually talk about their cavaliers so calmly and jovially! Mercy is done masking her grief, her anger and frustration, done with making herself likeable and palatable. And yet Augustine made exactly that his whole personality, and it seems to work, at least on John. She is repulsed by his cooler-than-you attitude, which makes her seem emotional and unrefined next to him.
I have way too many thoughts about these old bastards
Just for context - because I didn’t catch that on my first read either until I started going back through! - there are a few instances that seem to suggest Pyrrha remembers at least some of her life pre-Resurrection. Off the top of my head, I know there’s one point where she refers to G1deon as G–, just like John does. Nona also says that Pyrrha calls her “Hairy Maclary”, which is referring to a series of children’s books by a New Zealand author. Here’s a link to a picture and some info about Hairy Maclary… I can definitely understand why Pyrrha would call Nona that lol. This one’s super interesting to me in that it’s such a fantastic example of the way Tamsyn uses memes and references so skillfully! In the previous books, most of the references are fairly organic in that they’re things that could conceivably be, you know, just things the characters say; the readers catch it (if they also know the reference! otherwise they’re fairly unobtrusive) but the characters themselves aren’t intentionally making a reference. This would be the things like “You can’t just ask someone why they want to be a Lyctor” and “a hunger that only thumbs could satisfy,” etc. The exception, though, is John. The “none Houses with left grief” particularly is SO fun from an exposition perspective (but if I start on that one I’ll never stop), and then of course we have Commander Wake Me Up Inside. The implication here being that John remembers these specific things and is intentionally making those references within the context of the story. Pulling that same expository trick with Pyrrha sets them up as both remembering… at least to some degree. The hints that we get from Pyrrha are such that it’s pretty unclear to what extent she remembers, leaving a lot of room for juicy speculation :)
When assisting with Harrow’s lobotomy, Ianthe tells her, “If you push your brain too hard, any surgery could simply heal over.” And in NtN, Pyrrha tells Palamedes, “You should be draining and replacing her fucking brain fluid… When Gideon and I designed that trial, I used to crack his skull and sieve it myself, just as a control variable… The only other people I put through that damn trial were Mercy and Cris, because only Cris didn’t mind being trepanned on the regular.” I don’t know exactly where the threshold is for pushing one’s brain too hard, but I suspect frequently draining and replacing one’s brain fluid is in that ballpark. Which is to say, it’s very possible that Mercy and Pyrrha (and potentially others) could have healed over from anything John had done to their brains.
Also, I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me as I was writing up that other post, but when Pyrrha’s telling Palamedes about how dangerous their uhhhhh living arrangements are, and how they’re risking brain damage… Pyrrha and G1deon were operating under somewhat similar circumstances for thousands of years. Cumulatively, it’s possible that G1deon’s brain was racking up damage that eventually eroded away whatever John had done. Another thought is that maybe the fact that G1deon died and Pyrrha didn’t is at play here.
It could very well be less dramatic than that, though. We don’t know much about how Lyctorhood impacts the brain, although to be completely fair, we also can’t say for certain how a typical human brain would function after ten thousand years of runtime either. Our brains are constantly wiring new neural pathways and rewiring and revising old ones. After thousands of years, might we be reaching a Ship of Theseus situation with regard to the neural circuitry impacting pre-Res memories? Which is a fancy way of saying, “Maybe it wore off.”
It could be all of the above, too. Assuming that Lyctor brains retain plasticity like we see in typical human brains (and I’m not letting myself think too hard on implications either way, because in sci-fi/fantasy make-believe land, neuroscience can be whatever you want it to be), we’d probably see that effect happening with the other Lyctors at roughly the same rate, but at least as far as we can tell (and that wording is intentional because I’m not taking anything off the table with this series), the others don’t seem to remember. So that might be contributing, but not sufficient on its own. BUT perhaps ten thousand years of rewiring PLUS ten thousand years of cohabitation PLUS however long of being “trepanned on the regular” PLUS G1deon dying might override John’s meddling.
We’ve still got so many open questions here regardless of what the specific mechanisms are. Like, I’d love to know when Pyrrha started to remember exactly. And did G1deon remember anything, then? It seems like he was Straight Up Not Having a Good Time so if he did remember, he might not have been relying on those memories much. Whatever’s going on, I’m sure it’s just as bonkers as the rest of the series!
The most fascinating thing about Ulysses and Titania is how little we know about them, especially considering they were “there” during all the pre-resurrection events.
John “knew” and “loved” those two before he ever even met Alfred or Nigella (and possibly Cristabel, but it’s unclear to me whether he knew her before Mercy brought her into the fold at the compound).
Harrow asked what it means for a child of the Ninth to love God. I think Ulysses and Titania force us to ask what it means to be loved by God.
In my usual fashion, the long post is long, so all my speculation is below the cut!
I love the conversation between Pyrrha and Pash about Wake. Like yes, Wake was ruthless, mean, and married to duty – and she loved her family. She loved her sister, she loved her niece, she was proud of the blood they shared.
This puts her feelings about Gideon in even starker contrast. She didn’t love Gideon. She didn’t want Gideon. She raised and nurtured unborn Gideon for the sole purpose of killing her at the right place and time, and hated every last goddamn second of it.
We could have just assumed Wake wasn’t familial. We could have just assumed she was cold and merciless without discretion.
But Tamsyn Muir wrote this conversation to make it very clear that this wasn’t the case. Gideon didn’t have an unloving mother, she had a mother who didn’t love her.
i kept wondering why wake left gideon alive here; she’d already shot mercy, she clearly has no love for lyctors - which is what gideon was, at that point - and it’s not like she had any particular maternal feelings towards her; the only name she’d ever given her was bomb. she was a thing to kill, a thing to detonate.
this post reminded me that she didn’t feel like that towards all family, towards all children. she spent years in gideon’s sword, a sword gideon probably took with her everywhere, while she chattered to her mother’s niche, while she trained to become a soldier, unconsciously following in her mother’s footsteps - maybe, after all, wake did feel a sort of fondness for her down the line. for her daughter that looked like her, trained like her, was the only person to talk to her in years. maybe she felt the smallest amount of softness for her in the end - enough to spare her life while there were bigger fish to fry, at the very least.
I’ve seen multiple locked tomb posts about Gideon’s vocabulary and how many hyper-specific or uncommon descriptors she uses and such tracing this trait to her rivalry with Supreme Nerd Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Which is very fair, but I think it’s ignoring the real explanation for why they are both Like That in terms of vocab, which is that they were raised in critical proximity to Ortus.
oh boy do i have prompts for you!!! literally anything with cam because i love her so much. cam and gideon? cam and pal? cam and nona? cam and corona? cam and pal and harrow and gideon? possibly these are not good prompts because. i'm just listing characters so let me get back to you with more elaborate prompts lol
i love the locked tomb but I find it super tiring that no one is able to have willing legitimate and critical discussions abt how tamsyn muir is not a race conscious writer at all, it’s very peak White Writer. and I find it is more exasperated in NtN (slight NtN spoilers here but nothing that major tbh). very rarely does tamsyn describe the skin tone of her characters, they’re pretty much aracial, her only confirmation of gideon and harrow being mixed Māori and camilla and palamedes being of “middle eastern” descent came from a Word Of God tumblr post. Even then, on the covers of GtN and HtN under the face paint you can clearly see gideon and harrow are both brown-skinned but by NtN harrow’s body is described as “skin the colour of the egg carton” and like that’s literally white skin. And when the cover of NtN was released ppl were rightfully saying that nona looked too white to be harrow’s body and ppl tried shutting it down by saying there are whitepassing Māori, well harrow was certainly brown-skinned on the cover of HtN if u looked more closely, so yes it is whitewashing.
Speaking of cam & pal, they’re described as middle eastern and look rather similar due to the very small gene pool in the sixth house, which has led ppl to surmise that the sixth house is deeply inbred. now that’s for interesting worldbuilding, but it’s in bad implications considering TM envisioned cam & pal (and probably the rest of sixth house due to high consanguinity) as middle eastern. Speaking of bad implications, John is heavily implied to be Māori: “P▬ said I looked like a Māori TV Pink Panther,” from a book of jod chapter in NtN. Now before this, John was merely described as brown-skinned, but making this imperialist head of a post-apocalypse, Christianity-inflicted, fascist empire an indigenous man?? wholly terrible implications, especially from a white New Zealand writer. I’m not calling TM a flat out racist mind you, it’s just simple media criticism of how blind white writers are to nuanced portrayals of race often.
‘The letter was wrapped around a black, folded-up bunch of angles: smoked glass, thin black frames, mirrored lenses. A little bend in one arm, but otherwise—you’d kept my sunglasses.’
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