Hey can you explain how wake got in the sword? And how wake did the whole revenant thing? Her storyline after her and johns baby is sooooo confusing to me
I’m not the best person to ask about this tbh I’m sorry 😭 My thought process:
- We know that she went directly from her bones to the sword (HtN 469), that anything strongly associated with her life or death will work, including anything that touched her murder weapon (172); however, Wake was kicked out of an airlock (so G1deon’s boot and No Air) and Gideon’s sword was still wrapped when she got it (418), so that seems like a dead end. We know that Gideon’s sword is of the Drearburh stock, which are traditionally not touched without gloves or bled on by anyone who isn’t the owner (323), and it’s at the very least the same type of sword Alecto used, but she didn’t overlap with Wake’s timeline, so that also seems like a dead end.
- On the other hand, we have Nonius forming a revenant link through Ortus’ “sheer passion” (453) for him; Gideon certainly had passion for calling her mother to her in spades, so I wonder if she could have done it by accident? There’s also the emphasis on blood wards being transferable through the blood of direct relatives, so maybe thanergetic links work the same way and Gideon bleeding on the sword at some point let Wake use it as a vessel. My final, least textually supported guess is that at some point Gideon fought a skeleton that included her bones and damage to them still counted as interacting with her thalergy/thanergy, especially since her revenant was still in them. Idk idk.
- Things become more clear-cut going into her HtN plotline. Since Harrow killed Cytherea with the sword she was in, she had a thanergetic link to her corpse and was able to use it to spook Harrow, alternately have sexy times and try to kill Pyrrha (and/or G1deon), and get her audience with Jod at the end. She also had access to Harrow’s head, presumably because Harrow washes the sword down with her arterial blood every night (59 - babygirl whyyyyy). Then Abigail and Magnus successfully exorcised her from Harrow and the sword, and Pyrrha destroyed her last corporeal anchor by destroying Cytherea’s brain (confirmed on 455 and 472)
- Presumably she’s currently in the River living her best afterlife. I mean, even if she has no way of knowing this in the end G1deon died surrounded by comrades, her niece successfully nepotismed her way into one of the most important positions of her organization, her bomb got the tomb open, and Pyrrha is stuck technically working under said niece while caring for a parade of casualties of devotion. Honestly she’s the closest thing this series has to a girlboss winning.
A couple of additional thoughts, if you don’t mind me jumping in!
This isn’t confirmed at all, but I’ve been working on the assumption that Gideon brought the sword to Wake’s niche to show it off and may have touched her sword to to Wake’s bones at some point. I’m basing this largely on the bit in HtN where Gideon says, “I used to sit by my mother’s niche and catch her up on everything. Things like: Aiglamene says I’ve fixed my hand placement when I block and pivot from the lower left. Things like: Harrowhark was a giant bitch today. (Told her that on the reg.) Things like: I can do ninety-six sit-ups in two minutes now. Absolute fourteen-year-old bullshit. Serious A-grade drivel.” Bringing her sword to show off to her mom seems like the kind of thing that would be in line with that, but again, that’s not confirmed at all.
Here’s what we hear from Wake directly when Mercy asks her where she’s been “hiding” for the last nineteen years: “‘Where - you - fucking - left - me,’ she ground out. "In my bones. Then a blade. In - that - fucking - hole.’” I’m assuming the “hole” in question is the drillshaft that Drearbrurh is in, but couldn’t say for certain.
It seems reasonable that she got from the sword into Cytherea’s body when Harrow stabbed her, but I can’t really figure out exactly when that transfer took place. There was the blow that killed Cytherea, but also on at least two occasions Harrow comes to lucidity with her blade in Cytherea’s body’s chest while on the Mithraeum, so it could be any of those times, or maybe she wasn’t staying in Cytherea’s body constantly. I don’t know!
A last note that, pardon the pun, haunts me: in the glossary included in the paperback of HtN, the Blood of Eden entry says, “On Wake’s Death, Blood of Eden withdrew somewhat out of the eye of the Houses to regroup, but were enlivened by the reappearance of their legendary commander in the form of a revenant.” I truly have no solid thoughts about how that could happen. Glaurica’s revenant made it back to the Eighth, but Wake seems to be an a whole other level than Glaurica, and also we really don’t have much info about the logistics of revenant travel or the timeline with regard to when Wake appeared to BoE. (I feel like there was a line in NtN that alluded to this but I’m about to go mow my lawn and I know if I start searching for that I’m gonna end up getting sidetracked and then it’ll be too late for mowing lol). Like was she going back and forth? Did she appear after Cytherea’s body was destroyed? Has she somehow learned to travel via the River? To quote Gideon, “So… what the fuck, basically.”