might be high time for a locked tomb reread…time to choose a character to focus on and recontextualize everything they do and say in the light of what i now know…
“Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy (…) we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop … but my bones will rest easy next to your bones.”
I think it was @swordrogue that made a post about schizophrenia in the locked tomb, and how maybe The Body is a hallucination that harrow’s mind supplied because she needed a reason to live.
I’ve been thinking about this more and it makes SO much sense. Over and over again in HtN, it’s reiterated that harrow does not want to die! she wants to live!! and while that’s framed as a result of her wanting to live for whatever’s in the tomb, I think it’s a good reflection of her character outside of that. when she opened the tomb and saw the body, it makes a lot of sense that as a mentally ill, extremely traumatized child, her mind would give her exactly the thing she needed to see.
also, it would make a lot of sense how John reacted to people trying to break into the 9th house tomb! When he asks Wake why she was at the ninth house 19 years ago, he says “There’s nothing there.” (this ties into the theory that I’m still convinced of, that the 9th house tomb is false and Alecto’s real tomb is at Canaan house).
especially because like, idk, The Body is almost too beautiful to harrow. how beautiful would a sleeping stranger have to be that you dedicated your life to them on the spot? unless maybe you were desperate for your life to mean something, unless maybe your mind provided you with the perfect person to live for. I think it makes a LOT of sense given what we know about The Body- it looks REALLY similar harrow (especially with the details about her philtrum and how they match the descriptions of harrow from gideon’s POV), and it wears what Harrow wears throughout HtN. (and I’m not gonna start on how horribly sweet and sad it would be that Harrow hates herself, but when her mind comes up with the perfect person to love and to live for, it looks almost exactly like her).
I’m also wondering if there’s any functional difference between a ghost and this sort of hallucination. a soul who cares about something SO much that it manifests in the world, and attaches to something that matters to it? a hallucination created by the mind of a little girl who was desperate for something to live for? symbolically, at least, it could function similarly.
So did harrow need a reason to live so badly that she created a version of herself that was important enough to her that it manifested into a real soul? I feel like it’s possible; she’s got souls to spare. John says that her parents essentially committed a kind of resurrection, he says he knows because he did the same thing and paid the same price. Bear with me, because I’m also tying in my Alecto-is-Earth’s-RB theory, but I think that that would set a precedent for all of those dead children dying at once and coming together to form a kind of pseudo-resurrection beast, a kind of collective revenant.
I know it’s far fetched but hear me out, I think maybe The Body is a sort of resurrection beast, maybe formed from all those souls killed at once by the creche gas, funneled into harrow and then given a purpose by her desperation. AND I think maybe that is the soul that’s in Nona.
Nona is like a child, she knows nothing about the world, but she is characterized almost entirely by her love of being alive. Her name is Nona, which means nine, and what better name for all the souls of the ninth? She loves herself and her body (Harrow’s body), and thinks she’s beautiful. Sure, it could be an amnesiac Gideon or Harrow, but we know from the narration that Nona knows it isn’t her body (she talks about being on borrowed time, not as if she’ll regain her memories soon, but as if she’s a different person entirely). And if you bear with me on the idea that Alecto is actually buried at Canaan house, then Alecto has no reason to be in Harrow’s body! But The Body does—its been there the entire time.
sorry to self reblog but I can’t believe I didn’t include this as evidence in the original post- at the VERY beginning of harrow the ninth, in the dramatis personae section, G1deon’s name gets clumsily exchanged for ORTUS. Gideon Nav, however, is NOT replaced in the same way, instead it’s unreadable, and definitely looks like a ton of names all written on top of each other over and over. there’s something going on there and I think it’s part of this theory, I think those 200 souls are still with her
I might be wrong about this, but I think magnus, abigail, and augustine are the only tlt characters frequently mentioned to smile and/or laugh in the books (maybe except jod), and I think that’s a really interesting parallel. considering magnus is a representative of the 5th, and augustine is its founder.
in many ways the house representatives at canaan are kind of adjacent to their founding lyctor (the ones we’ve seen so far) and it’s so so interesting to see.
but what interests me most so far is how magnus and abigail are brighter, more alive versions of what augustine pretends to be (or maybe used to be), whereas silas and colum are the exact opposite in comparison to mercymorn. so far they seem to be almost hollow representatives of the rather one-sided values mercymorn founded her house on, but because she and what she stands for have changed, so has she.
on the opposide side of the spectrum, the current 5th house representatives are animated, genuinely kind and polite people. magnus is frequently genuinely cheerful, even when no one else seems to be. but augustine, who has been broken by so many years of lyctorhood, can only pretend to be similar.
whereas mercymorn had to become more present to oppose her house’s traits, augustine had to fade until he’s not much more than a reflection of what he could’ve been.
this is so so interesting to think about what the eighth represents. that they’re supposedly the most religious house, the most devoted to god. it’s heartbreaking to imagine mercymorn as that, as someone utterly devoted to god over and over until she realized slowly that it was empty and that he had taken everything from her. and it is in keeping with the themes of the series- devotion and hatred are sisters and maybe it wasn’t hard for mercy to be full of both
not to draw conclusions that will probably immediately be disproven when I read nona, but I’m thinking a lot about the dynamic of the old lyctors compared to the people at canaan house
imo, this series seems to discuss the way that official and oppressive systems get turned human over time- how a harmful, twisted hierarchy (that of the necromancer and cavalier, for example) inevitably strays from the horrible trap it was designed to be (epitomized by mercy and augustine, who are still trapped within it). over time, people explore that framework, interpret it in their own ways, subvert it, turn it inside out. you get twisted versions of it, like silas and colum, but you also get new and wonderful versions of it, like abigail and magnus or cam and pal.
they didn’t know what lyctorhood was designed to be! they didn’t know how sinister “one flesh, one end” actually is. all they know is that they love each other, and that love kind of redefines what a necro-cav relationship COULD be, and what it is in so many instances. and the proof of that is that of ALL the houses that showed up at canaan house, none of them but ianthe would have gone through with lyctorhood.
did that mean the cavaliers were objectively worse at being cavaliers? maybe! but I think the series is arguing that love is what redefines those horrible traditions, and in light of those new definitions, the old traditions become flimsy by comparison. mercy and augustine are trapped. that’s what being a lyctor means to them and it always will. but the story isn’t written in stone yet for harrow and gideon, or for cam and pal! it’s a tradition that has done violence to them, and they’ll carry that forever. but beside that old and twisted tradition, someone like cam kind of stands out as an even more perfect cavalier than one who would see their entire purpose as sacrifice.
not to draw conclusions that will probably immediately be disproven when I read nona, but I’m thinking a lot about the dynamic of the old lyctors compared to the people at canaan house
imo, this series seems to discuss the way that official and oppressive systems get turned human over time- how a harmful, twisted hierarchy (that of the necromancer and cavalier, for example) inevitably strays from the horrible trap it was designed to be (epitomized by mercy and augustine, who are still trapped within it). over time, people explore that framework, interpret it in their own ways, subvert it, turn it inside out. you get twisted versions of it, like silas and colum, but you also get new and wonderful versions of it, like abigail and magnus or cam and pal.
they didn’t know what lyctorhood was designed to be! they didn’t know how sinister “one flesh, one end” actually is. all they know is that they love each other, and that love kind of redefines what a necro-cav relationship COULD be, and what it is in so many instances. and the proof of that is that of ALL the houses that showed up at canaan house, none of them but ianthe would have gone through with lyctorhood.
did that mean the cavaliers were objectively worse at being cavaliers? maybe! but I think the series is arguing that love is what redefines those horrible traditions, and in light of those new definitions, the old traditions become flimsy by comparison. mercy and augustine are trapped. that’s what being a lyctor means to them and it always will. but the story isn’t written in stone yet for harrow and gideon, or for cam and pal! it’s a tradition that has done violence to them, and they’ll carry that forever. but beside that old and twisted tradition, someone like cam kind of stands out as an even more perfect cavalier than one who would see their entire purpose as sacrifice.
I think it’s also worth noting that if Ianthe had actually had the cavalier she “should” have had—Coronabeth—even she wouldn’t have gone through with it. The only reason she went through with lyctorhood (besides her lust for power) is because she didn’t care about Naberius. He was objectively a perfect cavalier, as evidenced by Gideon’s duel with him, but just like with Gideon’s duel that perfection was only a veneer. He was only technically perfect, just like he was only technically Ianthe’s cavalier. Corona asked why Ianthe took Naberius and not her because “who even cares about Babs,” but that’s exactly the reason she chose to kill him over her. Ianthe may be a cold bitch, but her insistence on making sure that Harrow’s letters specify that Harrow isn’t allowed to harm Corona and her reaction to Harrow suggesting that she should have killed Corona instead of Naberius both show that she wouldn’t have gone through with lyctorhood if it meant killing her sister. So if not for the technicality of Naberius third wheeling the twins due to their parents wanting a “matched set” of necromancers, there would have been no houses present that would have willingly gone through with it
you are SO right and i’m so glad you brought it up. lyctorhood is an impossible framework, that asks every necromancer and cavalier to do an inconceivable thing. the only reason ianthe seemed to conform to that tradition was because her situation, by nature, created a loophole for her.
on paper, she gets away with a griefless lyctorhood! she’s the perfect necromancer to naberius’s perfect cavalier. she excels at consuming people! (and who cares about babs! he excelled at being consumed.) except she’s fucking haunted by coronabeth who she failed to kill, who she loves and needs and is tied to from birth. her circumstances allowed her to escape the trap of lyctorhood, but she ended up in a different trap altogether, where she loses her would-be cavalier anyways.
idk maybe i’m reading too much into it, but i love it as a discussion of systemic power and hierarchy. its an unattainable ideal, and the only sustainable version of it is a subversion (ie every non-lyctor version of necro/cav love), essentially a failure of that hierarchy. and those who do seem to conform successfully are miserable/trapped in the tradition they’ve conformed to. and then, when you look closer, even they are imperfect! idk if this is where the series is going, but so far imo its saying that no one gets out of the system unscathed, and most people don’t even get out alive. except maybe the people who subvert the whole system and in doing so, find something salvageable there. and i don’t think that’s ever gonna be ianthe bc she fits too perfectly into the trap
ALT