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.
this is so sad and you’re so right
it also makes me think about some of the themes regarding power hierarchies and exploitation? lyctorhood is this fucked up, final form manifestation of imbalanced power dynamics- one’s purpose is to eat the other, and the other’s whole entire purpose is to be eaten. and I think it explores those power hierarchies a lot obviously via Gideon and Harrow, both of whom have been formed by this power dynamic and know nothing else.
I think tlt asks questions about how queerness (both actual queerness but also any non-normative or subversive interaction with those structures) complicate those harmful cultural hierarchies, but also how they sometimes unavoidably replicate it too. what is necessary to dismantle? what is salvageable? how do we do something different, something better, when this is all we’ve ever known?
and palamedes and camilla add an interesting facet to that argument- that often the nature of these hierarchies is that they are inescapable, and often trying to escape them leaves you trapped and punished by them. palamedes figured out the implications of lyctorhood like halfway through gtn but he refused to even consider it. Camilla is more his equal than most of the other necro/cav dynamics and he subverts the dynamic further by sacrificing himself to save her.
but despite all that, she still ends up being tortured and suffering, they still end up trapped in the same body, apart from one another, either of their consciousnesses a zero sum game. but it IS still subverted in a way- they’re in Cam’s body, not Pal’s, and neither of them is consumed completely by the other (so far at least lmao)