on the bright side, i think i figured out why wake refused to redirect oxygen away from baby gideon’s bio-container at the expense of her own life. and coincidentally answered a series of seemingly unrelated questions that had plagued me for weeks, like why wake pursues harrow into that river bubble after saving gideon-in-harrow from mercymorn, why harrow alters her memories of canaan house so drastically when abigail assumes harrow only needed to excise all references to gideon, etc etc…..
i literally cannot paraphrase this without sounding insane so uhhhh fuck it here goes. did mercy and augustine devise both gideon and harrow’s conceptions as part of their plan to jailbreak john’s shitty blood ward?
…………hear me out. bc i think i may have explained half of htn in one fell swoop
one thing i wanted to add about parallels- i think harrow’s interaction/timeline with the body mirrors wake’s story with gideon. part of why htn was pretty confusing to me on the first read-through was because wake, who is NOT the body, is referred to in the dream as “the sleeper”. for the whole time, i was associating “the sleeper” with “the body”, and i was surprised when they ended up being two completely separate people.
not only that, though! when Abigail tells harrow that she’s not insane, she’s haunted, i feel like its a bit of a misdirection because Wake’s revenant only explains half of harrow’s symptoms (the bits of the letter that harrow keeps hallucinating on the bits of paper/flimsy). but what about the entire way that her insanity is introduced to us, and the way it manifests most regularly throughout the book? the presence of wake’s revenant does nothing to explain why Harrow sees the body. so is she just crazy and haunted?
possibly this is just super fucking obvious and i’m just saying what everyone already knows, but i think that when harrow rolled the rock away and entered the tomb and saw the body, the soul of Anastasia (bc that’s who i’m convinced is in the 9th tomb, i agree that alecto is at canaan house) latched on to harrow (mirroring how Wake’s soul latched on to Gideon’s sword) and has been haunting her the whole time. the body only began appearing to her after she opened the tomb. that would explain also why it mirrors what she wears and how she looks- because it’s in her body.
and of course that sets us up perfectly for anastasia to surface in harrow’s body just in time for nona the ninth. (not to mention that nona means nine, and anastasia is like, the founder of the ninth house. in a lot of ways, anastasia IS nine)
(i’ll admit this theory isn’t perfect, bc it doesn’t really explain the stuff about how nona is able to understand languages the way that she can. the only thing that makes sense that i’ve thought of so far about that is that it IS alecto’s soul in harrow’s body, and she knows how to speak those languages because she’s the revenant/resurrection beast amalgamation of all the earth-souls that were killed pre resurrection. i admit there’s still something missing here, especially with the parallel between alecto as an RB and harrow as practically a mini-RB. its also possible there’s just magic we haven’t accounted for? but its weird that TM would introduce some new part of the magic system at this point. imo its important to remember that ntn was originally the first part of atn, so i think its likely that we would have been given most of the puzzle pieces worldbuilding-wise before the third book. sorry that this is kinda the least impactful or convincing concluding paragraph ever)