I feel like the new nona excerpt gives some new and interesting context to the nona poem from tor

like this isn’t really new info but first of all, i think its really interesting that “Sleep” is capitalized in the first line, almost like a name. idk what it means, only that its interesting given the context of “the sleeper” and “Wake”.

but also i feel like it makes a lot of sense for this to be from the POV of John to Alecto. He’s putting her to sleep, either shutting her in the tomb or cryo-freezing her the way that they were gonna cryo-freeze the 11-billion. (still not convinced that the “you” in the nona excerpt isn’t BOTH alecto and the 11-billion. i think it works alongside the alecto-resurrection-beast theory.)

“what is morning?” just from the naivete here, this sounds a LOT like Nona, and also like the “she” that’s speaking at the end of the nona excerpt (who seems like Alecto but who John calls Harrowhark.)

“When everyone who fucked with me is dead. When everyone we loved has gone or fled.” This feels really reminiscent of the trillionaires who fled earth, and maybe of the people on earth who they couldn’t save. I’m not sure whether this poem is set at the time of the resurrection or at the time when Alecto was entombed, but depending, I think this could also be talking about BOE, especially given the other things John said about BOE in HtN: 

When it says “let’s put this first-draft dream of mine to bed,” I don’t really know what it means except that it makes me sad! I don’t really have any evidence for this, but it feels like its talking about something like the failure to save Earth’s people, or like the failure to save the cavaliers, or something. A plan that was hopeful and wonderful and could save someone, but was naïve and couldn’t have worked, and now its time to let it go. This could also be literally referring to Alecto as the “first-draft dream,” because she’s been framed as like, a proto-cavalier who wasn’t quite right, a human who wasn’t quite human, and the poem already seems like its about putting her to sleep.

I have fewer conclusions about the next two stanzas, other than that the first one reminds me of some lines in Annabel Lee (in the last stanza of the poem it talks about lying down by her side in her tomb). The stanza after that feels more mysterious and potentially more ominous, and I don’t know what it means other than that it reminds me a lot of the conversations/themes surrounding when Mercy kills God in HtN (forgiveness, anger, graves, lies). That’s all I can think of there.

And as for the last two lines, I feel like its pretty overtly connected to the nona excerpt. She (Alecto? Harrow? Alecto+Harrow=Nona?) asks “When is the part when you hurt me?” and he says “Soon, it’s coming up.” then she says “I still love you.” This feels pretty obviously parallel to “You held aloft the sword/I still love you.”

I don’t really have any other good conclusions about this except that it makes me have lots of feelings. tazmuir why did you build your book series like a scavenger hunt