I love when our girls get to Canaan house and one of the first interactions they have with non ninth human beings is Dulcinea commenting on how charming and novel it is to meet a ninth house nun, and then Harrow leads them in the Ninth version of the prayer and everyone stares at her like she has twelve heads, and Gideon is treated like the avatar of death itself swooping through the corridors
And we, as the reader, had just been going along with the bone motif the whole time. This is a book about necromancers, sure, skeletons working the fields, skull paint, bone prayer beads. That tracks.
And then they get out in the real world and it turns out the Ninth are just fucking weirdos being treated like a 12th century nun just walked onto the set of a modern reality show set because that’s exactly what fucking happened.
[ID: a stock image of two arms shaking hands. the left arm is labelled ‘jason mendoza’ and the right is labelled 'gideon nav’. the point where they are shaking hands is labelled 'faking a vow of silence to hide how much they are not a monk’.]
I forgot to upload this pass here! Worked on this for a whirlwind 2 weeks, then it was the holidays, and I haven’t touched it since😅
I’d like to continue to polish this - tighten up gideon, and take a brand new run at harrowharks focal length change, at rhe start, finesse the cam MUCH more. But Im busy working nearly 3 jobs! So maybe later