sometimes i think about silas bc he was a little bitch but he also was only 16, only 2 years older than jeannemary – who gideon AND harrow both thought as disgustingly young (which she was!). and he was still two years younger than gideon. he was one year younger than harrow. idk. 16 is so young and he was so annoying but also like. he was right? in a lot of things? and he isnt given like any narrative sympathy.
he distrusted dulcinea (cytherea) and he was right to do so!!! he challenged proteselauris to a duel bc pro literally punched silas so hard it knocked him out. which is reasonable, honestly. and he was like, the only one of the house scions to not accept cytherea’s “it was a seventh house leadership descision to make proteselauris a beguiling corpse” explanation, which as we learned, was a load of hot garbage.
he distrusted the ninth, who had not only killed his house’s people (sister glaurica, and depending on how they viewed it, ortus as well) horribly in cold blood, had also killed 200 of their own children. he hated the ninth and distrusted the ninth and that is… a perfectly understandable response? frankly, it might all be a bit of an underreaction on his part.
and he saw right through the lyctor trials. i have some feeling that the way siphoning is viewed outside the eighth is a bit different from how it is viewed within it, but…. regardless silas is a soul siphoner. from how he, the eighth house, and soul siphoning in general were described in GtN, he should have been the most willing of all to ascend. but he refused!!!! he did one trial to see what he was up against and then he decided he would not play this game. when ianthe revealed the full method, he immediately rejected it. even if he might have been trained to view his cavalier as just a battery he….. didn’t. idk. i hope we learn more about what his soul is getting up to.
thinking abt how manipulative John is bc like… he paired them off!!!!! in the beginning, when he had 16 disciples. he was like “here’s your buddy, live with your buddy, study with your buddy, rebuild the universe with your buddy :)” and then he made it so that half of them had to die. The first generation of lyctors were original ressurections, likely with no memory of the people they were before. perhaps not any memory of anything before. So the only person they had in the whole universe was their partner, and John. and John was sanctifying the bonds between them like one raises a sheep for the slaughter.
and on a practical level, that bond was not necessary for lyctorhood. John could have been like “hey, 8 necromantic pals, work on this "how to become immortal” puzzle, and then when you’re done, kill one of these 8 swordsmen that have been training seperatly and that you have no deep emotional bond with.“ like, from what we learned of the megatheorem and the eightfold word, there is no specific need for the cavalier to be a special person to the necromancer?
but John made it so. John created a system where his disciples had to kill and eat the people closest to them, their siblings and partners and lovers, which made him the only one they each had left. the death of the cavalier enshrined him, God, as the lyctors’ next closest confidant. he made them kill the very person they would have turned to with their doubts and fears and second-guesses and in doing so protected himself against mutiny and sealed their loyalty…. at least for a few thousand years before the cracks started to show. but i think they all would have betrayed him much earlier if John had not inserted himself so wholly as the OG lyctors’ only leftover love.
and i think it’s very nice that this manipulation tactic is also John’s downfall. after 10,000 years im not sure the lyctorsreally care about people anymore. i dont know if they really care about John’s imperialistic goals or whatever other evil shit he’s doing. but what the lyctors DO care about is their long dead and still burning cavaliers. they betray him because of the people he made them love and then lose. get fucked EJG :)
1st read of Harrow the Ninth: what if God was just a Dude and Guy? what if he was like your Dad (affectionate)? what if he Fucks?
57th reread of Harrow the Ninth: what if God was the WORST person in the entire universe? what if God was Genuinely Fucking Evil? what if he was like your Dad (derogatory)?
my personal headcanon is that i 100% think that ianthe calling gideon “gonad” and “goblin” when they first re-meet in the mithraeum was ianthe not being sure if her ensorcelled tongue was still in effect and not wanting half her face blown off. like, iirc we only ever hear her call g1deon the “saint of duty” and other such epithets. my headcanon is that ianthe literally couldnt say the name “gideon” for like, the whole 9 months of living with him and i think that is very funny.
losing my shit because this. this is about Gideon!!! Gideon gave Ortus shit for his poetry having phrases like “bone frenzy”. Gideon is an avid fan of prurient magazines and pamphlets. Gideon is exactly the sort of churl who would misread a simple evocation and i love her for it
thinking abt Harrow and Gideon hating each other but striking a wary armistice to shit on Ortus’ poetry (poor Ortus :( ). thinking abt a teenage Gideon absolutley delighting in making Ortus spitting mad by interpreting his poetry in the most egregiously sexual ways possible. thinking abt Gideon and Ortus both picking up their shipments of Reading Material – dirty magazines for Gideon, long poetic epics and Literature™ for Ortus – and trying desperately not to acknowledge the other.
im thinking about John’s callsign, J.G. because everyone else is following Cytherea’s format of necromancer-cavalier: A.A., G.P., I.N., H.“O”. etc. except for John, whose cavalier is only ever called names and titles starting with an A: Alecto, Annabel Lee, etc.
except. i was thinking abt that theory of Alecto being the earth’s ressurection beast. and Alecto was John’s cavalier. and how in the pronounceation guide, tm said that John chose his last name, he wasn’t born with it. so i was thinking maybe John IS following Cytherea’s tradition:
J.G., John Gaius. Gaius. and Gaia, also spelled Gaea, is the name of the ancient greek earth goddess. much to think about!!!
i love that of the 1st generation of lyctor and cavalier pairs (aka the ones that were original ressurections, aka Were Once Normal People Like You and I) everyone has a mostly normal name except Mercymorn who is named like some kind of warrior cat
in my opinion Coronabeth is a beauty and a bombshell and incredibly wicked smart, but more importantly she is also built like a fucking adonis send tweet. she has at least as much muscle as gideon if not more because she, being a princess from the bountiful third house, grew up eating more than snow leeks and nutrient paste.
pyrrha dve is a MILF due to meeting 3/3 of the following criteria:
mature age:not only is she 10,000+ years old chronologically, she was likely physically middle aged when she (and g1deon) ascended to lyctorhood. she is ten years older than augustine, who was described as having face wrinkes and looking “older than [harrow’s] father had looked when he died”
hotness: “the hottest cavalier” “stone cold fox” “absolute bombshell” “hotter than the very fires of hell”
motherhood: complicated maternal view of gideon (nav edition) due to, for 20 years, thinking that she was the one who had impregnated wake
thinking abt how both Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth feature big climactic final battles against antagonists who really did have a lot of valid points
thinking abt how pelleamana and priamhark must have spent years working on the theorem that gave them harrowhark. they must have spent time studying and planning and during all that time, children must have been born? and children must have been growing up. did they see those growing children and think abt how they were going to kill them? did they have a countdown? worse still, did they plan and wait carefully, waiting for enough children to produce a sufficient thanergy bloom – essentially breeding them for the slaughter? did they gnash their teeth in frustration when another child grew up and left the creche knowing it meant less avalible resources and therefore a delay in their plan? did they wait and wait and wait for that 200th child to be born, before they gassed them all? did they sit there in front of everyone and lead their congregation in prayer, with two hundred children shuffling and poking each other and giggling and sushing eachother and being too young to sit still for so long, all while they planned the death of their own house?
headcanon that Frontline Titties of the Fifth is actually Gideon’s original work. what if she got tired waiting for new shuttle shipments of pornography and thought “hey i could do that” and then decided to try her own hand at creating an erotic comic book
After a particularly bad family dinner, Harrow and Ianthe have a conversation about grief
“Ten thousand years to learn anything and everything there is to know about necromancy, and I cannot imagine spending more than a second of it pining over Ortus.” Harrow said. She studied her fingernails, where the keratin met split flesh. There was a growing pain in her skull, just deep to her pterion, and a trickle of blood was worming its way out of her ear.
here is a deeply, wildly self indulgent fic I wrote where Harrow and Ianthe kind of sort of but like, very opaquely, talk about their feelings, kind of. ft Harrow (lobotamized), Ortus Nigenad (contemplated), the Saint of Patience (covered in soup) and Ianthe (being Ianthe)
