im thinking about the specific tragedy wrt camilla and palamades that is losing the most important person in your life and going to the literal ends of the universe to bring them back, but then in your victory you cannot communicate with the other beyond leaving notes for the other to read. you are stuck in the same body and your souls are intertwined forever but you can’t Be With them, you can’t comfort each other or brainstorm together or do anything together like you did before.
im thinking about the Camillades Situation and im thinking about. what if lyctorhood is a curse and will always be a curse. what if there is no ‘perfect lyctorhood’. something something once you have comitted The Original Sin you can never go home, you can never go back, there is no return. in the best case senario there’s only figuring out the pieces of the rest of your (plural) fucked up life (singular). hurts!!!!
ok wait. im rereading GtN rn and when colum’s body is posessed by Whatever Was In The River, his eyes turned liquid black.
who else has liquid black eyes? fucking John Gaius. whose eyes did John take? Alecto’s. Alecto is a River Creature.
i think Alecto is Earth brought back to life. i think that in the beginning, when everything was dead and he was alone, John ressurected the whole earth in a panic because he didn’t know what he was doing: an entire planet and all her life force condensed into a single soul. so Alecto is an RB but also not quite an RB, because Ressurection Beasts are agregete revenants, aka ghosts, and Alecto is a ressurection.
i wonder if harrow ever went back into the locked tomb. she went into it once and i dont really know enough about how blood wards work to know for sure what happened to the door afterwards. did the blood ward simply let her pass or did she actually unlock the door? did she merely get through the subsequent traps or did she disable them in the process?
just because harrow had the key (gaiusblood) doesnt mean that the door would let anyone else through, past or present. but i also think it would be interesting to think about what if the tomb was unlocked, properly, and if harrow would have ever gone back.
one more reason i don’t think The Body In The Tomb is actually (or: fully?) Alecto:
from Harrow’s retelling, all the traps and tricks of the locked tomb are to prevent someone from breaking in. harrow never mentioned anything in there trying to prevent her from getting out.
ok so we never get a super clear description of exactly what knuckle knives are, other than they have blades and also some sort of wrist strap buckle situation.
and i know they are likely meant to be some kind of glove with blades, a la wolverine claws, but IMO it would be very funny if they were just. bladed brass knuckles with the wii remote wrist strap:
ok hold up. wait one second. what the fuck. im rereading the final lyctor!harrow v. cytherea fight, and harrow can see her. like, see inside her using Lyctoral Senses. cytherea isnt a black hole to her, harrow can see her soul and her bubbling cancer and she can interact with it. even mercymorn couldnt have done that or anything remotely like it, unless she had physical contact and even then it would have been hard. ten thousand years of study and mercymorn still needed physical contact to sense another lyctor’s body. but harrow feat. gideon, full lyctor edition, can do it without even thinking. what does this mean!!!!
tonight i am thinking about Ianthe and how she spent months on the Mithraeum working on how to necromantically preserve an apple. i am thinking about how every single other mentioned instance of that kind of preservation (the food stores on the Mithraeum, the body of Cytherea the First) is specifically named as the power of God.
i keep going back to this one specific detail from the nona excerpt: nona likes the feeling of hair on her cheek. which honestly by itself has convinced me that it isnt harrow or gideon in there, but someone entierly different
im obsessed w the moment at the end of HtN, where John is like “There is no forgiveness”. bc I think that is one moment where he’s not lying –he personally doesnt believe in forgiveness. he’s been on a 10,000 year long search and destroy mission, a revenge mission, and i wanna know WHAT he can’t forgive nor forget after 10,000 years.
it’s not BOE, bc he didnt even know they existed for the first thousand and because I believe if he wanted to, John could have wiped them out on his own long ago. and if he couldnt do it alone, his planet murdering lyctors could have done it. he seems to view them as a weird distraction he entertains when he’s bored. it’s not the ressurection beasts, because he has nothing to fear from them and seems to just? have his lyctors fight them as some kind of twisted pumpkin-in-a-tiger-cage kind of enrichment. it’s not alecto, because john loves her in his extremely John Like (derogatory) way. so what IS IT……
my current thought is 1) somehow related to the initial die off before the Resurrection, and 2) maybe related to the River and the clog and maybe what’s beyond it. rattling the bars of my cage until nona comes out
im thinking abt gideon just sitting in the lab 2/response viewing room twiddling her thumbs waiting for harrow to regain consciousness after collapsing from exhaustion.
i think this was a very fragile and important and transitional phase in their relationship – in contrast to before (where harrow passed out inside a bone cocoon, alone, and tried to deny her weakness and refuse any and all help when discovered) harrow let exausted herself be totally at gideon’s mercy. she didnt set up any wards, she didnt make a bone construct, she basically trusted that gideon wouldnt do anything to fuck w her while she was unconscious. she didn’t reject gideon’s presence, but she wasn’t yet at the point where she could ask for help.
gideon on the other hand had grown to the point where she didnt just up and leave harrow there alone, despite knowing that harrow wasnt in any danger. and she didnt just carry harrow out like before because she 1) knew harrow was just tired and gideon trusted that she just needed a lie down + 2) gideon knew that harrow would probably not want that? so she was like, trying to respect harrow’s style of necromantic recovery (being unconscious on the floor). also holding her necromancer in her strong arms is like a whole THING and gideon’s feelings are complicated
