‘On the Mithraeum, time took on a woozy, unbalanced quality that made Harrow feel like her head was stuffed through with cotton and razor wire; the days and weeks and months slipping through her fingers and washing around her like a sick tide.”
short drabble about time fuckery on bone island. inspired by that one time i utterly lost my mind trying think about how the FUCK does the empire keep time across 9 planets, 40+ billion light years, uncountable cohort ships, and all extended colonies and battlegrounds.
the HtN exchange between harrow and ortus leaves me weeping because. ortus was only a child during the creche massacre. he was left with no peers, no friends, with an abusive father pushing him to fulfil a role he was never going to be able to fill. and he grew up into an adult who did nothing as two children were hurt, beaten, poisoned, starved.
and harrow was a child deprived of nothing a child needs to live but everything they need to thrive. deprived of love, and care, and warmth and touch; born into a blood debt she can never hope to repay. it’s no suprise then that she grew into an angry and cruel creature who hurt others just because she could.
and their exchange abt this in HtN just gets me because. like.
ortus tells her he is sorry, because he was an adult and they were defenseless children, and he knows his parallel suffering cannot absolve him of his inaction. he knows he cannot change the past but he can stand for her now, and maybe that can still count for something. and harrow apologizes to ortus, because she realizes nothing, not even the hell of her childhood, will never excuse how she treated him. but she can honor him now, defend him now, belive him now.
im just. idk. something abt two people who were hurt, who are hurting, who hurt each other, coming together and saying that they will stop. that the cycle will not continue. even though nothing they do now can fix the cruelty of the past, even though they both know that whatever they do now could never even begin to tip any kind of cosmic scales; despite all of this, they will do right by each other now, even though it is too late. even in death and after it. weeping.
had a dream last night where i was attending an auditorium sized socratic seminar on if griddlehark was butch/femme or butch/butch. there were fistfights.
idk how she did it but tamsyn muir has, in Nona the Ninth, somehow crafted a novel moredisorienting and more confusing than Harrow the Ninth, which was a nonlinear account of a first-person narrative of another person’s post-lobotomy fuge state. she actually did it i have no fucking clue what happened in Nona the Ninth because Nona has no fucking clue what happened in Nona the Ninth. tamsyn muir has successfuly recreated the feeling, in text, of being strangled underwater while listening to early 2010’s pop music on a 10 hr loop. this is totally complimentary to be clear but i don’t know what to do with myself.
tamsyn muir will throw in random funny lines like “they would have given [Gideon] an interesting array of new air holes for speed” or “I’ll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut” and then deliver on them several books/several hundred pages later with the force of artillery
![edited screenshot from glee featuring Jane Lynch, an actress with short blonde hair wearing a pink tracksuit. She says "I will create a [book series] that is so [emotionally devastating]"](../media/7a04b66bb362c71cf290d1529adbf2423a4a41cb.png)
![edited screenshot of a tweet. the profile picture is photoshopped to have taika waitiki's face, with his eyes scribbled over to be pure black with rings of white. the name of the tweeter is John Gaius, with a blue check mark. his username is @necrolordprime. brackets indicate text that was edited. the text says: family should have always been my priority, but i lost focus and had [a few] consensual workplace relationship[s]. im sorry for any pain that my actions may have caused to the guys and the fans but most of all twoards [Alecto]. the only thing that matters right now is my family and my children and that's where i'm going to focus my attention](../media/d32be273192113f3fbfd81db2ed92b8307a4bb0e.jpg)