Too many of my friends are dead after this fucking cass review dropped and I can't talk about it anywhere else because everyone else is relying on me to be strong and stare the shit down so I'm talking about it here on my fucking fandom blog. I think this genuinely is time to go. I love you all. Stay strong.

See three weed smoking girlfriends is the name, and thats way too much context for BOE names. Itd be some random part of it like "And Yes They Smoke Weed"

I accept this. It would sound really portentous and epic. Among BoE, "Yes They Smoke Weed" is believed to have been part of a hymn describing a ritual once practised to confer clarity of mind. The "three girlfriends" part of the fragment appears to imply that the ritual involved an orgy

So I’m doing my first reread, and a) I hate Crux, I hate him I HATE HIM, but that’s beside the point, b) Glaurica said “I know the things that befall cavaliers, my lord, I know his fate”. So. How does she know? I thought that nobody knew what happened to lyctors cavaliers and yet this eerily on the nose and correct of her. Like does she mean that one necromancer usually has several cavaliers during their lifetime because the cavaliers keep dying? Doubt it, otherwise they would have taught Gideon.

Oh, I just remembered my own point a. Yeah that’s probably what it is about. But still, definitely a foreshadowing. Also Ortus and his “I do fear death, my Lady Harrowhark” my man your life is so horrible and you will have so much fun in death, you just wait. I wish he lived though, he is one of my favorite characters

I can't hate Crux because he's so compelling to me but he IS despicable. What a wrecked little man <3

I think Sister Glaurica was talking about Mortus. Ortus in HtN hints that he knows how his father died, and I can't imagine Glaurica didn't know. The Reverend Parents wanted him dead and he died. It's A Lot

(Ortus <333)

i feel like we, as a fandom, gloss over the scene where palamedes brings “dulcinea” tea.

he knows the real dulcie dislikes it when people bring her tea!!! he’s judging cytherea’s response! he’s starting to figure things out before abigail and magnus are even killed!

an excerpt from dulcie’s letter in the mysterious study of doctor sex (which everyone should read, by the way):

in conclusion: WHAT A MAN

Who are the Houses fighting, anyway?

Thinking about the Cohort and the Houses’ endless military campaign in TLT. Thematically, I love the idea of John being at war for thousands of years with the descendants of those who betrayed him etc., but in practice, the logistics of the war just… don’t make sense.

We know the Houses have been at war for a long time. Thousands of years, an insane amount of time fighting the same war. “Eternal war” could be a plausible scenario between two similarly-sized forces locked in a stalemate, but this hasn’t been shown to be the case. It would maybe be plausible if the Houses were shown to have a super ineffective offence force, but this again isn’t the case.

Troop casualties seem to be relatively common (lots of “went to the Cohort and died” mentioned) but at the same time is a massive fucking deal in HtN that BoE destroyed three ships and took out eighteen thousand people. It throws the entire into disarray and warrants a sudden reassignment of the Emperor’s Guard to the combat front to make up for it. So yes, their conquest strategy relies very heavily on sending in the infantry to die, but not to the point that every battle is a slaughter or those numbers wouldn’t cause that reaction. They seem to be a fairly effective force, and and before canon era they hadn’t lost a ship in a THOUSAND years.

Speaking of conquests. A lot of the fighting “lore” that is mentioned in the series involves ground fighting and planetary conquests, but all of the action that is actually described as having happened in the series was either putting down uprisings or dealing with fringe groups. Blood of Eden are an insurrection movement, not an enemy force, and no inhabited planets are mentioned that are outside House control. They are not a conquering force, they are an occupying force. That we know of.

So who exactly are they fighting? Actually who even is left to fight? Like, at some point, you HAVE to run out of planets to conquer. You HAVE to run out of non-House humans to subdue — and travelling cosmic distances without necromancy is very hard. The FTL ships and their descendants can’t have spread that far; they were strained for resources, jumping blind, and I doubt they had an easy time of it.

Some speculation:

Aliens. Like, I’m sure this is not the case, but everything would make SO much more sense if they were fighting an alien empire the next galaxy over, and the ongoing occupation of BoE planets and Empire building is part of that. I give it a 0% possibility of being true but still. Aliens.

Massive unreliable narrator failure. There IS a space empire next door built by humans but nobody mentions it because it didn’t have tits so Gideon didn’t care and everyone knows anyway.

Plot hole. Even the best authors have ‘em! Let Tamsyn live.

Free square ????

Enigmatic John Quote of the Post:

[Talking about the death of Dominicus if he were to die] I can only hope you’d all be dead already. Oh, there’d still be Cohort ships … hold planets … a scattering of us … but we would be so few, and so many people hate us, and my work is not yet done.

WHOMST, John. Notably, all through HtN he keeps talking about the tattered remains of Blood of Eden slithering out of the shadows, a group of maniacs, died with Wake etc. so I doubt he means them. So. WHO.

Tbh? I don't like Paul. I don't want Paul. I understand that Paul serves an important narrative function and that Paul is the best possible ending for Camilla and Palamedes given their situation, personalities, and relationship. However what I really want is for Camilla and Palamedes to attend the ATN wedding as two individual humans and for Pal to be a lightweight who loses his tie in the garden fountain after three drinks and for Camilla to do exactly one shot with the group, keep Gideon from ripping the sleeves off her dress shirt, and absolutely kill it at lawn games during cocktail hour. Since this scenario is a wild tonal mismatch for the series and also Palamedes was already dead, this was unlikely to ever happen. However Paul is the final nail in the coffin for the theoretical existence of this scene and I can't help but resent them for that

I'm always thinking about how G— was an engineer. A damn good one: the sole engineer of the cryo project, good enough that of all the ten billion, the FTL project chose him to inspect their work, back when the project was still a pipe dream. He was a man from an immigrant family in an underprivileged area who became arguably the world's best engineer, which is impressive in its own right, but it gets me thinking... Pre-Resurrection, John says they can't grow food on Mars (and for all John's unreliability, that's pretty believable, given that the high perchlorate concentration in Martian soil is one of the big obstacles to carrying out a sustained Mars mission), and as silly as this might sound, the engineer and scientist divide is real, and of all the nerds that John resurrected, I can't imagine it was the artist or the contract lawyer or the medical and chemistry experts that made the Mars installation viable. Gideon made a House out of it, and one that accepts recruits from across the Dominican system! "Saint of Duty" is said to fit him, evident in his loyalty and commitment to the Cohort and fighting the Resurrection Beasts, but I have to wonder, how much of that was his commitment to making shit work? I can't shake the image of a couple million people awaking to a ruined world, and someone had to get the other Houses settled, figure out spacecraft and space habitats using what little supplies they have left, and what better candidate for that than the man who canonically engineered spacecraft twice?

ANON I love this so much. You're SO right, and you put into words something about G1deon and John's shared background that I've tried to articulate for a while. In the very first chapter, John says, "It wasn’t that they didn’t have the money for a bigger team; we were simply the only ones capable of what they were asking."

This was an incredibly elite team. They were a brilliant bunch of hyperspecialised nerds. And, like, among John's squad, A- and M- and everyone else started out as colleagues — very smart people he probably met in academic circles, where being smart was kind of a prerequisite. It was their research that brought them together to begin with.

G1deon, though! He was John's friend growing up. John knew his grandparents. They spotted each other spare changes for snacks!! Then John went on to Dilworth, then to university and then overseas, and G1deon had his own (probably different) academic path, and maybe they only stayed vaguely in touch, but when it was time to look for an engineer that could help them build spaceships constructed to provide life support to the whole of humanity for centuries — and G1deon was the guy for that.

The fact that two boys from similar underprivileged backgrounds individually made huge breakthroughs in their chosen fields, and got to work together on a project that was meant to save the world... I bet at the time it felt like a miraculous coincidence. I think they thought, if they'd made it that far, that they could do anything.

(yet another layer to the tragedy of what happened etc etc. G1deon torn between John and P—. John stopping G1deon's heart)

Thank you so much for all your thoughts about the Mars space installation, also — I wonder how long there was between Mars becoming the Second House (founded by G1deon! he and Pyrrha did the bulk of the work!) and the institution of the Third House, which doesn't have a named founder and might very well have been a shared project built on the blueprint of what G1deon set up. "the man who canonically engineered spacecraft twice" — my god I love this so much. It's G1deon emo hours today

ortus nigendad inherited his position as cavalier primary to the ninth. he would have started training with the sword before his adept was even born, and been pledged to her the moment she could speak. reasonably, aiglamene would have been working with him since he was a boy.

do you think he was the only swordsperson aiglamene trained?

do you think he learned what a formal duel was by sparring with someone his age under their teacher’s watch? do you think maybe there was another child or two who showed promise, someone with a future in the cohort? and it frustrated everyone that *he* was the one to be cavalier when he was the worst swordsman in the bunch. do you think he tried to be better back then, to measure up to the other kids, even though he would’ve preferred to be doing anything else?

of course, he’d have needed one on one help from time to time. having classmates makes certain things easier to learn, but he was the future cavalier primary. he was meant to represent his house someday, and he hardly even seemed interested in it. some lessons would be for him alone even if the whole generation went through martial training.

do you think they called him for training one day, when every other child was meant to be in the nursery? do you think the older ones were jealous he was getting out of prayer circle, and the little ones were jealous he was missing naptime? and he told the more athletic ones not to worry and that he’d show off what he learned when he got back, but he didn’t mean it. they were meddlesome and annoying, and he wouldn’t think about swords for a second longer than he had to. everyone called him lucky, and he didn’t much feel like it.

do you think he got back from his lesson to find his home under quarantine?

do you think he was told that some unholy illness had broken out in the nursery and that they’d have to test him in isolation, but he couldn’t be allowed back in his bed out of hope that he was spared? it killed them all so quickly; the fact he was alive at all meant he’d likely gotten lucky. he didn’t feel like it.

do you think that was the day ortus nigenad gave up on the sword for good?

why did cytherea spare gideon when she killed jeannemary?

Saint of Duty for sure

Imagine being the Cohort soldiers from the Erebos who were sent respond to Judith's distress call.

They land to find a dead Lyctor, run through with a Cohort infantry sword, and two new Lyctors, one freshly missing an arm. I doubt either of them were particularly coherent by that stage.

And then they go to clear the inside of the building. In the room the transmission came from, there's a dead priest and an enormous pool of blood, but no sign of captain Deuteros. Her cavalier is missing an eye and seems to have been blown open from the inside.

A room down the hall is singed and splattered with blood and chunks of human flesh. Perhaps there are fragments of grey robes, or perhaps some poor psychometrist works out that they're looking at what's left of the Master Warden of his House.

Further into the building they enter a study with the words "YOU LIED TO US" daubed across an ancient and beautiful mural. The Third House cavalier lies dead on the floor, stabbed from behind. The Master Templar of the Eighth is lying dead, his throat slit, apparently by his own cavalier's sword. And his cavalier... His eyes are gone, there is something wrong with his mouth. His wrist and neck are broken. The whole room is dripping and sticky with blood and human fat.

Searching past the kitchen, they find the morgue. There's a bowl of ashes (two people's, dead before the pilgrimage even began, confirms the by now very shaken psychometrist). One of drawers lies open and the sheet has been roughly pulled off the body inside: the utterly shattered body of the Fifth House necromancer is lying there, her blouse rolled up to her ribs, a fist sized hole in her abdomen.

Neatly lying under sheets in the other drawers there are more bodies, and the preserved severed head of the Seventh House cavalier. There is no sign of his body. The Fourth House cavalier has been impaled through the chest, shoulders and legs, precisely, like an insect for display. Her necromancer...it might be easier to list the places where he hasn't been impaled. The Fifth House cavalier is just as destroyed as his necromancer: limbs broken, body horribly mangled.

Later, they find the bloodsoaked bed with "sweet dreams" daubed on the wall in blood. If they get as far as the facility, they discover the outlines of two horribly broken bodies surrounded by necromantic diagrams drawn on the floor in pen. One unremarkable room is splattered in blood and singed with spirit fire.

The building is full of collapsed skeleton constructs, seemingly mid task, as if all struck down simultaneously, and as they explore they find more dead priests. They find no sign of the Sixth or Ninth cavaliers, or the Crown Princess of the Third, or of Captain Deuteros. And from what they've already seen, this can't feel encouraging.

It's clear that this building has witnessed necromantic horrors beyond their comprehension. What were the scions of the Houses doing, or what was being done to them? What could possibly cause what they have seen?

And I can't imagine that after seeing the truth of what happened at Canaan House, that John would have taken the risk of those soldiers revealing what they had seen. After all, he's a very careful guy.

do you think, in her most uncharitable moments, camilla ever blamed gideon for palamedes' death? not as a rational thought of course, and i'm sure she felt bad about it, but in the depths of the grief and pain and desperation - might it have been easier to place blame on the girl who kept her from getting to her heart before he went supernova and left her to collect the shards of his skull?

because camilla knew where palamedes had likely run off to after that fight. she had lost sight of him which was inexcusable but she had a target for which to aim as soon as the ninth stopped asking questions, except that gideon asked to go after him first; gideon asked for a moment alone with him, for camilla to watch over harrow while the latter got her sword, and then ran off to meet palamedes alone in the hall outside cytherea's room just before he went and killed himself. and camilla let her.

do you think pal would have paralyzed her if camilla had been there? do you think he could have? if gideon had just let cam go with her, if cam had just gone against gideon's requests and followed, she would have seen his face one last time, even if the result still ended up the same...

... anon, how could you do this to me.

i think palamedes would’ve paralyzed camilla if she’d been there, even if the guilt of forcing her to witness his death firsthand would kill him a second time. to me, it echoes the line in nona the ninth where john says that g— wouldn’t have armed the nuke if p— was in range; palamedes wouldn’t have exploded himself if camilla was in the blast radius.

if multiple people were in the hallway outside of dulcinea's sickroom, i'm not sure whether palamedes would’ve had the power to restrain them all! but if camilla was there in gideon's place and it was a 1:1 replacement, i think things would’ve shaken out as in canon—except camilla might have been tempted to run towards the explosion, rather than away from it, when palamedes died and dropped the theorem holding her in place.

Exploring

Augustine: *watches his brother die by suicide in a premeditated and successful attempt to force his soul down Augustine's throat, has just finished gagging down the remains*

John: damn that sucks

John: anyway i just had the best idea vis a vis religious nomenclature. Guess what youre going to be calling ur fellow lyctors

Everyone's always swapping Harrow and Gideon into the Third no one's ever swapping Silas and Colum into the Third. What do you have against the concept of a medium-ugly twink who's a slut for Christ and his mesh-shirted cavalier who is in the club against his will. It's like none of you even care about me

Hi I know I don’t know you but I need you to know that your 3rd/8th house swap is propelling me rapidly back into my tlt hyperfixation. I already am so attached to 3rd house Silas it’s not even funny. He’d be so fucking mean. And in canon his faith is the biggest thing keeping him from Lyctorhood, so if he’s not eighth the only thing stopping him is his love for Colum, and whether that love succeeds or fails it’s just. So Juicy

Oh my god and eighth house Ianthe! Ianthe who’s had control over the religious lives of the Nine Houses since she was a kid! Corona would probably just be her cavalier instead of pretending to be a necromancer since the eighth isn’t as big on lies and secrets. So she would just have two cavaliers… and she’d have to pick which one to sacrifice? Plus, the Harrianthe drama of the Ninth being out of the religious control of the Eighth cannot be overstated 👀

And that’s not even touching on Colum or Corona or Naberius!!! I’m just. Thank you. You are feeding me with this AU

Omg haha I'm so glad you liked it!! It truly hit me like a truck to even think about and now I've been possessed by the image of him wearing like, slutty gold chainmail and being a cunt. He would be THE FUCKING WORST!!!!!!! I like to imagine that his faith remains very strong, but that he's also like a classically Third trashy whore in some regards because it's his Duty, as the Crown Prince and the Mouth of the Emperor and the Heir to the Throne of Ida, to get out on the floor and get the fuck down. Colum would still be completely tortured by this. And I totally agree that if he didn't have the theocratic power to declare something heretical and attempt to purge it entirely from the face of the First, it would be the fact that Colum has been his beloved cavalier and only real friend since the day he was born that held him back from eating him.

And YES, Eighth Ianthe (and Corona and Babs) would be fucking insane!!! The concept of Ianthe, who Corona starved for oxygen in the womb, feeding on Corona's soul due to their perfect genetic compatibility and making her weaker and weaker over time, more and more like Ianthe herself...AUGHHHHHH

silas colum saint of MERCY! silas who would have gideon hurt just because he could! colum who after a lifetime of being chewed on in river said no! colum who did everything for silas and yet looked at this black vestal, barely adult girl, and said no!