okay i finished nona. shaking and shivering like a small wet and pathetic dog

do you have any favorite quotes or passages from the locked tomb series?

mmm i don’t really think about prose in terms of “quotes” (not trying to sound like a snob i just find it difficult to make value judgments about a piece of writing when it’s isolated from its broader context!) but i think some of my fav bits of prose in the series are:

like, the whole of john 1:20, but especially the creation of alecto—’from my blood and bone and vomit i conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in, i was terrified you’d find some way to escape before i was done,’ ‘adam and eve, galatea, barbie, frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair,’ ‘i hid you in me i hid me in you’ etc. just a really really good sequence lmao.

the couple of parts of the john chapters where tm drops the monologuing conceit to have john & harrowlecto do some like rapid-fire dialogue (‘“[...] i couldn’t do a damned thing” / “so what did you do” / “a damned thing, didn’t i” / “i still love you” / “you always say that, harrowhark”’; ‘“do you remember what you said to me once i had done it? when we stood here together? / “yes” / “you said, i picked you to change and this is how you repay me?” / “what else did i say?” / “you said, what have you done to me? i am a hideousness” / “what else did i say?” / “where did you put the people? where did they go?” / “i still love you” / “you said that too”’) are really good.

the final few pages of nona before the epilogue where alecto’s memories start bleeding through into the present-day action (and the splicing of kiriona killing crux with the entry into the tomb + alecto’s memories of entombment … Screaming and throwing up) have some good turns of phrase—’the scrap of black-eyed meat had asked for it—the chain of a kiss: the ice that burnt the flesh of the mouth that had stuck to the mouth that was frozen. the teardrop on the hand. the hand that john had fashioned.’; ‘most human voices sounded alike, after all. they were not beautiful. the waters parted for her and it became possible to walk, crunching through the bones at the bottom. the bones at the bottom; what did they make her think of?’ ‘the terrible face with the terrible arms and legs and the terrible middle part, the terrible hair, and the terrible ears: the nose too short, the ears too brief. [...] her own edge had been pushed out, her swinging edge, her toy.’ walking a VERY fine line between lyrical and overwritten and actually landing it. 

really fond of varun the eater and nonalecto’s exchanges—’green thing, green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? where will your body go? what did he do to you to make you this way? [...] they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. i will pull their teeth. i will make it blank for you.’ REALLY goes. ‘what did he do to you to make you this way’ immediately after asking nona if she ‘loves’ and nona saying ‘ i don’t know what it means, did i ever know what it meant?’ and ‘john loves alecto, john needs alecto’ as the thing that forces alecto’s ‘return’ of sorts … every day i get emails

‘the shimmering white figure of the dead kiriona gaia’ is a very satisfying turn of phrase. i am fond of it

nona epigraph poem (‘you told me sleep, i’ll wake you in the morning / i asked what is morning and you said / when everyone who fucked with me is dead’ etc)

some of the language used in gideon to describe canaan house sets off my little fictional house sensibilities so bad. ‘castle that had been killed,’ ‘the look of a picked-at body [...] a beautiful corpse,’ ‘abandoned and breathlessly waited to be used by someone other than time.’ horrid horrid house i love her so much.

arm scene, obviously. incidentally—and this is present throughout harrow but i think i notice it more in scenes like the arm scene—i really enjoy how much harrow moreso than the other two is written in a voice similar to that of lolita, wherein you have a protagonist with an incredibly affected pretension which the narration pokes fun at them for but which also enables a kind of indulgence in pretension even whilst painting it as such. anyway—'an exquisite conglomeration of bone beneath skin and meat, pocketed in the middle with soft treasures of parenchyma and muscle [...] you were able to see her skeleton as though she had shyly undressed herself for you, as though in the orange hues of the daytime light she’d sloughed capillaries and glands off the budding rose of her scapula’; ‘prayed for a woman you loved to assist you in disrobing a woman you did not’ (insane line sorry); ‘the lovely cup of the radius, the forked embrace of the ulna.’ cowards will call it overwritten but not ME i love sex scenes

& finally, the descriptions of alecto in harrow (which, incidentally—something to be said for the text of harrow referring to alecto predominantly as the Body and the text of nona referring to kiriona pretty heavily as the corpse prince—anyway) but especially the ‘that night the body consented to embrace you’ bit spliced in with john bringing up annabel fucking lee for the first time. deranged.

since you're caught up on the Locked Tomb, I thought I'd send some asks your way because I'm kind of curious:

1) I've gathered Cam and Pal are your favorite characters, but do you any particular favourite moments/quotes of them? Or just why you love them as characters in general?

2) any plot twists you didn't see coming but liked?

3) any dark horse characters that grew on you over the series or that you'd want to see more of?

EEEE I SURE DID!! Okay, warning for anyone that is not caught up with it or plans to read it, that there are going to be spoilers below. You have been warned!!

Yes, they are my favourites.😔 Friends specifically told me to read the books because they are "very much my flavour" and they were right. Which is very rude of them, tbqh :/// As for the why, it's a lot of things, I think. From a character design perspective, I've always been a sucker for scholarly types like Pal, and you can never go wrong with short hair and double swords like Cam. I like that they have a decent amount of contrast and are quite different from each other in some ways while also being soooo alike in others. From a thematic perspective, all the bits and parallels around devotion, identity, and responsibility. How just by knowing someone, we add 'indelibly to their weight'. How this is explored both as a positive and negative thing. How just by knowing someone else - dare I say, to tame or be tamed by another 👀- can change us irreversibly. How burdening those we care about is something we have to come to terms with, and that being burdened can in and of itself be an act of care. How these themes are exacerbated and mixed with plurality and merging. The ever important question of 'where do you end and i begin'? For moments and quotes, a lot of my favourite things about them are just how they interact with one another (or with other characters). The sort of relationship where words often aren't necessary. How so much of their connection is conveyed in actions. "Tell Cam... never mind, she knows what to do." and the "what to do" is her collecting the fragments of his skull off the floor?? that she glues back together with her own hands?? then travelled millions or billions of light years to meet with the one person that can pull his soul back into it??? Her carrying him, despite the risk and harm it poses to herself, because he doesn't have a vessel anymore??? Pal asking Nona to "give this to Cam" and it's a kiss to the back of her hand???? Sick!! Twisted!! I demand financial compensation for damages!!!! Cam had every right to go sit in the bathtub about that!!! What the hell man!!! But I would be remiss not to mention the conversations they have across the voice recorder when they can't speak face to face, the co-fronting/synergy thing that happens when the protect Nona at the beach, and of course: "Life is too short and love is too long."

I'll admit I was spoiled a bit to some things going in so that skews this answer a bit. There were certainly some things I predicted incorrectly but then was like "OF COURSE THAT'S HOW IT HAPPENED, HOW COULD I HAVE ASSUMED DIFFERENTLY". I was not expecting that many people to die in the first book tbh. What happened to the Fourth and Fifth houses hit particularly hard. Was not expecting Gideon to find a decapitated head in Harrow's closet. I think the most surprises I had were in the second book though. Kept asking myself what the heck was going on. The narrator reveal was such an unexpected and pleasant surprise. Like, I kind of figured that was the case but I wasn't expecting that to be how we found out. Camilla showing up somehow out of nowhere?? The full extent of Harrow and Gideon's origins had me at a loss for words. Also the epilogue leading into Nona had me soooooo confused.

Yes. I absolutely adored Augustine. Big fan of his whole vibe; i miss him. Also really liked Magnus, Abigail, and Ortus in the second book. Especially them stepping up and being the Responsible Adults™ Harrow never really had, but always deserved. Also Polyamory Win with both whatever Pyrrha and Dulcie had respectively going on with Cam and Pal aha. Very big fan of Dulcinea in general. From her appearance in htn to popping up in The Unwanted Guest. I don't know how we could see more of her, but I would not be complaining if we did. Muir is really good at characterization tho, i don't know that there have really been any characters I've actively disliked. 🤔

Thank you for asking! I'd love to know some of your fave characters/plot twists too if you feel like sharing!! no pressure tho uwu

Chapter 2 of Nona the Ninth

I'm not sure what is meant by this? Harrow is a person and Gideon is a person, so if Nona turns out to be one of them she is definitely a person, it's not like either of them are like, two people, or something. Not sure if this was meant to say "not just any person, but one of two important people/people who Pyrrha, Camilla and Palamedes care about" or if it was something else

Oh, I figured that Nona was a clipping of Nonagesimus, but this makes sense if Nona is not allowed to know Harrow's name

We've come so far since Gideon's description of Harrow as an "evil stick" and Augustine calling her a crow, haha

I suspect it's probably not the case, but man, what if Nona actually was some kind of amalgam of Gideon and Harrow and that's why she does this. Not that you're not totally allowed to think you're hot and talk to yourself and kiss yourself in the mirror even when you aren't actually partly your crush but like, what if

So, I think confirmation that Camilla and Palamedes are a Lyctor now? So: she has Gideon's/Alecto's eyes, which could mean a) she's Gideon, b) she's Harrow and Harrow has achieved full Lyctor status and thus now has Gideon's eyes, or c) she's Alecto, who I think is the only other person who has those eyes, possibly

Ok, so she doesn't look like a ten-year-old, or at least I really hope she doesn't look like a ten-year-old

She knows what people look like when they're flirting, which I think makes her unlikely to be Alecto since she was consistently described as being and behaving in an "inhuman" way (and what would a planet know about flirting, anyway), but she doesn't seem to care about sex which probably makes her not Gideon and she doesn't object to being flirted with by strangers which probably makes her not Harrow

She definitely seems to have had some experience being an adult human being at some point, but for whatever reason forgot most of that

If Camilla was uncomfortable bathing Nona (which is totally understandable) why wasn't this Pyrrha's job? I bet Pyrrha doesn't give fuck

Priorities, lmao

BOE hates the Nine Houses so much that swords are actually banned? I guess the SCA did not survive the apocalypse, that's a shame

Nona makes this sound so unimpressive, haha

Nona doesn't remember her tantrums, so it can't have been the negative experience that makes her not want to have another one

So here we have an actual textual contradiction to the idea that English stayed around as a liturgical language, because Palamedes and Camilla only speak one language, unless you want to argue that they never would have learned it on the Sixth, but the Sixth seems like exactly the place where you would learn the equivalent of Latin, so I think that's unlikely

There's a number of possible things that we might be meant to take away from this information about the use of the Nine Houses language in BOE, but I think the only one that's at all sensible is the idea that there might somehow be a significant population of House expats or POWs or something interacting with regular BOE citizens, so there's a homegrown dialect of the Nine Houses language here. But I wouldn't expect it to be a prestigious trade language in that case, especially with how BOE sees the Nine Houses. It's "falling out of favor" but BOE has been at war with the Nine Houses for 10,000 years. Are we meant to understand that this language has been "falling out of favor" for 10,000 years now, or was there a recent event that made this language more commonly used and/or more prestigious, and now there is some kickback against its use? Also, I'm guessing from various comments/etc. that they call this language "House"... but you know, there's no actual rule that you have to call two dialects that are mutually intelligible dialects of the same language, if it doesn't fit with your political narrative, or doesn't support your nationalist propaganda, or whatever. Like, Serbian and Croatian are, from what I understand, about as similar as British and American English, but the speakers of those languages call them completely different things, consider them different languages, and sometimes insist that they can't understand people speaking the other language, because of the political situation in those countries. If BOE did have a trade language that was a close dialect of the Nine Houses language for whatever reason, I would imagine that they would do that same and declare it to be a completely different and unintelligible language, even if it was mutually intelligible. Also, I feel like I should mention that the opposite happens too - there's a bunch of different actually not mutually intelligible languages in China, but the Chinese government labels all of them as "Chinese" for political reasons. I could see languages diverging within the Nine Houses between the different planets, but John continues to insist that they are all the same language

Babies have a preternatural ability to learn new languages, but like the absolute earliest you even get a first word out of a baby is at about 1 year, and Nona has supposedly only been learning how to human for 6 months. Also, she doesn't learn these languages after 6 months of exposure to them, but immediately upon meeting people that speak them. I also feel like mentioning that you can't learn a language entirely by lipreading - lipreading works with specific languages because each language has a small set of possible sounds that can be distinguished at least partially by watching people's lips, but plenty of stuff happens inside the mouth where you can't see and I think it's definitely not possible to learn which specific sounds are being made just by watching the lips out of all the possible sounds in any human language. You can learn them by listening, but it would take a non-trivial amount of exposure to even hear all the possible sounds in the language and work out which ones are considered the same in that language, etc., let alone hearing enough vocabulary to carry on a conversation. I wonder if Nona actually has some kind of limited telepathic ability. Like, she obviously isn't able to read Harrow and Gideon's names out of the others' heads, but it might be something she uses unintentionally. I don't think knowledge of all these BOE languages is something she could possibly have had past experience with, regardless of who she turns out to be

Yeah Gideon is being really mean and jaded in Nona but also like, look at her life’s purpose;

She spent her whole ass life trying to get out of the ninth, join the cohort, earn her stripes by risking her life on the front lines, send prize resources back to the ninth to shove in harrow’s face / feed the need for harrow to depend on her, make her way up in the ranks to prove herself (to herself and harrow), and live the good life with a title and money and maybe even some power. All that good stuff.

Then within a very short span of time she is basically HANDED the title of mega cohort lieutenant, HANDED indestructible-ness, HANDED the title of first prince, heir to god-whatever just because she was born into it kinda suddenly. Everything she wanted was just suddenly handed to her and now she doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s boring. She’s likely cut down BOE soldiers like a bad bitch just like she wanted except there’s no fear of losing because she’s been made impenetrable, and she likely never had to rise up in the ranks. What the fuck else left is there to do? She finished her life goals in like, six months.

It would be so easy to feel empty. Especially if you pile on top of that Harrow being out of the picture. Even if it’s totally co-dependant and unhealthy, Harrow’s existence was a key factor in Gideon’s realized dreams being a source of happiness for her (because now there’s no one to prove herself to and for harrow to need and be dependent on her in the way Gideon only wanted to be needed by Harrow).

And yet, despite all of Gideon’s shitty actions in Nona, I have a feeling she still has her own agenda. And that agenda might include her potential surfacing self awareness about her life, and Harrow not being in it. (And hopefully some of John’s shittastic behaviour.)

We have the whole aspect of Gideon now being a revenant. We know John could have just resurrected her, but he didn’t? Why? Well, first off, I doubt John wants anyone, even his own daughter, to potentially be someone who could ever take him out. Much easier that she’s dead and easy to manage. That Gideon knew that he enlisted G1deon to either kill or fix harrow is still also in the picture, and potentially another reason to keep gideon under his thumb, but also keep her happy. (Unless John fucked with her memory.)

Gideon says she just “tagged along” without ianthe knowing. Because it was less boring than what she was doing. I think she might be lying. I feel like to keep gideon in line, John wrote off harrow. She’s gone. Best move on. I don’t think gideon has. Unless I’m forgetting something, no one could figure out why Varun was where he was if there were no Lyctors present. Maybe Gideon had the hope that there was a Lyctor present; Harrow. So, she ‘tags along’.

So, it would be easy to see both her willingness to open her eyes when she sensed harrow, looked like she wanted to be kissed by her, and then promptly got extremely pissed when she realized it wasn’t her.

Ianthe seemed to be on the right track when she questioned gideon about her secondary motives being about Harrow with regards to opening the tomb. And when we hear Gideon tell Alecto to get in line, it becomes more obvious.

Gideons actions mayyyyybe also due to her missing her heart, and part of her soul. But I’m not sure. More on that though; Pyrrha says harrow had a piece of gideon John wouldn’t be able to take back. We know perfect lyctorhood involves the sharing of souls. We know John and Alecto have pieces of each other in them and now with harrow and Alecto’s body swap plus the Vow (whatever it may be) there could potentially be a MEGA clusterfuck between the souls of john, Alecto, harrow, and Gideon. And if harrow and Gideon ever pull off a full lyctorhood process, with separate bodies, I feel like the souls of john and Alecto may be integrated into that - potentially leaving them dead, without bodies, fully integrated into our fucked up lil’ nunlets. I feel we might see Alecto sacrifice herself.

Anyway, I have faith in gideon. But also on the side, I totally hope she had some shameful ‘we miss harrow’ / hate sex with ianthe during her six months of existential crises.

And you know what she deserves to let go and be trash for a while.

Spoilers for the new Nona excerpt look away now if you haven’t read it

(Please bear with me if this is kind of incoherent and doesn’t make complete sense in all places, it’s 2 am where I live lol)

Okay hear me out: if Nona is really in Harrow’s body which the new chapter seems to heavily point towards currently, I think the soul is Alecto.

There’s an actual logical explanation for this, too: thinking about it, the possibility has occurred to me that Harrow was never actually hallucinating Alecto. (For the record, yes, she is still schizophrenic, I will get to that in a second.)

So there’s this interesting thing about Alecto seeming to know things Harrow doesn’t when she speaks to her in HtN, like when she tells her to not tell Mercy her real age. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but that does point towards at least the possibility that there might be more going on and that Harrow’s head isn’t necessarily making the Body up.

I honestly feel a little stupid because I didn’t consider this sooner, but: what if, the day Harrow opened the tomb, Alecto actually did escape? More specifically, her soul? What if, in the way Wake anchored herself to Gideon’s sword, Alecto’s soul anchored itself to Harrow’s body? 

It does seem possible to anchor yourself to a body, considering Wake walks around in Cytherea’s corpse, and that one of the things Abigail lists as revenant anchors that can be destroyed are corpses. So why wouldn’t it be possible for Alecto, the other half of a Perfect Lyctor, to anchor her spirit to a living body?

When Harrow died, Gideon resurfaced. When Gideon in Harrow’s body died, and for a moment there wasn’t a soul left to fill it, Alecto took over. A part of me is wondering if the incoherent “No no” that Nona’s name is based on was Gideon trying to say “Nonagesimus”, which, yes, would be heartbreaking, but might have been her thinking the soul resurfacing was Harrow, and handing the body back over in relief. So she ends up shelved at the back of Harrow’s mind again, except this time she has no idea whose soul she’s stuck there with, or where the hell the actual Harrow even is. Harrow, meanwhile, is anchored to Gideon’s sword—the one that Alecto doesn’t know what to do with.

The most likely moment for Alecto’s anchoring to Harrow to happen would be after she first opened the blood ward, since she mentioned she started seeing the Body after that—she spoke to Harrow at first and then stopped when her parents died and then started again at the Mithraeum. 

The tomb opening and her parents dying is also when Harrow starts struggling with her schizophrenia symptoms. I imagine it would’ve been incredibly easy for her to lump the dead woman she’s seeing together with the other audio-visual hallucinations she had. That seems like a perfectly logical conclusion on her part. But she might’ve been wrong.

It’s a good way to throw us off with the symptoms being grouped together with her seeing the Body and the yellow eyes seemingly pointing towards Nona being Gideon while also subtly hinting that something else is going on.

The thing with Nona kissing the mirror? The person Alecto was stuck with and that was supposed to build the tomb was Anastasia, Harrow’s ancestor, who also had every reason to hate John considering he killed her cavalier in order to not be discovered. I’m thinking maybe Harrow resembles her, and that’s how the kiss happened. 

Another possibility would be that Gideon briefly managed to take over in some moments before Alecto’s spirit properly lodged itself in place controlling Harrow’s body, and she did it on a sort of autopilot. This could also be an explanation for the two tantrums Nona threw but can’t really remember. (The only sort-of example we have for something like this happening is when Pyrrha talks to Harrow after the little furnace incident and Gideon the First doesn’t seem to recall it when asked.)

Another thing that deeply fascinates me is the way Nona describes languages and how her powers related to that work, especially the “watching [others] talk, making her lips look like theirs”-bit, but having to see their face and eyes and lips. How does she do that, when neither Harrow nor Gideon ever could, but doesn’t remember how to use bone magic or know anything about swordsmanship?

In Harrow the Ninth, John says “My first Resurrection was not a normal human being, and she struggled to pretend.“

But in what way was she pretending? Did she try and learn what it meant to be human by imitating others, and that’s what the description refers to? Has she always had a superhuman ability to learn languages? Is she, considering she’s most likely a resurrection beast, a mesh of human souls and has a resource pool to pull from when she sees someone speak in a certain way?

It’s worth noting that Gideon in Harrow’s body wasn’t suddenly able to use necromancy. She had lyctoral healing abilities, and so does Pyrrha, but she’s unable to access the necromantic abilities of the body, and since we pretty much know for sure that whoever is in this body isn’t Harrow, it can’t be a necromantic ability—and even then, it isn’t an ability we’ve ever seen anyone possess. So what is it, if not that?

At the end of Harrow the Ninth, Mercy describes Alecto as a “monster in a human suit”, which is an interesting detail considering she does seem to be walking around in someone else’s body.

Again, I apologize for this being somewhat incoherent, I just needed to get it out of my system because my mind is spinning in too many directions at once.