canaan house map should have included the orgy room. WHERE was the orgy room harrow???

Lyctoral Grief

Does anyone else feel like the Lyctors' endless, evergreen mourning for their cavaliers is... almost unnatural, a little bit? Not that it's unnatural to feel grief and guilt about having murdered someone you loved. But it's been thousands of years. The Lyctors must have loved and lost more people than they can count anymore. And yet every Lyctor we meet -- and, it's implied, all the ones we didn't -- is still steeped in the horror of what they did, even the ones like Cytherea, whose cavalier went willingly.

I don't think it's just because they loved their cavaliers, miss them, feel guilty for their deaths. I think there's more to it, even if they don't realize that themselves. I think it's an effect of the cavalier not being entirely gone. One can mourn the dead, adjust to life without them, let time dull the pain -- but the cavs aren't quite dead. They aren't gone. They're still trapped inside their necromancers, suspended in the moment of death so that that moment can continue generating infinite thanergy forever. They never finish dying. After a while, they're supposed to be "fully digested," but thanks to The Unwanted Guest, we know that's not exactly true -- or at least that that supposed "digestion" doesn't mean the total breakdown of the cav's soul, but rather, at least partial incorporation into the soul of the necromancer. Cytherea Loveday. Ianthe Naberius.

The Lyctors' grief isn't because the cavaliers they loved are gone, but because they are never quite gone, and so the mourning process can never end. The cavalier is still dying inside them, and because some fraction of what is now the Lyctor used to be that cavalier, they are dying inside themselves. Never quite finished, never at peace. Forever.

tfw you're part of a team of cryoscientists trying to save the world, but one of those scientists is your frenemy who you despise but also respect and care for in a slightly fucked up way, then 10,000 years later you're holding eachother after you've murdered your other scientist friend who forced you both into immortality and he's saying "but my bones will rest easy next to your bones" and you still hate him but you've also never loved anyone more

So the Unwanted guest has given me Pyrrha thoughts that makes me so so emo. If souls are permeable and the lyctor takes from the cavalier over time until parts of them eventually can’t be separated, then that means the person G1deon became was because of Pyrrha. He became Gods attack dog because of what he absorbed from Pyrrha!!

In the John chapters in NtN G1deon feels very different, still loyal to a fault but, he seems less hardened a little more squishy. The same could be said about Pyrrha. Pre-resurrection she was a cop and almost every example of her behaviour she’s yelling at someone, calling them out, telling them they need to toughen up and get thicker skin. Pyrrha also said in HtN that G1deon absorbed more of her than Harrowhark did Gideon.

So this means G1deon took the hardest parts of Pyrrha, the parts that were ruthless and determined. The stuff that made her the perfect soldier. Than when he dies at the end of HtN Pyrrha is left alone, in a body she didn’t want, as the softest version of herself. She felt so much harder for Wake, Nona, Palamedes and Cam, and those feelings of love scared her so bad. And I’m Ntn she’s trying so hard to be that old person and hold it all together, and she feels like she’s failing, but really she’s just succeeding at loving and taking care of people as best she can. Pyrrha is the loving person we know her as because G1deon took the worst parts of her and left her at her best and I’m going to scream.

"If he hears that yet another one of his duplicitous sluts betrayed him, he's never going to come back from it. He's so fragile right now."

- Ianthe Tridentarius, Nona the Ninth Officially, 'duplicitous slut' is the funniest way to refer to the OG lyctors :D

The fact that Jod has hopped in and out of the head military ships of the Nine Houses for like 9000yrs is a trip for me. So like if your grandpa survives his time in the Cohort he comes home and was like…. “I saw God eating peanuts in an admiralty meeting, once.” And that is like the family legend/brag for like hundreds of years.

Even worse (or better?) if your ancestor banged Jod. Does he let those people survive? Or does a Lyctor or high ranking officer find a way for them to conveniently die a “heroic death in battle”?

It’s got to be so weird for people of the Nine Houses who worship a god who hasn’t come back to their solar system for 9000yrs but your random cousin of a cousin of a friend’s uncle saw God and the Saint of Patience making out in a broom closet during his time on the Erebus.

Anastasia and Pyrrha in the labs.

TLT girlies, I think one or several of us should draw the First House as this pic of Taika Waititi with the cast of Thor: Ragnarok

i hope alecto goes into so much detail regarding first and second gen lyctors and their relationships. i would read a whole book about just them. how did they all get along immediately post-resurrection? what inspired them to found each of their houses? how did it feel when the first pair ascended? what did augustine experience when he killed and ate his brother? why did mercy kill cristabel? what really happened with anastasia and samael? what about the ones we don't know much about - ulysses and titania, cyrus and valancy, casseiopeia and nigella? did the first generation even try to stop the second from ascending? how much did they each individually hate john? frankly i could watch a 20 season reality tv show about the 10,000 years the lyctors spent together on the mithraeum but barring that i will DEVOUR whatever tazmuir decides to give us about them in atn

also. we don't talk enough about how the og Canaan House gang were doing metaphysical experiments on people. just cramming a dozen souls into one person. five hundred into fifty. yes yes it's tragic that all the cavs died but also they were ALL taking those freshly resurrected batches and squeezing their souls like juice to make creepy priests. Anastasia I just want to talk

Thanks! I think the biggest thing currently bugging me about HtN is why every surviving lyctor, with 1 single exception, was plotting to kill Jod? My understanding is that it was only when they saw cav!Gideon's eyes on the Mithraeum that they realized Jod lied about the existence of perfect lyctorhood. So why had they spent decades plotting with BoE to open the tomb and murder God? Only explanation I've read is "because he made them kill their cavs," which seems weak.

The short answer is: They at least suspected that he lied about it even before meeting Gideon. She was just the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. Plus, he did make them kill their cavs! Their siblings, their lovers, their closest friends! They dealt with that truth for far more than a lifetime, but they just so happens that they had a lot of time to dwell on it. It’s not really a surprise that it eventually got ugly.

Long answer under the cut, because I love my followers and don’t want them to suffer.

First off: it isn't just the surviving lyctors who betrayed God. Mercymorn, Augustine, Cytherea, yes; but even G1deon was willing to share a bed with the enemy. Either he or Pyrrha told Wake about the RB's and what they do to necromancers, thereby handing her an effective weapon against lyctors. 

And then there's Anastasia, who's implied to have gone against John's orders by even founding the Ninth House. Cassie, who contacted BoE *6 000 years ago*. So who really knows what Cyrus and Ulysses were up to, or would have been if they'd survived for long enough. 

As for why? We get two pieces of explanation in the text. 

YOU LIED TO US

Could this refer to the proof in Gideon's eyes? Sure.  But I'm not convinced that it wasn't the message Cyth always wanted to send. 

Checking in with the other duplicitous sluts:

“You’ve offered us explanations for everything over the years. But—some of them didn’t hold up on examination … It was the power I could never get my head around, you know? I follow power back to its source, John. It’s the skill you asked me to perfect. And the longer I looked at yours, the less things added up.”  “This has been troubling you for a very long time, then,” God said finally. [...] “You don’t get your power from Dominicus,” said Augustine. “It gets its power from you. There’s no exchange involved, no symbiosis. You draw nothing from the system. It relies on you entirely, as we all know. You’re God, John. But—as the Edenites are fond of pointing out—you were once a man. So whither that transition? Where does your power come from? Even if the Resurrection had been the greatest thanergy bloom ever triggered, it would drain away over time. And then Mercy said to me—in a moment of true Mercy vileness—she said, What is God afraid of? [...] I never wanted to believe it when she said, What if he didn’t really put down A.L.? And then—What if he couldn’t put down A.L.?” (HtN, ch. 51)

So: they knew that John didn’t have a tangible power source; and lyctorhood was the only kind of internal furnace they know about. Ergo: yes, they suspected that John had lied about perfect Lyctorhood. He made them kill their cavs. 10 000 years of guilt, literally chasing them across the universe, and for what? For whom?

What kind of God demands such a sacrifice? I think that's one of the central questions of these books. What kind of God demands it? (compare the Binding of Isaac - John) But also: What kind of God punishes it? (compare the Mark of Cain - the Resurrection Beasts) 

But - 

“Why would one of the Emperor’s Lyctors hate him?” “Hate him?” The voice of the girl whom Gideon had known as Dulcinea rose, high and intent. “Hate him? I have loved that man for ten thousand years. We all loved him, every one of us. We worshipped him like a king. Like a god! Like a brother.” (GtN, ch. 35)

They are Believers losing their Faith. They’re questioning the entire foundation of his divinity. Augustine and Mercy are still asking, still hoping that they're wrong - “All that effort to break open the Locked Tomb,” said Augustine, “only to have the answer we wanted wander up in the form of one dead teenager flaunting your genes." - but crucially, they are also lovers going through a messy divorce. You know, when people who once loved each other and were presumably capable of communication are suddenly throwing plates at each other? “Come, swear your loyalty, my son—my brother—beloved—Lyctor—saint.” 

Possibly what Tazmuir is saying is, they're the same picture. But that might be conjecture. 

(edited to add in links to other theory posts. call it the director's cut)

d’you think the final straw with the lyctors deciding alecto HAS to go was during one of cyrus’s Sexy Parties™️ where she just stood in the corner like 🧍‍♀️.

God wears novelty t shirts

"Cassy played long games"

Cassiopeia the First, Fourth Saint to serve the King Undying

I am DESPERATE to know more about Anastasia and Samael and their story and the formation of the ninth house

But also I need to know why Pyrrha was painting a nursery, explain what colour she painted it in what I assumed was an all grey stone building that had slowly built into a bone church over time. Did it used to be colourful? Did it used to imitate the nurseries on Earth? Was the ninth house formed BEFORE Alecto was entombed and is that why Pyrrha was there??? (I am 100% looking way too much into this)

Welcome to the locked tomb, where the color of a character's eyes in fanart matters