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cal-adia · 2 years

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MAJOR spoilers for Nona the Ninth. It’s been 24 hours since I finished Nona, and I’m finally have coherent thoughts.

We know Nona’s personality resembled other people, but there’s quite a few references to her brain specifically.

I’m gonna add a lot of images but tl;dr there’s three souls inside Nona and evidence that Gideon’s soul is incomplete/fractured

Page 56 The references begin off handed and dismissible, but it still sounds like Gideon (doodling) and Harrow (asking questions)

Page 252 and Page 381 Later on, the references start to become more absurd (brains plural, entire brain in her forehead). In the first quote, it’s like knowledge is being pulled from multiple sources.

Now in the second quote, we have to remember Harrow’s lobotomy and how she messed with her prefrontal cortex (the part closest to the forehead) because that’s where Gideon was. So when Nona is in need of endurance and agility (cavalier stuff), she’s unconsciously calling on Gideon.

Page 413 I included this whole section because it’s important for context. This happens after Nona was on top of the truck and Pyrrha tried calling her Alecto.

The whole book, by way of Alecto’s memories, John is telling Harrow how he ended the world. So it would make sense that Harrow might be far from the foreground (Nona’s cupboard behind a fake plank of wood). GtN and HtN are evidence of Harrow being touch averse, hence “Don’t touch me.” The part I still haven’t worked out yet is what she says after.

Page 439-440 At this moment in the River, they are looking at the early stages of Canaan House. The above, middle, and below of Nona’s brain recognizes what it is because John showed it to Alecto at the end of the world, and then the Lyctorhood Trials with Gideon and Harrow.

Page 470 This is the final and most crucial evidence. Earlier, when Pyrrha was going to call Nona Alecto, Nona said “Don’t call me that or anything like that … don’t make me remember. […] You won’t like it.” Then in this scene, once she hears the name, the middle brain disappears, suggesting that the above and below brains are Gideon and Harrow.

It seems that there’s multiple souls inside Harrow’s Body, but they didn’t meld together. Harrow is in there because she comes back after physically touching the Corpse, Gideon is in there because of Kiriona Gaia’s behavior (she wasn’t mindful of Cam’s injuries and is bffs with Ianthe) (not to mention Nona knew how to wield a two-hander without instruction), and there’s Alecto because soul swap in the epilogue.

#this is also why i think that alecto has been inside harrow the entire time #alecto says that anastasias line in unbroken #harrows family has been passing down alectos spriti #the whole time #thats why she was able to the body #there was literally another soul in there with her #anyways #nona the ninth #nona spoilers #ntn spoilers #nona the ninth spoilers #ntn

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alittlegallongall · 2 years

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I have a theory about the john chapters.

If Harrow was trapped in Alecto’s body, it makes a lot of sense that these chapters take place on Nightmare Earth. What else would be inside of the bodily representation of a murdered planet? But, at the same time, they are also on the bank of the river.

And I’m so interested in the river! Like why is it brackish? Brackish water should usually only occur at estuaries and sloughs and things, but usually what we refer to as a river is fresh water. And why is it so scummy with trash and body parts? Has it been dammed? Or flooded?

I think that the river is connected in some inextricable way to Alecto’s revenant soul. The thing that makes the most sense to me is that the river is what connected the planets in our solar system, and maybe all living planets. I think that when John passes out drunk during the events of Nona he finds himself rummaging around in earth’s ghost and finds Harrowhark. His most faithful servant. The one who loved him even when he wanted her dead. And he sees in her someone who will listen to his side of the story and tell him that he did the right thing.

Maybe he’s been telling this story to Alecto’s sleeping body for 10,000 years, groping for the version where he had no other options. Something that has interested me from the jump is that part of the Ninth intercession is a prayer that the Body remains insensate, with stilled brain. That’s always seemed like a weird and significant thing to pray for- since they all seem to agree that the body is a corpse, and John is the only one they believe to have the power to resurrect people. Curious. What would happen if her brain worked. What would happen if she dreamed.

So he tells Harrowhark everything. He’s absolutely lying to her, leaving things out, denying his own agency in what happened etc. gaslight gatekeep girlboss and all that. And Harrow gives him the absolution he thinks that he wants. She keeps telling him that she still loves him. And it doesn’t feel as good as he thought it would, because he knows she won’t when she peers around his story to see what really happened.

And she absolutely does not. When he admits that he didn’t just resurrect humanity- he was the one who killed it- she denies his divinity entirely. He isn’t god. But she still believes that god is out there. And that the first place to look is the tower.

#and what is the tower???? I have less of an idea about that #my mental image is of the turret on the Victorian Barbie dream house #purely because I had one as a kid and I think it’s funny given Alecto’s whole deal #nona the ninth #John gaius hate blog #the locked tomb #nona the ninth spoilers #tlt #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth

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abigail-pent · 3 years

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TLT Theory Redux: Secret Doors and Heists

gather round the fire, children, for I have finished my third reread and I have theories to spin. they are interconnected. they will also take the form of "a listicle, kind of". This is not as tightly written/cited as I hoped it would be, many thanks to tumblr for eating the first version of this post.

THEORY #1: HARROW WAS RIGHT

About what? Probably lots of things, but specifically about the secret door. You remember Harrow's "secret door theory," right? On GTN p. 303, Harrow and Palamedes are having an argument about what is going on in Canaan House. Harrow makes fun of Palamedes' idea that there is such a thing as a Lyctoral megatheorem. Pal lightly mocks Harrow's "secret door" theory, about which she says:

"But all this is more than unsustainable, Sextus. The things they've shown us would be powerful -- would bespeak impossible depth of necromantic ability -- if they were replicable. These experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They've hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that's the true prize."

The action picks up pretty quickly after this, and you just sort of forget about Harrow's theory since Pal's theory is so quickly proven correct. It's set up to make you think these theories are competing, but they're not. Harrow and Pal are both right.

Proposition 1: An entrance to the River -- or perhaps the part of the River on the other side of the stoma -- is hidden under Canaan House.

Evidence for Proposition 1:

1A) On GTN p. 191, Teacher says, about Silas siphoning Colum in the facility: "He cannot empty anybody here, lest they become a nest for something else!" This is highly reminiscent of HTN p. 98, when Mercy says: " A Lyctor's body, empty, with its battery intact but nobody in the driver's seat? Do you know what could take up residence? Anything could get inside you -- any horrible or evil or lonely thing, any miserable revenant, or worse." These two places are described very similarly; they may well be the same.

1B) I'm missing the citation, exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's textual that the first time the Lyctors + John ran from RBs, they ran by dropping into the River. Quite possibly from Canaan House itself.

1C) Teacher. We know he hates the water (GTN p. 325), we know he was created for the "sole purpose of safeguarding the place" (GTN p. 373). Of course, the whole place is surrounded by saltwater.

1D) When Ianthe and Cytherea are fighting and Canaan House is disintegrating, "brackish water from the fountain spattered across the floor and trickled into the cracks" (GTN p. 418). It's been well established already that 'brackish' is the word used to refer to River water. It's also the word used to describe the water that emits from Colum's mini stomae when he dies (GTN p. 393). Why is the fountain water brackish when other water in Canaan House -- for example, the pool -- is saltwater? Seems like a clue!

Proposition 2: Whatever is behind the secret door is the source of John's power.

Evidence for Proposition 2:

2A) During the big confrontation with John in HTN (p. 478-479), Augustine's suspicions echo Harrow's from GTN p. 303, when she's describing the secret door theory. He says:

"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."

Leaving aside for now the fascinating question of why John would ask Augustine to cultivate this skill, he goes on to ask:

"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?"

Proposition 2.1: The source of John's power is not exactly Alecto, but is Alecto-adjacent. Alecto is from the space behind the secret door.

2.1A) Alecto is called a saltwater creature (HTN p. 328).

2.1B) The oldest parts of Canaan House are where the power emanates from (citation needed, but I’m sure it’s there). They are also the parts closest to the sea. As Teacher says (HTN p. 110): "The base of Canaan House dates back to before the Resurrection. We first built upward, to get away from the sea; then we built outward, to strive toward beauty."

2.1C) The Sleeper is identified with Alecto. Like Alecto, she carries a weapon, she sleeps in a coffin, she can’t be killed, and the River bubble crew is warned that the worst and most cataclysmic thing in the world would occur if she were ever to wake up (HTN p. 112, 185). Since the Sleeper is so clearly identified with Alecto, and is also identified as the presence that’s haunting the River bubble version of Canaan House, it suggests the connection between Alecto herself and the physical version of Canaan House.

Proposition 3: John has dammed the River underneath Canaan House by trapping the Earth Resurrection Beast there.

3A) Per HTN p. 43, we know there's one missing RB, since 9-5=4>3.

3B) Abigail thinks something is messed up in the River and it's dammed, and spirits cannot get across. On HTN p. 396-397, she says:

“A spirit can be trapped, trapped as every spirit in the River is trapped . . . I think there is a whole school of necromancy we cannot begin to touch until we acknowledge its existence – I think these centuries of pooh-poohing the idea that there is space beyond the River has stifled entire avenues of spirit magic, and I believe the Fifth House is waning entirely due to us reaching a stultified, complacent stage in our approach . . . Something has gone terribly wrong in the River, Harrow, and I wish you’d find out what.”

She’s describing a dam in the River that traps ghosts there. This is extremely consistent with what Teacher tells Harrow about what’s down in the facility (see 3E).

3C) On GTN p. 213, Cytherea suggests that "something has been lurking [in the Canaan House facility] forever", and when Harrow insists that "[A spirit] cannot sustain itself", Cytherea replies: "But what if one could?" We know that Resurrection Beasts are revenants, and a revenant is a type of spirit; and if any spirit was going to be self-sustaining, it would be an RB.

3D) HTN p. 172: "The card up the sleeve of the revenant, and the Resurrection Beast, is that it can inhabit anything it's got a connection to. Anything thanergetically connected with their death." So what killed Earth? Climate change, plus a massive nuclear fission chain reaction. Historically, early nuclear fission chain reaction tests took place underneath the ground (see, for example, the facility at the University of Chicago). So an underground or underwater facility could very well be thanergetically connected to the death of Earth.

An RB may very well be a continuous source of thanergy; and if this is the case, John may want to kill or neutralize the other RBs to keep other people from rivaling his power. Or better yet: harness the other RBs the same way Earth's RB was harnessed.

3E) On GTN p. 152, Teacher literally tells Harrow that the ten billion are haunting the facility. Harrow says she is “repeating exactly – to the word—what Teacher said to [her]”:

“Down there resides the sum of all necromantic transgression. The unperceivable howl of ten thousand million unfed ghosts who will hear each echoed footstep as defilement. They would not even be satisfied if they tore you apart. The space beyond that door is profoundly haunted in ways I cannot say, and by means you won’t understand; and you may die by violence, or you may simply lose your soul.”

For those of you following along at home: ten thousand million = 10,000 x 1,000,000 = 10,000,000,000 = 10 billion, or the exact number of people who died in the Resurrection. This is of course completely consistent with the Earth RB being down there, somewhere in or under the facility, because the revenant of a planet includes the spirits of every living thing on it when it was murdered.

Proposition 3.1: Alecto is one of the physical anchors for the Earth RB.

3.1A) HTN p. 454: “The only sure way to banish a revenant is to destroy the physical anchor it inhabits before it can escape the shell.” If John’s cavalier is the physical anchor for the Earth Resurrection Beast, which is the source of his power, then this would justify the characterization of Alecto as the “death of the Lord”: if she’s a physical anchor and she is destroyed, then so is the source of John’s power.

3.1B) She was the first Resurrection, and it’s plausible that she would be thanergetically connected to the death of Earth.

3.1C) HTN p. 495: Pyrrha notes that the stoma “must think [John] is a Resurrection Beast.” Which is a super interesting mistake for the stoma to make! But if John’s cavalier is a physical anchor for a RB, this mistake becomes more understandable.

Proposition 4: The other side of the stoma is not a trash space, and John actually can access it. He uses it as a battery for his necromancy. It’s a storage space for RBs, and now I guess for Lyctors too. (this is the most galaxy brain proposition, and evidence is slim)

4A) On HTN p. 340, John says: “It is a portal to the place I cannot touch -- somewhere I don't fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless.” But this is the kind of shit John lies about on the reg, so take what he says and apply opposite day rules.

4B) if the other side of the stoma is related to the River Beyond, it would be to John’s advantage to keep the Fifth House scholarship from treating the River Beyond seriously (see 3B). If they don’t take it seriously as a branch of scholarship, they can’t learn anything about it, and they can’t let the RBs out from where John is keeping them.

4C) this could be why John condemns soul siphoning (GTN p. 340). If soul siphoning sends the cavalier’s soul to the other side of the stoma, and the power that floods into the empty body is from the other side of the stoma, then soul siphoning threatens John’s monopoly on use of power.

This brings me to Theory #2, born out of a delightful discussion with @mayasaura: the heist in ATN is not going to open the Tomb at all. Instead, it’s going to open the part of the River underneath Canaan House, and the goal is to free the Earth RB. After all, the Tomb has been open for seven years already.

Extant questions:

1) Mercy seemed so sure that the RBs were coming back and targeting Alecto in particular. But Alecto stayed in the Nine Houses, and didn’t get eaten by any RBs, and the Ninth House is still there. So why does Mercy think Alecto is a target, or makes the rest of them into targets? If she was lied to, what is the purpose of this lie?

2) Why does John want Augustine to hone the skill of following power back to its source?

3) If RBs eat Lyctors and both RBs and Lyctors are in the hammer space on the other side of the stoma, then, like… hey Augustine and Ulysses… are you guys ok??

#tlt meta #tlt spoilers #locked tomb spoilers #locked tomb meta #gideon the ninth #gideon the ninth spoilers #harrow the ninth #harrow the ninth spoilers

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mayasaura · 3 years

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Alecto, The River, and Colum Asht

I’ve been working on a few different Harrow the Ninth meta theories, and I noticed some threads that seemed to pull them together. Maybe you could call this another megatheorum, but I’m not sure it’s comprehensive enough for that.

I think whatever kind of monster Alecto is, the clues we need to guess are in salt water and the death of Colum Asht.

Salt water leads us to the River. @ovrgrwn @sauntering-vaguely-downwards and I were talking about the symbolism of salt water in the series, and Ovrgrwn mentioned both that Alecto is a “saltwater creature” and that the River isn’t salt water. The thing is, I realised later that the River is salt water.

One of the biggest puzzles we were left with pieces of in Harrow the Ninth was "What is Alecto?". She's been called a lot of things, but we know very little abit definitively. There’s a theory that I was discussing with @thunderon and @asimovsideburns that Alecto is something like a Resurrection Beast, in that she and Harrow are both communal souls forged through human sacrifice. There’s a theory that maybe she was someone else before the Resurrection and in trying to pull her soul back John accidentally got a whole bunch of souls instead. Or she could literally be Alecto the First the way Harrow is an entire generation of the Ninth, with every soul that used to inhabit the world of the First packed into her body. I like all these theories—it feels like we’re on the right track, but also like we’re missing something. This by itself doesn’t seem like it would be so viscerally terrifying to Augustine and Mercy, who were present for the creation of Teacher and the revenant constructs in Caanan House. If she’s an overstuffed suitcase of ten billion souls, why is she a saltwater creature? Why does Teacher call her tomb a zoo, and why are her eyes Like That?

[Image: It came down around her in shreds, as light and insubstantial as drifts of spiderweb. The water sprayed through white holes, rushing in with a pounding roar: that brackish, bloodied water that only existed within the River. She was bouyed up by a spray of ice water and filth - but she wasn’t; she seemed to be walking down her long black corridor again-]

In chapter 53 when Harrow tears her way out of the bubble of the false Canaan House, the River is described as “brackish, bloodied water”. Brackish water is the water that’s found at the place where a river meets a sea; too salty to drink, but not as salty as sea water. The River is brackish salt water, and Alecto is a saltwater creature.

Brackish water is mentioned only one other time in either book.

[Image: She appeared behind the grey-thing-that-had-been-Colum. She took its twisted neck in her hands as calmly and easily as though it were an animal, and she tilted it. The neck snapped. Her fingertips dipped inside the skin; the eye-mouths shrilled, and the tongue around Gideon’s neck flopped away, and both those mouths dissolved into brackish fluid. The body dropped to the floor—]

When Colum Asht dies in chapter 34 of Gideon the Ninth, a brackish fluid runs out of his eye sockets. Whatever creature was inside Colum, it came from the River. And then there’s the description - it’s too long and spread out to quote in full here, but the details are that his eyes went liquid black, and he moved “like there were six people inside him, and none of those six people had ever been inside a human being before”. There are lights under Colum’s skin and things pushing and slithering along his muscles as he walks. When he opens his eyes again, they’re toothed mouths with tongues, and Colum’s tongue has become long and prehensile and it wraps around Gideon’s neck like a tentacle.

The stoma at the bottom of the the River, the mouths to Hell that only open for Resurrection Beasts and the Emperor, are described like this:

[Image: It was a huge, hideous, dark expanse, and it had seething, weird edges; it took the lights pattering over them for me to see that the edges of the hole were enormous human teeth. Each one must’ve been six bodies high and two bodies wide, with the dainty scalloped edges of incisors. The teeth shivered and trembled, like the hole was slavering. And that hole had nothing in it; that hole was blacker than space, that hole was an eaten-away tunnel of reality.]

[Image: Streamerlike lingual tentacles emerged—the unassuming pink you got on normal, non-Hell-bound tongues—easily a thousand of them, jostling, questing, blindly thrusting up out of that mouth. Pyrrha flinched.]

Colum’s eyes have become miniature stoma. It’s interesting that while the thing possessing Colum advances on and kills Silas first, the stoma don’t open until Gideon attacks it. It uses Colum’s sword to kill Silas, but draws Gideon in with its tongue, like the tongues from the stoma at the bottom of the River draw her father the Emperor and Augustine in. But that’s another meta post.

Perhaps the stoma are creatures, sentient hellmouths lurking at the bottom of the River, and it’s stoma that are possessing Colum the Eighth. Maybe it’s the river itself possessing Colum, and the lights under his skin are souls. Maybe it’s something from beyond the stoma, something that came out of Hell. It’s an important question, but not one I have an answer to right now. I am confident in the connection between the stoma and the Eighth House. In chapter 36 of HtN Augustine accuses Mercy of not taking the stoma seriously “which is why your whole damned House sucks at it like a grotesque teat-”. Mercy’s House is the Eighth House, so whatever the metaphysical effect of siphoning is, it presumably involves the stoma. What interests me most about Colum’s transformation for now is that his eyes went full liquid black, and that he was possessed by a creature that left salt water behind it.

Still with me? Now we tie it all together with Alecto’s eyes, the eyes currently in the face of God, the Emperor of the Nine Houses. Like the possessed Colum, their sclera are black. Unlike Colum, their eyes have irises and pupils. The irises are “dark and leadenly iridescent - a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white.” Even before I had any idea about Alecto, I wondered what sort of soul the God who was once a man had consumed to have eyes like that. The way Ianthe’s eye colors swirled and merged when Naberius was fighting her, I wondered if his dark iridescent irises were the colors of ten billion souls swirling together, but that wouldn’t explain the black sclera. Now I think the Resurrection Beasts, the stoma, and these theories about Alecto are offering an explanation.

Perhaps Alecto is an enormous collection of human souls, like in our theories, but she is not only human souls. Whatever was possessing Colum Asht is also a part of Alecto. The black sclera she gets from the River, and the iridescent irises she gets from thousands or millions or billions of human souls. Depending on how you interpret what possessed Colum, that could mean a few different things. Maybe she's a human stoma, a human soul merged with the mouth of hell. Maybe she's a tributary or avatar of the River, and the power of all of history's death runs through her. Maybe she's partially comprised of a creature from the incomprehensible chaos of Hell.

The stoma option seems like the most likely to me, to explain the fear and disgust that Mercy and Augustine feel toward Alecto. An avatar of the River is terrifying, but also awesome. That's not the right vibe for 'put that thing down before it hurts one of us'. It was implied in the conversation about Hell and the stoma at the end of chapter 36 that nothing had ever been observed coming through the other way, and it's plainly stated by the Emperor that nothing which goes in has ever come back. If Mercy and Augustine were aware that part of Alecto was from Hell, I would expect it to be hinted at in that scene, and it wasn't really. I did notice that Augustine is more scared of Alecto than Mercy. When Mercy thought Alecto had come to kill her, she spoke to her. When Augustine thought he had seen Alecto, he turned and ran. Maybe Mercy is just braver in general, but Mercy is also less afraid of the stoma than Augustine.

As a closing note, evoking the stoma or what might lie beyond it would explain the only line in Annabel Lee as a metaphor for Alecto that puzzles me.

And neither the angels in heaven above,

Nor the demons down under the sea,

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee

#the locked tomb #tlt meta #alecto the first #alecto the ninth #harrow the ninth #htn spoilers #tlt spoilers

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boneempress · 4 years

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Have some indulgent griddlehark-adjacent analysis re: Harrow and the body below the cut if you wish!

Note that this is just my interpretation based on my reading(s) of GtN/HtN and the fact that the narration, while not trying to directly deceive the reader by lying to them in the traditional way, is often unreliable in the sense that it reports things as our perspective characters perceive them rather than how they actually are; such as, Gideon thinking of herself as disobedient in spite of her obediently keeping a vow of silence for half an entire book. So I don’t quite believe the book when it says that she fell in love with the body in the tomb (during a chapter where Gideon was “erased,” notably) and I especially don’t trust Gideon’s fervent belief that Harrow is in love with tomb girl based on their exactly one conversation about it. But, onward.

Chapter 3 of HTN alludes to at least two separate occasions when Harrow tries to get into the tomb, when she is feeling suicidal enough for it to seem reasonable; the first time, after a particularly bad fight with Gideon (who else on the Ninth would she get bloody fists from fighting with? or would leave her with a bruised heart thinking that “everyone” [who mattered] hated her?):

This longer process is consistent with her description in the pool scene in GTN of having spent a year trying to walk six steps inside:

The second (and more important) time she gets into the tomb is when she actually makes it all the way in and sees the body of Alecto lying there. This is what she tells John about, which he doesn't believe, because he put unbreakable blood wards on the tomb which can only be bypassed with his own blood - or, as we learn later, Gideon Nav's. This is the time that Gideon knows about and tells Palamedes about in GTN.

"Gideon had been witness to that fact" - in fact, Gideon's fight with Harrow when Harrow was ten and Gideon was eleven, was also the reason why Harrow tried to break into the tomb the second time as well as why she was able to do so (again, with Gideon's blood on her fingers!). “Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?”

What's the point? Well, both times Harrow tried to enter the tomb were after particularly bad, distinctly hurtful fights with Gideon, the one living human being on the Ninth who isn’t a constant source of trauma for her. (”They were the only two children in a House that was otherwise busy getting gangrene.”) As we know from the pool scene she immediately becomes obsessed with the body lying there as soon as she sees it. When her knowledge of Gideon is suppressed - so that she literally can’t think directly about her lest she grievously injure herself - she has visions of The Body in which it, of course, has newly yellow eyes, and is a source of comfort and familiarity for her throughout, and is the object of her sexual fantasies. After she regains her memories of Gideon it is eventually directly implied in this small but crucial bit from Act 5 of HTN - here I’ll emphasize that this is the only time Harrow thinks about tomb girl at all as she is about to die, out of the whole of Act 5 - that she associates the body in the tomb, pointedly, with Gideon:

Of course, Priamhark and Pelleamena’s suicides immediately after she makes it all the way into the tomb cause an incredible amount of trauma for Harrow and drive a huge wedge between her and Gideon; having grown up on the Ninth, she’s presumably never acquired any remotely healthy ways of processing any of this, so she doesn’t. But Gideon and Harrow remain the most important people to each other - “Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me.” I would posit that perhaps Harrow never really actually hated Gideon so much as wildly misinterpreted Gideon’s meaning to her / their meaning to each other, and vice versa for Gideon (Gideon’s endless capacity for denial is another post for another day) and that until they arrived at Canaan House and were forced to work together and to help and protect each other - all things they fall into imperfectly but pretty immediately as if they just needed a push - they had no positive outlets or, certainly, healthy models for it.

Finally, one last allusion to her end:

It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.

The whole of her, always. Gideon, the last three syllables out of her mouth as she lay dying.

tl;dr: Harrow was maybe never really in love with a chilly weirdo in a coffin, but (subconsciously) used tomb girl as a way to project and deal with her feelings for Gideon :)

#harrow the ninth #htn spoilers #since people asked for it #literally #this has been sitting in my drafts for weeks #i spend entirely too much time thinking about all of this to an embarrassing degree #but i suppose this blog is where i put all my embarrassing thoughts about tlt #no idea if this is convincing to other people and atn could drop and prove me very wrong!#but here you go folks #mess #tw suicide

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