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?

Shoutout to characters that are both genuinely deeply kind and also genuinely terrifying and willing to spill buckets worth of blood to get something done. And neither of these are an act, they're just both very true.

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.)

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

Camilla Hect's Morning Routine. she's absolutely my favorite.

I'm giving Anastasia a try, on the fence

What Happened to Nigella Shodash?

I once again find myself scratching a persistent itch in my brain as I think about my bestie and yours, the sixth house lyctoral cavalier, Nigella Shodash.

Here are the reasons we love this lady:

She was a funky professional artist

She provided capes and eyeliner on demand with no preparation, so you know she had a cool sense of style

Queer af

Consented to a shotgun gay wedding during the apocalypse

Thought the tooth bouquet was hilarious

Didn't out her repressed lawyer gf in front of her friends even though it would have been easy to slip up

Supported her repressed lawyer gf after she ghosted her fancy job in contract law and moved to New Zealand to be a professional apocalyptic lesbian/necromancer wrangler

She is allegedly prettier than Pyrrha Dve (according to Mercymorn, who is very serious about ranking people by attractiveness)

She was loved by Cassy, the smartest lady in the whole universe

She's kinda a slob (cavaliers - they're just like us!)

If you knew nothing else about her other than these details, how might you imagine the house she went on to co-found?

And yet. Sure, Cassy had a big hand in the policies on the sixth, but Cassy loved Nigella! Even if their marriage didn't transfer post-resurrection, they were still necromancer and cavalier for hundreds of years, and Augustine describes Cassy as protective. They were in love. They were a team.

It makes me wonder where we can find Nigella's hand in the sixth aesthetic. How did we get from "capes and eyeliner" to "gray librarians?" Sure, I make jokes about the practicality of communal laundry, but is there no color whatsoever outside of requisition forms?

Yes, it's a very small discrepancy, and there could be an explanation (WHO FOUNDED THE SEVENTH, DAMNIT)... but it is grating on me because it's not the ONLY small discrepancy. There's also the discrepancy of Cristabel coming off as incredibly well-spoken and competent pre-resurrection and dumb as a doornail post-resurrection. Was it the persistent, elective trepanning, or memory manipulation? Both? It's a lot easier to reconcile the ways Augustine and Mercy (and even Pyrrha and G1deon) changed between the John chapters in NtN and the current timeline because they've had ten thousand years to become something other than human. They make a poor case study. But the first-gen Canaanite cavaliers are interesting to me. Did the Sixth lose the whimsy over 10,000 years, or was the whimsy lost in translation?

Just a little food for thought on this rainy Friday! Even if it's nothing, I feel a little Nigella appreciation is always warranted. I hope we see her in action in Alecto!

"Ianthe was screaming over the comm."

Something about this line just really makes me feel for her in ways nobody should feel for Ianthe probably. She has never been alone in her life before. She and Corona only ever spent three nights apart. And now she's without her twin, and while she does have Harrow, she actually doesn't really have Harrow. The version of Harrow who has any idea of what they both went through at Canaan House is gone, and Ianthe can't tell anyone the full story. So she is in a sense going through this whole experience by herself, for the first time ever. Harrow feels isolated because she's a diet Lyctor, which we know is plenty bad; but Harrow is used to isolation. Ianthe is more prepared for Lyctorhood but way, way less prepared for loneliness.

I don’t know why I’ve never zeroed in on this line before, but right after Gideon’s gotten Jeannemary out of the facility and is trying to figure out where to go?

“She had to get her to safety. She wanted her longsword and she wanted Harrow.”

I cannot get over how even in the middle of complete panic, when she needs safety her mind goes to her sword and to Harrow in the same breath.

Badness Level

Maybe Harrow just needs to play some Elvis on the beach.

I hate you all. I have hated you for millennia…except you, my lord. I merely want to put you in a jail, and fill up the jail with acid once for every time you made a frivolous remark, or ate peanuts in a Cohort Admiralty meeting, or said, ‘What would I know, I’m only God.’ Then, at the end of a thousand years, you would say, ‘Mercy, I have learned not to do any of these things, because I hated the acid you put on me.’ And I would say, ‘That is why I did it, Lord. I did it for you, and for your empire.’ I often think about this.

Every time I remember that Pyrrha has never seen Palamedes’s face I suddenly want to jump into a trash compactor.

Is it better if John erased their memories, or if they came back that way and he just decided not to fix them?

It's immensely better if he intentionally mindwiped them. TO ME.

I'm a John fan. I think he's a tremendous tragic antagonist, and that everything he does in the HtN backstory is relatable if not painful familiar. He was under immense pressure, trying to mitigate the literal end of the world, having his mind and his whole self changed in ways he had no frame of reference to understand. He went from being desperate and trying to do his best to being carried away by circumstances to going absolutely fucking insane. There are many ways to rationalise John's actions all the way to the end, which is what makes it such an effective corruption arc. If you want to engage in some blorbo apologism, there are plenty of excuses to be found.

There's absolutely no fucking way to excuse mind-wiping his friends. THAT is why it's so important to me that he did it deliberately, in cold blood, justifying it to himself as a way to take their burdens upon himself so they wouldn't have to feel guilty. He removed their agency. He didn't want any peers in the world he'd created. He could have acknowledged what had happened, for better or worse, and tried to make amends - but instead, he chose to remove their knowledge that something had even happened in the first place. It's the turning point! I need him to go into that with his eyes fully open. He's doing it on purpose! He weighed the pros and cons and prioritised his comfort over his friends' identities.

EYE believe that his story arc is infinitely more powerful if there's a point we can look at and say "here is when John's story went from things happening TO HIM to John doing terrible things". Especially in a backstory that's ultimately about divine corruption and losing touch with your humanity, I think that turning point needs to be something that has a personal value to him, something that can't be chalked up to "he was high on death" or "humanity was doomed" or even "he touched the soul of the earth and went insane."

I think it's important, thematically, that one of his first actions after acquiring godlike powers was to make sure that no one would be able to remember his human self and challenge him on equal footing, even if he's still internally lamenting his own loneliness and wishing things were different.

Obviously, this is all coming from a known John Girlie™ and Eldritch Alecto Enjoyer — I interpret John's ascension to quasi-divinity as something that was mostly imposed ON him and he couldn't control, which is why I need him to cross the moral event horizon outright with the mind violation of his inner circle. Someone who views John as more directly culpable in the end of the earth might feel less strongly about the importance of the mindwipe in his story arc than I do, but TO ME it's the culmination of the tragedy. You've become the inhuman horror, baby.

/post that inspired the question

Mercymorn, Saint of Joy, Second Saint to serve the King Undying

[ID: a watercolor sketch of Mercymorn in profile, wearing her nacreous lyctoral robe, in front of a circular background of squamous cells and finger bones. End ID.]

Hi Tumblr! It’s been [redacted] years that I haven’t posted something, which is rather silly actually. Fixing that.

Anyway, here’s Harrowhark Nonagesimus from The Locked Tomb series! :) Enjoy!

Say what you will about my new fav Silas Octakiseron, but he sure did complete exactly one (1) lyctoral challenge and look inside exactly one (1) locked room and decide he'd seen enough to realise the vibes were rancid.

Huge shout out to John Gaius, necrolord prime and emperor of the nine houses for designing a challenge so terrible that the dude who keeps a portrait of you as the only decoration in his room declares you (the literal God-King of a 10,000 year old religion that he has dedicated his life to so completely he's got a bunch of special titles after his name about it) a heretic.

ianthe's poker fantasy

Saint of Joy | Saint of Patience

I got brainrot