#and means that Mercy likely examined Gideon's corpse before ever meeting Harrow

[mayasaura]

Hello! I thought you'd be the person to send this to since you are a beacon of tlt thoughts, but I haven't seen anyone else mention this (maybe I just missed it) but in the glossary of htn it says "on Wake's death, BOE withdrew somewhat out of the eye of the Houses to regroup, but were enlivened by the reappearance of their legendary commander in the form of a revenant" and since BOE seem to be pretty active, with the missile attack and all, wouldn't that mean they somehow knew of Wake's revenant pre htn events, so she had some way of contacting them while in the sword and/or on the Ninth- I may be completely wrong of course but I thought I'd put it out there

Holy shit, so it does. It does say that. Wake has been in contact with Blood of Eden. And if it was her leadership and influence as a revenant that has enlivened her cell and inspired the nuclear attack....

Thinking about the timeline, I think it's most likely that she made contact with her people after they took the survivors and Gideon's remains into custody. Harrow was unconscious for twenty-nine days after her surgery, and the attack seems to have happened in the nebulous period of the first five chapters, while Harrow was in and out and the passage of time is impossible to gauge. That means Wake would have had about a month to make contact, plan, and execute the attack.

Well hell. That makes this exchange very funny in hindsight:

Trying to get her to condemn an attack she helped coordinate lmao

As for how it's possible for her to have contacted them while in the sword, we can refer back to Augustine's lesson on revenants. The corpus of a revenant—the physical part that anchors it to this world—is an item or items that it has a thanergetic link with. Grave goods, murder weapons, anything present at its death, anything it kills after dying, or, as we see in The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex, the remains of a dead blood relative. The revenant's mind can only be present in one part of its corpus at a time, but it can have multiple concurrent links. That's how Wake was able to hop back and forth between the sword, Cytherea's body, and Harrow's dreams in Harrow the Ninth.

From the way things went down on the Mithraem, and the events in Doctor Sex, it seems that a revenant is limited by the physical capabilities of its vessel. Wake could not speak or take action from the sword; she needed Cytherea's body to move around and communicate, so she would need something similar to communicate with Blood of Eden.

Something like her daughter's empty corpse, perhaps? It would have been free real estate while Gideon was busy being entombed in Harrow's brain, and Judith did say her body was the "object of some weird superstition" to the Edenites.

I know I've already seen some folks saying they think Wake is going to possess Gideon like she did Cytherea. Count me in, I'm on your team now. I think she's already done it.

#taking that even further..... #that would mean that As Yet Unsent is set in the month after Canaan House while Harrow is out cold #which would makes sense for how well healed Judith is when Harrow sees her on the jungle planet #and means that Mercy likely examined Gideon's corpse before ever meeting Harrow #if Wake is possessing Gideon's body then the tests BoE were doing on it were probably before she'd gotten situated #it took her a long time to work up to being able to walk and talk in Cytherea's corpse #doesn't leave her much time to arrange the attack on the Cohort #but if she had any awareness of what was going on around her while in the sword she might not have needed much time #she was on the Cohort flagship #talk about a well placed spy #thank you so much for this you've blown my mind wide open #I NEVER NOTICED THAT DETAIL IN THE GLOSSERY #I didn't think she was going to drop hugely important plot revelations in the GLOSSERY #that's on me I guess #the locked tomb #tlt meta #nona speculation #harrow the ninth #htn spoilers #as yet unsent #blood of eden #commander wake #awake remembrance of these valiant dead kia hua ko te pai snap back to reality oops there goes gravity