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ossifer-bones · 11 months

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The question of Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia was the founder of the Sixth House, the Fourth Saint to serve the King Undying, and seemingly not perfectly loyal to him: it was on her instructions—created prior to her death—that the House she founded withdrew from the Empire, transporting its facility away with the aid of five hundred and thirty two obelisks. Why?

What is her current status?

Cassiopeia is dead, according to Mercy. She was torn apart by ghosts whilst luring the physical portions of a Resurrection Beast into the current of the River—specifically Resurrection Beast Number Seven, Varun the Eater.

Mercy is not averse to lying. Mercy witnessed this happen from the bank of the river, as she was nowhere near as immersed as Cassiopeia was, and thus we also don't know if her recollection of events is accurate. We don't know how long ago this happened, either. Pyrrha also asserts that Cassiopeia is dead, but we don't know how accurate this is, because she was compartmentalised within G1deon most of the time, and may have received this information from an unreliable source.

The characters, besides Camilla, also thought that Palamedes was dead. Harrow could not believe his survival. As for how he survived? He made a bubble in the River:

This bubble, created with a single thereom, relied on the use of spirit magic:

Ninth, this place is powered by one single theorem, held together with the fragility of spirit magic.

What was Cassiopeia's specialty, again? Spirit magic. And she was no ordinary spirit magician, she was Augustine's superior!

And she could use theorems while in the River. This feat was only replicated by Harrowhark, whose parents harnessed the power of the thanergy bloom resulting from the killing of two hundred to guarantee she would be born necromantically capable, resulting in her being a staggeringly powerful adept. Cassiopeia is possibly the most powerful spirit magician we know of.

If there was anyone who would be able to replicate Palamedes' creation of a bubble in the River, achieveable with a single theorem? it's Cassiopeia. Who's to say she isn't alive in some regard? Cassy played long games.

What is Cassiopeia's long game?

Now, we don't know the context in which this exchange took place, but the entire Dios Apate plot was only made possible because of Cassiopeia's sharing a tidbit about blood wards to Mercymorn:

Dios Apate Major was the direct result of Cassiopeia's action of sharing this knowledge. Why did she share it? Did she intend for it to be weaponised?

We know that Mercymorn's anatomist specialty is only relevant to someone who intends to kill Lyctors, or God, something Augustine points out, so perhaps Cassiopeia was banking on Mercymorn using it in this way. Or perhaps she was a co-conspirator. We don't know. But you know what we do know?

Cassiopeia worked with Anastasia in the hopes of achieving a perfected form of Lyctorhood.

An avenue of research that John said ended in disaster.

(An avenue of research that was successful enough that John knew she had cracked it, and interfered by killing Samuel.)

Anastasia and Cassiopeia carried out this research together, closely. Anatasia, who later helped John design the tomb, guarded with a blood ward, or more accurately a cell ward. Anatasia, whose remains lie in the tomb.

Cassiopeia's long game is unfolding and the Sixth House's emancipation is merely part of it. And maybe, just maybe, Cassy herself is one of the pieces in play.

Bonus: Finger food

Harrowhark attempts to assassinate G1deon by sectioning her own tibia and animating the bone into a construct inside him, an attempt that is nearly successful. This attempt catches God off guard at first, because not even Mercymorn would be able to perceive foreign bone within a Lyctor, until Harrow reveals it's her own bone.

When else do we see a Lyctor introduce their own bodily material into another Lyctor? The incident with Cassiopeia's cooking that Augustine recounts in the very same scene.

Why would Cassiopeia do this intentionally? To me, two distinct possibilities exist.

She intended it as a contingency of sorts, aiming to use the introduced bodily material to kill one or more of her fellow Lyctors in the event she needed to. They presumably can't perceive it within themselves.

She intended to track the movement of her fellow Lyctors by using her introduced bodily material to circumvent the fact Lyctors are perceptive blank spots: Harrowhark can manipulate her own bone within G1deon from a distance, so presumably Cassiopeia would be able to sense the movement of her own bodily material within her fellow Lyctors as it is digested

Or maybe, just maybe, the finger incident was for irony's sake, considering what Harrow was about to do. Who knows?

#the locked tomb #cassiopeia the first #nona the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #harrow the ninth spoilers #alecto speculation abounds here folks #tlt

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talaricula · 1 year

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I know this is a gay lawyer opinion and as such probably spectacularly biased but ever since ntn came out I have been going absolutely crazy about the reveal that Cassiopeia is a gay lawyer and that she was the one to, first, call Jod out for granting more importance to punishing billionaires than to saving the billions of other people on Earth, and to, second, plot for ten thousand years to betray him. Idk if tazmuir did it on purpose but this reveal hit me right in the fucking heart and is for some reason incredibly meaningful to me.

Other ppl have already pointed out that Jod picked his STEM buddies to be necromancers and the more humanities leaning people/very broadly service workers (not that I'm a big fan of cops or clergy but you catch my drift) as cavaliers. But what's interesting here is that Cassiopeia is the exception to that. She's a necromancer and she's a lawyer. Which speaks v interestingly to the position law holds in a lot of STEM ppl's minds - it's "tough" enough to kind of be honorary STEM. But, crucially, it is factually not STEM. It is factually, very obviously, humanities. Its whole point is analysing society and figuring out how we want to shape it. And STEM people forget that. Which means that Of Course it's the STEM ppl who forge ahead, doing things because they have the capacity to, and of course it's the lawyer who is the first to question whether they should do so, what the impact of that is on the actual world, whether there shouldn't be agreements and rules about this.

And look don't get me wrong, I don't have an idealised view of law. Law can be one of the most oppressive forces in our current society. People often uphold it for the sake of itself and not for the sake of what it can do for people, to make the world and people's lives better, and the consequences of that are, unquestionably, a net bad. But that's where the gay lawyer part comes in. I work in an office where over half of us are queer lawyers and there is something fundamentally delicate and "in the middle" about being gay and a lawyer. Law is often actively hostile to queer people, and most queer people who go into law go into it with the intent to change it (or its application, even on a very small scale) rather than to uphold it because they are aware of its unfairness and oppressiveness. But simultaneously you need to believe in law enough to believe that it can be a useful tool for change if you're going to devote your professional life to it, which is a relatively idealistic position to hold. In my experience, the consequence of that is that queer lawyers are often the most likely to be very critical and sceptical of law and agreements and systems and people in power, even the ones they're close to, because a significant part of their lives is led in the midst of, very close to, or at least in a state of constant hyper awareness, of a system that is hostile to them for being queer.

Which is why it is so crucial that Cassiopeia is a Gay Lawyer. Of course she is the one who realises that the new rules and agreements implemented by her friend who suddenly finds himself with incredible power are detrimental to society as a whole. Of course she's the one who sees the inconsistencies between what he says he wants to achieve and what he's de facto working towards. Of course she's the one who calls him out for it. Being in close contact with both the rules and the people who makes them or enforce them isn't new to her, and analysing them is literally her job. He made a contract with his friends and with the world and he's not upholding it. Of course she's the one who takes issue.

Cassiopeia has to be radical enough to actively support Jod's cause at the beginning and traditionalist enough to see when he's going overboard and then again radical enough to call him out for it and build her own revolution. Cassiopeia has to be idealistic enough to believe a better world is possible and sceptical enough to realise when the new world they're building is emphatically not better and then idealistic enough again to believe it is possible to change it again, not back but forward, to something even newer. Cassiopeia has to be radical enough to spend thousands of years fomenting a rebellion against Jod and also traditionalist enough and enough of a Fucking Nerd to decide that the best and most efficient way to do that is to turn her House into a Rebellion University over that time period instead of, idk, anything a normal Rebel Against The Established Order would do. Of fucking course she's a gay lawyer.

Last point and then I'll shut up but equally crucial to this is that Nigella, her wife and cavalier, is AN ARTIST. The biggest cliché of "useless humanities", the person STEM looks at and thinks "I mean sure, fun enough, but ultimately a luxury at best and a waste of money and resources at worst". Because part of the divide within the field of law wrt what law means for society (is law a tool for society as it is or as it should be) is very much informed by how you look at society, of course, and while part of that outlook is informed by personal identity and experiences (ie the gay thing), another part is informed by the experiences and views of the people you surround yourself with. And Cassiopeia who loves an artist, Cassiopeia who strongly believes in the value of art for society, Cassiopeia who admires her lover for the way she studies and represents and transforms society through her art? That's so relevant to her specific brand of gay lawyer. That's the same Cassiopeia who's enough of an active idealist to side with Jod in an active rebellion against the agents of climate change at first, to stress the importance of helping innocents over punishing the guilty second, and to, finally, try to organise a revolution which, if I am interpreting all the care she takes with the Sixth correctly, prioritises helping the people Jod fucked over over punishing Jod.

TL;DR: Of course Cassiopeia is a gay lawyer and I love her, your honour.

#The locked Tomb #Nona the ninth #nona spoilers #ntn spoilers #Cassiopeia the first #Long post #I've been sitting on this rant for like two and a half months sorry #This probably matters to no one else than me but fuck does it matter to me

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domibomz · 3 months

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BIRTHDAY GIIIIIRL!!! everyone helped with the cake (except alecto but shes just happy to be invited tbh) @ghostsessioned birthday :3

#tlt #the locked tomb #my art #ghostsessioned #anastasia the ninth #aleco the ninth #samael novenary #nigella shodhash #cassiopeia the first #bestie squad

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racefortheironthrone · 2 years

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Thoughts About the OG Lyctors

Introduction

For my money, one of the most satisfying elements in Nona the Ninth was that we finally got an account of everything leading up to the destruction of Earth - notably, Harrow cuts off the retelling before the Resurrection, the establishment of the Empire, and the lyctoral ascension at Canaan House - in no small part because we get some really comprehensive information about who the original lyctors were and what they were up to.

So in this post, I want to talk about what we learned about the lyctor’s pre-Resurrection lives and what we can infer from them about their post-Resurrection lives.

M- and A-

I’ve decided to start with the “usual double act,” both because M- and A- spend so much of the narrative in close proximity, often described one right after the other, and because I think their arcs taken together are an interesting example of the ways in which Tamsyn Muir is playing with repetition and mirroring between pre- and post-Resurrection dynamics.

M- and A- aren’t just John’s first followers, they were the first team members in the original group that was trying to cryogenically preserve eleven billion people. M- was the group’s doctor, which suggests a strong continuity with her later lyctor specialty as an anatomist. Notably, John 19:18 establishes that M- made it a special cause of hers to fight against reproductive injustice in space, which is quite interesting given her post-Resurrection distaste for all thing having to do with children. A- seems to have been the chief cryobiologist - he’s described in John 20:8 as the “glycerol-6 genius,” and glycerol-6 is a cryoprotective agent that prevents the freezing process from damage physical tissues. (Interestingly, we never learn what John’s specialty is on the project.) Here, we don’t get as strong a link between pre- and post-Resurrection interests, although there may be some link to the unexplained experiments with the apples that Ianthe was doing on the Mithraeum.

John 15:23 establishes that “their usual double act” of squabbling frenemyship was absolutely a dynamic of their pre-Resurrection lives, and throughout the rest of the bubble narrative we see M- and A- acting as a pair - sometimes in opposition and other times acting as a united front. In 15:23, for example, A- is the first to believe in John’s new powers, whereas M- “was so frantic to prove something in the science had gone wrong, or right,” and insisted on putting the immaculate corpses through elaborate experiments - to the point where she has something of an atheist’s crisis of faith in John 5:18.

At the same time, both M- and A- act in concert most of the time - they’re the first to move into John’s compound full-time, they try to keep an eye on his mental wellbeing, and once they come to terms with the idea that John’s a necromancer, they’re the ones who “go raid a fucking graveyard” to see whether John can do it to more than just the specially-treated corpses of the cryo-project. Most significantly, it’s M- and A- who act as “good cop and bad cop” in negotiating with what seems to be the U.S government for billions of dollars and a suitcase nuke in the early stages of their conflict with the FTL project - a revelation that gives them a significant degree of responsibility for the dstruction of the ten billion.

As the crisis escalates, it’s M- who puts the final pieces together that there is no second wave of the FTL project, whereas A- is the one who pushes John to prioritize stopping the first wave from leaving - which leads to the crisis escalating. Furthermore, when John reveals to the group his intent to use nuclear blackmail to stop the first wave from leaving, M- and A- both side with John - although M- does get cold feet in the final hour and tries to get John to stop.

And in the final moments, M- and A- express their intent to “go out together.” A- is shot first in front of M- and John, and M- is shot trying to get their assailants to spare John’s life - which is a detail that particularly grabbed me as an inversion of her death in HTN.

G- and P-

The second pair I want to talk about is G- and P-, who seem to have been the next pair brought on to the project. Although it does seem like G- was the project’s engineer - hence the bit about “we even lent them G- at the time because they wanted to talk about coating,” presumably having to do with how to shield both spaceships and cryo cans from the harmful effects of radiation and the like - the dominant theme of both G- and P-’s arcs have to do with loyalty and familiarity.

Throughout the narrative, John makes much of the fact that “G- and I were both hometown boys” and that “he and I had grown up on the same street. I’d spotted him for mince pies all the time as kids.” On the other hand, P- "knew G- from way back” but doesn’t seem to have been as close with John - and I get the sense from the way that John keeps passively-aggressively denigrating her skills and qualifications that he was somewhat jealous of her closeness with his childhood mate.

P-’s role on the project is somewhat ambiguous - she seems to function as a kind of volunteer head of security, but all we really learn is that “she’d made detective by that point; was going on to big things in the MoD.” Unlike G- who doesn’t seem to have followed up on his engineering post-Resurrection, P-’s skills clearly put her in good stead as Commander of the Second House and Head of Trentham Special Intelligence.

G- somewhat drops out of the narrative in this middle section, while P- plays a more significant role as the one who “said...if they’re going to let us fix the world, you’ve got to make them take us seriously. Get some leverage,” and seems to have been the one to set up the deal with the U.S government. Likewise, it’s P-’s police and military connections that the group turn to in order to investigate the FTL Potemkin village. At the same time, P- has a moment of crisis when John kills the hundred military and police surrounding the compound, challenging John’s actions - although she does ultimately fall for John’s deception that it was all an accident.

The crucial moment is when John chooses G- to carry the suitcase nuit to Melbourne for the negotiations with the government(s). “I wanted G-. P- volunteered to go with him, but G- said he wouldn’t arm it if P- was in range. P- went off at him, but it was one of those times where he held his ground against her.” It’s a fascinating example of dueling sacrifices, as P- is either trying to save G- from being sniped or is trying to go down with him, while G- prioritizes saving P- at his own expense - which is an interesting reversal of what happened during their Lyctoral ascension. While they die later, their fate is essentially sealed the moment that they are separated.

C- (and N-)

One character who speaks to the potential opportunities and dangers that lay in opening up the group is C-. As we learn in John 20;8, “C- was brought on by the oversight execs for contracts, you know, checks and balanced, but look where that ended up, she was on our side before the first year was over.” While it is somewhat surprising that C- was a corporate lawyer specializing in contracts rather than an academic (given her post-Resurrection pursuits), we do see right off the bat the way that John was able to use his significant charisma to circumvent attempts to control him from the outside.

C-’s outsider status is further confirmed by the fact that we learn in John 5:20 that C- was the one member of the original team who was English rather than a Kiwi (I’m assuming that M- and A- were Kiwis, given the way that John seems to have stuck to people he knew pretty well for his early team, and his education was solidly in the home country). It was in NZ that C- meets her cavalier-to-be N- (a local artist), which starts the extended plotline where C- refuses to admit to her relationship with N- until the very end - which could be a result of the fact that “C- had been raised little-England Anglican.” (Incidentally, I’m not quite clear what Muir means by that - the “little-England” movement was an anti-imperialist movement in the UK but from a rather conservative and xenophobic perspective. It’s not used very often in conjunction with “Anglican” - the only thing I could find is that T.S Eliot was described as a “little-England Anglican.”)

In the middle phase of the narrative, C- is present mostly as the project’s legal advisor who is active in trying to prevent the Energy department from cutting off power, and then “she’d managed all the contracts and told the cops we needed to be in there to make sure disposal and records were handled properly,” in order to buy the project breathing from. Notably however, C- chooses to live with N- offsite rather than move into the compoung, suggesting a degree of independence even as she leaves her job. At the same time, C- does get stuck in to M-’s experiments despite really not being cut out for working with dead bodies. (A sign of her predeliction for matters of the spirit?)

C- somewhat drops out of the narrative for a bit, until after John acquires his suitcase nuke. However, she really comes to the fore in the wake of this acquisition as the one member of the team who really challenges John on this point: “Pick one. Are we more interested in proving this new plan is bullshit, or in saving you...it can’t be both. Pick one and stick to it. Decide what you give a fuck about.” Similarly, when it comes down to the final conflict between John and the FTL project, it’s C- who pushes for John to use his growing necromantic powers to actually do something about climate change: “can’t we gin up some kind of miracle...any way to stabilize the North American glacier? Any way to trap atmosphere over the North Territory, show them we can fix things here?” This opposition culminates in C-’s final challenge to John once he initiates nuclear brinksmanship:

“C- said, John your problem is that you care less about being a saviour than you do about meeting out punishment.

I said, C-, I was just your best man!

C- said, You still are. That doesn’t change the fact that you can be quite the most appallingly vindicative person I have ever met.”

More than any other of the original lyctors, it’s C- who manages to see John Gaius for who he really is - a man whose genuine desire to save the Earth and the ten billion living on it was ultimately outstripped by his wounded need for revenge against the trillionaires who had undermined his solution and destroyed his reputation. While I’ll get into issues of post-Resurrection memory later, I don’t think it’s an accident that it is seemingly Cassiopeia of the Sixth who is the first of the lyctors to reach out to the Blood of Eden and enact a secret plan for the secession of the Sixth. My guess is that Cassiopeia’s relentless intellect wouldn’t let her remain content with the narrative that John had spun about the Resurrection and the Empire’s mission - and that this led her to make contact with the Messenger cadre of the Blood of Eden, who seem to be focused on the preservation of old Earth knowledge, allowing her to check their records against the Imperial records held by the Sixth and come to some sort of understanding of the lies that John had been telling for five thousand years.

In contrast to C-’s thematic importance to the bubble narrative, N- is really only present as a romantic interest - with C- finally deciding to come out of the closet and marry N- in the final day before the destruction of the Earth, which serves as a kind of final moment of happiness before the inevitable downfall. N-’s one main contribution to the project seems to have been that, once John decided that “they want to call us a cult, let’s be a cult” that it was N- who designed the new religion’s aesthetic presentation, since “N- already had eyeliner and capes.” This suggests that Anastasia wasn’t the only goth among John’s lyctors...

M’s nun

Perhaps the most surprising revelation from John’s narrative is the dramatic role played by the unnamed person who can only be Cristabel - she’s a nun and the Eighth is the most pious of the orthodox Houses, she’s M-’s best friend and works closely with her, her only other association in the group is with A- Jr. the brother of A-, and her major act is a suicide meant to provoke metaphysical transformation - rather than Anastasia.

Cristabel enters the narrative somewhat late, after John’s made the discovery of necromancy and has begun raising the dead and healing the sick. While the rest of John’s scientific buddies are flying in the dark somewhat, Cristabel uses her deep knowledge of the New Testament to provide advice about how to handle a burgeoning religion - “Christ never said no and never asked anyone to pay and got way too much attention and brought the heat down on everybody” - and help the group get religious cover from the Vatican to avoid being labelled a dangerous cult.

Most significantly, Cristabel is the one who makes the most consequential discovery in the burgeoning field of necromancy by pointing John in the direction of the soul: she tells John that the reason he can’t bring people back from the dead is that “their souls are gone,” and then later tells him that “the last frontier I couldn’t cross was the soul. M-’s nun of all people was convinced that this was the element I was missing, and that finding it...would bring us closer to God.” And then, during the final 24 hours, Cristabel decides to force John’s hand by making him witness her suicide - although given the context of her earlier speech about reaching out to God versus pushing away from God and fear and grace, she clearly sees what she’s doing as an act of sacred martyrdom - which enables John to first perceive the nature of the individual human soul, and then to make contact with the world-soul that is Alecto, enabling John to become the Necrolord Prime and gain the power needed to destroy the sun and the solar system. This makes her possibly the most consequential Catholic figure in human history - and it lends an entirely different, equally tragic air to her and Alfred’s suicide pact at Canaan House, suggesting both an inevitability where the same personality drives push to the same conclusion but also suggesting that John probably anticipated what was going to happen and chose to do nothing to prevent it.

At the same time, I don’t want to reduce Cristabel to a martyr complex. Cristabel also had a close wortking relationship with both M- and A- Jr., working with them to uncover the FTL project’s fraudulent manifests, and working with A- Jr. to attempt a last-minute mediation during the nuclear standoff.

Ulysses and Titania

The second-most surprising revelation to come from John’s narrative is that we learn that Ulysses the First and Titania Tetra, the sexy-party-having founders of the Fourth House, were the first two corpses that John was able to preserve and pilot around in the very advent of his discovery of necromancy:

“my two kids, the guinea pigs, they were U- and T- on their certificates, youi know their old names. I thought about using those but it didn’t seem appropriate. They weren’t around to say yes or no. I was starting to really care about that. What they would’ve thought, what they would’ve wanted...so I brought them into the room with the bodies and I was all, Let me introduce you to...Ulysses. Let me introduce you to Titania.”

Ulysses and Titania are obviously distinct both from the rest of the original first wave of lyctors and the second wave of lyctors who John met after the Resurrection, in that they were fully dead already before necromancy was even a thing. This raises a rather important question: where did their souls come from? This in turn raises a bunch of others: Did John somehow manage to pull their original souls from the River when he resurrected the rest of the original Lyctors? (Did the River even exist prior to the Resurrection?) Did he stuff completely new souls from the ten billion floating around into these pre-existing bodies?

Leaving aside matters of the soul, I’m fascinated by the interpersonal implications. How did John treat Ulysses and Titania once they were up and alive, since on the one hand he had this deep Pygmalion-like obsession with their bodies in a way that really presages everything he got into with Alecto, while on the other he didn’t have the pre-existing relationship with them that he had with the original lyctors he had known in life? Were they his favorites?

The second generation

So what do we say about who’s left? Well, one thing that we can say is that we have to revise something of our understanding of the different generations of lyctors - the Locked Tomb wiki has Cyrus and Valancy as first generation lyctors when they don’t appear at all in John’s bubble narrative and so must have come up post-Resurrection, while Ulysses and Titania are described as second wave when we know that they were there in body, if not in spirit, along with A-, M-, G-, C-, N-, Cristabel, and A- Jr.

Another thing we have to grapple with is the fact that, as we learn during John’s raising the dead and healing the sick for online clout period, John was fully capable of curing cancer long before his powers were enhanced by lyctorhood with the earth. This has understandably raised some comments because of the implications for Cytherea the First. A lot of people have asked why John allowed her to live with cancer for ten thousand years when he could have cured her at any time - and I’m certainly one of those. However, after talking it over, I think I have the answer: we know that Cytherea and Loveday only went along with the lyctoral process because they thought it would save Cytherea’s life. If John had cured her cancer before they went through with the Eightfold Word, Loveday would have flatly refused to go through with it and would have resisted any attempt to make them proceed, given how hostile she was to John and the other lyctors for putting a sick woman through the rigors of travel and scientific investigation. If John had cured Cytherea’s cancer after they went through with the Eightfold Word, she would have turned on John instantly instead of waiting for ten thousand years. I think John did nothing because he wanted Cytherea as a lyctor in his service, one more finger to hurl at his enemies, and nothing more.

Finally, I want to say a few words about Anastasia. The last chapter of Nona answered a lot of theories that had been floating around about Anastasia, Alecto, and the Locked Tomb: no, the Locked Tomb on the Ninth wasn’t a decoy with the true tomb being located at Canaan House, yes, Alecto was inside the Locked Tomb, and no, Anastasia was not the Body or the Nonabody. However, we do learn that inside the Locked Tomb there is “Anastasia, tucked where nobody would find jher: Anastasia, all bones. Not really Anastasia. but Anastasia’s body without the meat on it, snuggled right into the curve of the rock, ready to close the door whenever it was opened.”

This tells us a lot about what happened to Anastasia: it doesn’t seem that she completed the Lyctoral process, but rather seems to have gone the revenant-haunting-your-own-bones route pioneered by Doctor Sex and later by Palamedes. More importantly, at some point - possibly when Anastasia and Alecto were sealed inside the Tomb? - Anastasia and Alecto entered into a pact that bound Alecto to the line of Anastasia, a pact whih includes some unspecified favor to be done and a cavalier-like pact of service.

Initials and Memory

Finally, I want to close by talking about the most consequential decision John made in the Resurrection - namely the decision to bring back both “my loved ones” and “anyone I feel didn’t do it. Anyone I feel had no part in it. Anyone I can look in the face of and forgive” without their memories. I’ll quote the section in detail:

“In fact, G-’ll be easiest - he won’t remember the compound - none of them will have to remember anything. I know where rememberance lives in the brain, and he won’t have any of it...”

“Teacher, why?”

“They won’t forgive themselves...they’ll spend the rest of their lives asking what-ifs. “What should we have done? How could we have done it differently? Did you need to do it?”

While John posits his actions as esentially benevolent, driven by a desire to prevent mental suffering, and imbue his loved ones with a “blessed ignorance” as he put it in HTN, it’s abundantly obvious that what he really cares about is avoiding that last question. He wants his friends back, but he doesn’t want them to be able to question or challenge him for having gotten them and everyone else killed. We see him already beginning to think about this during the final siege of the compound when he says “People don’t forgive, not really. Once they doubt, you’ve already lost them. That’s what was sacaring me about the others. Had I already lost my best friends.”

So while John displays an enormous amount of self-pity because he’s the only one left who’ll remember the old world and who’ll laugh at his jokes, ultimately John chooses his own isolation by remaking his friends without their memories. As with Ulysses and Titania, he tries to remake them while staying as close to the original as possible, changing the names but keeping the same initials because he’s unimaginative and nostalgic.

But anyone who knows even a little bit about the brain knows that it’s pretty much impossible to separate personality from memory - the existence of the self is essentially the result of the brain constantly rewiring and reinforcing itself over time, creating new connections and new associations, resulting in a constantly evolving moving target that we think of as a continuous and authentic whole. And from everything we’ve been able to compare about the original Lyctors before and after Resurrection, they’re way too similar to their prior selves. They have the same personalities, the same relationships, they make the same decisions and the same mistakes, over and over again. So rather than being pure blank slates, I think John left quite a bit of their previous selves intact - I doubt he would have wanted to start with object permanence, language acquisition, and not touching fire, and he definitely would have wanted to hang on to useful things like Mercymorn’s medical skills or Gideon’s engineering know-how or Cassiopeia’s facility with logic.

Here’s another thing about the brain: it’s incredibly plastic. Even when parts of the brain are damaged by injury or disease, it has this fascinating ability to re-wire itself, forging new connections that reconnect separated areas. Who’s to say that, across ten thousand years, this didn’t happen to at least some of the original Lyctors as they pondered the mystery of the Resurrection?

One last thought:

“You want Cyrus, Augustine, Cassiopeia...you want Gideon the First, and Gideon the First is dead. He’s not coming back. Oh, God, Gideon,” said Pyrrha suddenly. “Gideon...G-, you died for nothing.”

#the locked tomb #nona the ninth spoilers #ntn spoilers #spoilers #mercymorn the first #augustine the first #cassiopeia the first #nigella shodash #cristabel oct #alfred quinque #ulysses the first #titantia tetra #gideon the first #pyrrha dve #anastasia the first #samael novenary #alecto #nona the ninth

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mayasaura · 8 months

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now that soul permeability is established, do you think cassy and/or g1deon will have a major effect on varun?

varun has already shown small signs of quote unquote 'infection' from cassy, because i remember that varun-through-judith laughed at palamedes lamenting sounding like he was a sixth house committee member which. y'know. is a cassy thing to do. and varun was reported to have gone dormant for a century after it ate her

do you think we'll learn more about cassy through varun, and that her motivations have bled into its own, affecting how it will approach alecto and the idea of vengeance and love?

(on a smaller level, do you think we'll learn about pyrrha's pre-res memories this way? if her knowing g-'s name is a result of memory blending, then how does he know his name?)

Did Varun eat Cassiopeia? We have a few slightly differing accounts of her death that mostly boil down to: Which would you rather be torn apart by; ten thousand feral ghosts, or one feral ghost ten thousand times the size?

But yeah, that laughter was fucking weird wasn't it?

If that's Varun laying low inside Judith and getting startled into laughter, then. Damnit, I hadn't even considered that. It would be just like this series to have two ghosts playing dead in one scene; one the audience explicitly knows about, and one we don't.

Anyway, let's assume Pyrrha's account of Cassiopeia's death is the most accurate.

At the volume a soul like Varun's must have, I wouldn't think we'd find out too much about one specific soul it incorporated. Unless....

I noticed something very interesting while I was searching for the above quote. "Dormant" is repeatedly used in Harrow the Ninth to describe only one thing: a lyctor's body when its soul is elsewhere. We've seen that a Resurrection Beast can also throw its soul elsewhere—into poor Judith—so .... if there's an equivalency there, where did Varun go for those hundred years after killing Cassiopeia? And what was it doing?

A planet's ghost is burning through Judith pretty quickly, but how long would it take it to burn through a lyctor? Maybe a century?

#the locked tomb #the unwanted guest #nona the ninth #tug spoilers #ntn spoilers #cassiopeia the first #varun the eater #tlt meta

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lylikers · 8 months

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some pre pres lyctor designs&doodles

#the locked tomb #nona the ninth #pyrrha dve #alfred quinque #cristabel oct #nigella shodash #cassiopeia the first #and some cameos #my art

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figonas · 2 years

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something something Augustine & Mercymorn hated each other in two lifetimes something something Cassiopeia and Nigella loved each other in two lifetimes something something Cristabel committed suicide in two lifetimes something something Alfred known for his patience in two lifetimes something something a trace of the true self exists in the false self something something

#this has been rattling around in my brain like a coin in a change purse #the locked tomb #the locked tomb spoilers #nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #augustine the first #mercymorn the first #cassiopeia the first

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multifunctionalnitroglycerin · 4 months

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The Locked Tomb Series- Alecto Theory

Brace yourselves this is 3000 words of me connecting dots that aren't even there.

First things first, this post is an amalgam of various brilliant theories I have seen posted on Tumblr, so if anything feels familiar, that will be the main reason. I am just going to present my own take on this, and hopefully add something new to what we already have.

The subjects of today’s conspiracy theory are Alecto and Anastasia -and Cassiopeia in part, the vow to Anastasia’s bloodline and what could very possible be, Dios Apate MAJOR.

So let’s start with what we have from the books, and feel free to correct me or add sth I might have forgotten.

Anastasia and Samael are the only ones of the original Lyctor batch, that didn’t complete the Lyctorhood process, thanks to - in no small part – John, and/or possibly Alecto. (“I am sorry about Samael”). Which could mean that Alecto was somehow involved in the whole process going wrong, and thus she feels responsible for Samael’s death, or that she was close enough with Anastasia and Samael, that she herself felt Samael’s loss, or she felt for Anastasia’s grief. (I like to believe that they did have a tentative friendship even before the vow thing happened.)

Anastasia is also the only one of the Lyctors we know, so far, to have had children. Which is an important bit on its own, (Can full Lyctors, have children? If so, are they different from other children, necromantic or not? Is there a reason that in spite of biological capability- if it exists-the other Lyctors have chosen not to have children? Even with Augustine’s and Mercymorn’s plan we see that in the end Gideon is conceived with Wake’s material – John is a whole different story as far as Lyctorhood goes so he doesn’t count.)

Back to our discussion though, Anastasia’s bloodline was so important to the Ninth House that it has been preserved for 10.000 years. We do not really get a clear picture on whether the Reverend Family knows why the continuation of the bloodline is important, Harrow certainly doesn’t, but it was so deeply ingrained to them that Anastasia’s bloodline must remain intact, that they effectively committed genocide, dooming the House’s future, in order to produce one more direct descendant of the Saint that wasn’t.

We do get a hint, a rather big one, on why the preservation of Anastasia’s blood is so important, in Nona’s Epilogue. Alecto states that Harrow is “the blood of the tombkeeper” after kissing her and drawing blood. What did she taste on Harrow’s blood I wonder? And how did she recognize the taste, as the taste of Anastasia’s line? Did the vow she initially made to Anastasia herself involve them drawing blood? Did it bind them to one another, so deeply that they ingrained themselves into each other on a molecular level?

To add to this, young Harrow, young desolate Harrow, who had had enough with her life and was prepared to die, young Harrow who opened the Tomb for that express purpose, loves Alecto from sight. And decides to keep living for her. And there is something exceedingly weird to just how much Harrow loves Alecto. Alecto is probably the most attractive person Harow lay her eyes upon to that day, true, but this instant infatuation, and its persistence throughout the years has something more to it, don’t you think? As Gideon points out, both to herself and to Ianthe, Harrow’s heart belongs to the dead cold body in the Tomb. And said cold dead body in the Tomb, recognizes Harrow from sight when she wakes “Alecto recalled her, for it was a face once dreamed in Alecto’s dream.”

And this line begs the question. Could Alecto dream, in the tomb? If so, how? And what did she dream of? Did she dream of Harrow? Why did she dream of Harrow if that is the case? Or did she dream of Anastasia, and the resemblance is that great? On the other hand, if this refers to Harrow first opening the Tomb, and looking at Alecto, does that mean that she was in some form conscious throughout that stasis? Does this mean that she could have heard and felt Anastasia while they were both locked in the Tomb, for however long the other woman lived?

(The scene where Nona describes the feeling of Anastasia's hands in the water and feeling safe. I am going to cry.)

I do have an interesting theory about Alecto’s “dreams” but we’ll get there in a bit.

Something else that is fishy, is that the Ninth, is the House of the Sewn Tongue. It sounds a bit like too much flesh magic for a bone magic house to specialize in, right? The cure to the Sewn Tongue on the other hand? Removing the mandible and all that? That sounds like a Bone Magic solution to a flesh magic problem. And I wonder if the fact that the Ninth House’s emblem is the Jawless skull, insinuates that the Ninth is not so much a house where many secrets are kept – though this is undoubtedly true, as the Ninth is known as the House of secrets by the other houses – as much that in the Ninth, all secrets are revealed. Where the sewn tongue is healed, and the truth comes to light. And I’d like to point out that it sounds a bit like foreshadowing, and a promise. Anastasia has been betrayed by John and sworn to secrecy, and then locked in the Tomb to die and take his secrets with her. I feel like the jawless skull acts as a constant reminder, that even with the sewn tongue, all curses can be broken, and all secrets will eventually come to light. And it feels like a promise to John, that her House, the house of secrets and unspoken truths, will be the one to rid of the sewn tongue and bring the truth he so fears forward. And this aligns a tad too well with the Sixth’s mantra, Six for the truth, over solace in lies.

And you know what else fits here, in this concordance of the Sixth and Ninth Houses? Cassiopeia and Anastasia’s friendship. Their alliance if you will. We know they both worked closely together trying to figure out the perfect Lyctorhood process, and it is possible that Anastasia made her attempt a bit before Cassiopeia. The exact same attempt, that performed in perfect conditions ended in failure, with John ultimately killing Samael.

We also know that Cassiopeia left contingency plans in place, should the emperor become a hindrance to the empire. And from what we have seen of Cassiopeia in the books, it is safe to assume that she is driven, determined, exceedingly intelligent, perceptive, logical, and excellent at planning. She is also the one to point out John’s less than favorable qualities pre-Resurrection such as his interest in taking vengeance on those that wronged him being bigger in his interest to save lives.

So, we have, Cassiopeia and her logic driven, truth seeking brilliance, and Anastasia, the thorough, overly methodical researcher. We have them both working on perfect Lyctorhood, and we have them both, in one way or another, being betrayed by John. Chances are, that they were the first post Resurrection to notice John’s flaws, the first to concoct a plan against him. But contrary to Cytherea, Mercy and Augustine, they are more subtle than those cannonball attempts. No, I believe they planned. And they planned long term, and together. Cassiopeia left her House a note, left them instructions, she was preparing them for when John would become a liability. And then an aforementioned amount of time later, Anastasia is asked to design the tomb.

We do not really know anything about Alecto’s relationships with the other lyctors apart from the fact that most found her revolting, a “monster” in Mercy’s words. So here is a thought, perhaps Anastasia, the one of the original Eight to never ascend, perhaps the one whose failure Alecto was involved in – “I am sorry about Samael” – finds kinship in John’s unnerving pet, his undead “cavalier”, the one he betrayed first, the soul of earth. Perhaps they even became friends. Perhaps she and Cassiopeia realize the extend of what John has done and realize that Alecto is the key to undoing it. When John refuses to kill Alecto to appease the others, the plan fully forms.

So, they construct the tomb. And Cassiopeia is well-known for building mechanisms within houses, so maybe her and Anastasia create secret passages, and mechanisms with extra access to the tomb that would be independent of John sneaking in, or whatever he planned to do with that blood-ward. And hear me out, we know that Cassiopeia stayed 7 minutes in the river before being torn apart by the resurrection beast – at Mercymorn’s account at least, not sure how reliable of a narrator she is. But what happened during those seven minutes? Paul says he thinks he knows how to get to the Locked Tomb via the River. So, the river and the Tomb are connected. What did Cassiopeia do, I wonder? (Here I’d like to say that my other theory is that she did eventually die, or rather was consumed by Varun the eater, much like Judith Deuteros was. The RB burned through her in what, a couple months? How long would a Lyctor last? Perhaps that was the reason that Varun didn’t resurface until 100 years after Cassiopeia’s presumed death. She could have been alive and slowly wasting away, while still making failsafe within failsafe until she lost her sense of self and eventually wasted away)

To recap until now, the first part of my theory is that Anastasia and Cassiopeia dissatisfied with the world John had made and the truth he had served them, probably worked together to find the truth. And they worked together from the shadows, to create a plan, a long-term plan, with which they could bring John down if the need ever arose, and undo what he had done. And Anastasia’s bloodline and their secrets are really bloody important to that plan. (Also, some nice symbolism about the Ninth being about secrets revealed, rather than secrets kept, and that functioning as a bit of foreshadowing.)

Now into the second part of my theory. Anastasia’s bloodline is so important because she has bound her bloodline to Alecto. And I think this happened in the premise of the Vow Alecto has made to her, or they have made to each other. This might be part of the initial vow, of which we know nothing about, apart from the fact that Alecto pledged herself to Anastasia, and that it is important enough that she pledges herself to Harrow, or a failsafe within it. A failsafe to ensure that should Alecto wake after Anastasia has passed, she will not be fooled by any imposters, or anything else John might have planned. Or perhaps, a failsafe to ensure that even if John changes his mind and finds a way to rid of the body within the tomb, to “kill” Alecto, she will not be completely gone, she will keep existing within Anastasia’s line, thus ensuring that the plan for John’s demise can still be enacted and that the soul of the earth will not be dead.

That plays really hard in the Alecto is within Harrow from the beginning theory. And I will explain. I believe I saw something that looked like this in Twitter by lesbian_mothman, but I do not really remember so I apologize if all this has been said before.

In all the dream chapters with John, we relive memories from just before and after the resurrection, and John talks to Harrow as if she is Alecto “You always say that Harrowhark” as a response to “I still love you.” Or when Varun recognizes the Earth’s soul “green thing” within Nona in the car chase scene, or when Judith regaining consciousness asks “Harrowhark?” and Nona replies, “No, and I never was.” So that begs the question of how much of Harrow is Harrow, how much is Alecto and how much are the 200 souls within her? (And there was a crowd of dead children there. They were striving loudly against living children on the far-off shore of the tomb. CHILLS)

In Nona we learn that Palamedes and Camila on the one hand and Pyrrha on the other have two different theories about who Nona is. The Sixth believe that she is an amalgam of Gideon and Harrow, and Pyrrha believes she is Alecto, golden eyes and all. And I am more inclined to believe that it is indeed Alecto, or at least a part of her, that resides within Harrow, and took the wheel when both Harrow and Gideon were gone. Think abt it. Gideon is back in her body, and we have no idea what the hell happened to Harrow, only that she doesn’t have the wheel, and Nona acts nothing like Harrow or Gideon did. It’s like she is learning how to be human for the first time. She learns how to love and be loved for the first time. So with no soul to govern the body, the part of Alecto within Harrow takes the wheel.

And then there is the candle metaphor in NtN. Alecto’s soul is the candle passed from one necromantic heir of the Ninth to the other.

So long story short, part of the vow, if not all of it, is that part of Alecto will always live within Anastasia’s descendants, so long as they are necromancers. And here comes the part of Alecto’s dreams. Because if indeed she lives within the souls of Anastasia’s necromantic descendants, does she see through their eyes? Does she feel through their hearts? Does she dream of their lives, while locked in the Tomb, while a part of her lives in them? Is she conscious within them? Or does the whole thing act like a cavalier- lyctor sort of connection, where she cannot take the wheel unless the other soul in the body Is gone?

Part of her soul is bound to Anastasia’s line, and they are bound to her, and over the course of 10.000 years do they spill over? Alecto to Anastasia’s descendants and they to Alecto. Was this part of the plan to have a failsafe within Anastasia’s line in case something happened to the body in the Tomb? Was it a promise Anastasia made to Alecto, to give her a chance to live, to be human, through the lives of her own descendants?

All in all, I guess I could some it up in a few concise points.

Cassiopeia and Anastasia worked closely together, they were friends and allies and saw in John, the unfulfilled promises he made, and all the faults he tried to cover with rewriting his own version of history.

They decide to make a plan, a long term one, a detailed one, for when John is more a liability than it is worth. And thus, Cassiopeia creates the mechanisms in the Sixth and leaves the protocols for the rest to find. Truth over solace in lies.

Meanwhile Anastasia attempts to ascend, and John kills Samael. Alecto might be consciously or unconsciously involved and harbors guilt over Samael’s death.

Anastasia probably befriends Alecto or finds kinship with this strange being that is the soul of a planet that no longer is.

The planning continues and John after being asked to kill Alecto decides to lock her in the Tomb instead and has Anastasia design it. He later asks her to stay in the tomb and guard Alecto. (Antigone style)

Anastasia designs the tomb, probably with Cassiopeia’s help, probably with a few hidden mechanisms of its own and or a secret pathway through the river, an extra way out.

At some point, Anastasia sires a line, and she makes her vow with Alecto.

The vow probably is in regards of bounding Alecto to Anastasia’s line so long as there are necromantic heirs. A part of Alecto is constantly alive within each descendant of Anastasia’s.

It might work a bit like the lyctoral process, because Alecto only takes the wheel when there is no Harrow and no Gideon in Nona’s body, aka when there doesn’t seem to be another soul guiding it.

Alecto dreams. Whether she dreams of herself within the tomb and that’s how she recognizes Harrow on sight – from the memory of Harrow first unlocking the Tomb – or her dreams are glimpses of the lives Anastasia’s descendants lead I don’t know.

Alecto is thus bound to Anastasia’s line by blood. She recognizes Harrow by her blood, tasting either Anastasia, or the part of herself residing within it, when she kisses her. It also ensures that the line is intact the vow is intact and it’s not a pretender trying to fool her.

Anastasia and Cassiopeia planned to bring John down by opening the tomb when the time was right and leaving her to Alecto’s (and the RB’S???) mercy. There is still a lot left to be explored.

The tomb is to remain closed until the time has come God has to die. We can all see how that can be misinterpreted to > if the tomb opens God will die. And instead of a promise to be fulfilled it becomes a terrible terrible thing, that will spell everyone’s doom.

The freaking skull of the ninth is a threat, a foreshadow and a promise. The Ninth was a house that should have died with Anastasia in the tomb. But it didn’t. It continued existing its bloodline unbroken for 10.000 years. Nine for the tomb and all that was lost. The Ninth is predominantly I feel a house of mourning – the whole nuns, all black, and skull makeup thing. But it is also a house of secrets. It is a house represented by the cure to even the tightest secret held. So the Ninth, the house that should never have been the house that should have died with its secrets in the tomb of its inception, is the one that will break the sewn tongue, and reveal all the secrets, bringing the truth to light.

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