#ortus nigenad my beloved......

[procrastinationaccount]

Ortus: I believe that we are trapped in a labyrinth of, consciously or unconsciously, Lady Harrowhark's making. Although she is a mere seventeen years of age, she has endured enough pain and accrued enough power to fell a Lyctor. Do not underestimate the machinations of her dark, twisted mind.

The machinations of Harrow's dark, twisted mind: What if I was Gideon's cavalier 🤔🤔🤔🗡🗡🗡What if she was a charming princess and I was an impoverished little nun 🤴🤴🤴💓💓💓 What if she worked at a coffee shop ☕☕☕🤗🤗🤗

#harrowhark nonagesimus #griddlehark #the locked tomb #tlt memes #ortus nigenad #gideon nav #harrow the ninth my beloved

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

i fucking love the stuff with the ghosts in htn btw.

abigail and magnus get to be 3-dimensional and interesting and they get to use their skills to help people. they're first act shock value deaths but they were so so smart and in this one they get to be useful like they never got to be before. they get to do what they would've done, given the chance, and hold the group together. they get to actually solve the problem and offer harrow a truly healthy relationship with adults. they get to show her real guidance.

marta dyas, a one-note character who dies off page, completely freaks out when sock puppet judith dies. she's distressed, she's confused, but abigail convinces her so easily to stay and help harrow, a girl she's barely spoken to. she doesn't just get to demonstrate her genuine resolve and skill when fighting commander wake, but she also gets to be a good person, and she gets to be afraid.

dulcinea septimus. fucking dulcinea septimus. the woman on the sidelines whose name means sugar, the romantic interest who you were delusional for believing in, the unseen recipient of letters, is sick of roses and horny for revenge. she's jilted, she's angry, she's been cooped up and bored for a long long time and she's going to help you kill a ghost because what does she have left to loose.

and ortus nigenad, my beloved. talk about a one-note character who dies off page. a generally unpleasant poet who almost none of the characters respect. and he gets to be the hero. his genuine passion and love for something no one else gives a shit about is enough to warp reality and save everyone. harrow goes to him genuinely contrite and ashamed of herself, and he doesn't just forgive her, he apologizes for not doing more to protect her. he gives her a hug. he makes her feel seen and safe and real. and then. and then this is a story in which the power of love genuinely does save the day and ortus's ardent love for his mattias nonius verse fanfiction is the love that makes up the difference.

even protesilaus writes poetry. he has a family. he cultivates roses in his free time. and his relationship with dulcie is complicated. he genuinely cares for her but he isn't always what's best for her. and he, too, stays to help harrow. with no ulterior motives, no self interest, despite having never met her before, he stays to help harrow.

it just offers so much agency and depth to these characters who are so easy to write off in the first book. like, it sucks what happens to ortus, but no one was crying about him. we feel kinda sad about dulcinea for palamedes's sake, but not for her own. but then harrow the ninth comes out and suddenly they're all people. selfless, brave, intelligent, angry people banding together to help this unpleasant but desperate seventeen-year-old and i love them all so much. harrow the ninth is such a good fucking book.

#harrow the ninth #dulcie septimus #ortus nigenad #magnus and abigail #protesilaus ebdoma #marta dyas #my post

[nerves-nebula]

Ortus Nigenad's lame (affectionate) poetry my beloved <3 i love him i love that he played such an important role in the story i wanna kiss him on his big bald head <<33

#nnstuff #the locked tomb #ortus nigenad

[appsa]

On a more serious note there's something to be said about mercymorn calling harrow a child vs ortus calling her a child in htn but i cant articulate it rn

#shut it apsa #something something mercymorns comes from a place of condescension #where she acknowledges that harrow is small and inexperienced but does nothing to protect her #vs ortus who recognized how he had failed gideon and harrow by standing on the sidelines #and watching them grow up far sooner than they should have ever had to #locked tomb #breaks my heart how harrow spends the whole time resisting it right until ortus says it #like it soothed some wound she didnt even know she had #bye im feeling an emotion #ortus nigenad my beloved...... #the fact that he acknowledges it and then fights for harrow 😭😭😭 bro that moment was EVERYTHING #also. condescension is probably oversimplifying it but lol i dont think i fully understood the lyctors anyway theyre too weird

[betwixtify]

Ortus................................................

[ID: A pencil drawing of Ortus Nigenad from Gideon the Ninth. He is a fat person with skull face paint, multiple facial and ear piercings, and tattered black robes with bone ornamentation. He stands facing right, his eyes closed and his mouth slightly open in a speech. One hand held out to the left has a glove that covers all but pointer and middle finger and tip of his thumb, all of which are smudged with ink. His other arm is bent up at the elbow, his fist clenched in passionate oration. /End ID.]

#tlt #gtn #htn #ortus nigenad #gideon the ninth #ortus #my art #sketch #tlt ortus #i love this guy....he deserves everything..... #described #ORTUS MY FUCKING BELOVED

[ortustheninth]

free GtN paperback ebook chain reaction has reignited my undying rage on behalf of ortus nigenad

#gtn #htn #the locked tomb #ortus nigenad #i have 2 hours of sleep and an oncoming deadline so u can see i am not entirely coherent #dont think it’s possible to post to tumblr dot com in full coherency #but god. ortus nigenad. my beloved #fairly rated as an abominable cav but that’s a good thing. that is the goal that gideon is hopefully developing towards #and for what! to get blown up for his unwillingness to live and die for a horrible teenager who did not appreciate either of those things #and he can’t get out of it! not even in death. pov: you’re murdered by the home that has always seen your death as infinitely more valuable #than your life and has made sure you Know it. and then. u wake up again. in the River #wearing your father’s face paint. reenacting the events that lead to your murder #except! this time there is no refusal or escape #the horrible teenager who plainly does not like you and whose father figure murdered you in her name has created an afterlife that u physic #ally cannot opt out of and now u are stuck serving in the role u died trying to get out of #and the horrible teenager doesn’t know what’s going on and STILL doesn’t like u #and also doesn’t get all of your poetic and melancholy references to your own death. god that would kill me can u imagine being murdered #by someone’s minion and then that someone is totally unaffected by your death. no memory of it no acknowledgement of it no apology for it #ok enough essay in the tags maybe I will come back to this after I’ve been smacked by the oncoming deadline #tlt spoilers

[helianthus-hellion]

ok inspired largely by this post and also screaming w @msevildoom i have some Thoughts on ortus nigenad

- my first thought is to apologize to ortus for having not really considered any of this before. with each re-listen he climbs somewhat higher on my list of beloved characters and i am ashamed to say i did not really think much at all about him to start.

- that being said: JESUS CHRIST I JUST PROCESSED THAT HE WAS ALL OF SEVENTEEN WHEN EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS PEERS DIED??

- HE WAS SEVENTEEN.

- he probably had, like, friends? possibly even a boyfriend/girlfriend??

- statistically speaking there were probably 20-25 kids in total age 17, and since it's kind of implied that 17 was the cutoff age for stuff like school, he was basically about to graduate with the peers he'd spent his whole life with

- and then they all just.

- die.

- all of them.

- also idk about all of you but when i was 17 i was an only child but i definitely had, like, younger kids in my school and friends' little siblings and i basically adopted my own cohort of younger siblings?

- so like not only do all of his peers die but also any littler kids he felt protective kinship over? gone

- and ortus ostensibly doesn't know about the war crime but ortus also ostensibly didn't know about the reverend parents and his father and the circumstances of his death so it is not outside the realm of possibility that he knew. maybe not all the necromantic nuance, but he could very well have known this massacre was somehow involved in bringing harrow to life, especially since he had to have been intentionally spared so he could be her cavalier primary

- dude is 17-18, grieving the loss of Every Friend He Ever Had, and then is sworn into service of an infant, whose existence is probably the reason all his friends are dead

- then ghost!ortus is watching harrow, who is the same age he was when the war crime happened, facing the loss of the only peer she ever knew

- do you think he saw his own grief mirrored in her?

- do you think he was ever able to look at her and not recall the faces of his friends?

#the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #the locked tomb spoilers #ortus nigenad

[number63liveblogs]

Harrow the Ninth: 15

“Do I have Ortus’s eyes? Are these ones mine? I never really looked at them— Beloved, what were my eyes like?”

[…]

“She asked me not to tell you.”

“She”? The most likely option would be that it was Harrow before she wiped her memory, considering it would be quite a twist if Harrow’s hallucination talked to someone else. But then again, The Body has been giving Harrow hints of things in situations where it’s ambiguous if it’s something Harrow even cold have subconsciously noticed, like telling her to lie to Mercy about her age.

When you stared at your bloodshot eyes in the mirror and tried to remember Ortus Nigenad’s, you couldn’t recall a difference: they were both that deep and fathomless black[.]

The thing is, this is Harrow’s eye colour:

The Reverend Daughter’s sharp-angled, foxy chin was thrust out, and she still had a thick rime of blood circling each nostril, but with her burning black eyes she looked exalted as a bad bone saint.

Gideon, on the other hand, had gold-coloured eyes:

“They tell you such a lot. I couldn’t tell you much about your Reverend Daughter … but you have eyes like gold coins.[“]

So, it can’t just be because of whatever it was that Harrow did to erase Gideon from her memories, right? They should have switched eye colours the moment that the Lyctorhood process was completed, that was what happened to Ianthe. And Harrow did have a whole discussion with John afterwards while she still remembered Gideon.

Although it is possible that whatever Harrow did also changed her eyes, considering it might be the reason she isn’t capable of accessing all of Gideon’s abilities like she’s supposed to. Come to think of it, there was a message to Harrow from her pre-amnesia self that she was told to “open if your eyes change.” So she must have known that she would keep her original eye colour or revert to it, and that getting Gideon’s eyes (back) would be significant.

And now that we’re at it, The Body also has golden eyes:

She looked at you with her heavy-lidded, yellow-gold eyes[.]

Is this connected to Gideon’s Super Secred Destiny that we still don’t know much about? My guess is yes.

#the locked tomb trilogy #harrow the ninth #liveblog #number 63

[randomfatechidna]

musings at 25%

summary of my notes/highlights in harrow the ninth up to the end of the first act ordered in a handy list

canon text in “quotes”, notes in my library copy in italics, notes i am making now, at the time of writing, in (parenthesis)

“THE NIGHT BEFORE THE EMPERORS MURDER” - audible gasp.

“Your” - oh! second person! i love that for me (now that i’ve read a bit further, i can understand two things, that the changing of narrative person is excellent for dividing past and present, but also can be VERY interesting if you look at it as harrow lacking self identity due to *vague hand gesture* whatever she did to herself)

“Please don’t be in such a hurry to die...Do not underestimate me, Teacher, I have always lived.” oh! (this confused the hell out of me because i always saw harrow as not really caring whether she lived or died, which is clearly wrong! she lives because of the 201 dead children inside her, even though it makes her want to die :(

“I could protect you, if you’d only ask me to.” GIVE me weird harrow and ianthe dynamics PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE (i’m so delighted with EVERYTHING to do with their arcs so far. pre-htn harrow was probably incensed at having to trust her. this is hilarious to me.)

“Unless there’s something in those letters I don’t know about, you’re out of tricks.” what letters!! (of course, i eventually found out, but i’m proud of myself for picking up on this.)

“Looking deep into the eyes of the cavalier she murdered, you realised, not for the first time, and not unwillingly, that Ianthe Tridentarius was beautiful.”

“Well, I tried, and therefore no one should criticise me.” that’s a CURSED daniel radcliffe meme (i literally hate muir SO much i hate this!! i hate that it made it into the book!! i hate that i recognised it!!)

“Beloved dead, hear your handmaiden. I loved you with my whole rotten, contemptible heart—I loved you to the exclusion of aught else—let me live long enough to die at your feet.” (HARROW 😭😭)

“You were only half a Lyctor, and half a Lyctor was worse than not a Lyctor at all.” how is she only half a lyctor, does she mean without gideon? (i’m so glad i get to look back on this. i was so damn confused lmao)

“You prepared to die with the Locked Tomb on your lips. But your idiot dying mouth rounded out three totally different syllables, and they were three syllables you did not even understand.” gideon? ianthe? alecto? emperor? SO many choices (i love reading these because i didn’t expect to know so many answers as i did when writing them. it’s gideon! poor harrow!)

“I need you to hide my infirmity,” Harrow said. “You see, I am insane.” (my biggest question with this book is, how much of the flashbacks are real and how much aren’t? we know harrow regularly hallucinates the body now but was that true for the events of gtn? i feel so gaslit reading this book it’s incredible.)

“Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing.” WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON

“Harrow, who had been born for the sole privilege of worshipping this corpse, loved it wildly from sight.” (harrow’s such a weirdo i love her SO much)

“Harrowhark Nonagesimus has always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.” (compare this with the point above where the emperor tells her not to be in a hurry to die.)

“There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born.” this means the body right? this can’t mean gideon. is she just so shocked that she can’t handle thinking of gideon? or is the emperor shitting her? (at this point i thought the emperor had altered her memory, which would be the MUCH less painful route.)

“You yourself never had power over anyone but you misused it violently.” (harrow. do you. need. a hug? perhaps?)

“You leant down and—holy shit—kissed her squarely on the mouth.” LITERALLY HAD TO PAUSE READING AND JUST GAPE FOR THREE MINUTES.

“To open in the event of the Emperor’s death. To open in the event of Ianthe’s death. To open if the Ninth House is in mortal danger. Some of them were opaque to the point of madness. To open if your eyes change. If met, to be given to Camilla Hect.” (saved this in case it becomes relevant. also, i miss cam!! where is she!!)

“Harrow,” said Ianthe gently, “don’t fuck with me. I’m not here for your amusement either.” ianthe is so wild i love her

“Perhaps there would have been something in rocking up to the First House with an octogenarian in tow: a sort of wild and confident fuck-you—Oh, your cavaliers are young? And they fight? How classic! So jejeune!” (harrow’s mind is a BLESSING to be inside. also, aglaimene an octogenarian? i knew she was old but DAMN good for her!!)

“It’s blank, my lady.” “Fuck.” AHHH WHAT IS GOING ON!!! I DEMAND TO KNOW!!! was she actually seeing things in gtn or is this her remembering incorrectly??

“She looked at you with her heavy-lidded, yellow-gold eyes” the body has gideon’s eyes??????

“A rubber-bodied toddler with a painted face and very red hair lay dead beside your knee and for some reasons it was this that destroyed you...you howled in a purity of fright.” :((

“Everyone alive swung around in a hurry, and in walked the next terrible part of your life.” (is ortus the first the next terrible part? or the fact that they are being chased by Literal Ghost Monsters?)

“Harrowhark had forgotten that he was Abigail’s husband, and found the concept of making eyes at one’s cavalier too revolting to bear.” (SAYS YOU, MISS NONAGESIMUS. SAYS YOU.)

“THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME SO I DID THE IMPLANTATION MYSELF YOU SELF-SERVING ZOMBIE AND YOU STILL SENT HIM AFTER ME AND I WOULD HAVE HAD HIM IF I HADN’T BEEN COMPROMISED AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE SAW ME AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME! AND FOR THAT I’LL MAKE YOU BOTH SUFFER UNTIL YOU NO LONGER UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THAT GODDAMNED WORD” (harrow uses the word “compromised” to describe herself in the letter to herself in chapter 4? what does it mean what does it all mean)

i didn’t highlight this but i have a distinct feeling that the longsword isn’t just the longsword. something’s definitely been done to it...

anyway see you guys when i’ve finished act II

#rose #htn #harrow the ninth spoilers #once again all htn spoilers are being tagged htn #anything locked tomb related remains being tagged gtn #eta: it is SO HARD not to read this book in one day #but i learn from my mistakes and i am going to spread it out #because it is all the joy i have right now

[procrastinationaccount]

One detail from the Harrow Nova au I think gets overlooked is that Ninth cavs are supposed to get sacramental skulls scarified onto their faces. Not only does Harrow forgo this, like the shaved hair requirement, but she doesn't even bring it up to Gideon or to Ortus. Whatever she says she doesn't want to bind them into service to the Ninth or cling to the grimmest of its rituals the way the reverend line before her did.

#harrow the ninth my beloved #the locked tomb #griddlehark #harrowhark nonagesimus #gideon nav #ortus nigenad #tlt spoilers #htn spoilers

[procrastinationaccount]

May I just say that Glaurica fascinates me. This woman was raised in the Eighth House and became one of the last-ever pilgrims to the Ninth. She moved for the love of their cavalier primary, Mortus, who is one of the only adults Harrow seems to have relatively pleasant memories of. They had a son and named him Ortus. Their intercession saved him from the " crèche flu "; she knew the truth of the circumstances of Harrow's birth, or at least part of it, and it drove her demented. Her husband died with no official reason given besides the assurance that it was in service to her adopted House, which was now for all intents and purposes run by a ten-year-old. She's seemingly the only (mostly) lucid adult who never figured out that Pelleamena and Priamhark died at the same time as Mortus, which is probably because she was busy raising the best-adjusted person on the Ninth (not a high bar to clear, of course). Said lucid adults held both her and her son in open contempt, one because she was an immigrant and one because she allowed/encouraged his poetry habit over his cavaliership. She completely ignored the much-abused teenage bondservant of the Ninth until after her own death. She only tried to leave the Ninth only when she learned that her son might be taken from her, unknowingly acting as a pawn in her teenage monarch's attempt to fastrack her own enemies-to-lovers arc. Her Marshall planted a bomb on the transport and all she could do was look upon it and weep before it killed her. She followed a thanergetic link all the way back to her home planet and at the least hinted at the war crime that she had witnessed on the Ninth; seemingly all the Eighth did about it was lord it over Gideon (ultimately to the benefit of said enemies-to-lovers arc). Only like three people on the Ninth were even informed of her death. What a life.

#the locked tomb spoilers #tlt spoilers #glaurica appreciation post #ortus nigenad #gideon the ninth spoilers #gtn spoilers #harrow the ninth my beloved #htn spoilers

[procrastinationaccount]

#Harrow the ninth my beloved #The locked tomb #HtN spoilers #harrowhark nonagesimus #ortus nigenad #Gideon nav #Harrow the ninth spoilers #griddlehark