bone witch
once every 2 million babies, a “strong baby” is born. That baby has the strength of one hundred regular babies. I am that baby, and I wish you a merry christmas
3. Your Favorite Dragon Character
Argenta. She irritates me, but I love her tsundere personality.
(with apologies to kate beaton)
this is a birthday present for my best friend. i love her, and yet i do this
I don’t know how I feel about it and I don’t know what it means but I think Cytherea was one hundred percent sincere when she held and comforted Gideon during the avulsion trial. I don’t think she was pretending at all
oh I completely agree!! and it brings up such particularly Cytherea feelings because the invitation to collaborate to get the 8th key was absolutely a murder attempt. if Harrow (or Pal) had tried to siphon and wasn’t strong enough, or if their cav wasn’t strong enough, she would have knocked out another potential Lyctor and made it look like a casualty of the process. but she genuinely does like Gideon, I think, and doesn’t want her to die! so it’s part murder attempt for Harrow and part test of Gideon’s strength. but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t regret it!
okay, so, i agree re: cytherea being sincere, and, i think there’s something in that scene we don’t understand yet! it’s going to be the focus of my reread tbh. here are some thoughts without conclusions yet:
- why does cytherea want the avulsion key so bad? who’s study was that again? she does ask palamedes first, so it can’t have been achieved only by gideon/purely to test gideon’s power. also there are (as we see) way easier ways she kills someone she wants dead, so i don’t think we’re just Here For Murder or to Test Gideon Out.
- she could have done it herself. she not only could literally do it as-is, but she can make bone matter as small as she describes that situation needing (see: the fifth’s wounds). so she doesn’t need someone else to get that key, but she needs someone else to go through that trial… why?
- and the two she picks are palamedes and harrow. why is that? what sets them apart - and what makes her prefer palamedes? his likelihood to agree with her because of his obvious crush on ‘dulcinea’? and he declines. so she goes to griddlehark. but why palamedes first?
I think Palamedes first for the same reasons as she killed Abigail. He knows a lot and he’s great at finding things out. Same with Harrow. Both are incredibly observant that way. And she is definitely trying to kill them both, and it may be easier to avoid a whole Agatha Christie style situation by arranging it to effectively be an accident, death occurring in the course of trying to ascend.
The avulsion trial is the 8th house trial. I don’t think she particularly wanted that key, so much as she wanted to use the trial to achieve some murder. Like you say, she doesn’t need to get into that lab. This whole scene, like most of her scenes, is a set piece where she performs for others.
i hear you, and… i’m just not sold on that. it’s a set piece for who? all of her other deaths are by construct and displayed to be found. the deaths of the fourth, which don’t out her, were never an accident. doing this in a trial setting doesn’t track with her modus operandi. to what end? to prevent the others from killing themselves during this deadly trial, rather than encouraging it? and if she did want them dead, they would be dead; her murders are quick, certain, and without her present. if she changed her goal partway through avulsion because of gideon—why let palamedes live after for as long as he had, up until he does figure it out and confront her? she puts no further effort into killing him. the dots just don’t connect for me; i think she’s up to something…
I agree with the Duchess. There is something off about Cytherea’s behavior around this trial that indicates a larger game, one we never explicitly see the endgame to.
Cytherea had three keys at Canaan House: the one to the lab where Teacher was made, the one to the final lab that she hid inside Abigail, and this one. This key is the only one she didn’t obtain herself, and it opens the only one of those three rooms we don’t see inside. I wonder if we had, if we would be able to guess what Cytherea wanted with these three rooms specifically.
My question is: Could Cytherea have done this trial herself? Cytherea prefers prevarication over outright lying whenever possible, and she says right out that she doesn’t think she can physically do this one. Her battery is inexhaustible, but it would be inside the entropy field with her. She emphasizes that Harrow needs an outside source of energy to draw on. Is there something about an entropy field that would disrupt her access to the lyctoral well? Or prevent her from effectively using that power before the senescence got to her? That might be something to keep an eye on. It would be just like Mercy to set up a trial that could kill a lyctor.
The nature of the fields gives me pause, too. Entropy and senescence …. Time acting on a system, time acting on an organism. So many things keep coming back to time.
Maybe the excessively lukewarm take, but I would still guess that it was more about the people than the room. Cytherea and the idea of “we had the choice to stop” are pretty entwined, the trial serves as a stand-in for lyctorhood, and the Sixth and the Ninth are the two she is trying to gauge as far as could-things-have-been-different; how far are they really willing to go?
Palamedes turns her down to prevent harm to Camilla, Harrow gives it a shot when convinced, and testing Gideon’s power is a side benefit. She genuinely feels for Gideon, and the apologies about “we take so much” are sincere, but she goaded Harrow into it--something something projection re: Loveday and recreating the original Canaan environment?
Anonymous asked:
Rhea Fire Emblem
hahahaha WOW yeah like, a million reasons, most of them to do with, like, what she is. a thousand-year-old shortsighted theocratic dictator with the mother of all unresolved mommy issues is not my cup of tea, thanks. i'd sooner go out with Lorenz.
do we at least agree that Edelgard Did Nothing Wrong, Ever?
ehhhhh, edelgard did sort of qrpvqr gb tb guebhtu jvgu ure "qrpyner cebybatrq naq oybbql gbgny jne ba gur erfg bs gur pbagvarag" cyna jura fur pbhyq'ir rnfvyl whfg hfrq olyrgu nf n yrire gb qrcbfr eurn jvgubhg n shff. v trg gung fur unq fbzr cerggl gbhtu pvephzfgnaprf naq rzbgvbany snpgbef gung yrq gb ure znxvat yrff-guna-bcgvzny qrpvfvbaf, ohg yvxr, fb zhpu bs gur cybg bs Oynpx Rntyrf jnf qevira ol Rqrytneq snyyvat cerl gb gur fhax pbfg snyynpl naq abg errinyhngvat ure cyna va yvtug bs gur npdhvfvgvba bs arj erfbheprf.
V guvax hfvat Olyrgu nf yrirentr jbhyq trarenyyl unir erdhverq xabjyrqtr fur qvqa'g unir be tnzoyrf fur jnfa'g jvyyvat gb znxr*, gubhtu nqzvggrqyl vg'f orra n juvyr fvapr V cynlrq gur tnzr. Gung fnvq gurer'f cebonoyl na nethzrag gb or znqr (tvira gur bgure ebhgrf, jurer vg qbrfa'g raq jvgu Eurn'f pncgher) gung Rqrytneq'f qrpvfvba gb fgneg n jne eryngrf gb nsberzragvbarq rzbgvbany snpgbef naq/be n oryvrs gung Nqerfgvn fubhyq or pbagvarag-fcnaavat, naq jnfa'g shyyl centzngvp.
*Guerng gb Olyrgu nf yrirentr erdhverf xabjvat gurl'er jbegu n pbagvarag gb Eurn juvpu ng yrnfg cer-ubyl-gbzo vf aba-boivbhf; hfr bs Olyrgu nf na npghny nyyl erdhverf gehfgvat gung gurl'q gnxr ure fvqr bire Eurn'f. Nal abaivbyrag qrcbfvgvba bs Eurn evfxf ure whfg bhgyvivat rirelbar vaibyirq naq fjnaavat evtug onpx va, naq nyfb n aba-jne aba-vzzrqvngr fbyhgvba znl unir pnhfrq GJFvgQ ceboyrzf gubhtu gung'f yrsg cerggl nzovthbhf.
gothicenjoyer
Anonymous asked:
Hey I hope this isn't too much of an ask but could you explain perfect lyctorhood ? Like I'm still super confused as to how Aug + Mercy figured out Alecto was John's cav, what perfect lyctorhood is, and how it works. I've heard it requires you like siphon energy from ur cav (without killing them), but wouldn't that be a very painful process in of itself? Etc. Tysm in advance;;
aye no worries. a lot of this is very difficult because it’s honestly not 100% clear what perfect lyctorhood entails, exactly, but i’ll do my best.
augustine and mercymorn probably knew that john had to have a cavalier, if we take cavalier to mean ‘person who a lyctor needs to eat and absorb the soul of in order to have access to the ‘lyctoral well,’ or a consistent source of thanergy,’ just by virtue of the fact that john had to get that power from somewhere - augustine says:
“You don’t get your power from Dominicus,” said Augustine. “It gets its power from you. There’s no exchange involved, no symbiosis. You draw nothing from the system. It relies on you entirely, as we all know. You’re God, John. But—as the Edenites are fond of pointing out—you were once a man. So whither that transition? Where does your power come from? Even if the Resurrection had been the greatest thanergy bloom ever triggered, it would drain away over time. And then Mercy said to me—in a moment of true Mercy vileness—she said, What is God afraid of?”
john had explained his source of necromantic power as being taken from dominicus. augustine specialised in 'following power to its source’ and worked out from here that this couldn’t be true, which then begged the question of who or what was providing john’s lyctoral well. mercy asks 'what is god afraid of,’ which is a reference to the opening of psalm 27 - god tells harrow that dominicus is named such as a reference to “dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea, quem timbo?” (“the lord is the source of my light and my safety, so whom shall i fear?”) the answer to this question, in this case, of course being alecto. which, as far as i can tell, is how augustine and mercymorn got to the conclusion that the source of john’s necromantic power came from alecto, who he 'switched off.’ augustine goes on to say:
“But we have never loathed each other so intensely that we couldn’t work together. It kept us honest. I never wanted to believe anything Joy was saying … I never wanted to believe it when she said, What if he didn’t really put down A.L.? And then—What if he couldn’t put down A.L.?”
the idea basically being that over time, augustine and mercy grew suspicious of the mechanics of john’s necromancy, because his explanations didn’t add up, and concluded that alecto must have been his cavalier. but alecto was alive when john was a necromancer! she wasn’t 'switched off’ for a while after they all became lyctors, which meant there was a 'perfect’ form of lyctorhood that didn’t kill the cavalier.
this only becomes clear beyond a shadow of a doubt when gideon surfaces in harrow’s body and mercy and augustine see that she has the same eyes as alecto:
Augustine said, “The eyes have it, John. Those damn golden eyes she always had, like a cat’s. When I saw young Harrowhark over there—” He jerked his thumb in our direction, which still somehow had the ability to startle me, I guess because I thought he’d forgotten we were even in the room. “—sporting those exact same lights, I freely admit my first thought was Fuck me backward, she woke up.
“But it didn’t make sense, of course,” he continued, “because if A.L. turned up on the Mithraeum, she would have been as … distinctive as ever. So why else would Harrowhark’s eyes change? For the same reason our eyes changed. The completion of the Eightfold Word. She had attained actual Lyctorhood.”
“Which meant,” said Mercy, taking up the thread, “that the infant’s cavalier had somehow ended up with the eyes of your Annabel Lee. There was no possible way Alecto’s genetic code—to the extent she even had one, which by the way I am not convinced she ever did—could have ended up in a baby in the Ninth House … but there very much was a way that your genetic code could have, because Augustine and I worked extremely hard to put it there.”
basically - gideon has an eye colour that apparently nobody in the nine houses has except for alecto having had it (mercy and cytherea call the gene 'recessive’ which means wake must have been a carrier for it but i mean that’s a WHOLE other thing!); they know that it can’t be alecto in harrow’s body because alecto has a 'distinctive’ behaviour pattern (what this entails exactly is unclear) whereas gideon was clearly human; gideon therefore has a genetic code that links her to alecto, but it’s impossible for gideon to be related to alecto; what is possible is for her to be the daughter of god, because of dios apate major. mercy and augustine figure out from gideon’s eye colour that wake had impregnated herself with john’s sperm and had a child who ended up on the ninth.
(nb. they also know this because we know from mercy saying she 'saw [gideon’s] body’ - and also now from her appearance in as yet unsent - that mercy knew about wake and a baby crash-landing on the ninth, and knew that that baby was harrow’s cavalier. the implication seems to be that she thought gideon was the lovechild of wake and gideon the first, until she saw gideon’s eyes and realised what wake had done.)
“All that effort to break open the Locked Tomb,” said Augustine, “only to have the answer we wanted wander up in the form of one dead teenager flaunting your genes. They were never Alecto’s eyes at all. They were yours, John. Alecto had your eyes from the moment any of us first saw her. And those extraordinary black eyes you’ve always worn … they were always hers.”
Harrow, I was not following all of this, because necromantic theory is a lot of hot bullshit even when I’m not busy having Complex Emotions, but that last bit pinged even me as weird. I’d seen Ianthe wearing Tern’s eyes, like a funeral in her face. I’d looked in the mirror and seen your face with my much more attractive and cooler eyes, and that was—weird. I’d figured out that the eye-change is what happens when two people become one. It’s not what happens when two people swap places. No one was ever going to see that ass Naberius strutting around with a pair of bad purple eyes that got left out in the rain, because the Lyctoral eye swap relied on him taking a rapier backward to the heart. There was no way a cavalier could end up with a necromancer’s eyes.
Unless the cavalier failed to die.
so, basically, gideon’s eye colour is the final confirmation for mercy and augustine that alecto was john’s cavalier, and from there it’s pretty easy to see how they concluded that there’s a form of 'perfect lyctorhood’ (which is the term they give to it) which keeps the cavalier from dying.
it’s not exactly clear what perfect lyctorhood does do to the cavalier. we know that alecto was Unbelievably Fucked Up, but we don’t know if that’s because john botched her resurrection or if being alive through perfect lyctorhood does that or - my personal guess - if it’s because she’s some sort of resurrection beast.
as for what it is - honestly? god knows. john definitely has significantly more power than the other lyctors, and i think kept them from finding out about perfect lyctorhood so that none of them would have a power that would be able to match or supercede his. Weird Shit John Can Do is as follows:
- full-on necromancy and actual resurrection - he resurrected alecto (albeit botched it massively, apparently); he resurrected the nine houses; he resurrects the cohort officer who draws the wards on the erebos near the start of harrow.
- he seems to be able to….stop time? or at least freeze a room? he does this when gideon the first is midway through getting exploded by harrow’s soup construct and then again when wake and mercy start arguing near the end
- gideon says his necromancy feels 'more taste than theorem’ and it’s stated multiple times to leave a strong citrus tinge, which is not a thing anyone else’s has been able to do - “You and Ianthe were left blinking, eyes and noses streaming, as though you had just eaten something slightly too spicy.” - “there was the ever-present sign of God keeping her preserved, with the hot lemon scour of his divine necromancy punching the back of each sinus” - “There was a flash of—I don’t know what. If it was necromancy, it was of a kind I’d never felt before. It was too sudden: more taste than theorem. There was this citrus taste in your spit. Everyone shut the fuck up, which, as spells go, was probably pretty useful.”
- he can come back whole after getting torn asunder by mercy; it’s not entirely clear if lyctors can die all the way (cassiopeia is clearly not dead, ulysses is in the stoma and is for sure coming back, cyrus got spaghettified but that doesn’t mean he’s DEAD, he’s just….spaghettified. poor cyrus. cytherea is dead i guess but also her corpse is possessed for most of htn, so) but at the very least it doesn’t seem as though they can do that
so to answer your question - it’s not really clear exactly what perfect lyctorhood is, besides potentially being a two-way energy transfer between a necromancer and a cavalier, and probably a more powerful form of lyctorhood. if i’ve missed stuff (i am Bad at getting my head around the mechanics of this world!) then other people please add on xx
the only thing to add to this excellent explanation is that Camilla has Palamedes’s eyes in the epilogue to HtN, and Palamedes urgently wanted to know if Harrow became a Lyctor “the right way.”
A couple related points: Palamedes is initially disheartened to hear that Harrow supposedly became a lyctor the "normal" way, but this turns around when he becomes aware of Gideon in Harrow's mind--unless he knows Gideon has some kind of physical immortality, this suggests that true lyctorhood can still be attained without both parties having a body (or that there's some way of recovering the second body in such a case) and doesn't have to have been completed in one action while cavalier and necromancer are both alive--good news for him and Camilla, given his own situation.
This also suggests that John's proxy attempts to kill or threaten Harrow into being 'fixed' were specifically about avoiding the possibility of her becoming a true lyctor, since it was potentially pretty obvious to him that she'd failed to digest her cavalier.
That said, it's hard to tell which aspects of John's lyctorhood differences are because his version is perfect, and which have to do with Alecto, or even the pre resurrection conditions of his ascension. Unless the back-and-forth flow of energy between a perfect lyctor and cavalier generates power by itself, the question of "from whence" is still an open one.
Less a particular addition so much as a detail, but John doesn't seem able to stop time so much as lock down people (lyctors specifically though, which is meant to be fairly impossible for anyone else at that distance) given that the non-people/necromancy objects stayed in motion:
Anonymous asked:
A thought for you, friend.
Who drags the other out of bed by their ankle. Ike or Mist?
I feel like they'd both be disgustingly early risers
but Mist probably gets up first because the only time she can get some peace and quiet is before the noise begins.
So no one, but if Ike doesn't wake up on his own, Boyd's going to bust down his door while shouting YEET at the top of his lungs which is basically the same thing.
This one’s easy it is also Boyd.
-Path of Radiance, Chapter 17
hey who wants a quick rundown of what we do/don’t know about the events in Gideon the Ninth between Chapter 37 (which ends with harrow cradling gideon’s body) and the Epilogue (which starts with harrow waking up on the Eberos)?
cuz (for my own theories im making) i organized the information and added a list of conclusions i think we can draw. just in case anyone else finds it helpful, i decided to post it here, so check it out:
Good points made here about Pal being surprised Harrow and Cam aren't together! Also massively agree re: it being weird that Ianthe doesn't look for Corona at all in HTN. Throughout HTN there are references made to there being "a traitor" (singular!) and I'm pretty sure this refers to Ianthe. Even though she does grab John and take him away from the stoma at the end. I'm not at all sure what her game is, but I think it's longer and a bit more grey than it seems just based on that action.
I don’t think saving John necessarily says much about Ianthe’s game. Gideon’s very judgmental about it (“threw in her lot with the guy who had lied to everyone about everything,” “blew it in a huge spectacular way,” etc) and fair enough, but Ianthe at this point has no particular reason to disbelieve that John’s death would cause the death of Dominicus and the Nine Houses (and seemed genuinely horrified when she initially thought it had happened,) so she may have saved him for that reason alone. This goes double if she had reason to believe Coronabeth was or could be in the system at the time.
The necromancers and cavaliers from Gideon the Ninth.
I was thinking of drawing GtN characters aside from Harrow and Gideon… but wasn’t sure of their exact looks (especially outfit-wise). Drew a few sketches, then my completionist tendencies took over and I had to design all 17. O.O
Been getting some requests for a labeled version of the character line up, so here ya go! (it’s too big for Tumblr to properly host, so please click on the link below for the full size bO.O)
Also I made a character sheet for Gideon and Harrow to at least attempt some sort of consistency…
Hey, I finished drawing the rest of The Pool Scene ™!
Was inspired after reading a bunch of comics and manga to work more on this.
Sixth House!
Gonna read the short story now. :3
Honestly if nothing else, you’d think people would be more upset about Ike’s fifth alt just being another sword guy alt.
Can’t speak for everyone by any means but a few thoughts on this and the previous post:
Death first to vultures and scavengers.
Gideon Nav. Smirking at the face of some Harrowing circumstance, probably.
I finished the book yesterday. Holy shit what an amazing book.
💀 We do bones, motherfucker. 💀
painted in cs6
horrible teenage bone nun- a cropped work in progress
(there’s gonna be a skeleton holding her cape in the final but that’s Hard so I’m saving it for later )