#og cavaliers

[twink-with-an-agenda]

Please tell me I'm not the only one weirdly attached to Samael Novenary

#hes my boy. idk he just gives me Great Vibes #plus he has massive transmasc swag sorry i don't make the rules #samael tlt #samael novenary #anastasia the ninth #tlt #the locked tomb #og cavaliers #og lyctors #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth #my art

[liesmyth]

More proto Lyctors: I don’t think the original purpose of assembling everyone at Canaan House was discovering Lyctorhood. I think the purpose, originally, was just to figure out how necromancy works. Because John didn’t know.

Everything he did early on was trial and error, and after absorbing Alecto he became so powerful he could brute force anything. The necromantic theorems everyone in the Houses uses were developed later, John never needed any of that. He had no frame of reference for how ‘normal’ adepts users could channel the power he unlashed, because he’s way beyond normal.

Thinking of this bit. In NtN, John tried for a hot second to approach his new death powers like he was going to write a peer-review paper. They do corpse experiment. He tries to make it sound like a legit science. Of course it goes nowhere because the world is ending, but also because you can’t apply scientific principles to something that can’t be reproduced by others. Post Resurrection, though? Sure. Basically, he was putting the gang back together, out of affection but also because he really needed lab buddies to help him nail down the framework of something that for him was as intuitive as breathing.

A corollary to that, IMO, is that I don’t think John was sitting on a well of information that he refused to share. I think even by canon era he doesn’t have the sophisticated grasp of nercomancy-as-a-science that the Lyctors do, and I really don’t think he was sitting on the secret to perfect Lyctorhood the whole time. He watched everyone misunderstand the process because he didn’t reveal the full truth about what Alecto was, but I also very much doubt he knew what the “human” version of absorbing another soul would be until the others figured it out. I doubt he even knows an alternative is viable instead of just theoretically possible; I predict John will be very surprised to learn something like Paul exists.

#I think the simple fact that in Htn Mercy & Augustine call Alecto 'John's cavalier' shows they had absolutely no idea of who Alecto was #because he very much killed her and ate her soul. It's just that she got better #anyway just. the idea of pre apocalypse John trying to submit his paper on phthinergy for peer review.... insane #tlt #tlt thoughts #og lyctors #ejg

[theriverbeyond]

griddlehark Barbie heist AU, divergent timeline 2020's. Harrow is working on her final thesis project, something that will make or break her career/future. she's so close to being done, but she's missing one important thing: footage from the lost media Barbie (1983). a movie that was originally projected to break the box office and usher in a new era of media, it ended up shelved due to corporate bureaucracy with most copies destroyed, never to see the light of a theater. only one complete copy is rumored to exist, but it's location is lost along with its director, former legendary film maker John Gaius, who disappeared -- seemingly off the face of the planet -- soon after the movie was shelved.

hijinks ensue, and Harrow ends up having to rope in her longtime childhood enemy/rival/dubious subject of multiple erotic dreams Gideon Nav in order to plan and execute the heist. with the director missing, and everyone else involved either sworn to secrecy or just as hard to find, Harrow and Gideon will need to dig deep to find a way to work together and overcome their troubled history.

the closer they get to each other, the closer they get to the truth -- but as they piece together the mystery of Barbie (1983), they end up stumbling on a worldwide conspiracy that, if revealed, could end up having nuclear consequences.

will Harrow succeed or will her thesis (and future) be lost just like Barbie (1983)!?

#griddlehark #im supposed to be getting lunch w my parents but they are running LATE so i am doing this instead. #what happens next? you decide. #trb.txt #obviously all the OG lyctors and cavaliers were working on the original film #many of whom have now died!!! in mysterious circumstances!! #tlt thoughts #barbie heist au

[mayasaura]

After the reveal about Babs’ body in Nona the Ninth, I’m extra curious about what the original run of lyctors did with their cavaliers. Harrow never hears about any of it, because her cavalier’s body wasn’t recovered, but where was Naberius stashed and what happened to the original seven?

Is Pyrrha’s body out there somewhere, perfectly preserved as if she’d died minutes ago?

#my best guess is that Babs was being kept in storage on the Erabos #he wasn't on the Mithraem obviously #since the Mithraem no longer exists and he wasn't on the shuttle with Ianthe and Harrow #so if the OG cavs are still out there my guess would be they're entombed in Canaan House #and the more I think about it the more certain I am that they would be #they've got all this Catholic stuff going on #and a body that doesn't rot is one of the catholic markers of sainthood #it may be that Mercy considered it NORMAL for a sainted cavalier's body to not rot #and forgot to consider that actually John did that and John has never seen nor had access to this body #that would explain a lot #the locked tomb #ntn spoilers #nona the ninth #pyrrha dve

[frontlinebicepsoftheninth]

can't stop thinking about this priceless pre-resurrection artifact preserved by the sixth house with utmost care. found in "a sermon on cavaliers and necromancers" (gtn additional material)

for one it's hysterical to find out that a phrase that has thus far represented utmost devotion and codependency is something that some of the original saints thought came across more like a euphemism. secondly love that we get cristabel and alfred lore, clearly they were very close friends and this only adds to the backstory of mercymorn and augustine's myriad-long feud. but most importantly:

the cavaliers came up with it. they unknowingly originated an oath that would eventually describe their own deaths. i need to lie down

#assuming cyrus wrote the note but who knows but if it was him he sounds like a naturally funny guy #what i wouldn't give for a spin off short story anthology of og lyctor shenanigans #gtn #gideon the ninth spoilers #gtn spoilers #gideon the ninth #htn spoilers #harrow the ninth spoilers #tlt spoilers #the locked tomb spoilers #tlt #the locked tomb #a sermon on cavaliers and necromancers #mine

[arundolyn]

#lambda 11 #blazblue #edits #blazgif #crow.gif #attacks #specials #spada is so crazy. SWOOSH. flippy flip. #if theres one thing about prime fields. they sure do love flips. #q #i would put a quote but they nerfed lambdas quotes so hard she just says generic robot nonsense mostly #not even her move names really #fucked up! #also its so wild how all the followups are fullscreen #like why that? jesus #sparda is only BARELY not #like 1/8 of the max screen or so #which is mostly cause of the animation #blade and cavalier go aaaalllll the way babey #bit awkward bc if you do try it youre vulnerable for the og tri hit but if the opponent doesnt know whats up then #its kinda free real estate id think. blade especially. lambda having a fullscreen low is nowhere near as evil as izanamis. #FUCK b thunderbolt lance

[xoshepard]

the initials in john’s stories do match the lyctors’ and their cavaliers’ initials so i’ve been assuming that’s who this is about but also when mercy and augustine call john out about perfect lyctorhood their whole thing about the eyes sounds like sleuthing rather than an accusation based on their memories

however, he is naming two of the bodies names that a lyctor/cavalier pair have so who knows. cant wait to see how this goes

#i’m guess there will be some process by which some of them gain powers and maybe all of them lose their memories of the before times #or maybe alecto freaked them out so bad that the gold eyes made a serious impression on them #but i’m sticking w my theory that these are the lyctors and cavaliers bc he changed ulysses and titania’s names but kept the initials #so all these guys probably had normal names and he’s gonna ?? maybe have to resurrect them? #i’m mostly sticking w this theory bc i remember someone saying that the og saints were not immortal and had to stay near him and these guys #are already so used to staying near him #anyway i’m rambling but if you don’t follow me pls don’t respond to this w answers to my questions! i’m okay finding out by reading! #readin ntn #changing my lb tag in hopes of attracting fewer strangers dhskdhkd

[therevengeoffrankenstein]

succeeded in the 'become comically evil' new year's resolution. what now, boss.

#remember my hysterical cavalier homoerotic rival phase. that was the comically evil moment. #i'm still comically evil. idk man i think i've been since starting the w wip a couple years ago lmao #hmm or the year after that like 2022. last year!!! #lemme check real quick the date on the og short story version of the w wip. #twas early early 2021. hmm.... villain arc achieved sometime 2021-2022........ #myevilposts

[jukemaid]

sorely lacking healers in my fe:a run bc i made lissa into a dark flier and shes so powerful i dont know how to handle it. i was gonna get her galeforce but decided to set her back on sage bc im way too impatient and unwilling to grind her to 15. esp since i just did a bunch of bonus team grinding for others

#i sent chrom through cavalier and great knight and now hes a great lord again #robin through dark mage and sorc and shes a grandmaster #fred got knight and then back through cavalier to great knight again #so nothing crazy but they are strong now #oh and kellam is a trickster but like lissa i need his og role

[winepresswrath]

I really want to know what Mercy's association with the eighth looks like. All the other OG lyctors have nice legible relationships with with their pet planets where you can look at their personalities and the corresponding cultures and philosophies and then extrapolate, but Mercy and the Eighth have me stymied.

It's not like there's no overlap- they both go in for dour fun hating, there's a certain superficial brittleness covering up genuine principle, someone with no talent for inference has probably tried to compile her most bitterly exasperated asides into a holy book. The mad science they absolutely got from her, the religious fervour makes sense in terms of where her head was presumably at thousands of years ago, but I cannot see her having the patience to deal with their appetite for ritual and the soul siphoning and breeding cavaliers for batteries doesn't feel like something she'd be into on an institutional level. the eighth reads like mercy left a bunch of freshly resurrected amnesiac zombies with a very terse orientation package, some absolutely deranged medical notes and very strict instructions on lab safety alongside a rule about how they should only contact her if a significant section of the planet is on fire and then they developed a whole religion and culture about it while she checked in very occasionally to yell at them more about lab safety. Then when the other lyctors told her her children were ruining the vibe and inventing fundamentalism she got defensive about how fun is overrated and they have self determination AUGUSTINE, not everyone needs to micromanage and also look at what the third has done with commerce. Absentee patron saint of the year.

#technically they are all absentee patron saints ino #harrow 🤝 the eighth #being mercy's shitty malfunctioning baby she doesn't actually want #it's not that mercy doesn't suck it's that the gap between the ways she sucks and the ways the eighth suck are mysterious to me #however the more i think about her playing the quiet game where everyone gets in line #does their job and doesn't bother mommy the more i see the fundamentalism

[the-sword-lesbian]

Hello Locked Tomb fans!!

Today we’re going to talk about the ways in which Mercymorn is a walking domestic abuse/systemic domestic abuse allegory.

For a more comprehensive breakdown of some of themes of abuse in HtN you can check out this amazing post by Sophelstien

A lot of the glimpses of Mercy’s backstory have some pretty clear indicators of her perpetual abuse by John and her behaviors, especially towards Harrow and Ianthe just perpetuate the same abuse she suffered for years as she turns a mostly blind eye to what John is doing with them.

So let’s get started with all the things straight out of the domestic abuse playbook.

1. Isolation from loved ones:

In this instance he did this to all the Lyctors, not just Mercy. The OG Lyctors were already dependent on proximity to John for their very survival. But with the deaths of their Cavaliers they’ve now experienced a horrifying trauma that cemented that bond further. Their loved ones were gone, the ones they cared for the most, who supported them above all else. They were cone and never coming back. But it’s a good thing John was there for them. Good ole John would always be there for them, right?

You can(and probably will) argue that John himself didn’t do the isolating here(except in the case of Samael whom he definitely admits to killing). Especially in the case of Cristabel and Alfred. But John set up the system. The religious, fatherly but always your pal John at the top. And what better way to serve him, to help him, to be with him. Then to annihilate your support system.

So Cristabel is dead, Mercy’s brotherly icon in the form of Augustine has now become a perpetual antagonist towards her for something she didn’t do, and the only person she can seemingly lean on for comfort and support, is John.

2: Pressure to conform to uncomfortable situations and further self-isolation

Mercy always hated the sexy parties. This one should seem pretty self explanatory but there are other ways we can look at it as well.

So Mercy, now in a perpetually grieving state and entirely reliant on John and her fellow lyctors(who are also dealing with their own grief and trauma) is being pushed to attend what seems to be implied to be quite raucous events put on by her brothers and sisters. I’m sure a great many of them are also just doing it to cope with their own problems in the form of excess. Except John, who is the instigator of most of their traumas, who’s probably having a fantastic time.

Furthermore we see how this has long term shaped Mercy’s general attitude, and personality. She’s bitter, closed off, and a pretty significant shut in. She hardly ever leaves Mithraeum these days. She goes to collect John(and her new baby sister’s/children) from the Erebus and bring them home, to Mithraeum. And that whole scene is just dripping with imagery of a desperate wife/daughter pleading to get her husband/father to come home from the bar, overlooks his probable dalliances(Sarpedon) and his obsessive attention towards a younger subject(Harrow), and just begs him to come back.

And while we’re on the subject

3: Unhealthy attachment and willingness to overlook red flags.

Mercy loves John, and yes, a lot of that can be chalked up to soul permeability and Cristabel. But Mercy loves for him and cares about him as deeply as she can. We can see this in the resurrection beast meeting. Everyone deserves to die for mocking her. But John? John just needs to be locked up for a bit. It will do him some good. He is good, he just needs to learn. Surely there’s goodness inside of him. Surely she hasn’t just spent ten thousand years in service to a man who’s done nothing but torment her with a smile and a false family dynamic. She thinks about this often.

And speaking of overlooking red flags, Mercy’s barest protection of Harrow, only enough to survive. Because that’s what you do in this family. You survive. She doesn’t stop John from what he’s doing to Harrow, she knows what he’s doing surely. But she leaves Harrow to largely fend for herself. Because John isn’t bad, surely. She just needs to learn. Like Mercy did.

4: Plotting escape and the relief when it’s achieved

Mercy, with the help of others, has spent centuries planning John’s downfall. She and Augustine have tailored an incredibly long game plan to open the tomb and bring about John’s end. They got outside help to do it. They didn’t want it to come back at them. They didn’t want to face John’s consequences themselves. And really this couldn’t more obviously be an example of hiring someone to kill your abuser for you.

But the plan falls through, and that’s okay because Mercymorn, has a backup. She devoted thousands of years to a skill that Augustine flat out says would only be good for killing those like themselves. Those with power, and invisibility.

And the relief when it happens. The sheer joy and sadness and desperate exhaustion when she’s done it, and they’re finally free.

5: Retaliation

Mercy and Augustine were right to try and do it all as secretly as they could. They were right to fear a reprisal. Because the very second John comes back, he kills Mercymorn the first. He then attempts to use this display of violence as an intimidation tactic to try and sway the others.

“She made me do it, I had no choice. surely you all believe me? Surely you wouldn’t betray me all the same?”

How many thousands upon thousands of stories have there been throughout history, of abuse victims escaping, or attempting escape, only to be killed or maimed for their efforts.

She was free. They were all free. She’d saved everyone from him. They were safe. She was safe.

And then she wasn’t.

#the locked tomb #mercymorn the first #augustine the first #john gaius #harrow the ninth #harrow the ninth spoilers #tw domestic abuse #tw abuse #tlt meta

[nollypolly]

currently thinking about names in tlt. names are very much a subject that is constantly touched on in the universe- names typically follow which house one belongs to. the most explicit of this is the Tridentati, but that extends to pretty much everyone we meet in book 1. when gideon fully adopts the role of harrowhark's caviler at the end, it's repeated for the second time that nav is a niner name.

and then we find out john changed his lyctor's names post loved-one-slaying. their pre-resurrection names are forgotten, revered as holy even within the private og lyctors. he takes their names, a symbol of where they're from and the earth they failed, and strips them to the bone. he tacks on their cavalier's name on the end as an afterthought, a tribute to the graveyard he turned his friends into. even then, the cavaliers names are lost. he replaces them with what he thinks represents them, despite there being very little chance he was close enough to them to come up with something more than an incredibly shallow understanding of who they are. pyrrha becomes Duty. christabel becomes Joy. we don't know cytherea's saint name, but considering how even john wasnt a fan of loveday, it would make sense why she wouldn't want to use an alias for the most important person in her life. even less so one created by the man who not only lead her to her death, but never even liked her. hell, john doesn't even bother using most of the cavalier's names censored in ntn.

and then we're brought to gideon's first name. she is (unwittingly by the ninth house, in their defense) named after g1. after all, wake's ghost's last words come from right after he pushes her out of the airlock. we know that gideon dies in htn and pyrrha takes over the meatsuit. we know from ianthe's blowup in ntn that john is in active grief. so, now imagine, you just lost every last person you loved, and this sad little girl gets brought to you and she's apparently your long lost totally dead daughter. cool, fine, whatever- you're god, so really death is nothing but some annoying hoops you have to jump through to get what you want. he turns her corpse into a construct, tethers her soul to it, and gives her a bedroom with those glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars and all. luckily there are a lot of newly vacant rooms, haha! and then, as he did with everyone his holy hands have touched, john renames her.

kiriona is pronounced closer to gideon than siri-ona in te reo māori. in typical john fashion, he strips her of her name representing where she is from, blessing her with a new one made in his image. and, once again, he turns her into a tribute for what he lost. g1deon is dead. john honors him by naming his daughter after his best friend, in a dead language, both of which john had a hand in murdering.

she can't be called gideon bc it's a memory of how John failed the person who was most loyal to him. she has to be called something similar as tribute. kiriona isnt his daughter, isn't a person, but instead is a vessel for all of his pain and regret. exactly like the ninth house, kiriona has been transformed into a tomb for her father's grief, and her renaming only cements that.

#RAAA #although there is the cursed other option of simply #“lol yeah no I'm not calling u gideon thatd make shit wayyy too confusing” #anyway sorry this was kinda crazy #long post #tlt #tlt spoilers #the locked tomb #the locked tomb spoilers #haunt.txt

[cantevensyntax]

The OG lyctors give it the old college try. Mercymorn will walk down to the end, with Augustine, if he comes all the way down with her. Without a doubt the most alpha couple coded characters in fiction, particularly since "those eyes" both belonged to dead cavaliers. Art credit: @chillyweirdoinacoffin (edit: actual source, oops: https://alisandre7.tumblr.com!)

In the rough draft of this one I used Homestar Runner and Marzipan for the lyctors, let me know in the tags if you want to see it.

#the mountain goats #the locked tomb #tlt #harrow the ninth #augustine the first #mercymorn the first #Tallahassee (album) #old college try

[yoursincalendricalheresy]

So, if the corpse of a lyctor’s cavalier remains in stasis without any sort of decay… what happened to the bodies of the og cavs?

#this probably won’t be important but I was thinking about how they seemed to just Have Babs and Gideon stashed away somewhere #was that the original purpose of the Mithraeum? #I mean based off of my limited knowledge of the name’s origin I know it was another fucked up joke by Jod #but they weren’t historically used as tombs so… #gideon the 9th #tlt trilogy #the locked tomb #harrow the ninth #mithraeum #john gaius #alecto the ninth #nona the 9th #naberius tern #ianthe tridentarius #mercymorn the first #pyrrha dve

[power-of-fluffy-boys]

Palamedes's "perfect lyctorhood" and Paul

I assumed, and I think a lot of people assumed, that the gap Palamedes saw in the Caanan House method of lyctorhood was what Jod had found which is to say some way to swap souls between two bodies without consuming either, making both people lyctors while avoiding the central tragedy of the process. Now we know that that's not what Jod did and it's not what Palamedes found. Jod apparently did the same thing the OG lyctors did. It's just that his "cavalier's" soul was big enough that he could take a lot of it, enough to become god, without taking all of it. Palamedes and Camilla on the other hand found something closer to the alchemical rebis, a perfect being created by the synthesis of opposing forces, traditionally man and woman but in this case cav and necro.

To the first point: Augustine, Mercymorn, and Cytherea hated Jod because he never shared his "secret technique" to becoming a lyctor without killing your cav, but he didn't have one. The secret was just to eat a planet instead of a person. Did they know what alecto was?

To the second: I wonder if Jod even knows that something like Paul is possible.

#nona the ninth #nona spoilers #the locked tomb #palamedes sextus #camilla hect

[chaos-has-theories]

#would like to hear about your Egypian theory#does it relate to ba and ka and how the physicality of the cavalier's soul seems to survive the consumption and integration @mayasaura

It does a little! There was a theory a while back about the Eightfold Word being the cavalier's name, which did absolutely make my egypt senses tingle. You can read through a list of the Ancient Egyptian conception of the soul and find such bangers as "A person's name was an essential aspect of individuality and central to one's survival after death" or "The kꜣ (ka) 𓂓 was the Egyptian concept of vital essence, which distinguishes the difference between a living and a dead person, with death occurring when the kꜣ left the body" or "In the Egyptian religion, the heart was the key to the afterlife" and then you can cry a little about Kiriona -

But admittedly that's the kind of stuff that can be found in plenty of philosophies.

I'm more focused on the fact that every single lyctor can be mapped onto a major Egyptian deity, and every plot line so far onto a major Egyptian myth.

John and the OG Lyctors are the Great Ennead, with the Resurrection as the Heliopolitan Creation Myth. The Mithraeum follows the Journey of Ra through the underworld.

Harrowhark is Horus, and her fight with Cytherea mirrors the conflict between Horus and Set.

Alecto is Sakhmet, Nona is Hathor, both of them the Eye of Ra; Nona the Ninth is the 'Myth of the Distant Goddess' to a point where I'm embarrassed that I didn't realize so before the book came out.

Ianthe is Thoth.

(If you want to read my full 4000 word essay on it here you go, but that's the gist of it. Even more random ramblings under my tag #the egypt agenda.)

#i wrote that original post at a time when i was not quite on top of how tumblr works yet #also there is more a-coming i want to put the Nona/Hathor stuff into proper words I just haven't found them yet #also also don't worry i didn't think you'd forgotten about all the other influences on these books i've just never seen anyone but me #talk about the egypt stuff and decided to get on my soapbox #the locked tomb #chaos has theories #the egypt agenda