#the locked tomb speculation

[sainamoonshine]

So I know the entire narrative in The Locked Tomb is like « oh ahaha Babs, what a loser » but I genuinely think that there might be something really interesting about him. Babs was the only person in the whole galaxy to know about Ianthe and Corona’s secret. And I’m starting to think that as much of a natural asshole he is, at least 50% of what we see of him in GtN is acting.

Let me explain: he is obviously in puppy love with Corona, and dismissive of Ianthe when Corona is looking. But privately, he is terrified of her. He knows she’s his necromancer and NOT Corona; this is proven when the Second challenges the Sixth, and Corona wants to intervene but Ianthe says no. Ianthe is 100% certain that Babs will do as she says, but Corona is actually surprised. And when he finds Corona duelling Gideon, he is scared and tells her that he will not tell Ianthe. I think Ianthe probably threatened him behind Corona’s back one time or a dozen. And I think Babs isn’t just protecting their secret, he might be trying to protect Corona from Ianthe’s anger too. Being the annoying go-between, the butt of the joke, the meat shield. On purpose.

Pay close attention to when he’s being a contrary asshole for no reason. A lot of it seems to come naturally to him, sure. But also: when Jeannemary finds the human ash and asks for Corona of all people to help her identify the deceased: he immediately redirects attention by being a mega-asshole. Corona ends up not having to do any necromancy; her secret is still safe. Similarly, later on in Dulcinea’s sick room, when everyone is having a discussion about necromancy: he makes a tetchy comment, prompting Corona to whisk him away like ‘oh ahah he’s getting hangry’. How familiar is this routine for them?

I think deep down, while he’s an arrogant dickhead, Babs isn’t evil. He’s shocked and appalled that Silas went and took Dulcinea’s keys, and I don’t think it’s because he wishes he thought of it first, as Jeannemary accuses. I think he genuinely thinks that’s dishonourable. And when Corona tries to stand up for the Sixth and Ianthe says no, Babs follows her order, but is pissed about it.

But hold on, you might say to me, five minutes later HE is the one to issue a challenge to the Sixth!! Yeah, after a tense stare-off with his necromancer. After, perhaps, coming to some conclusions of his own about the Third house’s chances regarding the key situation. Ianthe herself says to Corona: you need a facility key. This is your only chance. Might be that Babs figured something similar!

When Harrow answers the call, his face is frozen in a look that’s both cautious but trying to look though. When Jeannemary jumps on the table, he immediately backs out. Without waiting for Ianthe to call him off. He tries to play it off, but Babs is pretty consistent on NOT wanting to fight the teenager.

In conclusion: the dude is a dick but I think he’s got honour and he is stuck between a rock and a very hard place. AND he fights Ianthe after the lyctoral process for a surprising and impressive long time!

Also: lmao when he jumps off the table he mutters ‘should have just stayed home and gotten married’. Okay??? Babs what’s that about? 👀

#the locked tomb theory #the locked tomb speculation #the locked tomb #naberius tern

[urcrookedneighbor]

Does John confirm to Augustine that he wiped his memories in HtN? Is that what "if the man I knew before the Resurrection had heard you say that.../Thank you for confirming that"

What is the antecedent of the "that" in Augustine's statement?

Confirming for the fandom that John knew Augustine pre Resurrection? Confirming that it was John who wiped Augustine's memories of the world pre Resurrection? Confirming that for the fandom or for Augustine or both?

#nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #the locked tomb speculation #the locked tomb #augustine the first #john gaius #minus typo

[mayasaura]

This might be the most "well duh" statement in history, but something I'm really looking forward to in Alecto the Ninth is.... Alecto.

We've seen little glimpses of her here and there, through the Body and through Nona, and the picture I see them painting is definitely of someone who has been hurt very badly, and who is very angry about it, but there's more to it. She's more complicated than that.

She's conflicted about necromancy itself:

It's not that she hates or fears necromancy—it "feels nice", she has positive associations with it, but it also makes her sad that Palamedes is capable of doing it at all. Is that regret? Does Alecto regret having introduced necromancy into the world? Does she consider herself to share in responsibility for the consequences?

Does that have to do with why she's frightened of herself, and of who she thinks she'll become if she remembers herself? She's understandably afraid to remember what was done to her, but she's also afraid of the person she'll be once she does. She thinks that person—Alecto—is incapable of love.

And it could be that her fear is only of being a person who has suffered. That she doesn't want the pain. But this series has never been shy about complicating that narrative. No one in this story is a perfect victim. Very few characters have avoided suffering terrible and undeserved harm, and few have avoided causing it.

I want to know who Alecto is. Why Nona thinks that Alecto, who is defined by love, whose final words were "I still love you," is incapable of loving. Even more, I want to know why Alecto's later actions make that fear seem kind of.... reasonable. Why the Body—who was never anything but gentle and kind to Harrow—hurts Harrow on waking, and seems to not even understand hurt has been done.

Who else has Alecto hurt, and how does she understand it? What harm has she caused, and how is she going to face up to it? What role will Harrow and her relationship with Alecto play in that?

I have some ideas, but I don't really know. And I dunno. I'm pretty stoked to think we might find out.

#the locked tomb #tlt meta #alecto the ninth #alecto the first #alecto speculation #ntn spoilers #I just don't think ms. planet earth is getting out of this mess without having to reflect on herself #planets and gods aren't exempt #look at your choices ms alecto #you can't unmake them #so what are you going to do next?

[grey-ves]

Especially with the release of The Unwanted Guest, I feel like I see too much focus on the “romantic” (as in idealized and regarding any type of love) message of the series and not enough on what I personally think tazmuir’s actual thesis statement is. We forget that she is a horror author, and I think that is her entire goal. Every set of relationships we’re presented with are codependent, unhealthy, consumptive. Someone is consuming someone they love, someone is being consumed by someone they love. Even if they claim not to, even if they try to find a more “fair” way to do it (ex.: Paul), it’s still what is happening in the end. (Abigail and Magnus are the only exceptions I can think of.) Pyrrha is the only character who seems to recognize this, and she tries so hard to call it out, but no one listens because they think it’s romantic. Because every relationship is either seen as romantic or wretched, both by the characters and by the readers, even though they are all so bad. I think tazmuir is trying to make readers question this. Why do we find certain toxic relationships - like Harrow and Gideon - romantic, but others - like John and Alecto - horrifying? Why is one acceptable but not the other? Where do we draw the line? In regards to TUG, why do we jump from changing each other with love, to consuming each other in its name?

I think this will be even more clear in AtN.

#tlt #the locked tomb #the locked tomb series #the locked tomb trilogy #tlt spoilers #tlt speculation #the locked tomb spoilers #gtn #htn #ntn #atn #tazmuir #tamsyn muir #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth #alecto the ninth #literally about to write my grad school thesis about this

[gaycicada]

Wait hang on you guys, you know when Nona dies in Ntn how her body and organs split at the seams and her skin kinda starts to slough away? That’s like strikingly similar to what happens to people with acute radiation poisoning i.e. nuclear weapons. Irradiated soul Alecto causing Harrow’s body to fall apart?

#gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #gideon nav #harrowhark nonagesimus #the locked tomb #alecto tlt #alecto the first #alecto the ninth #alecto speculation #alecto predictions #alecto theories #nona #nona the ninth #nona tlt #nona the 9th #harrow the 9th #harrow the first #harrowhark the ninth #the body #radiation

[puffywiz]

you can crown this bitch with so many crowns

#it is way harder to design a coronabeth who resembles ianthe than it is to design a nona that fits narrow #coronabeth tridentarius #ianthe tridentarius #tridentarii #gideon the ninth #the locked tomb #tlt #these were all stress relief doodles and they got me really wanting to reread gt9 #I started thinking about what could happen to these two in at9 #I’m almost wondering if corona is going to be the one to kill ianthe #it would be tragic and narratively fitting #I can’t begin to speculate though #tamsyns brain is so big #my art

[nonasbirthday]

Hi again I am on a Nona reread and having thoughts. This may be obvious (?) but I'm thinking the devils found on Antioch and the Ninth must be the souls of the people who were killed and not resurrected by John.

From John & Harrow's final dream conversation:

Hm. Sounds like we have some missing souls. Could they have gone beneath the River? Did John shove the souls he deemed unworthy through the stoma? Why aren't they in the River?

Kiriona seems to describe the devils as revenants, which are, as we know from HTN, only created by something with a soul experiencing a sudden violent death:

Varun, speaking through Judith, implies that the devils are coming up from under the River via the Tower. He also says that they have been "left too long," which, you know, ten thousand years is a long time:

From GTN, regarding the Canaan House spirits Teacher is so afraid of, who possessed Colum's body in the way the devils do:

Hey, you know what's another way of saying ten thousand million? Ten billion. Now why would that number sound familiar....?

Hm. Interesting.

---

Editing to add that this post from @demolitonlcvers has laid this all out and then some!!

#once again thinking about the tower and the devils.... #anyways this may already be a foregone conclusion and i am super behind lol. #the locked tomb #nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #alecto speculation #alecto theories #nonasbirthday #the hole in the tower #sticking this on the fridge

[douche-canoe-regatta]

The River's kinda the River Styx, yeah? the boundary a soul crosses to get to the other side.

Jod makes that shit a maelstrom. he dumps billions of souls into an eternity of rush hour traffic in Boston. the Resurrection Beasts might as well be 20+ years of construction delays every time they show the fuck up.

What happens when you're stuck in traffic for 10,000 years? wouldn't you do anything to be anywhere, anywhere else? what's left of you after sloshing around in a kiddie pool brimming with furious assholes honking their billion horns for TEN THOUSAND FUCKING YEARS?

Oh yeah: every now & then some shitass lyctor (dead but loving it!) buzzes by on their jetski to shove angels through a massive anus (or whatever) & looks upon you with pure disgust. They call you "mad" and "driven insane" by the River. You're drowning in a tsunami of everyone you ever knew and loved at the behest of Capitalism and a religious nutjob who got caught up on cows while he hyperfixated on Getting His Way, but his BBFs & their soul slaves get to tool around making your bones into servants or monsters or soap or, ugh, decor.... so....that's great.

You're filth to them - trash. They don't even know. They can't. They haven't been allowed.

People keep turning onto the River (non) Expressway, by the way. It never stops. You've been down here 10,000 years. you've been drowning under rotting corpses for 10,000 years.

Abigail (by far the most reliable scholar on the subject of the River) is convinced there's another side. it's a fucking river, right? ask a toddler to draw a river and they'll make two lines with blue in the middle. there's always two sides! it's, like, the only requirement!!

So what's on the other side? how do you get off this ride?

Would you blame me if I tried?

#would you call me a devil #if i took the back way #through the secret door #your soul left open #the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #wild speculation #augustine the first #mercymorn the first

[tonsillessscum]

“But you're God.”

And God said, “And I am not enough.”

-Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

#gideon the ninth #tamsyn muir #the locked tomb #tlt #dark academia #harrowhark nonagesimus #literature #gothic #gothic literature #speculative fiction #harrow the ninth #john gauis #john gaius #english literature #quotes #poetry #literary quotes #ritlt

[ossifer-bones]

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

[merlinityart]

#ntn #nona the ninth #ianthe tridentarius #ianthe the first #the locked tomb #noodle tlt #tlt #alecto the ninth #atn #alecto speculation #file this one under the list of things i want to see happen but definitely won’t #locked tomb #Ianthe's bone arm brings all the dogs to the yard #drawing noodle is therapeutic highly recommend it

[sainamoonshine]

Me: I just don’t get that whole Chain of Samael thing, Samael didn’t even get to see the Ninth be established

Also me: suddenly remembers that the weighted end of the chain is a Pelvis bone & that it is called the “relic of this long-dead warrior”. In catholic parlance, a relic can either be something that belonged to a Saint but is also very often a piece of physical remain of said saint. And such a thing is usually a core component of churches (legit for the longest time you could not have a catholic church without a relic it was MANDATORY). In ye olden days, there was also a HUGE catholic tradition of building cemeteries on top and around the graves of martyrs. And the Chain of Samael was kept in monument in the Anastasian, which is described as the sacred tomb of warriors and second most holy place on the Ninth.

Me: OH it’s not the chain of Samael it’s the chain OF Samael. It’s MADE with Samael!

#the anastasian #samael novenary #anastasia novenary #anastasia the ninth #the locked tomb theory #the locked tomb speculation #the locked tomb #harrowhark nonagesimus #the ninth house #harrow nova

[urcrookedneighbor]

Need the tumblr poll feature to be created and rolled out so I can ask the TLT community if they think the nursery Pyrrha painted in the Anastasian before it was the Anastasian was for:

Baby(ies)?

or

Plants?

Vote now on your phones!

#the locked tomb #nona spoilers #nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #the locked tomb speculation #Ninth House #Ninth House nonsense #what are we hiding in the Anastasian monument #Anastasia whose name means resurrection

[mayasaura]

Clinging like a piece of driftwood at sea to that interview bit where muir said we get to see in alecto what Gideon and Harrow's relationship looks like when Gideon has the upperhand

Absolutely fucking hope that means we get to see the girlies interacting. One hundred percent here for our precious baby girl prince to be a petty pile of dogshit about it

#the locked tomb #griddlehark #gideon nav #kiriona gaia #she has so much room to get worse with the influences she has in her life #i believe in you baby #ntn spoilers #alecto speculation #alecto the ninth

[lambentgrey]

i'm bracing for the amount of identity crises in atn and i don't even mean people having crises about their Own identity (which will also happen) but like. people having crises when seeing how much Others have changed

obviously harrow seeing kiriona but also:

harrow seeing paul

alecto seeing paul (will she remember them???? will she remember camilla and pal????)

harrow Not seeing crux

ianthe and harrow seeing each other

and ofc. john and alecto seeing each other

#off the top of my head those are the ones where i'm like. WOWEE all of these reunions are FUCKED! can't wait for the fallout <3 #harrow never getting to thank pal and cam as pal and cam for what they did for her and gideon after she remembers. goodbye #alecto the ninth #the locked tomb #atn speculation #tlt thoughts #lambentgrey.txt

[someabsolutenonsense]

Alecto ends with Griddlehark wedding because we have to bring back the “cavalier primarried” joke.

#sarcasm #but what if #the locked tomb #griddlehark #harrowhark nonagesimus #gideon nav #kiriona gaia #alecto speculation