bone empress

Like, she spent all of the previous book trapped in a walled off portion of Harrow's subconscious and thinking that Harrow hated her bc she refused to properly eat her soul. Then in the last like thirty minutes of the book harrow's soul goes on holiday and Gideon's now in her body fighting fucked up bug things and she still thinks Harrow hates her but also she's going to do her best to keep Harrow's body safe but definitely not because she cares about Harrow, just because she's her cavalier and that's what she's meant to do.

Then offscreen she got resurrected by god—kinda sorta we'll find out I guess, pyrrah seems to know what's up but is not sharing with the class—who she learned five minutes ago is her dad and was going around doing her tower prince thing with ianthe tridentarius who I'm sure she had a very normal and not at all weird relationship with. Idk maybe they bonded over wanting to fuck Harrow (not that Gideon would ever admit that of course).

Then while Gideon's being all corpse-y in her off time, who does she see but Harrowhark fucking Nonagesimus. Who immediately kisses her. Gideon then learns that said body that she definitely has only very platonic feelings about, antagonistic feelings even, is being piloted by an autistic six month old. Whose one really good skill is reading people and who kissed her because the second Nona walked into the room she read her like a fucking book and saw that Gideon really wanted to kiss Harrow('s body).

Gideon proceeds to be very normal about desperately needing to know where Harrow actually is. Not because she's in love with Harrow obviously, that would be crazy, she needs to know so that she can, uh, point and laugh at whatever predicament Harrow's in, yeah that's it. Only to learn that Nona doesn't fucking know.

200 dead children

literally Joan of Arc

First Flower of the Ninth House, the Best Cavalier They have Ever produced, Their Triumph, the Best of Them All,

she slaps augustine across the mouth and he spits out his teeth, despite the fact that he is a ten thousand year old lyctor who should have had ironclad shielding. out of all the necros that swore themselves to god, she was one of the remaining ones, one of the last lyctors to survive the resurrection beasts.

she vaporized god. she vaporized god. she unwound the most powerful necromancer she knew on the fly and reduced him to his base components because she just. had the knowledge in her brain. mercymorn turned a man running on the souls of ten billion into fine red mist on a fucking impulse.

she spends all of htn trying to kill harrow out of some bizarre attempt to live up to her name. she’s kind about it, even. she draws weird little squiggles that look like everything but monsters. she fantasizes about putting her idiot boss in acid jail. she worries about her dress making her look like a melon even though she literally seduces god and also a guy who hates her.

and nobody really likes her. g1deon is g1deon, by which i mean he is being tortured and weird about everything on account of being two people and thus has little to no opinion on what she does. augustine fucking hates her unless they’re working together to honey trap god (no i will not stop mentioning this) and it wasn’t even her fault that alfred died, not really. ianthe follows augustine around like an evil little duckling - does she even have strong opinions on mercy except that it’s gross she’s having a three way with jod and augustine? she was supposed to mentor harrow, but she got the defective one - the one that didn’t even make to lyctorhood properly (does she wish she could’ve done what harrow did? sealed cristabel away forever, even if she had to butcher herself to do it?). and jod. jod loves her, of course, but he’s just so. so. he doesn’t fucking listen is the thing. he deflects and he jokes and he doesn’t say “mercy, i didn’t meant to, mercy, i’ll fix it, mercy, please, forgive me.” he says everything but that.