um for the locked tomb folks that have their books memorized—do we believe that Jod committed the resurrection?
like, through Nona we get the story leading up to the end of the world. his genocide, anger over the trillionaires, the degree to which he manipulated his friends in order to keep them on his side. but he doesn't talk about the resurrection, all he talks about is what leads up to it: nuclear extinction, the death of the solar system, trillionaires escaping, crafting the body for Alecto, etc.
when he's asked about the resurrection he talks about how "the cost was too great" and even the neo-niners were just kept on ice for the myriad. plus, "John is a lying liar who lies". he doesn't even resurrect his daughter (though the issues of invulnerability serve him more), but instead grasps whatever is left of her soul and shoves it in a corpse, like his creation of Alecto's body. the most he demonstrated was the ability to create a revenant.
there's something that nags at me over this, because John's power isn't his own, it's Alecto's—given and stolen, the ability to wield it for massive solar system level extinction events by consuming the soul of the earth isn't the same as a practiced skill.
this is all for fun, but I do think John is taking credit for the resurrection as part of his myth, his ego. I'm tempted to say Alecto pulled it off and he took the credit.
also, I'm probably wrong and someone's gonna slam down some citations. please do it, hit me with some theological parallel for funsies too.
I don't think John is lying about the Resurrection, but as the end of NTN seems to hint at, I don't think we're getting the whole truth...
In the immediate aftermath of the deaths of 10 billion people and all the planets of the solar system, I do suspect John might have been able to fully restore a very small number of people. Because this is what Harrow narrates at the end of NTN:
You resurrect some of them. You wake up fewer still. You start out with a few thousand, then, later, some hundred thousand, then millions, but never more than millions.
Which suggests that John only ever resurrected a few million people, not the whole 10 billion population he slaughtered. And many of them he stuck in storage - hence the "ancient dead" who supply the new Ninth.
Harrow then says:
I want to understand why she was angry — I want to understand the mathematics, now that I have seen them for myself. I want to know how many of the Resurrection are left, and how many you began with, and what the discrepancies are. I want to know where you put them. They didn't go into the River. I want to know why she was angry...and why you were terrified.
The implication would seem to be that billions were never resurrected and their souls never passed into the River. What happened to those souls? In John 1:20, John describes how he "drank them in" after they were killed by the bombs or directly by him. But then it seems he didn't resurrect them all.
So this is where I start to wonder about the Tower, and about Varun saying "he left them too long - you left them too long, my salt thing". About how Harrow assumes the treasure of Canaan House is a power source in GTN. About how Abigail makes a strangely significant digression about the secret chambers of the Emperor in Canaan House in the middle of HTN, saying that they're more likely to find them than summon the ghost of Nonius...
Is some of John's power independent of Alecto, from the trapped energy of those billions of souls? Are these trapped souls the source of the devils? Just what is going on in the nexus of those questions Harrow asks, and how badly is that going to go wrong for him (and everyone else) in ATN? Why is John terrified?
If John is gaining power from those 10 billion souls being somewhere... Else, I wonder if the Eighth's soul siphoning method (using a vacuum) is an extremely diminutive form of that necromancy. That would also mean the whole concept of soul siphoning was foreshadowing.
Oh, ok, this is a fascinating suggestion...
Here's Cytherea explaining how soul siphoning works to Harrow and Gideon:
When Master Octakiseron siphons his cavalier, he sends the soul elsewhere and then exploits the space it leaves behind. The power that rushes in to fill that space will keep refilling, for as long as either of them can survive.
And here's Harrow and Palamedes discussing what the challenges at Canaan House are meant to teach them:
"As we saw in the entropy field challenge, continuous siphoning..." "...These experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They've hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that's the true prize." "Ah. Your secret door theory. Very Ninth." She bristled. "It's a simple understanding of area and space. Including the facility, we've got access to maybe thirty percent of this tower."
The Emperor is apparently on record as saying that "siphoning was the most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up".
In Harrow the Ninth, Abigail, asked to summon Nonius, says:
"I think our chances are very small. I think we've got a similar chance of Magnus tripping over the secret entrance to the lost chambers of the Emperor Undying. Actually, that's significantly less unlikely, as I've come to believe they run sidelong to the facility rather than — never mind..."
Which seems like a lot of detail for an apparently irrelevant digression.
Abigail also tells Harrow that there is "something terribly wrong with the River" and Alecto later describes it as "yet dead". Why does it feel like John in part runs on some metaphysical equivalent of a hydroelectric dam? Generating phenomenal power from something that interrupts the natural flow of a river, preventing things from moving through it as they should, upsetting the natural rhythms of the ecosystem...
I can't believe I haven't come across this post before—this is something I've been thinking a lot about, trying to figure out what the Tower is and how it ties to John's power source. I have also come to the conclusion that John might be using the perma-siphoned resurrected in his sunk-boat attempt at gathering enough energy to redo everything. I have a very long, half-written post somewhere in my drafts… This might very well be what upset Alecto so much and led to the tantrum that precipitated the whole chain of events where RBs showed up, lyctorhood was put into practice, John deactivated Alecto, fled to the Mithraeum, etc.
We get a thorough explanation of how siphoning works in the Avulsion chapter in GtN, and the mechanics of Eight siphoning are explained even though the siphoning used by Harrow in that trial is actually a different type, performed without sending Gideon's soul anywhere, and this stands out in a book that isn't in any hurry to explain its magic system and is selective about which puzzles we get to witness.
We are also told by Ianthe in GtN that there's a place “over the river […] where the soul goes when we knock it about… where the things are that eat us”, seemingly referring to Hell and not to the River Beyond. Augustine then says the Eighth house “sucks at [the stoma] like a grotesque teat”, confirming that the Eighth send souls to the stoma, and gets energy from there, not from the River per se? We then get of course a lot of info in HtN about the River, exerting space in non-space, etc. particlarly this interesting interjection by Harrow: “You can't build in the River! […] You might as well try to wall off time with bricks and mortar.” In Canaan resides “The sum of all necromantic transgression”, etc.
(Some of this has already been explored in u/Zealousideal-Sea9006's series of posts on what Cytherea was really doing in Canaan, which I absolutely recommend.)
Re: energy, one thing I'm fixated on—there's been very little information on what “spirit magic” is. For bone magic and flesh magic we understand thanergy and thalergy are used. There isn't a clear indication of what energy is at play when spirit is manipulated, or in what form would energy arrive from the River. There is no mention of “spirit energy” in all three books except once, Abigail speaking of Harrow's “heterogeneous soul situation” as her “spirit energy” being “diverse”. The entire River is, according to Augustine, made somehow of spirit magic, not spirit energy. As if this particular kind of magic was an extant, non-manmade thing, whereas bone and flesh magic are the specific practices. Are magic and energy synonimous in spirit magician lingo? What kind of energy is it that comes pouring from the stoma? I'm not sure how it could be thalergy or thanergy, seeing how nothing in the River is alive or materially dead—perhaps some earlier, primal type of spirit energy that converts to thalergy when materialized in our world? Is there meant to be a cycle, instead of an endless entropy of thalergy -> thanergy? Where does thalergy come from anyway? Energy can't be created, according to the laws of thermodynamics… (*)
The interesting thing is that Ianthe, who's been trying to figure out the Resurrection, isn't thinking about using human souls—she's thinking about using a displaced planet's soul. Tamsyn did say Ianthe was yet to do one massively shitty thing in AtN…
(*) My guess is: according to “Anastasia's tripod principle”, you need soul + body + thalergy for someone to stay alive. If someone's soul is separated from the body, but spirit magic is rushing into it, it might sort of fill the role of the original person's spirit, which allows the body to keep producing lots of thalergy which can be used outright or decayed into thanergy… and as we can see with Alecto, Jod or even Gideon, the amount of power/strength a body can generate and spend is bigger the richer the soul is, so an endless supply of spirit energy could mean a body produces much more thalergy than usual. There might be something weird going on with spirit -> thalergy conversion, considering babies release an immense amount of thalergy despite being small, no matter how much growth their cells are going through… as if their thalergy drew from some kind of lifetime reserve in the Beyond?
