bad wizards and shimmering rainbow-white robes
Someone else has probably already made this point—I'm late to the Locked Tomb party, I know—but I've been reading a whole lot of Locked Tomb posts (in between re-reading bits of the Locked Tomb books and thinking about The Lord of the Rings) recently, and if anyone else has made this point I haven't seen it yet, so, spoilers through Nona the Ninth:
Your gazes met. The other nascent Lyctor—the Third House saint, the Emperor’s bones and the Emperor’s joints, the Emperor’s fists and gestures—was clothed in a beautiful nacreous robe that glimmered all the colours of the rainbow: gauzy, iridescent white stuff that changed violently in the light.
(Chapter 4, Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir)
A mass of fabric whispered past you—you could not feel it on your body, but you felt the air upon your cheek—and then a person knelt in front of your chair. A shining, shimmering billow of pale fabric came into your field of vision, a rainbow-hued whiteness that ran through shades beneath the hot tungsten light, like the reflection of coloured glass on ice, the same stuff that now was draped around you. Then, awfully, your vision was lifted. Someone had pressed a finger lightly beneath your chin, and they were tilting it up so that you could see their face. You looked at the Lyctor. The Lyctor looked at you.
(Chapter 6, Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir)
‘“Radagast the Brown!” laughed Saruman, and he no longer concealed his scorn. “Radagast the Bird-tamer! Radagast the Simple! Radagast the Fool! Yet he had just the wit to play the part that I set him. For you have come, and that was all the purpose of my message. And here you will stay, Gandalf the Grey, and rest from journeys. For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!” ‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.
(“The Council of Elrond,” The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien)
I told them, This is it. We were put here to save the planet. We’re going to save the planet. We’re not going to let them run away. We’re going to fix this. And they were all, Yeah, John, because they were my friends and they loved me. But because they were also dicks and most of them had multiple tertiary degrees, they were also like, How though. We know you can do X and Y and Z. That’s still not A or B or C. We love the bone magic, but how are you going to pull this off? And it was P— of all people who said, First things first. If they’re going to let us fix the world, you’ve got to make them take us seriously. Get some leverage. If they want to make you into a bad wizard, be a bad wizard. We can write the history books to say you were a good wizard. Or at least an okay wizard. They’re not going to listen because we talk nicely, they’re going to listen because we scare the shit out of them.
(“John 5:1,” Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir)
Ironically, of course, John himself doesn’t wear the shimmering rainbow-hued robes of the Lyctors—but his crown of infant fingerbones is first described as “a wreath of ribbon and pearlescent leaves in his dark hair, rustling prismatically in the windless docking bay" (Chapter 6, Harrow the Ninth), and frankly I think rainbow pearlescent leaves each “intertwined with a match-sized infant fingerbone” sounds significantly more evil than Saruman bothered looking, so eat your heart out Curunír I guess.
Of course, there's lots of irony about John adopting the trappings of that particular evil wizard, but I think the most ironic part might be the extent to which he really should've taken notes on the rest of the passage in question:
‘“I liked white better,” I said. ‘“White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.” ‘“In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
