Jessi the Ninth Harbinger

One must imagine sysiphus as a hamster

the thing about harrowhark nonagesimus is that on the surface, she's this aloof maybe kinda creepy maybe kind of a bitch bone nun. but then she's also like a really good necromancer, and she does such crazy badass shit with bones, literally forming harpoons out of her own bones and spearing ghosts of planets with them, and she has these iconic lines like 'death first to vultures and scavengers' and she was so focused about the Canaan House puzzle that she mapped every goddamn door in the whole place in like a day and a half and worked herself to exhaustion learning theorems, she's just an intense, sharply thinking sort of person. not to mention she's so closed off you almost wonder if she even has feelings. but then you read a bit deeper and you realize that harrowhark nonagesimus is also a sad miserable kitten on a stoop in the pouring rain. she's a neurotic mess that is borderline incapable of admitting or acknowledging her true emotions (emphasis on borderline) and would sooner fling herself into the sun than admit any vulnerability. she's the daughter of genocide. she fucking hates herself. no one has more problems than her. she is pitiful. and THEN she's also a fucking weirdo on top of all that. she can't stand food with any significant flavor. tea biscuits are beyond her. she fell in love with a frozen dead body and would marry it if she could. she's afraid of hot water. she thinks bones are the sexiest thing there is. harrowhark nonagesimus is simultaneously so cool, so sick, and so strange, and it's enough for anyone to look at her and be like, what the fuck is going on here? and that is why she gets bitches.

Mercymorn reducing Harrow's so-called age all through HtN truly turned out to be the funniest foreshadowing of all time

anyway i feel like the unwanted guest is setting up a major point in alecto to be that love, and the heart, has the ability to rip the soul apart and bind it permanently to another. harrow has the cheeseburger part of gideon's soul. they bleed they mingle they contaminate each other. your skin your arm our heart. that's where my heart used to be. to love someone is to add indelibly to their weight. you can't take loved away. does this make sense

Soul permeability isn't just about preferences and personality traits. It also extends to the knowledge to perform motor tasks, ranging from smoking cigarettes to swordfighting. Both of those examples are acquired skills, not inherent qualities. That suggests to me that "the soul" is both more and less than the essence of a person... which we could assume, given that planets also have souls. There must be SOMETHING going on between Alecto and John... But are humans and planets the ONLY entities with souls? What about the interaction between a planet and another non-human entity with a soul? Also, what are the limits of permeability? Are there any? I am thinking about this in light of a question I ask myself CONSTANTLY: WHAT THE HELL IS A NECROMANCER? I know what a necromancer is by definition... though the definition we get in the glossary at the back of GtN is a little obtuse and talks about vestigial organs... but it's NOT genetic, and the series STRONGLY seems to suggest that it's not something you can test for or detect in utero. Apparently, you often can't confirm aptitude until you see it in action, which is how Coronabeth got away with her con for two decades! Plus, Even with the pomp and circumstance around Harrow's birth, there was no 100% guarantee that she would be born a necromancer. We also know from John that about 1/3rd of all people born in the Houses have aptitude... but, oddly, 1/2 of all the original residents of Canaan House have aptitude. It's still unclear to me if John was able to choose which of his friends was resurrected as a necro, though if it was coincidental, things really seem to have fallen out in his favor... But the original aptitude was a gift from Alecto to John, who hid some of Alecto in the Barbie bod... and also elsewhere... I'm wondering if John ACCIDENTALLY released necromancy into the general public through the process of resurrection?! Perhaps the souls he "kept" mingled with that weird soup of his and Alecto's souls, and some of the power permeated without his conscious intent? Is it continuing to permeate over a myriad? IS EVERYONE BORN IN THE HOUSES AT LEAST A LITTLE BIT JOHN-FLAVORED NOW?!?! Time to turn my brain off and stop thinking for ten thousand years bye