Katakaluptastrophy

(original poster)

Surprise Babs and Colum for @elevenbenevolentmammoths. His wealth of knowledge will surely win him over eventually, trust.

An idea I had for Blood of Eden propaganda/recruitment posters featuring some of our favorite guys - combo of digital-print cyberpunk graphic design style with oldschool Saturday Morning Post covers like you'd see Leyendecker paintings on

I was gonna post these ahead of tabling at a small con and selling prints of them but ended up not tabling because turns out grad school is hard

what the fuck was john, necromantically speaking

i don’t mean after the genocide/resurrection thing. we have plenty of theories about what he is then (i personally favor the theory that he’s a new and exciting kind of resurrection beast).

BUT. before that, but after he gains necromancy, he should just be a normal necromancer, right? but instead there’s a bunch a weird shit:

1. he isn’t frail? like necromancers are canonically pretty physically weak and sickly. but john mentions no illnesses or new limitations (there’s an argument to be had about his mental state, but that can easily be attributed to the Everything Burning Down)

2. doesn’t eat?? PLEASE correct me if i’m wrong, but i believe that john stops eating food while back on earth and he’s fine (for a given definition of the word). afaik, necromancers still need to eat, right? canaan house served kind of shitty meals that the necromancers still ate. why would they eat plain leaves if they didn’t have to? sooooo why could john starve himself without actually starving?

3. is more powerful that most necromancers??? at some point, john drops 100 people in a kilometer radius, and he can pinpoint the ones with guns. if adepts can do that, why aren’t the battles against boe and the rest being won much faster? if that level of power is - we’ll say slightly above average, for the sake of argument, then the normal necromancers are really not up to par.

the thing is, we know necromancy has a genetic component to it. it is possible to alter dna to make an extra strong necromancer (hi, harrow). john’s eyes turned gold when his necromancy kicked in and his daughter inherited them, as well as a portion of his unkillability, indicating they were at least partly genetic traits.

A soul is the best battery there is, and having total access to one is what makes Lyctors so much more powerful than a regular necromancer and means the toll for their "magic" does not go to their bodies. (I'll also like to add that Lyctor's apparent lack of "necromantic recoil" could be because they just heal super fast.) 

In John's case, he was connected to a planet's soul, which would be the greatest source of energy we have seen until now, so his limit is extremely high (but as far as we have seen, it does exist, he can't just do whatever he wants), and his regeneration is also almost limitless. 

He does seem to have an adverse effect (or to have had it before killing the planet) since Harrow lumps him with Augustine and Mercy as having a more typical necromantic look in comparison with Gideon I, but that could also be because he was being influenced by a non-human soul to have weird habits that were detrimental to his health (like how Nona acts). As for why that did not kill him, my best bet is that being connected to the Earth's energy let him keep his body functioning via magic.

Also, necromancy is pretty much not genetic but does seem to be soul-based (it is said that there is no biological difference between necromancers and non-necromancers except for greater activity from vestigial organs), but being conceived in the wake of a mass death (so, a place supercharged with thanergy) would seem to be able to skyrocket the chances of a soul being "in tune" with thanergy and therefore the baby being a necromancer. Gideon does not only have John/Alecto's golden eyes but also their regenerative abilities (or at least regeneration on par with a Lyctor), so she is probably (somehow) also connected to the Earth's soul, and that is how she gets both of those things.

What John is, pre-res, is actually pretty horrifying.

He's a regular human being, and something about him catches the attention of a vast and ancient entity entirely beyond human comprehension and communication. It picks up in some way that he is trying to help it, even though he does not understand that the thing he is trying to help isn't just a biosphere but a conscious, ensouled entity, albeit on a scale so vastly more complex than a human that they are scarcely comparable. It wants to help him to help it. They will both live to regret it.

This entity modifies him on a genetic level without his knowledge or consent - and we still don't know the extent of that. What can Gideon's abilities tell us about John pre-res, and how might they be relevant in ATN?

It's hard to say at what stage John not sleeping or eating went from a symptom of his mania to something preternatural. Maybe it was always both. He's certainly latterly manually tweaking biochemical processes to skip sleep and meals. What's not entirely clear is whether he's describing a situation where there's something else sustaining him, or if it's more akin to Harrow's experience on the Mithraeum and he is running on reserves he can't spare. Or whether the framework laid onto him by an entity so different to him has complicated these things for him - after all, even experiencing human bodily needs doesn't make Nona like eating.

Pre-res, he's operating at a level beyond the necromancers he created, but within a recognisable framework of energy exchange. : he kills those 100 people using the thanergy from five accidental deaths, and in GTN Harrow says "Give me a single death and I can go for ten minutes". But we don't know much of the broader mechanics of his abilities - just the aspects that he comes to identify as 'necromancy'.

John has been Changed and has no frame of reference for how or why. But he is working closely with cadavers, and much of his work will have involved the liminality of life and dormancy and death. So that's where his terrifying new senses take him. To the cadavers, to the workings of bodies, to what makes someone alive or not. But we know he had other abilities, and that he was aware of them: C- talks about the idea of him stabilising a glacier or manipulating the atmosphere. Later, we see him commanding water and earth.

it’s also just way more juicy for john. like he is so obsessed with getting it right and fixing it all, but it’s not just because of his literal god complex. he was made to fix it all, and he failed. oooh that’s just so interesting.

The thing with how necromancy works, and indeed, what's going on with House fertility in general, is a bit murky.

What we do know:

There is something specific about the thanergetic Dominicus system that makes it possible for necromancers to be born: "necromancers do not reproduce successfully outside the system" [GTN glossary] The planets of the Dominicus system are "thanergetic" - they produce death energy in the way a normal planet produces life energy, as opposed to flipped shepherd worlds which are merely "thanergy planets", dying slowly. Hence Judith (or her pregnant mother - it's unclear) wrapped in grave dirt while stranded interstellar, and also presumably why Gideon - conceived, gestated, and born away from the thanergetic soil of the system - is not a necromancer.

M Bias also has a long digression about this in the Sermon: "'One flesh' is the underpinning of our whole Empire. We are born necromancers, or we are not; yet we are one. The non-necromancer will still have necromantic children. The necromancer will have parents who lacked the aptitude. The possibility is within us. We live under the thanergetic light of Dominicus, are born, grow, and die in his thanergetic Houses; the Resurrection made us so. We are fundamentally different to those born on thalergy planets outside the empire" (it rather goes on, including the whole wrapping your...bump?...baby?...in grave dirt thing, and a whole kind of imago dei-esque bit).

There is some kind of intersection of exposure to thanergy and necromantic potential: Harrow's conception is obviously an extreme example of that, but Silas' comment that the twins' parents intervening to save Ianthe in utero was "a wasted opportunity, I'd think" seems to suggest there would have been some theoretical benefit to extra thanergy exposure at birth.

Harrow seems to describe two separate processes in her parents' terrible no good very bad date night: "My mother used the resultant power to modify her ovum on a chromosomal level, so thanergy ignition wouldn't compromise the embryo. She did this so I would be a necromancer" (HTN ch 14). The only other reference to chromosomes we get in TLT is Judith's description of the Fifth's "genetic failure of their chromosomes", and given how strongly Abigail is figured against Pelleamena in TLT, I wonder if we're meant to read this as Harrow's parents resolving some kind of genetic issue that was impacting their ability to carry to term, as well as making the embryo able to withstand an abnormally high thanergy exposure at conception?