one flesh, one end.

Here lies a compilation of TLT lore I painstakingly unearthed exclusively from Gideon the Ninth. These are but the bones that I am working to reconstruct into a full skeleton in the hope of Lyctoral understanding. Like the books themselves, it took much blood sweat, focus, and tears to compile. Enjoy hours of thorough, bone-cocooned research because unlike my own Gideon (girlfriend) I must understand and suffer as much of this series and its lore as possible. Reconstruct as you please, and keep in mind that there is overlap and I have simply organized into categories the best I can for now. Further analysis and more developed personal conclusions to come, as well as a similar treatment of Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth.

What Happened at/to Canaan House/The Facility Below/The First House

The First House is long dead and unkillable with tumbled-down cities and temples. A sleeping throne. (66)

The planet of the First House is a grave and brings Harrow both pain and pleasure to behold as they approach on the shuttle. (68)

In the facility, there are Labs 1-10, Pressure Room, Preservation, Mort, Work Rooms 1-5, and Sanitiser labeled for certain. Harrow thinks Control Room, Console, and Dump Room may be labels for the others. It's a very old facility, older than the rest of Canaan House – pre-Resurrection, or made to look pre-Resurrection. Palamedes is obsessed with dating it, but Harrow believes it's more important to figure out the function. She doesn't know what it is yet, but is convinced that if she did, she'd be a Lyctor already. Also, whoever left the facility left the majority of their work behind and intact – not in books or theorems, but more so in terms of tests that can be triggered. Theorem models meant to challenge talented enough necromancers to understand what they were doing. (148-149)

There's a symbol of an animal's skull with two long horns that curve inward and almost touch that both Harrow and Gideon had seen, Gideon on the hidden hallway down by the cavalier's training facilities, Harrow from an uncertain other location. (150)

In the facility resides the sum of all necromantic transgression. The unperceivable howl of ten thousand million unfed ghosts who will hear each echoed footstep as defilement. They would not even be satisfied if they tore you apart, and the space beyond is profoundly haunted in ways Teacher cannot say and by means Harrow won't understand, and they may die by violence or simply lose your soul. (152)

Upon seeing Magnus and Abigail dead, Teacher could only get down a few rungs of the ladder. He seemed wildly terrified, saying Silas couldn't siphon Colum and in doing so empty him because that could make Colum a nest for something else. He urges them to get their bodies upstairs quickly by any means and says that he can't guarantee the safety of any of them down in the facility another minute despite Camilla saying they're safe down there and investigating. (191)

The facility is the most dangerous place in the system of Dominicus and there are monsters there, according to Teacher. Whatever was done to Abigail and Magnus isn't something he believes was done by the living, but by some malevolent force within the First House – like vengeful ghosts born of some necromantic act – as the Second cites him as saying. (194, 197)

The facility also includes Transference/Winnowing.(/?) Datacenter. This is where they come from after seeing the auras around the construct and successfully defeating it. (183) 

Dulcinea is enthusiastic about the idea that something is lurking in Canaan House, that something could linger for thousands of years and therefore make it so that after death is when you really live. Harrow points out, spikily, that a spirit comes at invitation and can't sustain itself. Dulcinea looks tired during this exchange. (213)

In Lab 8, they find #14-8 Diversion, Procedural Chamber with “Avulsion!” written below it. Lab 2 contained Imaging and Response. (217-218)

The Second claims that the First House falls under Cohort jurisdiction, but Teacher denies this, saying that it's sacred and that imperial law is based on the writ of the Emperor, and since the Emperor is the only law on the First planet, there's no interpretation (and no other rule than presumably the not opening doors without permission one). There aren't even natural laws against murder and theft. (238)

There were bone fragments in the Fifth's wounds from different osseous sources, but Sextus doesn't get to actually say what that's indicative of before they learn the Fourth were eavesdropping on them and drawing their own conclusions about a bone construct. (245, 258)

Jm is still troubled when they go down to the Facility because technically they still didn't have a key. Gideon says she's been down without permission and that it was fine. (277)

Teacher randomly tells Gideon he hates the water, including fountains and the pool downstairs, and says “it's a terrible portent.” She points out that Canaan House is surrounded by sea, and he laughs. They both laugh hysterically before he apologizes to a “poor child,” at first seemingly referencing Gideon, then seemingly referencing someone else, saying “we never intended this to happen, none of us.” (325-326)

The Emperor believed that soul-siphoning was the “most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up.” (340)

Palamedes investigated the tooth in another challenge room, which he determined was from an male in his 60s who lived and died in the self-same tower having never left the planet. He tried to track it and found absolutely nothing, meaning the soul had been removed from it entirely. So he looked around for a skeleton servant missing the same tooth and found him upstairs. He was a revenant, the opposite of what Dulc called the beguiling corpse – a ghost inhabiting a physical shell, a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body. They aren't constructs because they move too well, and they would've needed someone to control them if they were. Instead, they power themselves. However, this still doesn't explain why there isn't an energy signature on the bones. When Harrow unfurls the tooth, tiny letters read 

“FIVE HUNDRED INTO FIFTY

IT IS FINISHED!”

There's also a board on the wall with rainbow pins with clusters around white pins and string attaching them to said white pin. The smallest ones had 3 pins around 1 white one, the largest more than 100 around 1 white. There are hundreds of pins on the board, which Palamedes counts after seeing the picture of Teacher and the others. (365-369)

A note in the molar room reads

CONFIRMED INDEPENDENTLY HIGHLIGHTED

BEST OPTION

ASK E.J.G.

YRS, ANASTASIA

P. S GIVE ME BACK MY CALIPERS I NEED THEM

And a binder right beside it contains mugshot-like pictures of people, including Teacher. Palamedes is shocked, implying the impossibility of a beguiled corpse without someone controlling him, and the unlikelihood of him being independent. Then he turns to counting the pins around the white pins, searching for a way for the corpses to be self-sustaining, presumably using the thanergy of the other souls. (368)

A fire alarm interrupts their investigation of the pins and picture-filled binder, and they run out to see that all of the skeletons have collapsed into dust and sashes while doing their usual duties. They run to Dulc, who says that Teacher left an hour ago “to lock a door.” (369)

When they find the Second are responsible for the skeletons collapsing and calling the Emperor, the Captain's left arm is “wizened and crumpled… like it had been put in a bog for a thousand years,” implying some necromancy on Teacher's part, as he lays at her side. He had initiated by attacking Dyas and taking out her eye, saying Cap had “betrayed the Emperor” and put him at risk. (372-373)

Teacher was a “shell filled with a hundred souls” according to Harrow, but just a prototype. She says something more dangerous than the old experiment that created him and the rest is still around Canaan House.  (373)

Teacher was scared of Canaan House and the facility most of all. (376)

Silas's draining of Colum makes him a husk to what seem like 6 people who had never “been inside a human before,” his eyes pitch black compared to Ianthe's pure white ones from before. (391)

Colum's strength greatly increases with this transformation, but he lacks a cav's coordination. He kills his necromancer. After Ianthe breaks his wrist, his eyes transform into mouths ringed with teeth and tongues. His original tongue grows long enough to wrap around Gideon's neck before Ianthe steps in and breaks his neck. When he falls to the ground, he appears as he did before the teeth and tongues. (393)

Gideon's Backstory

Nav is a Niner name that she was given, but Gideon doesn't know where she was born. Eighteen years ago, her mom had tumbled down the shaft in a dragchute and a battered hazard suit that was already out of power. She had landed brain-dead for that reason, because the battery power for the suit had been sucked up by the bio-container that was attached to the suit that held one-day-old Gideon. It had been out of power for about an hour prior, and she couldn't have cleared gravity from a drop above the planet or her haz would have exploded. However, the Ninth claimed she wasn't an escapee from their prison that holds the House's worst criminals. All the nuns could get from her was her screaming “Gideon!” three times before she fled. (23)

Gideon is chipped. (24)

Gideon wants to go to Trentham on the Second to join the Cohort. (25-26)

Dulcinea describes Gideon's golden eye color as “singular” and “lipochrome… recessive.” She seems pleasantly surprised by them, and they tell her a lot about who they belong to. (106)

Inside the room with the horned skull symbol on the front, Gideon and Harrow find 2 rapiers, a training floor, and ancient blowback carbine guns, which Gideon had only ever seen pictures of. The wood leading up to the beds that were quite close to one another wasn't so degraded as the rest of the Canaan House. (205)

The theorem from the trial room for transference (utilizing a living soul, the whole experiment) was inscribed on stone in the same room Gideon found the old crimson and white emblem of the Second House. Beneath the inscription was a line on its own: “In the hope of attaining Lyctoral understanding. All glory and love to the Necrolord Prime.” The Second cav and necromancer were responsible for creating the theorem and conducting the experiment. (206-208)

In one of the books in the same room, Gideon reads “One flesh, one end. G. & P.” (207-208)

The torn and crumpled note Gideon picked up in that room (X-203 btw) read 

“ut we all know the sad + trying realit 

is that this will remain incomplete t

 the last. He can't fix my deficiencies her

ease give Gideon my congratulations, howev”

(210).

Camilla is stunned that Gideon is fine (as she takes notes on her vitals and all) and not in a coma (like Sextus said she'd be) after that because although she and Sextus could have completed it, they would've had to accept caveats like her permanent brain damage if he didn't get it right immediately. Although the Eighth breeds batteries and Colum probably does have brain damage because of it, it's not the brain a necromancer needs. It's something that's in a trained and true (figuratively speaking for Gideon) cavalier. (234-235)

Dulcinea tries to comfort Gideon as Harrow walks and draws on her energy. She talks about how young Gideon is and how none of this is worth it, calling her vital and apologizing for saying that they take so much. She also claims responsibility for this individually and calls Gideon a poor baby. (226-227)

Dulcinea says “Nice hair” to Gideon after her hood came off during the whole thing. (229)

“Bodies were brought into here – a long time ago. A lot of bone matter” said Isaac about Sanitiser, the place where Gideon had originally found Harrow. He also doesn't totally agree with Gideon that the research seems self-contained and is sweating buckets. (280)

Even after Isaac's really good wards, a motion-sensor light comes back on behind them as they start to exit, revealing a super fresh message in blood: DEATH TO THE FOURTH HOUSE.” They are confronted with the biggest skeletal construct Gideon had ever seen that had to have assembled itself in the room by no visible means, since it couldn't have fit through any of the doors. It contains a skull in its core, which has closed eyes and lips, “as though locked perpetually in prayer.” (281-282)

The blood message over Jm's head in the bed at the hideout, X-203 or whatever, reads SWEET DREAMS. Huge bone staffs speared her shoulders, thighs, and ribs to the bed. Gideon is untouched and was napping for only like 15 min. (288)

Dulc gives Gideon a strangely tender smile after G admits to being a fake cavalier, “as though they had always shared some delicious secret” and says “I think you're a cavalier worth of a Lyctor. I want to see that, what you'd become. I wonder if the Reverend Daughter even knows what she has in you?” (295)

Silas knows her last name is Nav because he talked to Glaurica on her return to the mother house as she died. He claims she's the tool of her oppressors and the lock on her own collar. (297-299)

Gideon has a recurring dream of her mother, “alive now, overlapping with her life in a way she hadn't in reality, shrieking Gideon–Gideon–Gideon! while, as Gideon watched, crones of the Ninth gently levered her skull from the rest of her head with a big crunchy crack. (300)

Silas knows that Gideon's mom had the same hair phenotype and muses that perhaps she was Third because he'd asked Glaurica, a revenant, about Gideon's mom. He doesn't say why, but it seems as though it was partially Glaurica's doing in steering the conversation when he probed about the 200 lost children of the Ninth. (317-318)

Gideon was meant to die along with the other kids, as she inhaled nerve gas for ten whole minutes just like the rest of them, even though she was two cots away from the vent. H's parents were scared of G for the rest of their lives. (353)

Cy says she'd meant that Gideon was wonderful, and that she “would have made that little nun such a cavalier,” so much so that she “almost wish[es] she'd been hers.” (411)

Cy says that Gideon is brave like another Gideon she used to know, but that Gideon is prettier in the eyes. (424)

Cy asks Gideon to cry mercy, saying “Please. You don't even know what you are to me… You're not going to die here, Gideon. And if you ask me to let you live you might not have to die at all. I've spared you before.” (424)

Cytherea/Dulcinea

Dulc/Cy claims she wanted to be a Lyctor because she didn't want to die. Harrow shares her dislike for Dulcinea and Pro. (230)

“At least two people” were put into the incinerator with consistent time signatures that indicate corpses three months dead. For some reason, Deuterous is convinced Pro isn't one of them, though he's been missing. The Fourth says it's because they saw Pro go into the facility last night. Palamedes believed them. (256-272)

Dulc claims to be a “walking thanergy generator” because of the cancer and that she'll “probably live forever… worse luck.” (294-295)

Teacher had realized that Dulc was Cyth and went to head off the Second. He doesn't name her, though. (374)

Inside the previously gummed up door, the walls “had been painted lovingly” with flowers and clouds and birds. But one of them was marred by foot-tall black words that were freshly painted:

YOU LIED TO US

I'm guessing this was written by Cy and that Teacher had tried to lock the room to hide it? (380).

Pal confronts Dulc about not being Dulc and asks why she killed the Fifth. Dulc confesses that since Pent had such a keen interest in history, she should've swept the whole place of letters, pictures, etc. before they'd gotten there, but she'd been nostalgic. She also admits underestimating his “ghost-within-the-thing” and "Sixth psychometry” mastery. (399)

Dulc says she put the key in Pent to obscure its traces in her flesh, giving her time to gum up the lock. According to her, it should've been almost impossible to remove, and she's impressed by the Ninth for it. She thanks goodness that the Emperor would never get hold of Harrowhark. (400)

Cyth is Seventh just like Dulc. The real Dulc is in the furnace, but she wasn't placed in there until Harrow took out Pro because she'd held on to her body. (401)

Dulc says she knew that if she ruined the Emperor's Lyctor plans, killing the heirs and their cavs, she'd draw him back to the system – but subtle enough that he would come without the remaining Lyctors. He'll only sit beyond the system of Dominicus while trying to figure out what's going on, which is exactly where she wants him. She wants to shatter his Houses one by one and find out how many of them it takes for him to break and cross over before he “sees what will come when I call… and then [she] won't have to do anything. It will be too late. (401-402)

Cy says she doesn't hate the Emperor and has loved him, worshipped him, like a god and a brother. But she says that Lyctorhood is neither life nor death and that it's something nobody should ever ask you to embrace, not even him. Pal says he wouldn't have done that to Cam. Loveday was Cy's cav and that Cy hadn't wanted to do it, either. “You can't do that to somebody's soul.” She adds that Teacher was nearly demented and even kind of scared her because of the process the Sixth of her generation had done to him. (402)

Pal “tied the noose” on Cy, buying time to speed up her severe blood cancer and its side effects as they talked. Pal claims she'll die spewing her own lungs out of her nose. She coughs continuously but doesn't seem impressed until Pal brings up radical thanergetic fission: when a necro disperses their entire reserve of thanergy very quickly. He then explodes the sickroom into white (but cold) fire and Gideon's restraints (made by Pal originally) release. She describes him as a “god-killing star.” But Cyth lives, wounds sewing up and lungs getting vomited up. (403-404)

Cy says she's come back home to kill the Emperor and burn his Houses, starting with Gideon. (405)

Cy traps Cam with bones and begins to drain her before Harrowhark shows up and creates a sea of bones at Cy – and tosses Gideon her two-hander. Cy responds by forming the construct that killed Isaac, but Harrow is exhilarated to face her (“its natural predator, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House”), and Gideon gets up to her rightful place before her necro to fight perfectly together. (407-409)

When Ianthe shows up and stabs Cy through the stomach, Cy is excited – or at least surprised – about a baby Lyctor (“always wanted a little sister…I have so much to teach you”) despite the fact that they immediately fight. (417)

Cam throws one of her knives at a delicate swollen mass next to Cy's shoulder and gets her off of Ianthe. Black and yellow liquid flows from the wound when she yanks the blade out. (422)

Cy was out to kill God and yet he says she was the most loyal and had the most capacity for kindness. He wishes they could've just fought it out because she was upset over her Lyctorhood. After all, he had wanted Lyctorhood to have been contemplated and accepted bravely rather than forced on anyone. (443)

Who the Other Original Lyctors Were

The Fifth don't have a lot of post-Resurrection, pre-sovereignty and pre-Cohort, records, except for secondhand ones – like the transcripts they have from the Sixth's originals, which they aren't even allowed to look at through glass. Pent found what she thought were unencrypted communiqués between two people (Lyctors or those who later became so) that Gideon doesn't care to listen to. 

Palamedes confirms that the note from X-203 with G's name on it is real, aka 10 thousand years old. (336)

The Girl Inside the Locked Tomb/How the Emperor Came to Be

"The Locked Tomb's meant to house the one true enemy of the King Undying… something older than time, the cost of the Resurrection; the beast that he defeated once but can't defeat twice. The abyss of the First. The death of the Lord.” Opening it would basically mean the apocalypse, according to H's parents. The Ninth House was supposed to just die there with the corpse and was never meant to be, as Silas had said. (354)

Behind the doors of the tomb, there's a rock and a tomb surrounded by water, along with the other locks and wards. “There's a blood ward bypass on the doors which will only respond for the Necromancer Divine, but I knew there had to be an exploit, a way through for the true and devout tomb-keeper. I knew in the end it had to open for me. The water's salt, and it's deep, and it moves with a tide that shouldn't exist… The tomb is stone and ice… and inside, in the dark, there's a girl… they laid a sword on her breast.” Seeing her frozen face made H want to live forever just in case she ever woke up. (357-358)

The Emperor believed that soul-siphoning was the “most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up.” (340)

Ianthe has always specialized in large-scale energy transferral and had studied what it had taken for God to restore their dying Houses back then, the price he'd had to pay. She implies the price is the soul of the First planet. She also has interest in the River. (382)

The Emperor is a sentinel that hasn't been back for over 9000 years and can never return but protects his House from afar anyway. (66)

Gideon's Two-Hander

Harrow never liked the “cursed thing anyway,” referring to the two-hander, because she always felt like it was judging her. (165)

Necromancy/Lyctor Theorems

With Harrow seeing through Gideon, they could both see the differently colored coronas that wreath the construct. Harrow is shocked to hear that Gideon could see them too because she thought she knew what the experiment was doing. (180-182)

After completing the transference experiment, Harrow could ride another living soul but was more interested in what she'd learned from the theorem behind the construct: how to make a construct regenerate. (212)

Palamedes refused to siphon Camilla, and Harrow initially refuses to siphon Gideon, too. But it's not soul siphoning, not quite, according to Dulcinea, because the soul wouldn't be sent elsewhere and the space it left behind exploited; it would be drawing on Gideon as a power source outside of the entropy field that would otherwise drain Harrow's reserves of thanergy immediately upon crossing it. Harrow can't draw from Dulcinea, according to the Seventh, because you can't move thanergy from place to place like that. It has to be life to death, or death to a sort of life, like the Second do. She would have to take Dulcinea's thalergy, which wouldn't get her far because she's dying. Thalergy from Gideon would turn into thanergy for Harrow. (221-223)

The Second House does something similar, in reverse, as mentioned, as the Second's necro gift is to drain dying foes to strengthen her cavalier. Thanergy into thalergy. (223)

Palamedes tries to recreate the key ring based on thanergy lingering on Magnus's wedding ring that had touched it, but there's too much jumble, so he takes some of the pockets Magnus may have held it in for a longer period of time instead. They don't find evidence that he had any other key other than the facility key, which is odd because others had that key too. (243-244)

There's 8 parts of the megatheorem, 1 per House. Presumably, this either excludes the 1st or 9th house. I'm thinking 1st because nobody questions whether the 9th should be there/was there and there's evidence that the 1st house and Emperor already existed back then, thus they wouldn't have had a Lyctor (?). But ACTUALLY since the Ninth was never meant to exist, I'm going with 9th now. Also cuz the 8 theorems seem to correspond with the house numbers 1-8. (271)

According to Dulc, “Once somebody dies, their spirit's free forever, even if we snatch at it or try to stopper it or use the energy it creates. Oh, I know sometimes they come back… or we can call them, in the matter of the Fifth… but even that exception to the rule shows their mastery of us. They only come when we beg. Once someone dies, we can't grasp at them anymore, thank God! – except for one person, and he's very far from here, I think.” (293)

Ianthe defines the megatheorem of Lyctorhood as

Preserve the soul, intellect and memory still intact

Analyse it, understand its structure and shape

Remove and absorb it without consuming it

Fix it in place so it can't deteriorate (like with the sword she used, presumably)

Incorporate it in a way that doesn't overwhelm your own soul

Consume the flesh, even just a drop of blood will do

Reconstruction, making the spirit and flesh (of the cav) work together the way they used to in a new body

Hook up the cables and get the power flowing

 (383).

After a bit, every time Ianthe landed a hit inside the blood cage she'd created around them, Cy's earlier wounds start to unravel and reopen because she hadn't healed for real, just shallowly fixed it. She needs thalergy – life force – to really heal, and she grabs Ianthe to take that from her, noticing that Ianthe is tiring because she isn't completed. She tells her that it would take centuries at the least, and more since Tern hadn't gone willingly like Loveday had for her. (420-421)

“Someday you'll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then.” – Gideon to Harrow (437)

Harrow begs the Emperor to undo what she's done, swearing she'd never ask anything else of him again “if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.” He says he can't, even though he “would very much like to. But that soul's inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I'd take yours with it and destroy both in the process.” (441)

The Ninth House

Harrow has an angry outburst about what the theorems are even for, saying they gained so little from that and that she should've walked away like Sextus but that she didn't have the luxury because she needs to become Lyctor now, before something happens. (231)

There are stories about the Ninth House that Jeannemary dismisses as “probably bullshit, anyway” and agrees to go with Gideon to look for Pro. (274)

Silas accuses the Ninth – via Gideon, including Harrow – a house of liars. (321)

“The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there I will be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee,” said Gideon. “See you on the flip side, sugarlips.” (438)

Harrow says “We can't go home again” when the Emperor offers it as an alternative to being one of his Hands. However, she says she will have to go back eventually” in reference to Canaan House because she “needs to find out what happened to [her] cavalier's body.” He says he knows that she will have to. But she accepts being his Lyctor “for now.” (444)

The Third House

Naberius interrupts Corona fighting and seems terrifically afraid, saying “you can't.” She collapses into his arms and bites his arm, and he promises her not to tell her, implying Ianthe is the “her.” (328)

Palamedes gets upset that his timing was wrong, saying the Fifth had gone down and completed a challenge in the facility but that he hadn't checked Abigail's body in time to notice that a key had been stored there by someone, who we later learn is Cy. The Third had then taken it. (377)

Corona is in the fresco room crying while Ianthe is adjusting to having killed/absorbed Tern. (380-381)

Ianthe has had to be two necros since she was 6 to cover for Corona's lack of abilities. (385)

What Happened at/to Canaan House/The Facility Below/The First House:

The First House is in the system of Dominicus and is practically covered in water; it's blue and green with a blue sky and an atmosphere with clouds. Canaan House has been built atop the facility, which either is pre-Resurrection or made to look so and holds the majority of the original Lyctors' work. Palamedes wants to date it. A cow symbol is on the hidden hallway door by the cav's training facilities and another, unknown, location. In the facility resides the sum of all necromantic transgression, done by the Emperor. Cytherea is eager at the idea that something has been lurking there for thousands of years, making it so that after death is when you really live. Going down into the facility without a key seems to be no big deal, frankly, as nothing happened to Gideon and what happened to the Fourth is Cytherea's doing. Teacher hates the water of all sorts, as it's a terrible portent. Gideon points out that Canaan House is surrounded by sea and he laughs hysterically, then apologizes to a "poor child" -- presumably meaning Gideon, then someone else. He says that none of them intended this to happen. The Emperor believed soul-siphoning was the most dangerous thing a House had ever thought up. The tooth belonging to a revenant skeleton had never left the planet. The soul is removed entirely, and his bones strangely lack an energy signature. Inside, it reads "FIVE HUNDRED INTO FIFTY IT IS FINISHED!" In the same room is the pin board, as well as a picture of Teacher and the others who look after Canaan House. A note from Anastasia mentions a "BEST OPTION" and instructs the recipient (unknown) to ask John. She also demands her calipers (size measurement tool) back because she needs them. Pal is shocked because he thought Teacher was a beguiled corpse, but nobody is controlling him. He hypothesizes that he may be self-sustaining by using the other souls on the planet as thanergy. Teacher had left to lock a door and keep the Second from calling John, but he was unsuccessful and he dies with the skeletons he was presumably controlling, as he is capable of necromancy. Teacher was a shell full of 100 souls, but just a prototype. Colum is taken over by what seemed like 6 souls who had never been in a human body before. His eyes transform into mouths ringed by teeth and tongues, and his original tongue grows, implying hunger.

Gideon's Backstory:

Gideon and her mother were dropped into the Ninth's atmosphere in a hazard suit that had been out of power for about an hour before. She screamed "Gideon!" 3x before her soul fled. They share hair colors. Gideon is chipped. She wants to go to Trentham on the Second to join the Cohort. Dulc/Cy is pleasantly surprised by her eyes. G&P (of the 2nd) made the theorem for transference (using a living soul), and they loved each other. A torn and crumpled note in their room reads "ease give Gideon my congratulations, howev" presumably about the baby Gideon otw. Cam and Pal are stunned Gideon is okay after walking, and this implies her natural cav aptitude as well as H's great power. Dulc/Cy calls G vital and claims responsibility for this (?) individually, wondering if H even knows what she has in G. D/C's construct has a skull with closed eyes and lips at its core, as if perpetually locked in prayer, and spares G. G had inhaled nerve gas for 10 min from 2 cots away but was the only one who lived, thus scaring H's rents for the rest of their lives. G has prettier eyes than Gideon. D/C asks G to cry mercy, saying she doesn't even know what she is to her, she won't die here and may not have to die at all, and that she's spared her before.

Cytherea/Dulcinea:

D/C wanted to be a Lyctor cuz she didn't want to die but now she doesn't want to live forever. She killed real Dulc and Pro at the start (3 months ago) but held onto D's body and was controlling Pro. She claims she's a walking thanergy generator cuz of the cancer. Teacher had recognized her (but doesn't say) and went to head off the 2nd to prevent the Emp from coming. C had gummed up the lock of a room that had been painted lovingly with flowers, clouds, and birds. Freshly painted is the message YOU LIED TO US, which I assume Teach had been intending to lock in order to hide? C confesses she hadn't swept the place of historical notes cuz of Pent but that she'd been nostalgic. She had hidden the key in Pent to give her time to gum up the lock (???) which should've been about impossible to remove, thus leaving her impressed by H. C and Loveday had been 7th, and C hadn't wanted to merge w her either. C says she knew if she ruined JG's plans, killing the heirs and cavs, she'd draw him back but subtly so he's without his Lyctors. She wanted him to break and cross over before he saw what would come when she called, which would mean she wouldn't have to do anything. It would be too late. She had loved him like a god and brother but Lyctorhood isn't life or death and shouldn't be smth anyone is asked to embrace. Pal sped up her cancer and its side effects, but she isn't impressed until Pal brings up radical thanergetic fission. She lives, then says she's come back home to kill the Emp and burn his Houses, starting with G. H is her natural predator and she and G unite to fight perfectly together. C likes the idea of having a little sister, but not so much that she won't fight Ianthe (which could be because she's a Lyctor on principal and/or because Ianthe attacks her immediately). The mass next to Cy's shoulder that Cam throws a knife at has to be a side effect of her cancer. God says he wishes they could've just fought it out for real because he had wanted Lyctorhood to be contemplated and accepted rather than forced on anyone.

Who the Other Original Lyctors Were:

5th history keepers don't have a lot of post-Ressurrection, pre-sov. and pre-Cohort records except secondhand ones, like transcripts from the 6th originals. However, Pent had found was she thought were unencrypted messages between two people who were or would become Lyctors -- maybe even God himself. The X-203 note with G's name on it is real, aka 10 thousand years old.

The Girl Inside the Locked Tomb/How the Emperor Came to Be:

Alecto was the cost of the Resurrection (which also was the planets/world before??) and the abyss of the First. The Ninth was never meant to be for long. Her tomb is surrounded by salt water, and H somehow knew that the blood ward bypass on the doors that would only respond for the Necromancer Divine would open for her regardless. A sword is laid on Alecto's breast. Seeing her face made H want to live forever jic she ever work up. The Emperor believed that soul-siphoning was the most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up. Ianthe's specialization in large-scale energy transferral and her study of what it had taken for God to restore their dying Houses back then, the price he'd had to pay, led her to imply that the price was the soul of the First planet (aka HIS CAV because he can't return to his House)...

Gideon's Two-Hander:

H never liked G's two-hander because she always felt like it was judging her, but that also implies that it wasn't the same one on Alecto's breast...

Necromancy/Lyctor Theorem:

The transference experiment allowed both H and G to see the differently colored coronas wreathing the construct, which showed where to strike in order to undo the regeneration theorem behind it. Siphoning isn't the same as using a cav as a power source. That power transference has to be life to death or death to a sort of life, which is what the Second do. (Thalergy to thanergy.) The Second does smth in reverse by draining dying foes to strengthen her cav (thanergy into thalergy). Originally I thought the 1st is the House without a part in the megatheorem because there isn't a question abt whether the 9th should be there  when the information about there being 8 parts of the megatheorem is revealed... however, because the Ninth wasn't meant to exist, I'm going with 9th -- also because the 8 theorems seem to correspond to house numbers 1-8. D/C says that only God can grasp at a soul after someone has died because otherwise their spirit's free forever.

Megatheorem of Lyctorhood - 1. Preserve the soul, intellect and memory still intact 2. Analyse it, understand its structure and shape 3. Remove and absorb it without consuming it 4. Fix it in place so it can't deteriorate (like with the sword she used, presumably) 5. Incorporate it in a way that doesn't overwhelm your own soul 6. Consume the flesh, even just a drop of blood will do 7. Reconstruction, making the spirit and flesh (of the cav) work together the way they used to in a new body 8. Hook up the cables and get the power flowing

C used Ianthe's thalergy to heal for real. She tells I that it would take at least centuries (or more) for her completion because Tern hadn't gone willingly like Loveday had for her. Harrow begs the Emp. to undo what Gideon had done, swearing she'd never ask anything of him again. He says he can't, though he'd like to, because the soul's inside her now, and if he tried to pull it out, he'd take hers with it and destroy both in the process. Interesting.

The Ninth House:

Harrow said she didn't have the luxury of walking away like Pal did from siphoning/utilizing Cam's thalergy because she needed to become a Lyctor now, before something happened. There are stories about the 9th that Jm dismisses as "probably bullshit, anyway." Silas accuses the 9th - including Harrow - as being a house of liars. Harrow says "We can't go home again" but that she will have to go back eventually to Canaan House because she needed to find out what happened to her cav's body. He says he knows that she will have to. She accepts being his Lyctor for now.

The Third House:

hello locked tomblr! i was at the tamsyn muir event in oxford - here are my notes i've tried to group them thematically rather than chronologically, and to point out spoilers when i can. there are some parts that i missed/didn't hear correctly - i would appreciate it if others at the event correct me :D

Key takeaways

Alecto is still being written! Muir was reluctant to say a year, so it will probably be more than that

Alecto won’t be written in a Biblical style, and there will be multiple POVs. It will mostly be told from Harrow’s POV (I hope I heard that right)

Muir loves the idea of a TLT videogame

Muir’s not yet done with Floralinda

Q&A: Alecto when?

(putting this first because I know you want to know!)

Alecto is not yet finished

Reason why:

Muir was already slated to write another book before Alecto (Floralinda, I think)

Floralinda took longer than expected

Muir also suffered from health issues

Muir was about to say Alecto would come out in a year, but was reluctant. It will be soon. It will be before she dies.

Once Alecto gets to the editor, it will be fast-tracked. There will be few advance reader copies

And Alecto will not be 2 books, do not fret!

Publishing journey for the Locked Tomb Series

TL;DR – Muir got published because she had good contacts

George R. R. Martin was Tamsyn Muir’s mentor at Clarion

Muir took what she described as the ‘traditional route’ into publishing

She spent around 3 years publishing short stories

Then she got contacted by an agent for a novel

Muir acknowledges that routes into publishing are not like that now

Sometimes, fanfiction writers are approached – Muir doesn’t approve as that ruins the hobby, it adds a financial incentive and makes people do it for a career rather than for fun.

Muir wouldn’t do anything differently

We joked a bit about an agent who remarked on the ‘sisterly relationship’ between characters in Muir’s manuscript

Advice for aspiring authors

Send stuff to an agent regardless of where you are

Work in the industry

There was a bit of discussion on self-publishing – it doesn’t suit Muir personally, but it’s a good route for someone with the energy to be their own editor, advertiser, etc.

Q&A: something about being a successful writer (sorry I forgot)

Basically, getting successful requires having good connections

Videogame Influence on Locked Tomb Series

Muir is a big fan of the emergent narrative that videogames afford

Muir worked for Disney and wrote videogame scripts before GtN. There’s an insane House of Mouse script archived somewhere, which Muir wrote.

Novel writing is very different from videogame writing.

In a videogame, you have to fully flesh out the in-game universe and provide enough choices and points of interest for players

This taught Muir to be in-depth when writing her novel universes…

…which particularly influenced her to write tonnes of AUs for the Locked Tomb series

There are two versions of Nona, for example: one which is what’s really happening, and one which is Nona’s POV

Q&A: did the videogame influence help Muir to write so confusingly in the Locked Tomb series?

Muir strongly cites Umineko as a key influence

This is a perfect example of a slow reveal, like in the Locked Tomb books

Muir doesn’t strictly plan her reveals (e.g., on the second reread, the reader finds this out), but she does love a slow reveal and works hard to make close reading rewarding for the reader

Tamsyn Muir would love for the Locked Tomb series to be adapted into a videogame!!

A funny story was told where Muir got approached by a gacha game company… which didn’t come to anything

POV voice shifts in the Locked Tomb series

A key reason for the books being so different is that Muir didn’t want to write the same thing again – she gets ‘easily bored’

She focussed on the sentence links of each character – Gideon’s sentence links are very different from Harrow’s

Vocabulary also played a key role (again, compare Gideon and Harrow)

The second person narrative in HtN was planned for a while, the tricky thing was convincing publishers to accept it

Muir has an HtN draft somewhere, 50% written, that’s in third person

POV in Alecto the Ninth: It will not be written in a biblical style

There will be different POVs

Q&A: Book inspiration for writing in the second person?

Muir notes that she didn’t write in perfect second person – it was actually first person

She will always turn to On a Winter’s Night a Traveller

And this is another videogame inspiration

She mentioned Homestuck then said don’t mention Homestuck so…

The theme of memory in the Locked Tomb series

Memory as a result of love, and memories which are a source of pain

This is a key theme in HtN – note how memory affected Harrow throughout the book

It’s also going to be a key theme in Alecto

Muir is using memory as horror

The horror of not being able to trust yourself and to know what is real

She’s drawing on her own experiences of being schizophrenic

Magic systems in the Locked Tomb series

Muir wasn’t actually a big fan of necromancy before writing TLT

She found it too passive in Dungeons & Dragons

She wanted an active magic system, something unintuitive that required hard work and study to learn

She also wanted a magic system to be gross!

TLT magic system was described as “telekinesis with meat”

Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: what was Muir’s worldbuilding starting point/seed?

Muir struggled to find this out. There’s no magic formula

Creative writing can’t be taught, only practiced

For GtN, she wanted a story about duty, and duty vs freedom

She wanted the story to be about two young women

Gideon was originally a cop/fireman

For Muir, worldbuilding is there to serve the plot. She does not worldbuild for worldbuilding’s sake

Everything in Muir’s books is there to serve the plot

Would the TLT protagonists make a good DnD party?

Absolutely not!

Although Camilla and Palamedes would be fine

There was some joking around about how Muir and her friends tried to play as Gideon and Harrow in DnD and it didn’t work out

Genre merging in the Locked Tomb series

Muir identified her blend of comedy and horror as unique to Kiwi fiction

She used Peter Jackson’s early films before the Lord of the Rings as an example

For Muir, science fiction and fantasy are merged – it only really feels like science if you do hard sci-fi

Muir grew up with Star Wars, so it felt natural to set her fantasy world in space

The genre merging created publishing problems

Publishers want an easy comparison to other books to make it sell, but there was nothing like Gideon the Ninth

We joked a bit about TLT being compared with Dune

Q&A: now that TLT books are out, has Muir noticed any very similar books that GtN etc. are being compared to?

Not really.

Muir sees the most similarities with people who know her and have had similar influences

An example is A. K. Markwood

Another book that seemed very similar is ‘Dawn Hound by Necksy Strownack’ another New Zealand author (I did a quick google and I think this is the Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach?)

Comedy and Humour in the Locked Tomb series

Muir’s advice for aspiring writers is not to write humour to appeal to everyone, as you’ll please no one. Stay true to yourself.

Muir writes plenty of humour into her manuscripts, which are often cut away during editing

Q&A: memes that didn’t make it: (note: I struggled to catch what was being said under all the laughter and I am also woefully uncultured – many of these are me transcribing as best as I can. Do correct me if I’m wrong!)

Mr Bones’ Wild Ride

Emperish meme

Horse Plinko (this got referred to a lot!)

Harrow calling Ianthe the ‘God of Thot’ in HtN

And many more

Muir mused about whether she will dial back the humour in later work, or whether she will go full throttle as she doesn’t care anymore

Writing process for short stories vs books

Muir sees her short story days as mostly behind her, although she is getting one published soon (as we are aware!)

With short stories, you only have time for one thing, whilst with a novella, you have time for plot and subplot

Short stories are great to practise your technical writing skills

Muir personally would not turn her short stories into novels – she wants to do something new

Q&A: The planning process for the Locked Tomb series

Muir had already planned the whole story before writing GtN

GtN and HtN are the question arcs

NtN and AtN are the answering arcs

Muir really enjoyed writing a New Zealand story

Lesbians as epic heroes in the Locked Tomb series

Muir doesn’t see this as jarring – why can’t epics have lesbians in them?

All epics want you do to is die gloriously

You can do anything after that

Q&A: Epic influences on the Locked Tomb series

The Iliad. It all comes back to Homer, and the Iliad.

There was some insightful discussion on how the Locked Tomb world codifies its past. In a sense, it’s stuck in time. There’s no golden period to hark back to.

The discussion then turned to the idea of the hero, and what a hero should be.

This is heavily explored in Gideon the Ninth, which centres around Harrow failing to prevent Gideon from being the hero

Add lesbian to anything

Muir would love to see a lesbian Hunger Games

Floralinda vs Gideon and Harrow

“Floralinda blows” – Tamsyn Muir

Floralinda is a supervillain story about a ‘bad girl who gets worse’

Muir has written/is planning to write more on Floralinda

Q&A: Advice for writing characters who suck?

Just let them be shit, go hard first and don’t hold back

Take a sin, take a virtue

All of Muir’s characters, in some way, are a ‘fuck up’

Catholic imagery in the Locked Tomb series and Catholicism in general

Q&A: was it difficult to link lesbians with Catholicism in the Locked Tomb series?

It felt good for Muir, a lesbian Catholic

And also very fun!

Q&A: who’s the hottest saint?

In the TLT universe: Valancy!

In the real world: Saint Barbara

This sparked some light-hearted banter

Q&A: Meaningful names in the Locked Tomb series

Muir loves writing meaningful names that hide things in plain sight

Muir does not browse ‘Behind the Name’ lol

She has a ‘laundry list’ of names she likes which she’s accumulated throughout her life

Homer and ancient Greek influences played a key role

Also Biblical names

Changing names are highly important in the books, e.g., Gideon to Kiriona

Muir doesn’t mind if people sus out a character’s plot after immediately reading their names

Umineko inspiration

Lolita and the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: the audience member read Lolita at the same time as NtN. They were wondering if the similarities between the two were deliberate.

Muir loves Lolita and thinks that Nabokov is an expert in writing misery

Muir was open about being a child sexual abuse survivor. The influence of this is pervasive in her work.

There is a strong focus on relationships with authority people

Particularly in NtN, which contains sexual threats. This was hard for Muir to write.

Another example is the relationship between John and Alecto.

They are not a one on one comparison between Humbert and Lolita, but the theme of a man fashioning a girl into the perfect partner is there

Whether there is a sexual element in this will be answered in Alecto the Ninth

Muir explicitly does not want to include overt sexual violence in her work

Misogyny in the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: In the worldbuilding of the Locked Tomb series, how do you balance the misogyny that still exists (which is particularly obvious when John talks to/about Mercymorn) and the outward appearance/initial impression people get of the houses having gender equality (e.g., Abigail as head of the fifth, Jeannemary as a knight)?

This question had Muir wriggling in delight

The answer to this is addressed in Alecto

Why is John fucking up in the creation of his utopia?

Muir encourages readers to question what you, the reader, perceive as misogyny, versus what the characters perceive as misogyny.

Q&A: Cannibalism in the Locked Tomb series

Cannibalism is a metaphor for toxic love

Cannibalism of the soul is much more severe than cannibalism of the flesh

Link to Lolita

It’s eating someone’s life and personhood. A central theme in TLT is exploring love as something taken violently

Can you love someone without taking something from them? This is one of Muir’s favourite ideas

And, it’s not necessarily negative

Example of Camilla and Palamedes (spoiler for NtN!!)

They had to eat each other

Grappling with the question: Is love weightless?

Q&A: How much of their old selves are preserved in the Lyctors?

HtN spoilers!!

John didn’t simply wipe and rewrite them – if not, why are they trying to kill him?

John wanted his friends, so he tried to bring his friends back

Interesting implications for the two people he didn’t know well and only saw as cowrokers

BUT then the Lyctors are changed by their immortality and John

Q&A: What was it like to write immortality?

Muir acknowledges that she doesn’t do a perfect job, and that it’s actually impossible to actually write immortality – it will be too alien for the reader

But this links back to the theme of memory – how much can the Lyctors retain?

The Lyctors are heavily weighed down by time, Mercymorn in particular

Q&A: How long would Muir last in the TLT universe?

0.5 seconds

Muir doesn’t see herself as a necromancer or cavalier

Nor is she particularly aligned with any House

Q&A: Books that Muir is reading right now that she would recommend

(again, my poor listening skills and lack of culture limit me here!)

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran

‘Payback for Malory Towers’

A.K. Markwood’s new book, the Seventh Banisher

Muir has advance access. AK is her friend.

Q&A: Books and media that influenced Muir as a child

She was a highly prolific reader as a child!

Obviously Animorphs

Weird Kiwi fantasy stories

Margaret Margey

She read a lot of David Eddings as a teenager and got annoyed at the role of women in the books

Gormandust was a key inspiration for TLT (I googled this and ‘Gormandust’ doesn’t exist, hopefully someone more in the know can help to translate my poor transcription!)

Grimmbolts was another influence (again, I probably didn’t hear this correctly)

Q&A: Warhammer inspiration

Muir didn’t get into Warhammer until after HtN. She loves it.

She has been approached to write for the Black Library but she had to decline as she had too much work

Q&A: What’s Muir going to do next?

Muir does not want to keep going back to TLT, she is happy to release it to the fanfiction writers once it’s done!

There are a couple more things in the TLT universe she may add

For example, there’s a big Harrow AU…

Muir wants to go back to videogames

But in her history, the projects she works on tend to fold

Muir is trying to write her own videogames and is slowly learning Python

A very good question about deconstruction was asked, but I missed it because I was too excited

The bad news: Alecto is not finished. It will hopefully come out "soon" and will likely be fast tracked with few ARCs when it's finished.

The news you may take differently depending on your preferences: It is not being split.

The good news: It is not all written in Ye Olde Alecto speak (it sounds like Harrow's POV will be fairly major, but there will apparently be several narrators).

A slightly random selection of things I frantically scribbled down:

The protagonists of TLT would make an "absolutely shit" D&D party ("Palamedes and Camilla would be fine")

We could have had horse plinko and begone thot, but for the anti-meme ministrations of her editor. She would love an edition that puts all of the memes back in.

On Catholic imagery and lesbianism: "you ain't seen nothing yet"

"Harrow is now a believer without a church"

She said that while John and Alecto's relationship is not meant to be a 1:1 analogue to Humbert Humbert and Lolita, there is the idea of a man fashioning (something he thinks is) a girl into a perfect partner (the question of whether that is a sexual partner apparently may be relevant to ATN)

She does not have a favourite House and would just be a regular person in the world of TLT (though she would last about 0.5 seconds)

The tension between the Houses' ostensible gender equality and the misogyny that still persists is apparently also relevant to ATN. "John has set out to make a society on values he holds dear and cherishes and in some ways he has done really well... And in some way he has fucked it up beyond comprehension" (Maybe not an exact quote. My auditory processing is questionable.)

The backstory in NTN was planned right from the beginning

Lyctors "are not truly human any more. They've crystallised themselves" and "They have lost themselves and the only thing they've been able to hold on to is what other people make of them". She said she would have liked to make the Lyctors more alien but had to balance that with them being relatable narratively.

Like the blue light with Varun. Because if theres a real world example of a haunting blue light you never want to see in person ever, it's this:

Also, Nona does not want and probably can't really eat, which is both a running gag but also one of the first sympthoms after somebody gets radiation poisoning. And at the end of the book, her condition deteriorates.

And there are debatably implications they were working with radiation in the first place for the cryo project! From the sound of everything combined, probably testing that the frozen people shipped off to Tau Ceti would be good to survive the radiation of space, and they'd gotten it up to an estimated 92% chance of success without significant lasting damage for the average person, but to get to those numbers, they'd wound up with a whole mess of very irradiated corpses. Which was why they were going to have so much trouble disposing of them, and when John talks about just burying them he sarcastically mutters "you would've loved that", and why the general population was so freaked out by how Scary it sounded, and why John got blacklisted from a lot of shit (despite having been the one to insist on clearance from Asia-Pacific Environmental!). He describes the latter specifically as "I was irradiated." And we do know how Muir loves layered meanings, especially through John!

On Tor's website, TLT is listed as Scifi/Fantasy. However, when forced to choose, Tor picks Scifi above all. This is HUGE, because even with all the necromancy and fantasy elements of The Locked Tomb, the publisher looked at the series and said "No, this is scifi." Ergo: the "magical" elements must have a basis in science.

Now, spiritual/religious elements (souls etc) can exist alongside science without much issue. But if you're manipulating physical objects in a real-world environment, you have to explain it in a way that could conceivably track with scientific theory as it functions in the real world. You can extrapolate from there.

So. In GtN, we enter a world of fantasy tropes and Regency-era hand wringing about social morés.... but we also see Palamedes tear his hair out about dating Canaan; how nothing seems to fit a reasonable timeline. In real life, scientists use radiometric dating in geology & archeology to determine the age of objects. (also, do necromantic (or irradiated) interactions with objects impart additional radiation? I don't know!!)

TLDR; You can tear the soul out of a planet, but the actual tearing process needs to make enough sense to pass muster in the Scifi world. Nuclear fusion is a great candidate, as mentioned by @oh-jod-dammit and @championofdnd and is supported by the text ("the soul was like a tiny atom bomb"). God, it's right there.

This, of course, raises some questions.

If necromancy is related to radiation, what power does Alecto/Earth impart to John that allows him control of (assumingly) irradiated corpses? and WHY? What about him was so fucking special? Sure, he was trying to get humans off Earth for its own sake, presumably by testing radiation shielding for long-range space flight. (aka the problem with pregnancy is you have to worry about irradiation for fetuses or reproductive organs. probably.)

But how is John a better ally than an eco-warrior or biologist or any number of scientists that were presumably trying to save the Earth? Alecto (allegedly) said she chose him. How did he bring himself to her attention? If we keep following this logic, how did radiation connect them?

I'm tired. Let's review some facts from both sides.

.Electromagnetic Radiation is produced by stars and other celestial bodies.

.Planets, people, and stars emit different types of radiation.

.Planets and people are proven to have souls, which can be removed from the body by force.

.Do stars have souls?? The sun?? The Moon in the Fucking Sky??? (where is the Moon, btw??)

.Does radiation serve as a connection to a different dimension? Are radio waves a bridge to The River? Did John tear a hole in spacetime and make some kind of wormhole?

"you were the noise that was everywhere" thats RADIO WAVES. tamsyn muir I will GET YOU

This is why Wake is wearing a Haz suit in the River Bubble, btw. She only started experiencing negative effects when the suit was punctured. (right?). It's why The Eggs All Died. It's why flipped planets slowly mutate. RADIATION. I love y'all.

The stupid First House robes? They're a fucking PRISM. Electromagnetic Radiation is visible light!! GODDAMN!!!

And here's where I leave this for a breather. My original document got corrupted somehow. probably the radiation :(

Resurrecting this blog to post the parasite occupying 30% of my brain since I started reading TLT almost a year ago