Worm with Problems💫

they are thinking of ways to hurt each other

there was once a little boy.

he is born disabled. his body hurts, and he can’t walk properly the way the other children do. he doesn’t understand why. he’s a little boy. but he plays with wooden boats and pulls toys on a string.

somebody makes him a tunic. they sew ducks onto it in red and green and yellow and blue. the bright colours of a child.

the little boy is eight years old, and he’s going to be king now. there’s a big ceremony about it. he doesn’t really fully understand what’s going on, because he’s eight, but he wears the tunic with the brightly coloured ducks for the occasion because he loves it. look at his ducks! aren’t they great?

he is a child. the adults around him manipulate and coax him to gain more power for themselves. he still plays with toys.

as a teenager, not yet an adult, he fathers children. they do not survive. he’s not even old enough to have full agency in his job and is still being manipulated, but he had babies and they died.

he does not make it to his twenties. at eighteen or nineteen years old he dies, and is buried. his babies, so tiny, are buried with him.

and so is his tunic with the little ducks that he loved so much he kept it long after it no longer fit.

yeah i think that like. especially with historical figures in your mind people who were kings and queens or important nobles were adults. even if you know how old they were it doesn’t really click. it doesn’t seem real

but then you get something like a little tunic with brightly coloured ducks on it and it hits you like a fucking truck that this really was a little kid and no matter how far removed you are a little kid is still a little kid. their brains didn’t develop any quicker back then. he was just as developed/mature mentally as any 8 year old now. he had cartoonish animals on his clothes and he played with toy boats and probably terrorised the local cat population.

tutankhamun was a child and he didn’t make it to adulthood because he was unfortunate enough to be a very important child

his dad died when he was 8. he saw his own babies die when he was still just a boy himself.

tutankhamun had a little pair of sandals with ducks on them. he had earrings decorated with ducks. he kept those, and other items of childhood clothing. some toys. keepsakes. things he loved, and treasured. he kept them all in a little wooden chest. the chest… was carved with ducks.

and that little duck chest, filled with things he kept from his childhood, was buried with him. maybe he was keeping them for the little babies who did not make it. maybe they just reminded him of good days and fun times.

WITH PLEASURE

(greyscale makes it hard but the duck head is on the right above the toe strap. always takes me a while to find it too)

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

No matter how injured. If a parent doesn't deem it necessary to see a doctor, it doesn't happen. Teachers can suggest a doctor visit, but unless it's a very acute injury (and even then), it's ultimately up to the parents.

You can be 13. Twisted, maybe broken ankle. You teacher lets you sit out in PE. She's concerned, and tells you to rest when you go home, and see a doctor. You get home, ur parents fill a bath and add some Epsom salts, and then laugh at you for using it moms old colorguard stick as a cane. Take some ibuprofen they say. It's just a little sprain, ur a kid.

You go to school the next day, go to ur office assistant time. Office calls ur mom to come get you, because you're clearly in too much pain for school. Your mom laughs when she gets you, says you just were so determined not to miss school. Scolds you for making the office ladies worry.

You never see a doctor for the injury.

Your parents come into the exam room at every visit. This does not stop with age, except for gynecologist. But your parents are on the medical release forms. They fill them out for you, with you. You do not get to take them off.

You never get to tell s doctor about the ankle. Even though it never quote healed right, and it hurts every day.

Then your 18. In college. Still on your parents insurance, and have no car. The on campus clinic only does std testing. You fall down some stairs. Same injury. You call your parents, crying from the pain. You are using a mop as a cane. They console you and say to have a bath, take some meds, and let them know how it feels in a few days. You end up borrowing your roommates rolling chair to get around for the weekend.

By Monday, you can walk again. You walk miles to class every day. You ask to see a doctor, but your parents won't drive the hour to come take you, and you don't have the insurance card. You are still at their mercy for medical care. The ankle tries to heal again. This time worse than before. The tendons click with every step.

Now you're in your twenties. Finally have your own healthcare. You see a doctor. You get to mention the ankle! They say it's been too long to really even know what was damaged. That you have arthritis now. It healed wrong but it can no longer be fixed.

she slaps augustine across the mouth and he spits out his teeth, despite the fact that he is a ten thousand year old lyctor who should have had ironclad shielding. out of all the necros that swore themselves to god, she was one of the remaining ones, one of the last lyctors to survive the resurrection beasts.

she vaporized god. she vaporized god. she unwound the most powerful necromancer she knew on the fly and reduced him to his base components because she just. had the knowledge in her brain. mercymorn turned a man running on the souls of ten billion into fine red mist on a fucking impulse.

she spends all of htn trying to kill harrow out of some bizarre attempt to live up to her name. she’s kind about it, even. she draws weird little squiggles that look like everything but monsters. she fantasizes about putting her idiot boss in acid jail. she worries about her dress making her look like a melon even though she literally seduces god and also a guy who hates her.

and nobody really likes her. g1deon is g1deon, by which i mean he is being tortured and weird about everything on account of being two people and thus has little to no opinion on what she does. augustine fucking hates her unless they’re working together to honey trap god (no i will not stop mentioning this) and it wasn’t even her fault that alfred died, not really. ianthe follows augustine around like an evil little duckling - does she even have strong opinions on mercy except that it’s gross she’s having a three way with jod and augustine? she was supposed to mentor harrow, but she got the defective one - the one that didn’t even make to lyctorhood properly (does she wish she could’ve done what harrow did? sealed cristabel away forever, even if she had to butcher herself to do it?). and jod. jod loves her, of course, but he’s just so. so. he doesn’t fucking listen is the thing. he deflects and he jokes and he doesn’t say “mercy, i didn’t meant to, mercy, i’ll fix it, mercy, please, forgive me.” he says everything but that.

Augustine truly genuinely hates her AND she truly genuinely hates him, and it wasn't her fault or his, it was Alfred's and Cristabel's, but they ARE a little bit Alfred and a little bit Cristabel now, aren't they? Every time they look at each other they see the eyes of that overzealous idiot who brought out the worst in their overzealous idiot and know they were both to blame. And none of that is even WHY they hate each other, it was apparently just on-sight from before magic ever existed, and even back then they still shared a partner and it really fucking feels like "well I'M not leaving so I guess YOU'LL have to deal with it." They're still pettily bickering about who loves him more and who he loves more after 10,000 years of misery and while both actively wanting to kill him. The mere sight, the mere mention of each other pisses both of them off and they trust each other unconditionally BECAUSE they don't respect each other enough to hide their intentions, if they wanted to hurt each other they just would. (I think often of a post that described them with "Literally nobody is doing it like them. Because why would they, ever.")

In a book series that uses "fuck" liberally even in the narration, she very rarely curses. She uses cutesie ass language like "nincompoop" and "silly buggers" and stammers when she's flustered and gets flustered easily. She uses condescending pet names; "It's a Resurrection Beast, honey." In a setting where everyone is color-coded like crazy she makes her entire persona a color no one else wears and it's bright peachy pink.

She's the most, if not the only, reasonable person in any given room 95% of the time and the other 5% she is the most petulant bitch alive despite being the second oldest person alive (third if you count Pyrrha as 'alive', fourth if you count Alecto as 'a person'). She screams and thrashes and flings herself down and sulks and whines and guilt trips and makes herself cry on command because of course she can and then she picks herself up and she's dead calm again 2 seconds later.

Everyone only ever seems to focus on the 5%. John is by far the nicest person to her because the bar is lightyears underground and even he treats it more like it's 50/50.

She is trying so hard to be eternally serious and she's so unfathomably beyond depressed, she desperately wants to throw herself into the nearest sun and the only reason she hasn't yet is because she's always cared too much about everyone and everything and never knew how to stop, she could never bring herself to just leave the universe to its fate. And yet, even with all that, she is still so incredibly funny and cannot resist being roped in on the bit. She will get exasperated with herself for getting in on the bit. ("We can live in magma." ... laying her head down miserably on the console. "Now I'm doing it...")

When Harrow unties her own spinal chord, reaches in and sees what Mercy has done and manages to undo it herself, Mercy is relieved.

She tries her damnedest to ignore this child and resents this responsibility so much. (She also had every reason to worry in the back of her mind that this might be her own biological child, hers and John's, given she didn't know the eggs died or what Wake had to do. She keeps reducing Harrow's age and it's a hilarious bit because she is hilarious but also, was any of it wanting to push Harrow further and further away from that possibility? She's too young to be That Kid. She's way too young. She's only 12. She's only 9. Way way way too young.)

And she still trains her to some extent. Supervises while she kills planets after presumably showing her how. Tells her bluntly that it's not a matter of Harrow's skill, it's that her body won't survive what Lyctors are demanded to, tries to warn her even if in a condescending way. When Harrow comes to her for help putting her cortisol in overdrive, it's a horrible unhealthy thing to enable but it's help Mercy just casually gives, and in context it's? horribly enough, one of the most respectful things of Harrow's agency anyone on the Mithraem does? It is NOT good for her, but Mercy doesn't try to tell her what is and isn't good for her, at least not about anything but being here and involved in this whole mess at all. And Harrow doesn't even slightly appreciate that.

She stabs Harrow in the gut and dulls her nerves "out of a misplaced sense of affection." She drags her into the hall in hopes she'll be eaten quickly, before she has time to suffer.

She kills God single-handedly with her bare hands not because she has any greater power than any other Lyctor but because she has the most insane special interest the universe has ever known and she devoted herself to doing it. She doesn't have to say anything when she does, but she still chooses to make what she thinks will be the last words he ever hears "I forgive you everything, Lord." She wants to throw herself into the nearest sun immediately after and has to be talked out of it, so she absolutely saw a swift death as an act of Mercy.

But she is still talked out of it, because they still have a job, because people still need them. Because the man she hates more than anyone else, far more than the man she just exploded, knows exactly how to appeal to her and promises that they'll keep hating each other the whole time and then his bones will rest easy next to her bones.

and re: her special interest, this brings up a really good point: what the fuck was going through mercy’s head that she trained herself to be the perfect lyctor-killing machine? like was it a coincidence that her area of study just happened to let her kill somebody with great and terrible precision, or that she took it so far she could bypass lyctoral shielding?

Like I describe it as a special interest because the sheer fucking volume of information. The human body is wildly variable and John says—even if probably some degree of hyperbole but probably not much after this long—if there's anything Mercy doesn't know about the body, it isn't that it's not worth knowing, it hadn't existed previously. Literal God looks at her with a degree of awe and terror about this. He has also lived these 10,000 years with even more power and perception and he does not know this as intimately as she does. Harrow asks if it's "just" a matter of memorization why other people don't do it and they're like, are you crazy?? Like Augustine does it in the most condescending way but he recognizes he does NOT have the capacity for that, he couldn't do what she does no matter how hard he tried, even with just as much time to work on it.

BUT ALSO. He sure does also straight up say, in the same conversation, in front of God and everyone,

“One would only really need it to kill Lyctors, Harrowhark, and the rest of us never evinced any interest in that.” That broke up the dinner somewhat.

And that... really is about it jawoejiawe. Like. In theory, MAYBE she could have used it for something like... examining and easing Cytherea's symptoms? But Lyctors can't get new illnesses, they can't really have anything changed about their body without actively doing it themselves or to each other. Like Harrow could regrow Ianthe's arm, Ianthe could make Harrow's hair grow faster forever, etc, and I'd argue it's implied Mercy's used flesh magic to affect her own appearance too (older than John or G1deon yet "no signs of aging touched those screwed up eyes"). So I... GUESS? there could have also been incidents where they'd secretly do petty shit to each other in the same vein as Ianthe messing with Harrow's hair, and Mercy would have the unique ability to examine them and figure out what was fucked up, similar to how she was able to examine Harrow's brain???

Ofc with anyone but each other they can effectively see, hear, whatever inside of them, and from a great distance even. Harrow can tell exactly how many beating hearts are aboard the Erebos. With other Lyctors, though, it seems like Mercy examines them the same way Pal examines people, through touch and probably something like extending a bit of their own thalergy to comb through them? But they have to know exactly where they're aiming and what they're looking for to make good use of it. (And I say thalergy because we see Pal examine people in Cam's body at times when he says nothing thanergetic.) Mercy's just... ridiculous enough that she can tap the side of Harrow's head and pop that sense into her ears and brain and understand what she's done. 😭

So yeah getting THIS deep into it and practicing enough to use it to this degree really does seem to be "just in case I ever need to kill him or any of the others." I don't think she ever actively 'wanted' to so much as was willing to for the greater good, and I don't think she started heavily considering it until ~500 years ago, but I can absolutely see her having always wanted to be prepared...

Also, sometimes I remember just how her power is described and I get a little more feral about her...

The spear was removed. You still remembered acutely what that felt like. In the midst of that sensation, quick, light fingertips tapped a symphony over your back, arresting the flow of blood, seizing your flesh, cutting off circulatory shock; it was only then that you really began to understand what Mercymorn could do. With another fingertip, she tapped above your eyebrow, and your pituitary gland spewed out a flood of neuropeptides that immediately replaced the adrenaline squirting through your system. She was saying: “It’s not fair of you to try to bump them off when we’d get in trouble for it. They can die well enough on their own, you toad. This one’s all of twelve years old.” [...] “Oh, I hate you! I’ve always hated you, you dreary, repetitive leg,” said Mercymorn passionately, and then you felt her thumb press down on your lower back, and your gastrointestinal tract—so interrupted by spearpoint—flushed, deep and warm, and you felt some of that twisting pain within you. You could barely feel it anyway, you were so running with hormones. It was the best you’d felt since before you’d gone to Canaan House. Then she said, more reasonably: “I know what you’re doing, and it’s not like I don’t understand it, but if you’d wanted to smother the kittens you could do it more cleanly by knocking her out and dropping her out the airlock…” She trailed off suggestively. The Saint of Duty said stonily, “I do things face-to-face.” “I am not trying to be cruel,” she said cruelly, “but that is what got you into trouble nineteen years ago.”

She's so fucking funny. She's so fucking petty. "Leg" is such a jwioeajoijioeaw,,, And just going off on this whole tirade and hitting him with such a laser-focused jab while casually playing Harrow like a keyboard, practically as an aside, even as she's annoyed with herself for bothering. Harrow on the floor high off her ass from this not really able to do anything more than take it all in.

and yes! exactly! every lyctor has the raw power + basic skill to take down most nonlyctor opponents in a one on one fight with what they already know about the body and there’s no need to specialize too deep, even for healing other lyctors (like you said).

but what did john think she was doing??? like did he never realize? “oh, just mercy, getting weird and obsessive as per usual” fuuuck could you imagine having such rare and gorgeous talent, using it to become the perfect killer, and your boss is just. Like That.

augustine probably understood the threat mercy posed on account of the Scheming but he hated her anyway so

(and this is a mercy post but what was augustine doing learning to plunge such large areas into hell?? was this some sort of bigger conspiracy???)

6th House is on mercury and 9th House is on pluto so they're on the opposite ends of the dominicus system

9 is 6 uspide down and 6 is 9 upside down

the Ninth House and the Sixth House are religion vs science

Gideon and Harrow are (were) childhood enemies, Camilla and Palamedes are (were) childhood friends. Gideon and Harrow had a hard time trusting each other, Camilla and Palamedes trusted each other with everything.

Gideon and Harrow are all about forgetting ("But I don’t even remember about you most of the time", the whole lobotomy situation), Camilla and Palamedes are all about remembering ("I’ve carried you, Warden. And I’ve carried your memory … I’d rather carry you", "Palamedes remembers everything: That was his problem. I always remember him. That’s mine")

Gideon and Harrow are water (the Pool Scene, Gideon being in the "well" in Harrow's mind, Harrow deciding to stay in the River and Gideon "dying" in the River), Camilla and Palamedes are fire (Palamedes's first death, Palamedes and Camilla's lyctoral ascention)

in griddlehark's case the necromancer carried their cavalier's soul, in campal's case the cavalier carried their necromancer's soul

Gideon and Palamedes sacrificed themselves, Harrow then carried Gideon's sword even though it was killing her and Camilla carried Palamedes's bones even though boe electrocuted her for it

Gideon and Camilla are both "devotion's casualties"

Harrow and Camilla risked permanent brain damage to save the souls they carried

Gideon barely had any training for her position and Camilla trained her whole life, but they both didn't normally use their rapiers and were both set on fighting rather than on traditional duelling

the 6th and the 9th are both poor, underestimated, dying houses. Harrow and Palamedes have been leading them since they were very young and they do anything to try to improve the situation

Harrow fell in love with the Body when she was 10, Palamedes began writing to Dulcinea when he was 8. both into old dead chicks (as Gideon phrased it) while also loving their cavaliers

Camilla watched Gideon impale herself to force Harrow's ascention, Gideon watched Camilla light herself on fire during her and Palamedes's ascention

"This was your shell but it was all filled up with me" & "It's not you. It's me wearing you"

"I keep turning around to find you, and there’s nobody there." "I know the feeling." & "You’d touched that letter, and I—you know it was killing me twice that you weren’t there, right? You must know it was destroying me to be there in your body, trying to keep your thumbs on, and I couldn’t even hear your damn voice?"

"Kiriona Gaia was staring politely at the side of the truck, as though there were something really interesting on the paintwork" & "Even Camilla, who had turned away to politely investigate something on the opposite wall, wasn’t there"

"It was just her and Harrow and Harrow’s bitter, high-boned, stupid little face" & "Palamedes said, and now Nona knew he wasn’t speaking to anyone else in the universe"

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