I was inspired by the black-out poems made by @playing-with-colors and decided to apply it to the locked tomb series!

not five pages earlier: gideon waxing poetic about how harrow tenderly wrapped gideon's sunglasses (that harrow allegedly hated btw) and sealed them tightly in an envelope for eight months on the OFF CHANCE gideon came back in some way shape or form

Another reminder that the Mithraeum probably looks even weirder than you think, this time courtesy of the relics of St Munditia in Munich.

Dad: “now, we both know I'm an upstanding guy who would never stoop to torturing you for intel, but you are tied to a chair and I am immortal so like, I can wait for you to be reasonable for a very, very long time :)”

Harrow goes on to experience constant assault that could be coded in a certain way familiar to a lot of young women attacked by older men (Mercymorn: "What did you say, to make him try to kill you?" (pg 191).

Later she experiences the very unpleasant imagery generated by the Sleeper's pregnancy (and all the failed attempts) while in the River bubble (where she is guided by another mom-coded figure), unaware this is referring to her Gideon, whose mother has been haunting her from that "large steel infant" and once Harrow vacates the premises (her body), Gideon finally emerges and gets a front-row seat to this shitshow where she literally comes out of a closet.

Oh, and Mercymorn who keeps regressing Harrow's age as we count down to the birth of a new character?

Besides, Ninth funeral custom is to put the body somewhere out of the way until the bones are ready to be washed and animated, and the Canaan House morgue is kept cold. People do rot in the Nine Houses, they just don't do it on page.

Or, on closer inspection, it could be down to the narration. Magnus is described as having "not improved" since Gideon saw him last, and it takes Palamedes some work to get a ring off his finger. Intriguing possibility: the bodies do rot, and Gideon was just too polite to mention that part.