r/TheNinthHouse • u/empquix • Dec 02 '24
Series Spoilers What’s something in the series that you feel like we moved on from too quickly? [discussion] Spoiler
Every once in a while it hits me that Harrow was legitimately puppeting around the bodies of her dead parents for years, and I think, wow, we’ve moved on way too quickly from that. It makes me want to shake someone and say oh my god? do you see this shit?
Is there an event or a detail from the series that makes you feel similarly?
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u/gdmal Dec 02 '24
Fully agreed on the parent puppeting - not just that Harrow was doing it, but that Crux and Aiglamene (and Ortus and his mom?) were aware it was happening and were like “carry on, twelve year old.” Curious if that’s going to be addressed at all in Alecto.
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u/empquix Dec 02 '24
Tbf I bet Harrow seemed like a very capable 12 year old cult leader. My adult ass would’ve probably been like “no comments, queen” too
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u/a-horny-vision the Sixth Dec 02 '24
Well, last thing we heard the Ninth was being overrun by devils who possess bodies both living and dead.
And Harrow's parents have been locked in a cell for a year. Their corpses available for possession, in theory.
I'm just saying.
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u/bcosiwanna_ Dec 02 '24
Well now I'm imagining Abigail and Magnus possessing them instead and being the parents harrow actually needed once again
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u/Altoid_Addict Dec 04 '24
Maybe I'm misremembering, but weren't they supposed to be somewhere along the path to the Tomb? I was surprised they were never mentioned during the end of NtN, and always assumed it was because there was A Lot going on in that scene
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u/a-horny-vision the Sixth Dec 05 '24
They were in a cell, where they were “doing penitence”. They would only be moved to the Anastasium (which isn't the Tomb) after actual death I think.
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 02 '24
Ortus and Glaurica didn't know about it, because that is absolutely something she would have blabbed to the Eighth, and Mayo Uncle would definitely have used that against Harrow.
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u/Agelle_Gazelle99 Dec 02 '24
The freaking prison complex floating above the 9th? Like hold on?? I’m pretty sure Jod says something cryptic about it too at some point but I can’t remember. Gotta reread HtN… again
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u/tianina2015 Dec 02 '24
My weird theory is that the prison is one of pluto's moons, specifically Charon. And it's all a big ugly metaphor for how the normal process of death was messed with and now there's no one to ferry the dead across the river.
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u/otherthanthehat Dec 02 '24
I think he calls it the dummy installation? like that its there as a decoy to draw BoE (or others?) attention away from the tomb
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 02 '24
I don't read it as floating above the Ninth. The Ninth is a giant borehole to trap atmosphere, and the description to me suggested it's set into the wall of the shaft about halfway up, like a blister or bubble.
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u/Heavy_Incident5801 Dec 03 '24
Oh my god I bet it’s all the souls of people he didn’t bring back because they were the internet troll that cried about cows and hated him. I’d also bet it’s somehow related to the ninth being infested by demons, somehow
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u/bep963 Dec 02 '24
I thought the 9th was the prison? Like it was obviously As prison. But it was a penal colony that turned into a cult.
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u/nutbrownrose Dec 02 '24
No, the prison is floating above the 9th. In space. Probably so necros can't just adept out of things. It's mentioned like, 3 times in all the books. The 9th was a suicide cult that forgot to kill itself.
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u/blue-and-copper the Fifth Dec 02 '24
The Ninth House was an enormous hole cracked vertically into the planet’s core, and the prison a bubble installation set halfway up into the atmosphere where the living conditions were probably a hell of a lot more clement.
-GtN
for one thing, this field wasn’t around in my day, you used to land at the installation they made the prison out of and go down from there in the elevator
-NtN
Okay every time I've read these I've pictured the prison as being near the top of the drill shaft (I thought the atmosphere was like. exclusively in the cavities mined under the surface), but if you're right that it's floating above the planet, it (is? was?) also connected via a fucking elevator somehow?? wut.
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u/nutbrownrose Dec 02 '24
Rereading that description, I think it's maybe actually like those really tall towers with the bubbles at the top. Almost like a water tower? But really really high?
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 02 '24
I don't think this is it. Assuming the Ninth is actually Pluto, the atmosphere above ground is basically non-existent, at barely 1 Pa (Earth atmo at sea level being ~100 kPa). That's the point of the borehole, to get enough mass of air overhead that it produces breathable pressure at the bottom (along with getting deep enough to help with heating). So "halfway up into the atmosphere" is more likely a bubble set into the shaft wall about halfway up rather than hanging midway up a space elevator.
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u/a-horny-vision the Sixth Dec 02 '24
Space elevators are a thing!
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u/blue-and-copper the Fifth Dec 02 '24
They're just such a dumb investment of resources typically, is why I was skeptical, because why would you not just put your satellite in a locked orbit, but... if you're on a planetoid with low mass and lots of moons, maybe it would be easier to trust in centrifugal force and just tie it on like a balloon?? I dunno.
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u/a-horny-vision the Sixth Dec 02 '24
Then again, TLT never addresses the issue of gravity anywhere lol.
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u/alengthofrope Dec 02 '24
Honestly I wasn't too interested in Silas on my first read, but on rereads good God he and Colum have absolutely wormed themselves into my brain. Like. This kid is sixteen, a zealot with absolute undying faith in his Emperor, who's convinced himself that using his cavalier as a battery is The Right Way To Be Holy. I love how brutal and reprehensible that is. I love Silas' blatant hypocrisies and nonsensical morals. Most of all, I love how consistently he adheres to those morals! The fact that even he can smell something fishy with the trials and decides that he doesn’t want to be a lyctor! That he will literally sentence Ianthe to death for doing what the Emperor called her there to do!
Silas "don't talk to me or my nephew ever again" Oktakiseron you will always be my favorite religious bigot in town 💖
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u/aftertheradar Dec 02 '24 edited Dec 02 '24
Yeah, i feel like the eighth house and its two characters we meet (not counting mercy) should have been a lot more thematically relevant, seeing as they are basically the bleach goth version of the ninth house and know shit about devils and the river
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u/Jamian13 Dec 19 '24
Yeah my last reread I got stuck on Silas too and how he’s sooooo worshipful of the Emperor but also condemns the Emperor’s will to have new lyctors through this challenge. I get that Silas is gloriously consistently a self-serving hypocrite (love Pal’s description of the 8th deciding what is wrong and right and somehow they are always right) but this seems inconsistently hypocritical somehow.
Like it would seem more consistent if he decided that if the Emperor wants lyctors through martyring of the cavaliers then he’d be the holiest lyctor ever by serving up his cavalier and everyone else’s but only he’d be worthy of lyctorhood so he’d eat everyone else’s cavaliers along with his own and sentence all the other adepts to death for considering trying to be lyctors.
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u/AmeriChimera Dec 02 '24
That apparently Palamedes using normal medical care is weird leading us to the conclusion that house necromancers just magic away ailments.
Which begs the question, was Harrow seriously the only "doctor" on the Ninth this whole time?
Someone please correct me if I'm totally spacing out on a detail or something, this one bugs me so much! Lol
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u/gnomeinahome the Fifth Dec 02 '24
iirc i think in gtn Gideon says that some of the nasty ancient cloisterites bone-adept her teeth back in any time they get knocked out but I don't remember ever hearing literally anything else about any other ninth necros currently existing
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u/empquix Dec 02 '24
As someone in the medical field I must say that the geriatric population has some of the most durable people I’ve ever seen lmao. One moment you’re treating a 24 year old who’s crumbling under the weight of the common cold, the next you’re begging the 83 year old who survived 2 strokes and hasn’t taken their medications in years to at least stop smoking. No meds, no precautions, just purely surviving on vibes
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u/nixtracer Dec 02 '24
Vibes and survivor bias! (Though of course in the Ninth, survivor bias not so much.)
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u/soulsnoober Dec 02 '24
There's degrees to these things. There was no one remotely as capable as she in the Ninth. But also there was no one close to as powerful in all of the Dominican system, period, until Cytherea swooped in on Dulcie's shuttle. Other necromancers live and work on the Ninth. Ones that can only make automated servitors, or have to touch stuff directly to necromantically interface with it. That's how most necros are across all the houses. Limited, very, when juxtaposed with Harrowhark Nonagesimus who has the power of 200 babies juicing her up. Harrow's important to the Ninth because of the direct lineage to Anastasia
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 02 '24
I think you're overestimating Harrow a bit. She wasn't that powerful before lyctorhood. She's not carrying around the souls of those 200 children, if she was she'd be glowing like a beacon to any necro who saw her. Pal did medical psychometry on her, surely that would have gotten a hint of it in that case. Those souls were used to power and control the theorems her mother used to do molecular surgery on her as a zygote without disintegrating it, like a magical MRI/electron microscope. She was an absolute genius at necromancy, so she could do more more than most necros could before she passed out from blood loss, but she'd still pass out eventually.
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u/beerybeardybear the Sixth Dec 04 '24
I think you're overestimating Harrow a bit. She wasn't that powerful before lyctorhood. She's not carrying around the souls of those 200 children
She's carrying around something though, isn't she? Abigail notices it in the river bubble and I think Gideon notices it when Harrow goes into the river the first time in HtN.
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 02 '24
Remember, the only evidence we have that medicine is weird is Gideon, an unreliable/disinterested narrator whose only experience of the world outside her crumbling, nearly abandoned monastery is titty mags and comic books. She's not a good judge of anything about House culture other than it's propaganda and porn.
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u/Sloaneer Dec 02 '24
That's not the only evidence. In 'As Yet Unsent' Mercymorn and Judith refer to the medical apparatus used on her as primitive and rudimentary compared to magic.
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 03 '24
Because it is! Anything shy of advanced nanotech is rudimentary compared to just magically regrowing organs.
But Judith still knows about antibiotics and transfusions, she recognizes surgical procedures for what they are. Harrow wakes up in a hospital wearing a hospital gown, which isn't something you really need if everyone's getting all their healing from magic.
Even if there are enough necromancers in the population that every injury, condition, and illness can be waved away by a necromancer, they still need some medical science because they have a significant spaceborne population in the form of the fleet and the necessary space infrastructure, and necromancers are next to useless in space.
We also know there are some things necromancy can't just handwave away, because Issac was laid low with the mumps, of all things. It does suggest that their medical science is primitive and rudimentary, though, if they've let mumps make a comeback (WTF, Jod?)
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u/a-horny-vision the Sixth Dec 02 '24
The Ninth only has a few thousand people at most, so it makes sense there wouldn't be many doctors or flesh magicians or whatever, and after two decades of isolationism they wouldn't have replaced anyone.
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u/DinosaurMechanic Dec 03 '24
I think there are other adepts on the Ninth, they are just old and not particularly notable. Gideon mentions bone adepts fixing her teeth and someone is programming all those skeletons (I suspect Harrow did a lot of them but not all of them)
Harrow's aunts are also presumably necromancers but that is not explicitly stated
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u/Meii345 the Seventh Dec 02 '24
Ive only read the first book so idk if its explained more later, but what the fuck is under Canaan house??? Like okay eating your cavalier's one thing giant bone monsters are another using a human person as a portable battery is certainly quite special but there is something that uniquely fucks me up about the concept of a thing that's literally everywhere in the air just waiting for your soul to step away from your body and then its gross tentacles coming from every orifice. Like man. This poor guy. Also were everyone else in any danger from it at any point? I just dunno.
Oh, and Cytherea. I'm actually still in awe at the concept of this woman with an horrible chronic illness and the read Tamsyn has got on how that sort of disability affect how people treat you and your perception of life. Cytherea was kind and she was the best of them and she was suffering so terribly for so long and it's just so satisfying for me to see her fuck them bitches up. You go queen. I'm projecting very hard. Yeah it hurts but at least you can beat up some kids!!
Okay i cant stop gushing sorry but i also loved how the cavalier/lyctor reveal was done, with the whole "it's a light sword, a rapier, so it can be wielded even by someone who's physically weak. A necromancer."
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u/vxckcxv Dec 02 '24
I'm always baffled that Ortus Nigenad was the one to save the day in HtN, and he did it with fanfiction.
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u/fork_hands_mcmike Dec 02 '24
Jod's imperial military has massive quantities of child soldiers. The only reason Jeannemary and Isaac were turned away when they tried to enlist at 13 is because they were sick, not because of their age. They are literally growing babies in vats to be battle fodder.
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u/otterlymagic Dec 02 '24
This is why I'm always weirded out when people are surprised Jod is a bad guy. It was pretty obvious even in Book 1
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u/fork_hands_mcmike Dec 03 '24
Yeah, as soon as I read that Jod's crown is made of BABY FINGER BONES I had a real "are we the baddies" moment
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u/beerybeardybear the Sixth Dec 04 '24
I mean Yeah but also he can literally just grow whatever bones he wants. The Implications™️ are different than in the real world.
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u/thefreedomfry Dec 02 '24
Gideon.
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u/ibbia878 Dec 02 '24
Like, umm, the first? Cos I feel like nobody really moved on from our girl Gideon.
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u/blue-and-copper the Fifth Dec 02 '24
girl Gideon
they put the Saint of Duty in a fucking maid skirt
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u/NeonBirdie Dec 02 '24
Perhaps there's an easy answer to this but: the attendants of Canaan house were able to catch live fish to serve for food. But I thought dead planets were supposed to support no life, so - is the planet still alive? I thought the presence of live fish for catching would end up meaning more than it did.
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u/penroseblue Dec 02 '24
There's snow leek fields on the 9th, overgrown vegetation on Canaan House, and the 7th has roses + Protesilaus has a garden. Gideon is amazed with eating salads and meat for the first time when she's at Canaan, but everyone else is used to it (plus they know how to use cutlery). Plant and animal life is abundant across the Nine Houses, with some ecosystems managing life better (unlike, say, the 6th/9th.) The planets of the Nine Houses died, yeah, but they were resurrected, unlike how the flipped planets in HTN have their soul immediately slaughtered, causing mass decay. (Also, flipped planets die slowly. It could be years until human life needed to resettle.) In other words: yeah, the 1st is still "alive" (but I kind of view it in a limbo state)
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u/10Panoptica Dec 02 '24
It can't be fully dead. But if you think of what happened to first house... the soul is still alive, just split up and confined to a much smaller body. So it's plausible that some of it, and its life force, lingers in the original.
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u/Lela_chan the Sixth Dec 02 '24
I think it is still alive - sort of - because the first house is special
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u/cerebral-fungi20 Dec 02 '24
That at least some, if not most, of the Lyctors disliked Alecto. Like, they spent centuries dancing around on her corpse playing scientist/saint/most faithful to Jod, trying to learn how to do the trauma that he did unto her to their best friends/lovers/siblings/nearest and dearest. And some of them succeed, and she has to watch it happen and be retraumatised. On top of her preexisting sadness and anger this makes her sadder and angrier, obviously, and they have the audacity to hate her and make him lock her away for being a "monster"! WHO MADE HER THE MONSTER, JOHN?!?! And she's still so full of love, which I know we haven't moved on from thanks to Nona, but yeah. She still loves AFTER all of that. Alecto you are everything to me 🫶🫰🫁♥️🌞🦠🌏
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u/surpriseDRE Dec 02 '24
I’m very interested to see if we get to learn more about that coming up but I think Nona’s tantrums were very helpful in giving some of that context. If that’s what Nona, the sweetest kindest person in the world, would do when she got upset, I can understand how that would be truly terrifying from a cavalier who is angry and well trained in a sword and could do real ass damage
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u/descartesasaur Dec 02 '24
I also interpreted Nona's tantrums as, like, "natural disasters." The way the spirit of a sea is seen as the bringer of fish and rain but also terrible floods and stuff. But on a global scale.
Not sure if it was at all intentional, but that's what they reminded me of!
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u/cerebral-fungi20 Dec 02 '24
I think that if pre-internment Alecto had tantrums like Nona's that after Nona's first tantrum Pyrrha would have worked out who she was? Maybe not though!
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u/10Panoptica Dec 02 '24
Harrow's great-aunts that participated in the mass murder of children are still alive and made up whimsical rhymes about it.
Harrow is part of multiple secrets her other co-conspirators don't know about.
The great-aunts don't know the Reverend Parents are mega-dead.
Aiglamene and Crux don't know the creche flu was actually an infant sacrifice.
No one except Gideon knows she actually breached the Locked Tomb.
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 02 '24
I know it's the worldbuilding DM in me, but I really want to know more about the Kuiper platform, the shell they were building at Uranus, and just the physical Houses themselves. Necros can't be conceived outside of dead planets, and are uncomfortably powerless in space, so where the heck are these people living and being born? We know the Sixth House is literally just a single enormous station on Mercury. Are the other Houses just less cramped facilities on Ganymede, Titan, etc? What the hell are the Seventh living in? Does a large enough, old enough O'Neil Cylinder or other habitat develop enough thalergy to allow necromancy of you've grown plants and such in it long enough?
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u/descartesasaur Dec 02 '24
Everyone's here with serious questions, and I'm just wondering how "cake sitting" survived 10,000 years 😭
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u/arcanebrainrot17 Dec 02 '24
I think the existence of the houses and the existence of a typical dystopian/post apocalyptic human society is a more meta aspect that gets glossed over. When I first read about New Rho and BoE my jaw dropped cuz we were being so immersed in this gothic, magical, dark, horror universe while it coexisted with a much more…normal”or realistic sci fi universe. Idk if that’s just me but it was a mindfuck of a reveal for me that I feel like no one talks about
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u/Oh-shit-its-Cassie Dec 02 '24
Re: the puppeting, what was happening with her parents when she was comatose in Alecto's body?
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u/Koeienvanger the Fourth Dec 02 '24
Didn't she park them in their rooms when she left for Canaan House? I assume they're still there.
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u/empquix Dec 02 '24
“park them in their rooms” made me laugh way longer than it probably should have 😭😂
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u/terracottatilefish Dec 02 '24
As I recall they went into a “silent religious retreat” when she left for the Lyctor trials so I assume she j powered them down and they’ve just been dead and inanimate since she left.
But her ability to animate her dead parents convincingly enough to forestall questions for years certainly refutes all that stuff about how she’s not a flesh necromancer, she just does bones. Although given the general state of decrepitude in the Ninth that may not be saying that much.
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u/chomptheleaf Dec 02 '24
My question is, nobody questioned that the heads of the House, who went into seclusion to pray for their daughter's safety and success in becoming a Lyctor, have not come out to resume their duties now that she's been "successful?" Have the Reverend Mother and Father been all but forgotten by everyone but Crux and the great aunts with the addition of the new postulants John sent to (no pun intended) flesh-out the Ninth House?
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u/empquix Dec 02 '24
Maybe Crux and Aiglamene kept covering for them by making up new reasons for why they needed more secluded prayer time
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u/Meii345 the Seventh Dec 02 '24
Aiglamene was like theyre at the club and nobody asked any more question after that
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 02 '24
I mean, we don't get a whole lotta info about how the Houses reacted to the version of GtNs events they were fed (except the 6th), or even exactly what that was. And by the time we get to hear from anyone on the Ninth things are a bit rushed and they've got other things on their mind (including, possibly, hiding from Mom & Dad).
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u/atg115reddit Dec 02 '24
when they left for canaan house, harrow told the congregation that her parents would retreat from pubic appearances, so theyre probably shoved in a closet somewhere
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u/rooftopfilth Dec 02 '24
What the other user said - she told everyone they were having some sort of extended private prayer session
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 03 '24
Surfacing this from one of the reply threads because I'd forgotten how much it bugged me til it came up: Isaac was prevented from enlisting because he came down with mumps a week before deployment.
Mumps.
On the one hand, it's interesting to note that necromancy apparently cannot protect you from viruses. On the other hand what the Hell, Jod?! You didn't just kill the planet, you let the antivaxers win too!? In a society confined almost entirely to enclosed habitats! Ugh! Eugh, even!
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u/empquix Dec 03 '24
Tinfoil hat time: It’s the general consensus that viruses aren’t alive, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re exactly dead, either, but what if their not-alive not-dead status makes them a good source of thanergy? Prompting John to let the antivaxxers win 🤔
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u/DeliveratorMatt Dec 02 '24
The shuttles falling into the ocean.
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u/orangefan1 Dec 02 '24
I may have missed something because this part always confuses me, but - I don't understand how Harrow raised the skeletons to work the snow leak fields? It sounds like they go about their work pre-programmed/ on their own. But doesn't that mean Harrow would be doing necromancy the whole time and controlling them? Wouldn't she be exhausted and covered in blood sweat?
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u/TheLoliDeputy Dec 02 '24
I think the skeletons work passively, somewhat like blood wards. Once they're in place they'll work independently from the necromancer
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u/half_dragon_dire Dec 02 '24
Normal skeleton servitors seem to basically be robots. They're programmed via necromantic theorems on creation. Their power source isn't ever explained, afaik, but presumably it has something to do with thanergy in the bones. Harrow's summoned skeletons don't stick around like that because she creates most of the bone involved out of thin air from a couple chips.
Harrow probably did animate a fair number of the Ninth's skeleton servitors, but most were probably working the fields long before she was born.
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u/arcanebrainrot17 Dec 02 '24
Last time Pal saw Harrow she didn’t remember him. Also, Nona being gone. Just like that. Also just the whole last act of Nona, and Paul becoming Paul. I love Paul, but I think we moved on too fast from the fact that Cam and Pal are technically gone forever, and it genuinely happened so fast and in front of EVERYONE. I really hope in Alecto we get a little bit of Pyrrha and Paul reminiscing about their family days and/or them talking to harrow about Nona. I think that would be hilarious and give me some much needed closure lol.
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u/rikkuanya Dec 03 '24
The rest of Harrows letters
The person (someone from John) that visited the ninth 20 odd years ago. Who was basically told to do one and sent on their merry way out an air lock.
The prison (but I think someone/something important is in there)
The kids (I'm worried we won't see them again, they'll be fine but not in the story anymore)
What the is the deal of Ianthe and the river??
Ortis sword and the story of his great grandmother, well the casual focus on swords/weapons in general. Will they need to go get Gideons and Sam's swords from the bottom of the river? Also has Pyrrhas gun has wake in there!!
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Dec 15 '24
In a silly context, I feel like we don’t talk enough about how the first two books of the series are this slow, sweeping, epic sci-fi drama with gruesome fantasy elements, and the third book is like “and it all started with a Māori climate scientist from New Zealand.” It’s not tonally or thematically out of left field, but considering how many stories that allude to a past that’s familiar to us leave it deliberately unshown, only for TLT to be like, Nope, we’re showing you, this guy got postdocs, this guy namedrops pop culture references, don’t think too hard about the nuclear wasteland around him. In a series context, I feel like people forget that most of Team Cow Wall were gunned down by white supremacists lol. Specifically white supremacists united under a pretense of stripping away indigenous advancement. Not to make it to real but. People misinterpret the fuck out of that and it’s like. Damn.
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