Both ladies were the daughters of the 5th Earl Cadogan, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1895 to 1902…. The sisters dressed for the Ball most impractically as two of the personifications of vengeance, known to the Romans as “the Furies.”Taking their costume components from Dante’s Inferno, they commissioned the costumer, Mrs Mason of New Burlington Street, to create “classical draperies” with hanging sleeves of crimson gauze shot with gold. For Dante’s “waists cinctured with green hydras”, they wore girdles of jewelled serpents with emerald and ruby eyes. Where the Inferno states “For hair they had horned snakes and poison adders”, they wore jewelled serpent head-dresses. or as The Queen stated: “they were wreathed around the head with reptiles”. [x]
There’s been a lot of wild theories about Alecto the Ninth (the book and the character) being thrown around, and I’d like to throw my own theory hat into the ring.
At the end of HtN, Mercymorn vaporizes John. And yet he comes back, completely unscathed, after about a minute. He tells Augustine that he can’t be killed, at all, period. John is actually immortal.
Obviously this can’t be true, simply for plot reasons: if John can never die, then there’s not much point to the third book. In order to have a remotely interesting plot, your main villain must be defeatable.
We know that Alecto is John’s weakness, somehow. Otherwise he wouldn’t have entombed her on the Ninth. But why is he so afraid of her? Is it because he pissed her off so bad that he’s afraid of her revenge? Or is it because Alecto is his weakness?
I propose that John can only die if Alecto dies. His life is tied to hers. (And yes, Alecto is often described as dead, but she also wakes up, so she’s either not really dead or not that dead.)
There’s a common fairytale trope that the villain has hidden his heart in a secret location (sometimes an object inside of an object inside of an object etc.) and is therefore ‘immortal’ unless his hidden heart is destroyed. It shows up in the Russian fairytale Koschei the Deathless. The horcruxes in Harry Potter are a version of this trope as well. And Muir likes fairytales. She’s already written her own Sleeping Beauty spin-off with Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower.
Is Alecto John’s heart? When John says that he cannot die, is that because he assumes that Alecto will always be safe and entombed in the Ninth? John’s perception of Alecto’s security is his blindspot; despite Harrow presenting excellent evidence that she broke into the Tomb, John refuses to believe her on principal.
If Alecto’s death equals John’s death… That could be a very interesting pickle for our heroes to solve.
[ID: The first three images are icons with characters from “Hades” on a faded asexual aromantic flag. The characters are: Megaera, Tisiphone, and Alecto.
The last image is a banner that reads “do not interact if you’re a: aphobe/biphobe/enbyphobe terf/truscum/transmed/etc.” on top of a faded asexual aromantic flag]
[ID: The first three images are icons with characters from “Hades” on a faded agender flag. The characters are: Megaera, Tisiphone, and Alecto.
The last image is a banner that reads “do not interact if you’re a: aphobe/biphobe/enbyphobe terf/truscum/transmed/etc.” on top of a faded agender flag]
[ID: The first five images are icons with characters from “Hades” on a faded lesbian flag. The characters are: Alecto, Eurydice, and Tisiphone.
The last image is a banner that reads “do not interact if you’re a: aphobe/biphobe/enbyphobe terf/truscum/transmed/etc.” on top of a faded lesbian flag]
[ID: The first three images are icons with characters from “Hades” on a faded asexual flag. The characters are: Megaera, Tisiphone, and Alecto.
The last image is a banner that reads “do not interact if you’re a: aphobe/biphobe/enbyphobe terf/truscum/transmed/etc.” on top of a faded asexual flag]
![Victorian Fancy Dress: Lady Lurgan, née Emily Julia Cadogan [left] and Lady Sophie Scott, née Cadoga](https://64.media.tumblr.com/0f2402d0bd62d41c3467002215aeca5d/tumblr_oynwoyDQfA1sjg84qo1_1280.jpg "Victorian Fancy Dress: Lady Lurgan, née Emily Julia Cadogan [left] and Lady Sophie Scott, née Cadoga")
