If I had a nickel for every sci-fi/fantasy series I read that spends the entire first book building up romantic tension between two women before ending with one of them sacrificing herself to allow the other to obtain ultimate power and a high ranking position within the empire that rules their world, but in the sequel she can’t even use that power properly because she’s too busy processing her grief in increasingly self-destructive ways up to and including keeping her dead lover’s personality sealed away in a part of her brain that she doesn’t know how to access I’d have two nickels
There’s a brief scene in Harrow the Ninth where Harrowhark is warding her quarters with bits of her own organic material while “perched atop a ladder of skeletons” and I just couldn’t get this visual out of my cranium, I love these bonkers bone lesbians so frickin’ much
anyway, here is Harrow “funeral for a twig” Nonagesimus doing death cult magic on a tower of anatomically questionable skeletons inside a spaceship 4u
thank you Tamsyn Muir for this absolutely UNHINGED book series
Man, Palamedes suggesting that the Sixth call in an expert from the Ninth to help overhaul their skeletal servitors really hits hard on just how much the Ninth is diminished. Harrow was maintaining the Ninth’s infrastructure mostly on her own. How many Ninth experts are there left to call on? Twenty? Fifty? Twelve? One?
Omg don’t hide this in the tags!!
need the AU fic that’s just Harrow and Gideon showing up in increasingly improbable disguises for all these different “experts” Pal needs and Cam and Pal just keep their poker faces on so they think they’re fooling them
and the requests keep escalating because Pal wants to know how far Harrow will go for this and it just devolves into a weird game of necromancy chicken and Camilla and Gideon are just… in the room, communicating with their eyebrows. They’re friends at this point, probably, but they haven’t said a word to each other.
The one problem here is that Gideon would notbe able to maintain her poker face. She would not be doing eyebrow communication. She would be leaning on the hilt of her greatsword weepingwith laughter because this just gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes on. She’s pretty sure that sooner or later she and Harrow are going to be wearing false moustaches, and when that happens she will Legitimately Die.
you are completely correct, and I have no answer for that, but there will absolutely be fake moustaches. this AU was entirely conceived as a means to force them to wear fake moustaches. They will both have them. Gideon is dying inside. This moustache is fake, and it itches and tickles her nose, and Camilla is smirking at her because she knows, but Gideon can’t flip her off until she’s out of both their necromancers’ line of sight
i think the funniest option would be: everyone knows that gideon is faking every position, which also have increasingly ludicrous job titles ranging from “chief bone carrier” (lugging around bones for harrow) to “ninth house customer service rep” (listening to complaints about harrow). whenever someone asks her what she and harrow really do, gideon just says “we do bones, motherfucker”
this pattern continues and by the time gideon shows up to canaan house as the cavalier primary who could not be more obviously not the cav primary, everyone just goes “sure why the fuck not”
I also wanna put it out there that when Palamedes was trying to get an expert from the Ninth House to come in, he wasn’t even fourteen. Harrow would’ve been ten, maybe eleven. Her parents just died. They get a request, and can’t not show up, so now she has the option to either admit they only have a ten year old bone expert left or go with Ortus and Gideon, make Gideon carry her around on her shoulders the entire time while she wears a huge ass cloak that hides the fact that there’s another person underneath, and hope they pass as one whole adult.
No one buys it because Harrow is ten and even with the paint on just has an obvious child face, but people simply do not have the heart to tell this kid that her disguise is rather poor. The general assumption is that the Ninth House didn’t think helping the Sixth important enough to send an adult and this is some kind of joke, but then it turns out Harrow is actually really good at what she does and it gets more of a “kid really wanting to prove herself, maybe she begged or snuck onto the shuttle or something”-vibe. People speculate Ortus is the one who was supposed to help but is letting the kid do her thing.
They’re asked to stay for dinner, and Gideon keeps reaching for stuff on the table from underneath the cloak because it’s been a long day and she’s hungry, damn it. Harrow is dying inside. She wants to chide her but can’t say anything without drawing even more attention to the fact that there’s hands coming out of her cloak. Eventually Harrow begrudgingly passes Gideon all the food that has too much taste for her so she stops reaching on the table, but now it looks like she’s throwing food underneath the table, and also Gideon slurps when she’s drinking the sauce off her plate.
Not to make the obvious joke but
Of course she’s all these different experts and holds all these different roles
in many ways gideon is v much a standard gothic heroine but instead of putting this line of argument anywhere productive, i can’t get the thought of her stumbling across the dracula brides milf room and losing her mind and subsequently dying within the first thirty or so pages of bram stoker’s dracula out of my head. so now you all can have it also
have had it pointed out that harrow’s main role in the narrative would be to keep her from doing exactly this. refuted by the fact that harrowhark nonagesimus would die on page five from contact with paprika
everyone in my life has been viciously bullying me to read gideon the 9th and I had never heard of it until today when I realized that all of you have been blogging abt it for months but i confused the locked tomb with the concept of the empty tomb and ignored all the posts bc i sort of assumed yall were talking abt christ or something
okay this makes more sense than everyone deciding to find god at the same time i want my best friend harrow to win the space necromancer squid games
[ID: A digital drawing of Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus from The Locked Tomb series. They are younger than they are in the series, featured in their short story “The Mysterious Study of Dr. Sex.” They are examining a study and desk, cluttered with books and paper. They are both studying the two skeleton hands on the desk, Palamedes thoughtfully with his chin resting on his hand and Camilla looking more frustrated. The drawing is done mostly in warm tones. End ID]
[ID 1: A drawing of Gideon and Harrow from The Locked Tomb. They are in a dark high-walled hall of Canaan House. The columns are ringed with skeletons. Gideon purses her lips. She is wearing sunglasses. She carries an unconscious Harrow over her shoulder. End ID 1
ID 2: Coronabeth and Ianthe. Ianthe sits on a plush purple couch with a glass of wine in one hand and her legs crossed. Coronabeth lies on the ground, resting her head on Ianthe’s leg and draping an arm over it. She holds an empty wine glass. Naberius’s hand is limp on the floor, barely in frame. There is spilled wine on the white tiled floor. A wooden table holds fruits and a plate of fish. End ID 2
ID 3: Camilla and Palamedes in a library. Camilla stands next to a bookcase in the foreground. Her back is to the viewer, and she looks over her shoulder with a neutral expression. Palamedes stands on a black spiral staircase with one hand on the railing. His face is serious. End ID 3]
I died knowing you’d hate me for dying, but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me.
[ID: Four digital paintings with dramatic lighting, with text on an orange background overlaid. 1. Gideon viewed from behind, her two-hander gleaming as she has it propped on her shoulder. Text reads, “Always your sword, my umbral sovereign.” 2. Gideon and Harrow side by side, surrounded by partially raised skeletons, Gideon’s sword at the ready. Text reads, “In life…” 3. Harrow, one eye gold and one black, blood dripping from her nose, trying to hold the two-hander. Gideon stands behind her, one hand on the handle and one on the blade to help her hold it. Text reads, “in death…” 4. Harrow, both eyes gold behind her shades, grinning as she reaches over her shoulder to grab the bone-encrusted sword. Text reads, “in anything beyond life or death that they’d want to throw at thee and me.” /end ID]
i’ve never seen a piece of media that gets the ‘lesbian gaze’ quite like the locked tomb does like …. my god let’s look at a few of our main players shall we
gideon: butch, ripped as fuck, sword, dumb but also smart where it matters, is a bitch sometimes, is also the most genuine caring person you’ve ever seen, did i mention sword, hot
harrow: deathly pale wet rag at all times, really fucking good at what she does, severely lacking in emotional areas, bone clothes, goth clothes, emo face paint always, emotionally closed off but secretly desperate for affection, is a bitch, extremely unhinged, hot
cam: severely competent at everything she does, only braincell in the room, sword, loyal as fuck, please cam give me a chance, please, hot
ianthe: pathetic, sexy, evil, hot
it really just hits all the bases i’ll never get over it
I just want to add, as the 45 year old bisexual, that I would die for Harrow and Gideon but if I was picking for myself it’d be Abigail Pent.
Like, perfectly happy to make it a throuple with Magnus, but he’s not the draw here let’s be real.
“Under no circumstances will I ever desire your juice,” said her necromancer, mouth getting more desperate.
“It felt like nothing, at first. Besides Harrow touching her neck, which was a one-way trip to No Town.”
This being the same Gideon who previously bit Harrow’s fingers when Harrow tried to do the lesbian hand-chin-tilt-thing power move to do her face paint. Come on, Gideon, why do you want Harrow’s fingers in your mouth? Kinda gay of you there.
i’ve never seen a piece of media that gets the ‘lesbian gaze’ quite like the locked tomb does like …. my god let’s look at a few of our main players shall we
gideon: butch, ripped as fuck, sword, dumb but also smart where it matters, is a bitch sometimes, is also the most genuine caring person you’ve ever seen, did i mention sword, hot
harrow: deathly pale wet rag at all times, really fucking good at what she does, severely lacking in emotional areas, bone clothes, goth clothes, emo face paint always, emotionally closed off but secretly desperate for affection, is a bitch, extremely unhinged, hot
cam: severely competent at everything she does, only braincell in the room, sword, loyal as fuck, please cam give me a chance, please, hot
ianthe: pathetic, sexy, evil, hot
it really just hits all the bases i’ll never get over it
i really love how tamsyn muir portrays gideon’s reaction to seeing other people grieve. her visceral discomfort at the sight of other people grieving is really. like. like she has this deep, terrible anguish that’s layered all over with discomfort and derision and absolute resignation. i want to eat it.
