TRANSCRIPT — 21. We Do Bones, Motherfucker

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00:00:10 BAILY: Hello, fellow boneheads! Welcome to One Flesh, One End, a Locked Tomb re-read podcast. We’ll be combing through the series by Tamsyn Muir for all the context and clues we missed on our first read. I’m Baily,

00:00:24 KABRIYA: And I’m Kabriya, and we’re so excited to take a look through all the theories we can’t stop obsessing over.

00:00:29 B: Thanks for joining us on this journey through ten thousand years of history! We can't wait to spend more time with the characters putting the romance in necromancy.

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00:00:38 B: In this episode, we will be recapping the first half of Gideon the Ninth Chapter Thirty-Six, which is the big fight with Cytherea, the final boss.

00:00:50 K: Then, for our fun game, we are going to be looking at what we have randomly decided to call the Eastern Conference of the first round of our bracket of most iconic lines from Gideon the Ninth, which we recently enlisted your help voting on online. We’re gonna be going through a newly-seeded bracket based on your results, and giving our thoughts and opinions and feelings on the most iconic lines of the book. And then, in our discussion after that, we are gonna be chatting about the apocalypse and resurrection. This was a requested topic that we’re really happy to dig into. We are going to be talking about it for a while, and in this episode, we are gonna be talking specifically about the timeline and sequence of events, and what, actually, we can parse happened based on various characters’ telling of events in the books.

00:01:37 B: Oh, my god. [laughs] Not quite done with book one.

00:01:41 K: We’re finally here! It’s been two and a half years of our lives. [both laugh] And we’re almost there.

00:01:49 B: To be fair, we did some eps on Nona, too. But yeah, it’s kind of funny.

Chapter Thirty-Six begins with a jump cut, right from Cytherea advancing on Gideon – you know, how the last chapter ended on quite the cliffhanger – to Camilla. It goes: “Camilla hit the advancing Lyctor like the wrath of the Emperor. … Camilla Hect off the leash was like light moving across water. She punched her knives into the Lyctor’s guard over and over and over. Cytherea met them ably, but such was Camilla’s speed and perfect hate that she could only hope to block the thunderstorm of blows; she could not even begin to push back against them. … It was a relief to know she would never have to tell Camilla that her necromancer had died. She was already fighting as though her heart had exploded.” Uh! Uhhh! It’s bad! Oh, it’s so bad!

00:02:39 K: Ugh! I just– It’s bad. It’s bad. I just wrote, “Cool, kill me,” in the notes here. But I love all of that description of Cam’s fighting style. I think it’s something that we talked about recently when we were discussing the Sixth House, and how Gideon sees and marvels at her fighting ability. I think this is such a great chunk of text of Gideon’s POV of her fight. And then to just get that little stab in the heart at the end. Ohhh Cam, out of nowhere, avenging, furious. It’s very sad. We love her, and it’s great, and she’s ferocious, and amazing for Gideon to watch.

And watch, she does. She is trying to figure out the best angle to join in and help Cam fight against Cytherea, when a skeletal hand emerges from behind Cytherea, and grabs her face and her wrist. [Baily laughs] So I guess that’s a pair of skeletal hands. And we see that Harrow has also now arrived to join in the fray. Gideon sees her standing at the top of the stairs with her hands full of bone fragments, throwing them out before her, and from each one, a perfect skeleton rises, and they all rush at Cytherea, who just goes down in a sea of them.

00:03:48 B: Oh, my god.

00:03:49 K: So, a lot of good entrances in this chapter, kind of over and over again.

00:03:51 B: Yeah!

00:03:52 K: But this really– we’ve already got Camilla, I don’t know where, fighting; we’ve got Harrow making a big statement. This chapter is really just full of characters making iconic entrances, and I think it should be remembered for that, as well as all the really sad stuff that happens. [laughs]

00:04:05 B: Well, it’s also such a great parallel to Harrow’s introduction at the beginning of the book, right? Where she takes down Gideon in a sea of skeletons. [laughs] It’s so good.

00:04:16 K: Yeah, there’s really a lot of good parallels here to how they’ve fought against each other in the past, and a lot of the trials and tribulations they’ve been through in Canaan House, and how that really culminates here. I think it’s a chapter and a final boss fight situation that pulls everything together so, so well.

00:04:35 B: Well, very much like a video game boss fight, in a way, where, typically, you will bring together all the things and puzzle mechanics that you’ve learned along the way, and here it’s like, “Okay, we’re putting all the pieces together.”

00:04:48 K: Yeah, yeah. Like, that cool move that you had to learn how to do to fight the smaller guy in level seven, or whatever. Actually, now, it’s that same mechanism, but on a much larger scale, or something. It does very much feel like that.

00:04:58 B: Oh, you’ve seen the huge bone construct before! Here it is again, but bigger! [laughs]

00:05:04 K: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah. Gideon watches this happen, and sees Cytherea go down on all these bones, and she kind of goes forward, moving in to take Camilla’s place, but Harrow yells at her. It says, “‘Leave it!’ barked her necromancer. ‘Nav! Here!’ Six more skeletons sprang to her call. They were unstrapping something from Harrow’s back—it was Gideon’s longsword, shining and heavy and sharp.” And I just–

00:05:25 B: Ahhh! What an entrance! [laughs]

00:05:27 K: Oh, it’s such a good moment! Like, entrance moments for the longsword, too!

00:05:31 B: Yeah!

00:05:32 K: It’s great, and I just think Harrow bringing Gideon her longsword is something that can be so personal to all of us, and especially to Gideon Nav.

00:05:39 B: It’s so good. It’s such a good moment.

00:05:43 K: Mhm. And also, just, talk about things from earlier in the book reappearing in this bigger way, you get the growth that we’ve got here, where Harrow is offering the longsword to Gideon, wants her to use it, sort of thing, has brought it for this big, important fight at the end. Everything is coming around, and it’s so good.

00:06:01 B: Well, and also, you know, the last we heard from Harrow about the longsword was her being like, “What?!”, when Gideon told her where to get it, kind of shocked and confused, but she did go and get it, and she came right back. [laughs]

00:06:12 K: Yeah, yeah. It’s so good.

00:06:15 B: But before Gideon can jump in to fight Cytherea, the floor explodes, and the giant bone construct crawls out. It goes: “A fretwork of bones, a net, a lace of them—long stingers of teeth, a nesting body, a construct so big that it turned one’s bowels into an icebox. The hulking construct that had killed Isaac Tettares filled the room behind its mistress, stretching itself out and expanding, pulverising a wall and a staircase as it emerged. Its great bone head lolled and loomed above them, masklike, with its hideous moulded lips and squinted-shut eyes. … Gideon got up, dusted herself off, and found Harrow standing in a pool of osseous dust and facing the construct with a hot-eyed, half-delighted anticipation. Without even thinking about it, her body moved to take her rightful place: in front of her necromancer, sword held ready.” Uh! [laughs] I love that this is Harrow’s first time seeing the construct, and she’s like, “Oh, fuck yeah!” [both laugh] Oh, so good.

00:07:20 K: Yeah.

00:07:21 B: Another callback, too, to their first trial together, right? The Winnowing Trial. Yeah. It’s great.

00:07:26 K: Mhm. Absolutely. And so then, Gideon says urgently, “‘This is the thing that killed Isaac.’” And this really struck me, because even just when the construct is introduced in the first sentence in the text, it’s described as “the hulking construct that had killed Isaac Tettares,” and that kind of jumped out at me, then, that that was the reminder and the recognition that we were getting, that that was the most significant thing about this creation, was what it had done to Isaac. And I think the fact that both, we see it that way in text through Gideon’s eyes, and then she also feels the need to say that to Harrow, it really brings to the forefront how much this is obviously still weighing on her, and it brings those deaths, which are several chapters ago now, lots of shit has gone down since, but it’s still very present and very recent for Gideon, that those Fourth House deaths are still really with her, and she watched that happen, and of course that is what she’s going to be associating with this monster.

Then Harrow asks after Pal, and Gideon has to tell her that he’s dead. It says, “Harrow’s mouth briefly ruckled,” which is just so sad for me to picture. And just the little, quiet bits of their friendship and relationship, and how Harrow is obviously saddened by that devastating news from Gideon. But, you know, they have this terrifying bone construct to deal with in front of them–

00:08:35 B: [laughs] More immediate concern.

00:08:36 K: –that kind of has to be dealt with very presently. So Harrow then just says, “‘A necromancer alone can’t bring that down, Griddle. That’s regenerating bone.’ ‘I’m not running, Harrow!’”, Gideon insists. “‘Of course we’re not running,’ said Harrowhark disdainfully. ‘I said a necromancer alone. I have you. We bring hell.’”

00:08:53 B: Ahhhhhh!!!

00:08:55 K: Which is so good. Such a good line. And also, Harrow correcting Gideon immediately, like, “I never said anything about running. I said that we’re gonna need to work together. You know? What has this all been for?”

00:09:04 B: Gideon says, “‘Harrow—Harrow, Dulcinea’s a Lyctor, a real one—’ ‘Then we’re all dead, Nav, but let’s bring hell first,’ said Harrow. Gideon looked over her shoulder at her, and caught the Reverend Daughter’s smile. There was blood sweat coming out of her left ear, but her smile was long and sweet and beautiful. Gideon found herself smiling back so hard her mouth hurt.” Oh, my god. “Her adept said”–

00:09:28 K: Ughhh! Both of them smiling like fools when there’s a horrible monster. [Baily laughs] Oh, my god, calm down.

00:09:36 B: “Her adept said: ‘I’ll keep it off you. Nav, show them what the Ninth House does.’ Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotten wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly. ‘We do bones, motherfucker,’ she said.” [both laugh]

00:09:57 K: Yes!!!

00:09:59 B: Oh my god.

00:10:00 K: So many– great chapter to be talking about our iconic lines bracket, truly, because, I mean, there’s a reason. There’s just so much in this one chapter that is instantaneously iconic.

00:10:11 B: Iconic.

00:10:13 K: Wow, I love that we both said “iconic” at the same time while talking about how in sync Harrow and Gideon are. [Baily laughs] That was really so them of us.

00:10:20 B: So cute. I wanted to quote these two funny Tumblr posts about how, in this chapter, we’re seeing how their history of always being at odds with each other is helping them come into sync. Thunderon says, “I love all the little moments in Gideon the Ninth when Harrow and Gideon are unexpectedly on the same page and their uniting emotion is ‘100% ready to kick some ass.’” And appsa says, “the one thing they have in common is how if it’s fight or flight, they will always pick fight.” [laughs]

00:10:50 K: Oh, god. It’s just so good here.

00:10:52 B: They’re just always ready to throw down.

00:10:56 K: Mhm. And then I love this too, because we also see how far they’ve come in that regard too, than immediately, Gideon attacks. They end up fighting together against this horrible monster, right? And it says, “With Harrow there, suddenly it was easy, and her horror of the monster turned to the ferocious joy of vengeance. Long years of warfare meant that they each knew exactly where the other would stand—every arc of a sword, every jostling scapula. No hole in the other’s defences went unshielded. They had never fought together before, but they had always fought, and they could work in and around each other without a second’s thought.”

00:11:25 B: That’s sooo good. “They had never fought together before, but they had always fought.” [laughs]

00:11:31 K: “They’d always fought!” Again, just pulling that dynamic from the first chapters of the book to now, and seeing how well it lends itself– this is peak romance, to be honest. This is great.

00:11:39 B: Peak romance! Yeah, this is the enemies-to-lovers absolute peak. [laughs]

00:11:46 K: Mhm, mhm. They can fight so well together because they’re used to fighting each other! They know exactly all of each other’s weakest spots to protect! It’s so good.

00:11:55 B: So good. Yep, it’s just incredibly– it’s pulled off so well. [laughs] Oh my god.

00:12:01 K: Mhm. And you have these dual things happening, where they’re fighting together, and Gideon’s not afraid anymore, but also, it says it let her focus on this emotion of vengeance, and I think that really is carried over too. It continues, it says, “She struck at spines with the mad fury and sudden belief that if she just hit and hit and hit—accurately enough and hard enough and well enough—she could rewrite time and save Isaac and Jeannemary; save Abigail and Magnus.” So, again, those characters’ deaths are still really, really at the forefront here of what’s going on through Gideon’s mind and what this creature really represents to her.

00:12:30 B: Yeah. Gideon and Harrow keep fighting this monster in sync, until Cytherea leaps out from where she was lurking to ambush them, and she looks just completely whole and healed from her previous injuries. She attacks Gideon with her rapier; Gideon deflects with her longsword and strikes back, and Cytherea grabs the blade of her sword and holds it still. [laughs] And then it’s like, she just pulls out this move of literally holding Gideon’s sword a couple times in this fight, which is just insane.

00:12:57 K: It’s just always such a good move. Any time anyone can grab your sword, like, that’s such a power move. I’m sorry.

00:13:02 B: Bare hand, I know. It’s wild.

00:13:06 K: You’re fucked.

00:13:08 B: [laughs] Cytherea says, “‘I meant it. You were wonderful. You would have made that little nun such a cavalier—I almost wish you’d been mine.’” And Gideon says, “‘You couldn’t fucking afford me.’” [laughs]

00:13:23 K: Brilliant. So good.

00:13:25 B: She wrenches her sword away and kicks Cytherea’s legs out from under her, and the bones on the floor rise up and close around her. And Gideon hears the construct is howling horribly, and sees it collapse right where Harrow had been. It goes: “There was an agonizing crash as the fountain shattered under its weight. Gideon’s heart was in her throat: but there was the dusty black figure emerging from the wreckage.” So Harrow is alive!

00:13:49 K: Her heart was in her throat, seeing Harrow in distress, potentially! Look how far we’ve come. [Baily laughs] Yeah. So Gideon fights her way toward Harrow, and it goes: “‘I need to be inside you,’ Harrow bellowed over the din. ‘Okay, you’re not even trying,’ said Gideon.” [both laugh] So I do love that even with every fucking other thing happening in this chapter, Tamsyn’s like, “Let’s have a little fun with this.”

00:14:09 B: Let’s have a little joke. A little laugh.

00:14:10 K: Let’s throw in a little joke for the girlies. Yeah.

00:14:13 B: Harrow explains that she needs to enter Gideon’s mind again, like in the Winnowing Trial, and direct her exactly where to take the skeleton construct apart. And Gideon allows it. She feels Harrow’s presence in her mind, and they go and attack the construct in this way. And she can kind of– it’s not really like Harrow’s talking to her in her mind, but she can just sense Harrow directing her where to hit, which is pretty cool. It’s like, “Eye level on the right,” and she goes and hits it there, which is really fun.

00:14:39 K: Mhm. Yeah, again, it kind of pulls to what you were saying earlier about the video-game-esque levels like this, where literally a trial that you learned how to do in this smaller, confined circumstance, now you have to use that in the fight against the final boss. I did think as well that it’s kind of interesting that we get this moment of Harrow’s presence in Gideon’s mind being felt and needed in this fight right before we then, obviously— where this chapter leads to with Gideon sacrificing herself, and the next chapter of her in Harrow’s mind as well, talking to her, and that sort of flip between them, I thought was kind of interesting, and just another way that those themes of them existing in the same space or body obviously become a much larger thing in the series. And then also, we also get the joke that Gideon makes later, in Nona the Ninth, about the wound that she has there, where there’s a little throwaway line in this, where it says, “Half a dozen tendrils came after her. They would have given her an interesting array of new airholes for speed,” so that’s just a continuation that she obviously says in Nona the Ninth, too, and I think several people have pointed out that it also pops up here, which is kind of funny.

00:15:44 B: Oh, my god. Gideon attacks the construct’s legs where they’re joined into the body, and Harrow sends skeletons in where it’s coming apart, which then melt into perpetual bone and cover the rest of the limbs. “The hard shine of it and the suppressed agony of triumph in the back of Gideon’s head made her eyes water, and she was filled with a weird pride that was all her own. Holy shit. Perpetual bone. Harrow had actually cracked it. She was too busy admiring her necromancer to catch the thick rope of vertebrae that looped around her waist and cinched tight.” This is such a good passage, because Tamsyn clarifies that the pride Gideon’s feeling is hers, it’s not Harrow in her mind. And this is also really good, I guess, underpinning, or evidence, of the fact that what Kiriona spouts in Nona, knowing necromancy facts, isn’t coming out of nowhere, right. Gideon has had this understanding of what Harrow has been trying to do all along.

00:16:42 K: Mhm. And has gotten to watch that develop as well, too. I think that’s a really interesting point to see here, that we’re obviously presented with Harrow as this really talented necromancer right off the bat, and as a reader, you kind of have to then get a grasp through _____ of what is actually within her abilities and what is outside of her abilities, and then here we’re seeing this thing that was not something she was able to do and has cracked and learned in this show of growth and how she’s becoming an even more skilled necromancer that Gideon, someone very familiar with her and her abilities, feels this rush of pride at how significant this.

But yeah, then she gets flung up into the air by the construct. And a giant pillar of skeletal arms rises up to catch her – thanks, Harrow – but then the construct knocks it out of the way, and she falls back down on the ground right next to Harrow. We get this great little moment as well, too, where Harrow is saying, “‘I have bested my father,’ said Harrow to nobody, staring upward at nothing, alight with fierce and untrammelled triumph. … ‘I have bested my father and my grandmother—every single necromancer ever taught by my House—every necromancer who has ever touched a skeleton. Did you see me? Did you behold me, Griddle?’ This was all said somewhat thickly, through pink and bloodied teeth, before Harrow smugly passed out.” [Baily laughs] And so we get to see that moment, that pride, what she’s just accomplished, like we were just talking about, through her own reaction to it, too. She’s sort of amazed at herself, and we get that emphasis on the significance of it again, too, of how this really is something that no one else would have been able to do in her place, and she’s just that girl, you know?

00:18:12 B: [laughs] So, yeah, Harrow has managed to actually trap the construct, pin it down. Its back legs are stuck in Harrow’s cocoon of regenerating ash. So Gideon looks for Camilla and finds her with Cytherea. She’s got one hand in Cytherea’s hair. She’s holding her head back with a knife pressed to her throat. And it goes: “This would have been a commanding position, except that the knife blade was quivering in place. Its edge creased the pale skin, but it hadn’t drawn blood, even though Camilla seemed to be leaning on it as hard as she could. Whatever terrible force was holding the knife at bay was also slowly peeling the skin from the cavalier of the Sixth’s hand. ‘You’re a nice girl,’”–

00:18:51 K: Don’t love that.

00:18:52 B: “–the Lyctor said. ‘I had a nice girl as a cavalier too … once. She died for me. What can you do?’” [laughs] She’s so evil! But it’s so good.

00:19:05 K: Mhm. So evil, so enjoying it, and does not really seem bothered at all by this predicament of knife at her throat. It says, “Cytherea looked faintly amused by the blade that was a finger’s breadth away from being buried in her jugular. She drawled, ‘Is this meant to kill me?’ ‘Give me time,’ said Camilla, through gritted teeth. Cytherea gave this due consideration. ‘I’d rather not,’ she said.” [laughs] Which is also great. She’s having fun. So, as she says this, Gideon sees this tentacle of bone winding up from behind Cam, poised to stab her, and yells her name to warn her.

00:19:42 B: And it goes: “Perhaps it was the yell; perhaps it was Camilla’s extraordinary instincts.” So, Cam twists just in time, and instead of stabbing her right through her back, the bone just stabs through her shoulder instead. Cytherea gets free and shoves Cam away, quote, “contemptuously,” and Cam topples over with this sharpened bone in her shoulder. And Cytherea picks up her rapier, Gideon is frantically trying to get over to Cam, and it goes: “The Lyctor stood above her with her green sword gleaming in the light. ‘You can’t hurt me,’ said Cytherea, almost despairingly. ‘Nothing can hurt me anymore, cavalier.’ … As the Lyctor drew back her arm for a clean thrust into Camilla’s heart, four inches of bloodied steel emerged from her belly.”

00:20:29 K: What? How could that be?

00:20:30 B: “Camilla stared up at her as though trying to work out why everything hadn’t gone black. A red stain was spreading across the thin bedsheet. The Lyctor’s face didn’t change, but she turned her head slightly. A pale head was now nearly pillowed on her shoulder, peeking over, as though to make sure the sword had hit home. Colourless fair hair spilled over Cytherea’s collarbone like a waterfall: the figure behind her smiled. ‘Spoke too soon, old news,’ said Ianthe. ‘Oh,’ said Cytherea, ‘oh, my! A baby Lyctor.’”

00:21:00 K: Speaking of incredible entrances! I mean, this is just so good for Ianthe. Reading this again, just the whole peering over her shoulder to be like, “Oh, did I get that right?” as blood is starting to seep out from the bedsheet across her– you know, her bedsheet. The sword is sticking out from her belly. It’s so good. And it’s also, strangely, such a hero moment?

00:21:21 B: Yeah!

00:21:22 K: For, like, worst, terrible Ianthe, showing up right as Cytherea is about to kill Cam, and stabbing her through the back. It’s a very interesting concept, especially now, especially because it reminded me a lot of the end of Harrow the Ninth when Ianthe swims down to where God and Augustine are grappling in that too. You have this moment of, “Oh my god, is she gonna do the right thing? Is she gonna save the day and everything?”. And of course not, she saves God and lets Augustine die, but in this way, in this book, she shows up right at the peak action in this fight between Cam and Cytherea, and she does stab Cytherea, so it’s a neat little parallel to that.

00:21:57 B: Well, thinking about it from Ianthe’s perspective, the reason she – we assume – the reason she saves God at the end of Harrow is because God has said that if he dies, the Nine Houses will get engulfed by the sun exploding, so I think if we think through Ianthe’s actions as being primarily motivated by wanting to keep Corona alive, both of these moments make perfect sense. She wants the Nine Houses to stay alive so that Corona lives at the end of Harrow the Ninth, and then here, it’s like, well, Corona’s still alive somewhere here, and Cytherea has clearly stated that she wants to kill everyone. So I think Ianthe’s motivations as a character make complete sense if you think about them from that lens. But from the perspective of Gideon and Harrow, yeah– [laughs]

00:22:38 K: Very different reader experience of them. But yeah, no, exactly. It’s just the flair for dramatic timing in both instances I think, too. It’s very cool that she gets to have these moments. It makes it funny when Tamsyn tries to insist that Ianthe’s not meant to be cool whatsoever, because I’m like, “Tamsyn, you keep giving her these moments that are just undeniably cool.

00:22:56 B: Cool moments!

00:22:57 K: “This is incredible, what are you talking about? This is a great scene for Ianthe.” [Baily laughs] Yeah. Just yeah. Great visual, all of it, so good. “Pillowed on her shoulder,” I know you wrote that down too, is such a good visual of just the peeking over. I just– I love everything about it.

00:23:14 B: Obviously, you know, the almost intimate pose, right, of like, maybe you’re taking a couple’s photoshoot. But no, you just stabbed her. [laughs]

00:23:21 K: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The mix of the intimacy of the language and the violence of the action also feels very on-brand for Ianthe, and everything to come with her. So then, as she’s done this, and stabbed Cytherea through the stomach, she then flicks some drops of Cytherea’s blood over her shoulder and Gideon sees that they “hang in the air, sizzling,” and spread out into a “shimmering, transparent pink sheet,” which separates both Ianthe and Cytherea from the construct that’s trying to reach them. It tries to get at her and send a bone stinger at her head, but that stinger just hits the shield and dissolves, so this wall of blood seems to be protecting them from the bone construct, or anything trying to get through.

00:23:59 B: Gideon tries to use the moment to get to Harrow and Cam, and get them out of there while Ianthe and Cytherea have their moment. It goes: “Another stinger, then another, hurtled into the blood disc and evaporated. Despite herself, she turned to watch: the construct stiffened a dozen of its tendrils, two dozen, aiming them like javelins at Ianthe’s tiny form, and Gideon remembered Isaac Tettares, impaled on fifty spines at once.”

00:24:21 K: Oh. I know I’m beating the drum over and over on this, but I do really love how present his death is in the chapter, because the more I thought about it while I was reading it, too, is like, the bone construct– like, yes, you have Cytherea who is obviously driven by this very personal vendetta and motivation, but the construct she’s using that is so frightening and such a threat to them is a very impersonal thing. It has no stakes or conscious or vendetta. It’s not even a ferocious monster driven by its own need or anything. It could easily be very random and impersonal, but we have these emotional stakes created – and this fear and these emotions associated with it – because of what it’s already done, and what that is is that Gideon keeps thinking about Isaac and keeps remembering his death, and really feels that sense of vengeance compelling her. I just think that makes it such a more engaging final battle, and gives us a more emotional stake, and reminds me how sad I am about the teens all over again, constantly. So, thanks for that, Tamsyn.

00:25:13 B: Wow, that’s a really good point. Ianthe’s blood shield grows, and the construct starts to pull away from her. And we get: “Gideon snuck past the foot of the dais in time to see Cytherea smile. ‘I’ve always wanted a little sister.’ She walked away from Ianthe’s sword with a bad, liquid sound.” [laughs] Ew.

00:25:32 K: Don’t like that.

00:25:33 B: Gross.

00:25:34 K: That’s really gross. [Baily laughs] Lots of gross descriptions in this chapter, in a good way, but just very visceral.

00:25:41 B: Yeah. Cytherea steps on Cam – oh, my god – and turns back once she’s a few paces away, and she’s running her fingers over this wound in her abdomen, quote, “apparently amazed by her capacity to bleed. Gideon wished she was less interested and more dying, but you had to take victories where you could get them. ‘I’ve tried the sister thing already,’ said Ianthe, circling around to one side, ‘and I wasn’t any good at it.’”

00:26:05 K: To be fair, you did point out, she is kind of trying to save Corona right now, even if she did leave her crying somewhere over the fact that Ianthe chose to eat Babs and not Corona, but, you know. They’ve got their things to work through!

00:26:15 B: Yeah! [laughs] Cytherea says, “‘But I have so much to teach you.’” [laughs] And then they charge at each other and fight. Oh my god, it’s so incredible. “Once upon a time it would have been pretty cool to watch the perfect showman’s sword of the Third House compete against an ancient and undiluted warrior of the Seventh, but Gideon was crouching down next to Camilla and trying to gauge whether or not her own kneecap was trying to slide off somewhere weird.”

00:26:42 K: Ew. Poor Gideon.

00:26:43 B: Poor Gideon.

00:26:44 K: I was going to make a comment earlier about Cam having such a no-good kind of day when it was the bit about Cytherea stepping on her, and then I was like, “Honestly, none of these characters are having a good day.”

00:26:51 B: They’re all having a bad day.

00:26:52 K: None of these characters are having a good week. That is essentially the point of this book. [Baily laughs] Nothing is going anyone’s way. But yeah, Gideon has laid the unconscious Harrow down on a pile of what is described as “the softest-looking bones,” which is very funny, because are any of them that much softer than others? But very nice consideration for Gideon to take in the middle of all this. And she’s just sort of wishing that Harrow was awake and present, and trying to figure out what to do in this situation. She pulls the bloodied spike out of Cam’s shoulder too, which is described as clearly not being very fun for Cam as well, very painful, but she manages to drag her into cover with Harrow.

00:27:32 B: Also, definitely not what you should do if you have been impaled by something. You just leave it in, okay? If you take it out, you could be opening up an artery or something like that. Just leave it in, if you’re ever in this situation. [laughs]

00:27:45 K: But she’s gotta drag her away, you know? It’s in the way a little bit, I imagine, this giant bone spike.

00:27:51 B: Okay, okay, true.

00:27:54 K: She’s doing her best, everyone’s unconscious and injured around her. [Baily laughs] There’s a giant bone monster. Like we said, it’s not a good day.

And then we get this moment, which we kind of discussed in the last episode about Cam and Pal, but Gideon has pulled Cam into cover with Harrow, and it says that “[she] started to look her over to see if her intestines were fountaining out, or something, but Camilla grabbed her sleeve. Gideon looked down into her solemn, obstinate face, and Camilla said— ‘He say anything?’ Gideon wavered. ‘He said to tell you he loved you,’ she said. ‘What? No, he didn’t.’ ‘Okay, no, sorry. He said—he said you knew what to do?’ ‘I do,’ said Camilla with grim satisfaction.” [laughs]

00:28:33 B: So fucking funny.

00:28:35 K: This is just top, top Pal and Cam moments to me. There’s so much else that hurts or that feels all sorts of things with them, especially in Nona the Ninth and that, but this, to me is just– it’s the immediacy of Gideon feeling like she has to say something and clearly kind of like–

00:28:51 B: Yeah. Something appropriate for the moment.

00:28:54 K: –not quite understanding the dynamic, or trying to pull something appropriate, and Cam immediately being like, “Of course he didn’t say that. Why would he say that?” And then also the fact that what’s important is not Pal saying he loved her, it’s saying, “You know what to do.” That is what she both relates to and can cling to, like, “Yes, I do know what to do and yes, of course that’s what he would have said.” That, to me, is their dynamic. That is everything in a nutshell.

00:29:17 B: It’s so good. Iconic!

00:29:18 K: Iconic.

00:29:19 B: Gideon looks back at the fight, and as Ianthe and Cytherea are fighting, the room is exploding around them at their passing, and suddenly there are more pressing matters: “The floor was cracking. Everything was cracking. Huge fissures separated Gideon from the doors.” I did just want to note here that this part really reminds me, kind of hilariously, of all the imagery of vampires from books and TV. I’m thinking about The Vampire Diaries and Twilight, how it’s like, when they’re fighting, they’re breaking stuff. [laughs] That’s how we’re gonna show these people are really powerful.

00:29:56 K: That’s true, oh my god!

00:29:57 B: Stefan and Damon are fighting and it’s tearing down the house. [laughs]

00:30:01 K: Vampire Diaries loved to be like, “These vampires are just slamming into each other and everything’s toppling over,” and that’s how you know they’re really strong and really mad. It’s like, okay, I guess that’s one way to communicate it. Oh, what a show.

00:30:12 B: Oh my god, the imagery. Ianthe raises up a column of black blood that lifts Cytherea twenty feet into the air and drops her down, and then steps up to her, quote, “hand sparking and flickering with harsh white light,” then punches her straight through the wall. And then the wall collapses. [laughs] It’s so funny.

00:30:31 K: So many great Ianthe moments in this chapter, truly. And while that’s happening and everything’s going to shit completely around them, Gideon manages to get her arm under Cam to support her. It says she grabs the “bird-bone bundle of her necromancer” and somehow manages to get them all outside onto the garden terrace while the hall just continues to collapse inside, and Ianthe and Cytherea are still going at it. Cytherea picks herself up after she’s been thrown through the wall. Ianthe lunges at her again, and Gideon notes that Cytherea is really the one on the defensive here. It says, “She was not as quick as Ianthe; she was not as reactive. She would still have speared Gideon through in the first ten seconds of a fair fight, but against another Lyctor, things seemed to be going wrong.” So, this is interesting to observe. Speaking of other vampire media, maybe someone’s thinking like Twilight. You know, the baby ones are the strongest ones, and Ianthe’s got the upper hand here. Is that what’s going on? Is she about to save the day and do everything, question mark? I did also find this sentence just a little bit rough, though, with the whole mention of “spearing Gideon through,” because it’s like, yeah, we know we’re getting to that, but let’s–

00:31:34 B: Give us a second! Oh my god.

00:31:36 K: Let’s give us a moment. A lot of lines where I just really felt what was about to happen.

00:31:42 B: As Cytherea’s blood is flowing into the air from every cut, Ianthe freezes it into place and creates this web of blood that tangles around her, which is so cool and so weird. [laughs]

00:31:54 K: Mhm. Lots of cool, weird visuals in this. Just a very interesting fight in terms of– I feel like in a book, sometimes, it is quite a skill to write really interesting, intricate fight scenes, and I think what really distinguishes the ones in this book to me is just how weird and fucked up visually they often are, with obviously the bones and body horror stuff, and this is such a good example of that.

00:32:15 B: Yeah, and she’s really– Tamsyn has really done a good job giving everyone a really unique flavor of magic. We’ve seen the Sixth House’s magic, we’ve seen quite a lot of Harrow’s magic, and we’ve only seen a little bit of Ianthe so far, so it’s really cool how she’s showing us what Ianthe can fully do here, which is all really cool and weird.

Gideon’s also noting as the two fight that all of Cytherea’s earlier wounds are beginning to reopen – you know, the ones that Pal inflicted when he blew himself up. And Cam explains, “‘She hadn’t healed. … She’d just skinned over the damage—a surface fix, hides the cracks. To really heal, she needs thalergy—life force—and she hasn’t got any to spare.’ ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Gideon. ‘Sextus gave her turbo cancer.’ Camilla nodded with enormous personal satisfaction. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’ll do it.’” [laughs] Oh, my god.

00:33:07 K: [laughs] Love that so much. Yeah, and then we get this interesting description of the Lyctorhood process that’s just occurred here as well. Gideon’s watching the fight, and obviously Gideon fought with Babs before and really admired his swordplay, and that sort of thing, and she really sees that on display again here. It says, “Ianthe’s magic was as efficient and lean as Naberius’s swordsmanship— neat and contemptuous, clean and too perfect, not a beat missed or a second’s hesitation.” So, I think that’s really interesting, because it’s not just that she’s picked up the swordsmanship in how she’s handling a weapon against Cytherea, but even just, Gideon’s noticing the similarity of style with her magic, and is that anything of Babs coming through, or is that just, in a sense, the same quality that Babs brough to his swordplay is also on display in the way that Ianthe wields her magic? I thought that was very interesting in terms of that comparison between the two of them, and how they weren’t characters we saw compared in any similar way before, but they both have that intrinsic thing to them.

00:34:07 B: Ianthe drops Cytherea in this net she’s woven of Cytherea’s own blood, and seems to think that she’s bested her, or at least has the upper hand. It goes: “‘Tired?’ she said. Cytherea opened her eyes and coughed. ‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘But you’re exhausted.’” And then she dissolves Ianthe’s net, just like that. She steps forward, she grabs Ianthe by the throat, and she goes, “‘Just like a child … all your best moves first,’ said Cytherea. Ianthe squirmed. A thread of blood coiled in the air around her, uselessly, and then spattered to the ground. The ancient Lyctor said, ‘You aren’t completed, are you? I can feel him pushing … he’s not happy. Mine went willingly, and it hurt for centuries. If I’m old news … you’re fresh meat.’” Ooh hoo hoo!

00:35:00 K: Flipped it on her, oh my god!

00:35:01 B: Ooh boy!

00:35:05 K: Ianthe did not quite have the upper hand. She thought she did. I love the little mention there of the potential of Babs not being happy, or there being some sort of issue with the process and how it happened, because again, it’s not something that we saw first-hand. We obviously don’t know anything at this point in time about what happened originally with the original Lyctors and cavaliers, so it’s interesting that she mentions that Loveday went willingly, and obviously, then, this leads into what we end up seeing in Harrow the Ninth where there’s more discussion of how Ianthe’s Lyctoral process is settling on her, and the different theories about that.

But yeah, obviously Cytherea does have the upper hand. Ianthe was not really besting her as much as Gideon and everyone thought she was, and so Cytherea then just tightens her hand on Ianthe’s throat and begins to siphon from her. It says, “[Ianthe’s] eyes rolled back and forth in her head, and then there was no eye to roll: she jerked and squealed, pupils gone, irises gone, as though Cytherea had somehow had the ability to suck them out of her skull. ‘No,’ cried Ianthe, ‘no, no, no—’”. Uhhh! What a horrible visual! Like, to go back to the body horror of it all, and especially thinking about the significance of the eyes to the Lyctor process as well, and the different ways that we’ve seen eyes affected throughout different kinds of magic and siphoning and all of that before, this visual of her eyes completely going empty while Cytherea does get to siphon that energy that Cam was just pointing out she kind of needs, now she’s getting from Ianthe.

00:36:23 B: Yep, she’s healing– well, we actually see. It goes: “‘Okay,’ said Camilla in carefully neutral tones, ‘now she’s healing.’” [laughs] So it’s not so great for everyone else.

00:36:34 K: Doesn’t seem great.

00:36:35 B: This is also so funny. It’s very clearly the second phase of a boss fight. You’re playing a Soulslike, and it’s like, “Okay, good, I’ve managed to whittle down the boss’s health. He’s bested, we’re fine,” and then it’s like, “Oh, okay, there’s a second phase, actually. There’s a second phase.” [laughs]

00:36:54 K: Mhm. Like, pulls something out that you had no idea was coming, or whatever, and it’s like, “Wait, we have to deal with that?” Yeah, so, Cytherea had more to her, don’t worry. She just drops Ianthe to the ground when she’s done, and not bothered, and it goes: “‘Now, little sister,’ she told the grey-lipped Third princess, ‘don’t think this means I’m not impressed. You did become a Lyctor … and so you’ll get to live. For a while. But I don’t need your arms and your legs. So—’”. And then she steps on Ianthe’s wrist to hold her down, and with this giant shank of bone, she slices her right arm off, just above the elbow.

00:37:26 B: Mmm, gross! Awful.

00:37:31 K: So that’s really not fun. And it’s interesting that she lets her live as this baby Lyctor, but there’s also this extreme stroke of violence immediately, and like, “How dare you rise up and think that you can best me, little baby Lyctor who’s been alive for a blink of an eye?”

00:37:51 B: Gideon lurches forward, but Camilla tells her to duck, and Gideon sees that Camilla’s propped herself up on her injured arm, and her good arm is holding her knife, ready to throw. So Gideon ducks, and Cam throws her knife right into Cytherea’s upper back. It goes: “This time Cytherea screamed. She went stumbling away from Ianthe’s prone form, and Gideon saw what Camilla had been aiming at: a lump, a delicate swollen mass, right next to Cytherea’s shoulder blade. It bulged out only slightly, but once you saw it, it was impossible to unsee—especially with a long knife buried squarely in its centre.” And so Cytherea pulls at this knife. She looks at it a bit wonderingly, and then she turns her head to look at Gideon, Cam, and Harrow. “‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘heroics.’” [laughs] Ohhh! Oh boy!

00:38:36 K: Just wait! Just wait for the heroics! So then after being knifed in the back, Cytherea grabs Ianthe’s hand and begins siphoning a bit more from her again. And it goes: “‘An inadequate Lyctor,’ said Cytherea, as though giving Gideon and Camilla a hot tip on stain removal, ‘still makes a perfect power source … an everlasting battery.’”

00:38:55 B: Oh my god, poor Ianthe! I actually wanted to quote this funny Tumblr post from annabelle--cane, who says, “Love that Ianthe finally Won and was so proud to do her big villain monologue and explain how actually she’d been the world’s most specialest girl the whole time and she was the best and her beautiful charismatic much beloved sister was just an unworthy facade of a person and she was the final boss most important real deal. Only to then immediately be upstaged completely by Cytherea’s villain turn and spend the last twenty pages of climactic denouement passed out on the ground.” [laughs] Poor Ianthe!

00:39:28 K: [laughs] RIP. Poor Ianthe. Yeah, it’s interesting because it also really calls to mind to me, it’s interesting how we get this double reveal, almost, of the horrors of Lyctorhood after it’s positioned as this thing that they’re striving for throughout the whole novel, and then we get Ianthe getting her big villain monologue turn, of, she achieved it, she did it, and it’s this horrible thing, and also then, immediately, I remember my surprise at realizing how quickly we were confronting, “Oh, here’s one of the OG Lyctors, and she’s also horrible. Oh my god, this is actually a terrifying thing to be that they’ve spent this whole book trying to get towards.” I think that’s such a neat inversion to make the final fight going up against the thing that you’ve been trying to be in this increasingly-stakes way. Ianthe could’ve been the final baddie, and it could’ve been a fight against her, and she could’ve had her moment in the sun, but that she immediately gets usurped as well by Cytherea’s presence really speaks to how Tamsyn really effectively manages to keep upping the stakes beyond what you expect them to be, and I think that is what makes it so fun, and makes all of these climaxes really exciting across the books of the series.

00:40:32 B: Cytherea just starts stalking toward Gideon where she’s with Cam and Harrow on the ground, and Gideon notes that it’s almost scarier how unafraid she seems as she approaches them. Gideon plants herself between Cytherea and the others and takes in their surroundings. It goes: “They were alone in a back area of the courtyard: a little area not yet buried in rubble or tilled up by the titanic fight between two immortal sorcerers. Dead trees bowed overhead. Gideon stood behind the iron fence that had once protected some herbaceous border, as though its bent, bowed spikes would be good for anything other than throwing herself down on as one last fuck-you salute.” Oh boy! Oh my! Oh my goodness! Hm!

00:41:13 K: Ughhh! God! The way that this is slipped in there so casually and doesn’t strike you at all on first read as anything other than Gideon’s dark humor, but then it’s just excruciating on a re-read. And I think, again, the fact that Tamsyn manages to get that in there so casually and the little knife twist of it is just insane. It’s so good. It’s so good. It’s so horrible.

00:41:37 B: Wow. Oh my god.

00:41:41 K: Such a painful chapter, honestly. It’s just gonna get worse.

00:41:44 B: So, this horrible piece of foreshadowing is where we’re ending our recap for this week. We will pick up next week with the rest of Chapter Thirty-Six.

00:41:54 K: Yeah, we simply haven’t been talking about Gideon the Ninth enough, so we’re really gonna drag out these last few chapters into even more episodes. [both laugh] Can you believe it? But it really is just a lot to tackle, and we gotta save all our emotions and feelings and make sure we go over all of it, so we’ll be back to continue this.

(Upbeat, driving electronic music)

00:42:19 B: Today’s game is going to be a bracket of the best lines from Gideon the Ninth. So, crucially, these are lines that are not memes or jokes. They’re just straight-up lines from the book. We will later do a meme bracket at some point, maybe halfway through Harrow or something like that, but I originally seeded this bracket. I picked out what I thought were maybe the sixteen top lines. I seeded them according to what I kind of thought I liked best, I guess, and then we did a run-through of this bracket on Twitter, so if you were following along with that bracket on Twitter, I hope you had a really good time. We will reveal in a second which line won there. But what I did was I took the Twitter results, and I re-seeded the bracket, so we are going to do our own separate picks, just based on what we prefer, and also on some criteria which I will go over in one second. But yeah, basically the Twitter results are the new seeding for this bracket. So I thought of some criteria–

00:43:21 K: Very scientific approach.

00:43:22 B: Yeah! I thought we could do how memorable the quote is; how quotable it is, like, how much you remember it and think about it; just the general quality of the prose, because it’s something that makes you think, “Wow, that’s really well-written”; how much is reflects the overall character arcs of the story; and the impact on the story. So those are the five things I thought we could kind of rate all the quotes on.

00:43:45 K: So in this episode, we’re gonna be looking at what we’ve randomly decided to call the quote, unquote, “Eastern Conference” of the first round of the bracket: basically just the first half of the first round. And in the next episode–

00:43:56 B: [laughs] Absolutely no justification for it.

00:43:59 K: We just love to break things down like sports conferences. In the next episode, we will continue with the Western Conference half of the first round. So, our very first matchup in the Eastern Conference, we have the number one seed, which is the overall winner of the vote that we did on Twitter. And it’s Harrow speaking in Chapter Thirty-One, and it is the quote where she says, “‘I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.’”

00:44:31 B: Ohh!

00:44:32 K: I mean, it’s a worthy winner. I’ll say that. You can see why it got the people’s vote.

00:44:37 B: I underseeded it, for sure. I think I originally had it at the number three seed. Also, when you were reading that, I remembered when Nora read it in our pool scene ep, and I was like, “Aw!” [laughs]

00:44:46 K: Aw, such a good ep. So iconic.

00:44:48 B: The quotable part, you know, “I’m undone without you,” is pretty quotable, but it’s not one that really stuck with me, I think is why I gave it the number three seed. I don’t know, originally.

00:44:57 K: I would say, actually, the “I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy” is probably the bit that jumps out as more quotable to me from that entire thing. I think that’s quite a strong line.

00:45:07 B: I’m giving it a three out of five.

00:45:08 K: But I agree, I think the whole thing is just a little bit longer than some of the shorter, pithier quotes.

00:45:13 B: And that’s the thing. I was torn on some of the quotes. I was like, “I could take more of this whole section,” but then it’s really– because you want the context, but also, sometimes the line is just four words that you actually remember.

00:45:27 K: Yeah, absolutely.

00:45:28 B: I do like the prose. I think it’s well-written.

00:45:31 K: I think it’s well-written. I think it’s classic Tamsyn where there’s some really specific vocabulary choices that I think really make it. I think you could have a similar quote that maybe didn’t hit quite as hard. I think “wretched life” is really strong, and then I think the simplicity of the end, of, “You are my only friend,” “undone without you,” there’s this balance of very simple and yet very big, meaningful statements in that, and I think that comes across here really well. It's a good economy of prose.

00:45:59 B: In terms of the characters and the story– yes, economy is a good word. Although, in fact, I don’t know, it’s funny, because Tamsyn sometimes vacillates wildly between very economical, to-the-point lines, and then lines that are very flowery. But I think this one strikes a good balance. In terms of characters, I think this is a five out of five. It’s a quasi-love-confession. Story, five out of five. It’s progressing the whole arc between our two main characters. Yeah. What does that give us? Twelve out of fifteen?

00:46:31 K: Beautiful.

00:46:33 B: Okay, then we have our number sixteen seed. The sixteenth seed was hard, right, because I was like, “Well, some of these lines after the tenth are pretty good, but they’re not winners.”

00:46:45 K: Yeah. So this is another quote from Harrow, Harrow quoting Teacher in this instance in Chapter Thirteen, when it says, “‘The space beyond that door is profoundly haunted in ways I cannot say, and by means you won’t understand; and you may die by violence, or you may simply lose your soul.’” I mean, it’s very atmospheric.

00:47:03 B: Ohh! Like, it’s good! Yeah. Well, and the whole thing is like, “Ten thousand million unfed ghosts,” blah, blah, blah. This was one where I was like, “Okay, I’m just gonna take the more impactful second half.” But I think memorability may be a one or a two. Like, it’s good, but it’s not one that’s gonna stick with me.

00:47:21 K: Yeah, I think so. It’s a quote that, while you’re reading it, is impactful, or very fun and very dramatic, and does a lot for where you are in the text, but it’s not a quote that I think you remember later when you’re trying to think of quotes, in particular. Less so than sort of feeling or emotion or moments.

00:47:39 B: Yeah. Same for that, I think quotability–

00:47:40 K: Not very quotable.

00:47:41 B: Maybe a two out of five.

00:47:43 K: Quite low.

00:47:44 B: Prose, I love. Five out of five. I think it’s super well-written.

00:47:46 K: Mhm. Yeah.

00:47:47 B: Characters, one out of five. It’s not really doing much. Yes.

00:47:52 K: Story, yeah.

00:47:53 B: Story is a four.

00:47:54 K: Story, it does a lot to set up where they are in the story, the mood, the stakes, all of that. So, overall–

00:48:00 B: Ah, twelve. Wait, that can’t be right. This can’t also be a twelve. Am I dumb? Oh, it’s not out of fifteen! I’m so stupid, it’s out of twenty-five! [laughs]

00:48:07 K: We’re bad at– oh, okay. But wait, they can’t both be twelve out of twenty-five.

00:48:14 B: But the other one wasn’t twelve. I subtracted from fifteen instead of adding up. This is what my six hours of sleep gets you.

00:48:20 K: Oh, we’re off to a great start. We’re off to such a great start.

00:48:23 B: I’m almost a PhD candidate, folks. [laughs]

00:48:25 K: Adding basic numbers. I haven’t done math since eleventh grade, so I’m not– [laughs]

00:48:31 B: Okay, first one’s twenty-one out of twenty-five.

00:48:33 K: I’m not taking any responsibility or blame here. Okay, we have a twenty-one out of twenty-five and we have a twelve out of twenty-five. That feels like it better reflects our sentiments more. The rubric does work. Everything is fine.

00:48:45 B: Yes, the rubric is good.

00:48:46 K: This is a very scientific process.

00:48:49 B: [laughs] Okay. Then we have our next set of matchups. Oh wait, sorry. The winner of that matchup, obviously, number one seed.

00:48:57 K: Next matchup. We have the eight seed, which is the iconic–

00:49:00 B: First line of the book!

00:49:03 K: First line of the book! “In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.”

00:49:15 B: Oh, my god. This is such a banger opener.

00:49:17 K: It’s such a banger opener.

00:49:19 B: Oh, it just sets up the tone for the whole book.

00:49:22 K: It does! And I feel like people go on a lot about the first sentence to start a book, and the impact of a first sentence, and there are ones that, yes, are classic and are classic for a reason, and there are other books that you can read and be like, “That wasn’t really– it didn’t really matter how strong that was, it was more about everything that gets set up, it doesn’t need to have a definitive line that’s a bit of a cliché,” but my god, that really works so well here. It just tells you everything. I know we’ve discussed it a bit to death in this podcast before, but just the way it jumps from this very high-level, you know, “myriadic year of our Lord,” the high fantasy feeling of what it’s setting up, to then immediately talking about, “sword, shoes, dirty magazines.” The tonal shift is so good. It tells you exactly what you’re getting into. And also, there’s an action and a circumstance presented right away in this sentence. You’re not only establishing the stakes of the universe, but you’re also establishing, she’s escaping. We are starting with a character escaping from the House of the Ninth. We don’t know what that means, we don’t know why she wants to escape, but there’s immediately an investment in her story right there. I think the amount that this sentence is doing is incredible. Which is not going through the specific criteria, which we will now do, but that’s my overall–

00:50:32 B: I think, story, five out of five. Characters, four out of five, because we learn a little about Gideon. Prose, love it, five out of five, amazing. Quotability–

00:50:41 K: Quotable?

00:50:42 B: It’s like a four.

00:50:43 K: I think it’s pretty quotable. I think for how long it is, it’s impressively quotable. I think you are gonna have people who can basically rattle it off, and it’s there. And yeah, I think, memorable, five out of five, because even if you’re not able to quote it word for word, if someone mentions the first sentence, you’re like, “Oh, I know what you’re talking about. The thing with the dirty magazines.” It’s really good in that way. So that gives us twenty-three out of twenty-five. Love that.

00:51:08 B: It’s a strong contender. Then we have our nine seed, which is another line from Harrow in Chapter Nineteen, where she says to Gideon, “‘I must no longer accept being a stranger to you,’” which is such a good pivotal moment. They’re– what is it? They’re having an argument, or something, and Harrow’s like, “Okay, we actually need to work together.” [laughs] Instead of fighting.

00:51:30 K: Exactly, yeah. It’s that pivotal shift in the book where they do have to work together, and after being against each other for so long at the start of the book, the stakes arriving at Canaan House, realizing that they’re actually gonna have to come together. It’s a very expected but really good moment.

00:51:47 B: I think memorability, though, one or two? Like, it’s a good line, but–

00:51:50 K: No, I don’t think it’s very memorable as a line. I think it’s more the context that is memorable, the fact that they have to start working together, less so the line itself, and I think–

00:52:00 B: Yeah. Quotability, it’s good. Maybe a three?

00:52:03 K: It’s a bit more quotable, then, but it’s probably not what people are quoting most in the book. But it’s kind of– you know, it’s short, it’s impactful.

00:52:11 B: I might knock memorable down to one, quotable two. Prose is good. I think this whole section is good, but nothing above a three. It’s not knocking my socks off.

00:52:20 K: I like the phrasing of it. I like the classic Harrow a little bit stilted, a little bit formal too. She’s not saying, “Okay, let’s be friends.” It’s, “I must no longer accept being a stranger,” you know what I mean? There’s such a slightly convoluted edge to it that I do really like.

00:52:36 B: I think characters, five out of five. It tells us a bit about Harrow. It’s a pivotal moment in their relationship. Story, maybe a four?

00:52:41 K: Mhm. Yeah. I’d give story a four or a five, to be honest. I think Gideon and Harrow finally starting to work together is a big story moment, so it’s got that significance going for it.

00:52:50 B: What does that give us? Sixteen. So sixteen out of twenty-five. So, our winner is, of course, the first line of the book.

00:52:57 K: Hard to expect to beat that so early on.

00:53:00 B: Although, that’s one of the closer matchups. Which, I think to me, is not really that close, but the Twitter users did not love the opening line. They were all about the romance. [laughs]

00:53:11 K: Yeah, I guess it depends what you’re pitting it against. It’s got a bit of an easier one in our bracket here that we’ve now drawn up. That brings us to our third matchup!

00:53:21 B: Which is the pool scene where Gideon says, “‘One flesh, one end, bitch.’” She repeats this line in the really sad scene at the end of the book, but I like this one a lot more. [laughs]

00:53:32 K: Yeah, we’re gonna focus on the pool scene, the fun part.

00:53:37 B: It’s just so good.

00:53:38 K: It’s just kind of everything.

00:53:39 B: Memorable, yes. Quotable, yes. Characters, five out of five. [laughs] I think the only thing I might not give it a five out of five for is prose, four out of five. It’s just not giving a lot. It’s a great line, it’s well-written, but it’s kind of like– I don’t know, that’s not its strong suit.

00:53:58 K: Yeah. It’s a classic Tamsyn thing where it’s got a mix of fanciful quote, you know, “One flesh, one end,” and then–

00:54:06 B: “Bitch!”

00:54:07 K: –you’ve got “bitch” thrown in, sort of thing. It makes it kind of fun, and it is a very good choice of the word pairings that she’s established in-universe for this saying, “One flesh, one end.” I think it’s incredible, iconic, great, memorable, all these things. But I agree, I think the prose points should probably go more towards some of the lines that are really demonstrating some of those skills more in depth. But it is great.

00:54:28 B: Yeah. And I think characters, five out of five, but maybe story, four out of five? Because it’s not necessarily advancing the overall plot quite as much as the relationship.

00:54:38 K: Yeah, there’s a lot more going on in that pool scene that is advancing the story, I would say more so than that line, but that line, for the characters, is just perfect.

00:54:45 B: So good. So that’s a twenty-three out of twenty-five. And then we have our thirteen seed. “‘Surprise, my tenebrous overlord!” said Gideon. ‘Ghosts and you might die is my middle name.’” So this is actually Gideon responding to Harrow’s line that we read earlier where she’s quoting Teacher about all the ghosts that will kill you. [laughs]

00:55:03 K: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I love “my tenebrous overlord.”

00:55:07 B: So this was originally my sixteen seed. Yeah, my original sixteen seed. But people on Twitter did quite like this one. And yeah, it’s quite cute. I don’t know about memorability. Maybe a two.

00:55:20 K: I mean, I feel like the “Ghosts and you might die is my middle name,” I do see tossed around a little bit. It’s not– well, it may be more quotable, then, I would say. It’s maybe more quotable than memorable. It’s quite a fun thing to quote. Yeah. Prose, I mean, Tamsyn’s got “tenebrous overlord” in there. “Tenebrous,” I don’t know if I’m saying that right.

00:55:35 B: It’s a three, I think. “Tenebrous,” yeah.

00:55:39 K: I think that’s kind of nicely snuck in there. Characters, it’s classic Gideon.

00:55:43 B: Absolutely, but wait, before we move on from prose, I do want to say, I feel like “my middle name” is a bit cliché and overused, which is why I’m not giving this a four, you know what I mean? Yeah, it’s a cute line, but it’s not like she’s rewriting the wheel. Wait– “rewriting the wheel”? [laughs]

00:55:56 K: No, that, to me, feels more like her sneaking in jokes or parlance from, you know, circa twenty-first century online, or not even online, just rhetoric to show that that’s still kicking around then. But yeah, it adds a bit more of a modern, sarcasm touch to Gideon, and I think it’s very classic Gideon in that way.

00:56:18 B: Characters, for sure, five out of five Gideon. Story, maybe a two. Or even a one.

00:56:23 K: Yeah, very little for story. Just kind of a good Gideon moment. Yeah.

00:56:27 B: Okay. What. Is. This. Ah, fifteen. That’s my brain working in real time. [both laugh] Alright, so our winner is the number four seed.

Now we’re on the last matchup of our, quote, unquote, “Eastern Conference,” matchup number four. And we start with the number five seed: “‘Nav, show them what the Ninth House does.’ ‘We do bones, motherfucker.’” [laughs] Which is Harrow and Gideon in Chapter Thirty-Six, which we went over earlier this episode. And I was accused, on our Patreon Discord, of underseeding this in my initial bracket, and it ended up being the number five seed according to the Twitter vote, but I don’t know. Honestly, don’t love this line. I get why people like it, but to me, I was like, “Oh, cringe.” [laughs] So I don’t know.

00:57:15 K: I think I had maybe less of a cringe reading than you did. I think I found it fun, but in a sort of, you know, it is classic Gideon, Gideon-isms, sort of thing. I think the “We do bones” thing is sort of funny, and we’ve obviously seen at this point all the bones we do, it’s nice to see Gideon getting on board with that rather than being like, “Harrow and her dumb bones.” So I think in that way it’s a good little bit of that team-up energy, again. You know, Gideon’s part of this now. But I agree, I think it’s fun, it’s obviously very quotable. I think we’ve got to give it five out of five for quotability. “We do bones, motherfucker,” I’m sure people are putting that on merch. Prose–

00:57:53 B: Sorry, I’m giving it a one.

00:57:54 K: Yeah, I think a two or a three.

00:57:55 B: I don’t like it!

00:57:56 K: Okay, a one? [laughs]

00:57:58 B: Can we compromise on 1.5?

00:58:00 K: Alright. I think– well, I guess, prose, there’s not really anything that stands out to me about the prose, necessarily. I think I just don’t dislike it as much as you, but it’s not really doing that much for me either, so that’s fine. Characters, I’d give it more, because I think it is sort of–

00:58:14 B: Yeah. This is a four.

00:58:15 K: –classic Gideon. Not that we don’t know Gideon at this point, but it’s a fun moment for her.

00:58:21 B: Story?

00:58:22 K: Story, I mean, it’s Gideon and Harrow teaming up in a fight.

00:58:23 B: Yeah, they’re teaming up and fighting. Maybe a four?

00:58:25 K: Like, it’s kind of fun. I wouldn’t say it’s massively important.

00:58:27 B: Maybe a three? Three or four?

00:58:28 K: Okay, yeah. I would say three. Yeah, yeah.

00:58:31 B: Okay, what is this?

00:58:33 K: Sorry to everyone who accused us of underseeding. [Baily laughs] You might not like this mathematical response we’re about to generate.

00:58:39 B: 18.5.

00:58:41 K: That’s just math, baby!

00:58:42 B: Yes!

00:58:42 K: That’s how numbers work.

00:58:43 B: It’s so objective. [laughs]

00:58:46 K: It’s so objective. We’re actually conducting rigorous scientific assessment here, and this is purely scientific results. I don’t know what to tell you.

00:58:55 B: I should’ve added a sixth category for cringe that gave negative points. [both laugh] But no.

00:59:00 K: No, we don’t need to be mean. We love every line in these books. We love.

00:59:07 B: Okay, and then the last contender in the Eastern Conference is our number twelve seed, which is from chapter Twenty-Four, right before the duel. It goes: “Gideon silently willed her necromancer to put her knucklebones where her mouth was and, for the first time in her life—for the first real time—do what Gideon needed her to do. And Harrowhark rose to the occasion like an evening star.” I love this line! It’s so good!

00:59:34 K: I love this line. I love it so much. I love what’s happening, I love the “Gideon silently willing,” I love that “Harrowhark rose to the occasion like an evening star,” that is such a good line.

00:59:45 B: God, so good.

00:59:46 K: It’s beautiful, it’s great. I really love this line.

00:59:50 B: I will say, in terms of memorability, this is probably only a three or a four.

00:59:54 K: Yeah, I think probably a three for memorability, and maybe– I don’t know, how do you feel about quotability? Because it’s a little bit long overall, but I do think “Harrowhark rose to the occasion like an evening star” is quite good.

01:00:05 B: It’s pretty good. Maybe 3.5 I can’t believe I’m getting into the half points. [laughs] Prose is a five, I love it. Characters is a five.

01:00:15 K: Prose is a five, characters is a five, story is a five.

01:00:17 B: I’m gonna go four for story.

01:00:18 K: The duel is such a good moment for them. Really?

01:00:20 B: Okay, no, you’re right, you’re right. Let’s do a five. The duel is big.

01:00:24 K: I think it’s such a– to me, it’s also such a key moment of them, again, being on the same wavelength, partnership, before they even get to the point of actually establishing that with each other formally. Or maybe after, my timeline– my chronology is fumbling around these quotes here.

01:00:38 B: No, no, you’re right, you’re right. Yeah.

01:00:41 K: But it’s just such a good moment for them of being on the same page and working together. I love this line so much.

01:00:45 B: That is 21.5. I agree. I think it’s awesome. That is the winner of our final matchup. An underdog! Twelve seed taking out the five seed. [laughs]

01:00:56 K: An underdog! Took out the one that everyone else loves. Sorry!

01:01:01 B: Sorry guys. We just don’t love it as much.

01:01:04 K: So that’s where we’re gonna leave the bracket this episode. We will be continuing this, because obviously there are many more iconic lines to keep going over, and we will be looking at what we’ve called “Western Conference” in our next episode.

(Upbeat, driving electronic music)

01:01:29 B: This week’s discussion topic is the Resurrection, and this was selected by our supporters on Patreon in a vote. So, if you’d like to participate in polls like these to decide what we cover in our upcoming episodes, please join us at Patreon.com/OneFleshOnePod.

01:01:47 K: Yeah, thanks to everyone who’s done that and who voted. It’s very fun to know that we’re chatting about things that people want to chat about with us, so we can’t wait to discuss it more after with you guys.

01:01:55 B: We’ll start with the basics. We have our timeline, our facts that we know, our facts that might be lies, about the apocalypse and the Resurrection. So, John’s first account for the reader is in Harrow the Ninth Chapter Twenty-Seven when Harrow asks God about A.L., this mysterious figure who she’s heard about but doesn’t know anything about. And John says, “‘She was the first Resurrection. She was my Adam. As the dust settled and I beheld what was left and what was gone, I was entirely alone. The world had been ended, Harrowhark. One moment I was a man, and then the next moment I was the Necrolord Prime, the first necromancer, and more importantly, a landlord with no tenants.’” It’s so dumb that he describes himself as a landlord. [laughs]

01:02:41 K: Yeah.

01:02:43 B: But yeah, he’s very vague. He’s very cagey. And Harrow says, ““Teacher, what destroyed the House of the First?’ ‘Not much. Rising sea levels and a massive nuclear fission chain reaction … it all went downhill from there.’” And he says A.L., quote, “‘was my defender and my sole companion, and my colleague in the scholarship of learning how to live again. It was bloody difficult. I had never been God.’” So still very vague, very cagey. [both laugh] And then the final little bit that we get about A.L. is, he says: “‘She lived to see what happened at Canaan House,’” which I’m pretty sure is referring to the process of the first wave of Lyctors. “‘And when the cost of Lyctorhood was paid, when the emotions were at their peak … we found out the price for our sin. The monstrous retribution. To be chased for our crime to the ends of the universe, to have our deed stain our very faces and follow after us like a foul smell. She died after that first terrible assault.’” Which we now know is really conflating what the Resurrection Beasts are actually trying to do with the whole process of Lyctorhood, because we know that all the Resurrection Beasts were killed by John in the apocalypse and maybe don’t actually care so much about Lyctorhood as they do about saving Alecto.

01:04:01 K: Yeah, it’s interesting that he tries to frame that as the sin, because also it’s something that, then, it makes Harrow complicit in, as well, that she’s ascended to Lyctorhood, she’s one of them, she’s committed the same sin that they’re all being supposedly punished and chased after for, rather than John acknowledging that it has to do with his own actions thousands of years before Harrow came into the picture. So it’s quite manipulative in that way too.

01:04:24 B: Well, and it’s him– the reason I’m bringing this up in the Resurrection discussion is because this is an event that happened prior to the Resurrection that he’s then trying to tie to the event, the ascent to Lyctorhood, that happened probably two hundred or a hundred and fifty years after. Which I find kind of interesting.

01:04:40 K: Yeah.

01:04:41 B: So yeah, that’s his first very vague account. We don’t really know how much of it is true. Parts of it are kind of true. But yeah, this is the story that God’s been telling himself for ten thousand years, and it’s just been softened, I think, over time.

01:04:53 K: Yeah. And now he has an audience of Harrow to tell it to, which, conveniently, makes himself look like a better person in all of it. [Baily laughs] Who knew? But there are some elements that we can identify that obviously are true from what he’s saying. He mentions rising sea levels, which, yes, is what prompted everyone wanting to get off the Earth, the cryo project. And then the massive nuclear fission chain reaction that he mentions as well, also true, because he set off a nuke in Melbourne and prompted nuclear responses from all around the world and caused a nuclear apocalypse, so he’s not taking responsibility for it and saying that, but that is a chain of events that did, in fact, occur.

01:05:31 B: Yeah. And then, as we mentioned, he implies that the Heralds were the ones to kill Alecto after the process of Lyctorhood, as though those things are causally related, but in reality, “She died after that first terrible assault” means that he switched her off. [laughs] So that time that they came to Canaan House after Lyctorhood might have had absolutely nothing to do with Lyctorhood at all, and we’ll talk about the Resurrection Beasts in a later episode a bit more, I think.

01:06:00 K: Yeah, it’s really quite a play on words, almost, to say that someone died after an attack, and obviously you would then take from that sentence that they died in the attack, when actually it’s like, “Oh, well, no, chronologically speaking, her death occurred after this other thing. Her death, which was actually at my own hands, and completely unrelated to it.” Like, it is quite a little bit of playing going on there.

01:06:24 B: Oh yeah. I also thought that calling Alecto his “first Resurrection” was a very odd thing to say because I couldn’t remember that Alecto died? I thought that she was just hurt and dying but didn’t actually die, but then, when I was prepping the notes for this episode, I re-read his account in Nona, and he does explicitly say that after he killed everyone on Earth for death-power, he says, “I put my hands around your neck,” and then, “I cupped your soul in my hands.” So, in between those two sentences he choked her to death, and then took her soul, absorbed it, made the Barbie body for the rest. Did you pick up on that? Because I fully was just like, I guess, in a fugue state reading this chapter.

01:07:02 K: [laughs] I think, to me, I had a memory of her death because I had a sense of, he killed everyone on Earth and sort of killed Earth in the process as well, and that there was a death of Alecto associated with that in the same way that we see all the life being drained out of other planets now, or a little bit different. But that was the sense that I had, that she had been killed in that moment, not necessarily– I don’t think I picked up on the between-the-sentence things that we’ve isolated here, but I think that was more the general sense of death that I associated with it.

01:07:33 B: Yeah, and I mean, obviously, I just had a complete misconception. If she’s a Resurrection Beast, she died! [laughs] I don’t know how he could have scooped out her soul without also killing her at the same time. So it obviously all makes sense.

01:07:46 K: Yeah.

01:07:47 B: Then we have John’s next, potentially more truthful account in Nona the Ninth. And I just wanted to quote this one response Tamsyn gave in 2022 in a Vox interview before Nona came out, where she says, “Nona is about a friend you know getting super, super drunk at the club, and you’re sitting with him in the local McDonald’s at midnight as he tells you a bunch of incredibly intimate details about something you always wondered about, and you’re torn between wishing you were not in this McDonald’s and egging him on, because you know he’s really, really going to regret telling you all this when he’s sober.” [both laugh] Which I feel like implies that John’s story here is at least more truthful than what he says to Harrow in Harrow the Ninth.

01:08:24 K: Yeah, exactly, that this is the drunk tale of things he’s gonna wish he didn’t say later, and there’s got to be an element of truth to it. I do really love how good Tamsyn is at coming up with really abstract, insane metaphors, in the same way that she had the thing about, “Nona the Ninth is about your cousin– or, the girl you have a crush on goes to camp and her cousin’s hot,” or whatever. I’m completely mixing it up, but where you read it before it came out, and you’re like, “What the fuck does any of this mean? This has nothing to do with the books we’ve read.” And then after, you’re like, “Oh, okay! I kind of see where you’re coming from. That was actually a sensical allusion,” or whatever. [Baily laughs] Yeah, she’s really good at that. [laughs]

01:09:02 B: I talked about potentially doing a B-segment about things that she’s said in interviews about the books, and are they true, are they not true.

So, the Resurrection story is covered in “John 1:20” and “John 5:4.” So things kind of break bad at the Greytown cult-slash-necromancy compound, which is presumably modern-day Canaan House. John’s been struggling to find and understand the human soul, so Cristabel kills herself, and John manages to find Alecto. And he reaches for her, but he isn’t quite strong enough to harness her power. So he says, quote, “You were the noise that was everywhere. … You drowned everything out. You were so huge and so complicated, and you were screaming. … That’s when I realised you were there. … I wasn’t holding two nukes on the line. I was holding three. And compared to you, the other two were birthday candles. You were screaming. I wanted you to stop, I wanted… I wanted you. I wanted you like a caveman wants a wildfire… or the sun. I thought you were going to take me, somehow. Purge me. Use me as an instrument. But you didn’t say anything… I was babbling, Show me. Come on. I’m ready. You kept screaming and screaming… like a baby in pain. So I tried to hurt you—I did hurt you. I reached out for you, and it hurt you… but I wasn’t strong enough. The caveman. The wildfire. The Neolithic priest staggering in front of the falling star.” I really like the wording there. I think it’s so good. [laughs] It’s just trying to explain his mental state in relation to her soul.

And it continues: “He said, I felt P— go. G— was the last one alive. I reached out and stopped G—’s heart. I’m still sorry it was Melbourne, honestly. Love a working tram service.” So, this, in relation to the previous paragraph, he very explicitly intentionally starts the nuclear apocalypse to get the thanergetic power from all the deaths to harness Alecto and take her power. That’s the thing that he’s been intending to do since he sensed her soul. His first thing was, “Oh, I must harness this.” And the nukes go off in response all around the world. He says, “God, that hurt you. That stung. I ate every single death. … In the body they’d paid me to puppet, I gave the command. … The world went down in dominoes. … One little nuke… then a lot of bigger nukes… Christ, why’d we have ’em? Nukes into nukes into nukes.”

01:11:13 K: So we’ll talk a little bit more about that element, the nuclear reaction, a little bit more later, because I do think it’s really interesting and there’s a lot of context that I maybe wasn’t tapped into when first reading this, but I do think this reveal again, too, of how directly responsible he was for everything, I think, in Nona the Ninth, is really interesting, because again, there’s a complete–

01:11:35 B: And his motivation is so clear with a close reading.

01:11:39 K: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s all about getting enough power to get Alecto and tap into her power, and kill and resurrect her, and all of these things, and that’s what he’s going for very directly. I think the way that it initially gets set up in Harrow, the sort of off-mention of it, like, “The world was in a horrible place. All these things were happening,” it is really horrific on reading again to see just how much of his own decision-making and choices in that moment are really alighted by that, and how much he’s told himself, over ten thousand years, that what he was doing was a reaction to circumstance rather than driven by any of his own desires for power.

And then he also says, as well, when he’s telling this story, how he kills some people before they die in the bombs. He says, “First, I became a demigod.” So this is not when he’s recognizing himself as a full god yet. This is when he’s just had the first wave of deaths. He hasn’t yet resurrected Alecto. And he says, “I nearly fell out of my body. I put my hand around half the world’s throats. Some of them I managed to snap before they were melted away by nuclear fire. I did them clean. Everyone died, but I helped a hell of a lot of them go before they knew anything had happened.” So again, he’s painting this in this very benevolent way, almost. Like, “We set off all these nukes, but I didn’t want everyone to have to die in nuclear fire. I killed them myself before they even knew it was happening.” Again, what you’re saying here is a responsibility for billions of deaths across the world. It’s not really being– it’s really interesting when I find so much in this telling of the story that drunk McDonald’s John has so much of what he’s saying is this, “I’m saying these things in this very sympathetic, woe is me, I was trying to do my best in these horrible situations,” sort of way, but the actions that he’s actually describing are very horrific over and over again.

But those deaths, it says, also weren’t enough, the ones from the initial nukes going off and all of that, so he continues. He says, “I drank them in, and it wasn’t enough. I needed those ships. I needed to extend my hand. I got it around the throat of the other half. I made them go away too. Then I had control of everything on the surface, but not the ships… birds flying above the fire… kids playing keep-away.” So, again, there’s the sense that it’s not just that nukes are going off and he’s trying to save people. He kills all these people, and it’s still not enough for him to have the power that he’s trying to amass. That is, again, the goal here that is being clearly stated over and over again, is he’s trying to kill enough people to have the power he needs to get Alecto and tap into her and resurrect her too. So it’s very clearly about that, over and over again.

01:14:15 B: Something that just occurred to me here as well is, you know, we don’t know to what extent everyone on Earth may or may not have died purely because of the nukes. It’s very plausible that they would’ve killed everyone in the end anyway, and he was doing people a service by helping them die painlessly. But he also has these incredible healing powers. If he’d been a completely different person with different motivations, could he have used this moment to instead protect people from the effects of the nukes and keep more people alive instead of just making everyone dead? [laughs] Well, yeah, but he didn’t.

And then, after having killed every single person, he does have enough power to explicitly kill Alecto, like I mentioned earlier. It goes: “I put my hands around your neck. I cupped your soul in my hands. I took you into myself and we became one.” But he can’t quite fit all of her in, so he takes what he can. He makes a body to house the rest of her. You know how that goes. And he makes her this Alecto body out of his ribs and his vomit, from dirt, from blood. We’ve already talked about this in our previous episode about John. And he continues, “As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you… I hid you in me. And when we were together… once the shaman had claimed the sun… I became God. It wasn’t enough.” So he’s achieved this goal of harnessing Alecto, but he also wants to kill everyone on the ships that are escaping. So he bites through the sun. He kills all the other planets. He says, “I sliced through Venus, Mercury, Mars. … I had to kill Jupiter and Saturn in a fucking hurry. … You and I went full fucking Hungry Caterpillar. We took Uranus… Neptune… crunched down Pluto.” And he was able to grab one ship, but didn’t manage to kill anyone on it before, quote, “They were gone… lost to me in time, forever,” presumably going into faster-than-light travel. So that’s how– yeah. A close reading of his motivations and actions during the apocalypse.

And then, before the Resurrection, we have this unknown time period after everyone on Earth is dead and it’s just him and Alecto. So he sits around in this nuclear winter with just Alecto for this unknown period of time. There’s lots of nuclear radiation all around the world. Thewinterstale on Tumblr has a great post on the timeline of radiation and the Resurrection. They say, “The John-and-Alecto, Alecto-and-John period is interesting. These two were having a gay old time making nuclear fallout snow angels, snacking on irradiated corpses, and weeping. For a brief period, the concept of time (as we understand it) didn’t really exist. Alecto was passing out when her body got too tired to function. … There was no society. Time was just one more man-made structure they temporarily lost in the apocalypse. We know, quote, ‘Anything that hurt them only hurt them for a little while,’ which I took to mean they were both healing instantaneously – but even the concept of ‘a little while’ is so freaking murky when you remember that Alecto is billions of years old. That’s barely something I can comprehend.” So we don’t know– I mean, they could’ve sat on Earth for, like, a thousand years before resurrecting anyone. [laughs] We have no idea how long that time period was.

01:17:19 K: But they do go on in that post, as well, to estimate how long it would’ve taken for the radiation to subside and for Earth to become habitable again based on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdowns. And so they note that with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they’re currently safe and habitable now: “Their background radiation levels are on par with those in unaffected countries.” But Chernobyl is still unsafe forty years later because of “the amount of reactor fuel involved in nuclear fission … which produced unique forms of radioactive waste, each with their own half-lives.”

01:17:50 B: I didn’t know that at all. Did not understand that. That is a cool fact. [both laugh]

01:17:55 K: Yeah, exactly. This is what I was saying. We’re gonna learn a lot of very cool things about nuclear power in this episode. Or at least a lot of things I didn’t know. This is maybe one of our more informative discussions.

They go one to say as well, then, that “presumably, the frantic, unplanned bombing of the entire Earth also involved these reactions and would probably be more severe than the one at Chernobyl,” and would be more severe close to affected nuclear power plants.

01:18:16 B: Yeah, which makes a lot of sense.

01:18:18 K: Yeah. And then they say, “A lot of other factors go into the amount of radiation, too, such as distance from actual detonation,” so it would be different in different parts of the Earth, then, we can assume. And they note that New Zealand’s pretty far from Melbourne, where the first bomb went off. A suitcase nuke is less radioactive than a nuclear bomb dropped from an aircraft. We don’t know if New Zealand got hit directly at any point, and there aren’t any nuclear power plants in New Zealand. The closest one is in Sydney, Australia. So that gives a sense of the distance that New Zealand, at least, would’ve had from where the nukes were going off across the world.

01:18:46 B: Yeah. And the reason this is important or interesting is trying to establish a baseline for that time period before anyone was resurrected, because you have to assume that John would not try to resurrect people into this completely irradiated Earth, but maybe he would, because he can heal them, but maybe he waited for the radiation to subside. So thewinterstale goes on to say that “nuclear radiation is most dangerous during fallout, beginning about ten minutes after detonation, and becomes less dangerous pretty rapidly. Radiation levels fall to one-tenth seven hours after detonation, one-hundredth forty-eight hours after detonation, and one-thousandth after two weeks. The most dangerous and radioactive element found in nuclear bombs has a half-life of a little over 30 years.” Although I do want to note that even if the radiation levels fall to one-thousandth, given the initial amount of radiation, that could still be an incredibly dangerous amount of radiation. [laughs] You know, you–

01:19:41 K: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes it sound very tiny, but– [laughs]

01:19:44 B: Yeah. Even X-ray technicians, the amount of radiation that they accumulate over their lives is absolutely miniscule, but they wear those lead vests, because it can still cause cancer, even in those miniscule amounts. But yeah, they go on to say that “theoretically, the earth could have been fully ‘safe’ and habitable for humans without god-like healing abilities as soon as sixty years after the bombings,” as an early estimate. They continue, “I could see John and Alecto waiting that period out before John attempted his first resurrection. However, I think it’s a bit more likely that he used his powers (which we know go beyond run-of-the-mill necromancy – we’ve seen him stop time) to speed things along. … He’s God and half a planet. He definitely has skills we haven't seen.” So, interesting idea. It’s possible they waited around before resurrecting people for, like I said, potentially a thousand years, or maybe they did it as soon as possible.

01:20:32 K: Anyway, we still have lots of questions left from this about the Resurrection, in terms of who gets resurrected, how many people get resurrected, how many people were originally killed, what is going on here with all of this. There’s a lot of information that we don’t necessarily have. We know that this unknown time period passes, and then John decides to resurrect some, but not all, of the people. He says in Nona the Ninth, “‘Resurrection is different from waking up. We’ll get them all back… some of them, anyway… or at least, the ones I want to bring back. Anyone I feel didn’t do it. Anyone I feel had no part in it. Anyone I can look at the face of and forgive. And my loved ones… The ones I left, I’ll bring back.’”

01:21:10 B: [laughs] He starts with “get them all back,” but he can’t even stick to this bold-faced lie for more than half a second. He maybe intended to resurrect everyone first, but as Cassiopeia said, he’s very vindictive, very spiteful. He only actually resurrects people who had no part in it, the betrayal of the trillionaires leaving on the ships. And he also wipes everyone’s memory before resurrecting anyone, even his closest friends. So, I think it’s fair to assume that he– since he wiped all of his friends’ memories, he probably wiped the memories of the other randoms he resurrected. He says, “‘None of them will have to remember anything. I know where remembrance lives in the brain, and he’” – meaning Gideon – “‘won’t have any of it.’” Partially a decision to spare them the trauma, I guess, but also, if the people he resurrected, just randoms off the street who he felt had no part in it, they would know him just as this bad cult figure. [laughs] So, in a way, it’s self-interest to wipe them.

01:21:11 K: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, in this resurrection he has remade himself as God, and why would he let anyone remember that there was anything other than that before that, right? Yeah, and so Harrow recaps some of all of this, talking through Alecto’s memories, and says, “‘You resurrect some of them. You wake up fewer still.’” So, the rest of them, we know, are still left in suspended animation to this day. She continues, “‘You start out with a few thousand, then, later, some hundred thousand, then millions, but never more than millions. You teach them how to live all over again. You teach yourself. You work out how to repopulate the installations on each planet—or to finish the work begun before the bombs, or to improve on it. It’s easy. You’re God. Your energy is limitless and you can sustain your theorems without a thought—forget about them—because she is so enormous, and you and she are one.’”

01:22:59 B: Yeah, so, coming back to something we’ve mentioned a couple of times about how God is not really a theoretician, he just does necromancy with his enormous power.

01:23:10 K: Harrow continues, “‘I want to understand why she was angry—I want to understand the mathematics, now that I have seen them for myself. I want to know how many of the Resurrection are left, and how many you began with, and what the discrepancies are. I want to know where you put them. They didn’t go into the River.’”

01:23:22 B: Mhm. So Harrow has all these very relevant questions. [laughs] Why is Alecto angry? How many people did John resurrect to start with, compared to all the people who were on the Earth? How many people from the Resurrection are still around? I guess the ones that haven’t been woken up yet. And what happened to the people who died in the bombs but weren’t resurrected because they didn’t go into the River? She implies that John, quote, “put them” – pardon me – “put them somewhere,” because they’re not in the River. I think it’s also possible that because they all died before John became God, they died this, quote, unquote, “natural death,” of people on Earth before the Nine Houses. Like, how people die now, before the events of the books. And there’s been some speculation that John created the River, and the River’s a weird artifact or creation of necromancy. So maybe that death at the time didn’t involve the River at all. So, yeah, possible that Harrow’s going at it a bit backwards because this Nine Houses magical death is all she’s ever known, right? So this is all set up for the harrowing of Hell that we will hopefully see in Alecto, and we’ll figure out what the hell’s going on with the River.

01:24:26 K: So, if some of the things that John was saying in his drunk McDonald’s talk were true beneath it all, however, there are also definitely still some discrepancies here, so we also wanted to chat about what those discrepancies are and what we still have to figure out what to believe. So, in the “John 20:8” chapter in Nona the Ninth, he says, “We knew the plan could work. The Mark-R cryo cans had room for eleven billion people, easy.” So there are, we can assume from that, eleven billion people on Earth before this part of the story begins. This is estimated to be the population of our Earth roughly around 2080 to 2100 based on current estimates, but we also kind of know that John is very much giving middle-aged millennial, so probably more likely to be 2030 to 2050-ish timeline in this book.

01:25:16 B: Yeah, I think people out there have done more detailed potential timeline reconstructions, but I think the main takeaway here is just that book timeline about forty years before our timeline.

01:25:29 K: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But then we know that, according to Wake and Cytherea, around ten billion people died in the nuclear apocalypse. In Gideon the Ninth in Chapter Thirty-Five, which we talked about last week, when Cytherea gives her speech, she refers to the “vengeance of the ten billion,” and then, in Harrow the Ninth, Chapter Fifty, John says to Wake, “‘You’re acting like a woman who very much wants me to end her life,’” and she says, “‘Telepathy. Did the ten billion give you that too?’” So we get these repeated references to “the ten billion,” “the vengeance of ten billion,” this idea that ten billion people died in the act that John committed before the Resurrection.

01:26:06 B: And it’s, I guess, a pretty solid number, because Wake and Cytherea– I mean, we know Cytherea worked with B.O.E. at some point, but they probably don’t agree on many things, but they agreed on this one number. One thing that we’re not quite sure about is how many of that ten billion are people who died versus were resurrected afterwards. Like, would Wake count resurrected people as people who were killed by John? I think probably yes, but Cytherea would probably be like, “Well, they’re alive.” [laughs] So I don’t know. But yeah, they agree on the ten billion number. John also agrees on ten billion people left behind on Earth by the trillionaires. He says in “John 1:20” in Nona the Ninth, “They’re cutting and running. They’re leaving ten billion people behind to die.” So this ten billion people number is pretty well-established, and he also says to Wake, when Wake asks him at the end of Harrow the Ninth how many people died in the bombs, he says, “All of them.” So we can be pretty sure that ten billion people were killed on Earth in the bombs, and around one billion people lived by escaping on the ships. But then, we know he didn’t resurrect ten billion people. Harrow says he resurrected “some,” so, could be anywhere from ten to under ten billion. [laughs] I feel like “some” implies less than half. She says he never resurrects more than millions, so probably way less than half, maybe less than a tenth of everyone who died.

01:27:25 K: Yeah, we definitely get the impression too just from the way that Houses are discussed across the books that the population is not massive in most of them, right? Or there’s certainly several where the population is quite small, so I think there’s probably not billions and billions of people spread out across them.

01:27:42 B: Yeah, exactly. So John woke up some fraction of these ten billion people. He kept most of them on ice, basically as insurance for later. He uses some to replenish the Ninth House. Also possibly as he was rebuilding society, he wanted to be able to control the numbers to not have more people than the society could support. And yeah, like Kabriya said, we don’t know the current population of the Nine Houses, but under one billion currently seems pretty reasonable. And the original resurrectees all had descendants and stuff, but he woke up a very small fraction of the people who died.

And then I wanted to quote this post by tanis-zed on Tumblr, who says, “Just did a little math, for fun. … You could pull ten Ninth-House-sized massacres every single day since the start of John’s empire and still not kill as many people as John Gaius. The massacre that led to Harrowhark is so small compared to what John did to become god that it’s barely a statistical error!” Which is pretty wild. The number was slightly corrected by inphront in the notes, but, yeah. There’s also someone else in the notes named embegember who said, “Popular factoid: everyday an average of 219 people get massacred for necromantic gain. This is a statistical error. The day of resurrection that had ten billion people massacred was an outlier and should not have been counted.” [both laugh]

01:29:01 K: Yeah, very, very different statistics that we’re going off of here. Which also makes it, then– it really puts into perspective any attempt to compare or relate the tragedy that led to Harrow gaining her necromantic powers and what John did in the Resurrection to gain his powers. Acting as if they’re the same in any which way– obviously not to say that one mass death is better than another, but the scale is very, very, completely different. And obviously, what John did was his own orchestration, and Harrow’s was not, it’s just this guilt that she carries with her. So it’s a very different circumstance in that way too.

01:29:37 B: Also kind of helps you conceptualize how big ten billion is. Like, ten Ninth-House-sized massacres every day for ten thousand years is a lot of fricking people.

01:29:45 K: Yeah. It’s a lot. Yeah, it’s like when they have those videos, being like– when people talk about millionaires and billionaires really interchangeably, but just getting your head around how much more a billion is and how absolutely insane that is. I think the average conception of that probably is a struggle.

01:30:01 B: Yeah. Yeah, like the piles of rice. I know what you’re talking about. [laughs]

01:30:05 K: Mhm.

01:30:06 B: It’s been theorized by some people that I’ve seen that John only brought back New Zealanders, which is a very funny and also plausible idea. Gothicenjoyer and ohjimmy78 on Reddit both point out that the cast of the book just consists of Polynesian ethnic groups, with the exception of Cam and Pal, according to Tamsyn Muir. So these are ethnic identities that only make sense in the New Zealand context. Gothicenjoyer says, “It’s possible that this is just Muir being a New Zealander and crafting her world from that perspective – which, valid, I guess, God knows American writers do it enough – but it seems significant that they’re almost all essentially a giant solar-system-wide Polynesian diaspora.” And ohjimmy78 points out that nobody picks up on any accents, and everyone uses New Zealand slang, so the House language might be New Zealand English. Very plausible.

01:30:56 K: Mhm. Yeah, I think that’s very interesting too. I think we’ll talk a bit more about getting into the New Zealand angle too, but I do think it’s something that gets a little bit lost sometimes in the interpretation of these books, and that is the context that Tamsyn is writing from, and that clearly does seem embedded into the cast of characters here in a way that could just be the background she’s writing from, but also is quite interesting in the context of the book and the Resurrection and the fact that that’s where John and them were from and the idea that that was potentially a specific choice on his part, to bring back that population is plausible to me. It makes a certain amount of sense. Believable, at least.

01:31:31 B: Yeah, like how many people live in New Zealand? Like four million? I’m looking this up, live, right now. [both laugh] “Population of New Zealand.”

01:31:40 K: Population’s another thing that I struggle to get my head around. Like, imagining, “What does it mean to have X amount of people in the city, or not?”

01:31:47 B: 5.124 million as of 2022. So, yeah. Maybe he brought them all back. [laughs]

01:31:51 K: Yeah. Maybe. So there’s a lot more to get into in the New Zealand angle of it all, but this is going to be a multi-part discussion in that we are going to continue into our next episode talking about the Resurrection and the apocalypse, but specifically getting a bit more into why it’s significant that Tamsyn chose to write a nuclear apocalypse originating in New Zealand and some of the historical and cultural context behind that decision that was pretty new to both of us until we got into it. So, that will be part two!

(Upbeat, driving electronic music)

01:32:24 K: Okay, bone of the week! So I have a bone for you. I think you will probably have a sense of where this bone – or bones, plural – is located in the body, but I’m curious just how much you’ll be able to tell us. And then we can talk about the ____ rating.

01:32:40 B: Okay!

01:32:41 K: This is not one that I pulled from the Gideon the Ninth. We are almost all the way through the Gideon the Ninth recap, obviously, and we’ve been running out of bones, hard as that is to believe. So this is– these are some bones from Harrow that I’m giving to you. Your bone of the week are the ossicles.

01:32:58 B: Oh, these are the ear bones! [laughs]

01:33:01 K: They are! They are bones in the ear. Can you tell us anything more about them?

01:33:04 B: The stapes, the malleus, and the incus.

01:33:07 K: Holy fuck! I didn’t think you knew the specific ones.

01:33:09 B: I know.

01:33:10 K: Fuck, this is the problem with you and your anatomy background. I’m like, “Okay, she’s gonna know they’re in the ear, but does she know much more about them than that?”

01:33:16 B: Well, I might be getting the Latin names wrong. The stapes, the malleus, and the incus–

01:33:20 K: Those are all correct. Ten out of ten. Three out of three. You’re golden.

01:33:22 B: It’s like the– [laughs] They’re named after their shape. There’s one that’s kind of shaped like a– the thing you put your foot in when you ride a horse? What the fuck is that called?

01:33:30 K: Stirrup.

01:33:31 B: Stirrup! And then one based off a hammer, and blah, blah, blah. So they’re these really, really tiny bones in the ear, and I believe what they do is they vibrate to transmit the sound signal from the eardrum to the brain? And that’s pretty much all I know. I think they’re the smallest bones in the human body.

01:33:45 K: Yes. Yeah, they are. They transmit sound vibrations from the eardrum to the inner ear. The other one that you mentioned is the anvil, is the other one.

01:33:53 B: Mmm, the anvil.

01:33:54 K: And they form a chain-like bridge that moves between the eardrum and the oval window, and so they are very instrumental, obviously, in transmitting sound and taking sound in. So that is what’s cool about them!

01:34:04 B: Wow.

01:34:05 K: Now that we know exactly what they are, because Baily knew what the three bones were, how sexy do you think the little tiny hammer, anvil, and stirrup in our ears are?

01:34:15 B: I have to go with not really that sexy. I mean, these little tiny bones, to me, they’re just kind of cute. They’re like chibi bones. [laughs] You know, like, the anime baby versions of our other bones.

01:34:26 K: [laughs] I think the thing is, if you said to me, “the hammer, anvil, and stirrup bones,” I would be like, “Those all do sound kind of sexy,” you know? We’re riding horses. We’re working in a forge. Give me some of those sexy bones. But actually, then, that’s not what they conjure, you know?

01:34:40 B: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, I think I have to go with a one or a two, honestly. These are obviously great and useful bones– well, okay, you know what, maybe I shouldn’t, because obviously–

01:34:47 K: Okay, but what about hearing? Audio, audio can be sexy.

01:34:50 B: Yeah, hearing, hearing– [laughs]

01:34:52 K: We are delivering a podcast in an audio format to our listeners.

01:34:53 B: Hearing is important.

01:34:57 K: Their inner ossicles are vibrating right now in their ears, and are we saying that that’s not something we care about whatsoever? I mean, I’m not saying I’m trying to deliver a sexy podcast here, but I’m saying we should pay more respect to the audio medium that we are dependent upon right now.

01:35:08 B: No, you’re so right. Oh, you’re so right and correct. Okay, okay, maybe more like a four.

01:35:16 K: Okay.

01:35:17 B: It’s a compromise between the fact that these bones are very cute and little to me, and have no sex appeal, and their role in the human sense of hearing, which is important in a sensual way.

01:35:26 K: Important to some people. Can be, certainly can be. Think of all those people listening to ASMR with their little bones vibrating in their ears.

01:35:34 B: Oh, yeah!

01:35:35 K: Transmitting those vibrations, you know? [Baily laughs] They’ve got a purpose.

01:35:39 B: Very true.

01:35:40 K: Alright, I’m glad that I’ve argued you up to a four for the ossicles.

01:35:41 B: Ossicles, four.

01:35:45 K: I didn’t realize how passionately I felt about them until we started talking, and I thought, “You know, actually, listening is sexy.”

01:35:50 B: That’s the beauty of bone of the week.

01:35:53 K: That’s our conclusion for bone of the week this week. Listening is sexy. And so are the ossicles, a little bit.

(Slow, groovy rock music)

01:36:02 K: Thanks for joining us this episode as we recapped the first half of Chapter Thirty-Six where we have the big final showdown with Cytherea, and we are crawling our way towards the horrible, tragic end of this chapter. We couldn’t quite bring ourselves to get there in this episode, but we promise we are gonna be there soon. And if you have thoughts and feelings about that, as we do, and want to chat about that, or any of our bone, iconic line bracket, or the Resurrection discussion, which we also just have absolutely so much to say about and will be continuing to talk about in our next episode, please do chat about it with us online. We really love hearing from you guys. You can find us at @onefleshonepod on Twitter, TikTok, and Tumblr, or email us at onefleshonepod@gmail.com. You can also, of course, support us on Patreon at patreon.com/onefleshonepod and join our Discord where we get to chat about all the subjects we covered in this episode, or anything else you want to talk about. We will be back next episode with, essentially, a continuation of all the same topics and chapters we talked about in this episode, because there is just so much to go over, and we are excited to get through more of it with you.

01:37:16 B: We’ll see you next time on One Flesh, One End.

(Slow, groovy rock music continues)

01:37:30 B: Thank you so much to all of our supporters on Patreon, and especially to Adrian J, Alex, Amber, Anne D., Spookybean, Duck, Bridget Lowery, Camille, Chel, Eli Swihart, Erin M., Esther Wright, George, Gina, Grace, Heather Cartwright, Jack, JJ, Turtle on Mars, Jess, Keisha, Ludwinas,

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