History Characters / TheLockedTombMain

* AmbiguousDisorder: Her full backstory indicates that she has some form of mental illness that has interfered with her life in the past -- aside from being suicidally depressed her entire life -- with an intense focus on rituals, a near phobic revulsion to being seen without her veil and facepaint, an inability to eat or drink anything with more than a mild flavor, and visual and auditory hallucinations. While she's not formally diagnosed, the fact that her symptoms occurred alongside the outset of puberty strongly suggest she has schizophrenia, along with trauma from her harsh upbringing; this is complicated however by the fact that she's [[HauntedHeroine also haunted]], with Ortus even suggesting she's never truly suffered hallucinations. (It appears to be six of one, half a dozen of the other; anything ghost- and Alecto-related is real, but her periods of hearing doors opening, footsteps, conversations, etc are mental illness.)

* AmbiguousDisorder:
** Nona is treated by those outside her family as being someone with either an intellectual disability (with traditional euphemisms like "simple" being used) or someone who has been through extreme trauma, and one who is effectively a child despite being 19. Nona herself doesn't mind being seen as stupid or that her friends are children, and even boasts about being unintelligent. However she does get extremely embarrassed by being seen overly childish by her friends or family, and has a recurring fear that if she gets too angry, she'll have a third tantrum and embarrass herself totally (since the first two don't really count).
** Her near total inability to pay attention to lessons and topics she finds uninteresting is suggestive of inattentive [=ADHD=] without being explicitly named.

* CameBackWrong: John told everybody that Alecto was the first resurrection, leaving it only to implication that he had ressurected a human and she'd come back something different. In truth, she was never human to start with.

* DreamWalker: In her frozen Tomb, Alecto seems to have the ability to travel through Harrow's dreams, as Harrow inadvertantly formed a connection with her when she broke into the Tomb as a child.

* MyGreatestFailure: Explored. Her selflessness causes her to [[ItsAllMyFault take responsibility]] for the deaths at Canaan House, especially Jeannemary. Although she doesn't say so directly, Gideon is clearly deeply remorseful over her inability to protect Jeanne, and mentions her and the other dead of Canaan House regularly, even after her own death. However, the people in question themselves don't blame Gideon at all, and other characters recognize her self-flagellation over it as the outlet for self-loathing that it actually is.

* OneHundredPercentAdorationRating: Excluding Gideon, all her subjects in the Ninth House are absolutely devoted to her.

* NeverFoundTheBody: The Emperor's forces fail to find her body at the end of the first book. Which is odd given it was last seen laying dead in a courtyard right next to where they found Harrow and Ianthe. It is eventually revealed that, at Camilla's urging, Blood of Eden took it when they took the survivors of Cannan House

* InTheBlood: Zigzagged. Despite having grown up never knowing either of them, Gideon became extremely similar to both her father, a sarcastic and sometimes abrasive person who never sees a situation so dire she can't crack a joke, and her mother, a ferocious and ruthless fighter whose also abrasive. From both of them she inherited a driving passion and a buried undercurrent of sharp seething rage. However, unlike them, while Gideon's charismatic, she's no leader, blames herself for failures and deaths around her rather than others, and when granted [[WhatYouAreInTheDark a chance to take revenge, like her parents were before her]], Gideon chooses to forgive and to sacrifice herself rather than others.

* TheHeroDies: Played straight before being subverted. ''Gideon the Ninth'' ends with Gideon choosing to sacrifice herself so that Harrow can become a Lyctor, a decision that s sets the tone for ''Harrow the Ninth'' to be a far more somber and remorseful story. However, Harrow was unwilling to Gideon die, and tore her brain apart to preserve her, and Gideon survived as a result. The result is a complicated Lyctoral bond that serves as one of the emotional and narrative cores of the remaining books, owing to it being further complicated by actions taken by John to partially undo it and Alecto posessing Harrow's body.

* ProperlyParanoid: Harrow can be said to be easily the most antagonistic towards the other Houses at Canaan House and she handles the first murderers much better than most of the rest of the cast.

* DidntThinkThisThrough: She helps Ortus and Glaurica to steal Gideon's spot on the shuttle and escape the Ninth, purely to spite and screw over Gideon. However, she's then left with the reality that the only possible replacement for Ortus as her cavalier during the Lyctor trials ''is the person she screwed over,'' and Gideon not only lacks the necessary training for a credible cavalier but hates Harrow's guts on a good day and utterly despises her now.

* BittersweetSeventeen: Harrow is seventeen in book one, and deals with such ComingOfAge trials as: leaving home for the first time, growing closer to her first crush, and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking trying to ascend to Lyctorhood to secure the future of her House]].

* [[BigBrotherInstinct Big Sister Instinct:]] Has towards Jeannemary Chatur in the first book [[spoiler: and is absolutely devastated by her death]].

* BlankSlate: Part of what makes [[DrivingQuestion Nona's identity]] such a mystery is that she was "born" after the events of ''Harrow the Ninth'' with seemingly no memories, little ability to care for herself, and a childlike mental state. By the time ''Nona the Ninth'', nearly six months after her birth, nobody is any closer to understanding what happened to make Nona the way she is.

** Although John pulled Gideon's soul away from Harrow's body, making her a revenant out of her corpse, some of Gideon still resides in Nona, shown primarily in her hands; they know how to do things Nona doesn't, like reflexively wielding weapons with a two-handed grip. They're the only feature of her body that Nona hates, viewing them as not belonging to her. What's described of the middle thoughts indicate they're more compassionate and ignorant than the other thoughts, and are implied to be part of Gideon.

** As another soul inside Harrow's brain, like Gideon in ''Harrow the Ninth'', Nona has a muddy, confused access to Harrow's memories, and seems to believe some of them are hers. She also has a few of Harrow's quirks, such as her dislike of eating and loving people's bones. Although Harrow's soul resides in the Tomb during the events of ''Nona the Ninth'', she experiences experiences Alecto's memories as a shared dream with John whenever Nona is unconscious, and part of her may reside in Nona as well as the bottom thoughts.

* SpiritAdvisor: She's clearly invested in Harrow's mental well-being and continued safety, for some unknown reason.

* {{BFS}}: Downplayed. Her WeaponOfChoice is a six feet long sword, but is a realistically proportioned Zweihander, and only stands out by virtue of being an infantry soldier's weapon when most cavaliers use rapiers.

In the years after the Resurrection, John would come to call her his cavalier, and reshape the Solar System he devoured into the Empire of the Nine Houses. However, when the Resurrection Beasts, the revenants of the Earth's sibling planets, returned to seek revenge against their murderer, his acolytes grew frightened and begged him to seal away Alecto, fearing she drew them. To both protect his inevitable death and acquiese to their demands, John created her a Tomb in the deepest cave of the Ninth, and locked her inside. In the thousands of years after, the Empire would come to view the Tomb as a sign of the apocalypse, that the Emperor's greatest enemy was sealed within, and that its opening would mean the end of the world.

* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: In ''Harrow the Ninth'', it's revealed that Harrow's dreamed of the Body often since childhood, and hallucinated her in the year of madness following her parents suicides, before the visions return in full after she becomes a Lyctor. She believes they're hallucinations since others don't react to her presence, but the Body sometimes speaks to her with warnings and knowledge Harrow doesn't have. The ending of the book seems to firmly settle on her visions being real.

* WildCard: What Alecto is, what her abilities entail, and what her motivations are, even if shes a fully conscious person or something else entirely, who else she's working with, and why she seems to have taken to watching over Harrow are all major questions raised throughout ''Harrow the Ninth''

* DarkSkinnedRedhead: Like her mother, Gideon has bright red hair and dark skin.

* StrongFamilyResemblance: Double subverted. ''Harrow the Ninth'' teases that Gideon is related [[RedHerring to Gideon the First]], who, like her is tall, muscled, and a DarkSkinnedRedhead, when she's in fact the daughter of the Emperor and Commander Wake. In ''Nona the Ninth'', Pyrrha Dve notes she's nearly identical to her mother in appearance, having the same vibrantly red hair, but her brows, eyes, and crooked smile are from her father.

* AmnesiacDissonance: Nona is a part of Alecto that is kind, happy, loving, and loved, and she is consequently terrified of going back to being Alecto, to the point where she's quite eager to die as Nona rather than go back.

** Although John pulled Gideon's soul away from Harrow's body, making her a revenant out of her corpse, some of Gideon still resides in Nona, showing up primarily in her hands; they're the only feature of her body that Nona hates, viewing them as not belonging to her. They know how to do things Nona doesn't, such as reflexively wielding weapons with a two-handed grip. The middle thoughts are more compassionate and naive than the other thoughts, and are implied to be part of Gideon.

** As another soul inside Harrow's brain, like Gideon in ''Harrow the Ninth'', Nona has a muddy, confused access to Harrow's memories, and believes some of Harrow's memories are hers. She also has some of Harrow's quirks, including her dislike of eating and a love of people's bones. Although Harrow's soul resides in the Tomb during the events of ''Nona the Ninth'', she experiences experiences Alecto's memories as a shared dream with John whenever Nona is unconscious, and part of her may reside in Nona as well as the bottom thoughts.

* LeakingCanOfEvil: Throughout ''Harrow the Ninth'', Harrow's visions of Alecto draw attention to the frost clinging to her corpse. Throughout the course of the story, the ice melts into dew and eventually water, and it's not clear if this is just Harrow's psyche imposing on her or if Alecto really is slowly escaping her prison.

Camilla and Palamedes lost Gideon's body some six months ago, and it shows up in the company of Ianthe Naberius. While they initially believe that it might be an empty vessel for whatever soul is in Nona, upon recovering it they discover that Gideon is still in there, animated by the Emperor but also still dead. Gideon--or Kiriona Gaia--is even more acerbic than usual, fully on board with the Emperor's plans, but also even more heartbroken than before.

* DoesNotKnowHisOwnStrength:

* TheEmpath: Nona is capable of reading voices and body language as nearly perfect indicators of emotion and intent on a subconcious level. It extends to being able to perfectly mirror other people's actions which Nona is unable to describe any better than simply as "watching how they move". She has trouble with people who have warring emotions or those who detach from their emotions, and Kiriona Gaia confuses her, as Kiriona's tangled emotions and overwhelming sadness are too much white noise for her to parse.

* LikeYouWereDying: Nona's effusive happiness comes from the secret knowledge that her days with her family are numbered, and that each remaining one is an impossible treasure. As a soul possessing Harrow, she's burning Harrow to pieces and her time runs out as the book progresses, barely able to keep Harrow's body together by the end of the book.

* RecurringDreams: Nona has the same dream every night: Gideon embracing Harrow while forgiving her in Canaan House's pool. The very first thing she has to do in the morning is answer a barrage of questions from Camilla about it.

* AmnesiacDissonance: Nona is a part of Alecto that is kind, happy, loving, and loved, and she is consequently terrified of going back to being Alecto, to the point where she's quite happy to die as Nona rather than go back to being Alecto.

** Although John pulled Gideon's soul away from Harrow's body, making her a revenant out of her corpse, some of Gideon still resides in Nona, showing up primarily in her hands; they're the only feature of her body that Nona hates, viewing them as not belonging to her. They know how to do things Nona doesn't, such as reflexively wielding weapons with a two-handed grip. The middle thoughts are also implied to be the kind and naive parts of Gideon.

!!! Annabel Lee, Annie Laurie, First, Gaia, Corse of the Locked Tomb

* HurricaneOfEuphemisms: John, and consequently, his Lyctors, use a variety of terms other than her name, and have had 10,000 years to accumulate them. First, One, A.L., "Annabel Lee", "Annie Laurie", and so on. Harrow adds in the Body, Corse of the Locked Tomb, and many more, having never known her name in the first place; Gideon, [[ClingyJealousGirl being jealous]], throws in more insulting terms as well, like "ice-lolly bimbo", and "big slut".

* MeaningfulName: In Greek mythology, Alecto was one of the Furies, born of Gaia and the castrated god of the Sky, Uranus, and representing unceasing anger, said to punish murderers along with her sisters. Little wonder why a man who chose the name Gaius named her as such at the beginning of his galaxy spanning endless war of revenge against those who abandoned Earth to die.

-> '''Ortus''': You are the most worth heroes the Ninth could muster. I truly believe that.\\\
%%

* BashBrothers: She has a strange fraternal relationship with Ianthe as God's Tower Princes, being something between best friends and brothers who complain about their father's prolonged midlife crisis, though Kiriona reveals this and then immediately betrays her.
* CameBackWrong: Kiriona is very much not the Gideon we loved and knew in the previous books. Some may be due to not seeing her snarky but often sympathetic internal narration at all. Otherwise it may come as a result of inhabiting a dead body, not having all of her own soul, or just becoming numb after losing Harrow. She's basically an emotionless husk being driven entirely by boredom and despair, she doesn't even notice Camilla wearing her sunglasses, react to Palamedes calling her a friend, wields a rapier without complaint, and worst of all, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking she's now best friends with Ianthe]].

* GreenEyedMonster: Openly and rampantly jealous of Nona and Alecto, who gets every scrap of devotion and loyalty Harrow can muster.
* HeelFaceRevolvingDoor: Who, if anyone Kiriona is loyal to throughout the book is unclear, and changes frequently. At first she's just a corpse, then an antagonistic prick who Troia Cell needs but doesn't recognize. When they reach the Ninth, she reflexively attempts to save her former house, before haughtily recommiting to their mission. On the threshold of the Tomb, she performatively and loudly double crosses Troia Cell to join Ianthe, but immediately triple crosses Ianthe, proclaiming her intentions to kill Alecto to save her father, then seemingly abandons that as well in favor of her devotion to Harrow.
* JerkassHasAPoint: Although she does so in a fashion that infuriates Nona, she's the first person openly state what's become obvious to everyone: Nona clearly isn't Harrowhark, ''can't'' be her, and is someone else. She is also the first person to confront her about being Alecto.
* LivingMacGuffin: Principally important in the middle portion of the book is her role as the key, being retrieved so that Eden can, at long last, open the Tomb, with a secondary need to save Nona's life. That she ends up alive inside her own corpse comes as a shock to everyone.
* MeaningfulRename: Renamed by her father as Kiriona Gaia, with a whole host of attendant titles. "Kiriona" is a transliteration of "Gideon" into Maori, as seen in translations of the Bible. She answers to both Kiriona Gaia and Gideon Nav, and claims she barely remembers she's supposed to be Kiriona, but given that Nona doesn't know Gideon, the narration in ''Nona'' opts to refer to her primarily as Kiriona.
* OneSteveLimit: Part of why John renamed her presumably had something to do with the fact that he already had known somebody named Gideon for 10,000 years, who he thinks is still alive.

* PerspectiveFlip: Much of Gideon's heroic attributes when seen as the protagonist in the prior two books are flipped in Prince Kiriona; her constant sarcasm and innuendo is abrasive and callous, her tendency to lash out is taken as deep insult instead of misplaced self-loathing, and her eagerness to fight is deeply sinister. Nona, a character who is eager to love and be loved, takes an immediate disliking to her.
* RedHerring: Thinking Nona is Nav and Kiriona's stoic reapparance beside Ianthe wearing Naberius, Troia Cell assumes that she's merely a shell being puppeted by Ianthe, and that returning Nona to Gideon will restore her to her prior self. Kiriona awakens to destroy the notion, careening the last third of the book in an entirely different direction.
* SourOutsideSadInside: Although she's an abrasive jerk to her previous friends, Nona notes her every motion screams that Kiriona is completely miserable, the saddest person she's ever seen.

* UndeadAbomination: Whatever her parentage had made her before, Gideon Nav was ultimately just a gifted swordswoman who was difficult to kill. As Kiriona however, her body has been heavily altered in her undeath to make it effectively impossible to draw her blood; she lacks a heart, her blood turns to ash outside her body, her dead skin is as hard as steel, and her bones are even harder.

* VengeanceFeelsEmpty: When given the opportunity to kill Crux, a man who saw her raised from an infant and never offered her anything but abuse and disgust, going willingly to his overdue death, she does so, and then nearly has a panic attack from how little she feels from doing so.

* LoveAtFirstSight: For the Body inside the Locked Tomb, effectively TheAntichrist of the Empire's religion, and one of the reasons Harrow wanted to become a Lyctor and safeguard the Tomb.

-->'''Muir:''' "Harrow is named very specifically for the harrowing of Hell. 'Hark' is one of those terrible, portentous words that always precedes an awful time, in the old sense of 'awe'. Hark! A herald angel. Hark! From the tombs, a doleful sound."

* SingleTargetSexuality: Discussed. Gideon believes that Harrow incapable of loving anyone other than Alecto, the beloved Body she's revered since she was a child. From what is shown of Harrow's perspective, it's mostly, but not totally true; Harrow still experiences attraction to other women in moments of weakness, but resists Ianthe's affections when she's lucid for this reason. However, it's all but directly stated that Gideon is the sole exception, though presented in a way where Harrow herself doesn't fully admit it. Ianthe interprets Harrow's MemoryGambit as a desperate act of love, three of her {{Elseworld}} fantasies put her in the role of a romantic partner to Gideon, and she [[WhenSheSmiles smiles helplessly over Gideon]] in the final chapter of ''Harrow the Ninth''.

Harrow spends most of the book as John's companion, listening to her tell the story of how he saved the Earth. She truly reappears only in the epilogue, after Nona's soul has left her body.

* LoveAtFirstSight: Harrow has been in love with the Body since the first time she saw her when she opened the Locked Tomb as a child.

* ObliviousToLove: She doesn't truly comprehend that Harrow is in love with her, not reacting at all to when Harrow attempts to kiss her, and becomes confused when Harrow attempts to do so, and not having any answers when Kiriona corners Nona and asks her point blank if she loves Harrow.

* InTheBlood: Despite having grown up never knowing either of them, Gideon became extremely similar to both her father, a sarcastic and sometimes abrasive person who never sees a situation so dire she can't crack a joke, and her mother, a ferocious and ruthless fighter. From both of them she inherited a driving passion and a sharp seething rage against the world and all its cruelty.

* CameBackWrong: Kiriona is very much not the Gideon we loved and knew in the previous books. Some may be due to not seeing her snarky but often sympathetic internal narration at all. Otherwise it may come as a result of inhabiting a dead body, not having all of her own soul, or just becoming numb after losing Harrow. She's basically an emotionless husk being driven entirely by boredom and despair, she doesn't even notice Camilla wearing her sunglasses or react to Palamedes calling her a friend and wields a rapier without complaint, and worst of all, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking she's now best friends with Ianthe]].

* HeelFaceRevolvingDoor: Who, if anyone Kiriona is loyal to throughout the book is unclear, and changes frequently. At first she's just a corpse, then an antagonistic prick who Troia Cell needs but doesn't recognize. When they reach the Ninth, she performatively and loudly double crosses Troia Cell to join Ianthe, but immediately double crosses her again, proclaiming her intentions to kill Alecto to save her father, then seemingly abandoning that as well in favor of her devotion to Harrow.

* UndeadAbomination: Whatever her parentage had made her before, Gideon Nav was ultimately just a gifted swordswoman who was difficult to kill. As Kiriona however, her body has been heavily altered in her undeath to make it effectively impossible to draw her blood; she lacks a heart, her blood turns to ash outside her body, and her dead skin is as hard as steel and her bones are even harder.

!!Gideon Nav / Gideon the Ninth / Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia

%%[[caption-width-right:350:figure out a good line to go here]]

[[caption-width-right:350:"I love you."]]

* EatingTheEyeCandy: Nona loves watching bodies, and loves easily; she loves all features of bodies from bones, muscles, and eyes, to scars and burns and tattoos. She has a long-standing crush on Camilla and develops another on Pash, shamelessly attempting to flirt with her which only disgusts Pash and eggs her on further.

!! The Earth / Alecto / A.L. / The Body

%% [[caption-width-right:350:some caption text]]

A mysterious new personality who wakes up in Harrow's body almost six months before the start of ''Nona the Ninth''. She serves as that book's primary protagonist and third-person narrator, and the question of her true identity drives much of its plot.

* PasteEater: While she has to be cajoled into eating most food, she has no problem chewing pencils to bits or taking bites out of erasers.