Characters / The Locked Tomb The First House

The Locked Tomb Series | Gideon the Ninth | Harrow the Ninth | Nona the Ninth

Main Characters | The Sixth | Secondary Characters | The First House | The Nine Houses | Non-Empire Characters

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NOTE: Due to the large amount of revelations tied to the First House, this page contains unmarked spoilers for all works in the series, including Nona the Ninth.

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One for the Emperor, first of us all;
One for his Lyctors, who answered the call;
One for his Saints, who were chosen of old;
One for his Hands, and the swords that they hold.

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The First House

THE EMPEROR
HIS LYCTORS
AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CANAAN HOUSE

In General

• The Ageless: All members of the First are immortal, though still capable of being killed.
• Ambiguous Situation: The Unwanted Guest reveals that souls are changeable and permeable - after such a short amount of time, Naberius's characteristics have bled into Ianthe without her realizing it, some of his opinions and memories coloring hers. With how much longer it's been for the other Lyctors, they must be far more messily intermingled with their cavaliers and may have taken on more of their traits.
• Back from the Dead: The first ten disciples of the Emperor were part of the Resurrection, and John knew some of them before he became God.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Lyctors are noted to be capable of doing spacewalks without a space suit. The Emperor can do the same — his inner sanctum in the Mithraeum gets decompressed when danger calls.
• Cryptic Conversation: Exaggerated. As a result of having known each other for millennia, the First sometimes conceal conversations in front of others by dropping into a mostly silent shorthand, and seem fully capable of conversing fluently while doing so. Witnesses are, naturally, completely baffled.
• Deck of Wild Cards: Augustine, Mercymorn, Pyrrha-in-Gideon, Cassiopeia, and Cytherea all come to turn on their Emperor. Even Gideon had some degree of friendly contact with the head of Blood of Eden.
• Dwindling Party: Aside from the Emperor, there were eight Lyctors originally, reduced to seven with Anastasia's failed ascension. 10,000 years of fighting Resurrection Beasts later, there are four. The plot of Gideon the Ninth begins because the Emperor badly needs new ones. By the end of Harrow the Ninth, only Pyrrha Dve, the leftovers of Gideon the First, is left of the original seven, and she's turned against the Emperor, leaving only Ianthe as his last and newest Lyctor.
• Healing Factor: Lyctors and the Emperor all possess one as a prerequisite of their immortality. However, it has limits; severed limbs don’t grow back all the way, and decapitation or destruction of the brain will always kill them.
• Heroic Sacrifice: All of the Lyctors' cavaliers submitted to be killed, believing it was the only way for their necromancers to become Lyctors. Finding out that this was not the case is a big deal to Mercy and Augustine.
• Immortality Immorality: To ascend, Lyctors have consumed the souls of their cavaliers, marking them forever with an indelible sin that causes the Eldritch Abomination Resurrection Beasts to chase them around the entire universe; whatever the Emperor did to attain his own immortality is implied to have been far greater and far worse.
• Killed Off for Real: At the time of Harrow the Ninth, three Lyctors have died due to fighting Resurrection Beasts. Ulysses physically wrestled Number Eight into the mouths of Hell and was dragged down with it, Cassiopeia lured the corpus of Number Seven into the River and was devoured by the ravenous ghosts (the Beast emerged unscathed twenty minutes later), and Cyrus died by drawing Number Six's physical manifestation directly into a black hole. Also, every cavalier except Pyrrha.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Of the original eight acolytes to join John before the Resurrection - the ones who became Augustine, Alfred, Mercymorn, Cristabel, Gideon, Pyrrha, Cassiopeia, and Nigella - all had at least some and possibly all of their memories of their lives before the Resurrection removed by John, just as everyone else he brought back without memories. This was so they wouldn't ask themselves - or him - any hard questions.
• The Lost Lenore: All of the Lyctors have mourned their cavaliers for millennia, several of whom were in romantic relationships with them.
• Love Dodecahedron: They've all been around so long they've all been with each other innumerable times to cope with the loneliness. Even the Emperor gets sucked in sometimes. Only Gideon the First stayed out of it.
• Meaningful Rename: All of John's original disciples were symbolically renamed by him as part of the Resurrection, retaining the first initials of their first names.
• The Needless: The conditions of Lyctoral immortality mean they have internal, limitless supplies of thanergy and thalergy. They don’t need food and they don’t need to breathe, though their sanctuary is set up to allow them to do both, and can survive any injury that doesn’t destroy or separate the brain. The only things Lyctors strictly need are water and sleep.
• Our Liches Are Different:
  • Lyctors are heavily inspired by the concept of liches, and Muir's recommended pronunciation (LICK-tor) emphasizes it. Like liches, their immense necromantic power was created primarily as a means of immortality, and they are the ultimate form of necromancer. However, unlike typical liches, they aren't undead, and their source of power comes from a secondary soul preserved and eternally consumed inside them.
  • God is a closer example to the trope as the Necrolord Prime, with his Resurrective Immortality and supreme necromantic power causing him to be worshipped as a divine figure.
• Phantasy Spelling: Spelled "Lyctor" instead of "Lictor" (a Roman title for a bodyguard and enforcer to an official) because they're created by the lysis of souls. Specifically, the Petty Lysis of a cavalier's soul being absorbed by a necromancer's, rather than the true fusion of a Grand Lysis, as theorized and ultimately performed by Palamedes and Camilla.
• Pimped-Out Cape: The distinguishing feature of office of the First are white robes that are almost translucently thin and have a rainbow sheen; while still technically robes, they fit more into this trope, given the Emperor and his Lyctors often wear them hanging off their shoulders.
• Really 700 Years Old: All but the newest members of the First are over 10,000 years old or dead.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: One of the few things that can kill Lyctors, aside from total bodily destruction or the direct death of their soul in the River.
• To Absent Friends: The main way information about the deceased Lyctors and cavaliers is conveyed has been through anecdotes and comparisons shared by the Lyctors who out lived them, especially for the cavaliers.

God

The Emperor

God / The Emperor / John Gaius

The supreme deity and ruler of The Empire, the Necromancer Divine, King of the Nine Renewals, our Resurrector, the Necrolord Prime.

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• Ambiguously Human: While he was once human and mostly appears as one, God's humanity after the Resurrection is vague at best. His body remains human, but he's capable of full conscious thought and action while completely disintegrated, and he shares the same soul as Alecto.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: After recovering from Mercy killing him, he kills her and individually demands every person in the room swear to his service or be killed in turn, though he tells an angry Gideon Nav that she's exempt, because he didn't want to give his daughter such an ultimatum the same day he'd first met her.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Divine and beneficent and nearly supernaturally patient up until his Lyctors finally confront him over the myriad of lies he's fed them and then are not mollified by his apologies, whereupon the veneer vanishes. Best shown in his reaction to Gideon Nav, a daughter he never knew he had. He treats her gently and fatherly initially, and afterwards discards her as just a complication of Harrow's loyalties who he neglects to kill primarily because it would be tacky to kill your child the first day you've met them.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Inverted, then played straight. His near totally black eyes are his most notable physical feature, with his irises being slightly iridescent and surrounded by a white ring, while the sclera are matte black. And, at least within the Empire, he's viewed as divine and beneficent. They ultimately turn out to be eyes he took from Alecto when he merged their souls, and fit his true personality; his original golden eyes were a sign of the deep love the Earth had for him, while his stolen eclipse eyes are a symbol of his rage, hatred, and lust for power.
• Broken Pedestal: He's God, and also a deeply manipulative man who's spent countless generations lying to his Lyctors.
• Cataclysm Backstory: The Resurrection, and the events that preceded it, reshaped the planets that were the Nine Houses and fundamentally changed John Gaius into God, The Emperor.
• The Champion: The very Earth itself gave him the power over life and death because he was her champion, always fighting to try to save her, no matter what. She'd come to regret the decision.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Tamsyn Muir has stated that she envisioned him as Taika Waititi.
• Complete Immortality: Even when Mercymorn completely vaporizes him, he was still alive enough to work his necromancy to reassemble himself a la Dr. Manhattan in just a couple minutes.
• Consummate Liar: Combined with Self-Serving Memory—he lies to his Lyctors, he lies to Harrow, and he even lies to himself. He as much admits to Augustine that he doesn't see a difference between the truth and whatever he tells himself is true.
• Control Freak: He generally comes across as quite lax, even sloppy, but in the 'dream' in Nona The Ninth he hates to relax his control of things enough to sleep. After recounting a point where he'd "accidentally" killed a hundred people he says "Guys as careful as me don't make mistakes." Might also be why, despite killing ten billion, he only ultimately resurrects a few million people.
• Cult: His own account of his origin in Nona casts him as a typical modern cultleader. A man with a god complex who surrounded himself by acolytes, including a loyal inner circle, operating out of a private and secretive compound which was even raided by the police at one point. Unfortunately for everyone, John could actually back up his god complex.
• Demiurge Archetype: What his full backstory in Nona ultimately reveals; rather than being God, he was a man with granted an enormous gift by the Earth, who developed a burgeoning god-complex; who discovered an enormous all powerful soul that he coveted, ate, and condensed into Alecto the First.
• Disproportionate Retribution: To be sure, he had legitimate cause way back when to resent "the trillionaires" trying to escape Earth by themselves instead of helping the whole population, but he himself prioritizes punishing them high over saving anyone else and has been waging war on their descendants with the same ugly resentment for ten thousand years, taking Sins of Our Fathers to a ludicrous degree. Especially when you consider that there were only six trillionaires on those ships and thousands of others - he's punishing their distant descendants for the sins of six long-dead people.
• Drowning My Sorrows: According to Ianthe and Kiriona, he's spent the entirety of the gap between Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth drinking heavily and sleeping with basically everyone around him, wallowing in the grief of being betrayed by and killing two of his Saints.
• Elemental Motifs: Light; his necromancy manifests as bright white light, the First's colors are mother-of-pearl, and he literally powers the Sun with his necromancy.
• Elemental Powers: A limited example; in his ascension to becoming God, he placed the soul of the Earth inside himself, and is capable of manipulating the rocks and waters of its surface, as he demonstrates to Harrow in Nona the Ninth.
• Evil Is Petty: He's a completely average guy who wants to be seen as a wise mentor and honorable leader without putting in work to actually be either of those things, letting his Lyctors slowly succumb to bickering and loathing and apathy without trying to keep them together. He pursues an ongoing grudge against the Blood of Eden, enabling a genocide against them out of what is essentially petty bitterness. He lies, but not with intentional malice, and seems to lose track of what the truth is even to himself. Worst of all, he makes references and tells jokes that only he would understand in conversation with others. For someone who rules over an immortal necromantic empire that kills planets, and who was responsible for killing all human life on Earth with nuclear weapons and necromantic power, he seems to ultimately be a very mediocre person with far too much power.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Harrowhark notes that God looks like an ordinary, unremarkable man. Only his eyes give away who he is.
• Fatal Flaw: While John has many flaws, the one that kickstarted the entire series is his obsession with vengeance, which Cassiopeia (when she was still C— instead of a Lyctor) called him out on. Given the chance, he will always prioritize retribution and punishment, even if that means passing up the chance to actually make things better.
• Fan of the Past: Frequently refers to contemporary internet memes and pop cultures, 10,000 years in the future. Notably, these references would be dated even for him, as he lived during a time when human population had increased to ten billion and other planets had started to be colonized.
• Fantastic Drug: Describes thanergy as being stronger than drugs, and his Jumping Off the Slippery Slope moment has him kill several dozen of police and bystanders, partially just to experience the head rush and power trip.
• Finger Poke of Doom: All that he does to kill Mercy is pat her on the back to make her entire chest explode, and flick her on the back of the head to destroy her brain beyond what Lyctorhood can heal.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: A simple boy from Aotearoa^note New Zealand with an extraordinary intellect who loved the earth so much that it gifted him with power over the dead became the 10,000 year old Emperor and God.
• Galactic Conqueror: According to Augustine, he's spent the past 10,000 years conquering the galaxy primarily as a campaign of symbolic revenge.
• God-Emperor: In the Nine Houses, the Emperor is God, with a capital G and all that entails.
• God Is Flawed: Explored; within the Empire he's viewed as a supreme being, but to those around him, he's also clearly still a man despite his supreme powers and responsibilities. Consequently, he's prone to getting caught up in all the details of running a 10,000 year old galactic Empire, and not focusing on the critical issues, a fact which lets Cytherea's plans escape his notice and leads to the events at Canaan House.
• God Is Evil:
  • His true nature in Harrow the Ninth; he's ultimately revealed to be deeply selfish, manipulative, and operating from his warped morals to single-mindedly pursue bloody revenge, all while lying for millennia to even his closest allies, who sacrificed everything for him.
  • Exaggerated in Nona the Ninth, where it's revealed that he ascended to godhood by murdering all ten billion people on earth, and using the power to consume the planet's soul.
• God Is Good: At least according to everyone in the Nine Houses. It's also how he presents himself in the epilogue of Gideon the Ninth, and throughout much of Harrow the Ninth.
• Human Sacrifice: The truth of the Resurrection and the ten billion is that he ate them in an attempt to consume Earth's soul, which served to make him God.
• Humble Hero: It's implied that he finds all the reverence around him rather tiring, but he feels it's necessary to keep the Empire running. Then again, even when telling Harrow not to worship him he makes it clear what he is to his Empire.
• Hypocrite: A myriad ago he and his team were outraged by the idea that not everyone could be saved and that the people who'd helped drive Earth to this point would be the ones to escape it. Ultimately, when they cut and run John kills everyone who's left to try to punish them, rather than making any effort to save anyone at all.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Explored. John counters the accusations against him, of concealing a true Lyctorhood, of how Earth died, and of who Alecto was, as being necessary, and that he has remained conflicted about them for milennia since. Wake however, accuses him of doing so to seek power, and when his platitudes fail to convince Mercy to forgive him, he's quick to fall back on threats of death to bring his Lyctors in line. Also comes up when he's recounting the events that led to the Resurrection. He revived his core of closest followers without their memories so they wouldn't question the rightness of his actions.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Two in the early days of his necromancy move John from the idealist he once was to someone more power hungry and wrathful:
  • Initially John struggles to be taken seriously, then is taken completely seriously when the police try to raid his compound, causing him to create a living wall of bone and flesh out of livestock to keep them out; this would be viewed by his critics as a line too far, with the humanity of cows becoming a recurring attack line against him.
  • When a skirmish breaks out on the outskirts of his compound, John experiences a thanergy rush first-hand, and high on the death, drops over 100 people with guns in the vicinity of his compound; when P— is furious with him for killing a bunch of her friends, he has to lie and plead that it was an accident to placate her.
• Kick the Dog: Nona the Ninth lays out numerous examples where John the man proves to be a less than compassionate God:
  • John's guidance to his acolytes, people who served him even after death, as they created the Eightfold Word to become his Lyctors to seek immortality, is flawed and deliberately misguided to protect his own secrets, and effectively trapped his closest allies in a mirror of the decision John made out of rage and lust for power: to kill their closest loved one.
  • His treatment of Gideon Nav, his entirely unexpected daughter, proves to be particularly cruel: when he comes into posession of her corpse, rather than simply destroying it, he pulls part of her soul out of Harrow to make a undead necromantic construct, heavily modified to prevent her blood from ever being drawn again. While his motivation for doing so is uncertain, Crown Prince Kiriona is completely miserable as a result.
• Lack of Empathy: He doesn't appear to suffer this, having a very kindly and compassionate affect at times, but Nona the Ninth expanded on his powerset and proves that he could have cured Cytherea and regrown Ianthe's arm instead of attaching a new one she hated, and he probably could have done something about Harrow's Lyctoral struggles besides subject her to regular attack. Nona also reveals that he was perfectly capable of resurrecting Gideon (which Harrow literally begged him to do the moment they first met) as soon as it suited him.
• Light Is Not Good: His power manifests as light, he wears mother-of-pearl accoutrements, and, as seen above, he is definitely not the good guy.
• Like a Son to Me: As part of positioning himself as a Parental Substitute to Harrow, he tries to reassure her by saying he wishes that she had actually been his daughter, which ends up finally overcoming Harrow's guilt about having opened the Tomb and makes her confess to him. Given how he treats Gideon Nav when she's revealed to be his actual daughter and that he sent Gideon the First to try to kill Harrow to fix her broken Healing Factor, the sincerity of his claim is dubious.
• Load-Bearing Boss: If he dies, Dominicus turns into a black hole and destroys the Houses. He can come back, but the sun won’t, unless he takes immediate action.
• Locked Out of the Loop: While Harrow does actually confess opening the Locked Tomb to him, he doesn't believe her—as she only got in because she had Gideon Nav's blood under her fingernails, and at the time she tells him this, neither of them is aware of Gideon Nav's lineage.
• Meaningful Name: Both of his names are extremely common and extremely important, much like the Emperor himself: John, one of the most popular names in history while also referencing John the Baptist, and Gaius, a very common Roman name, likely meaning "to rejoice". It ties him to the person most people associate with the title Emperor, Gaius Julius Caesar. It's also the male form of "Gaia", or Earth, tying back to Cytherea's preference of referring to herself with both her own and her cavalier's name.
• Mentor Archetype: The primary guise he assumes around his Lyctors is one of a teacher more than a divine figure, and when the older ones aren't calling him John they're calling him Teacher.
• Modest Royalty: Even Harrow, a child of the impoverished Ninth, can't help but notice that his clothing is shabby and battered. The only concessions to his office that he wears are his First robes and on occasion a crown of laurels and the fingerbones of infants.
• My God, What Have I Done?: A subversion: his chapters in Nona are a twice over backstory, where he's recounting the events after the death of Earth to Harrow in place of Alecto immediately prior to the Resurrection, and there are lengthy periods where he breaks down sobbing from the sheer guilt of what he's done. But he never apologizes, and ends his memories resolving to undo it only partially, creating the Empire of the Nine Houses that would pursue his vendetta for 10,000 years to come.
• Necromancer: The first necromancer, and the only one capable of bringing people Back from the Dead, who resurrected entire planets and taught the first to learn necromancy after him. He also brings a woman back from the brink of death in front of him, with all the apparent ease of giving her a bandage.
• Never My Fault: Uses passive voice when telling Harrow how the world ended pre-Resurrection, as if he simply survived. While recounting his backstory in Nona he admits to what he's done but repeatedly insists that it was the only thing he could do and places a lot of blame on others.
• Nightmare Fetishist: When Harrow tells him about the circumstances of her conception, he's more interested in enthusiastically speculating how technically complicated the mass sacrifice must have been to pull off than he is in offering any comfort or guidance.
• No Ontological Inertia: On his death Dominicus, the reborn sun, would become a black hole that consumes the system.
• No Place for Me There: Cannot come back to the Dominicus system lest the Resurrection Beasts follow him.
  "I saved the world, but not for me."
• No-Sell: Unlike his Lyctors who require physical touch to use necromancy on each other, the Emperor can do so from a distance with ease. Additionally, Mercy's murder attempt works for about five minutes, generously estimated, and most of that is because he's too busy doing damage control to reconstitute his physical form immediately.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: Every time he's nice to Harrow, he accidentally makes her feel even worse about opening the Locked Tomb.
• Oh, My Gods!: It's noted to be odd how he swears "my God." To the readers, it's pretty obvious that he's reflexively referring to some older divinity, but Harrow is just confused as to why he's swearing by himself.
• Parental Substitute: Due to Ianthe and Harrow being so much younger than any other member of the First, he has, or attempts to have, a paternal relationship with his new Lyctors, neither of whom is all that happy about it:
  • Towards Harrow, he positions himself as a compassionate teacher, and even claims near the end of Harrow the Ninth that he idly wishes she'd been his daughter. Harrow is extremely conflicted by this; she never truly had a father, and is far more comfortable with being subservient to her Teacher, and to her God. Although she draws some comfort from his compassion, she is disappointed at finding out her God is often informal and crass, and is deeply ashamed by not immediately confessing her breaking into the Tomb as a child.
  • His relationship with Ianthe is less detailed, but by Nona the Ninth, he's titled her Prince Ianthe Naberius, effectively adopting her as a surrogate son alongside Gideon Nav. Ianthe, who was always favored by her parents less than her sister, and knows that God favors Harrow more than her, finds his sentimentality obnoxious and pathetic, ultimately viewing it as nothing more than a weakness to be exploited.
• Person of Mass Destruction: His command of life and death is powerful enough that he could sense, kill, and absorb the souls of everyone in the solar system, while snuffing out the planets themselves. He only failed to kill the Blood of Eden's predecessors because they jumped to FTL.
• Poor Communication Kills: Presents himself as a Reasonable Authority Figure, but his failure to have a serious discussion with Cytherea drives most of the plot of the first book. Much of the rest of the plot is driven by his failure to provide clear instructions to the Lyctor candidates or to monitor what they are up to.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Subverted. His Imperialness keeps dropping references to modern-day memes and pop culture; the subversion comes in when you realize that none of these memes have been relevant for 10 000 years, and he is the only one in the entire universe who gets the joke.
• Resurrective Immortality: Mercymorn blows him into dust. He reconstitutes after a few minutes, having zipped back to the Nine Houses and stabilized Dominicus in the interim, and kills her with a single touch.
• Revenge Before Reason: Is so intent on punishing the people who try to flee Earth (and who speed up their timetable as he gets increasingly hateful and alarming) that he literally takes the entire Earth hostage to try to stop them, and then pulls the trigger to become powerful enough to kill them on the edge of the Solar System. C— who became Cassiopeia calls him out on it.
  C—: John, your problem is that you care less about being a saviour than you do about meting out punishment.
  John: C—, I was just your best man!
  C—: You still are. That doesn't change the fact that you can be quite the most appallingly vindictive person I have ever met.
• Sins of Our Fathers: Taken to such an extreme that his own original Lyctors question it, with Augustine calling it purely symbolic revenge.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Turns out he has more than his natural eye color in common with his daughter; once his true nature is revealed, he's just as sarcastic and informal as his daughter, but still fully capable of summoning the gravitas that a 10,000 year old deity possesses. He also shows intimate familiarity with modern-day memes, peppering his speech (among his Lyctors, at least) with them.
• Special Person, Normal Name: Even on the tail end of a weeks-long mental breakdown, Harrow finds the fact that God is named "John" to be shockingly mundane.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: John's original eye color was an entirely normal light brown, but lightened and brightened to a vibrant gold, one of the earliest signs of his developing necromancy, and ultimately a sign that he was chosen by the Earth.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: Jumped for it in his backstory.
• Time Stands Still: When he desires so, large displays of his power make time itself seem to warp and distort. It's not truly time freezing, but the Emperor freezing others' bodies in place.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: The Emperor of the Nine Houses, the King Undying, the Necrolord Prime, the Kindly Prince of Death, the Resurrector, the God of Dead Kings, vindicator of death... and that's not even all of them. Which one and how many people use seems to depend on how dangerous the situation is and how much power John is exerting (when he murders Mercymorn he gets no less than three from the narrative), though they do also sometimes come up when he's doing very mundane things. Ten thousand years as god-king is a lot of time to accumulate titles.
• Unreliable Expositor: What his divine beneficence and compassion obscures is the fact that he distorts the truth and outright lies to even his closest allies in order to advance his own agenda.
  Augustine: Is that the truth, or the truth you tell yourself?
  God: What is the difference?
• Unreliable Narrator: In Nona, several chapters are effectively narrated by him within a Framing Device of a flashback to him telling his story to someone; he's no more reliable when narrating than he was when expositing. His listener directly points out at one point that he contradicted himself, and he says it doesn't matter.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: He views his empire as far superior to the Earth that existed before the Resurrection, but the cost of it was not just the genocide of nearly the entire human race, but the deaths of all the planets in the entire Solar Sytem and even the Sun itself. And he lauds the Resurrection as a great act of mercy and compassion, but he himself admits that he only brought back the people he found to be free of sin, which amounted to merely a few million of the 10 billion he killed, all of which he erased the memories of.
• Willfully Weak: In the modern day, he refuses to resurrect people, despite being fully capable of doing so, believing the cost is too great after a myriad spent dealing with the unforeseen consequences of the Resurrection. It's later implied that this is a lie, because all of the consequences he references were actually due to his genocide of the entire Solar System, and not the Resurrection which followed it.
  • He also, despite having the ability to cure cancer pre-Resurrection, didn't help Cytherea. It seems like if she'd been cured pre-Lyctorhood she would not have sacrificed Loveday and become a Lyctor at all.
• Wrong Context Magic: Necromancy is a very rigid magic for everyone, but not for the Emperor. His abilities are near-limitless (including resurrection, impossible for anyone else), beyond even the super-powerful Lyctors, probably because while the Lyctors draw their power from a second human soul, he draws his from—basically—the soul of AN ENTIRE PLANET. He is not worshipped as a god without reason.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: His reaction when he finds a Cohort necromancer dying on the floor of his shuttle making a blood ward for him. He tiredly heals her and says she'll get a commendation.
  Emperor: For fuck's sake.
• You Monster!: Wake attempts to reverse his criticism of her back on him. John is unmoved.
  John: "Don't spout bigotry, Commander, I won't kill you for it and it hurts your cause. I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don't make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they've got a certain something, and nobody likes toddlers juxtaposed with cleansed.
  Wake: How many babies died in the bomb, Gaius?
  John: All of them. [...] I'm not really interested in this particular game, Commander.

A.L.

Alecto the First

The Body, A.L., "Annabel Lee", First

Listed with main characters

Lyctors

Augustine

Augustine the First

The first Saint to serve the King Undying, the Saint of Patience. Founder of the Fifth House. His cavalier was Alfred Quinque (see below).

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• Amnesiac Dissonance: Alluded to when he confronts God about his endless wars. Nona the Ninth reveals that the person who became Augustine, along with the people who became Alfred, Mercymorne, Cristabel, Gideon, Pyrrha, Cassiopeia, and Nigella were John's close core of followers pre-Resurrection, all brought back deliberately without their memories.
  Augustine: "Nobody has to be punished anymore for what happened to humanity."
  John: "Augustine, if the man you were—if the man you were before you died, before the Resurrection—could hear what you just said to me, he'd tear your throat out."
  Augustine: "Thanks for confirming that."
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: He and Mercymorn hate each other and if anything their relationship appears to deteriorate over the course of the book, but they've also schemed together for centuries and planned to die together. When he says that they're not done yet and outlines what they have to do first, they embrace. After John resurrects and kills Mercy the narration repeatedly mentions a carefully emotionless Augustine being spattered with Mercy's blood and pieces of her heart and looking at her body, seeing the casual way John disrespects it - and while fighting God in the River, the ever affable and collected Augustine screams.

  "Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy. We knew that that was the only hope that we would have, that we would live to see it through and pray for our own cessation. Oh, we'll still hate each other my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop. But my bones will rest easy next to your bones."

  • It's even part of their pre-Resurrection Cataclysm Backstory, that they usually squabbled and fought but would unite when things were bad enough and cried in each other's arms. It does appear that they were closer back then and that the deaths of their cavaliers made their relationship worse.
• Bash Brothers: While he loathes Mercy and planned to topple God, he does have a genuine respect and camaraderie with Gideon the First, even if he helps Ianthe and Harrow plot to murder him.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Of Harrow the Ninth, together with Commander Wake and Mercymorn.
• Break the Badass: He's confident and affable, and has Seen It All, but Harrow using her own bone marrow for soup in an attempt to kill Gideon the First completely rattles and shocks him.
• Death Seeker: Much less emphasized than with his sister Lyctors, but he and Mercymorn once planned to kill themselves after killing the Emperor. When they do manage to kill him and Mercy brings up dying themselves, he says they have to ensure peace, find the survivors a home, and kill the Resurrection Beasts first, that an easy suicide was a fantasy of the best-case ideal scenario.
• Defector from Decadence: Appears to be his primary motive for turning on the Emperor in the first place - he is bewildered by John's campaign of "purely symbolic retribution" and desires to make peace and let necromancy die quietly.
• Dual Wielding: Alfred's offhand was a shortsword, paired with his rapier.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Inverted. Augustine is John's first saint, his oldest ally and a man who he knew from even before the Resurrection. He even killed his own brother to serve God faithfully forever. Finding out that John had lied even to him, and has done so for millennia, and seeing him kill Mercymorn without a shred of regret has Augustine reject John's offer of forgiveness with an uncharacteristically quiet "No, John."
• Foil: To Abigail, daughter of the house he founded and likewise a major protagonist in Harrow the Ninth. Augustine is bitter, jaded, and noted to be performing most of his emotions to cover up how empty he truly is, and treats Harrow and Ianthe with a variable degree of disdain. That he's the kindest of the three Lyctors to his new sisters just says something about how cruel Mercy and Gideon the First are. Abigail on the other hand is a Team Mom who's constantly fascinated by everything around her and risks her and her husband's afterlife to save Harrow from the Sleeper. Their most marked similarity is that Augustine is a covert Defector from Decadence, while it's All There in the Manual that Abigail is critical of the Nine Houses' military.
  • He also serves as one to his student, Ianthe. They're both ruthlessly intelligent manipulators who enjoy a decadent lifestyle, but while Augustine is defined by his choice to kill and absorb his brother in order to become a Lyctor, Ianthe is defined by her choice to kill and absorb Naberius INSTEAD of her sister.
• Ironic Name: Not as ironic as Mercy the Saint of Joy, but he readily says that he's not very patient. Like Mercy, it also flips around to become meaningful when it's revealed how long he's waited for a chance to kill John.
• Little "No": When faced with the Emperor, after he's killed Mercy, offering him an ultimatum and a chance to rejoin him and be forgiven, he takes a moment to look around the gathered Lyctors and Mercy's corpse and then quietly says "No, John," before dropping the whole Mithraeum in the River.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's a snobby jerk who is quick to suck up to the Emperor and treats his fellow Lyctors ranging from disdain to outright hatred, but in the end, he's truly devoted to his goals, and has a warped respect for those around him. Of course, his dedication is trying to murder God and reconcile the surviving members of the empire with the people they're at war with.
• The Nicknamer: Tends to refer to others by diminutives or nicknames when he's being casual; one that recurs often is referring to Ianthe and Harrow "chicks".
• No Place for Me There
  "We're going to round up the ships, everyone who's left. Sue for peace, get the Edenites on-side. And then we'll find a place to fulfill the old promise. Somewhere out there exists a home not paid for with blood. It won't be for us, but it will be for those who have been spared."
• Meaningful Name: Two fold. Saint Augustine is one of the most important figures in the development of Western Christianity, and is credited with ideas such as original sin and morally just war. And "august" means "dignified, distinguished" while being somewhat archaic in the modern era.
• Miles to Go Before I Sleep: He would like to die after John does, but there's still so much to do first.
• Senseless Sacrifice: Drops the Mithraeum in the River and wrestles God to the Stoma layer, attempting to literally drag him into Hell. He fails when Ianthe saves God, and is pulled down himself.
• Sibling Murder: His cavalier, Alfred, was his brother, and Augustine describes him as "my other half".
• Soul Power: Doesn't have a particular necromantic specialty, describing himself as something of a spirit magic generalist, with a focus on River magic.
• Stepford Smiler: his defining character trait. Although he projects affability, humor and charm, it's largely a performance to cover up the deeply empty shell of a man beneath; when Augustine drops his mask, he's extremely critical of others, extremely cynical, and casually threatens murder to solve annoyances. It seems to come from a combination of never getting over the death of Alfred, a profound weariness with his long life, and the deeply-rooted doubt and treachery he harbors for his God and Emperor.
• Suicide Pact: Refers to his plan with Mercy as this, also saying that he's a terrible person to enter into a suicide pact with because they have so much left to do.

Alfred Quinque, his cavalier

• Fratricide: Alfred was Augustine's brother, and he had to consume his soul in order to ascend to Lyctorhood. (Going by some of Augustine's comments, it seems Alfred might've forced the issue by killing himself. But as the consumption of a cavalier's soul renders them Deader than Dead - or, well, with their memories and personalities quietly combining with the Lyctor's - it counts as a fratricide either way.)
• The Load: John singles him out in his retelling of the events that led up to the Resurrection as being not particularly valuable, due to him being a hedge fund manager who joined John to follow his older brother, even as John's other friends brought in loved ones with even less useful skills.
• Noodle Incident: Cristabel and Alfred had some sort of altercation or relationship, involving Cristabel's 'influence', that ended very poorly. Mercy and Augustine still squabble about it long after their deaths.
• One-Steve Limit: Since the pre-Resurrection versions of characters are only called by their first initial, the pre-Resurrection Alfred is only ever referred to as A—'s brother, since both brothers have the same first initial and it would be confusing otherwise.

Mercymorn

Mercymorn the First

The second Saint to serve the King Undying, the Saint of Joy. Founder of the Eighth House. Her cavalier was Cristabel Oct (see below).

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• Albinos Are Freaks: Downplayed. She's implied to have some variant of albinism, given her naturally pink hair and complexion and one of her eye colors being reddish. She is also the most ostracized and unstable of old Lyctors, but it's entirely because of her personality rather than albinism.
• Berserk Button: She really doesn't like it when people bring up Cristabel, especially in a negative context.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Of Harrow the Ninth, together with Commander Wake and Augustine.
• Death Seeker: Not as pronounced as Cytherea, but when she sees Number Seven her panicked babble includes "Sometimes I wish I could die", and after killing the Emperor she brings up that she and Augustine had planned to die in their turn.
• Elemental Motifs: Storms. Her mood is eternally temperamental, she constantly lashes out at anyone around her, and her eyes are frequently referred to as a hurricane.
• Enraged by Idiocy: Her default mood seems to be a deep irritation with everyone around her.
• Everyone Has Standards: It may be her Enraged by Idiocy tendencies speaking, but Mercy is one of the few characters who explicitly objects to the idea of children becoming Lyctors, having proposed a minimum age requirement and apparently been ignored. Pre-Resurrection the woman who became Mercymorn was quite insistent on reproductive justice, offended by the callous assumption that anyone going into cryopreservation would have to terminate their pregnancies first.
• Fatal Flaw: Befitting the house she built: pride. She's very self-absorbed and quick to judge, and consequently, not very observant or subtle. She overlooks Harrow's ability because of her youth and frailty, and tends to (but not always) blame everyone other than herself when things go wrong.
• Hypocritical Humor: Constantly refers to Harrow and Ianthe with infantalizing language, but is herself a very petulant and immature person.
• Immortal Immaturity: She's constantly petulant and immature, acting far more like the young adults she berates for their immaturity than the 10,000 year old immortal warrior she is.
• Inescapable Net: Cristabel's offhand is a weighted net, pairing nicely with her Touch of Death.
• Ironic Name: Twofold, and even noted by Harrow. Mercymorn, the Saint of Joy, is an impatient person who is often rude and belittling to everyone around her, including the Emperor. As it turns out, the "Saint of Joy" title comes from her cavalier, who was a genuinely nice person.
• Killed Off for Real: Murders the Emperor, and gets put down when he reconstitutes himself.
• Miles to Go Before I Sleep: She's reluctant to accept Augustine's claim that they can't die together immediately after killing John but she does appear to agree.
• Meaningful Name: Her Ironic Name flips around to this in the final act, as she attempts to kill Harrow and the Emperor as acts of mercy.
• The Mourning After: Even after all this time she's highly upset about the cavaliers she and her siblings killed, especially her Cristabel. She's sickened and horrified to find out that John lied and they didn't need to die, listing all their names twice.
• Necessarily Evil: Considers killing John - and thus millions of her own people - a "sin" that had to be done, and in the moment it had to be her sin.
• Painting the Medium: When keyed up, Mercy is capable of enunciating two exclamation points at once!! Harrow is impressed by this.
• Rejected Apology: During the climax God says there is no forgiveness. Mercy gets him close and tells him "I forgive you" just before killing him, then says to Augustine that God was right.
• Sanity Slippage: She spends much of Act Five of Harrow the Ninth in hysterics due to the proximity of the Resurrection Beast as well as the traumatic revelations of what Gideon Nav represents, though she heaves herself back into shape for the final confrontation.
• Tears of Blood: Heralds consistently make her bleed from the eyes, which irritates her to no end.
• Technicolor Eyes: Unlike most other Lyctors, her irises seem to be a fusion of both her and Cristabel's eyes, being a combination of sandy hazel and reddish-grey.
• Touch of Death: Her necromantic specialization comes in this form, capable of crumbling her enemies into dust or modifying their bodies at will. After 10,000 years of life, she's effectively memorized the entire human body down to a cellular level, and is capable of complete physical control of even a Lyctor's body by sheer rote memory. While she is capable of using the same ability to heal, she only does so with annoyance, since Harrow with her broken Healing Factor is the only one who needs it.
• The Unfavorite: Augustine implies as much to her within Harrow's hearing, claiming he could kill her and God would eventually come round to admitting he had a point. The Emperor does seem to have considerably less patience for her than his other Lyctors, but turns out not to respect Augustine as much as he thinks he does either. This gets a callback in the climax - it seems Augustine was telling her that by making herself 'unloveable' she was making it impossible for her to get close enough to kill John.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: For a given meaning of utopia. She and Augustine had both wanted to evacuate the Dominicus system on the event of the Emperor's death, knowing that otherwise everyone there would die. Augustine still wants to get there, but subsides when a still-stunned Mercy says all they would be able to do was watch their people die from close up.
• What Beautiful Eyes!: Harrow finds her eyes very attractive, often specifically calling them "dreamy". Gideon disagrees completely.

Cristabel Oct, her cavalier

• Amnesiac Resonance: As a nun, she kills herself to demonstrate to John the nature of the soul and help him finally figure out the last necromantic technique she needs. It's strongly implied that she advocated a similar tactic for achieving Lyctorhood (and, going by some of Augustine's comments, that the Noodle Incident described below had a whole lot to do with Alfred listening to her).
• Dumb Muscle: Augustine describes her as such. This was not the case with who she was previously, as a nun she was forceful, competent, and quite intelligent. Whether she was resurrected with those faculties intact is unknown.
• Good Is Dumb: According to Augustine, she was "effervescent", extremely kind, and beloved by those who knew her for these traits, but not terribly intelligent.
• Nice Girl: She was apparently nice to absolutely everyone all the time, which is why Mercy was dubbed the Saint of Joy.
• Noodle Incident: Cristabel and Alfred had some sort of altercation or relationship, involving Cristabel's 'influence', that ended very poorly. Mercy and Augustine still squabble about it long after their deaths.
• One-Steve Limit: Since the pre-Resurrection versions of characters are only called by their first initial, the pre-Resurrection Cristabel is only ever referred to as "the nun", because she shares the same first initial as Cassiopeia and it would be confusing otherwise.
• Opposites Attract: As a nun she was best friends with the woman who became Mercymorn, who was an atheist.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In the Cataclysm Backstory she saw John's powers through a religious lens. Trying to help him to understand and grasp the soul with the idea that he would then be able to save everyone, she ultimately kills herself in front of him. He does grasp the soul - and within minutes kills everyone on Earth and in the surrounding solar system, and the planets and sun themselves.

"Ortus" / Gideon

"Ortus" / Gideon the First

The third Saint to serve the King Undying, the Saint of Duty. Founder of the Second House. His cavalier was Pyrrha Dve (listed with secondary characters).

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• Ambiguous Situation: Once the situation with Pyrrha surviving in him and sometimes taking over is revealed, resulting in blank spots in his memory, it throws doubt on how many of his scenes are really Gideon and how many are Pyrrha, who can impersonate him exactly. If his eye color isn't noticed, it's up in the air.
• Anti-Magic: His unique specialty among Lyctors is negating the thanergy of any objects.
• Apologetic Attacker: The last time he makes an attempt on Harrow's life he awkwardly says "Sorry. This wasn't my idea."
• Childhood Friends: Unlike A— and M—, who were John's colleagues in cryonics research, and all the other acolytes who came later, G— is John's oldest companion, having grown up with him.
• Dumb Muscle: It's eventually implied his and Pyrrha's roles were an inversion of the typical cavalier-necromancer bond; Pyrrha is the scientific mind between the two of them, and the Second's trial at Canaan House and their contribution to the Eightfold Word is largely her design.
• Establishing Character Moment: He strides up during Cytherea's funeral, gives himself a half-second to grieve her, then turns to the Emperor and demands to know whether they should fight or flee from the approaching Resurrection Beast, immediately cutting through the Emperor's dithering and forcing his hand in a way that Mercymorn couldn't.
• Eye Color Change: He took on Pyrrha's bright green eyes when he consumed her to ascend to Lyctorhood. She in turn gained his natural reddish-brown, and their reappearance signifies when she's in control of Gideon's body.
• Foil: In Nona the Ninth, John's retelling of the events that led up to the Resurrection has G— play a role not dissimilar to Camilla Hect; G— is John's childhood best friend who trusts him without question, going to his first death with a suitcase nuke without even a word of complaint. The difference between G— and Camilla is that John ultimately abuses that trust and kills G— without feeling too bad, aside from the fact that he's sorry it had to be Melbourne; he loved their public transit.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: According to the Emperor, he got an almost sexual thrill from hunting down Blood of Eden, and his first sexual relationship in millennia was with their leader. Given that Lyctors take on personality traits of their consumed cavaliers over time, it might be that Pyrrha's interest in intense, violent people has been bleeding through.
• Killed Off for Real: Dies fighting the Resurrection Beast, leaving Pyrrha to assume sole control of his body.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Unaware Pyrrha is still alive inside of him, while Commander Wake knows. Also seems entirely ignorant of his sibling Lyctors' plots against the Emperor.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The other Lyctors note that while their titles are somewhat ironic, the Saint of Duty fully fits his title, with it being noted that he's so devoted to his duty that even the Emperor hasn't seen him in decades.
  • Harrow's Trauma-Induced Amnesia causes her to perceive his name as Ortus, in the same way that she replaced Gideon with Ortus in her Fake Memories. His full title also serves as a Punny Name: he's literally Gideon the First as the namesake of Gideon Nav.
• Magic Knight: While Lyctors are hybrids of necromancer and cavalier, they still keep the typical necromancer build and favor light weapons when they need to use them. Gideon, on the other hand, is described as a "walking tendon" made entirely of lean muscle, dual wields a rapier and an entire spear, and specializes in Anti-Magic that lets him take fights up close and personal. His House's necromancers are also somewhat more vigorous than those of other houses, though not to his extent.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Spared Wake's child when he led to her death out of a belief that the child was his.
• Mind Hive: Due to accidentally compartmentalizing during his ascension, Pyrrha's mind has persisted inside him for millennia. Gideon himself is not aware of her preservation. Whenever Pyrrha takes control of his body, he is shut out entirely, and consequently views his random black outs and lapses in memory as mental instability.
• Missing Time: Has lapses in his memory when Pyrrha takes over.
• Not So Above It All: Joins the other Lyctors and God in making fun of Mercy's bad drawing.
• "Not So Different" Remark: After Harrow saves him from the incinerator, parallels are drawn between them, as like Harrow, he suffers periods of forgetfulness and cannot always trust his perceptions, though these are due to his cavalier resurfacing inside his body rather than Harrow's hallucinations and self-surgery.
• Red Herring: While the Ninth House unintentionally named Gideon Nav after him, and he has a Strong Family Resemblance to her, Gideon the First has little to do with the origins of the younger Gideon beyond being her mother's killer and former lover (and the host body of her other former lover).
  • Gideon the First as a whole ends up being a Red Herring himself, as his role in Harrow the Ninth is fairly marginal in comparison to his sibling Lyctors and even his own cavalier.
• Significant Green Eyed Red Head: A subversion, to play into his role as a Red Herring. And as a Lyctor, his green eyes are not his original eye color, which was a more natural reddish-brown.
• Significant Name Overlap: The fact that he shares a name with Gideon Nav is both a clue and a red herring to the reveal of her true parentage, as she was unintentionally named after him from the final words of her mother's ghost. This name overlap causes quite a bit of trouble for Harrow's lobotomized mind throughout Harrow the Ninth, since she had tried to replace Nav with Ortus in her memories, and as a result perceives Gideon the First as Ortus the First.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Legendarily unamorous, having not pursued any of the countless affairs that went on aboard the Mithraeum, having only ever been attracted to Pyrrha. It's not until Commander Wake, a likewise extremely dangerous and extremely devoted woman, that he fell in love again. And even this was probably helped by the fact that Pyrrha—who's survived inside his body and whose personality traits he's somewhat absorbed, like all Lyctors—was also in love with Wake and had been in a relationship with her for two years by that point.
• Sink or Swim Mentor: Attempts to murder Harrow repeatedly throughout the book, on what are eventually revealed to be the Emperor's orders to either kill her or hope that the trauma fixes her broken Healing Factor. Neither works, and after he comes to view her as a Worthy Opponent, even Gideon grows tired of it.
• The Stoic: He's quieter than anyone else in the Emperor's orbit, rarely stringing together more than a few words at a time, and more reserved than any of the others as well. A few times he gives nonverbal indications of solidarity with Harrow at the antics of their sibling Lyctors; Harrow being dismayed at how this comes after he's tried to kill her dozens of times.
• Strong Family Resemblance: A subversion. He's Gideon Nav's namesake, and like her he's tall, heavily muscled, and is a dark-skinned redhead... all as a Red Herring, because Nav is actually the Emperor's daughter. Even he and Pyrrha both thought the child was his (genetically at least).
• Undying Loyalty: To the King Undying. He's the only Lyctor of the original eight who survived to modern times and hasn't schemed to kill him, and his attempts to kill Harrow are eventually revealed to be on John's orders, despite Gideon's misgivings. This was also the case with his pre-Resurrection self, who according to John thought absolutely everything he did was "fine. Not okay maybe, but fine" and didn't question things like having his arm torn off and regrown before heading off with an armed nuke in a suitcase.
• Worthy Opponent: Comes to view Harrow as this in response to her fending off his attacks, growing weary with trying to follow John's orders to attack her as a result. He gives her a casual salute after she nearly kills him, and awkwardly tries to convince her to commit suicide rather than be killed by the approaching Resurrection Beast.

Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia the First & Nigella Shodash, her cavalier

The fourth Saint to serve the King Undying. Founder of the Sixth House.

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• Category Traitor: Nona the Ninth states that Cassiopeia is Source Gram, making her the first of the Lyctors to betray John for Blood of Eden, and confirms that the Sixth House's secession from the Empire was on orders she left behind.
• Everyone Can See It: In John's retelling of the events that lead up to the Resurrection, it's a Running Gag that everyone knows the two of them are dating, to the point where when Cassiopeia finally admits it, the reaction from everyone else is bemusement that they thought nobody knew.
• Heel–Face Turn: From John's perspective at least. C— was a lawyer brought on by the cryo project's oversight executives but came around to his side within a year.
• Last Wish Marriage: In the final hours before the Resurrection, as everything spirals wildly and dramatically out of control, C— and N— get married in the gardens outside John's compound. They're both dead before the end of the same chapter.
• Mad Scientist: Cassiopeia is often referred to as brilliant long after her death, as a genius even among geniuses, and the fact that Harrow is able to match some of her accomplishments even with her flawed Lyctorhood is viewed as a major compliment. Of course, her research created Teacher, and her necromantic specialty was in studying Resurrection Beasts.
• Supreme Chef: Cassiopeia the First was supposedly an extremely talented chef, but also tended to injure herself while cooking.
• Token Good Teammate: Possibly. The pronunciation guide in the paperback of Harrow the Ninth includes a note that sharing names with an evil Greek mythological queen was not indicative of her character, and that she was "universally beloved and clever" but "the evolutionary pressure of Lyctorhood has, alas, selected for jerks". Pre-Resurrection C— was more independent than the others who became Lyctors, living with N— offsite rather than in the compound, and was the only one in the circle to challenge John's plans and point out his Revenge Before Reason tendencies. It seems that post-Resurrection Cassiopeia retained this independence and willingness to question him. She seems to have been the first Lyctor to turn on him and actually arranged for her House, which took after her in this willingness, to be able to follow.

Cyrus

Cyrus the First & Valancy Trinit, his cavalier

The fifth Saint to serve the King Undying. Originally from the Third House.

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• Kitsch Collection: Cyrus the First's quarters are completely decked out with nude portraits of himself and his cavalier holding bizarre objects.
• Out of Focus: He and Valancy are the pair with the least focus on them throughout the series- they're not even mentioned in Nona.
• Statuesque Stunner: Valancy Trinit was tall, curvy, and absolutely gorgeous—which Ianthe and Harrow know because she and Cyrus created dozens of paintings of themselves posing naked, put them up everywhere in the Third's suite on the Mithraeum, and gave them as gifts on peoples' birthdays.

Ulysses

Ulysses the First & Titania Tetra, his cavalier

The sixth Saint to serve the King Undying. Originally from the Fourth House.

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• Dead to Begin With: Of the first generation disciples, the ones who became Ulysses and Titania were the only ones John didn't originally know in life. Their bodies were donated for his cryogenics experiments, and he developed an emotional attachment to them.
• Meaningful Name: In a rather roundabout way. Titania is the queen of the faeries in A Midsummer Night's Dream, while Ulysses is the latin name for Odysseus the Seafarer (though John admits that he only considered the Titania connection, whereas Ulysses was from his childhood dog). These are not meaningful on their own, but they are names that inspire awe and recognition. Out of all the Lyctors, Ulysses and Titania are the names with the most "brand recognition", so to say. And as John reveals, this was because he intentionally chose those names because they felt more appropriate than their birthnames.
• Noodle Incident: Ulysses apparently had a habit of starting "sexy parties".
• People Puppets: Pre-Resurrection, theirs were the first corpses John necromantically controlled as his powers appeared.
• Satellite Character: They have a marginal narrative presence even in comparison to the other dead Lyctors and their cavaliers. Even in Nona the Ninth, while they share an important role in John's backstory, it's primarily as unspeaking corpses he controls as one of the first signs of his nascent necromancy, literally extensions of his will.

Cytherea

Cytherea the First / Cytherea Loveday

The seventh Saint to serve the King Undying. Originally from the Seventh House. Her cavalier was Loveday Heptane (see below).

One of the Emperor’s original Lyctors, the woman impersonating Dulcinea Septimus, and the force behind the deaths at Canaan House.

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• Ailment-Induced Cruelty: John speculates in the first book that suffering late-stage cancer for a myriad is what turned her from having been the most humane of the Lyctors.
• And I Must Scream: Mercymorn alludes to the situation they'd placed her in. She's essentially dying yet immortal for many thousand years.
• The Baby of the Bunch: She was the last of the disciples to join the Emperor, being born decades after the Resurrection. It's part of why she was The Heart to her sibling Lyctors, and none of them has a single negative thing to say about her.
• Badass Boast: "My name is Cytherea the First. Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the seventh saint to serve the King Undying. I am a necromancer and I am a cavalier. I am the vengeance of the ten billion. I have come back home to kill the Emperor and burn his Houses. And Gideon the Ninth... this begins with you."
• Batman Gambit: Her plan ultimately relies upon one of the Houses deciding to override Teacher and break the rule forbidding off-planet communications to put out a distress call, and the Emperor choosing to bring only his own ship in answer, which they do and he does. In a rarity for the trope however, it's noted by Cytherea herself that her impersonation of Dulcinea almost fell apart at nearly every stage, and it's treated more as luck that things managed to go her way more than any true cunning. The Eighth, Fifth, and Sixth's necromantic specialities could have revealed that she was not who she claimed to be, and Palamedes's Psychometry was eventually the thing that did reveal her. Additionally, she completely failed to account for Abigail's background as a historian and Palamedes's relationship with Dulcinea, and couldn't have known that Harrow would immediately recognize that Protesilaus was dead.
• Big Bad: Of Gideon the Ninth.
• Corpsing: In-Universe. There are a few moments while she's passing herself off as Dulcinea where Cytherea has trouble concealing her amusement at the charade, though they're subtle enough that they are unlikely to be picked up on as Foreshadowing and more as a Rewatch Bonus.
• Dead Person Impersonation: She passes herself off as Dulcinea Septimus for the majority of the book, knowing that 1) no one had actually met Dulcinea in person, and 2) Seventh House heirs all look remarkably similar anyway.
• Double Meaning: Claims to have never lied to anyone, and has a penchant for speaking in hypotheticals or oblique terms. Almost all of her dialogue, especially with Gideon, takes on a new meaning with the knowledge of her true nature.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Palamades dies accelerating her cancer, also exploding to wound her. During the final battle much of her power and attention is held on arresting his efforts, and her wounds don't actually heal until she starts draining Ianthe. She keeps stopping to cough out Body Horror lumps and largely stands by to allow her monstrous construct to fight.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Cytherea's Lyctorhood as presented in Gideon the Ninth doesn't really line up with Lyctorhood as it's more thoroughly explained in Harrow the Ninth, with Harrow using necromancy on her at a distance, and killing her by stabbing her through the heart. Dulcinea also lacks any particular necromantic specialization, aside from her monstrous construct. Justified by her terminal cancer being accelerated by Palamedes in the final chapters and the editorial necessity of leaving her corpse in a state where it's able to be possessed by Commander Wake.
• Eye Colour Change: As a Lyctor, her blue eyes are not her original eye color, but were taken from her cavalier.
• Face–Heel Turn: She was a loyal Lyctor to the Emperor for a myriad, but at some point decided to raze his Nine Houses and kill him.
• Freudian Excuse: She has endured thousands of years of the pain of dying from cancer, of having to live with the person she loved most in the world as her always-dying-never-dead necromantic battery, and everything else the Emperor asks of Lyctors. However, she herself never asks for sympathy; it's the Emperor who asks Harrow not to blame her, saying Cytherea's actions at Canaan House are ultimately his fault for putting too much on her and waiting this long to get replacement Lyctors to share the burden. Played with in that revelations in the later books make it clear that his purpose in presenting a Freudian Excuse for her were probably just to deflect attention from he real reason for her actions, which were larger in scale.
• Healing Factor: She survives getting blown up, and manages to heal over all the injuries getting blown up would entail. Including growing back her hair.
• The Heart: According to the Emperor and the surviving Lyctors, before her Face–Heel Turn she was always the kindest and most loyal and humane of all his Lyctors. Augustine can't think of a single negative thing to say about her, and the most Mercy can muster is that Cytherea laughed too much.
• Incurable Cough of Death: She has the same disease that plagues the Seventh, so she commonly coughs up blood.
• Immortality Hurts: Lyctorhood has preserved her body at the exact stage of her illness she’d reached as a human. She's been suffering the painful symptoms of the terminal illness for 10,000 years, but being a Lyctor just means she can't actually die from these symptoms.
• The Juggernaut: Her Healing Factor and 10,000 years of fighting make her nearly impossible to stop despite her severe illness. In the end, it takes the combined efforts of Sextus and Gideon's Heroic Suicides, the newly ascended Lyctor Ianthe, Camilla, and Harrow's ascension to Lyctorhood to defeat her.
• Meaningful Name: Cytherea is an epithet of Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, making it fitting for a gorgeous woman of nearly godlike power from the House described as "beauty that blossoms and dies". It's also heavily implied the Seventh House is on Venus, and "cytherean" is a slightly outdated term to refer to the planetary features of Venus. Blood of Eden refers to her as Chrysaor, which in The Faerie Queene is the sword belonging to the embodiment of justice - while her motives in general appear rather personal, that she refers to herself as the vengeance of the ten billion suggests that some part of her drive to turn on God is knowledge of what he did to the people of Earth.
• Meaningful Rename: At her funeral in Harrow the Ninth, the other Lyctors mention that after she became a Lyctor, she had wanted to be called "Cytherea Loveday," combining her first name with her cavalier's.
• Red Herring: Early in Harrow the Ninth, it's suggested that she was working with Blood of Eden, and her corpse moving around on the Mithraeum is her returning to continue taking her revenge. She does seem to have been aware of the Ninth House Operation, clearly recognizing what Gideon Nav's eyes mean and colluding to some degree with Blood of Eden, but it ultimately turns out that Augustine and Mercymorn are the traitors, and her body is possessed by the revenant of Commander Wake.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Her Blood of Eden contacts refer to her as Source Chrysaor. Chrysaor is a figure in Greek Mythology, but going by the legendary weapon theming BoE use for Lyctors she's probably named for a sword from The Faerie Queene.
• Replacement Goldfish: Gideon reminds Cytherea of Loveday, who likewise was fiercely protective of her necromancer.
• Stepford Smiler: Her sibling Lyctors, at her funeral, unhappily state that she "laughed too much" recently and seemed fine, but was "good at seeming".
• Suicide by Cop: While she does say she doesn't plan on dying, her Face–Heel Turn was motivated in part by the desire to force someone to kill her, and finally bring an end to her long suffering. Her reaction to Harrow ascending and leveling a sword at her is giddy anticipation, and when she's finally mortally wounded, she immediately sighs in relief.
• Takes One to Kill One: Although she's not entirely immune to necromantic or physical attacks, in the end it takes another Lyctor to have any chance of actually killing her.
• Villainous Crush: She claims her affection for Gideon is entirely genuine, and Cytherea deliberately spared Gideon when her construct killed Jeannemary and Isaac. In the final chapters, Cytherea even tries to get her to ask for mercy. Gideon doesn't take kindly to the request.
• Walking Spoiler: Talking about her means giving away who "Dulcinea Septimus" really is.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: She bitterly warns Palamedes and Gideon that Lyctorhood is not worth it. Notably, becoming The Ageless didn't cure her cancer, only blocked off natural death as a potential escape from the pain, but she's also become convinced that it's an unforgiveable thing to do to one's cavalier.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: As a Lyctor, she's able to exert herself far more than she let on when she's impersonating Dulcinea, and her terminal illness and symptoms prior to that were largely theatrical displays.

Loveday Heptane, her cavalier

• Dumb Muscle: Augustine describes her as such.
• The Lost Lenore: Loveday is this to Cytherea, with the added pain of having consumed her soul to ascend to Lyctorhood.

Anastasia

Anastasia the First

A disciple of the Emperor and founder of the Ninth House. Her cavalier was Samael Novenary (see below).

Anastasia was the only disciple to fail in her ascension, remaining unsainted and with only half of her cavalier's soul inside her. God set her to guard the Locked Tomb after Alecto was sealed inside it, with Anastasia's ultimate fate unclear.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Whether she did indeed fail in her performance of the true Eightfold Word, or whether John deliberately sabotaged her to keep it a secret from the others. When John says that he killed Samael and thus ruined the ascension for her own good, Augustine challenges him on whether it's the truth or the truth he tells himself. John simply replies "Is there a difference?".
• Generation Xerox: From the other Lyctors mentions of her, she was very similar in personality to Harrow, and was likewise extremely diligent in her studies yet "failed" in her ascension, and was consequently deemed a half-Lyctor.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Anastasia's ascension supposedly went wrong when she tried to slow down the Eightfold Word to properly incorporate Samael into herself, though the person saying this is John.
• Meaningful Name: A Lyctor who seems to have mysteriously disappeared is naturally named Anastasia. Her name is also, fittingly, nine characters long, which is a trait shared by several other Ninth characters.
• Red Herring: Late in Harrow the Ninth, the Emperor tells Harrow that she couldn't have possibly opened the final seals on the Tomb, heavily implying the Body she had been hallucinating for years was never Alecto, but possibly Anastasia instead. However, it's later revealed that Harrow did indeed open the Tomb, using the blood of his daughter, Gideon Nav, with Anastasia nowhere to be seen.
• She Knows Too Much: She figured out the true Eightfold Word that would allow a Lyctor to keep their cavalier alive, and almost performed it with Samael. After she failed, John set her to guard the Tomb for millennia, keeping the other Lyctors from finding out about it.
• Shrouded in Myth: The only Lyctor to have never had their identity forgotten, legends of Anastasia persisted as an ancient founder of the Tomb. Harrow is a little disconcerted to be told that she was in fact a real person and not a legend all along.
• Uncertain Doom: Anastasia was set to guard the Tomb after it was constructed to hold Alecto, but by the time the series takes place, she's become little more than a Ninth legend, her ultimate fate left unclear. Nona the Ninth reveals she herself was sealed into the Tomb as well, and has since decayed into a nondescript skeleton tucked into a corner, her only purpose to close it back up should it ever be opened.

Samael Novenary, her cavalier

• Chain Pain: "The Chain" revered in Ninth religion refers to Samael's offhand, a black chain whip; it's briefly mentioned to be Harrow's weapons in one of her Elseworld, before it gets shut down.

Canaan House

Teacher

Teacher

The leader of the three old priests at Canaan House.

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• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite his overall goofiness and friendly disposition, when Judith and Marta confront him his skill and power with necromancy leaves Marta in such a state that Gideon's narration cannot describe it in any way other than "her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce." Cytherea, a Lyctor, says he was the only person at Canaan House who actually scared her (though she was still confident of her chances against him).
• Death Seeker: In Harrow's Dream Land, he's positively excited about the possibility of dying. Of course, he's already dead at that point.
• Infallible Babble: Harrow, Abigail, and the other revenants have no context to understand his ramblings in Harrow the Ninth and dismiss it as insanity, while they serve as references to how the Empire formed.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Both of the other priests die and all the skeletons at Canaan House fall to pieces when he is killed.
• Many Spirits Inside of One: He is the result of an experiment of the original Lyctors, a demented creature comprised of one thousand souls stuffed into one body.
• Mentor Archetype: Averted, despite his name. He says he has nothing really to teach the heirs, and has as little idea of how they can achieve Lyctorhood as they do, and beyond providing the facility keys, he doesn't interfere or even engage with the cast aside from clarifying a few points of order at certain points.
• Mr. Exposition: He speaks at length about the haunted nature of Canaan House, especially its Creepy Basement. Adds more in Harrow the Ninth posthumously, before his Sanity Slippage sets in.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: While it's probably true that he doesn't know the actual nuts-and-bolts theorems behind Lyctorhood, Teacher clearly knows what it ultimately entails and deliberately gives only vague hints about it. Cytheria suspects that Teacher recognized her, although that's ultimately unresolved. He's mysteriously aware of who's beaten challenges and where the keys are, but only brings it up when it suits him. Even at the end, his motivations for any of this are not clear.
• Really 700 Years Old: A group photo from thousands of years ago features Teacher, looking exactly the same as he does today.
• Riddle for the Ages: Teacher is a bit of an enigma. Even Cytherea, who was present when he was created, has no idea what his motivations were or why he didn't recognize her (or, if he did recognize her, why he said nothing), and is fairly relieved that the Second eliminated him for her.
• Sanity Slippage: Harrow accidentally pulls him into her liminal space inside the River (or at least, part of him), but he becomes steadily less coherent as time passes, babbles what Harrow interprets as gibberish, and ends up cheerfully walking back out into the River.
• Undead Abomination: Exaggerated, almost comedically so. Every necromancer who understands even the slightest bit about Teacher is utterly horrified and disgusted by his abominable nature, but in spite of it all, he is only a threat once provoked and seems surprisingly genuine in his facade of a cheerful, kindly old man.

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