Characters / The Locked Tomb Main

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 reveals about the primary characters, this page contains unmarked spoilers for all works in the series, including Nona the Ninth.

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Main Characters

Shared Tropes (Gideon and Harrow)

Ortus: You are the most worthy heroes the Ninth could muster. I truly believe that.

The last two daughters of the Ninth have had intertwined lives since they were infants, a fact that becomes all the more literal after Harrow takes Gideon's soul into herself to ascend to Lyctorhood.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Their Lyctoral bond is atypical by the standards of God's Saints, and Harrow the Ninth hinges on people questioning just how much Harrowhark managed to perfect the process, or if her Memory Gambit was only a temporary ploy that will eventually be undone, causing Harrow to inadvertently kill Gideon for good. It gets even more complicated in Nona the Ninth, due to Alecto possessing Harrow's body and John pulling part of Gideon's soul out of the bond as the revenant Kiriona.
• Ambiguously Brown: At one point in the first book, Gideon asks Colum the Eighth "Why do you have an uncle the color of mayonaise?", implying she's never seen someone with light skin before, including both herself and Harrow. invoked Word of God from Tamsyn Muir states that she considers both Gideon and Harrow of mixed Maori descent.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Loads and loads.
• Childhood Friends: They were, at one point, completely obsessed with each other, as the only other children of their generation. Despite how they fought and antagonized each other, it was still the closest thing to a friendship with someone close to their age that either of them had. That is, until the death of Harrow's parents twisted that frenemy dynamic into something more cruel.
• Combat Pragmatist: Both characters show this in their own way. Gideon was planning to be a soldier and mentions that sparring matches on the Ninth were "to the floor", until one party is downed and unable to fight, rather than to first touch. When she gets disarmed in a match with Naberius she reflexively slugs him. Harrow prefers to attack unexpectedly, such as when she seeds the floor of the drillshaft with bone fragments before her match with Gideon, chest-bursting a skeleton out of Gideon the First, or tossing a bone-based grenade into a room where she thinks Gideon the First will be.
• Commonality Connection: Explored extensively, and foundational to their relationship as the series progresses. Despite their differences in personality, they're ultimately both very similar when it truly matters, being stubbornly defiant, fiercely loyal, and self-sacrificing. Their lives have also been literally overlapped ever since Harrow's birth, being the only other children of their generation following the genocide of the Ninth's children. After Gideon's death and resurfacing inside Harrow, she takes it to an extreme, expressing the belief that she is ultimately just an extension of Harrow.
• Determinator: In subtly different ways. Gideon will do anything to protect others, even when her body is battered and broken or she's faced with impossible odds. Harrow, on the other hand, will do anything to accomplish her goals, pursuing them with single minded devotion, regardless of the consequences to herself. The fact that these differ is what leads to Gideon's Heroic Sacrifice at the end of Gideon the Ninth.
• Eye Color Change: Subverted, unlike all other Lyctors. Even when Gideon takes control of Harrow's body late in Harrow the Ninth, they both retain their original eye colors. "Epipardos", which takes place from Ianthe's perspective before Harrow performed the work shows that this trope had started to take effect before Harrow removed her ability to perceive Gideon.
  • In Nona the Ninth, Palamedes explains that an Eye Color Change can be a result of a soul being temporarily present in a body, whereby the possessing soul will have their natural eye color ^note  Which is why Wake in Cytherea's body has dark eyes, and Colum's eyes turn solid black when he is possessed . As for whether that applies to Gideon and Harrow is questioned and left vague throughout the book.
• Hate at First Sight: Gideon and Harrow supposedly hated each other since the moment Harrow was born.
• Human Sacrifice: Harrow was born of one, Gideon was meant to be one.
• The Gift: Each of them is superbly talented at their given discipline, with Gideon being one of the finest fighters the Ninth has ever produced and Harrow being one of the most innately talented necromancers in the history of the Empire.
• Like Brother and Sister: Intentionally defied. Although their relationship as cavalier and necro is compared in-universe to other pairs that that do have this relationship (namely the Fourth and Sixth), there is also a lot of romantic tension in their relationship as well. Muir has even discussed in interviews how some early reviewers responded to Gideon and Harrow's relationship as sisterly, instead of the homoerotic nature she intended it to be read as.
• Mind Hive: At least temporarily. Thanks to Harrow performing "the work" and rendering herself unable to perceive Gideon at all, Gideon's mind and soul has persisted inside her body, semi-conscious for the intervening nine months. Gideon compares it to living in a well or watching the events of a play through a blindfold, and seems to have access to some, if not all, of Harrow's memories.
• Mundane Luxury: Having grown up in the extremely poor Ninth, things as simple as sunlight, freely available food, and warmth are things they take a good deal of pleasure in: Gideon finds Canaan House (decrepit and ruined as it is) to be the most fancy place she's ever set foot in, and considers taking a bath to be the height of luxury (due to the scarcity of water on the Ninth).
• Wise Beyond Their Years: While both Gideon and Harrow superficially act like the teenagers they are, the circumstances of the Ninth after Harrow's birth meant they were never able to truly be children.
  Ortus: "You both had more grit at seven years old than I ever had in my entire life."

Gideon

Gideon Nav / Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia

Her Divine Highness, First Lieutenant of the Cohort, Heir to the Emperor Divine, First of the Tower Princes

One flesh, one end, bitch.

An indentured servant of the Ninth House since she was taken in as a foundling, Gideon Nav grew up detested and unwanted, spending years training with her sword in order to one day leave the Ninth behind and never look back. She ends up being dragged by Harrow to the Lyctor trials on the First after Harrow's cavalier primary fled, knowing that Harrow's success is likely the only way she'll ever escape the Ninth for good.

While Gideon died at the end of the first book in order to save Harrow, much to her own surprise she wakes up nine months later with a rapier in her necromancer's gut and Harrow's soul missing in action. Preserved from total consumption by Harrow's Trauma-Induced Amnesia, Gideon became a ghost inside Harrow, only returning in full during Act Five while Harrow is trapped in a Battle in the Center of the Mind, and is revealed to have been the person narrating the story to Harrow, with the remainder of the story that takes place in the real world coming from her perspective.

For most of Nona the Ninth Gideon's whereabouts and status are unknown, having last been seen in Harrow's body facing down impossible odds with Pyrrha, her own body missing ever since the battle with Cythrea. The amnesiac girl who wakes up in Harrow's body, dubbed 'Nona', is speculated to either be Gideon, sans memories, or a possible fusion between her and Harrow. Gideon eventually reappears as a walking corpse alongside Prince Ianthe Naberius, renamed by her father as Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia. Though the Sixth initially believe that her corpse is nothing but a puppet of Ianthe, and hope that bringing Nona to it will return Gideon to her body, they discover that Gideon has already been returned to herself, reanimated by the Emperor as a corpse with a partial soul. 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.

Gideon serves as the primary protagonist and third-person narrator of Gideon the Ninth as well as the first-person narrator of Harrow the Ninth.

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• All of the Other Reindeer: She's spent her life detested by everyone in the Ninth House, mainly due to her irreverent attitude and mysterious origins, viewed as worthless by literally everyone except her mentor in swordsmanship, especially compared to the only other child of her generation, Harrow, who is the perfect nun and a powerful necromancer. This is primarily because she survived the mass murder of the rest of the Ninth's children.
• Amazonian Beauty: Hot, and with big biceps.
• Ambiguously Human: It is teased extensively throughout the series, that due to her mysterious origins (and eventually, the reveal of her Divine Parentage), Gideon is something other than human, though what exactly she is remains very unclear. Eventually made explicit in As Yet Unsent, where, under the watch of Blood of Eden, her corpse fails to decay in any discernible way despite exposure to the elements over months, and scavengers refuse to approach it.
• Aura Vision: In tandem with Harrow riding her mind, she can see thanergetic concentrations and patterns as weird shining auras. This stands out through the series, as necromancers, even Lyctors, don't percieve thanergy like that, and Harrow is stunned when Gideon mentions it.
• Awkward Kiss: After seeing Nona, and consequently, Harrow's body, for the first time in over a year, Nona responds to Gideon's expression and kisses her, which Gideon is completely shocked by, causing Nona to react defensively and get annoyed with her.
• Bash Brothers: She has a strange fraternal relationship with Ianthe in Nona the Ninth 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 right before betraying her.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Zig-Zagged. Gideon does get beat to shit over the course of the first book, but as mentioned above after death her body preserves itself perfectly. After months of being left out to rot, Corona pointedly observes that she's still incredibly attractive.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Gideon is fond of Magnus because he was the first person in her entire life to be kind and friendly to her. It's also why she's hit so hard by his death.
• Berserk Button: One of the few things that pushes her buttons instantly is others speculating about her origins and her mother's origins. After her death, people treating Harrow poorly becomes one as well.
• BFS: Downplayed. Her weapon 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.
• Big Brother Instinct: Has towards Jeannemary Chatur in the first book, and is absolutely devastated by her death.
• The Big Guy: She's tall, absolutely ripped, and is the only cavalier who favors a heavy weapon; her fighting style consequently often includes physically overpowering her opponents.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Her father is God the Emperor, whose cavalier is Alecto the First, the same corpse her necromancer (whose body she now shares) has been in love with since she was a child, and her mother is a Rebel Leader who was in a relationship with both her Lyctoral namesake and his dead cavalier taking control of his body intermittently, the former of whom led to her premature death, a fact which likely kept Gideon herself alive. She finds out all of this in the span of an hour in Harrow the Ninth.
• Black Swords Are Better: Inverted. Gideon's rapier has a black blade to match the Tomb, but she hates it and far prefers her plain metallic two-hander.
• Blood Knight: For most of her life, Gideon has lived for fighting, and she loves it completely. Her favorite thing in the universe is her two hander, and she's extremely enthusiastic about the prospect of a good fight; even the prospect of watching someone else fight is enough to make her break out in an unnerving grin.
• Bodyguard Crush:
  • In Gideon the Ninth, part of her attraction to Dulcinea stems from a desire to take care of and protect her. Toyed with for Harrow. As Harrow opens up, Gideon's narration starts to compliment her, and comments on her physical appearance far more, but is overwhelmingly shocked that Harrow has anything attractive about her until the final few chapters.
  • In Harrow the Ninth, her attraction to Harrow has blossomed into a full-on Love Epiphany tied in part to her duty as a cavalier, though Gideon believes Harrow can't reciprocate due to her fixation on the Body.
• Bolivian Army Cliffhanger: She and Pyrrha at the end of Harrow the Ninth, are trapped as two cavaliers inside their absent and dead (respectively) necromancers, stuck inside the depths of the River, and soon to be crushed by the pressure or devoured by ravenous ghosts. As she dies, she sees Alecto trying to resuscitate her, possibly as a hallucination. As revealed in Nona the Ninth, her death once again didn't stick, as her father was able to revive her as a revenant.
• Book Dumb: Gideon herself will freely admit she's kind of a dumbass. All she reads are comics and porn mags, but she's quick on her feet, quicker to run her mouth with elaborate sarcastic insults, and learnt the rapier in three months.
• Broken Hero: Despite growing up unloved by anyone and being constantly abused by her adoptive House, Gideon is relentlessly upbeat and is instinctively drawn to help others, albeit with some major issues lying under the surface.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: Gideon adores fighting and is quick to enact violence, but it's no secret she has a soft and squishy heart. Her compassion extends to Damsels in Distress, the horrid teens, and even Harrow.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Almost everything that comes out of Gideon's mouth is an innuendo or a weird, confusing joke, and everyone assumes she's a total idiot. She's also very likely one of the finest sword fighter the Ninth House has ever had.
• Butch Lesbian: Short hair, tall and buff as heck, with a squishy center. Classic butch.
• Came Back Wrong: Kiriona in Nona the Ninth is very much not the Gideon we loved and knew in the previous books. Some of this may be due to not having her snarky but often sympathetic internal narration to soften her outward words and actions; 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 basically presents herself an emotionless husk being driven entirely by boredom and whim (though it may be a cover for grief and/or depression, as Nona observes she's "never seen anyone so sad in her whole short life") and is much less observant and vivacious than usual; she doesn't even notice Camilla wearing her sunglasses or react to Palamedes calling her a friend, wields a rapier without complaint, and worst of all, she's now best friends with Ianthe.
• Cargo Ship: Directly Invoked to show how much Gideon values her two-hander.
  [Gideon] loved her sword so much she could frigging marry it.
• Cultural Rebel: Gideon is about as un-Ninth as it's possible to be: whining about the strictures of Drearbruh religion, reading porn and comics instead of ancient tomes, mouthing off with little provocation, and absolutely loving a good fight. Multiple people question if she's even from the Ninth throughout the first book. Ends up downplayed during the climax and later in the series; when her sword is needed, Gideon embodies the best attributes of the Ninth with her defiant stubbornness and ruthlessness in combat.
  Harrow: "Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my house, you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer."
• Deadpan Snarker: Rarely ever stops her sarcasm from infusing nearly everything she says, and it flavors her narration heavily. Whenever she genuinely stops quipping it's a major sign of O.O.C. Is Serious Business.
• Doorstop Baby: She was a day old when she arrived in Drearburh, safely enclosed in the bio-container of a dead woman's hazard suit.
• Driven to Suicide: In a very unusual way in Harrow the Ninth. Gideon's self-loathing, Survivor's Guilt, and self-sacrificing nature has transformed into genuinely wanting Harrow consume her completely, an act which would kill Gideon for good. While Harrow views the two of them as intertwined all their lives, Gideon takes it further, viewing herself as only being an extension of Harrow, and that her continued existence is something to be undone as soon as possible. Finding out the true nature of her parents doesn't help matters either.
• Dumb Muscle: Downplayed. Gideon's treated by Harrow like she's completely incompetent, the Sixth find her amazingly dense at times, and even Gideon admits she's kind of an idiot. However she's an incredibly talented fighter, often comes up with elaborate sarcastic insults on the spot, and planned surprisingly intricate escape attempts; it's more that much of the cast around her are geniuses expecting her to keep up, while she's extremely ill-informed on life outside the Ninth.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Her narration indulges in this a lot, usually when Coronabeth is flouncing around her in skimpy nightgowns or a wet swimsuit, though it also flavors her more sincere attraction to Dulcinea, with her narration often fixated on Dulcinea's eyes and hair. Also used as a hint towards her Bodyguard Crush towards Harrow. As she sees Harrow without makeup several times towards the end of the book, her narration often fixates on Harrow's face and lips. She's more restrained in Harrow the Ninth, given the circumstances of her resurfacing, but her narration does note that she thinks Valancy Trinit's nude paintings are hot.
• Elective Mute: Pretends to have taken a vow of silence shortly after arriving at Canaan House in Gideon the Ninth to avoid blowing her cover, surprising a few characters when she starts talking and reveals herself as a foul-mouthed irreverent rather than a grim devotee of the Tomb. It cracks early on around the Sixth and ends up breaking entirely once the shit hits the fan at the end of Act Three.
• Elemental Motifs: Is strongly associated with iron/steel/metal to Harrow's ashes/bones, being symbolic of her role as a cavalier, her personality, and eventually, the blood of God running in her veins. It's most often seen with her attachment to her two-handed sword, her narration on how the Ninth is being as hard and unyielding as iron, and she kills herself by impaling herself on an iron spike. When part of her reappears as the corpse prince Kiriona in Nona, her entire body has been rendered as cold and hard as metal to prevent her blood from being drawn.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Despite her bitterness and hostility towards everyone from her life as Gideon and her new allegiance to her father and his empire in Nona the Ninth, she has some kind of reaction to Crux telling her Aiglamene is dead, which humanizes her a bit, and she seems unhappy that Aiglamene clearly hates that she's dead.
• Everyone Can See It: She almost immediately becomes very obviously infatuated with Dulcinea to the point where Harrow tries to limit the time Gideon spends around her.
• Everyone Has Standards: Gideon is fond of dirty jokes and dirtier magazines, but when Harrow is left naked by one of the trials Gideon's eyes remain firmly on her face without even a hint of temptation. When she's left in Harrow's body, she never once invades her privacy.
• Face of a Thug: In Gideon The Ninth, she has this reputation among the gathered in Canaan House: her Ninth House accoutrements (her black robe and skull facepaint), her tall and muscular frame, and Harrow's instructions for her not to talk to anyone make her rather scary in the eyes of the other House necromancers and cavaliers. Most of them are rather surprised when she starts talking and reveals herself to be a snarky Bruiser with a Soft Center with a penchant for puns and sex jokes.
• Family Eye Resemblance: Her Supernatural Gold Eyes are identical to her father's original eye color, which ends up unraveling his millennia of lies.
• Fiery Redhead: Her bright, vibrantly red hair is uncommon in the Nine Houses, and is something her mother shared. Gideon is as spirited and passionate as the trope suggests.
• Final Speech: Before her Heroic Suicide in Gideon the Ninth, she gives one to Harrow.
  Gideon: Harrow, I can't keep my promise, because the entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That's what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.
  Harrow: Nav, what are you doing?
  Gideon: The cruelest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me. You'll know what to do, and if you don't do it, what I'm about to do will be no use to anyone.
  Gideon: For the Ninth!
• Gender-Blender Name: "Gideon" is generally a male given name, and she's named after a male character, though nobody comments on it throughout the series.
• Go Out with a Smile: Gideon's corpse is still wearing a smile after she sacrifices herself to power up Harrow against Cytherea and the battle is won.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Openly and rampantly jealous of Nona/Alecto, who gets every scrap of devotion and loyalty Harrow can muster.
• Healing Factor: Unlike Harrow, when she's in Harrow's body she has the innate regeneration that normal Lyctors have, which is the only thing that keeps her from being killed by Heralds shortly after resurfacing, and allows her to wield her two-hander in a somewhat normal fashion, despite the fact that she's tearing Harrow's frail muscles apart while doing so. It also appears to be stronger than other Lyctors due to Harrow's Memory Gambit or Gideon being Ambiguously Human, as she heals an amputated thumb immediately, which Lyctors are not supposed to be able to do.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Who, if anyone, Kiriona is loyal to throughout Nona the Ninth 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 then 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.
• The Hero: For all her goofiness, Gideon is undoubtedly good and a hero to the end. There's a reason the very first book is named after her.
• The Hero Dies: 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 allow Gideon to 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.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: She prefers her two hander specifically, although she's more than competent with the traditional rapier all cavaliers use, even if she whines about it not being proper fighting.
• Heroic Sacrifice: She impales herself in the heart so that Harrow can extract her soul and become a Lyctor powerful enough to kill Cytherea, and thereby save both Harrow and Camilla. In Harrow the Ninth, it's discussed how Harrow views it as "murder" and not "suicide".
  Harrow: I will spit in the face of the first person who tells me she committed suicide; she was in an impossible situation, and she died trying to escape it. She was murdered, but she maneuvered her murder to let me live.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Gideon did not have a good time growing up in the Ninth as a universally reviled indentured servant. She's mostly blase about it, treating instances like having the heat turned off in her cell until she's so cold she's left screaming in a hallway as comically mundane, but it gets Played for Drama later, especially when it comes to her twisted and entangled history with Harrow.
• Hypocritical Humor: Almost always refers to Jeannemary and Isaac as "the shitty teens" (and similar variations) in her narration, despite being only four years older than them, and very immature and naive in her own right.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Though she's more than passably skilled with the rapier after her training with Aiglamene, her real skill and passion lies with her two hander. When she finally breaks it out, she and Harrow quickly dismantle Cytherea's bone construct, and when she duels Cytherea, Gideon effortlessly smashes through her defenses, only failing to kill her due to the Healing Factor she possesses.
• I Am Who?: Double subverted. Her origins are both incredibly significant and utterly irrelevant. Gideon is the first and only child of The Emperor, but was born solely as a Human Weapon to break the lock on the Tomb sealed with his blood. However, she does get recognized later as the Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia, but this comes only after her death and John partially undoing her Lyctoral bond with Harrow.
  "It turned out I was the child of God—hey, suck it, Marshal—but also nothing more than a stick of dynamite. I was nothing but a chess move in a thousand-year game."
• Iconic Item: Her beloved two-hander and especially her aviator sunglasses. They're featured on the cover of Gideon the Ninth, and she wears them in all but the deepest darkness. Others recognize this as well: in Harrow the Ninth, Harrow's prepared letter for her is a simple "ONE FLESH, ONE END" on a note wrapped around the glasses. That Kiriona Gaia doesn't even notice someone else wearing them is a major indication she's Come Back Wrong.
• In the Blood: 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 who's 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 a chance to take revenge, like her parents were before her, Gideon chooses to forgive and to sacrifice herself rather than others.
• Indentured Servitude: The Ninth raised her since she was a baby, a debt they won't soon let her forget.
• It's All My Fault: A habit of hers, probably tied to her Chronic Hero Syndrome. Becomes particularly apparent when she isn't able to prevent Isaac and Jeannemary from getting killed. It's also revealed that she's blamed herself for Harrow's parents' suicides since the age of eleven.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Although she does so in a fashion that infuriates Nona, she's the first person to openly state what's become obvious to everyone: Nona clearly isn't Harrowhark, can't be her, and therefore must be someone else. She is also the first person to confront her about being Alecto.
• Knuckle Cracking: Gideon has a tendency to pop her knuckles, shoulders, and neck, but in an inversion, only does so when she's nervous or thinking, and never does so before a fight.
• Lamarck Was Right: Two different uses even! It's heavily implied that Gideon's Divine Parentage on her father's side is tied into strange durability, and despite never knowing Commander Wake (herself perhaps one of the greatest warriors in history), Gideon became one of the most talented fighters in the history of the Ninth.
• Leave Him to Me!: Temporarily. When she believes Harrow is responsible for the murders, she is left saying a variation on this repeatedly, and very nearly ended up waiting in their quarters to kill her.
• Lightning Bruiser: Gideon is very strong and surprisingly quick among the other cavaliers. It's downplayed with the rapier due to her lack of training and dislike of it, but both her speed and power are fully realized with her two hander.
• Limb-Sensation Fascination: A negative use. She's incredibly weirded out to be inside Harrow's frail body in Harrow the Ninth, especially in losing her height and strength. She’s furthermore resolved to take only the most practical interest in it out of respect to Harrow’s privacy, up to taking showers with her clothes on.
• Living Emotional Crutch: It turns out she is this to Harrow, in a twisted and complicated way. They've known each other their whole lives, and Harrow can't imagine life without her. When Gideon is not only killed, but willingly sacrifices herself to give Harrow everything she ever wanted, the resulting guilt and trauma completely shatters Harrow.
• Living MacGuffin: Principally important in the middle portion of Nona the Ninth is her role as the key to the Locked Tomb, with her body being retrieved so that Blood of Eden can, at long last, open the Tomb, with a secondary need to save Nona's life. That she ends up being alive inside her own corpse comes as a shock to everyone.
• Love Epiphany: Posthumously! In the time since her death at the end of the first book, she seems to have come to realize that she truly does love Harrow in addition to the duty she feels towards her, though she believes Harrow can't reciprocate and is fixated only on the Body, a fact which may not be entirely true.
  "I died knowing you'd hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I had your full attention."
• Made of Iron: Gideon is strangely and supernaturally durable, which is observed and commented on throughout Gideon the Ninth. She survives the extended siphoning in the Avulsion room and recovers completely from the experience in less than a day, when Palamedes says it ought to have given her permanent brain damage, if not outright killed her. Then there's the matter of the nerve gas that was released in her nursery when she was a baby, when just releasing the gas blinded Harrow's great-aunts. Gideon breathed it for ten minutes unharmed. It's later implied that her Divine Parentage conferred her with some strange abilities as a result.
• Malicious Misnaming: Throughout their childhoods and into Gideon the Ninth Harrow never uses Gideon's name, addresses her either by her House name or as "Griddle". It's to the point that Gideon is surprised and delighted on the very rare occasions that she uses her proper first name. However, it's inverted in Harrow the Ninth after Gideon's death, with both being treated more fondly.
• Master Swordswoman: Gideon is called the finest cavalier the Ninth House has ever produced, and there's serious implications that it's accurate. She learned enough rapier in 3 months to defeat cavaliers that have been training for all their lives, she has a near Holmesian skill at analyzing her opponents, and she holds her own against Cytherea, who has about 10,000 years worth of experience on her, only losing due to her Healing Factor. If there's a problem that can be solved with a sword, Gideon's got it.
• Meaningful Name: For being only three letters, "Nav" packs in a lot of symbolism. "Nav" is Breton for "nine", as well as being a term for the souls of the dead and The Underworld in traditional Slavic folklore. It also has a number of puns in English, such as "knave", "naive", and "navigate", all of which fit to Gideon to a certain extent, and naturally makes her full name nine letters long. As for her first name:
  Muir: "There are a lot of reasons as to why Gideon is called Gideon. The warlike prophet of God who really messed up the Midianites is part of it. Gideon is a prophetic name: someone named their own demise in her."
• Meaningful Rename: Renamed by her father as Kiriona Gaia by the time she appears in Nona the Ninth, 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 her as Gideon, the narration in Nona opts to refer to her primarily as Kiriona.
• Messianic Archetype: As of yet downplayed, but present. In addition to being the child of God, she forgave Harrow for her sins, sacrificed her life to save others and Harrow's brain surgery to preserve her from being consumed entirely happened on the third day after her death. And then there's her mysteriously perfectly preserved corpse.
• My Greatest Failure: Explored. Her selflessness causes her to 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 the self-loathing that it actually is.
• Mysterious Past: The questions of who her parents were and why she was taken in by the Ninth are one of the major driving mysteries of the entire series, and serve as one of the culminating dramas of Harrow the Ninth. It's lampshaded as well, as Gideon's narration notes that her origins are "obviously mysterious as hell".
• Mundane Luxury: Gideon grew up in the austere and cloistered conditions of the Ninth House. Thus simple luxuries like a bath or fresh vegetables are incredibly extravagant to her and she takes her time to enjoy them in Caanan House.
• Muscles Are Meaningful: Gideon is jacked from years of intense workouts and training with a BFS, and is noted to be even more fit than she'd be required to be to gain entry to the Cohort, due to a dream of excelling the second she joined and also having a habit of exercising whenever she's bored, which happened often in the Ninth. Consequently, she's a Lightning Bruiser who's able to outfight cavaliers born to the role despite only having a few months of training with a rapier.
• Naïve Newcomer: A downplayed version in Gideon the Ninth, and toyed with on top of that. Since she's lived her entire life on the Ninth and wasn't Harrow's first choice of cavalier, she doesn't know much about the other Houses, especially their necromantic specialties, or what being a cavalier primary actually entails. However, it also extends to things that she's unfamiliar with but are normal in real life, such as daily nightfall, baths, and what a salad is.
• Narrator All Along: The Second-Person Narration about Harrow in Harrow the Ninth is eventually revealed to be told to her by Gideon, who becomes the first person narrator when she gains control of Harrow's body. While she remains a largely detached observer for much of the book, being only semi-conscious inside Harrow, there are subtle moments where her own observations leak through to color the narration with snarky asides or comment on things Harrow doesn't know.
• Never Found the Body: 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 Canaan House.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • After the death of the Fourth right in front of her, Gideon's sarcasm turns very bitter and hurtful, often directed at herself as her self-loathing rises, and she starts lashing out at people more frequently. It isn't until she and Harrow finally reconcile that she shakes it off.
  • Gideon's narration makes note of the fact that, although they despise each other, and Harrow routinely hurts Gideon emotionally and physically, Gideon has never physically threatened or hurt Harrow in return, and the times that Gideon comes genuinely close to doing so are times when she's especially upset or infuriated by Harrow.
  • That Kiriona is abrasive and rude to her friends in Nona the Ninth is unexpected. That she doesn't even look at her sunglasses and wields a rapier is a surprise. But that she knows necromantic theory is what makes Palamedes recoil in shock.
• Oblivious to Love: While by Harrow the Ninth Gideon has come to realize she loves Harrow, she believes Harrow can't love her in return. She interprets Harrow's refusal to fully consume her as a rejection, rather than the desperate act of love it actually is, which isn't helped by the fact she sincerely believes Harrow literally can't love anyone other than the Body.
• One-Steve Limit: Presumably part of the reason John renamed her in Nona the Ninth had to do with the fact that he already knew somebody named Gideon for 10,000 years, someone who he thinks is still alive.
• Only Friend: Harrow reveals this is how she actually views Gideon, despite having mostly treated her like she despised her.
• Orphan's Ordeal: It's a sore point for her in the first book that she knows nothing about her family or where she came from, and was raised by a House full of people who never loved her or showed her any real kindness.
• Overlord Jr.: In Nona she's openly recognized as the Emperor's daughter, as well as his appointed heir, which she seems fine with. In fact, she wants to be his cavalier.
• Perspective Flip: Most of Gideon's heroic attributes when seen as the protagonist in the prior two books are flipped as Prince Kiriona in Nona the Ninth; her constant sarcasm and innuendo comes across as abrasive and callous, her tendency to lash out is taken as deep insult instead of misplaced self-loathing, and her eagerness to fight seems deeply sinister. Nona, a character who is eager to love and be loved, takes an immediate disliking to her.
• Plagued by Nightmares: Gideon got them a lot as a kid, especially ones about the Locked Tomb opening. Her dreams get a lot worse after the Fourth's death, her nightmares mostly revolving around all the deaths she failed to prevent.
• Possessing a Dead Body: In Nona the Ninth. In a twist of this trope, the body she's possessing is her own. The Emperor brought her back as a revenant inside her own corpse, but she's still, in her own words, "mega dead."
• Power Fist: Her offhand weapon alongside the rapier is a set of spiked, obsidian knuckle-knives. Subverted in that they're mainly for appearances' sake, as Gideon has absolutely no idea how to use them for anything beyond blocking and backhanding.
• Proud Beauty: Gideon is perfectly aware that she's an Amazonian Beauty and has a tendency to sardonically brag about it.
  Harrow: I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it.
  Gideon: Yes you can, it's just less great and less hot.
• Pungeon Master: Gideon assumes puns are automatically funny.
• Red Herring: Thinking that Nona is Gideon and seeing Kiriona's stoic reappearance beside Ianthe who is wearing Naberius's body, Troia Cell assumes that she's merely a shell being puppeted by Ianthe, and that returning Nona to Gideon's body will restore her to her prior self. Kiriona awakens to destroy the notion, careening the last third of Nona the Ninth into an entirely different direction.
• Sad Clown: Gideon will make inappropriate jokes in the most dire of situations, mostly because her whole life has been a fairly dire situation. Palamedes observes that Gideon, underneath her bluster, absolutely hates herself. She can't deny he's right.
• Slasher Smile: Despite being The Hero, Gideon's still a Blood Knight, and has an irrepressibly savage enthusiasm for fighting that unsettles Harrow at times. When it reappears in Kiriona Gaia, the entire effect is deeply sinister.
  "It was not a very friendly smile: it went slowly up her face, and there was something a little bit hungry about it."
• Sophisticated as Hell: While it's common among the cast, Gideon constantly juxtaposes elaborate language with swearing and juvenile humor, and it's one of the distinguishing factors of narration from her perspective.
  Harrow: What are you even saying half the time—
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Although she's an abrasive jerk to her previous friends in Nona the Ninth, Nona notes that Kiriona's every motion screams that she is completely miserable, the saddest person Nona has ever seen.
• Spanner in the Works: Her existence as a person who was born solely to be killed but just didn't die reveals not just one but two dark secrets of the Emperor to his Lyctors: that a perfect Lyctorhood is possible, and that God's eyes are not his own.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Double subverted. Harrow the Ninth teases that Gideon is related to Gideon the First, who, like her is tall, muscled, and a dark-skinned redhead, 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.
• Sunglasses at Night: She wears her sunglasses constantly, even sleeping in them periodically. Justified, in that the Ninth is a very dark hole bored into the core of a dead planet, so wearing sunglasses even in the deepest shadows at Canaan House isn't much impediment to her, and covering her eyes is part of the costume Harrow demands of her. It's lampshaded at as well; despite her fondness of them, even Gideon thinks it's stupid to fight with them on and she does take them off when she needs to.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Gideon's eyes are a bright and unnatural gold, which are the same as her father's after he was given Necromancy but before he became God.
• Survivor's Guilt: Combined with It's All My Fault, Gideon takes all of the deaths at Canaan House very personally, especially Jeannemary's, who she mentions regularly even into Harrow the Ninth.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Gideon in the first two books was a Jerk with a Heart of Gold. Kiriona in Nona the Ninth is a complete dick to everyone she meets, enough that her venom startles Palamedes and nearly makes Camilla instinctively attack her. It makes the all-loving Nona immediately loathe her.
• Trauma Conga Line: Wakes up inside Harrow in Harrow the Ninth and in quick succession finds out that she was born solely as a Human Weapon, that her mother hated her from conception and planned to kill her, that her father is God and also probably evil, that namesake is also dead, and then gets dropped into the River, all while interpreting her preservation as Harrow rejecting her sacrifice and struggling to adjust to her undeath in Harrow's body.
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: Portions of her past occasionally get told in passing flashbacks, and given her entire existence has been troubled, they inevitably come off as this.
• Undead Abomination: 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.
  "I am the perfect sword hand and the final expression of the art of the Nine Houses. Don't you get it? I am the Emperor's construct."
• Undying Loyalty: Eventually and literally to Harrow.
• Unknown Rival: Harrow claims she barely remembers Gideon exists most of the time despite Gideon considering Harrow her greatest enemy for most of their lives, though she's clearly lying.
• The Unreveal: The questions raised in Gideon the Ninth about Gideon's Ambiguously Human nature and how she survived multiple incidents that should've killed her go unanswered in Harrow the Ninth when the mysteries of her parentage are revealed, mostly because the people who could answer those questions have far more important issues than Gideon to care about.
• Unwanted Revival: When she wakes up inside Harrow in Harrow the Ninth, Gideon is genuinely angry and distraught that Harrow tore her brain apart to forget her, both because Harrow could have rendered Gideon's death meaningless by getting herself killed with her flawed Lyctorhood and because she interprets Harrow's Memory Gambit as a rejection of her sacrifice.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: 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, with him going willingly to his overdue death, she does so, and then nearly has a panic attack from how little she feels from the deed.
• What Beautiful Eyes!: Several characters comment on her eyes as being striking, and Harrow is especially fascinated by them.
• What You Are in the Dark: Alone in Canaan House's pool with Harrow, the woman who has abused Gideon all her life, having just learned her adoptive House tried to kill her as an infant, Harrow begs Gideon to kill her. Gideon instead embraces Harrow and forgives her completely.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy:
  • Despite how much she professes to loathe the Ninth, as a child she tried desperately to earn approval from her adoptive House, including telling Harrow's parents that Harrow had unlocked the Tomb out of a misguided desire to finally be praised. While she's largely past it by the time the story takes place, it's Harrow calling her the finest cavalier in the history of the Ninth that cements her decision to commit Heroic Suicide.
  • In Nona the Ninth she says she wants to open the Tomb so she can kill Alecto, which will get her John's affection and allow her to take Alecto's place as his cavalier.
• The Worf Effect: Despite being a talented fighter in her own right, Gideon loses the majority of fights she's in throughout the series, in large part because even a skilled cavalier is meant to work alongside a necromancer and is easily outmatched alone.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Although her other injuries from Canaan House were repaired, John left the punctures in her torso and throat in place, unhealed in a dead body.

---

Harrow

Harrowhark Nonagesimus / Harrowhark the First

HEIR TO THE HOUSE OF THE NINTH, THE REVEREND DAUGHTER OF DREARBURH

The Tomb I will serve till the end of my days, and then see me buried in two hundred graves...

The Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, heir to the Ninth House and the long line of guardians of the Locked Tomb, Harrowhark Nonagesimus is haughty, one of the most powerful necromancers of her generation, and Gideon's lifelong bully. It is only out of necessity that she conscripts Gideon as her cavalier for the Lyctor trials, because her need to become a Lyctor in order to safeguard her House and the Locked Tomb eclipses her hatred of Gideon.

But after getting everything she ever wanted—Lyctorhood, the restoration of her House, the safeguarding of the Body— Harrow could not handle the guilt and grief of Gideon's death being the cost of it. Prior to the beginning of Harrow the Ninth, she performed "the work", overwriting every memory of Gideon in an attempt to save Gideon's soul from total consumption, and in the process attempting to commit psychic suicide so that a new Harrow could go forward unburdened. Seeing this through came with a heavy toll: the new Harrow is a flawed Lyctor, has become apathetic to nearly everything, deals with the constant barbs of her fellow Lyctors and the disappointment of God, on top of someone trying very dearly to kill her.

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

Harrow serves as the deuteragonist of Gideon the Ninth as well as the POV character of Harrow the Ninth.

---

• Anti-Hero: She’s the other protagonist of the series, but not nearly as virtuous or traditionally heroic as Gideon. There are times in the first book when it's called into question whether Harrow is one of the "good guys" at all, but ultimately Harrowhark does what she does for the sake of her House, and she's not at all as heartless as she tries to appear.
• Badass Boast: She's prone to these.
  Harrow: I have bested my father. I have bested my father and my grandmother—every single necromancer ever taught by my House—every necromancer who has ever touched a skeleton.
• Badass Bookworm: Par for the course as a necromancer, but Harrow in particular is one of the only necros whom the others consider a significant threat even without a cavalier at her side.
• Barrier Warrior: Along with swarms of skeletons, one of her recurring techniques is to summon shields of bone. By the end of Gideon the Ninth, she's also learned how to make them regenerate.
• Beneath the Mask: Projects hostility and haughtiness largely to cover up her deeply rooted issues and atrocious sense of self-worth.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: She has a very fraught version of this with Gideon in book one, and Ianthe in book two.
• Big Damn Kiss: Subverted; her beloved Body, Alecto the First, kisses her when she reawakens, but being what she is, she has absolutely no idea how to kiss, a meat thing she's never done, and the experience leaves Harrow bleeding. Alecto notes Harrow is unsatisfied with it, which nearly provokes her anger.
• Bittersweet 17: Harrow is seventeen in book one, and deals with such Coming of Age trials as: leaving home for the first time, growing closer to her first crush, and trying to ascend to Lyctorhood to secure the future of her House.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Doesn't extend to her sclera like in some examples, but her irises are so dark as to appear black, and she's Gideon's lifelong tormentor. Also ultimately ends up as a subversion.
• Blessed with Suck: The massacre that Harrow's parents caused to ensure she would be born a necromancer has also made her a prodigy par excellence, to the point of being talked up as one of the most powerful bone witches to ever live. Unfortunately, the circumstances of her birth also given her an absolute plethora of deeply-rooted issues and abysmal self-esteem that have rendered her heavily suicidal her entire life.
• Bodyguard Crush: It's very heavily implied that she has a crush on Gideon beneath all of the tangled emotions between them.
• Break the Haughty: In Harrow the Ninth, due to both her character development and her external veneer slipping, as well as the trauma from Gideon's death, Harrow goes from an aloof Insufferable Genius to being easily frightened, questionably sane, deeply traumatized, and being viewed as a colossal failure by those around her.
• Broken Bird: Harrow is cold and cynical, but her parents killing themselves when she was ten is also only the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to her issues.
• Brought Down to Normal: Lacks her Lyctoral abilities while in her river bubble, and is completely aghast at how much it costs her to do even simple actions.
• Byronic Hero: Volatile and violent, sullen and withdrawn, intensely self-critical and highly intelligent, haunted by a past that involves her falling passionately in love with the corpse of The Antichrist... Harrow is as excruciatingly Byronic as a teenage girl can be.
• Cassandra Truth: Harrow often expresses her dislike of Dulcinea, much to Gideon's exasperation. Guess who turns out to be behind all the murders?
• Child Prodigy: It's mentioned that she could control skeletons before she could properly walk.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: Became the leader of her house at the age of ten after the suicide of her parents, though only a few people know that they're dead.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: When she tries to limit the time Gideon spends around Dulcinea, Gideon accuses her of being jealous, while Harrow insists that it's because Dulcinea isn't trustworthy. Although she ends up being right, Harrow was also being jealous.
• Crazy-Prepared: Zigzagged. Her letters in Harrow the Ninth account for a number of circumstances that her past self believed she would need, including the possibility of Gideon Nav taking control of her body, but she's also caught completely off guard by events she could never have predicted, such as meeting Palamedes again.
• Creepy Loner Girl: Harrow fits this to a T in the first book, shunning all company at Canaan House while sulking around in the shadows. It's also invoked: she encourages the other Houses to see her this way, as it fits into the mysterious reputation of the Ninth and prevents them from prying.
• Death of Personality: Explored, and ultimately defied. Harrow characterizes her Memory Gambit as death, and that the resulting Harrow is a new person, but it's very obviously wrong. In the immediate aftermath she's left nearly catatonic for weeks, and throughout the story has no answer when faced with the very obvious flaws in her rush job. She is eventually forced to reconcile the reality that she cannot divide herself in two after less than a year, even given the possibility that she'll completely kill Gideon if she does so.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Over the course of Gideon the Ninth, she goes from abusing Gideon at the start of the book to being extremely protective over her by the end. She also defrosts to the other heirs at Canaan House, enough to be concerned about their whereabouts in the epilogue. Continues in Harrow the Ninth after she finally regains her memories, accepting and even enjoying a hug from Ortus.
• Deuteragonist: Gideon may be the eponymous, point of view character of the first book and the Narrator All Along for the second, but Harrow's story develops in tandem with hers and is just as important, even before they're literally two people in the same body. Tellingly, the second book is named after Harrow and shifts to following her after Gideon's Heroic Sacrifice.
• Didn't Think This Through: 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.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In her introductory chapter in Gideon the Ninth, she kicks Gideon in the face while she's disabled — hard enough to make Gideon cough up a tooth — for trying to leave. This is comparatively mild; Harrow is fond of doling these out to Gideon for her escape attempts, such as poisoning her food so that Gideon was sick for a month and giving her frostbite by turning off the heating to her cell.
• Dream Land: Spontaneously and seemingly accidentally created a liminal bubble within the River, and drew in the dead of Canaan House to act out roles in her dreams exploring her Fake Memories in an Elseworld take on the events of Gideon the Ninth that starts breaking down as the Sleeper tries to take advantage of the space to take control of her.
• Dream Walker: She spends the majority of Nona the Ninth as John's companion in the dream of his and Alecto's memories of the first days after the Resurrection, being both Alecto and Harrow simultaneously.
• Driven to Suicide: Harrow has always been suicidal, from her earliest memories, and made at least two attempts at her life from a young age by first unlocking the Tomb and later attempting to roll away the rock that served as the final barrier. Despite not being successful either time, she continues to have an atrocious sense of self-worth into the present. She's suicidal to the point of total apathy in Act One of Harrow the Ninth but does manage to move past it for the most part, and ultimately finally decides she needs to continue living by the end of the book.
• Easily Forgiven: Twice.
  • When told all the darkest secrets of the Ninth, Gideon forgives Harrow's lifelong abuse of her easily, immediately, and completely. Even Harrow is stunned at how easy it is for Gideon, and has to be reassured later on that she really did forgive her.
  • When she finally regains her memories and tells Ortus that he owes her no loyalty given that their House killed him, Ortus forgives her as well, viewing her lashing out as a combination of the immense stress and pressure she was under at a young age and his own lack of resistance.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Gideon's narration to her notes that Harrow finds Mercy's eyes "dreamy", and somewhat resentfully admits that Harrow finds Ianthe beautiful.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Checks all the boxes. Some of the other heirs note that Harrow is as stereotypically Ninth as they come.
• Elemental Motifs: In addition to the general association with water that necromancy has and darkness that her House has, Harrow is associated with ashes: her entire existence is the result of a Human Sacrifice, she's a Broken Bird largely defined by her grief and guilt, and as a necromancer, her specialty becomes extensive use of regenerating bone, also called perpetual ash. Gideon even notes that she reeks of ash, even after being dunked in Canaan House's pool.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Ianthe is fond of calling her "Harry," which infuriates Harrow (and amuses the Emperor and Gideon).
• Fake Memories: Part of "the work" in Harrow the Ninth entailed reconstructing her past around the replacement of Gideon with Ortus at Canaan House, but they're primarily confined to her Dream Land; when she meets Camilla and Palamedes and has to reconcile their familiarity with her, she's left deeply confused, and thinking too long on her past triggers another part of her Memory Gambit by making her head split with pain.
• Forgets to Eat: Big time, in addition to forgetting to sleep and drink water. It really doesn't help that there's almost no food she actually likes.
• Freak Out: Becoming a Lyctor triggered a weeks long one that left Harrow projectile vomiting at the drop of a hat, disgusted with anyone seeing her body, and resulted in a deliberate and complete restructuring of her memories to remove every memory of Gideon.
• Friendly Rivalry: Develops one with Palamedes in the later portions of Gideon the Ninth that continues beyond the end of the book; both of them effusively praise the other as brilliant to others, and strive to outdo one another, with their arguments being both academic disagreements and attempts to push the other past their limitations.
• The Gift: Invoked. Harrow is likely the strongest necromancer in the entire history of the Ninth, and has been raising skeletons since almost before she could walk, on top of being a genius who even Palamedes considers his better. Harrow even describes herself as "the perfect necromancer" as an honest self-assessment. This however came with the massacre that led to her birth, and the consequences of that have left Harrow with a lifetime of guilt and self-loathing.
• Hate at First Sight: Apparently she's hated Gideon since she was born, though over time her feelings for her become much more complicated.
• Hates Being Touched: Especially apparent in book two. Kind, gentle touches in particular terrify and unsettle Harrow.
• Haunted Heroine: In keeping with the trope, it's suggested Harrow's hallucinations stem from being haunted, or might be compounded by it. Her experience in the River and comments from Abigail in her Dream Land suggest that imprints of the souls of the 200 dead children of the Ninth might be forever bound to her soul, or that, at a minimum, Harrow fears that they are. In Harrow the Ninth it turns out that the Sleeper is genuinely haunting her.
• Have You Seen My God?: Resolves at the end of the John chapters of Nona the Ninth that she has to find God, or some fragment of God, to worship, but wants to discover everything about John and Alecto's past before she determines if the man who became God is the object of her devotion, or if she sleeps within the Tomb.
• He's Back!: Spends most of Harrow the Ninth in a constant state of despair and fear, but regains much of her prior personality and confidence when she regains her memories, albeit with the pain of Gideon's death being newly fresh.
• Heroic BSoD: Gideon's death hits her extremely hard, and in the final chapter and epilogue of Gideon the Ninth she's left sobbing and deeply heartbroken.
• Hypocrite: She's disgusted when she sees Gideon the First kissing Cytherea's dead body, but she herself is in love with a corpse (the Body). Ianthe lampshades this after finding out.
• I Am a Monster: She rarely talks about it, but from a very young age Harrow has been only all too aware of the abomination of her birth. She calls herself a personified "war crime" and by book two it's apparent she doesn't even consider herself human.
  Harrow: I am an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground.
• I Work Alone: Harrow, who is largely self-taught and has had to run her House essentially by herself since childhood, assumes that the Lyctorhood trials are purely about testing her as a necromancer, having brought Gideon as a cavalier entirely for appearances' sake, only to find that the trials are about testing the bond between cavalier and necromancer after working herself to the bone for weeks. She only begrudgingly works with Gideon initially, but eventually ends up working with both her and the Sixth closely.
• Insufferable Genius: Harrow is smug and arrogant, but she really is a hugely talented necromancer, assuredly one of the most powerful of her generation. And she won't let anyone forget it.
• Last-Name Basis: She calls everyone by their surname or formal title, and everyone in turn does the same to her. Gideon is the only one who occasionally calls her "Harrow," although Palamedes eventually works up to it too.
• Lean and Mean: In contrast to the muscular Gideon, Harrow is described as being extremely skinny (with Gideon's snarky narration calling her an "evil twig"), and she has a rather sharp, cold outward demeanor: it's implied to be the result of malnutrition due to her dislike of eating.
  Ianthe: Valancy Trinit was my height, weighed more than both of us put together, and — judging by her portraits — had a body that did not quit. Your body, by comparison, gave up at the starting line.
• Love at First Sight: Harrow has been in love with the Body in the Locked Tomb — effectively The Antichrist of the Empire's religion, and one of the reasons Harrow wanted to become a Lyctor and safeguard the Tomb — since the first time she saw her when she opened the Locked Tomb as a child.
  Harrow: Nav, when I saw her face, I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Like all Lyctors, she's capable of total control of her own body, and has to physically manipulate it in order to mimic the innate Healing Factor that the others have.
• Meaningful Name:
  • As Muir puts it in the pronunciation guide for Gideon the Ninth:
    "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."
  • In-universe, the "-hark" portion of her given name is a reference to an ancestor, much like "Coronabeth" and "Jeannemary", and is something she shares with her father. Consequently, it gets added or dropped at certain moments by the narration, often when Harrow feels especially repulsed by or bound to her lineage.
• Meaningful Rename: Played with, and ultimately defied. As part of her ascension to Sainthood, her House name and association with the Ninth were ceremonially discarded. However, Harrow retains a deep emotional attachment to her House, takes a selfish pleasure in being referred to by her old titles throughout the book, and reflexively refers to herself by them before she refers to herself as being of the First.
• Memory Gambit: The ultimate goal of "the work" is to preserve Gideon's soul from total consumption, with the added benefit alleviating the overwhelming grief and guilt Harrow felt in the aftermath of Gideon's death. It's ultimately successful, though whether Gideon's preservation is temporary or permanent is left unclear.
• Mundane Utility: She uses her own blood as ink and isn't above using skeletons for mundane things such as propping herself up in bed.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After Gideon's death, Harrow feels an overwhelming amount of guilt for how she treated Gideon all their lives, finding it difficult to even tangentially reference the extent of the abuse she subjected Gideon to, in spite of Gideon forgiving her easily.
• No Social Skills: Gideon is amused to discover that Harrow isn't just aloof, but absolutely terrified at the prospect of having to socialize at a cordial dinner party. Considering Harrow's spent most of her time with skeletons and nuns, it makes sense she has no idea how to interact with anyone in a casual setting.
• Noodle Incident: Comments from Ianthe indicate that she flew into a murderous rage the one time medical staff on the Erebos tried to remove Gideon's longsword from her, but Harrow herself can only distantly recall it.
• Nuns Are Spooky: As a devout follower of the cult of the Locked Tomb even before she became the leader of said sect, Harrow is sometimes called a nun; however Ninth religion differs so much from modern Catholicism that most tropes applied to nuns in fiction only tangentially apply to her.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Remarked upon frequently by Gideon's narration, which is disarmed to see Harrow open up and start to treat her with compassion throughout her Character Arc in Gideon the Ninth. Most especially when the final secrets are revealed between them, which leaves Harrow stammering, apologetic, and has her admit that Gideon is her Only Friend.
• Older Than They Look: Her body's nineteen as of Nona the Ninth, but people usually guess that it's only fourteen or fifteen.
• Parental Neglect: Harrow's parents were mostly distant and scholarly with Harrow, only showing emotion 1) when they were giving her regular reminders of the massive human sacrifice used to create her, and 2) when they were organizing the family suicide. Harrow thinks that the guilt of the massacre quashed their ability to feel positive emotion, including love for their only child.
• Plain Palate: In stark contrast to Gideon, Harrow views eating as a grim, necessary evil and strong flavours seem to physically hurt her. Even tea and biscuits are offensive to her tastebuds, and even when drinking something she doesn't actively hate (water with sugar and the faintest dash of lemon), she has to drink it slowly so the taste doesn't overwhelm her.
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: Harrow, enraged that Gideon feels sorry for her even after everything Harrow's done to Gideon over the years, furiously begs Gideon to strike her down, yelling that she deserves to die by Gideon's hand. Because they're in a swimming pool at the time, when Gideon comes over and takes her in her arms, Harrow thinks that she's being ritually drowned. She is mortified when she realizes that Gideon is hugging her instead.
• Powered Armor: Creates a skeletal version of this to help her wield Gideon's longsword, wearing it for most of Harrow the Ninth. Gideon herself peels it off with some disgust after she takes control of Harrow's body.
• Power Incontinence: Her Lyctorhood is viewed as fundamentally flawed by the standards of other Lyctors, with her not having any skill with a sword, her necromancy falling to pieces whenever she's unconscious or in the River, and her Healing Factor not being automatic. It's eventually revealed that this is because her Memory Gambit to preserve Gideon's soul broke the normal Lyctorhood process.
• Power-Strain Blackout: Harrow passes out quite a few times after straining her magic too far. She's the only necromancer at Canaan House shown to do so, though she often pushes herself past the limits where other necromancers would back down.
• Prone to Vomiting: Her stay on the Erebos consisted of her mostly being bound to the medical wing due to constantly Stress Vomiting.
• Properly Paranoid: Harrow can be said to be easily the most antagonistic towards the other Houses at Canaan House (at least at first, until she starts to defrost later), and she handles the first murders much better than most of the rest of the cast.
• Psychic Nosebleed: As a side effect of using necromancy, she often gets blood sweat, nosebleeds, blood from the eyes, and even exploded blood vessels when really letting loose with her magic.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Harrow achieves everything she set out to do in Gideon the Ninth, becoming a Lyctor and getting the Emperor to renew the Ninth House. However, it came at the cost of Gideon, her only friend and Living Emotional Crutch, and it's telling that her first words to the Emperor in the epilogue are to beg him to undo what she's done.
• Royally Screwed Up: The royal family of Drearburh is said to be extremely twisted, and Harrow and her parents fit right in.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Harrow can summon armies of skeletons like nobody's business, but she has No Social Skills, is phenomenally bad at taking care of herself, and has the physique of a wet noodle.
• Sanity Slippage: In Harrow the Ninth she believes she's significantly less lucid than she once was, hallucinating The Body's presence almost constantly and unable to trust her own perceptions. However, in the end, everything she perceived appears to have been true.
• Security Blanket: After Gideon's death Harrow can't sleep without Gideon's longsword beside her or literally in her arms, and only can stand to be separated from it while it's in the same room. Once Wake's been exorcised and Harrow has found out her Memory Gambit worked, it becomes a genuine comfort instead.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Parodied via thorough subversion. Gideon and Ianthe both have lengthy descriptions of Harrow without face paint, and mention she's has a lean angular face that isn't particularly attractive; Ianthe settles on "striking" more than "pretty". And the one time Ianthe manages to coax Harrow into a fancy dress on the Mithraeum, it's mostly for decorum's sake rather than attractiveness, and Harrow's thoroughly miserable and morose throughout the experience.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Discussed. Gideon believes that Harrow is 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 Memory Gambit as a desperate act of love, three of her Elseworld fantasies put her in the role of a love interest to Gideon, and she smiles helplessly over Gideon in the final chapter of Harrow the Ninth.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet: She has lots of bone jewelry, including bone earrings and bangles, and wears an entire ribcage around her torso. This is both fashionable and functional, as in a pinch she can use her bone accoutrements for necromancy.
• The Snark Knight: She's sarcastic, scathing, and critical, but is just as hard on herself as she is on others.
• Squishy Wizard: Gideon constantly marvels at how out of shape Harrow is. She's even scrawnier and frailer than the average necromancer, since she can easily just call bone constructs to do anything from heavy lifting to propping her up in bed.
• Stress Vomit: A lot of it in the weeks after becoming a Lyctor, and only barely getting a handle on it by the time the narrative starts.
• Supernatural Angst: The circumstances of her own conception fuel much of her self-loathing, to the point where she doesn't consider herself human due to the massacre of the Ninth's children.
• Teen Genius: Harrow is seventeen, a necromantic prodigy, and able to retain all the knowledge she obsessively researches to boot.
• Tragic Keepsake: Gideon's longsword becomes this to an almost religious degree after her death; Harrow keeps it on her person constantly, even though she can barely carry it, believes it hates her violently, and throws up any time she tries to wield it, creates elaborate rituals to treat it, and only parts from it with great reluctance. This ends up getting her haunted by Commander Wake, as the same sword is also Wake's Soul Jar.
• Trauma Button: Any use of the name "Gideon" around her, or things that might cause her to think too long about her past causes spontaneous bleeding from her ears in Harrow the Ninth. This is actually part of her Memory Gambit: part of her skull has been spelled to press against her brain to stop her from processing information that might undo her Trauma-Induced Amnesia.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Invoked; she deliberately removed her memories of Gideon as part of a Memory Gambit motivated both by her desire to possibly preserve Gideon's soul and to alleviate the intense guilt and grief she feels over Gideon's death.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Harrow has been puppeteering her parents' corpses since she was ten. Also at age ten, she broke into the Locked Tomb housing The Antichrist, which she was taught was pretty much the most evil and forbidden thing anyone in the Empire could do, in a nihilistic attempt to kill herself.
• Tsundere: Just look at how often she calls Gideon an idiot, while becoming a flustered mess when Gideon hugs her. Deconstructed in that her treatment of Gideon has created a lot of emotional baggage between them and is a huge roadblock to Gideon trusting her. Reconstructed after they have a long, honest conversation; Harrow is still this trope, but now that their relationship is in a better place, their back-and-forth is less loaded and tense, and more affectionate.
• Uncertain Doom: At the end of Harrow the Ninth. Having fended off Wake from hijacking her body, and learned from Dulcinea that Gideon is both aware and active now, she dissolves the Dream Land she was trapped in, dives into the River, and resurfaces inside the empty Tomb, possibly a mental space created by Gideon, before falling asleep and/or dying in the empty coffin that is supposed to house Alecto, in order to sidestep the open question of what will happen to Gideon if Harrow assumes control of her body again with her Memory Gambit undone.
• Universally Beloved Leader: Excluding Gideon, all her subjects in the Ninth House are absolutely devoted to her.
• When She Smiles: Harrow smiles with genuine sincerity very rarely, but the effect on her face is transformative. When she tries to force one, it's less so.
• Workaholic: Harrow devotes time, soul, and body to restoring her House and achieving Lyctorhood. Things like "sleep" and "food" are trivial and optional.

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Nona

Nona

I love you.

Someone new 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.

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• All-Loving Hero: Nona is one of the kindest people in the entire series, loving nearly everyone she meets and seeing the beauty in all of their features, even scars and burns. She gets shot in the head multiple times with intent to kill and forgives even that, because she knows they only did it because they were scared of her.
• Ambiguous Situation: The first half of Nona centers on a key question: Who is Nona? A lot of the evidence points in contradictory directions: her body is Harrow's with golden eyes and is unaffected by the presence of Number Seven which would imply Gideon, but her dislike of eating and dreaming of Canaan House's pool from Harrow's perspective suggests Harrow. Then there are the entirely Nona unique things, such as her apparent learning disabilities and personality being bright, cheerful, and effusively loving; the resolution of this mystery serves as the Driving Question of the book.
• Amnesiac Dissonance: 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. She's also not at all happy with the idea of her true identity being Harrowhark or Gideon; Harrow is strict and unhappy, and Gideon is just so... redheaded.
• Bad Liar: Her best attempt to disguise her Healing Factor involves frantically claiming that no, it's not her blood, it must be someone else's blood, or possibly tomato sauce.
• Berserk Button: She hates others being locked up, but being locked up herself is even worse, and proves to be the final straw before her third tantrum.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Nona is easily one of the kindest, most loving, forgiving, and understanding characters in the entirety of her book, and possibly of the series period. However, she's still Alecto deep down inside, and when she throws one of her tantrums, she terrifies the Blood of Eden soldiers to the point that nobody is willing to go near her for quite a while, and even We Suffer notes that Nona is one of the scariest things she'd ever seen.
• Blank Slate: Part of what makes 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 of Nona the Ninth, nearly six months after her birth, nobody is any closer to understanding what happened to make Nona the way she is.
• Brainless Beauty: Nona thinks she's absolutely gorgeous and openly brags about how pretty she is, as well as how dumb she is. Ends up largely as a parody, as most others don't agree with her at all.
  Beautiful Ruby: "You've got the face of a rat and the body of a dead person."
• Brown Note: Her screams aren't just deeply unnerving and unsettling wails, but pull from something else; her mimicking of the Captain drops every necromantic body in her surrounding area, and her third tantrum completely terrifies Eden.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Her All-Loving Hero outlook contrasts sharply with Gideon and Harrow, both of whom are extremely cynical.
• Death of Personality: Any time she gets close to remembering she's Alecto, Nona starts to forget that she's Nona. When she rejoins her body, it destroys her, leaving only Alecto, though she promises Paul and Pyrrha that she'll remember someday, it might just take a while.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Whenever she draws closer to remembering her past as Alecto, she has the impossible and effortless strength of Alecto as well, easily knocking people down or breaking things her body has no right to.
• Eating the Eye Candy: 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 long-standing crushes on Camilla and Crown and develops another on Pash, shamelessly attempting to flirt with her which only disgusts Pash and eggs her on further.
• The Empath: Nona is capable of reading voices and body language as nearly perfect indicators of emotion and intent on a instictive and subconscious 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 does have trouble with people with warring emotions or those who detach from their own emotions, and Kiriona Gaia persistently confuses her: Kiriona's tangled emotions against her overwhelming sadness are essentially too much white noise for Nona to parse.
• Forgets to Eat: Nona likes tasting but eating seems to be physically unpleasant for her. She constantly has to be coaxed and bribed to eat just a few more bites by her family.
• Healing Factor: As part of Alecto, she has the same Complete Immortality as her and John. Getting shot in the head knocks her out for a few minutes at worst. Pyrrha uses this to get past Ianthe's disintegration ward, which overloads and shorts out the moment Nona puts her arm into it, unable to keep up with how fast she regenerates.
• Kindhearted Simpleton: Although Nona is viewed by everyone, including herself, as being unintelligent, she is overflowing with love for her family, friends, dogs, and everything in the world.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: She's fine with dying early, having lived a happy life with friends and a 'family' she loved and a useful job as a teacher's aide; part of her despair towards acknowledging her true identity as an aspect of Alecto is that once she does so, all of that will be drowned out by Alecto's overwhelming anger (and how cosmic and alien her perspective is).
• Like You Were Dying: 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 final pages of the book.
• "L" Is for "Dyslexia": Nona is completely incapable of reading or writing any text in any language.
• Living Lie Detector: As part of her reading emotions, Nona is able to immediately and guilelessly pick apart anything untrue spoken in her presence, from deliberate deception to lies of omission and even lies people tell to themselves, which ends up distressing others.
• Made of Plasticine: As her life begins to end and her thalergy runs out, she begins regaining all the wounds she'd previously healed from, causing her body to begin literally falling apart. Only Paul's ministrations keep her in one piece long enough to reach the Tomb.
• Meaningful Name: Nona is of Latin origin and just means "the ninth". The first three letters of Nona also make up the prefix non-, indicating negation and absence. Some of the big reveals around her identity relate to who she's not: she knows she's not Harrow, and we learn with Kiriona that she's not Gideon. She also represses and refuses to process an awful lot to keep herself from returning to the boundless rage of Alecto - in other words, and using John's flashback naming habits, Nona is trying to stay non-"A-".
• Mind Hive: Although Nona is ultimately Alecto, or a part of her, she's not only Alecto; her nature as a soul posessing a body already in a complex Lyctoral bond, with a brain that had horribly rushed and shitty surgery performed on it adds only more complexity. In her final dying hours, after she enters the River, Nona begins to detach from her body, enough to see her brain in thirds, as top thought, middle thought, and bottom thought:
  • The top thoughts are Nona's main narration, a part of Alecto reborn in Harrow as an innocent Kindhearted Simpleton, a fact which she knows and avoids acknowledging because she loves being Nona, and wishes she could keep Harrowhark's body forever and make it hers.
  • 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 indicates they're more compassionate and ignorant than the other thoughts, and are implied to be part of Gideon.
  • The bottom thoughts are a wrathful and angry side of Nona that she hates to acknowledge, and that knows everything she wants to ignore. It manifests at times as a sternly critical voice speaking through her mouth, and is either the true personality of Alecto reasserting itself, or part of Harrow.
  • 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 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.
• Omniglot: Is capable of understanding of all languages, and conversing in them by mirroring others, a fact which is so confusing to Palamedes that it gives Camilla a headache. Like her ability to read emotions, it's strongest with direct eye contact: she has trouble understanding a broadcast that's audio only until the video's turned on.
• Paste Eater: While she has to be cajoled into eating most food, she has no problem chewing pencils to bits or taking bites out of erasers. The one time Pyrrha let her try a cigarette, she ended up eating half of it instead.
  Camilla: "Have you been eating sand again?"
  Nona: "I haven't eaten sand in months. Weeks. One week."
• Recurring Dreams: Nona has the same and only dream every time she sleeps: 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.
• Sense Freak: Nona loves new experiences, especially physical touches with her family; she also loves staring at people and new experiences, and tasting things, though the actual eating of things is something she avoids when possible.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Has the exact same unnatural, bright gold eyes of Gideon Nav, which Nona loves completely. Crown takes Nona's eyes as proof Nona is Gideon, and her family remains confused about them, as Gideon and Harrow's lyctoral bond was already atypical. They're in fact a sign of Alecto possessing Harrow's body, as she and Gideon have the exact same eyes.
• You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: It's mentioned repeatedly that her tantrums are a big deal, and Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha do everything within their power to keep her from having them, no matter how dangerous. We finally find out why after the "worst day of school ever": Nona in full dudgeon is essentially a tiny berserker warrior, attacking anybody who crosses her path, and due to her Healing Factor, she can simply brute-force her way through any obstacle or opponent. (When she can't break a ziptie off her wrist, she just yanks until her wrist breaks off and grows a new hand like it's nothing.) Turns out to be Foreshadowing for her true identity, who's always that angry and, unlike Nona, isn't interested in holding her temper back.

Alecto

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

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

"I pray the Tomb is shut forever. I pray the rock is never rolled away. I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest with closed eye and stilled brain. I pray it lives. I pray it sleeps."

10,000 years in the past, several decades into the future, the Earth was furious, and in pain, and dying. Seeing how badly a single man fought to save her, to evacuate all of humanity and fix the mounting climate disasters, in the hour of his greatest failure, she granted him necromancy. John used her gift to eat the ten billion and the soul of the Earth herself; burning up from trying to devour her whole, he created a body to trap her soul inside to prevent her from destroying him. This body he would name Alecto the First, a furious and broken fragment of the Earth who nonetheless still loved the man she'd chosen to save her.

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 acquiesce 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.

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• The Antichrist: The Empire believes she is the Emperor's greatest enemy, those who knew her consider her an abomination, and Empire religion believes that opening the Tomb is synonymous with the apocalypse.
• Ambiguous Gender Identity: Alecto is referred to with both she/her and it/it's pronouns in the epilogue of Nona. While her body is female and all other characters almost exclusively use she/her, Alecto describes herself with both sets of pronouns in different circumstances: she seems to refer to her body as an 'it' and to herself as 'she', but she only beings using feminine pronouns when reminded that she is Alecto. Whether this means she uses feminine pronouns because she likes them, for other people's convenience or because John made her appear female is unclear. Nona refers to herself as female until Alecto starts 'leaking' into her personality, after which Nona also refers to her body as an 'it'. As the soul of a planet trapped in human form, it's possible she doesn't even know what gender is or means, at least on a human level.
• Ambiguously Human: Despite superficially resembling a human, she's called an abomination by those who knew her. John eventually admits as much to Harrow, with the Alecto's body being an ad hoc construction of earth and John's body meant to contain the soul of the Earth, or at least a part of her.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Alecto seems to have no real concept or understanding of human values or norms: the Lyctors note that she acted in a very obviously inhuman way, and didn't even seem to care about pretending to come off as a normal person. This was initially passed off as her having Come Back Wrong as the first Resurrection, but is more likely the result of her status as a human-shaped Resurrection Beast.
• Broken Angel: She used to love all of humanity, all of the life that composed her when she was the soul of the Earth. After being killed and forced into humanoid form, now she has only her unceasing anger.
• Broken Pedestal: She gave John Necromancy because she loved him for how hard he fought to try to save her. And then, he killed her with it.
• Came Back Wrong: John told everybody that Alecto was the first resurrection, leaving it only to implication that he had resurrected a human and she'd come back something different. In truth, she was never human to start with. Of course, she is still absolutely different from how she was when she was alive. How much of this is because John's first resurrection was flawed and how much is just because she is unspeakably angry is unclear.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: Another part of her mysterious nature is a seeming inability to lie, possibly from not even understanding the concept, which Augustine accuses John of being the only reason he told them what she was. Even the part of her that is Nona is unable to do so.
• Complete Immortality: John's power as the Emperor stems in part from her and in part from the 10 billion he ate; as a result of the two being bound together, both Alecto and John are immortal. Neither can truly die unless the other is also killed.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Seemingly as a consequence of being an immensely powerful soul confined to a human shell, Alecto is immensely strong but barely aware of such, casually breaking her body apart by the simple act of walking, and sending Ianthe flying across the Tomb with a single blow.
• The Dreaded: The Empire as a whole fears what's inside the Tomb, with the Ninth treating it as an inevitable Armageddon. Several of the First, immortal and powerful warrior-necromancers, are completely and openly terrified of her.
• Dream Walker: In her frozen Tomb, Alecto seems to have the ability to travel through Harrow's dreams, as Harrow inadvertently formed a connection with her when she broke into the Tomb as a child.
• Eye Color Change: As the soul of the Earth compressed into a human shell, her eyes were originally John's inhuman eyes of black and white; however, after John merged their souls, they swapped eye colors, giving her the bright golden eyes she had granted John as a sign of her love.
• Family Eye Resemblance: Played with. Her bright gold eyes are extremely distinctive and immediately recognizable as identical to Gideon Nav's eyes, but the particulars of why Gideon and Alecto have the same eyes is tied into a dark secret John has concealed since the Resurrection.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Despite having been a huge part of the inner circle of the First, being John's bodyguard (and secretly, cavalier), both Mercy and Augustine make it clear that both of them hated her due to her inhuman nature, and imply that this was the case across the board of the First. Subverted in Nona, when Pyrrha reveals that she and the Saint of Duty had both liked her.
• Genius Loci: At the end of John's retelling of the story of the Resurrection, it's revealed just who and what Alecto was: The soul of the Earth itself, stuffed into a human body John made of his own flesh and blood.
• Humanoid Abomination: Superficially appears human but the descriptions of her by those who knew her suggest she really wasn't; Mercymorn questions whether she even had DNA. Teacher refers to her in his Infallible Babble as "the devil" and "the saltwater creature". In Nona it's revealed that her body is human-ish, made by God of his own body, but her soul is the Earth's soul, stuffed into that body, and then made stranger by John merging his soul with hers. In short, she's a human-shaped Resurrection Beast.
• Human Popsicle: Part of her prison is being frozen in a block of ice, and Harrow's hallucinations of her often call attention to her frosted eyelashes and dampness.
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: Tons! 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, being jealous, throws in more insulting terms as well, like "ice-lolly bimbo", and "big slut". Varun refers to her by addressing the ghost of the Earth, calling her the "salt thing" and "green thing".
• Infallible Babble: Throughout Harrow the Ninth, Alecto periodically speaks to Harrow in cryptic references to things Harrow doesn't know. The few times she breaks this to speak in direct terms consequently terrify Harrow and provoke immediate compliance.
• Ironic Echo: Harrow, as a bone adept, expresses disinterest in meat things; Alecto, as the never-human captured piece of the Earth finds everything human to be nothing more than meat things.
• King in the Mountain: Her death inside the Tomb is more akin to sleep than death, as she cannot die so long as John lives.
• Leaking Can of Evil: 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. By Nona the Ninth, it's clear it's the latter, as a part of Alecto has been possessing Harrow.
• The Lost Lenore: Supposedly to John; he refers to her both as "Annabel Lee" and "Annie Laurie" (a Scottish love song) and clearly misses her dearly while also idolizing her. A particularly twisted example of the trope, as he's responsible for her first death as the Earth, and chose to imprison her in the Tomb to placate his Lyctors.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: 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.
• Meaningful Name: 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 killed the Earth to make her, to punish those who abandoned her, named her as such at the outset of his eternal campaign of revenge.
  • John taking the last name Gaius also hints at her true nature, in the same way as Cytherea's choice to take her cavalier's name as her own last name: He is John, and she is his cavalier, Gaia.
• Oblivious to Love: She doesn't truly comprehend that Harrow is in love with her; she doesn't react at all and then becomes confused when Harrow attempts to kiss her, and doesn't have any answers when Kiriona corners Nona and asks her point blank if she loves Harrow.
• Pet the Dog: Despite being a horror all the Lyctors were frightened of, she once swore loyalty to Anastasia, and tells Harrow "I am very sorry about Samael."
• Red Right Hand: Her Supernatural Gold Eyes are immediately distinctive to the Emperor's Lyctors, and mistaking Gideon Nav's eyes for Alecto reawakening makes them react as if she has.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: When she reawakens as herself in Nona the Ninth; the final moment of the book is her stabbing John with Gideon's two-hander.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: According to the Empire, she's the evil, and the eponymous Tomb is the can.
• Spirit Advisor: She's clearly invested in Harrow's mental well-being and continued safety, initially for unknown reasons. At the end of Nona it's revealed that it was because of a promise she made with Anastasia to serve her bloodline.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: After John became one with her, a process later replicated poorly by the Eightfold Path, her natural eye color is the same golden-amber that was John's original eye color, which is shared with his daughter Gideon Nav.
• Super Prototype: As the first resurrection, God describes her as such to Harrow and his Lyctors, having strange abilities and a personality intermittently called alien and monstrous; this is another of his lies.
• Time Abyss: Being the undead soul of the Earth, she considers all other life mere children. Even Crux, who she describes as a child barely a hundred years old.
• Un-person: More so than any of the original Lyctors and cavaliers, traces of her existence are completely unknown to the Empire, save for those who were old enough to remember her in person, and they often only refer to her with euphemisms.
• Vague Age: Because the Ninth had no teenagers or young adults when Harrow was growing up, she voices uncertainty if Alecto is a girl or a woman. Given John based her on Barbie, it's half intentional.
• Voice of the Legion: Seems to naturally speak to others with the voices of people they've known instead of her own.
• Was Once a Man: John claims she was once a normal human, but this is eventually revealed to be a lie.
• Wild Card: What Alecto is, what her abilities entail, and what her motivations are, even if she's 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
• World's Most Beautiful Woman: An unconventional example. The first thing Harrow notes about her is that every part of her is empirically perfect save for a single flaw on her lip, and Gideon says her face is so beautiful that it nearly crosses into repellent. This was seemingly deliberate on John's part, as he made her body to look like a specific Barbie doll he had as a child. Alecto, on the other hand, finds her body unspeakably ugly (though that might be just a consequence of her hating being made of meat), and John is rather defensive in explaining that he tried his best when making it.

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