Nightmare Fuel / The Locked Tomb

aka: Nona The Ninth

SWEET DREAMS

Unmarked spoiler warning

Gideon the Ninth

Chapter 25

• After Isaac has just died in front of the two of them, Gideon takes Jeannemary to a Lyctoral study, thinking it's the only place that's safe. Despite herself, she falls asleep in exhaustion, and wakes to find Jeannemary pinned to the bed with massive spears of bone, and written on the wall above her, in fresh blood:
  SWEET DREAMS

Chapter 32

• The description of Marta's body when the protagonists find her and Judith after they'd killed Teacher and the priests:
  Gideon looked around for the lieutenant, found her, and then looked away again. She didn't need a very long look to tell that Dyas was dead. For one thing, her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce.

Chapter 34

• The sequence where Ianthe unveils herself as the newest Lyctor is incredibly creepy, as she's shivering, moaning in pain, spitting up blood, and her eyes keep changing color, even while she gleefully explains, without a hint of regret, how she murdered and consumed Naberius.
  "I haven't killed Naberius Tern. I ate Naberius Tern. I put a sword through his heart to pin his soul in place. Then I took it into my body. I've robbed death itself...I have drunk up the substance of his immortal soul. And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him, and he will never really die.
• After being warned by everyone to not siphon, Silas siphons Colum against his will, and Colum's empty body ends up possessed:
  [Colum] now moved like there were six people inside him, and none of those six people had ever been inside a human being before.

Glossary

• The definitions in the glossary help fill out an ugly picture. Planets and stars usually radiate thalergy or 'life energy'. They can be converted into thanergy planets (radiating death energy as they die) but almost never become thanergenic (radiating death energy without dying). The Empire called the Nine Houses only considers the Dominicus system home, with the territory they 'sheperd' not even an extension. They kill the planets they conquer in order for necromancers to be more effective on them. The second book mentions that the life on a dying planet gradually changes and becomes sterile 'mutants', and eventually the human population has to be evacuated.

Harrow the Ninth

Chapter 7

• Harrow's first experience in the River:
  You were lying in a sea of bodies. They had bumped up against you before you had realised it, before you could flinch away from their nearness: perhaps the blood conjured them into being, so suddenly were they there. You stood up without thinking, and more bumped gently into your elbows, your arms. They carpeted the bottom of the shuttle. They bobbed in an unseen current low to the ground, lacking the air to drift to the top. Through a thin curtain of your blood, you could see the dizzying array of slippery corpses, their faces painted in black and alabaster greys. Dead girls in their teens, their half exposed bones still caught in the act of fusing at the caps; dead boys still shedding their milk teeth; ungendered infants, mostly skull, their nails like tiny chips of stone. A rubber-bodied toddler with a painted face and very red hair lay dead beside your knee and for some reason it was this that destroyed you, it was this that kindled within you something you had no hope of defending against. You howled in a purity of fright.

Chapter 14

• A subtle moment and early hint towards the Emperor's nature comes when Harrow tells him the circumstances of her conception, and John is fascinated:
  Emperor: "[...] Harrowhark—even as the product of two obvious geniuses—you are a walking miracle. A unique theorem. A natural wonder."
  Harrow: "I have just told you that I am the product of my parents' genocide."

Chapter 22

• That scene with Cytherea's body:
  That walk! That shuffling, disconcerting, slithering walk! The body flung its arms before it for momentum, the legs stiff-thighed and lock-kneed, right-side arm moving in time with right-side leg, ridiculous, appalling. Those fixed dead fingers caught a skeletal arm wrapped in gold foil, amethysts studded like so many eyes between the knucklebones, and it clattered to the ground, and Cytherea tripped over it—without the head losing its tracking focus on you, those unblinking eyes adhered to yours—and the body splayed and juddered on the ground. Then the corpse began moving inchworm-fashion, pushed forward by the action of the legs, the forearms banging on the tiles, thrusting the blessed bones of some fallen faithful out the way as though unnoticed. It was as though a magnet were stuck in the meat, a magnet that craved some polar force within you.

Chapter 26

• After Gideon the First's constant attempts to kill her, Harrow tries to assassinate him in turn. She serves everyone soup for dinner; when asked what she used for the broth, she replies 'marrow' — just as a fully formed skeleton erupts from Gideon's chest, spattering everyone with blood. And this doesn't kill him. Even Augustine, who's been alive for nearly 10,000 years and presumably has seen it all, is shaken by this.

Chapter 45

• The River was already a pretty unappealing concept, the idea that the afterlife is nothing but eternity as a ravenous soul, gone mad with hunger, until a passing resurrection beast eats you. Abigail theory of the River Beyond, however, that somehow makes it both better and much worse at once; According to her, the River is meant to be a mere transitory plane, somewhere souls are shepherded towards the unseen realms beyond, but something has gone terribly wrong. Which raises the question; What in the world could go so wrong that the entire afterlife is affected?!?

General

• The implications of what the Empire really is: a galaxy-spanning act of Revenge by Proxy. Among the people of the dying Earth who were unwilling or unable to participate in the Homeworld Evacuation, one found a path to godlike power, unleashing planet-killing monstrosities in the process. He built a new society devoted to his will and fueled by murder, trapping billions of souls in torment. And he declared war on the descendants of everyone who abandoned him, a war Augustine says is based on "purely symbolic retribution". The reason no one discusses who the Empire is fighting or why is because it's irrelevant; it exists to make war upon the universe.
  • As mentioned in the glossary for the previous book, the worlds the Nine Houses take die and aren't even considered as part of it. There's no gain.

Nona the Ninth

Unsorted

• When meeting Ianthe, Cam tells Nona to either answer yes or no, or to pretend to have the blue madness like Judith. You'd think this would lead to some silly scenes where Nona babbles nonsense, right? Nope. She screams in the language of the Resurrection Beasts, which not only breaks the lights and knocks out anyone with a necromantic body, but summons Number Seven to begin its attack in earnest.

• The whole of the John chapters is the story of his ascension, told by him, so it might take you a bit to realize, but by the end it's impossible to not understand that John was handed the power of the Earth by Alecto and rather than use it to try and save the planet and its people, he wiped out the entire solar system and everyone in it, because his desire for revenge was stronger than his desire to actually fix the planet.

• The thing that possessed Colum the Eighth back in Gideon the Ninth was horrifying. Turns out that there are a whole lot more of them, and that they can also possess anyone, living or dead, and not just empty bodies like Colum's. The empire was fighting them on Antioch, but have now spread to the Empire, unleashing a full-fledged Zombie Apocalypse. With the nickname "devils" and the way Varun refers to them as coming from the Tower in the river and mentions "a hole at the bottom of their tower", it's strongly implied that the devils come from whatever lies beyond the stoma.

Chapter 19

• Nona's third tantrum. It starts with her screaming so loudly she tears her own throat open and gets worse from there, with her escaping her bindings by pulling at them so hard that her hand and ankles come off and regenerate, bashing down the door with a chair, and assaulting the Blood of Eden guards so violently that We Suffer later notes that no one is willing to come close to Nona even after she's calmed down.
  Somebody down the corridor shouted, "Disengage! Disengage," but Nona’s scream was louder. One of the soldiers didn't disengage, they shot her again instead. She raised the metal over her head, and she ran at them. They were screaming through their mask. Nona screamed through hers, the mask that was the front of her face.

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