Tear Jerker / The Locked Tomb

Unmarked spoiler warning!

Given the inherently spoilerific nature of most tearjerkers in the series, spoilers will remain untagged.

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Gideon the Ninth

Chapter 3

• Although it's Played for Laughs, Gideon's genuine devastation when Ortus and Glaurica steal her shuttle and her best hope for escape is dashed before her:
  Gideon had never confronted a broken heart before. She had never gotten far enough to have her heart broken. She knelt on the landing field, knees in the grit, arms clutched around herself. There was nothing left but blown-out, curly patterns in the pebbles where the shuttle had passed. A great dullness had sunk over her; a deep coldness, a thick stolidity. When her heart beat in her chest it was with a huge, steady grief. Every pulse seemed to be the space between insensibility and knives. For some moments she was awake, and she was filled with a slow-burning mine fire, the kind that never went out and crumbled everything from the inside; for all the other moments, it was as though she had gone somewhere else.
• And Harrow's explanation that follows the above:
  "[...] I will give you your due: there was no way you could have accounted for [the shuttle pilot contacting Harrow]. I could have spoiled it before, but I wanted to wait until now to do anything. I wanted to wait ... for the very moment when you thought you'd gotten away ... to take it from you."
  Gideon could only manage, "Why?"
  The girl's expression was the same as it was on the day that Gideon had found her parents, dangling from the roof of their cell. It was blank and white and still.
  "Because I completely fucking hate you," said Harrowhark, "no offence."

Chapter 15

• All of Palamedes' interactions with "Dulcinea" become Harsher in Hindsight once the ending of Gideon the Ninth reveals that he's been in love with the real Dulcinea for years, and doesn't understand why she's treating him like a stranger. Despite their tangled history, he never even tries to push as far as friendship, respecting the space that she apparently wants, while making it clear that he's there to help if she wants him to be. Learning that the real Dulcinea is dead and the woman he's been interacting with at Canaan House is her murderer sets him on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge in the novel's climax.
  If she had looked at him with interest, he looked at her with— well. He looked at her thin and filmy dress and her swell-jointed fingers, and at her curls and the crest of her jaw, until Gideon felt hell of embarrassed being anywhere near that expression. It was a very intense and focused curiosity— there wasn't a hint of shoulder in it, not really, but it was a look that peeled skin and looked through flesh. His eyes were like lustrous grey stone; Gideon didn't know if she could be as completely composed as Dulcinea under that same look.
  Palamedes said lightly: "I'm ever at your service, Lady Septimus."

Chapter 17

• The Fourth's initial reactions to the Fifth being found dead and the necromancers attempting to call their spirits back.
  In the beginning a group of them had opened their own veins in a bid to tempt the early hunger of the ghosts. That period ended only when the teens, mad with rage at the inadequacy of only Isaac's blood, both started stabbing at Jeannemary's arm. They stood screaming at each other wordlessly, corseting belts above each other's elbows to make the veins stand out, until Camilla took the knives from their hands and began dispensing rubber bandages. Then they held each other, knelt, and wept.

Chapter 20

• During the Avulsion trial, while Gideon is in horrific agony while Harrow draws from her life-force, Dulcinea holds her and comforts her, and, upon a reread, it's clear that what she tells Gideon is coming from Cytherea:
  "It's all right," someone was saying, over the noise. "You're all right. Gideon, Gideon...you're so young. Don't give yourself away. Do you know, it's not worth it...none of this is worth it, at all. It's cruel. It's so cruel. You are so young—and vital—and alive. Gideon, you're all right...remember this, and don't let anyone do it to you ever again. I'm sorry. We take so much. I'm so sorry."

Chapter 26

• Gideon sobbing silently in the makeshift infirmary after the deaths of the Fourth in front of her:
  The only thing that made sense was that she had ended up in the whitewashed room where they were keeping Dulcinea, sitting alone in an armchair, and there she had gritted tears out of her eyes for an hour. Someone had washed out all her cuts with reeking vermillion tarry stuff, and it smelled bad and hurt like hell whenever an errant drip of salt water touched the wounds. This made her feel sorry for herself, and feeling sorry for herself made her eyes even wetter.
• After the disappearance of Protesilaus, Dulcinea tells Gideon that she just wants to know what happened to him, for good or ill.
  Gideon didn't know whether she could get behind this either. She would've been devoutly grateful to live not knowing exactly the things that had happened, in vivid red-and-purple wobbling intensity. Then again, her mind kept flaying itself over Magnus and Abigail, down there in the dark, alone—over the when, and the how; over whether Magnus had watched his wife be murdered like Jeannemary had watched Isaac. She thought: It is stupid for a cavalier to watch their necromancer die.

Chapter 27

• After a period where they were getting along, Gideon and Harrow start squabbling over Dulcinea that turns explosive when Harrow sets off Gideon's still raw Survivor's Guilt:
  "I've got my priorities straight."
  "Nothing you have done in the past two days suggests that."
  Gideon went cold. "Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I didn't mean to let Jeannemary die."
  "For God's sake, I didn't mean—"
  "Fuck you," Gideon added again for emphasis. She found herself laughing in that awful, high way that was totally devoid of humour. "Fuck. We don't deserve to still be around—have you realized that yet? Have you realized that this whole thing has been about the union of necromancer and cavalier from start to finish? We should be toast. If they're measuring this on the strength of that—we're the walking dead. Magnus the Fifth was a better cavalier than I am. Jeannemary the Fourth was ten times the cavalier I am. They should be alive and we should be bacteria food. Two big bags of algor mortis. We're alive through dumb luck and Jeannemary isn't [...]
• When Harrow tries to stop Gideon's rant, she punctuates it by lashing out at Harrow:
  "Harrow, I hate you," said Gideon. "I never stopped hating you. I will always hate you, and you will always hate me. Don't forget that. It's not like I ever can."
  Harrow's mouth twisted so much that it should have been a reef knot. Her eyes closed briefly, and she sheathed her hands inside her gloves. [...]

Chapter 31

• Once Harrow has finally told Gideon the last secrets of the Ninth that she'd been keeping, all Gideon can say is that she's "so bloody sorry." Harrow is incensed, and finally lets loose the true depths of her own self-hatred about their fucked-up dynamic:
  "You apologise to me?" she bellowed. "You apologise to me now? You say that you're sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second's goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren't dead, all because—I regretted I wasn't! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you're sorry?"
  There were flecks of spittle on Harrowhark's lips. She was retching for air.
  "I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You've won. I've lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you."

Chapter 32

• Judith refuses to leave Marta's body - from As Yet Unsent we know she loved her - and in a mirror of Gideon's thoughts about how terrible it is for a cavalier to survive their necromancer, Judith says "Nobody should have to watch their cavalier die."

Chapter 34

• The description of Colum and Silas's bodies after Ianthe killed Colum after he'd been possessed and killed Silas:
  —and it was Colum again, his face disfigured, neck on the wrong way, sprawled over the pierced shell of his young dead uncle. There was no solace in that big, beat-up body, clutched around his necromancer's in morbid imitation of the whole of their lives. Neither wore white anymore: they were stained all the way through, yellow, red, pink.

Chapter 36

• Gideon, Harrow, and Camilla, backed into a corner and all heavily wounded, face their impending death all in different ways.
  Camilla closed her eyes and relaxed. Her long dark fringe fell over her face. It was that—Camilla in motion now Camilla at rest—that made the tiny voice inside Gideon's head say, amazed: We really are going to die.
  [...]
  "Nav," [Harrow] said, "have you really forgiven me?"
  Confirmed. They were all going to eat it.
  "Of course I have, you bozo."
  "I don't deserve it."
  "Maybe not," said Gideon, "but that doesn't stop me forgiving you. Harrow—"
  "Yes?"
  "You know I don't give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you," she said in a brokenhearted rush. She didn't know what she was trying to say, only that she had to say it now. [...] "I'm no good at this duty thing. I'm just me. I can't do this without you. And I'm not your real cavalier primary, I never could've been."
  [...]
  Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound.
  "Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House," she said hoarsely, "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."
• Gideon's Final Speech before she kills herself to save Harrow and Camilla, prompted by Harrow's praise above.
  "Okay," she said. "I understand now. I really, truly, absolutely understand."
  [...]
  She said, "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."
  A shade of exhausted suspicion flickered over her necromancer's face. "Nav," she said, "what are you doing?"
  "The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me," said Gideon. "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 turned and squinted, gauged the angle, judged the distance. It would have been the worst thing in the world to look back, so she didn't.
  [...]
  "For the Ninth!" said Gideon.
  And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes.

Chapter 37

• Gideon in the form of a hallucination or ghost attempts to get Harrow to focus when she's sobbing about Gideon's Heroic Suicide:
  "Now we kick her ass until candy comes out," said Gideon. "Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don't cry, we can't fight her if you're crying."
  Harrow said, with some difficulty: "I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it."
  "Yes you can, it's just less great and less hot," said Gideon.
  "Fuck you, Nav—"
  "Harrowhark," said Gideon the Ninth. "Someday you'll die and be buried in the ground, and we can work this out then. For now—I can't say you'll be fine. I can't say we did the right thing. I can't tell you shit. I'm basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry. Even if I wasn't, I don't know jack, Harrow, I never did—except for one thing."
  She lifted Harrow's arm with the hilt clutched in it. Her fingers, rough and strong and sure, moved Harrow's other hand into place above the pommel.
  "I know the sword," she said. "And now, so do you."
• The final description of Gideon's corpse, knowing that she spent her entire life trying to escape the Ninth only to sacrifice herself to preserve it and Harrow.
  The breeze blew Harrow's hair into her mouth as she ran back and strained at the arms of her cavalier, pulled and pulled, so that she could take her off the spike and lay her on her back. Then she sat there for a long time. Beside her, Gideon lay smiling a small, tight, ready smile, stretched out beneath a blue and foreign sky.

Epilogue

• After everything she'd gone through with the sole purpose of becoming a Lyctor so that she could save the Ninth, once Harrow has actually succeeded, and meets the Emperor, the very first thing she does is fling herself out of bed to beg him to undo it and return Gideon to her.
  She pressed her forehead down onto the cold, clean tiles.
  "Please undo what I've done, Lord," she said. "I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav."
  • John's refusal becomes even more of tearjerker by the end of Nona, when you realize that John could have absolutely brought Gideon back, he just didn't want to.
• Harrow can't bring herself to even look at her reflection after becoming a Lyctor.
  There was a vague reflection of her in the window, interrupted by distant space fields pocketed thick with stars. She turned away. If she saw herself in a mirror, she might fight herself: if she saw herself in a mirror, she might find a trace of Gideon Nav, or worse—she might not find anything, she might find nothing at all.

Harrow the Ninth

Chapter 2

• Harrow, newly amnesiac, coming face to face with Palamedes' remains:
  Nor could you locate bodies within either of the plain grey-sheeted hexagons intended for the sixth, though there were pitiable scraps and remains in one: leavings only, much less than a corpse. Something flickered in your nervous system that was a bit like an emotion, but it struggled and died, much to your relief.
• The Wham Line that makes it clear how deeply traumatized Harrow is after the death of Gideon:
  "Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing," he said.
  As he spoke, his mouth looked strange. A hot whistle of pain ran down your temporal bone. Your body was numb to grief; perhaps you had felt it once, but you did not feel it anymore. "Ortus Nigenad died thinking it was the only gift he was capable of giving," you said, "and I have wasted it—like—air."

Chapter 7

• Harrow seeing a child who resembles Gideon in the River:
  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 33

• Camilla's quiet anguish after Palamedes' death:
  Camilla Hect was a closed object, with locks and snaps; she had an expression like the rock before the Tomb, inexeroable, giving nothing away. But her eyes—her eyes were dark as the grit mixed with the soil, neither grey nor brown but both. They were the eyes of a winter season without any promise of spring. In comparing the eyes to the face, you saw into a zipped-up agony.
• The fact that, after the heartwarming Fire-Forged Friendship that the four heirs of the Ninth and Sixth formed with each other in the previous book, it's now all fallen apart. Gideon is dead and Palamedes is mostly so, and Camilla is wracked with uncertainty that she might not have managed to rescue what remains of her adept. Thanks to her Laser-Guided Amnesia and Fake Memories, Harrow has completely erased Gideon and believes she doesn't know Palamedes and Camilla (who, in her Dream Land recreation of Canaan House, died early on), treats them like strangers, and somewhat standoffishly rebuffs Sextus's attempts at familiarity when they meet again in the River. And though Cam is grateful to Harrow for finding Pal there, she ruefully tells her that things are different between them now, and they're on opposite sides (since Harrow is a Lyctor serving the Emperor while Cam is with the Blood of Eden).
• Palamedes' genuine horror that Harrow consumed Gideon to ascend to Lyctorhood, especially since she doesn't remember it this way and believes she consumed Ortus Nigenad instead, and thus comes across as rather coldly indifferent when talking to him about it:
  "[...] I am Harrowhark the First, formerly and in everlasting affections the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh: I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying, one among his fists and his gestures. I did not know you in this life, and I will not know you in the next one."
  He stopped dead.
  "You became a Lyctor," he said.
  "That was always the plan."
  "Not for the Harrowhark I knew. Tell me you did it correctly," he said, and there was a quick, questioning eagerness to his voice, something beneath the confusion. "Tell me you finished the work. You out of everyone could have worked out the end to the beginning I was starting to explicate. Your cavalier, Reverend Daughter—"
  "Has become the furnace of my Lyctorhood," you said.
  The dead Warden stopped. He looked at your face as though his eyes could peel through dermis, fascia, and bone. And he said, quietly: "How God takes—and takes—and takes."

Chapter 40

• The "Harrow Nova" Elseworld is a fiction flung up out of Harrow's subconscious and reveals her (probably accurate) conviction that her parents had no love for her and would have discarded her instantly if she'd proved to have no necromantic ability. It also suggests the thought that if they'd had someone else as a suitable necromantic heir, the Ninth would have been much better off, as while it's still poor, it's a lot better than it actually was as a result of the mass murder that led to Harrow's conception.

Chapter 43

• Harrow finally remembers Gideon:
  [...] When the world finally landed its long wound-up sucker punch, a tangled howl came out of her throat, and she was shocked that she was able to make such a noise. Memory hit Harrowhark Nonagesimus with the inexorable gravity of a satellite sucked from orbit, flinging itself to die on the surface of its bounden planet; the world hit her like a fall.
  [...] Harrow found that she was not shocked, after all. She was consumed. She was the kindling for the arson taking place in her heart, her brain dry wadding for the flames, her soul so much incandescent gas. She could not do this. She absolutely and fundamentally could not do this.
  [...]
  "If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten," her mouth was saying. "And add more also, if aught but death part me and thee."
  And, unsteadily: "Griddle."
  [...] she found herself facedown on the mattress, sobbing as she had not sobbed since she was a child. Someone said, "Everybody out. Go—" But this was more than she could take stock of. Harrow was too amazed by her body's expanding capacity for despair. It was as though her feeling doubled even as she looked at it, unfolding, like falling down an endless flight of stairs. She dug her hands into the mattress and she cried for Gideon Nav.
  She only stopped weeping when her body had physically exhausted itself. The tears could not flow from gummed-up eyes; nor sobs from a cracked throat. For a long time she pressed her face into the wet patch of mattress she had cried into, and smelled the old stuffing, and felt the grief that had multiplied into a universe.

Chapter 45

• Harrow continues to grieve for Gideon after remembering her:
  [Harrow] closed her eyes and lost herself in that dizzy unreality of blackness: of swaying minutely, of lost balance. So many months had passed: and yet, at the same time, she had only lost Gideon Nav three days ago. It was the morning of the third day in a universe without her cavalier: it was the morning of the third day—and all the back of her brain could say, in exquisite agonies of amazement, was: She is dead. I will never see her again.

Chapter 51

• The entire beginning of the chapter, which discusses Gideon's childhood love of her mother—a woman whom she has just discovered not only always hated her in return, but in fact outright planned to murder her shortly after Gideon was born to pursue her revenge—and her lashing out at Harrow prompting her suicide attempt:
  I remember the time you caught me telling her, I love you, and I can't even remember what you said, but I remember that I had you on your fucking back—I put you straight on the fucking ground. I was always so much bigger and so much stronger. I got on top of you and choked you till your eyes bugged out. I told you that my mother had probably loved me a lot more than yours loved you. You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go, you couldn't even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven?
  Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?
  You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, Suffer and learn?
  If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?

Chapter 52

• Gideon, once again facing an impossible situation and dying in Harrow's body, talks to her about what they are:
  Harrowhark, did you know that if you die by drowning, apparently your whole life flashes in front of your eyes? I didn't know, as I died and took you along with me—having kept you alive for what, a whole two hours?—whether it was going to show me both. Like, at the end of everything, if it was going to be you and me, layered over each other as we always were. A final blurring of the edges between us, like water spilt over ink outlines. Melted steel. Mingled blood. Harrowhark-and-Gideon, Gideon-and-Harrowhark at last.

Nona the Ninth

Chapter 4

• Since their partial Lyctorhood means they cannot be awake at the same time without disastrous consequences Palamedes and Camilla are reduced to communicating solely through letters, audio recordings, and, on occasion, Nona's ability to mimic actions.
  "Time's up," he said, "Give this to Cam for me, will you?"
  And he spread Nona's fingers like he always did, and he quietly kissed the second right-hand knuckle... The first time Palamedes had asked her to do it, quite a long time ago, and the first time she had raised Camilla's hand to her mouth and done it— pretty much exactly as Palamedes had, making the same shape as his mouth had done like she did when speaking languages, and touching the same way as his hands had touched— Camilla had looked at her, and then she had gone away to sit in the bath by herself in the dark for almost an hour, even though there hadn't been any water in the bath.
  Now when Nona waited for Camilla's eyes to clear, and she lifted up Camilla's hand to press her mouth to it, all Camilla said was, "Thanks." And she almost didn't flinch.

Chapter 9

• Cam's exchange with Pyrrha after the latter patches her up is especially painful after you've read the end of the book:
  In the end Pyrrha said in a calm, dead voice— "You can't do that ever again, Hect, 'never'. Synthesis is a one-way ticket— I walked the Eightfold, I should damn well know. I'd give Palamedes the hiding of his fucking life if he wasn't renting an ass with you."
  Camilla, cradled in Pyrrha's arms, with all the towels bright red, looked up at Pyrrha like Nona wasn't even in the room. Her eyes were chill and grey and gleaming. She whispered—
  "Don't tell him I was weak."
  "He's going to know, Hect. You're killing each other."
  "It's our choice."
  "He's going to ask."
  So do what you're good at," said Camilla, "Lie."
  "Hect you're not listening. It's killing him too—"
  "It was good," said Camilla, and her eyes closed. "It was good. We were happy."
• That scene also ends with one of the most painful lines in the book.
  Pyrrha: Here's to Camilla Hect, yet another of devotion's casualties.

Chapter 13

• Though Judith Deuteros's entire situation probably counts as a Tearjerker, special mention goes to the moment when, half-mad from pain and exposure to the Resurrection Beast, she mistakes Nona for Harrow.
  The Captain: Ninth, were is the mercy of the Tomb? Where is your sword in the coffin? Who are your masters now, and who do you master? Where is my cavalier, Reverend Daughter? Where is yours?

Chapter 15:

• Hot Sauce's attempt to reassure Nona about her involvement with Blood of Eden: "It's okay, first necromancer who gets in range, I shoot."

Chapter 20:

"'But you see, Palamedes, I don't mind dying,' said Nona, trying to make him understand. 'I've been doing it for ages. I'm not scared.'

This explanation died on impact. Palamedes said with a voice like concrete: 'I will not be party to this again.'"

Chapter 24

• Nona, upon seeing Kiriona, immediately walks up and kisses her, with the explanation being that she thought Kiriona wanted her to do it, quite badly. Since Nona is in Harrow's body (and Nona can read body language from bones) this means that the first thing Kiriona/Gideon wanted the moment she saw what looked like Harrow was for Harrow to kiss her.

Chapter 25

• Palamedes died in part to save Gideon, who died in part to save Camilla. When Palamedes finally gets his first chance to talk to Gideon since their deaths, he's clearly both shocked and deeply hurt by how much of a dick she is. Camilla's own reaction is furious, nearly attacking Kiriona despite being seriously injured.
  • Look at it from Gideon's perspective: she woke up to what she thought was Harrow kissing her, only to find out that it was someone else in her body. While playing dead, she finds out that Camilla and Palamedes are working with the person who has "stolen" Harrow's body, and the cavalier of the man who killed Gideon's mother and tried to kill Gideon as a baby. And now they're trying to use Gideon's body to break open the tomb and let out the monster that wants to kill her long-lost father. Gideon doesn't have any of the context from the first two thirds of the book. She doesn't know anything about Nona as a person, she doesn't know that Pyrrha's trying to make amends, and she doesn't know that part of the reason Camilla and Palamedes were protecting Nona in the first place is because they thought she was either Harrow or Gideon. Of course she's upset, and of course she's lashing out. She thinks her two friends are trying to use her body as a weapon and Harrow's as a puppet, and because of the absolute disaster of a situation they're in, no one has time to tell her otherwise.
• Nona is both fascinated and terrified by Kiriona's body language.
  It was the way in which she moved. Nona was so distracted she couldn't stop watching. She had never seen anyone move like that before.
  Nona couldn't quite believe they couldn't all see it; but they weren't watching, goggle-eyed, they hadn't even seemed to notice. It was in Kiriona's every movement [...]
  Nona had never seen anyone so sad in her whole short life. It made her nearly afraid to die.
• Kiriona's intense disdain for Nona is already sad for Nona, since she's such a sweetly naive person, but it rises to tearjerker level when you realize that the reason she hates Nona is that Nona is occupying Harrow's body and much like at the end of Harrow, it hurts her to be around Harrow's body but be unable to talk to her or interact with her.

Chapter 27

• Nona's conversation with Varun the Eater, who's possessing Judith Deuteros:
  "'Do you love?' said the Captain's mouth.
  Nona struggled. 'Yes— no— yes,' she said, then: 'I don't know what it means. I say it, and I don't know what it means.... Did I ever know what it meant?'"

Chapter 28

• Kiriona demanding to know where Harrow is (presumably because, no matter where it is, she will do whatever she has to to find her) and Nona's inability to answer, is heart-wrenching.
  Kiriona said, "Where is she?
  Nona didn't know what to say. The corpse prince urged-
  "Come on. Where'd she go. Where is she?"
  "I don't know who you're talking about," said Nona, miserably.
  "Listen, she can be in hell for all I care, I won't get mad," said Kiriona. "She can be at the bottom of the sea or the bottom of space. I just need to know - Where?"
• A few minutes later, Alecto's personality slips to the forefront during a conversation between Nona and Pyrrha:
  "Did you think this was fun, Pyrrha Dve? Did you think this was lovely? Family. Blood. Together. kiss, kiss. A child's game. You say nice words and everyone pretends they are the words you say. Here is a house. We live in it. Worms slithering over each other... did you like playing pretend? Did you like being both mother and father? You should have given into your desires and eaten us. Chew and swallow. More natural. Would have respected you for it..."
• Pyrrha has an absolutely miserable time in this chapter, which also includes her begging Camilla and Palamedes not to go through with the Grand Lysis.
  "I've loved you two," she said, "Not well. Not even wholesomely. I don't have it in me. But I've loved you— in a better world I'd be able to say 'Like you were my own,' but I don't know what that would even mean anymore. You've been my agents... you've been stand-ins for something I haven't had for longer than either of you can understand. Which is why I'm saying— don't do this. Please don't do this."
  Neither of them answered.
  Pyrrha continued urgently, "Understand that once you do this, you can't take it back. It's better to die. there's a power to dying clean... dying free. It's not love, what you're about to do. It's not beautiful and it's not powerful. It's a mistake. We didn't even do it right... we were children— playing with the reflections of stars in a pool of water... thinking it was space."

Chapter 31

• The closest thing Gideon had had to a parent or friend in Drearburgh was Aiglamene, and when Crux lies and tells Kiriona that Aiglamene is dead, it upsets her. When they actually see each other, Aiglamene reaches out and touches the side of her face. They both recoil, and Aiglamene is upset that her foundling is dead and and angry at "Harrow" about it. Whatever's happened to Kiriona, she still cares about that old woman, who despite her own general hostility also cares about her.

Chapter 32

• The one nice thing Kiriona Gaia says in the entire book is naturally directed at whatever part of Harrow still lives inside Nona:
  "Keep it together. Wherever you are, idiot, I know you can hear me. Keep it together..."

Epilogue

• One might hold out some hope that at least part of Nona survives within Alecto...until Alecto kisses Harrow and is bad at it, disdaining "how meat loves meat". Nona loves physical affection and is excellent at giving it (she can replicate Palamedes's hand kisses for Camilla exactly, as if she were actually him). So the fact Alecto can't kiss Harrow except in a way that tears the shit out of her lips and tongue means Nona's not there. Nothing is left.

The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex

• Although Cam doesn't say it explicitly, the letter they're reading at the beginning is clearly from the real Dulcinea. She seems like such a nice and funny person, and it just makes what we know to be her eventual end even sadder.
• Despite the short story being fairly light-hearted, the final lines end on a very bittersweet note as the ever stoic Camilla reflects on Palamedes.
  Palamedes remembers everything. That was his problem.
  I always remember him. That's mine.

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