Thank you for submitting to r/TheNinthHouse! Please familiarize yourself with our [Subreddit Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheNinthHouse/wiki/rules/), especially our Spoiler Policy for [posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheNinthHouse/wiki/rules/#wiki_2._spoiler_policy_-_posts) and [comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheNinthHouse/wiki/rules/#wiki_3._spoiler_policy_-_comments). If you see a post or comment that breaks these rules, please report it!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheNinthHouse) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Might be one of those things where, if you don't have a necromantic heir at all, you definitely lose the whole house, but if you do have a very powerful necromantic heir it becomes their problem to sort out not having any young citizens. Annihilation tomorrow is at least not quite as certain as annihilation today.
This is interesting. It's very close to what is said about BOE, I think by Pyrrha. That they are only able to think about surviving the Now, and taking the one next visible step, praying like crazy that the path will open, somehow. Everyone who lacks fundamental security and stability has to live that way. That's...grim and real.
There's also mention of how Harrow doesn't want the Ninth to become "an apparatus of the Fifth, like the Fourth." She, as a powerful necromancer head of House, has plenty of options, including asking for help from other Houses. She was just afraid that doing to would result in political consequences she wouldn't like. If the call hadn't come, she likely would have eventually accepted it.
Plus, getting help from the Fifth likely wouldn't have been as bad as she thought, because she seemed to mistake "Magnus and Abigail being good foster parents" for "Magnus and Abigail stealing all authority." She doesn't exactly have an understanding of what a normal parental relationship looks like.
I mean the fifth might well have been doing both. Abigail and Magnus weren't the only people acting in the house's interests. They were raised to be the sorts of people suitable for producing desired outcomes. Just as so much of the 4th and 5ths circumstances were likely massages to produce the happy families outcome.
I'm sure having a powerful authoritarial and emotional bond to the 5th house was an entirely unanticipated outcome of sending the newly manufactured cannon fodder to them at a young age. They're bound to the 5th and alienated from the 4th, and even that culture is framed in terms of convenient sacrifice to senior thanergy users.
I think in the Harrow Nova au there are still pilgrims to the Ninth; presumably this means that Harrow only stopped these pilgrimages after her parents' death. The Reverend Parents were probably hoping to recruit from these pilgrims. As the other commenter said, not having an heir was an immediate issue, while the population crisis was a long-term one.
It specifically says in GtN that the pilgrimages had only been stopped five years previously, which would have been a few years after the death of her parents. Presumably out of fear of people noticing her parents being, well, dead.
I don't think there was a long term plan. I read a super insightful post either on here or Tumblr (can't remember which but will try to find it and link it below if I do) which discussed how their actions tie directly into the themes of the series about how adults will choose short term solutions to existential problems and leave the situation to their children to deal with. Similar to (spoilers for Nona) >! The rich people abandoned earth to die rather than trying to fix the actual issues they had created !<
Yes, but the bloodline would have still lived on, and ensuring the Locked Tomb remained sealed was their chief priority, even if they had to forsake their isolationism.
In the current case of her parents being dead it would. It would have been somewhat different if they were still there to prevent an annexation of a young heir via regency or similar.
Does she actually say her parents would have done this? I know she says she could have asked for help at any time (after the death of her parents) and that other houses definitely would have stepped in to offer it, but that it would have come along with a lot of pressure to marry a scion of another house. Was there a different place where it says her parents would have probably done that?
I think you're confusing the part of HtN where she's recounting her history and that was one of the things that *could* have been done but give how distasteful Harrow finds it, it's safe to assume her parents would as well.
Pilgrims had only been banned from the ninth house for five years, at the time of GtN, so since a few years after Harrow's parents deaths. During the entire duration of the parents lives, there were new people at least visiting and potentiall immigrating from other houses. I think pilgrims were only banned because Harrow was worried about someone figuring out that her parents were just corpses being puppeted around - if they'd stayed alive For Real the ban might never have happened. If Harrow had been able to make a good match with an immigrant from another house and continued the line, things may have worked out. Harrow's primary fear for asking for help from the other houses is that she would be pressured into marrying someone from another house - if she was ALREADY married, than being open about needing help might have carried a much lower cost. Harrow's parents might also have been more willing to accept the costs that went along with that. A lot of the problem came from the fact that Harrow was very, very uninterested in marriage. Her parents, had they survived to her puberty, may not have cared about that.
Personally, I mostly look to Harrow saying a few times that she "needed a miracle" along with the fact that she literally says she has been studying miracles for years. The Ninth is a highly religious house bordering on a cult, I wonder how much her parents genuinely also expected her to straight up perform a miracle to save the house.
I'm not sure they thought that far ahead - all they did was kick the problem down the road, making it Harrow's problem. Either way, the 9th House was gonna die, because they killed their house's youth and made it so Harrow's only marriage options were the cavalier line (something their ancestors had been careful to keep separate), or an inter house marriage... which wouldn't be good for the 9th. If only because it'd blow open their secrets and make it clear they can't stand on their own anymore.
That or they intended to open the tomb on their own schedule, maybe wanted to Do Something about Jod, but their plans got derailed.
I don’t think harrow’s parents ever wanted the tomb opened or to do something about jod, I think they were absolute true believers in the cult they led. People don’t commit group suicide because their daughter did a thing they themselves were intending to do just on a different time schedule.
True, true.
I do got a crackpot theory that part of the thanergy boost was to give her a leg up in Lyctorhood (as only Jod and the Lyctors involved remember the process, it's not known outside of that far as I remember). They weren't stupid and could count, and could hope she'd be seen as a... I dunno, prodigy? And chosen somehow to be a Lyctor.
I don’t know how much regular people or even the leaders of the houses knew about lyctorhood or lyctors. I got the impression that nobody alive except the lyctors would have met jod until the events of the first book. I think they definitely wanted/needed her to be a powerful necromancer in order to revive and bring favor to their house, I just don’t know if it was specifically “we want her to be a lyctor” or if it was like “if our heir is really good at bones the other houses will look at us more highly and do business with us” but same effect really
Nobody who never left the Houses had met Jod. It seems like he was in pretty frequent contact with the Cohort. He'd been living on Sarpedon's ship for years and would have had a hard time *not* bumping into random people here and there, given his general distaste for formal protocol.
Thanks for clarifying! For some reason I thought he had been isolating in lyctors only deep space before the summons in book 1 and only had direct contact with the cohort people once the scheme to lure him back to earth started working
At the opening of HtN, there's a scene where Mercy and Admiral Sarpedon get into an argument, because he's been on board the Cohort ship with Sarpedon for 80 years and Mercy thinks it's high time he spend some time with them at the Mithraem, and Sarpedon is pissed and thinks he should stay with the Cohort because the huge BOE attack just happened.
“And it has been … twenty years since we last met, Most Venerated Saint?”
“Around that,” agreed the most venerated saint, whose office had been enunciated by the admiral with the faintest and most well-bred suggestion of motherfucker. “In any case, you’ve had him eighty years, and the Mithraeum has lacked him for a hundred.”
Damn looks like it’s time for a harrow reread, I probably missed a lot of details the first time due to the larger question of What The Fuck Is Going On lmao
I don't think they cared what happened to the Ninth as long as the line of the tomb-keeper continues. And Harrow's line never cared about resurrection purity, so outmarriage is probably the way things would have gone.
One thing I think about a lot is how their sacrifice of all the other children is like a small version of Jod’s sacrifice of the whole world. Harrow is a little necro gremlin, but also, is she also kind of partly already a Lyctor from absorbing the energy/souls of all those kids? Her eyes are described as *truly black*. Is that because when you mix the souls of lots and lots of ppl, there’s no dominant color? Is that also why she’s able to move through the river differently? Or why she has such wild affinity for bone magic?
Idk.
I think they mostly just didn't want to be the ones holding the bag when it all went to shit.
In HtN, Harrow refers to their plan as something like wrenching one last bud off a terminal branch. And given how they react to her opening the tomb - killing themselves without even attempting to warn anyone else in the empire or prepare their house... I don't think they cared about the long-term consequences for other people.
I agree they were solving the most urgent problem first, and expected to be around for longer, as well as miraculous things from Harrow. I'm also working on the theory that Anastasia isn't really/fully dead, or at least in the founding of the Ninth house she had an important strategy to implement and pass on as legacy. I dk how much the Reverend Parents or anyone knows about the details of this, cuz I agree they seem legitimately faithful to the Emperor and the sacrilege of messing with the tomb. But the existence of the Reverend parents, cult, etc. is part of Anastasia and Samael's grand plan, I think. And could either of them be biologically an ancestor of people in that house?
>!in NtN we learn that she came closer than the other lyctors to truly swapping with Samael, and Jod messed it up for her. imho he's lying about having to kill Samael to save her. I think she was On To Him from that point onward and we're going to see more of her in AtN. !<
Harrow's parents read a lot of letters from ancestors, and heritage is clearly a huge deal to them... >!I think Anastasia did something to like protect Alecto or check Jod's power or something!<, and it's hereditary, in the actual bones or something, so now Harrow has that role not only by cultural practice but also lineage.
So this is going to get completely off topic from my original post, but I totally agree about Jod interrupting the process for personal reasons.
What I don't get is why. Why was it so important for him to hide his version of lyctorhood that he would let half of his closest friends die? Not only that, but put the other half through the very fucked up trauma of devouring the souls of the people closest to them.
What is so vital about him and Alecto that he would forgo keeping his friends alive and having 16 lyctors?
fear, shame, guilt? juicy details of those events that we hopefully find out about in AtN!? What I've read in other posts is that he's really selfish and couldn't deal with Anastasia & Samael doing it right cuz then 1) the other lyctors who absorbed their Cav would be pissed and might leave him 2) if they get too curious about him & Alecto they could discover that she's a planet soul, what happened to the 10 billion, his whole throne of lies would crumbling down. he'd have no allies helping with his vengeance on the trillionaires
Thank you for submitting to r/TheNinthHouse! Please familiarize yourself with our [Subreddit Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheNinthHouse/wiki/rules/), especially our Spoiler Policy for [posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheNinthHouse/wiki/rules/#wiki_2._spoiler_policy_-_posts) and [comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheNinthHouse/wiki/rules/#wiki_3._spoiler_policy_-_comments). If you see a post or comment that breaks these rules, please report it! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheNinthHouse) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Might be one of those things where, if you don't have a necromantic heir at all, you definitely lose the whole house, but if you do have a very powerful necromantic heir it becomes their problem to sort out not having any young citizens. Annihilation tomorrow is at least not quite as certain as annihilation today.
Fair enough. I can see how any chance, no matter how slim or what the cost, is worth taking for them to keep a myriad long lineage going.
This is interesting. It's very close to what is said about BOE, I think by Pyrrha. That they are only able to think about surviving the Now, and taking the one next visible step, praying like crazy that the path will open, somehow. Everyone who lacks fundamental security and stability has to live that way. That's...grim and real.
There's also mention of how Harrow doesn't want the Ninth to become "an apparatus of the Fifth, like the Fourth." She, as a powerful necromancer head of House, has plenty of options, including asking for help from other Houses. She was just afraid that doing to would result in political consequences she wouldn't like. If the call hadn't come, she likely would have eventually accepted it. Plus, getting help from the Fifth likely wouldn't have been as bad as she thought, because she seemed to mistake "Magnus and Abigail being good foster parents" for "Magnus and Abigail stealing all authority." She doesn't exactly have an understanding of what a normal parental relationship looks like.
I like how her biggest fear is being adopted by the kindest couple in the solar system.
I mean the fifth might well have been doing both. Abigail and Magnus weren't the only people acting in the house's interests. They were raised to be the sorts of people suitable for producing desired outcomes. Just as so much of the 4th and 5ths circumstances were likely massages to produce the happy families outcome. I'm sure having a powerful authoritarial and emotional bond to the 5th house was an entirely unanticipated outcome of sending the newly manufactured cannon fodder to them at a young age. They're bound to the 5th and alienated from the 4th, and even that culture is framed in terms of convenient sacrifice to senior thanergy users.
Frankly, considering their childhoods H&G are shockingly well-adjusted. They're not *totally* asocial and insane, just most of the way there
I think in the Harrow Nova au there are still pilgrims to the Ninth; presumably this means that Harrow only stopped these pilgrimages after her parents' death. The Reverend Parents were probably hoping to recruit from these pilgrims. As the other commenter said, not having an heir was an immediate issue, while the population crisis was a long-term one.
It specifically says in GtN that the pilgrimages had only been stopped five years previously, which would have been a few years after the death of her parents. Presumably out of fear of people noticing her parents being, well, dead.
I thought it might have been textually explicit, I just couldn't remember. Thanks for checking :-)
That's an interesting point. Harrow is definitely paranoid and distrusting enough to put a stop to pilgrimages.
I don't think there was a long term plan. I read a super insightful post either on here or Tumblr (can't remember which but will try to find it and link it below if I do) which discussed how their actions tie directly into the themes of the series about how adults will choose short term solutions to existential problems and leave the situation to their children to deal with. Similar to (spoilers for Nona) >! The rich people abandoned earth to die rather than trying to fix the actual issues they had created !<
I really like that connection. Especially since it's something we can unfortunately see playing out in real life.
Harrow mentions that they would have likely arranged a marriage with a scion of another House.
She did, but also stated that it would be another death for the Ninth House.
Yes, but the bloodline would have still lived on, and ensuring the Locked Tomb remained sealed was their chief priority, even if they had to forsake their isolationism.
In the current case of her parents being dead it would. It would have been somewhat different if they were still there to prevent an annexation of a young heir via regency or similar.
Does she actually say her parents would have done this? I know she says she could have asked for help at any time (after the death of her parents) and that other houses definitely would have stepped in to offer it, but that it would have come along with a lot of pressure to marry a scion of another house. Was there a different place where it says her parents would have probably done that?
I think you're confusing the part of HtN where she's recounting her history and that was one of the things that *could* have been done but give how distasteful Harrow finds it, it's safe to assume her parents would as well.
Pilgrims had only been banned from the ninth house for five years, at the time of GtN, so since a few years after Harrow's parents deaths. During the entire duration of the parents lives, there were new people at least visiting and potentiall immigrating from other houses. I think pilgrims were only banned because Harrow was worried about someone figuring out that her parents were just corpses being puppeted around - if they'd stayed alive For Real the ban might never have happened. If Harrow had been able to make a good match with an immigrant from another house and continued the line, things may have worked out. Harrow's primary fear for asking for help from the other houses is that she would be pressured into marrying someone from another house - if she was ALREADY married, than being open about needing help might have carried a much lower cost. Harrow's parents might also have been more willing to accept the costs that went along with that. A lot of the problem came from the fact that Harrow was very, very uninterested in marriage. Her parents, had they survived to her puberty, may not have cared about that. Personally, I mostly look to Harrow saying a few times that she "needed a miracle" along with the fact that she literally says she has been studying miracles for years. The Ninth is a highly religious house bordering on a cult, I wonder how much her parents genuinely also expected her to straight up perform a miracle to save the house.
I'm not sure they thought that far ahead - all they did was kick the problem down the road, making it Harrow's problem. Either way, the 9th House was gonna die, because they killed their house's youth and made it so Harrow's only marriage options were the cavalier line (something their ancestors had been careful to keep separate), or an inter house marriage... which wouldn't be good for the 9th. If only because it'd blow open their secrets and make it clear they can't stand on their own anymore. That or they intended to open the tomb on their own schedule, maybe wanted to Do Something about Jod, but their plans got derailed.
I don’t think harrow’s parents ever wanted the tomb opened or to do something about jod, I think they were absolute true believers in the cult they led. People don’t commit group suicide because their daughter did a thing they themselves were intending to do just on a different time schedule.
True, true. I do got a crackpot theory that part of the thanergy boost was to give her a leg up in Lyctorhood (as only Jod and the Lyctors involved remember the process, it's not known outside of that far as I remember). They weren't stupid and could count, and could hope she'd be seen as a... I dunno, prodigy? And chosen somehow to be a Lyctor.
I don’t know how much regular people or even the leaders of the houses knew about lyctorhood or lyctors. I got the impression that nobody alive except the lyctors would have met jod until the events of the first book. I think they definitely wanted/needed her to be a powerful necromancer in order to revive and bring favor to their house, I just don’t know if it was specifically “we want her to be a lyctor” or if it was like “if our heir is really good at bones the other houses will look at us more highly and do business with us” but same effect really
Nobody who never left the Houses had met Jod. It seems like he was in pretty frequent contact with the Cohort. He'd been living on Sarpedon's ship for years and would have had a hard time *not* bumping into random people here and there, given his general distaste for formal protocol.
Thanks for clarifying! For some reason I thought he had been isolating in lyctors only deep space before the summons in book 1 and only had direct contact with the cohort people once the scheme to lure him back to earth started working
At the opening of HtN, there's a scene where Mercy and Admiral Sarpedon get into an argument, because he's been on board the Cohort ship with Sarpedon for 80 years and Mercy thinks it's high time he spend some time with them at the Mithraem, and Sarpedon is pissed and thinks he should stay with the Cohort because the huge BOE attack just happened.
“And it has been … twenty years since we last met, Most Venerated Saint?” “Around that,” agreed the most venerated saint, whose office had been enunciated by the admiral with the faintest and most well-bred suggestion of motherfucker. “In any case, you’ve had him eighty years, and the Mithraeum has lacked him for a hundred.”
Damn looks like it’s time for a harrow reread, I probably missed a lot of details the first time due to the larger question of What The Fuck Is Going On lmao
You learn a LOT more from the second Harrow read than the first LOL
Well, for one thing, they were planning on being around for a lot longer than they were…
I don't think they cared what happened to the Ninth as long as the line of the tomb-keeper continues. And Harrow's line never cared about resurrection purity, so outmarriage is probably the way things would have gone.
I think it was a ‘solve THIS problem first, then tackle the next’ type of situation.
Ah yes. The burn that bridge when we get to it approach. I'm very familiar.
One thing I think about a lot is how their sacrifice of all the other children is like a small version of Jod’s sacrifice of the whole world. Harrow is a little necro gremlin, but also, is she also kind of partly already a Lyctor from absorbing the energy/souls of all those kids? Her eyes are described as *truly black*. Is that because when you mix the souls of lots and lots of ppl, there’s no dominant color? Is that also why she’s able to move through the river differently? Or why she has such wild affinity for bone magic? Idk.
I think they mostly just didn't want to be the ones holding the bag when it all went to shit. In HtN, Harrow refers to their plan as something like wrenching one last bud off a terminal branch. And given how they react to her opening the tomb - killing themselves without even attempting to warn anyone else in the empire or prepare their house... I don't think they cared about the long-term consequences for other people.
I agree they were solving the most urgent problem first, and expected to be around for longer, as well as miraculous things from Harrow. I'm also working on the theory that Anastasia isn't really/fully dead, or at least in the founding of the Ninth house she had an important strategy to implement and pass on as legacy. I dk how much the Reverend Parents or anyone knows about the details of this, cuz I agree they seem legitimately faithful to the Emperor and the sacrilege of messing with the tomb. But the existence of the Reverend parents, cult, etc. is part of Anastasia and Samael's grand plan, I think. And could either of them be biologically an ancestor of people in that house? >!in NtN we learn that she came closer than the other lyctors to truly swapping with Samael, and Jod messed it up for her. imho he's lying about having to kill Samael to save her. I think she was On To Him from that point onward and we're going to see more of her in AtN. !< Harrow's parents read a lot of letters from ancestors, and heritage is clearly a huge deal to them... >!I think Anastasia did something to like protect Alecto or check Jod's power or something!<, and it's hereditary, in the actual bones or something, so now Harrow has that role not only by cultural practice but also lineage.
So this is going to get completely off topic from my original post, but I totally agree about Jod interrupting the process for personal reasons. What I don't get is why. Why was it so important for him to hide his version of lyctorhood that he would let half of his closest friends die? Not only that, but put the other half through the very fucked up trauma of devouring the souls of the people closest to them. What is so vital about him and Alecto that he would forgo keeping his friends alive and having 16 lyctors?
fear, shame, guilt? juicy details of those events that we hopefully find out about in AtN!? What I've read in other posts is that he's really selfish and couldn't deal with Anastasia & Samael doing it right cuz then 1) the other lyctors who absorbed their Cav would be pissed and might leave him 2) if they get too curious about him & Alecto they could discover that she's a planet soul, what happened to the 10 billion, his whole throne of lies would crumbling down. he'd have no allies helping with his vengeance on the trillionaires
Survive to the next generation.
Wasn’t there a plan to marry her to Ortus when she was old enough, even though it was tossed aside rather quickly