It's Worth Noting That There Are Some Extraordinary People In The World Who Have Been Quietly Doing The

Abigail Pent literally brought her husband, and look where that got her!

Oh, I can't be normal about this...

Ianthe is saying all of the quiet parts out loud about cavaliership in the Nine Houses:

She says "the cavalier’s job is to die for the necromancer" (Palamedes tries to gloss this to "protect the necromancer", but concedes that "if this entails their own death, then they're expected to accept that"). She talks about Naberius as a commodity, procured at birth, raised for a purpose, modifiable and disposable at will.

She wants to make it clear that she was terribly clever and has no regrets. Which is obviously why she's been thinking about two people she deems "dull and stupid" to the extent that they're her main touchpoint for explaining her position and that she name checks both of them, separately, during her responses... (poor Magnus).

Because the Fifth represent the opposite of how things turned out for the Third: an incidental cavaliership to a relationship of two equals who chose each other (against social currents, quite possibly on several counts). Ianthe made a choice at Canaan House. And Abigail made choices eleven and five years before that. And Ianthe has been thinking about those choices.

So Abigail Pent brought her husband on a research jolly to the First instead of bringing a slave to the killing fields (to paraphrase Harrow). And where did that get her?

Well, The Unwanted Guest rather confirms Abigail's heretical speculations about the River: it is not the end, but a purgatorial passing point through which one can travel lightly to the further shore, or sink down to the horrors at the bottom. Abigail may not have gained ultimate power and posters of her face, but she did end HTN going off to cross the River to what, in the implied cosmology of TLT, sounds rather like heaven.

And as for Ianthe? Jod's "indelible sin" may not be the most reliable account of Lyctoral River theology, but Lyctors do not seem to travel lightly in the River...and the Stoma did try to grab Ianthe back in HTN. The newly created Paul offers Ianthe - and Naberius - a second chance and she rejects it.

And now the Death of God has been released, Ianthe has bet on God, God is having a mid-dismyriad crisis, and the girl Abigail Pent risked a second and total death to help knows the truth and is off to harrow hell.

Ianthe Naberius used her cavalier for the rotten true purpose of cavaliers, and look where that got her.

me whenm i am. Prougraming on my Computer

time to get a delicious tea drink from my favorite crone, boba yaga

all i could think of when reading that section of The Unwanted Guest

Close enough welcome back cover of alecto the ninth

Man I hate it here I'm gonna fucking *remembers suicide jokes only worsen my mental health* bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear …

the ache of nostalgia

Now that I’ve finished it, here are more coherent/useful thoughts (under cut because spoilers)

Oh, this is so perfect. It’s SO perfect.

Ianthe loves being Ianthe. Ianthe loves being Ianthe more than anything else in the world—the closest she gets to loving any non-Ianthe person is loving her twin sister, and from the way Ianthe talks about Coronabeth, it’s pretty clear that it’s a distinctly acquisitive love, not a love based on knowing anything meaningful about Coronabeth as a person. Ianthe is, above all, extremely disinterested in getting to know anyone who isn’t the Most Interesting Girl in the World (Ianthe).

(I think that’s why she likes Augustine so much—he’s spent thousands of years crafting a perfectly blank persona, showing nothing of his interiority, leading Harrow to wonder if he even has any. Ianthe sees that and she’s like: awesome, finally somebody who’s not out to bore me with all their dumb complicated feelings, this guy’s the coolest ever, I want to be just like him)

So for Palamades to hit her with that—oh man. Oh MAN. Ianthe, in your quest to solidify Ianthe Tridentarius as an eternal unchanging paragon of Awe, you have become… not Ianthe. And you were too obsessed with your own Ianthe-ness to even see it.

You thought you could make the devil’s bargain with counterfeit currency and now the bill’s come due. Killing Babs is no big deal because “who cares about Babs?” Baby, YOU cares about Babs! You IS Babs now, bitch! Your perfect immutable self? You went and MUTED it!

God, it’s the perfect way to cut a self-obsessed person to the core. You love yourself so much? The person you love doesn’t fucking EXIST, Ianthe. You invited a permanent roommate into your soul and you don’t even LIKE him and now you’re on the lease together forever and you did it to yourself

The unwanted guest isn’t Palamades. The unwanted guest is Babs.

giveaway prize for scalematebutts!! i couldn’t decide which version of the beta kids to draw so i just did all of them lmao