@intezaarlily / intezaarlily.tumblr.com
big fan of liars. big fan of characters whose entire existence is a facade. love it when everything's stripped away from them and the lie is the only thing left of their identity. love it when the lines between an act and the truth are blurring. are they even them without the lie? the lie doesn't become the truth per se, but it's now such an intricate part of them it might as well be.
if that lie becomes their ruin then? delicious.
not to srs post but I do think the saddest interactions in tlt are the ones between Jeannemary and Gideon. like. when Jeannemary talks about going to the front and Gideon recognizes the horror of it. girl that's u!! u also have wanted that!!! and she has this compassion for Jeannemary that she totally lacks for herself, either in spite of or because of how similar they are, how obviously Jeannemary is Gideon at fifteen. heartbreaking.
It's been said before but I'll say it again — ever be so deeply, permanently emotionally destroyed by killing your best friend in the name of the newfound necromancer/cavalier relationship that you build a house that treats cavaliers as innately disposable, breeds them for a single purpose, genetically matches them to babies before they are born, names them for sacrificial animals, specifically so none of the necromancers who follow behind you will experience the heartbreak of losing the person they love most in the world, so horribly that they can't stand to hear their name spoken aloud for the next ten thousand years, only for the scion of that house, ten thousand years later, to be so revolted by the concept of killing his cavalier for Lyctorhood, so disgusted by your crime, that he claims G-d's directly expressed will is heretical and fundamentally morally opposed to the principles of the religion you helped to found?
And then, when that person does do what you explicitly built his house to be able to do and uses his cavalier as a tool rather than a person — even if he does it because he believes his cavalier capable of surviving anything, the polar opposite of what you tried to teach his house to believe — he experiences his cavalier's death as such an abrupt and horrifying loss that after he himself is killed he wanders the afterlife in grief, impotently taking revenge on a woman who should have been burned up for Lyctorhood by the person who loved and needed her most, but was spared, saying may all the blood of your blood suffer even a fraction of what I have suffered? The suffering you tried so incredibly hard to insulate him from? He of the church you built to bury the memory of a nun?
something something ulysses and titania being two "dead kids" and how the fourth house was founded by them and are meant to supply the military with bodies corpses generate more corpses and more often than not those kids die young something something jeannemary and isaac expecting to get shipped out at thirteen dying at fourteen something something fidelity fidelity fidelity
CRINGE: The world is ending and you're in love with your best friend who is a nun. and your roots are showing.
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bonus, from Muir’s book acknowledgements:
bonus 2:
i’d meet you where the spirit meets the bones
rip to my wife abigail and her husband magnus, they were too powerful and sensible to survive the first act of gideon the ninth
fucked up thing about colum the eight is despite the fact silas wasn't going to ascend; he would still be eaten. slowly and quietly but no less viscerally. he was made for it, lyctor or no lyctor. his destiny was always howling ghosts and a painful death no matter what happened at canaan house.
One of my very most favorite things about Silas Octakiseron is that his only social weapon after he runs out of steam being extraordinarily unpleasant to people is just saying "Stop talking to me" and exiting the conversation. That's it
dios apate minor, aka ianthe finally gets her makeover montage for harrow
i just think it's so interesting that the Eighth House is the soul siphoner house, when Mercy is (to put it incredibly simply) an anatomist. as far as i'm aware, she has little to no interest in souls past the baseline interest she needs to have. but you know who was very interested in souls? Cristabel.
devote your life to god; then go ahead and end it to help a man who might as well be god understand soul magic. devote your second life to your best friend; devote your body to her; devote your second death to keeping her soul alive for infinity. have the House you built with her take your sacrifice and devotion, and make of it an abomination. talk about tragic irony.
nona & the jellyfish :)
Everyone wants to humanize the devil. Everyone wants poor little meow meow Lucifer. Everyone wants to babygirl Satan. Tamsyn Muir had the vision and the courage to babygirlify God, and she deserves accolades for it.
Hi Tumblr! It’s been [redacted] years that I haven’t posted something, which is rather silly actually. Fixing that.
Anyway, here’s Harrowhark Nonagesimus from The Locked Tomb series! :) Enjoy!
oh so we’re all about subverting the chosen one trope until the chosen one nukes the earth and eats the solar system. i see how it is
