Throughout the book, Harrow has mentioned that her hair is growing unusually fast she assumes it's a side effect of her messed up Lyctoral transformation.This is just after we learned that the Emperor himself sealed the Locked Tomb with one, hence why Harrow was able to unlock it with Gideon's blood, meaning Harrow is unknowingly insulting her god. Ianthe asks why she didn't just use a blood ward, at which point Harrow says that she can't reasonably expect not to bleed for the next myriad and it would be stupid to rely on blood to keep anyone out. When giving her letters to Ianthe, Harrow tells her that the letters are encrypted in cipher and not to bother reading them.'Neither are we romantic-neither are we, frankly, platonic-' 'Sorry-I mean, you're the same age, I don't really know how this goes anymore, we've all been alive for too long.' It was your turn to sit up straight in your chair and intone, constructing each syllable with the same rigid emphasis you might give to a skeleton: 'We-are not- intimate.' I have this little book about babies, bodies, friends, and family. God sat up straight in his chair, looked at you in open astonishment, and he said, 'Are you sure you want to go with-that one? Let's go through all the other, less awkward ones first. Folllowed by Harrow's deadpan reaction:.The second is our vulnerability to man-eating fish. The first is that beings made of flesh and blood immediately die in magma. Mercy: The magma metaphor falls apart from here.Įmperor: Let us imagine the magma is full of unkillable man-eating magma fish. Ianthe: Teacher, the River is an enormous liminal space formed from spirit magic, populated with ghosts gone mad from hunger. If you understood your journey and the relative spaces well enough, you could instead drop into the magma, which would carry you to your destination in an hour. Travelling overland from point to point might take a year.

I'll use Cassiopeia's.Įmperor: Girls, imagine a rocky planet with a magma core beneath the mantle. Mercy: I will not help you to make hyperpotamous travel happen, thank you for the option, my lord.Įmperor: In that case, despite hyperpotamous being a perfectly good word that both catches the ear and does what it says on the tin, let's deviate. Mercy: -it's the River, which perfectly well lets you say, Imagine the River-Įmperor: Mercy, either you don't like my previous, perfectly good river phrasing, or you do. There is a perfectly good water metaphor waiting for you.Įmperor: Well, I want the idea of two depths, and I don't want to confuse them with the idea of speed where none. Emperor: I like to think of it as descending into a well.

Harrow the ninth gideon