first flower of my house.

i cannot conceive of a universe without you in it.

what is going on here?


so, this is my shrine to the greatest book series ever written, the locked tomb by tamsyn muir.

every piece of fanart shown on this page is a link to the original post by the artist. if you are the artist of any of these works and would like it taken down, let me know and i will.

goes without saying that some of these pieces will include spoilers. i'll keep them context free where i can, but if you haven't read these books yet, go and do it now. NOW!

i'll update this as i find new works i like and think of new things. some of the meta isn't finished yet. but for now, here it is

flaming text saying 'Spoilers Ahead'

i keep my thoughts and any meta on the characters in the labelled boxes beneath the galleries. however, some of the artworks themselves could be interpreted as spoilers for the book, some characters more than others.

if this shrine convinces even one person to pick up gideon the ninth i consider it worth it tenfold. enjoy!

griddle


gideon is a butch jock trapped around magic nerds, who dosn't really care for necromancy or the goth aesthetic of the ninth cultists. one of the things i find intruiging about her is that for about the first half of her book, she doesn't seem to realise what story she's in (and as a result neither does the reader), treating it as an action/adventure and slowly coming to terms with the fact that it is really a tragedy after the fourth meet their fate. and it's a reasonable assumption, she makes bad jokes and reads sexy comics and cares more about hot women and pushups than whatever apotheosis the scions are vying for - she doesn't feel like a tragic figure, which only makes her arc more heart-wrenching.

as the series progresses she slowly sucuumbs to her genre, from normal teenager to lyctor-ghost to an empty-hearted zombie prince as, on a more meta level, she goes from main character to distant narrator to third-act reveal. to me her arc is all about agency and disillusionment. she wants to escape the ninth, to make a name for herself in the cohort and for Harrow to be impressed by her. she wants her parents to be big important poeple to prove the ninth wrong for treating her like shit. and she gets it all in the worst way possible. she leaves the ninth for canaan house as Harrow's cavalier, impresses her (and more) through her swordfighting skill, and makes herself indispensible to Harrow by through ascension to lyctorhood. her mother is the hero martyr of the rebellion and her father is literal god, but one is dead and never wanted her anyway, and the other only keeps her around for his own security. as Kiriona's life is everything she claimed to want at the start of the first book, but she hates it because it, like her, is not real. just as she is half a soul stuffed into an animated corpse in the fascimilie of a person, her life is a plethora of empty titles and accolades masquerading as real achievement. her father, famously the only necromancer capable of full resurrection, will not do it for her. despite her power, renown, and allegedy loving parent, she is instantly willing to abandon it all the moment she thinks it will save Harrow. being useful to god tided her over for a while, but as soon as she could she returned to her true wish; being needed by Harrow.

her relationship with Harrow drives me crazy. as the only children of the ninth, Harrow adored and Gideon abhorred, the two always hated each other. they never had a kind word for the other, and tore each other apart at ever chance. that is, until they have one (1) conversation about their feelings, realise they were taking out their own self hatred on each other, and immediately swear to die for one another. from then on, all she wants is to be Harrow's cavalier. and while it stuck me a bit at first, it completely makes sense for their characters. Gideon, despite being a bit of an asshole, has a good heart. she gets on well with the sixth and fifth, takes care of 'Dulcinea', tries to protect the fourth, and is generally pretty friendly when she has the option. she hates Harrow because Harrow is an asshole, but after hearing the reasons why, and the fact that Harrow doesn't actually want to hate her, doesn't even blame her for her parent's death, of course she's willing to try again. the new side of Harrow, the side that tries to protect her, that says please and compromises and treats her as an equal, Gideon serves without hesitation. in her eyes love is servitude; and because she imagines Harrow doesn't feel the same, she is willing to destroy herself as an act of love because she sees it as the best thing she can do. they've only ever had each other, were the closest thing the other had to peers, even when they hated each other. both hated themselves and assumed the other hated them because - with circumstances considered - they should. they were pitted against each other by the ninth, so once they escape that and sort things for themselves, all of that old bitterness is instantly converted into fierce devotion because it's always been the two of them. now it isn't Gideon against Harrow and Harrow against Gideon, it's Gideon and Harrow against the world. (a little more on Harrow's perspective later)

for real though i had not realised how starved i was for cool butch characters until i read her. i need her i need to be her i need to smoke a joint with her. she's everything to me personally.

harrow hark'ness dementia raven way


patron saint of emesis, child messiah turned heretic, goth bone witch. a product of necromantic infanto-genocide which is, to put lightly, fucking mental.

impeccable arc literally no notes. you meet her at this nasty little bitch in charge of everyone and through the power of a lesbian situationship she becomes the most pathetic stick insect you have ever seen.

she real af tho bc if i lost gideon i would lobotomise myself too

on a serious note her journey through the series focuses on shifting her perspective of love. at first, upon seeing the body, she loves it, but the love is less one of romance and more of devotion, the kind of love one gives to god. except it is the body of god's enemy, and she is tasked with its entrapment, so this puts her in what literary scholars call a 'sticky one'. over the time at Canaan house she begins to forge a genuine, mutual respect and aprtnership with gideon, as opposed to the obsessive, often violent rivalry they shared before. for all her bravado at the start, harrow thinks about gideon a grreat deal and is intensely concerned with protecting her during their time on the first.

this is a woman who will admittedly stop at nothing to achieve her ambition of becoming a lyctor. who was born from the murder of 200 children and knows exactly the price her life was bought with, who is desperate to be worth the cost. and yet, when this woman discovers that the price of her ambition is gideon's life, she abandons it entirely. in the final battle against Cytherea she is ready to sacrifice herself so that Gideon and Camilla can escape, and only ascends to lyctohood because Gideon sacrifices herself first. in a desperate attempt to preserve Gideon's soul she performs BRAIN SURGERY ON HERSELF and raises dead souls from hell to keep them in a dream dimension alternate universe of false memories without a real endgame, severely affecting her own abilities and putting herself through a crazy amount of pain and suffering.

and then, when it crashed down and all is revealed to her, she willing gives up her body so gideon can live inside it, going instead to the tomb so that Gideon can have a chance at life in her place. to her, Gideon repesents everything wrong with herself. she is a walking reminder of the dead children Harrow's parents killed, the only person who knew she broke into the tomb, the other side of her coin. she cannot understand why Gideon forgives her because she cannot forgive herself for the crimes her very existence necessitated. but when she realises that the forgiveness is real, she would lay down her life without question for the one person who really understands her and accepts her as she is.

their reunion in alecto is going to be wild, somewhat complicated by them being on opposite sides of the apocalypse war, but i would be very suprised if harrow's perspective has changed much since the end of htn. she sacrificed her ultimate goal of power for Gideon to live, and i really look forward to her reaction to what john has done with it. my prediction is that the cav/necro dynamic of devotion will be reversed from the first book, with harrow ready to aly don anything and everything for Gideon (perhaps excluding alecto), and Gideon being the hesitant, cold one, changed by her time as the prince. Alecto will ultimately be the biggest obstacle, and as we don't really know how she will behave of what she will make of Gideon, it is hard to say how much longer harrow will be apart from her cavalier for

saint of emotional incest


it's her.... the worst woman in the universe...

she's so horrible and unwaveringly selfish that it's trascended into camp. like every possible decision she makes is a bad one.. down do catastrophically bad for harrow it makes her look stupid. ate babs becuse she didn't care about him but now he will a growing part of her forever

nobody can agree if she actually fucks her sister or just really acts like she does. she does, however, have a hilarious case of main character syndrome, both in the story at large and the running love story within. on both acocunt she is wrong, but damn if i don't love her goofy ass

EPONYMOUS



first beast of the ressurection. also a sweet nineteen year old toddler who loves dogs and swimming and all her friends, but probably not anymore

also the personified rage of a murdered planet and the ten billion souls upon it

coming out of my tomb and i've been doing just bad

she makes me cry if i think about her for too long :((

warden and scholar of the sixth


everyone's favourite second cousins

super codependent but i don't have it in me to dislike it. mess if fun.

either way they're super cool and i. miss them

who else is there?


Minor characters


favourites include

  • commander wake me up inside
  • nercynorn
  • dilf of the myriad pyrrha dve
oh yeah god is there too..... 🙄

one flesh, one end bitch


they haven't interacted in 1000 pages because tamsyn knew they would be too powerful

i hadn't cared about shipping in like 5 years before them. literally reinvented love. need a fingering-coded heart surgery in alecto please and thank you!

both of them r so desperate to die for one another. they lowkey need to calm down but not until i see them make out sloppy style.

silly!