Love, Death, and Lesbians
How the Locked Tomb Trilogy deals with love, death, and the loss of self.
Massive Spoilers for the Locked Tomb Trilogy, if you do not want to be spoiled, turn back now!
Life is too short
Imagine you were raised on a planet whose entire purpose was to hold a tomb with the aesthetics to match. Imagine you were one of two children on the entire planet and while you were an orphan that no one would acknowledge, the other child is the heir to the throne. Imagine after 18 years of hell and torture you are asked to become a knight in service of this other child as she strives for sainthood. Imagine after all of this, you fall in love with this woman and know that she will never love you back. Imagine that to run away from the fear of unrequited love, you kill yourself so that she may live. Imagine after all that, she dares to bring you back from the dead. This is the life of The Cavalier of the Ninth House and the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Child of His Celestial Kindliness, the First Reborn, and The Necrolord Prime John Gaius, the God Emperor of Mankind, daughter to resistance leader Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity, this is the story of Gideon Nav.
If none of that made sense to you, do not worry, this is a sci-fi series about lesbian space necromancers fusing souls to fight against other space necromancers and the ghosts of dead planets; there is a lot I am going to say that you are going to have to roll with.
Being a series that deals with death, the fundamental nature of the soul, and love (mostly of the lesbian kind but some heterosexuality exists), themes of the self in the face of death are bound to be present. A part of book one is people trying to achieve sainthood, aka a Lyctor, and become immortal warriors in the Emperor’s army. The only catch here is that you become a Lyctor by absorbing the soul of someone close to you and using them as a battery. Through this process, you as a Necromancer would absorb the soul of your knight, aka Cavalier, someone who has been training alongside you for your entire life, someone you might love (either platonically or romantically). Absorbing their soul destroys who they are and reduces them just to a power source. 10,000 years have passed since the first Lyctors were created, and we see that they are not over what they had to do to their companions. Throughout the second book, we see them still mourn their companions even after all this time. In Nona the Ninth (NtN) (book 3) two characters, Camilla and Palamedes seem to be attempting this process with each other, and at this moment a Lyctor by the name of Pyrrha tries to stop them by saying,
Understand that once you do this, you can’t take it back. It’s better to die. There’s a power to dying clean ... dying free. It’s not love, what you’re about to do. It’s not beautiful and it’s not powerful. It’s a mistake. We didn’t even do it right ... we were children—playing with the reflections of stars in a pool of water ... thinking it was space.
But they retort with
We had somethingvery nearly perfect ... the perfect friendship, the perfect love. I cannot imagine reaching the end of this life and having any regrets… Life is too short and love is too long
Palamedes and Camilla were very much in love, like all Necromancers and their Cavaliers, they pledged to each other “One Flesh, One End”, and they took this seriously. Even after Palamedes died, Camilla let his soul reside in her body, taking turns for control, with each not wanting to lose the other at the cost of reducing Camilla’s lifespan. Instead of doing the whole “eating your soulmate's soul for nigh-godhood” thing, these two figured out how to merge their souls and become one being known as Paul. Paul is technically a hybrid of Camilla and Palamedes, but they are different from those two and are instead more like a child of the two with each of their memories.
At the end of Gideon the Ninth (book 1), Gideon sacrifices herself for her necromancer/love interest Harrow, but Harrow was not ready to let Gideon go. Harrow loved Gideon, but not as much as Gideon loved her. Harrow was too busy being in love with a corpse (the one in the tomb from earlier) that she kissed as a kid (it is not actually a corpse but the soul of the earth put into a real-life Barbie Doll made by the Emperor that was put into an eternal sleep for everyone’s safety). To save her soul from being absorbed and lost to time, Harrow used necromancy to erase all memories of Gideon from her brain. In an act of love, Harrow destroyed the memory of her companion so that neither had to suffer. When Gideon (while piloting Harrow’s body) was confronted with what Harrow did by Ianthe, a fellow Lyctor, this exchange happened,
I am talking about forgetting, you big-mouthed warrior nunlet,” she said, and examined her fingernails, and levered a glob of dried-up green from her thumb with a brief flash of nausea. “Good God! Try taking Coronabeth’s memories from me ... I’d kill you myself. Love—don’t make that face, child, I have loved plenty—true love is acquisitive. You keep anything ... strands of hair ... an envelope they might’ve licked ... a note saying, Good morning, simply because they wrote it to you. Love is a revenant, Gideon Nav, and it accumulates love-stuff to itself, because it is homeless otherwise. I’m not saying she didn’t care about you. One does care about one’s cavalier, it can’t be helped ... but I watched Harry rearrange her brain so that she could empty herself of you.
You think anything I did has been to make her love me? You don’t know. She didn’t even tell you… She can’t love me, even if I’d wanted her to.
The final act of love I want to talk about before the analysis is through a character named Nona in book 3. Nona is the soul of the corpse that Harrow is in love with inhabiting her body, and the soul of a planet being in a human body comes with a disconnect in being. Nona doesn’t handle emotions like the rest of us, she’s had to learn how to do the most basic things, including not drowning in the bathtub, all while dealing with the knowledge that she is slowly dying. In NtN, Nona slowly learns what it means to love. What it means to feel familial love for Camilla and Pyrrha, what it means to feel sexual/romantic love for Camilla (it’s as messy as you think), how to love your friends, and how to love the people around her. Throughout the back half of the book we see her tell lots of people that she loves them, but nearly every time she knows that people are reading it wrong. Despite this, she never stops loving until the very end when she kisses bites Harrow and this happens.
[Nona] was angry, and raised her up, and kissed her. The child did not cry out, though blood fell from her lips and tongue, and she was wounded sore. For [Nona] knew not how to kiss, except such as it involved the mouth and teeth. And [Nona] said to her, Why are you not appeased? That is how meat loves meat.
A good chunk of these books are what I call, “in-body experiences” or out-of-body experiences that are happening because you are in someone else’s body and Nona exemplifies this; she only knows of love, not what love is. When asked if she does know what love is, she just responds “Yes - no yes… I don’t know what it means. I say it, but I don't know what it means. did I ever know what it meant?” She is detached from all of the chemicals and the drug-like feelings that comes from love because her sense of self is removed from it all. She does it all for love because her connection to love is only through others and not herself.
And love is too long
So what does this all say about the self and death? The characters in the series fall into two main camps when it comes to death, you are dead when you die, and you are dead when people forget you. For a lot of the Lyctors their Cavaliers died the day their souls were absorbed, with nothing of them left on this plane, they ceased to exist. But for characters like Paul, death is not the end of life, death only begins when no one remembers you. Camilla and Palamedes may not exist anymore, but they live on together through their new life as Paul.
Interestingly, neither of these views are portrayed as more correct. The Lyctors are allowed to mourn, Harrow is allowed to “save” Gideon through her erasure, when Camilla and Palamedes becomes Paul, Pyrrha does not yell at them despite her previous pleading. In a world of necromancers and a physical concept of the soul, you would think that there would be a consensus on where life and death begin.
Love on the other hand is a much trickier subject. As we saw in the first half, love in this series is messy. The main relationship dynamic for the first two books can be summarized as a love triangle where you're in your love interest's body after killing yourself for her but she's also in love with a corpse, and it’s not even your corpse! As someone who has been “blighted” by the addiction of love, I see myself in a lot of these characters. Harrow’s idea of “it is better to have never loved than loved and lost” can seem incredibly appealing at times, particularly in the face of death, but no one else seems to get this point. Harrow is criticized by both Gideon and Ianthe for her methodologies and implying that it isn’t even love at all. We see another example of this in an ancillary chapter at the end of Harrow the Ninth (book 2). One of the necromancers from book one named Judith is writing a bunch of reports given her new situation. Part of these reports is Judith and her “friend” Coronabeth discussing her late Cavalier Marta, a Cavalier that sacrificed herself for Judith and Judith could not save her. In the act recollecting the time she propositioned Marta and was rejected for the health of their work relationship Judith says,
I said to Camilla, Yes; and it was the best and kindest, most honourable thing Marta could have done for me. She didn’t have to tell me in so many words what we both knew, that the relationship between cavalier and necromancer could so easily curdle into codependency . . . a loss of self on both sides. An obsessive fusion of halves, not two complementary forces. We were both Cohort born and bred; I should have known better. She forgave me instantly. The fog cleared much quicker than I deserved. I knew without having to be told what I’d done wrong . . . And I didn’t err, ever again
I said, I wanted to let you know how lucky I was. She and I could have made that mistake together. It was such a near miss. I wouldn’t hold it against anyone else, except that I would want them to know that such a thing is never determined, never inevitable, like all the things I told myself that night when I was seventeen. If it had happened it would have been wrong and it would have hurt both of us.
Later in the same chapter Coronabeth offers to sacrifice herself for Judith so that Judith can ascend and Coronabeth can be free of the pain of losing her love. Judith denies it in a swift motion remarking,
It is not a confession of temptation. I wasn’t tempted by Coronabeth’s offer. There was never any possibility of it. I committed the understandable crime of desire for Lieutenant Marta Dyas, having joined my hand to hers with the best and most pure of intentions. Why would I ever knowingly take Coronabeth Tridentarius’s, having desired her already for twelve long, stupid, fruitless years?
And I said, Thank you for the offer, Your Highness, but not in this life or in any other.
Captain Judith Deuteros has loved and lost once in her life, and that was one time too many for her. As a military woman she acted like she always knew what was right, and the one time she let herself be wrong it was because she loved Marta too much to let her be wrong. It was through Marta’s reassurance that they would have lost each other to love that Judith shut herself off to anyone she ever loved in the hopes of never going through that again. Unlike the repeated dismissal of Harrow’s belief in this philosophy, Judith only gets the angry, tear-filled rebuttals from Coronabeth.
Gideon and the other Cavaliers’ love for their Necromancers seems to be the consensus at first, with all of them willing to lay down their lives for those they love, but this doesn’t account for who gets left behind. Those who are bound by the weight of those actions suffer, they remember their love, and miss it; they would give anything for it back. Immortality is not worth being alone forever. They embody the concept that when someone is out of your life for good, they feel more present than they were when they were there. When we fall out of love, it is like going through withdrawal, the chemicals in your brain that make you feel all warm and fuzzy are gone, and your memories serve as nothing but a grim reminder of what you have lost. But instead of taking the route Harrow did, they chose to live in and for their memories. We see this quite literally in Palamedes and Camilla, who do not accept death in the end and both sacrifice themselves so that they can live together forever. Although they do not exist in body or spirit, Paul exists as both of them with the memories of their love, forever.
Nona perhaps exemplifies the love I wrote about for Valentine’s Day; this concept that love is just not for those who you love love, but those who mean a lot in your life. The people who give your life meaning, those who bring you joy, those who you’d risk life and limb for. Characters so rarely show off this kind of love in media which is why I find that Nona’s love is the purest out of all we see in the series. As mentioned before, her love isn’t driven by brain chemistry and irrationality, but by the instinct of the self. Nona does what she does not because she loves them, but because she Loves them.
But the series is not over, the final book does not come out until later this year and all we know is that there is a wedding, bad dresses, and pop music in the book. When that comes out I will happily revisit this topic because as it stands what I just wrote about Nona falls apart because when Nona re-enters her own body she seemingly loves Harrow because she’s supposed to but not because she actually loves her, (but that is what you get when you fall in love with a Barbie Planet Corpse). But until then we will just have to speculate and yearn with our sapphic little hearts.
Rose is a nerd who get her degree in media studies. Everything here is subjective but also right so suck it up neckbeard. Pretty girlies can give constructive feedback if they want. Follow me on Twitter @ mrsdrmaestro