John is hiding two Resurrection Beasts, not just one.
This was originally going to be a much longer and fancier argument, but I don’t have it in me to dress it up properly, so I’ll just pepe silvia this out
What impact does a Resurrection Beast actually have from within the River?
Answer: an apocalyptic and defining one.
I think we’re all on the same page at this point that Tamsyn Muir loves Foreshadowing Literally Every Plot Twist From As Early On As Is Physically Possible, so for posterity, here’s what Palamedes and Harrow first have to say about the River Bubble phenomenon in HTN:
“You cannot build in the River! It is a dimension of perpetual flux—defined space is nonsense here—you might as well try to wall off time with bricks and mortar.”
“Yes. Sort of. But by our very presence in the River, we briefly exert space on non-space. Think of how, when you blow air into water, you make bubbles. The water can’t be where the air is. It’s like the air temporarily enforces its own rules over a localised area.”
-HTN ch. 33
The given impossibility of carving lasting form into the River seemingly leads directly into some of the biggest open questions as of the end of NTN - i.e., what is the Tower, how is it related to John’s cosmic imperium, and how has it enabled him to wall off time with stone and mortar after all?
However, this is misdirection. While the River Bubbles created by the presence of Palamedes and Harrow clearly remain fleeting and unstable, NTN explicitly shows us the existence of entities capable of pushing back against the River with far more force.
Pyrrha said, “This is impossible. We should be flayed alive,” and Paul said, “Yeah.”
Nona tried to explain.
“The water doesn’t want to touch us, that’s all.”
Crown was saying urgently, “Judith—stop, come back,” and Nona vaguely heard unbuckling; and then shadows fell over her, people standing behind her seat.
The Captain’s voice was like old teeth. “He left them too long—you left them too long, my salt thing.”
“You are here,” said Nona, finding talking was hard, that her voice sounded drowsy in her own ears. “Okay, good—the water really won’t touch us. I was worried about our back end [of our truck].”
-NTN ch. 30
The possessed bodies of Harrowhark Nonagesimus and Judith Deuteros - both of whom now carry the spiritual influence of Resurrection Beasts in whole or in part - actively function to repel the waters of the River such that Nona worries about min-maxing the coverage of their reality fields. If a human’s presence exerts some space on non-space, the presence of a Resurrection Beast supercavitates against the water.
Kiriona is also extremely explicit that the Tower serves much the same cavitation-function in the space of the River, ameliorating the existence-sapping pull of the waters:
“The ride?” said Palamedes. “Wait. You mean you both dropped through the River? In that shuttle?”
“Can’t be,” said Pyrrha, who was watching the Prince narrowly. “Not anymore. You’ve got a soul attached to you, kid … or part of one, at least. John would have had to go with you to stop it being stripped bare.”
The corpse prince tilted her head to one side, like a curious bird. “You haven’t been in the River lately, have you?” she said.
“What’s that meant to mean?”
“Guess you’ll find out at some point,” said the Prince.
-NTN ch. 25
Pyrrha sucked in her breath, and she said: “What the fuck is that?”
“Told you so,” said Kiriona Gaia.
As the megatruck spun around, the wide rippling grey waters resolved into something totally different. There was a big structure standing up out of the River—that water was the River, after all—a tall, cold cylinder of what was unmistakably stone.
-NTN ch. 30
In other words, we don’t need to postulate a new category of power to explain the Tower: we can be fairly certain that it’s one of the world-body-layers of an as-yet-unidentified Resurrection Beast, for whom an anatomy shaped like a heaven-piercing tower would make it no more alien than the rest of its peers.
That being said, it’s not a difficult guess at this point to match the anatomy inside the River with the outward-facing creature in physical reality - the Tower’s aesthetics are strongly reminiscent of John the half-RB and his literary cant, but John has been active for ten thousand years, and there’s only one Resurrection Beast who starts waking up at the same time as the Tower rises.
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
-Annabel Lee
He said, I didn’t stick my thumb in my mouth. Had more sense than that. Fuck knows what would’ve happened if I tried to absorb you all the way; I probably would’ve burnt to death. But I needed a house to put you in, if I wasn’t going to put all of you in me…
He said, From my blood and bone and vomit I conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in. I was terrified you’d find some way to escape before I was done.
-John 1:20 (NTN)
Before I get to the question of the relationship between the Tower and the Devils, I want to emphasize the significance of this explanatory stance: the Tower’s existence, as a lynchpin nailed through the unreality of the River, is no different from the influence that Palamedes and Harrow are able to exert in their respective River bubbles.
That is, the Tower is larger, but not qualitatively unique. A RB’s force of repulsion against unreality is exactly akin to a human soul’s repulsion against unreality, and both of them give rise to their respective reality bubbles. “Pushing back on the water” is exactly the metaphor for existence in the River that Palamedes takes for granted, and which Nona and the Tower both exert effortlessly.
And here we have to take a step back and ask: just what in the River is really ‘natural’? Does the subjective reality of the River even have objective features to begin with?
“This is Canaan House,” you said.
“Moment of death,” he agreed.
You said, “The barrier begins where your line of sight ended. It’s derived from everything you saw.”
He said, “And it doesn’t change … the sea is still. It looks like it’s moving, but it’s not—it’s like one of those holographic pictures where turning it up and down lets you see another part of the image. There is nothing here, and that nothing never changes.”
-HTN ch. 33
In the dream, they were hiking up a big hill of brown, sun-blasted grass, crunching like paper beneath their feet. Below them the waters were rising, but they ascended without hurry, unpanicked by that bubbling, churning, brown morass… The clouds were strange, and in the far distance, a twister danced on the neon surface of the sea.
-John 15:23 (NTN)
In the dream the waters kept rising. They started making a hut at the top of the hill. Bodies were bobbing up and down in the water. He was scared of that—he was always scared of the water—and he made the waters go away for a while, and he raised up some parts of the earth that had been covered by sea.
-John 19:18 (NTN)
I would venture a guess that the answer is no - that the organizing metaphor of death as flood waters and rotting oceans is actually being imposed by the expectations and experiences of the undead Alecto, just as Harrow-the-Lyctor exerted a uncontrollable subconscious pull over the world of spirit.
Exactly how many Resurrection Beasts are there?
The first time TLT raises this question, it explicitly lampshades that there’s a loophole in the final accounting for this metric: it wants you to pay attention.
“How many revenants are there?”
You prepared for an astronomical number. The Body raised its eyebrows when the Emperor Undying said, “Three.
“There were nine. We called them by number. Over ten thousand years, we have managed to take out a grand total of five.”
Before you could do anything—exclaim, or question his mathematics, which did not hold up even on first acquaintance—he did something dreadful.
-HTN ch. 2
Five casualties plus three survivors is eight, one less than the given total of nine. With the benefit of hindsight from Nona or a little forward thinking from eagle-eyed first-time readers, we know that John is equivocating because he doesn’t want to talk about Alecto, who was neither alive nor dead at the time, and who obviously the missing ninth Resurrection Beast of the Earth.However, Nona gives us another accounting problem:
He said, I took you into myself and we became one.
He said, I bit through the sun first. It’s human nature. That started things going. Once you take down the sun, you’re cooking with gas, pardon the pun. I sliced through Venus, Mercury, Mars … by that point a couple of the tugs had already launched through the Kuiper. I had to kill Jupiter and Saturn in a fucking hurry.
You and I went full fucking Hungry Caterpillar. We took Uranus … Neptune … crunched down Pluto … found every satellite and craft, reached in, crunched up all the humans, moved on.
-John 1:20
John kills ten celestial bodies, not nine - nine planets, plus the Sun. TLT is very clear that stars are alive enough to slay and reanimate with necromancy, and thus that they should properly be alive enough to leave Revenants behind upon their violent thanergetic death.
Moreover, the metaphors and apologetics John clings to in this section - the ways in which he talks around his crimes against the Dominicus - are extremely loaded: he can’t stop himself from equivocating between Alecto and the Sun.
He said, You were screaming. I wanted you to stop, I wanted … I wanted you. I wanted you like a caveman wants a wildfire … or the sun.
I realised you were too much for me. This is the problem, the incorporation, this is the hardest part … It’s the human instinct, to take.
He said, As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you … I hid you in me. And when we were together … once the shaman had claimed the sun … I became God.
He said, I bit through the sun first. It’s human nature.
-John 1:20
Augustine is certain that John can’t be drawing any power from Dominicus, and the rest of the story seems largely in agreement with his conclusions. However, John is clearly able to draw power from Alecto’s soul despite the fact that the First House is a corpse. If John were also supping on the dead soul of the sun in order to reanimate the sun’s corpse, that would be entirely compatible with the observed flow of energy from out of John and into the star of Dominicus, and it would resolve all uncertainty about his and Alecto’s absurd jump from Kardashev I to Kardashev II.
Then, the only missing planks of this wild hypothesis are: Why didn’t the Resurrection Beast of the sun flee the Dominicus system with the rest of the RBs? Where could John possibly be keeping a third keystone of his Perfect Lyctorhood? And, doesn’t this make the puzzle of John’s powers more complicated than it really needs to be?
As for the first question, I believe John and Abigail both have their answers for this:
“The only sure way to banish a revenant is to destroy the physical anchor it inhabits before it can escape the shell. Inanimate objects can be destroyed; corpses too, if you remove the brain. But, Harrow, we have other problems on our hands,” said Abigail.
-HTN ch. 49
You said, “So if you die, the Houses die with you. The star warming our system fails, and—becomes a gravitational well, as I understand it?”
“Yes. A black hole, like the one that took out Cyrus,” he said.
-HTN ch. 37
“It’s not that getting rid of the corpus wouldn’t be useful,” said the Emperor. “It would be. When Cyrus drew the corpus into a black hole, Ulysses said that it was the simplest thing in the world to dispose of the brain, that it fell into a dormant state, and he could bring it down to a stoma singlehanded…”
-HTN ch. 36
When we see Harrow flip planets on-screen, the process of apopneumatic shock which blows the soul of the Beast from its corpse is not instantaneous. In other words, if a highly energetic system such as a star were to immediately die, its corpse might collapse or detonate faster than its soul could possibly escape through a thanergetic link to another vessel. The Resurrection Beast of the sun may literally be stillborn, severed from its own ties to undeath and left vulnerable for John to seize it - a vast and spiritual world-body lost somewhere within the afterlife.
And there is, in fact, another candidate for this entity - another ‘objective’ component of the underworld that we can map to the ruin of the sun, just as we can map the Tower and the entire aquatic River to Alecto.
“It is the mouth to Hell,” said God.
He said, “A genuinely chaotic space—chaos in the meaning of the abyss as well as unfathomable … located at the bottom of the River. The Riverbed is studded with mouths that open at proximity of Resurrection Beasts, and no ghosts venture deeper than the bathyrhoic layer. Anyone who has entered a stoma has never returned.”
-HTN ch. 36
Outside—another kilometre down, maybe—was the pale belly of the River, studded with rocky promontories. And right at the bottom—the water was churning. The station tilted forward, and I could see clearly.
A hole had opened. It was big enough to swallow up the whole of Drearburh and have room to spare. It was a huge, hideous, dark expanse, and it had seething, weird edges; it took the lights pattering over them for me to see that the edges of the hole were enormous human teeth. Each one must’ve been six bodies high and two bodies wide, with the dainty scalloped edges of incisors. The teeth shivered and trembled, like the hole was slavering. And that hole had nothing in it; that hole was blacker than space, that hole was an eaten-away tunnel of reality.
-HTN ch. 52
“They concoct their own vengeance,” said the Captain. “Their justice is not my justice. Their water is not my water. I came to help. I am made a mockery. The danger is upon you, and you do not even know … they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. There is a hole at the bottom of their tower. I will pull their teeth. I will make it blank for you.”
-NTN ch. 27
A standard interpretation of Varun’s words is that the Tower itself is as a prison containing the Devils, and there’s a ‘hole’ in the sense of an aperture which now allows them to escape. Yes, but: the hole is specifically attributed to the bottom of the Tower because the spiritual embodiment of the black hole of Dominicus is spatially located at the base of the Tower. The hole is the Stoma, which Alecto has been placed to help seal and tap into - a Tower by definition rises up and over the bottom of the world.
We can say with some confidence, just on aesthetic grounds, that is an extremely strong connection between the Stoma and John’s power. The power of the Eighth House, which “sucks at the Stoma like a teat”, shares a shadow of the intensely oral, penetrating, incandescent burning glow of John’s transcendent necromancy:
As he faded, the pale Silas incandesced. He glowed with an irradiated shimmer, iridescent white, and the air began to taste of lightning.
Gideon felt an internal tug, like a blanket being pulled off in the cold. It was a little bit like the sensation back in Response (which was, what, a thousand years ago?)—something deep inside her being prodded in its tender spot. But it also wasn’t, because it hurt like hell. It was like having a headache inside her teeth.
-GTN ch. 17
Silas slammed his fists on the ground. The air was choked from Ianthe’s lungs. Her mouth and skin puckered and withered: she stopped, awkward, stiff, eyes bulging in surprise. The remnants of blood rose from the floor as pale smoke, trailing heavenward all around them. For a moment everything was blanched clean and luminously white.
-GTN ch. 34
And God said, “Stop.”
The world slowed down. You stopped, sitting upright in your chair: your bones somehow rigid and still, and your flesh chilly and rigid around those bones. The shrapnel spray from the Saint of Duty did not stop. But what remained of him stopped too, half man, half rupture—his prurient details hot and white, naked insides clothed with the sinus-drying burst of the power of God.
-HTN ch. 25
I’m not sure that John has entered a full Lyctorhood arrangement with a second Resurrection Beast. However, I certainly believe that he’s constantly siphoning the RB of the sun, and that he’s permanently shaped Alecto to help him siphon and subjugate the sun, in much the same fashion that the Eighth House uses its own cavaliers to suck at the Stoma - yet incalculably vaster, for Alecto’s world-soul is both an impossibly vast channel and likely more suited to metabolizing the power of the sun than any other planetary Resurrection Beast.
Likewise, because he has no personal connection to the sun, I suspect John is using it not just as a punitive measure, but also as a proxy to extend his Lyctoral well - he can feed countless billions of people to the stillborn RB of the sun, dump smaller RBs inside, let them render down into an insane soul melange hive - teeming with demonic Heralds bursting to leap free through the first thanergetic link or solar convergence they can find - and capture the energies released by their lysis without having to devalue the meaning of the priceless relationship he thinks he shares with Alecto.
TL;DR - Hell is the ghost of a black hole, John is using Alecto to perform the Penrose Process on it
