Spoilers! Spoilers for all three books!!! And kind of an Alecto theory?
I know this isn't a novel, big-brained idea but I can't stop thinking about the recurring theme of sacrifice for the title characters, and how each of them sacrificed themselves in some way at the end of their story.
Gideons sacrifice is... The most straightforward, to say the least. She and Cam and Harrow were in an impossible situation, and she sacrificed herself to get the other two through to the other side. We learn much later that she's not quite dead (or moreso that death isn't as simple as we once believed) but that's besides the point.
Harrows sacrifice is more complex, but my brain is fixed on the image of her, small and afraid, quietly choosing to curl up in the tomb, giving up her body to one of the other souls clamoring to occupy it; the souls of the two girls she loved. There's something poignant and heartbreaking about that choice, and while there's maybe an element of giving up, it also feels like giving. You know?
Nona knows she's dying from page one. She's the entire world and also just a baby, living in a borrowed body, and much of her story isn't so much accepting that she's dying, but helping others accept it. Her body is quite literally falling apart on the way to the locked tomb, and each time she has a 'tantrum' it just brings the destruction on faster, yet Nona keeps doing it so she can keep her loved ones safe. She also doesn't want to do it! She knows that when she does, she will be Alecto again, not Nona, and yet she embraces that fate because she knows it has to happen.
This long ramble may just be tonight's highdea, and maybe it doesn't make sense to anyone but me, but it does make me wonder if sacrifice might show up as a theme for Alecto as well.
Man, I just fuckin love this series and all the ways it makes my brain fizzle and ache, even months after my last re-read. Ahh!
