In conclusion sorry for getting into how 👀 the narrator is at harrow here, esp bc harrow herself would hate it probably. literal meaning vs associations/symbolism). denotation as opposed to connotation (i.e.

aside from being a frontline titties callback, it’s just right there in the text.

tits is ironically the least horny part, serving as the punchline for the excerpt.

straddling the sword no less (the sword being a classic phallic metaphor, but in this case primarily associated with gideon) if nothing else, bare is doing some work here

I thought I remembered bare feet being some sort of erotic symbol but I refuse to do more than 1 google search about this for obvious reasons.

from shoulder to hip and upon her chest - lot of body imagery here, which makes sense, honing in on harrow then expanding out through her senses to establish the setting, but sus given the rest of the excerpt.

laid - would be unremarkable except for the everything else going on.

like, what does “carving a slit through life” mean, and why pick that over a less obscure metaphor? tbh these feel like excuses to wiggle slit and wound in here more than anything) EDIT: she may be saying room actually but the Tor captions do say wound. why on earth did TM pick this phrasing if not specifically for the connotations. (this is the sentence that caught my attention in the first place. wound is the more shakespearean of the two and might not stand out on its own, but when they’re back to back like this and featuring in such odd imagery, that makes it guilty by association. The first thing she saw upon opening her eyes was a pair of tits. Upon her chest, straddling the sword, there was an open magazine. A sword was laid upon her from shoulder to hip. She had been walking when it had all gone black - any path ahead or behind was blotted out now she was here. At a point in the slit she was carving through life, Harrowhark Nonagesimus woke to find herself lost in a dark wound.

The locked tomb alecto