[Well, Molly will immediately come over and lean in? It's not like he can help with reading, but. Distress? An orange cat will hop up on the seat next to her as well, curious.]
I received an odd "prize." A letter addressed to my former cavalier. [It says To be given to Gideon Nav on it, but he can't read. He could try sounding it out, I guess?]
[he looks over at the cat, who is bunting its head against harrow's arm briefly before it curls up on the bench to nap. He will lean over and look at it, slightly nosey--
he is not so good at reading that he doesn't need to sort of mutter the sounds out to himself]
Oh, of course. 'To be given to Ortus Nigenad.' [The bone frenzy guy. . .] The cavalier primary of the Ninth House, before his death. But inside there's only a pair of glasses, which he never would have worn.
Don't complain. You pronounced it correctly the first time. Anyway, I -
[Here's your memshare, guy.
The sight you see, when you open your eyes, is a grand atrium, made of old marble and cracked glass, and in the center, a dried up fountain that was once beautiful. Scattered all around the floor are skeletons, lifeless, like they'd just fallen where they stood, some beginning to turn to ash. And also, in the atrium, is something that in this memory you are able to sense - thanergy, the energy of death, flowing and reeking everywhere. The walls to the atrium have blown open, steaming and smoking and standing in their wake is a woman. She is thin, with pale skin, and sickly veins that show too brightly across her body. The woman is clearly injured, blood dripping from her mouth, her hair sizzled to nothing, her body covered in gaping open wounds showing her meat and blood and rot within, monstrous, enough to kill anyone, but as she stands there, naked but for a bloody white sheet, radioactive blue eyes glowing with malice, the wounds begin to knit themselves back together, the rot recedes. She's holding a silver rapier in one hand. She is a Lyctor, one of the Emperor's fists and gestures, an immortal being of near limitless power.
Also there, in the atrium, is a woman with a shock of red hair, her face paint running, a rapier of her own in her hand, oh yes, and wearing a pair of sunglasses, fighting Cytherea alongside a second woman, Camilla Hect of the Sixth, both quick and furious in battle and also losing. You are standing at the top of the stairs, having just appeared in the battle, and all you know is that Gideon Nav is in danger, and that simply will not do.
You react, and the skeletons scattered around the atrium stand at your command and begin to fight, clawing at Cytherea, gripping her face and her neck, slashing and clawing at her as surely as they were your own hands. The skeletons in the atrium are not enough, and soon joining them are white particles shooting from her wrists, your ears, your waist, your pockets - the bone you carry with you always flying forward, each becoming its own skeleton construct, growing on itself and growing, becoming large and monstrous to aid the fight. The skeleton constructs swarm Cytherea until she goes under them, trapped under a sea of bone and grasping claws.
"Nav," you bark at your cavalier, and then skeletal hands pull something from your back to bring to her - the heavy two handed sword on your back, that you'd brought with you for precisely this instance. The rapier makes a better show for a cavalier, but Gideon with the two-hander was unstoppable.
Cytherea explodes outwards from your mass of bone - you knew it would never hold a Lyctor for long. You wrap yourself in a cocoon of bone while in her hands, far more skilled than yours, it grows into a hulking construct, a fretwork of bone with long stingers of teeth. It grows large enough to slam into the stairs and walls, knocking them apart.
You regard it with anticipation and half delight, like solving a puzzle, like a beast stalking its prey. Your cavalier takes her place in front of you, two-hander at the ready.
"This is the thing that killed Isaac,” said Gideon urgently.
"Sextus?" you ask.
"Dead."
You feel the weight of that for a moment, but there's no time.
"A necromancer alone can’t bring that down, Griddle. That's regenerating bone."
"I'm not running, Harrow!" your cavalier insists.
"Of course we’re not running,” you say disdainfully. "I said a necromancer alone. I have you. We bring hell."
Gideon is behaving as though you've gone mad. "Harrow — Harrow, she's a Lyctor, a real one."
Your mouth twists into a smile. "Then we're all dead, Nav, but let's bring hell first."
Gideon looks back at you, regards you with a strange expression that you can't place for a moment, and then smiles back at you, fierce and brave, so hard it makes your chest pound.
"I'll keep it off you, Nav," you promise. "Show them what the Ninth House does."
Gideon lifted her sword, drawing on your defiance. "We do bones, motherfucker."
And Gideon is a marvel. With her great two-hander, she forced a path, step by step, to the center of the creature, cutting through bone limb and claw and tentacle, and with each strike of her blade you are ready to unravel and undo the dying limbs before they can regenerate. Long years of bitter fighting between the two of you, every childhood scrape and bloody brawl, meant that you knew exactly where the other would stand. meant that they each knew exactly where the other would stand . You had never fought together before, but you had always fought, and you could work in and around each other without a second’s thought. You shield Gideon from the shrapnel of bone while you knit back together a limb of your own and punch the construct through its gruesome core.
Eventually you pull it to part, learning new theorems on the fly, mastering the replication of bone and the destruction of the same to the extent none of your ancestors ever thought possible.
You mumble to yourself something even you can barely hear over the blood flowing freely from your mouth, nose, and ears, something like, “Do you behold me, Griddle?” and then you pass out.
When you come to, you’re in the remains of a battle that continued without you, and Cytherea is there, beautiful and terrible and unhurt. Gideon is fighting her, on the verge of exhaustion, as Cytherea, with that terrible smile of her, tells Gideon softly how brave and beautiful she is as she goes to kill her.
You stagger to your feet, eight foot tall skeleton constructs holding your weak, bloodied body aloft as you approach.
“Step off, bitch,” you say.
“I wish the Ninth House would do something that is more interesting than skeletons,” Cytherea says, pensively. She builds more of her replicating bone constructs, and you do the same. The difference, of course, is that Cytherea is a Lyctor. She can burn herself perpetually too, use her body and every ounce of her strength and knit herself back together. You’re meeting her, power for power, bone for bone, but every second that ticks is taking its toll on your body. You’re too weak to stand on your own, blood gushing from your sweat and pores and mouth, the blood vessels under your skin bursting and bleeding too, your own body cannibalizing itself for the thanergy it needs.
“You’re learning fast,” says Cytherea, delighted. “But I’m afraid you have a long way to go.” And she’s correct, because she’s still going, building a second construct identical to the one you made yourself half dead trying to take apart. “None of you learned how to die gracefully,” she coos. “I learned over ten thousand years ago.”
You won’t give in. You can’t meet her construct anymore, so instead you build a wall of bone, solid, six inches thick, and that done, you keel over into Gideon’s arms as the construct beats against the wall you’re holding up with the very little you have left.
“Harrow, come on,” Gideon begs. “Siphon, damn it. You can’t hold this shit forever, Harrow! You couldn’t hold this shit ten minutes ago!” You could - you could reach out and draw, instead of from your own body, from hers, draw her energy out of her and increase her power, but you won’t. Not after you’ve seen what can become of a necromancer siphoning too much. You watched the Eighth House cavalier die before your eyes, his emptied body filled with ravening ghouls, and you won’t do it to your own.
Calmly, you spit out a clot of blood the size of a fist. “I don’t have to hold it forever. Take the Sixth, get into a brace position, and I’ll break you through the wall. Bones float. It’s a long drop to the sea, but you all you have to do is survive the fall. We know that the ships have been called. Get off the planet as soon as you can. I’ll distract her as long as possible - all you have to do is live.”
“Harrow.” Gideon’s brow knits, desperate. “This plan is stupid and you’re stupid. No.”
You reach and grasp a fistful of Gideon’s shirt, vision going dark with pain and nausea. “Griddle, you made me a promise. You agreed to go back to the Ninth. You agreed to do your duty by the Locked Tomb - “
“Don’t do this to me,” she says.
“I owe you my life,” you interrupt, with feeling. “I owe you everything.”
You let go of her shirt and fall to the floor, choking and sniffling on the thick rivulets of blood coming from your nose. You hear the continued beating and the sound of cracks as the construct on the other side threatens to smash through your wall of bone. Gideon and Camilla are talking, but you can’t focus on their words, you can’t see, you can hardly hear. All you can do is focus on your wall, the barrier between you and your cavalier and certain death, concentrating on staying awake so that you do not fall asleep, so that you do not die.
And through all of that, you raise a hand, and you brush Gideon’s cheek. “Nav - have you really forgiven me?”
You can’t really see her, but you can hear her panic. “Of course I have, you bozo.”
“I don’t deserve it,” you whisper miserably.
“Maybe not. But that doesn’t stop me forgiving you. Harrow - “ she’s speaking in a brokenhearted rush. “You know I don’t give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you.” There’s another shuddering, crunching sound, as another tendril breaks through your shield. “I’m not good at this duty thing. I’m not your real cavalier primary. I never could have been.”
The sunlight begins to shine through the cracks in your wall and you laugh, hoarsely, feeling your death coming over you.
“Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House. You are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.”
There’s quiet for a moment, in between the awful crunch of bone, and then the arms around you are gone, leaving you cold, as you hear Gideon stand up and move away.
“Yeah, fuck it,” she says. “I’m getting us out of here.”
Digging through someone else's mind uninvited. A thief, cold to the core, searching for something that doesn't belong to him. There are things he doesn't want to know about others - if they haven't shared, if they don't want him to see, what right has he to know it.
Still, this is both a terrible and a kind memory. Someone that clearly loves Harrow, fights for her. (Dies for her?) The powers on display are truly beyond him, so much so that he can only barely process what's actually happening. His talent is blood, not bone, and this sort of power is of those who walk a very different road than he has.
he understands enough about sacrifice, however, to get the point.]
Did she-- Did she get you out?
[He hasn't been asking questions of the others. But he does have to know this answer, if she has it.]
[Harrow comes away from the memory with blood streaming from her nose, and out the sides of her ears. That's probably fine. She looks disoriented. She lifts her hand and touches her temple, where her throbbing headache likes. And then she sighs.]
[Uh! Bleeding? Let's not do that. Just immediately leaning over, trying to at least wipe blood off of her nose.]
Shit, are you alright?
[But, uh,]
No, not-- Well, I'm glad to hear that, looked a righteous beast and a half, but--
[He isn't too intelligent. But he knows the power of a name you don't want to hear. Can't hear, even. He isn't so dense as to have missed that entirely. He pauses because he knows this is a knife he's about to wield. He isn't sure he wants to.]
[She'll just wipe away the blood, yes. It's fine? It's fine. She still seems a little disconcerted, unsure at the question, but when he asks the question, her face falls a little, folding her fingers in her lap, pained and guilty.]
It is good of you to ask that. I'm afraid that I have been. . . dishonest about many aspects of my circumstances since coming here. At first as a matter of strategy, but over time I simply. . . did not wish to explain it, even though that is ignoble of me.
As I said once, to be cavalier primary is a duty of historical importance, but on the Ninth the reputation is rather in decline. Poor Ortus got the position because his father was cavalier primary before him, and he did beg me not to bring him to Canaan House, knowing he could not compete with the cavaliers of other houses and supposing he would meet his death there. Which, indeed, he did, in a manner that I fear ought to be a stain on my House. Say what you will of the man, and truly he had no love of me either, but he always did his duty.
You really don't have to explain anything to me. Like I'm the person who would get after you for a few lies here and there.
[He puts a hand on her shoulder, briefly, squeezing. the last thing he wants, is, well. to go digging through her head even more. she bleeds, when he does that. such a physical reminder that he's doing exactly to her what he doesn't want done to himself.]
What happened to him? You don't have to answer. [ . . . ] You really don't have to answer, I shouldn't have even asked.
Cytherea was a Lyctor. One of the Emperor's Fists and Gestures, his immortal servants. Powerful beyond measure. When the Emperor invited the heirs of the eight Houses, along with their cavaliers primary, to Canaan House, it was with the promise that we, too, would have the opportunity to achieve Lyctorhood. We would be tested, and we would learn the secret technique that permits a necromancer to become a Lyctor, and then those of us found worthy would ascend.
I wanted this, Mollymauk. If I could achieve such power and earn the Emperor's favor, it would help my House - [she stumbles a little here]. To some degree, in some way, it might have allowed me to balance the scales.
[She just wraps her arms around herself, a little miserable, a little ill, to think about it. Sorry, Alli, but I'm being super duper self indulgent, so he's hit with a barrage of two quick memories in a row.
First, you walk into the library at Canaan House, though you often avoid it. You had not bade Ortus not to speak to the other heirs, and you regretted it. Here was Ortus now, declaiming poetry for the Abigail Pent, the Fifth necromancer and her cavalier husband, Sir Magnus Quinn. There was no one in Canaan House whose company you wanted less than the matronly and overfamiliar Pent and the curly-haired moron that is Quinn, both of them friendly and inviting, and wearing clothes the cost of which could have provided the Ninth with material resources for a decade.
But you must stay and speak, because Pent is remarkably clever, and she has devised some scholarship on the Lyctoral process that she is bewilderingly willing to share with you, her competitor. So you talk to her of Lyctors and history, defensive and ready to bolt at any moment, while Ortus humiliates you and every one of your ancestors by declaiming versus of the Nonius to Quinn's baffling delight.
"I would like to give you something," says Abigail. She takes a note and passes it to Harrowhark with her strong lovely hands, and smiles as though it did not hurt her to give you something so valuable. "Scholarship is best made as a communal effort," she says. "If you can tell me anything of interest about that paper, I’d be very grateful for it. If you could tell me anything tedious, I’d still be thankful. Bone adepts do have such a notorious eye for detail."
You are stunned, a little caught off balance. You take the paper, feel it in your gloved hands. "I -- am obliged to you, Fifth House."
Magnus was saying: “Ortus. What does happen to Nonius, after he faces the ensorcelled swordsmen? I assume they fight?”
You are surprised at how immediately you can answer in your cavalier’s stead: "He cuts down seven men in about as many lines. Then the leader of the swordsmen approaches, carrying two swords. I would have assumed there was a swift rate of decay in the efficacy of additional swords. The others part to let Nonius and him fight. Nonius wins easily, though he takes eight pages to do so. The remaining onlookers he kills, rather more cursorily, as it only takes around four lines.”
Magnus stares at her for a moment, his expression strange. "Is this how it happens?"
Something about that unsettles you, because very much against your will, you have memorized most of the Noniad. Then, something happens that unsettles you even more.
"I say, Reverend Daughter, is it an ancestral Locked Tomb tradition for your spirit energy to be so diverse?” Abigail asks brightly. "I’ve counted up to almost two hundred signatures contributing to you, and there’s more. They’re stamps rather than complete revenants, of course, which means their spirits were manipulated to leave marks on you in some way, which is fascinating if it means . . ."
Your blood runs cold, as you calculate how you might kill Abigail Pent. Against any other ghost-caller, their wards so exquisite and fatally slow, a single decisive strike would do the job. But Pent introduced that doubt, and that doubt makes you flee, a tactical retreat. Your heart hammering, feeling clammy and nauseated, you turn on your heels and walk out the door, as you hear the fool Quinn murmuring in your wake "My dear, you didn't have to - "
You shake in the corridor outside the library, and Ortus follows after you, reluctant. "We now avoid Pent and Quinn at all costs. For the sake of the Ninth House, and of the sanctity of the Locked Tomb. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, my Lady Harrowhark," says Ortus.
"If I believe they pose a threat, or that they intend us direct harm — frankly, on any minor excuse — I will invoke Tomb retribution. I’ll kill Pent where she stands if I need to, and you will swear that there was no sin of unjustified House war, no matter the circumstances."
Only a pause. “Yes, my Lady Harrowhark,” says Ortus.
This calm agreement makes you all the more furious, and cruel. "And it ought to be Non-i-us as three syllables, or Non-yus as two," you add, feeling some satisfaction. "Not whichever you happen to feel like at the time. It’s amateurish."
Ortus looks down shyly, like a beast of burden steadying himself for a jump. "Yes, my Lady Harrowhark. I am flattered by your attention to my craft. It’s consciously archaic. Emphasising my commitment to spoken performance."
"For God’s sake, Ortus, please stop sounding as though I’m about to whip you. I am taking care of our affairs, despite your ignorance."
"Let me not be unpleasing to my lady," he says. "Let the unseeing eye of the Locked Tomb gaze down upon me, and see me guard her with the unmoving aegis of a cavalier’s love. But I will not modulate my tone for you."
You round on him, knowing you're being unfair, knowing you are being petulant because you were frightened, and you cannot soothe yourself, and would use any means to try to do so now. When you are scared you become a child again, and you are afraid of being a child again more than almost anything else in your life.
"I have every right to correct you. We are at the gates of the Tomb, even now," she says. "I carry it with me, and its rules hold clear."
"Let us never leave it," says Ortus. "My lady, I follow your every order. I will accept your chidings gratefully. I will watch you slay whomsoever you feel the need to slay, and I will sponge the blood from your brow, but when I lay me down to sleep, I am a fully grown man who is allowed to feel precisely what I want, about anything I want. There has never been a rule against doing so, and that has always been my deep and unyielding relief with regard to you. Your final will be done, my lady.”
Then he bows to you — the very correct bow of a Ninth House tomb swordsman; his paint a perfect, if sad and melting, skull, his attitude sombre, his face the blankness of the grave. Except, seemingly unable to resist, he adds - "I might also note that synizesis is characteristic of some of our finest examples of early Ninth prosody. I'm certain your studies have kept you from the full breadth of the classics."
You decide to ignore your cavalier's insolence, and instead you examine the note Pent gave you. It is, to your horror, covered in nonsensical ranting and ravings, letters crowded together, screeching in capital letters about betrayal and eggs. You make the sign you taught to Ortus, the discreet symbol that means What am I seeing, devised to hide your madness, and he takes the note from your hands.
"If you come to my study, I will make you the potato dish you liked," he reads. "How must we understand potato?"
"As your closest vegetable relative," you snarl, even though you also have never seen a potato.
"You are a ready wit," Ortus says, with something like admiration. "I have always admired your facility for repartee, my lady. Oftentimes someone will say something to me, and later I will think up the perfect riposte — so perfect the hearer could not help but wilt, and be ashamed that they had set themselves up to receive it — but by that point it is often hours after the fact and I am lying in my bed. And in any case, I hate conflict, all kinds."
"The Tomb have mercy," you swear. "If only duels took the form of competitive passive aggression, I'd probably be a Lyctor already. For the love of God, Ortus, I need a cavalier with backbone."
"You always did," says Ortus gravely. "And I am glad, I think, that I never became that cavalier."
You spend the next few hours with that thought in your head, wondering what the hell he meant by that.
Second - A study of some sort, beautiful and sparsely furnished. In the study, one girl - blonde, tall, stunningly beautiful, is lying on the ground, arms wrapped around herself and shaking, weeping in the dull way of a person who has been crying for hours and doesn't know how to stop, curled in on herself. The girl in the center of the room, lounging on a sagging cushion like a queen, obviously resembles her greatly, but like a wan and sickly poor copy of her bright and beautiful twin. Her pale golden robe and pallid yellow hair are splattered in blood, and she's trembling, but she's smiling. Next to her, on the ground, is a corpse of a handsome young man.
"Hello, friends," says Ianthe, to the sorry group of necromancers and cavaliers assembled there, yourself and your cavalier among them. All of you froze; only Palamedes Sextus had the presence of mind to check the body and shut his too white eyes.
Naberius Tern, the Cavalier of the Third House, lay sprawled on the ground, looking like something of a tool in death as in life, with the expression of a man who had received the shock of his life. His lips were parted, as though he were about to crossly demand an explanation any minute now. There were blood splatters down his front, his shirt ripped, and a sword through his chest coming out his back.
"Yes," said Ianthe. "My cavalier is dead, and I killed him. Please don't misunderstand - this isn't a confession."
The Eighth House cavalier draws on her, and is easily batted away, while the rest of you only stand there, stunned. She seems to be groaning in pain, shaking and ill, like she has a case of violent food poisoning.
"I admit it, this smarts,” she said, broodingly. "I had my speech all planned out — I was going to brag somewhat, you understand. Because I didn't need any of your keys, and I didn't need any of your secrets. I was always better than all of you — and none of you noticed — nobody ever notices, which is both my virtue and my downfall. How I hate being so good at my job." Her violet eyes swivel, focusing on you. "You noticed, didn't you, you horrible little Ninth goblin? Just a bit?"
"Step one," Ianthe says, singsong. "Preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact. Step two - analyze it, preserve its structure. Step three - remove and absorb it, take it into yourself without consuming it in the process."
"Oh, fuck," you say. The megatheorem.
"Step four, fix it in place so it can't deteriorate. Step five, incorporate it: find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed. Step six: consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you. Step seven is reconstruction — making spirit and flesh work together the way they used to, in the new body. And then for the last step you hook up the cables and get the power flowing."
These are the instructions for how to consume a soul and, rather than devour it, use it like a battery to power oneself forever. Ianthe is right, she solved it. This is what Lyctorhood means.
"Like I said," said Ianthe haughtily, "I am very, very good, and moreover I've got common sense. If you face the challenge rooms, you don't need the study notes — not if you're the best necromancer the Third House ever produced. Aren't I, Corona? Baby, stop crying, you're going to get such a headache."
"I came to the same conclusion you did," said Palamedes, but his voice was cold and inflexible. "I discarded it as ghastly. Ghastly, and obvious."
"Ghastly and obvious are my middle names,” said Ianthe. "Sextus, you sweet Sixth prude. Use that big, muscular brain of yours. I'm not talking about the deep calculus. Ten thousand years ago there were sixteen acolytes of the King Undying, and then there were eight. Who were the cavaliers to the Lyctor faithful? Where did they go? I haven't killed Naberius Tern. I ate Naberius Tern," she said, indifferently. "I put a sword through his heart to pin his soul in place. Then I took it into my body. I've robbed Death itself. I have drunk up the substance of his immortal soul. And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him, and he will never really die. I have absorbed Naberius Tern. I am more than the sum of his half, and mine."
First of all, he feels a bit badly for laughing so much at the bone frenzy man now, who seems to simply be in a rotten situation. Still. Fucking strange, isn't it? he'd seen the other woman, a cavalier - harrow had called her that in the memory clear as day - and. There's enough to put together some terrifying pieces there. He'll have to consider it later along with whether it is actually proper to use both a two-syllable and three-syllable version of the name nonius because
And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him, and he will never really die.
Yes. 'Bit fucked' is one way to describe killing one's cavalier and consuming their soul, burning the tattered remains of it for all eternity in order to achieve immortality and the unfathomable power of Lyctorhood.
[It's definitely a today I fucked up kind of moment.]
But you asked me what became of Ortus Nigenad, and that is the answer. He did his duty and allowed me to consume him, and I burned enough of him to advance Cytherea's cancer until she died, and that is how I came to be a Lyctor.
[Her words here are very clipped - matter-of-fact, but the self-loathing there is still evident.]
The final insult to injury is that it seems I did the deed poorly. Ianthe fucked it up rather badly with Babs, actually. Don't give too much credence to her boasting, she's always dreadful at detail work. But she didn't make as big a mess of it as I. I took his life and his soul, and I used it to survive Canaan House, and then never again was I able to reach him. I'm only a failed half Lyctor, and I've wasted even his dying sacrifice like air.
He just listens, carefully, but he does reach over to hold one of her hands tightly - if she'll allow it. It's a sickening, dark feeling to dig through the mind of someone else. Knowing things that it seems harrow doesn't. It feels equally vile to somehow feel almost a little grateful for that. he hates it. that the truth here is something-- it always comes due, doesn't it?
he doesn't even know how to begin to explain this to harrow. a hand weighs on the scales of her life.]
I don't care what you've done. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me one fucking bit, you're still--
[ The memory is clear and bright, in the way that most terrifying experiences are, when you think them over.
You’ve just descended the stairs to the speakeasy of this Gentleman you’ve heard so much about, when a tabaxi turns to your group. She starts:
“Halt friends, I do not r— Lucien?” Her eyes widen in shock, but you still don’t know who she is, you’re racking your memory, but the name
The name makes you feel ill, all of a sudden, an itch at the back of your skull. There’s no time to consider it.
“It has been too long, two ye–”
“Far too long!”
“Two years!” She laughs, bright, hands still gripping your shoulders on either side, tightly, like an old, old friend. “Look at you! You grew out your hair! And you are covered in tattoos!”
There’s something in her expression that seems confused about this, as her eyes flit to your hands, your neck.
“We’ll catch up, we need a table, we need drinks for me and my compatriots.”
“Of course, you– these are your friends now?” She looks over your group, appraising, but then goes to do as you’ve asked. Drinks and a table.
You now get a better look up at the top, some skulking individuals with long dark cloaks and dark armor, carrying what looks almost like a heavy crossbow, but it’s a long, metal rod. You’ve only seen them in use here and there. A recently emerging technology that has been largely guarded within use of the empire itself.
The second she turns, you give Fjord - a green, half-orcish man, a little pat on the back and hiss a whisper at him. 
“I’m sorry, this is my nightmare, please just go with it? It’s Lucien.”
He simply looks a bit baffled in return. The tabaxi returns to the table, reaching her hands out for yours.
“Oh, too long.” She starts quickly, sitting up straighter, then her face suddenly turns apologetic. You see all the faces of your friends, twisted in confusion. They aren’t even trying to hide it.
“Nonagon. I apologize for using your old name. Nonagon, it is a pleasure to see you again.”
“Who can keep track these days? Again, a long story.” You manage to croak out. She doesn’t seem to notice. She just looks concerned.
“Nonagon, what happened? We watched you die.”
She looks expectant. As do the rest of them at the table. Jester, Fjord, Nott, Caleb, Beau. All of their eyes are trained on you. They all await your answer.
“I’m sorry, it— I think it all went a bit fuzzy at the end there. Won’t you remind me?”
The tabaxi looks almost stricken, but she recovers. Casting a glance at the others at the table, and then,
“I don’t trust these people, Luci— Nonagon, but—
If you trust them, then I trust you. You gave us a speech. We had a fine meal. We all got ready there in the forest. . . She said it would be hard for us to tell whether or not it worked at first, but we went and checked, and you were not breathing. For a good hour, you were not breathing and you had gone cold. We knew then that-- that we had lost you. We checked, and I'm very attuned to vitals, as you know. There was no heartbeat. So we waited longer. The sun rose, and nothing. So, as you told us, if anything were to go wrong, we had to get rid of any sign, any trace. So not far from the Tomb Taker hideout, we buried you and we went our separate ways. She took the tome, the mage woman, it was part of the arrangement you had with her. Her contract said she was in the right and that we knew better than to go toe to toe with her and her ilk.”
They all turn to watch your reaction. Eyes on eyes on eyes on eyes.
“So before you woke up in the dirt . . . nothing?”
You can feel the magic, pulling you. Whatever you say, it will be the truth. You’ve no choice about that for the moment. Jester doesn’t seem to be sorry at all.
“There is no before. Whatever happened before is not me. Some asshole got buried in the dirt. Fuck him. I am enjoying what I’m doing; I want nothing to do with that. Anything that came before, I was happy to just leave it be.”
“Do you really not want to know your past?” Nott is hesitant, hands in front of her, nervous.
“I really don’t. Whoever that was came to that end, and I want nothing to do with that. Whatever it was, it doesn’t feel good when I– the moment when something creeps through, I don’t like it. I don’t want anything to do with it. I was happy! I liked the circus! The circus was great!”
She tries again: “I’m sorry to belabor this, but what if you had a good life before this? What if you were famous or rich or had friends or family?”
At this, Yasha tries to intervene, how you love her, ”I think he’s quite an amazing person–“ but you interrupt anyway.
“Okay, here’s the thing that you’re not catching. That wasn’t me. This is mine. I don’t want anything from that other person anymore. That
 person is someone else. It was– I’m in for a penny, might as well. I’m told, although I don’t entirely remember this part, that I only said the word empty over and over again for the first week.”
“Empty. That sounds terrible. I don’t want to remember anything. I don’t want to anybody else’s baggage in my head and I don’t want anybody else’s problems, thoughts, ideas. I like this person, right now is a good person. Is a fine person. Is a happy person. It’s very freeing. It’s the best thing– it’s the thing that happened to me. It’s not the best thing that happened to me, it’s the thing that happened to me. I found peace in building a new person.
What if the past feels that I owe it something?”
Beau pipes in, loud and brash as always. “You don’t owe your past shit. If I don’t feel anything about my past, but I still remember it and I still don’t give a fuck about where I came from then, why should you care about shit that you don’t even remember?”
You scowl right back at her.
“I spent two years before I met you all cajoling people, occasionally ripping them off, occasionally doing a good turn here or there. Never trust the truth. The truth is vicious. The truth thinks you owe it something. None of that. I like my bullshit. It’s good. It’s happy. It makes other people happy."
Nott, again: “But it’s not who you are . . . ?”
“It is exactly who I am. I may be a liar but I’m never a betrayer. I’m honest in my work, and I believe in doing a good turn. I’ve never cheated you out of money. I’ve never robbed from you. I stayed with that circus for two years, I know how people treat each other. It’s important. I don’t care where you’ve been. I don’t care what terrible things any of you have done. You’re here now. This is how it works.
I do my best every town I went to and every town I left, no matter how they treated me– and a lot of them treated me with deep disrespect. I left every town better than I found it.”
You can feel Beau’s glare from across the room. You don’t care. You don’t care at all what she thinks of you.
“Let me make this abundantly clear. My name is Molly. That person is dead and not me. It’s just a person who had this body. They abandoned it.
[Oh. Oh. Well, a lot of pieces fall into place here - his discomfort over talking about the past, the hints on his profile, the questions about the name Nonagon and what it means.
And it is absolutely fascinating to her, as she puts them together like a riddle. Clearly this Lucien - this Nonagon - went into the grave to accomplish something, something she would very much like to hear of, and the process went. . . did it go wrong? Or did it work as intended? Something woke up there in the dirt, something with eyes on his body and blood that does magic on its own, but a void without memories.
She's watched a man become siphoned so thoroughly nothing remained in his body, and in that shell came hungry opportunists, taking control. But - though she knows little of spirits in Molly's world, she doubts that's the answer. Molly is too human (well, tiefling), too harmless, for the revenants she's aware of. It's more likely that without the memories of the how and the who and the why he simply went about his business. Without history, what remains of a person? Only the soul. She wonders what would happen if he were to remember again. The urge to press for every detail, to untangle every piece, to try to puzzle it out is so strong. She has a feeling that she could learn something new from this Lucien, something important. Harrowhark has always been hungry for forbidden knowledge, eager to get her hands on all the books she ought not to read, all the theorems thought too dangerous for a mere child. So hungry that when she ran out of new books to read and new things to learn, she turned to the one thing she had been told all her life she could not have, the thing that would bring about the end of the world. As a willful ten year old, she opened the door and rolled away the rock and gazed upon the Body and she never once regretted it, not even for what it cost her. That Harrowhark would pick this to pieces, too, no matter what it cost her, if she could learn even one new thing. The insistence of Lucien's body's current occupant to know nothing, to refuse to understand, to be satisfied with nothing but mindless, thoughtless bullshit, would disgust her, and Harrowhark is not a particularly nice girl to those she doesn't respect.
Or maybe that's just the natural result when you know your existence is a crime and the only value you have to give in penitence is what you can come to learn and come to achieve. When your own parents cannot look upon you as anything besides either a genius or an unspeakable horror. When you have never once been loved, never appreciated for any other charms besides your genius, never once been held while you cried.
This version of Harrow, sitting here now, has experienced these things. So maybe there's something to be said for letting a past self rot in its grave.
She just doesn't say. . . anything, for a long moment, too afraid of saying something wrong or ugly, waiting to see what he says.]
[That is the thing, isn't it? Molly doesn't know him, not exactly, except for the parts that sometimes manage to push their way through, unspoken thoughts and too-familiar names, powers that don't make sense, awakening in a body covered in eyes
but lucien is the type of person to pull at the threads until something falls apart, it seems. the bits of the conversation that cree (the tabaxi, cree, caleb had so cleverly managed to get her name) had shared mentioned they had left some order, tired of their shackles and tried a new path. one paved with blood, down a road that follows no known order of this material plane. he and harrow would get along, two of the same type of mind. for a time. there's only so long one can remain in stride with a person like that until the urge to dig into even your allies grows too strong, doesn't it?
mollymauk, as loud and demanding of space in a room as he is, is only a piece of something. incomplete, maybe. a broken lyctor, and half a ghost. he doesn't say anything either for a moment, before he just leans back, sighing out.
it doesn't seem to hurt so bad to let harrow see it, for some reason.]
. . . What was it you said? There. The whole ugly tale.
[Has Molly considered the irony here? Harrow - can't. Clearly what she said was the whole tale wasn't, can't be, because there is so much she can't remember.]
I suppose it would be better, wouldn't it, to live with no regrets? [What if she was a Harrowhark who didn't know that she was two hundred and one ghosts.]
[He does. He does get it. He would rather not. He digs in his coat pocket for a moment, like he's looking for something - or checking that it's there. And then sits with his hands on his lap.]
Can't say I didn't die without a few.
[ . . . ]
. . . Beau said Lucien had come back to haunt them. I didn't ask more. I didn't want to.
[Pretending, for just a while more. Still, he sees no need to lie to Harrow. A strange feeling.]
Is this why you asked about - bodies, and souls? Knowing what I know, I can provide answers, or at least suppositions. But I would also - rather respect your feelings on the matter.
[Hmm.]
At the least, I understand this much. I am a different person than I was the day I woke, missing so many pieces and so much time. In my case - I truly do not know if I am a better or a worse person, but I am not the same.
And yet, were I to learn more of the old Harrowhark tomorrow, I also doubt I would simply revert to who I was before. It isn't as though I would forget each and every moment that passed in the interim, or that those moments would cease to comprise my personhood.
[He looks a bit torn on the follow up, though. He isn't sure if he wants to know? Every fact he seems to learn, or consider - just another truth with its hand out, expecting its payment.]
But that's still you. It isn't as if-- He isn't me. And everything I do know about him, the things that this body knows, are never, ever good. It knew how to bleed things, it knew the names of terrible gods, it made people call it fucking Nonagon. What kind of bullshit name is that? A title? Pretentious bastard. Did you see the way that Tabaxi looked at me-- Fucking. Fucking reverence. I don't want that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
week 2; monday
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Everything alright?
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Is that yours?
[In response to his question - ]
I received an odd "prize." A letter addressed to my former cavalier. [It says To be given to Gideon Nav on it, but he can't read. He could try sounding it out, I guess?]
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[he looks over at the cat, who is bunting its head against harrow's arm briefly before it curls up on the bench to nap. He will lean over and look at it, slightly nosey--
he is not so good at reading that he doesn't need to sort of mutter the sounds out to himself]
To be gee-- oh, given . . .
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[But. Squints? Look he's bad at reading, but Ortus doesn't exactly . . .
Reaching over to pull harrow's wrist up so he can see the envelope again, squinting further.]
Gee. Dee. Ah, um, Gideon? [note this is probably said like. gee-dee-on. not gideon.]
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Ortus, yes. Your reading is improving very quickly.
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[He feels the bone frenzy rising right now!!! What????? Squinting at the envelope more?]
Is that really pronounced that way? What language is this? Abyssal?
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[Here's your memshare, guy.
The sight you see, when you open your eyes, is a grand atrium, made of old marble and cracked glass, and in the center, a dried up fountain that was once beautiful. Scattered all around the floor are skeletons, lifeless, like they'd just fallen where they stood, some beginning to turn to ash. And also, in the atrium, is something that in this memory you are able to sense - thanergy, the energy of death, flowing and reeking everywhere. The walls to the atrium have blown open, steaming and smoking and standing in their wake is a woman. She is thin, with pale skin, and sickly veins that show too brightly across her body. The woman is clearly injured, blood dripping from her mouth, her hair sizzled to nothing, her body covered in gaping open wounds showing her meat and blood and rot within, monstrous, enough to kill anyone, but as she stands there, naked but for a bloody white sheet, radioactive blue eyes glowing with malice, the wounds begin to knit themselves back together, the rot recedes. She's holding a silver rapier in one hand. She is a Lyctor, one of the Emperor's fists and gestures, an immortal being of near limitless power.
Also there, in the atrium, is a woman with a shock of red hair, her face paint running, a rapier of her own in her hand, oh yes, and wearing a pair of sunglasses, fighting Cytherea alongside a second woman, Camilla Hect of the Sixth, both quick and furious in battle and also losing. You are standing at the top of the stairs, having just appeared in the battle, and all you know is that Gideon Nav is in danger, and that simply will not do.
You react, and the skeletons scattered around the atrium stand at your command and begin to fight, clawing at Cytherea, gripping her face and her neck, slashing and clawing at her as surely as they were your own hands. The skeletons in the atrium are not enough, and soon joining them are white particles shooting from her wrists, your ears, your waist, your pockets - the bone you carry with you always flying forward, each becoming its own skeleton construct, growing on itself and growing, becoming large and monstrous to aid the fight. The skeleton constructs swarm Cytherea until she goes under them, trapped under a sea of bone and grasping claws.
"Nav," you bark at your cavalier, and then skeletal hands pull something from your back to bring to her - the heavy two handed sword on your back, that you'd brought with you for precisely this instance. The rapier makes a better show for a cavalier, but Gideon with the two-hander was unstoppable.
Cytherea explodes outwards from your mass of bone - you knew it would never hold a Lyctor for long. You wrap yourself in a cocoon of bone while in her hands, far more skilled than yours, it grows into a hulking construct, a fretwork of bone with long stingers of teeth. It grows large enough to slam into the stairs and walls, knocking them apart.
You regard it with anticipation and half delight, like solving a puzzle, like a beast stalking its prey. Your cavalier takes her place in front of you, two-hander at the ready.
"This is the thing that killed Isaac,” said Gideon urgently.
"Sextus?" you ask.
"Dead."
You feel the weight of that for a moment, but there's no time.
"A necromancer alone can’t bring that down, Griddle. That's regenerating bone."
"I'm not running, Harrow!" your cavalier insists.
"Of course we’re not running,” you say disdainfully. "I said a necromancer alone. I have you. We bring hell."
Gideon is behaving as though you've gone mad. "Harrow — Harrow, she's a Lyctor, a real one."
Your mouth twists into a smile. "Then we're all dead, Nav, but let's bring hell first."
Gideon looks back at you, regards you with a strange expression that you can't place for a moment, and then smiles back at you, fierce and brave, so hard it makes your chest pound.
"I'll keep it off you, Nav," you promise. "Show them what the Ninth House does."
Gideon lifted her sword, drawing on your defiance. "We do bones, motherfucker."
And Gideon is a marvel. With her great two-hander, she forced a path, step by step, to the center of the creature, cutting through bone limb and claw and tentacle, and with each strike of her blade you are ready to unravel and undo the dying limbs before they can regenerate. Long years of bitter fighting between the two of you, every childhood scrape and bloody brawl, meant that you knew exactly where the other would stand. meant that they each knew exactly where the other would stand . You had never fought together before, but you had always fought, and you could work in and around each other without a second’s thought. You shield Gideon from the shrapnel of bone while you knit back together a limb of your own and punch the construct through its gruesome core.
Eventually you pull it to part, learning new theorems on the fly, mastering the replication of bone and the destruction of the same to the extent none of your ancestors ever thought possible.
You mumble to yourself something even you can barely hear over the blood flowing freely from your mouth, nose, and ears, something like, “Do you behold me, Griddle?” and then you pass out.
When you come to, you’re in the remains of a battle that continued without you, and Cytherea is there, beautiful and terrible and unhurt. Gideon is fighting her, on the verge of exhaustion, as Cytherea, with that terrible smile of her, tells Gideon softly how brave and beautiful she is as she goes to kill her.
You stagger to your feet, eight foot tall skeleton constructs holding your weak, bloodied body aloft as you approach.
“Step off, bitch,” you say.
“I wish the Ninth House would do something that is more interesting than skeletons,” Cytherea says, pensively. She builds more of her replicating bone constructs, and you do the same. The difference, of course, is that Cytherea is a Lyctor. She can burn herself perpetually too, use her body and every ounce of her strength and knit herself back together. You’re meeting her, power for power, bone for bone, but every second that ticks is taking its toll on your body. You’re too weak to stand on your own, blood gushing from your sweat and pores and mouth, the blood vessels under your skin bursting and bleeding too, your own body cannibalizing itself for the thanergy it needs.
“You’re learning fast,” says Cytherea, delighted. “But I’m afraid you have a long way to go.” And she’s correct, because she’s still going, building a second construct identical to the one you made yourself half dead trying to take apart. “None of you learned how to die gracefully,” she coos. “I learned over ten thousand years ago.”
You won’t give in. You can’t meet her construct anymore, so instead you build a wall of bone, solid, six inches thick, and that done, you keel over into Gideon’s arms as the construct beats against the wall you’re holding up with the very little you have left.
“Harrow, come on,” Gideon begs. “Siphon, damn it. You can’t hold this shit forever, Harrow! You couldn’t hold this shit ten minutes ago!” You could - you could reach out and draw, instead of from your own body, from hers, draw her energy out of her and increase her power, but you won’t. Not after you’ve seen what can become of a necromancer siphoning too much. You watched the Eighth House cavalier die before your eyes, his emptied body filled with ravening ghouls, and you won’t do it to your own.
Calmly, you spit out a clot of blood the size of a fist. “I don’t have to hold it forever. Take the Sixth, get into a brace position, and I’ll break you through the wall. Bones float. It’s a long drop to the sea, but you all you have to do is survive the fall. We know that the ships have been called. Get off the planet as soon as you can. I’ll distract her as long as possible - all you have to do is live.”
“Harrow.” Gideon’s brow knits, desperate. “This plan is stupid and you’re stupid. No.”
You reach and grasp a fistful of Gideon’s shirt, vision going dark with pain and nausea. “Griddle, you made me a promise. You agreed to go back to the Ninth. You agreed to do your duty by the Locked Tomb - “
“Don’t do this to me,” she says.
“I owe you my life,” you interrupt, with feeling. “I owe you everything.”
You let go of her shirt and fall to the floor, choking and sniffling on the thick rivulets of blood coming from your nose. You hear the continued beating and the sound of cracks as the construct on the other side threatens to smash through your wall of bone. Gideon and Camilla are talking, but you can’t focus on their words, you can’t see, you can hardly hear. All you can do is focus on your wall, the barrier between you and your cavalier and certain death, concentrating on staying awake so that you do not fall asleep, so that you do not die.
And through all of that, you raise a hand, and you brush Gideon’s cheek. “Nav - have you really forgiven me?”
You can’t really see her, but you can hear her panic. “Of course I have, you bozo.”
“I don’t deserve it,” you whisper miserably.
“Maybe not. But that doesn’t stop me forgiving you. Harrow - “ she’s speaking in a brokenhearted rush. “You know I don’t give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you.” There’s another shuddering, crunching sound, as another tendril breaks through your shield. “I’m not good at this duty thing. I’m not your real cavalier primary. I never could have been.”
The sunlight begins to shine through the cracks in your wall and you laugh, hoarsely, feeling your death coming over you.
“Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House. You are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.”
There’s quiet for a moment, in between the awful crunch of bone, and then the arms around you are gone, leaving you cold, as you hear Gideon stand up and move away.
“Yeah, fuck it,” she says. “I’m getting us out of here.”
The memory ends.]
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Digging through someone else's mind uninvited. A thief, cold to the core, searching for something that doesn't belong to him. There are things he doesn't want to know about others - if they haven't shared, if they don't want him to see, what right has he to know it.
Still, this is both a terrible and a kind memory. Someone that clearly loves Harrow, fights for her. (Dies for her?) The powers on display are truly beyond him, so much so that he can only barely process what's actually happening. His talent is blood, not bone, and this sort of power is of those who walk a very different road than he has.
he understands enough about sacrifice, however, to get the point.]
Did she-- Did she get you out?
[He hasn't been asking questions of the others. But he does have to know this answer, if she has it.]
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Cytherea? She's dead now, never fear.
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Shit, are you alright?
[But, uh,]
No, not-- Well, I'm glad to hear that, looked a righteous beast and a half, but--
[He isn't too intelligent. But he knows the power of a name you don't want to hear. Can't hear, even. He isn't so dense as to have missed that entirely. He pauses because he knows this is a knife he's about to wield. He isn't sure he wants to.]
Gideon?
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It is good of you to ask that. I'm afraid that I have been. . . dishonest about many aspects of my circumstances since coming here. At first as a matter of strategy, but over time I simply. . . did not wish to explain it, even though that is ignoble of me.
As I said once, to be cavalier primary is a duty of historical importance, but on the Ninth the reputation is rather in decline. Poor Ortus got the position because his father was cavalier primary before him, and he did beg me not to bring him to Canaan House, knowing he could not compete with the cavaliers of other houses and supposing he would meet his death there. Which, indeed, he did, in a manner that I fear ought to be a stain on my House. Say what you will of the man, and truly he had no love of me either, but he always did his duty.
I ought not to have asked it of him.
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[He puts a hand on her shoulder, briefly, squeezing. the last thing he wants, is, well. to go digging through her head even more. she bleeds, when he does that. such a physical reminder that he's doing exactly to her what he doesn't want done to himself.]
What happened to him? You don't have to answer. [ . . . ] You really don't have to answer, I shouldn't have even asked.
THIS IS SUCH AN OBNOXIOUS COMMENT SORRY
Cytherea was a Lyctor. One of the Emperor's Fists and Gestures, his immortal servants. Powerful beyond measure. When the Emperor invited the heirs of the eight Houses, along with their cavaliers primary, to Canaan House, it was with the promise that we, too, would have the opportunity to achieve Lyctorhood. We would be tested, and we would learn the secret technique that permits a necromancer to become a Lyctor, and then those of us found worthy would ascend.
I wanted this, Mollymauk. If I could achieve such power and earn the Emperor's favor, it would help my House - [she stumbles a little here]. To some degree, in some way, it might have allowed me to balance the scales.
[She just wraps her arms around herself, a little miserable, a little ill, to think about it. Sorry, Alli, but I'm being super duper self indulgent, so he's hit with a barrage of two quick memories in a row.
First, you walk into the library at Canaan House, though you often avoid it. You had not bade Ortus not to speak to the other heirs, and you regretted it. Here was Ortus now, declaiming poetry for the Abigail Pent, the Fifth necromancer and her cavalier husband, Sir Magnus Quinn. There was no one in Canaan House whose company you wanted less than the matronly and overfamiliar Pent and the curly-haired moron that is Quinn, both of them friendly and inviting, and wearing clothes the cost of which could have provided the Ninth with material resources for a decade.
But you must stay and speak, because Pent is remarkably clever, and she has devised some scholarship on the Lyctoral process that she is bewilderingly willing to share with you, her competitor. So you talk to her of Lyctors and history, defensive and ready to bolt at any moment, while Ortus humiliates you and every one of your ancestors by declaiming versus of the Nonius to Quinn's baffling delight.
"I would like to give you something," says Abigail. She takes a note and passes it to Harrowhark with her strong lovely hands, and smiles as though it did not hurt her to give you something so valuable. "Scholarship is best made as a communal effort," she says. "If you can tell me anything of interest about that paper, I’d be very grateful for it. If you could tell me anything tedious, I’d still be thankful. Bone adepts do have such a notorious eye for detail."
You are stunned, a little caught off balance. You take the paper, feel it in your gloved hands. "I -- am obliged to you, Fifth House."
Magnus was saying: “Ortus. What does happen to Nonius, after he faces the ensorcelled swordsmen? I assume they fight?”
You are surprised at how immediately you can answer in your cavalier’s stead: "He cuts down seven men in about as many lines. Then the leader of the swordsmen approaches, carrying two swords. I would have assumed there was a swift rate of decay in the efficacy of additional swords. The others part to let Nonius and him fight. Nonius wins easily, though he takes eight pages to do so. The remaining onlookers he kills, rather more cursorily, as it only takes around four lines.”
Magnus stares at her for a moment, his expression strange. "Is this how it happens?"
Something about that unsettles you, because very much against your will, you have memorized most of the Noniad. Then, something happens that unsettles you even more.
"I say, Reverend Daughter, is it an ancestral Locked Tomb tradition for your spirit energy to be so diverse?” Abigail asks brightly. "I’ve counted up to almost two hundred signatures contributing to you, and there’s more. They’re stamps rather than complete revenants, of course, which means their spirits were manipulated to leave marks on you in some way, which is fascinating if it means . . ."
Your blood runs cold, as you calculate how you might kill Abigail Pent. Against any other ghost-caller, their wards so exquisite and fatally slow, a single decisive strike would do the job. But Pent introduced that doubt, and that doubt makes you flee, a tactical retreat. Your heart hammering, feeling clammy and nauseated, you turn on your heels and walk out the door, as you hear the fool Quinn murmuring in your wake "My dear, you didn't have to - "
You shake in the corridor outside the library, and Ortus follows after you, reluctant. "We now avoid Pent and Quinn at all costs. For the sake of the Ninth House, and of the sanctity of the Locked Tomb. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, my Lady Harrowhark," says Ortus.
"If I believe they pose a threat, or that they intend us direct harm — frankly, on any minor excuse — I will invoke Tomb retribution. I’ll kill Pent where she stands if I need to, and you will swear that there was no sin of unjustified House war, no matter the circumstances."
Only a pause. “Yes, my Lady Harrowhark,” says Ortus.
This calm agreement makes you all the more furious, and cruel. "And it ought to be Non-i-us as three syllables, or Non-yus as two," you add, feeling some satisfaction. "Not whichever you happen to feel like at the time. It’s amateurish."
Ortus looks down shyly, like a beast of burden steadying himself for a jump. "Yes, my Lady Harrowhark. I am flattered by your attention to my craft. It’s consciously archaic. Emphasising my commitment to spoken performance."
"For God’s sake, Ortus, please stop sounding as though I’m about to whip you. I am taking care of our affairs, despite your ignorance."
"Let me not be unpleasing to my lady," he says. "Let the unseeing eye of the Locked Tomb gaze down upon me, and see me guard her with the unmoving aegis of a cavalier’s love. But I will not modulate my tone for you."
You round on him, knowing you're being unfair, knowing you are being petulant because you were frightened, and you cannot soothe yourself, and would use any means to try to do so now. When you are scared you become a child again, and you are afraid of being a child again more than almost anything else in your life.
"I have every right to correct you. We are at the gates of the Tomb, even now," she says. "I carry it with me, and its rules hold clear."
"Let us never leave it," says Ortus. "My lady, I follow your every order. I will accept your chidings gratefully. I will watch you slay whomsoever you feel the need to slay, and I will sponge the blood from your brow, but when I lay me down to sleep, I am a fully grown man who is allowed to feel precisely what I want, about anything I want. There has never been a rule against doing so, and that has always been my deep and unyielding relief with regard to you. Your final will be done, my lady.”
Then he bows to you — the very correct bow of a Ninth House tomb swordsman; his paint a perfect, if sad and melting, skull, his attitude sombre, his face the blankness of the grave. Except, seemingly unable to resist, he adds - "I might also note that synizesis is characteristic of some of our finest examples of early Ninth prosody. I'm certain your studies have kept you from the full breadth of the classics."
You decide to ignore your cavalier's insolence, and instead you examine the note Pent gave you. It is, to your horror, covered in nonsensical ranting and ravings, letters crowded together, screeching in capital letters about betrayal and eggs. You make the sign you taught to Ortus, the discreet symbol that means What am I seeing, devised to hide your madness, and he takes the note from your hands.
"If you come to my study, I will make you the potato dish you liked," he reads. "How must we understand potato?"
"As your closest vegetable relative," you snarl, even though you also have never seen a potato.
"You are a ready wit," Ortus says, with something like admiration. "I have always admired your facility for repartee, my lady. Oftentimes someone will say something to me, and later I will think up the perfect riposte — so perfect the hearer could not help but wilt, and be ashamed that they had set themselves up to receive it — but by that point it is often hours after the fact and I am lying in my bed. And in any case, I hate conflict, all kinds."
"The Tomb have mercy," you swear. "If only duels took the form of competitive passive aggression, I'd probably be a Lyctor already. For the love of God, Ortus, I need a cavalier with backbone."
"You always did," says Ortus gravely. "And I am glad, I think, that I never became that cavalier."
You spend the next few hours with that thought in your head, wondering what the hell he meant by that.
Second - A study of some sort, beautiful and sparsely furnished. In the study, one girl - blonde, tall, stunningly beautiful, is lying on the ground, arms wrapped around herself and shaking, weeping in the dull way of a person who has been crying for hours and doesn't know how to stop, curled in on herself. The girl in the center of the room, lounging on a sagging cushion like a queen, obviously resembles her greatly, but like a wan and sickly poor copy of her bright and beautiful twin. Her pale golden robe and pallid yellow hair are splattered in blood, and she's trembling, but she's smiling. Next to her, on the ground, is a corpse of a handsome young man.
"Hello, friends," says Ianthe, to the sorry group of necromancers and cavaliers assembled there, yourself and your cavalier among them. All of you froze; only Palamedes Sextus had the presence of mind to check the body and shut his too white eyes.
Naberius Tern, the Cavalier of the Third House, lay sprawled on the ground, looking like something of a tool in death as in life, with the expression of a man who had received the shock of his life. His lips were parted, as though he were about to crossly demand an explanation any minute now. There were blood splatters down his front, his shirt ripped, and a sword through his chest coming out his back.
"Yes," said Ianthe. "My cavalier is dead, and I killed him. Please don't misunderstand - this isn't a confession."
The Eighth House cavalier draws on her, and is easily batted away, while the rest of you only stand there, stunned. She seems to be groaning in pain, shaking and ill, like she has a case of violent food poisoning.
"I admit it, this smarts,” she said, broodingly. "I had my speech all planned out — I was going to brag somewhat, you understand. Because I didn't need any of your keys, and I didn't need any of your secrets. I was always better than all of you — and none of you noticed — nobody ever notices, which is both my virtue and my downfall. How I hate being so good at my job." Her violet eyes swivel, focusing on you. "You noticed, didn't you, you horrible little Ninth goblin? Just a bit?"
"Step one," Ianthe says, singsong. "Preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact. Step two - analyze it, preserve its structure. Step three - remove and absorb it, take it into yourself without consuming it in the process."
"Oh, fuck," you say. The megatheorem.
"Step four, fix it in place so it can't deteriorate. Step five, incorporate it: find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed. Step six: consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you. Step seven is reconstruction — making spirit and flesh work together the way they used to, in the new body. And then for the last step you hook up the cables and get the power flowing."
These are the instructions for how to consume a soul and, rather than devour it, use it like a battery to power oneself forever. Ianthe is right, she solved it. This is what Lyctorhood means.
"Like I said," said Ianthe haughtily, "I am very, very good, and moreover I've got common sense. If you face the challenge rooms, you don't need the study notes — not if you're the best necromancer the Third House ever produced. Aren't I, Corona? Baby, stop crying, you're going to get such a headache."
"I came to the same conclusion you did," said Palamedes, but his voice was cold and inflexible. "I discarded it as ghastly. Ghastly, and obvious."
"Ghastly and obvious are my middle names,” said Ianthe. "Sextus, you sweet Sixth prude. Use that big, muscular brain of yours. I'm not talking about the deep calculus. Ten thousand years ago there were sixteen acolytes of the King Undying, and then there were eight. Who were the cavaliers to the Lyctor faithful? Where did they go? I haven't killed Naberius Tern. I ate Naberius Tern," she said, indifferently. "I put a sword through his heart to pin his soul in place. Then I took it into my body. I've robbed Death itself. I have drunk up the substance of his immortal soul. And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him, and he will never really die. I have absorbed Naberius Tern. I am more than the sum of his half, and mine."
The memory ends.]
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yikes!
First of all, he feels a bit badly for laughing so much at the bone frenzy man now, who seems to simply be in a rotten situation. Still. Fucking strange, isn't it? he'd seen the other woman, a cavalier - harrow had called her that in the memory clear as day - and. There's enough to put together some terrifying pieces there. He'll have to consider it later along with whether it is actually proper to use both a two-syllable and three-syllable version of the name nonius because
And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him, and he will never really die.
Oh.]
Bit fucked, that.
[You think?]
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[It's definitely a today I fucked up kind of moment.]
But you asked me what became of Ortus Nigenad, and that is the answer. He did his duty and allowed me to consume him, and I burned enough of him to advance Cytherea's cancer until she died, and that is how I came to be a Lyctor.
[Her words here are very clipped - matter-of-fact, but the self-loathing there is still evident.]
The final insult to injury is that it seems I did the deed poorly. Ianthe fucked it up rather badly with Babs, actually. Don't give too much credence to her boasting, she's always dreadful at detail work. But she didn't make as big a mess of it as I. I took his life and his soul, and I used it to survive Canaan House, and then never again was I able to reach him. I'm only a failed half Lyctor, and I've wasted even his dying sacrifice like air.
That is the whole of the ugly tale.
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He just listens, carefully, but he does reach over to hold one of her hands tightly - if she'll allow it. It's a sickening, dark feeling to dig through the mind of someone else. Knowing things that it seems harrow doesn't. It feels equally vile to somehow feel almost a little grateful for that. he hates it. that the truth here is something-- it always comes due, doesn't it?
he doesn't even know how to begin to explain this to harrow. a hand weighs on the scales of her life.]
I don't care what you've done. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me one fucking bit, you're still--
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You’ve just descended the stairs to the speakeasy of this Gentleman you’ve heard so much about, when a tabaxi turns to your group. She starts:
“Halt friends, I do not r— Lucien?” Her eyes widen in shock, but you still don’t know who she is, you’re racking your memory, but the name
The name makes you feel ill, all of a sudden, an itch at the back of your skull. There’s no time to consider it.
“It has been too long, two ye–”
“Far too long!”
“Two years!” She laughs, bright, hands still gripping your shoulders on either side, tightly, like an old, old friend. “Look at you! You grew out your hair! And you are covered in tattoos!”
There’s something in her expression that seems confused about this, as her eyes flit to your hands, your neck.
“We’ll catch up, we need a table, we need drinks for me and my compatriots.”
“Of course, you– these are your friends now?” She looks over your group, appraising, but then goes to do as you’ve asked. Drinks and a table.
You now get a better look up at the top, some skulking individuals with long dark cloaks and dark armor, carrying what looks almost like a heavy crossbow, but it’s a long, metal rod. You’ve only seen them in use here and there. A recently emerging technology that has been largely guarded within use of the empire itself.
The second she turns, you give Fjord - a green, half-orcish man, a little pat on the back and hiss a whisper at him.

“I’m sorry, this is my nightmare, please just go with it? It’s Lucien.”
He simply looks a bit baffled in return. The tabaxi returns to the table, reaching her hands out for yours.
“Oh, too long.” She starts quickly, sitting up straighter, then her face suddenly turns apologetic. You see all the faces of your friends, twisted in confusion. They aren’t even trying to hide it.
“Nonagon. I apologize for using your old name. Nonagon, it is a pleasure to see you again.”
“Who can keep track these days? Again, a long story.” You manage to croak out. She doesn’t seem to notice. She just looks concerned.
“Nonagon, what happened? We watched you die.”
She looks expectant. As do the rest of them at the table. Jester, Fjord, Nott, Caleb, Beau. All of their eyes are trained on you. They all await your answer.
“I’m sorry, it— I think it all went a bit fuzzy at the end there. Won’t you remind me?”
The tabaxi looks almost stricken, but she recovers. Casting a glance at the others at the table, and then,
“I don’t trust these people, Luci— Nonagon, but—
If you trust them, then I trust you. You gave us a speech. We had a fine meal. We all got ready there in the forest. . . She said it would be hard for us to tell whether or not it worked at first, but we went and checked, and you were not breathing. For a good hour, you were not breathing and you had gone cold. We knew then that-- that we had lost you. We checked, and I'm very attuned to vitals, as you know. There was no heartbeat. So we waited longer. The sun rose, and nothing. So, as you told us, if anything were to go wrong, we had to get rid of any sign, any trace. So not far from the Tomb Taker hideout, we buried you and we went our separate ways. She took the tome, the mage woman, it was part of the arrangement you had with her. Her contract said she was in the right and that we knew better than to go toe to toe with her and her ilk.”
They all turn to watch your reaction. Eyes on eyes on eyes on eyes.
The memory fades.
But it fades into another scene.
Fjord looks worried.
“So before you woke up in the dirt . . . nothing?”
You can feel the magic, pulling you. Whatever you say, it will be the truth. You’ve no choice about that for the moment. Jester doesn’t seem to be sorry at all.
“There is no before. Whatever happened before is not me. Some asshole got buried in the dirt. Fuck him. I am enjoying what I’m doing; I want nothing to do with that. Anything that came before, I was happy to just leave it be.”
“Do you really not want to know your past?” Nott is hesitant, hands in front of her, nervous.
“I really don’t. Whoever that was came to that end, and I want nothing to do with that. Whatever it was, it doesn’t feel good when I– the moment when something creeps through, I don’t like it. I don’t want anything to do with it. I was happy! I liked the circus! The circus was great!”
She tries again: “I’m sorry to belabor this, but what if you had a good life before this? What if you were famous or rich or had friends or family?”
At this, Yasha tries to intervene, how you love her, ”I think he’s quite an amazing person–“ but you interrupt anyway.
“Okay, here’s the thing that you’re not catching. That wasn’t me. This is mine. I don’t want anything from that other person anymore. That
 person is someone else. It was– I’m in for a penny, might as well. I’m told, although I don’t entirely remember this part, that I only said the word empty over and over again for the first week.”
Caleb, asks: “M.T.? Or empty?”
“Empty. That sounds terrible. I don’t want to remember anything. I don’t want to anybody else’s baggage in my head and I don’t want anybody else’s problems, thoughts, ideas. I like this person, right now is a good person. Is a fine person. Is a happy person. It’s very freeing. It’s the best thing– it’s the thing that happened to me. It’s not the best thing that happened to me, it’s the thing that happened to me. I found peace in building a new person.
What if the past feels that I owe it something?”
Beau pipes in, loud and brash as always. “You don’t owe your past shit. If I don’t feel anything about my past, but I still remember it and I still don’t give a fuck about where I came from then, why should you care about shit that you don’t even remember?”
You scowl right back at her.
“I spent two years before I met you all cajoling people, occasionally ripping them off, occasionally doing a good turn here or there. Never trust the truth. The truth is vicious. The truth thinks you owe it something. None of that. I like my bullshit. It’s good. It’s happy. It makes other people happy."
Nott, again: “But it’s not who you are . . . ?”
“It is exactly who I am. I may be a liar but I’m never a betrayer. I’m honest in my work, and I believe in doing a good turn. I’ve never cheated you out of money. I’ve never robbed from you. I stayed with that circus for two years, I know how people treat each other. It’s important. I don’t care where you’ve been. I don’t care what terrible things any of you have done. You’re here now. This is how it works.
I do my best every town I went to and every town I left, no matter how they treated me– and a lot of them treated me with deep disrespect. I left every town better than I found it.”
You can feel Beau’s glare from across the room. You don’t care. You don’t care at all what she thinks of you.
“Let me make this abundantly clear. My name is Molly. That person is dead and not me. It’s just a person who had this body. They abandoned it.
it’s mine now.”
And there it ends. ]
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And it is absolutely fascinating to her, as she puts them together like a riddle. Clearly this Lucien - this Nonagon - went into the grave to accomplish something, something she would very much like to hear of, and the process went. . . did it go wrong? Or did it work as intended? Something woke up there in the dirt, something with eyes on his body and blood that does magic on its own, but a void without memories.
She's watched a man become siphoned so thoroughly nothing remained in his body, and in that shell came hungry opportunists, taking control. But - though she knows little of spirits in Molly's world, she doubts that's the answer. Molly is too human (well, tiefling), too harmless, for the revenants she's aware of. It's more likely that without the memories of the how and the who and the why he simply went about his business. Without history, what remains of a person? Only the soul. She wonders what would happen if he were to remember again. The urge to press for every detail, to untangle every piece, to try to puzzle it out is so strong. She has a feeling that she could learn something new from this Lucien, something important. Harrowhark has always been hungry for forbidden knowledge, eager to get her hands on all the books she ought not to read, all the theorems thought too dangerous for a mere child. So hungry that when she ran out of new books to read and new things to learn, she turned to the one thing she had been told all her life she could not have, the thing that would bring about the end of the world. As a willful ten year old, she opened the door and rolled away the rock and gazed upon the Body and she never once regretted it, not even for what it cost her. That Harrowhark would pick this to pieces, too, no matter what it cost her, if she could learn even one new thing. The insistence of Lucien's body's current occupant to know nothing, to refuse to understand, to be satisfied with nothing but mindless, thoughtless bullshit, would disgust her, and Harrowhark is not a particularly nice girl to those she doesn't respect.
Or maybe that's just the natural result when you know your existence is a crime and the only value you have to give in penitence is what you can come to learn and come to achieve. When your own parents cannot look upon you as anything besides either a genius or an unspeakable horror. When you have never once been loved, never appreciated for any other charms besides your genius, never once been held while you cried.
This version of Harrow, sitting here now, has experienced these things. So maybe there's something to be said for letting a past self rot in its grave.
She just doesn't say. . . anything, for a long moment, too afraid of saying something wrong or ugly, waiting to see what he says.]
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but lucien is the type of person to pull at the threads until something falls apart, it seems. the bits of the conversation that cree (the tabaxi, cree, caleb had so cleverly managed to get her name) had shared mentioned they had left some order, tired of their shackles and tried a new path. one paved with blood, down a road that follows no known order of this material plane. he and harrow would get along, two of the same type of mind. for a time. there's only so long one can remain in stride with a person like that until the urge to dig into even your allies grows too strong, doesn't it?
mollymauk, as loud and demanding of space in a room as he is, is only a piece of something. incomplete, maybe. a broken lyctor, and half a ghost. he doesn't say anything either for a moment, before he just leans back, sighing out.
it doesn't seem to hurt so bad to let harrow see it, for some reason.]
. . . What was it you said? There. The whole ugly tale.
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[Has Molly considered the irony here? Harrow - can't. Clearly what she said was the whole tale wasn't, can't be, because there is so much she can't remember.]
I suppose it would be better, wouldn't it, to live with no regrets? [What if she was a Harrowhark who didn't know that she was two hundred and one ghosts.]
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Can't say I didn't die without a few.
[ . . . ]
. . . Beau said Lucien had come back to haunt them. I didn't ask more. I didn't want to.
[Pretending, for just a while more. Still, he sees no need to lie to Harrow. A strange feeling.]
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[Hmm.]
At the least, I understand this much. I am a different person than I was the day I woke, missing so many pieces and so much time. In my case - I truly do not know if I am a better or a worse person, but I am not the same.
And yet, were I to learn more of the old Harrowhark tomorrow, I also doubt I would simply revert to who I was before. It isn't as though I would forget each and every moment that passed in the interim, or that those moments would cease to comprise my personhood.
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[He looks a bit torn on the follow up, though. He isn't sure if he wants to know? Every fact he seems to learn, or consider - just another truth with its hand out, expecting its payment.]
But that's still you. It isn't as if-- He isn't me. And everything I do know about him, the things that this body knows, are never, ever good. It knew how to bleed things, it knew the names of terrible gods, it made people call it fucking Nonagon. What kind of bullshit name is that? A title? Pretentious bastard. Did you see the way that Tabaxi looked at me-- Fucking. Fucking reverence. I don't want that.
And I doubt he feels that fondly of me, either.
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