[She's just lying on the ground. And when he mentions a greatsword, she'll start looking around. Oh, thank god - a little friend followed her in here, carrying the sword. She takes a deep breath and says, in a much calmer and more tired voice - ]
[She also sits there quietly for a moment. Because - she's still distraught, and angry, and doesn't understand why he won't listen. But it also destroys her a little, that he thinks his response disappointed her in some way.]
Have I really not - I had thought it was obvious. [The way she's clung to him this past week. She thought it was so blatant, so pathetic, her desperation for continued comfort so childish. And he hadn't even realized.]
All I could do is say and do the wrong thing. But you won't.
[Her dumb lip is quivering again, but she's just tired now. Too tired to even embarrass herself with a third cry.]
I would have told you what you wanted to know, had you asked, but there are parts for which I don't have the words. I am not - skilled in that. I have never had to be, because I have never wanted to be. I have guarded all of the secrets of my House, and I suppose I would have guarded them until the day I die if this place hadn't leaked them senselessly.
But I have never learned how to say - was it as dreadful for you as it was for me?
[what do these nine eyes of mine see? sorry, you have been perceived.]
I'm going to be honest with you, and I promise I won't make a habit of the truth, but your little boney exterior act doesn't have a single one of us fooled.
[She doesn't say this defensively, just evenly. It sounds like something she actually means.]
Or if anything, the act has been - this part. I have tried to behave in a manner that is unnatural to me, because I was told it could help me achieve my goals. I have tried a different strategy than I have tried before to attempt to - not be despised.
[Since he's actually listening now instead of just frustrated, he just also lays on the ground, arms behind his head, thinking that over.]
It's always sort of an act, you know. The trick to the secret dark magicks, when it comes to these things. You're always making - there's always a choice. And you're making a slightly different one than before and at first it's hard, because you've never done it. Like learning to talk, or read or juggle. And so you do your performance, all the time, until it feels more natural than the other way.
[Molly gets some points here for understanding that her weird cryptic talk of acts and strategy were just referring to her attempts to be a little bit less of a butthole to everybody she meets.]
It is. . . a skill that must needs be practiced, you mean.
[She hadn't ever thought of it that way. But she's beginning to realize, compared to her skill and talent in all things necromantic, how . . . underdeveloped her muscles of being a human being are. Absolutely, she thinks for a moment, and don't forget about her physical muscles on her physical noodle body, which are equally terrible and might be improved with even one single squat. But she dismisses this passing thought, an irrelevance. Instead, she recalls something else, something she's a little ashamed of.]
. . . Do you know, earlier this week I told White I would kill him. Not in jest. It was not an act, but it was ill done.
The stage metaphor is stupid, and overly complex, and requires an excess explanation. Besides, my act isn't juggling, it is puppetry.
[Which is such a dark joke but she doesn't even explain it and it still works on a slightly less horrifying level than the one she means.
Anyway, as to White, that's. . . hard. That's a hard question to answer.]
I don't want him to die, or even to fear that he might. [She. . . she cares him.] But he saw something he wasn't meant to see, and I needed to silence him. [It just doesn't seem to have occurred to her that she could have just asked him not to say anything about it.] Because killing him would not have been feasible, I needed him at least to believe that I might.
[blowing a raspberry because he liked his little speech and the puppetry joke goes right over his head. He scratches his face at the white stuff though, because,]
If you're-- I'm not very good at apology stuff, myself. [he is on pride for a reason. he so rarely believes he's in the wrong.] I suppose if there's anyone you were to threaten with death who probably will bounce back from it, it's White. You could just do what I did and make him do a little swear that he won't tell anyone anything? I actually think he'd stick to it.
[What the hell are you going on about, Molly. And also, a little less indignant - just clipped and cold.]
He could tell anyone, and why wouldn't he. Why not. Sutcliffe died, and HK-47 died, not because they were monstrous, but because they wore their grotesquery plain, for anyone to see.
If we need another sacrifice on Saturday, he would be within his rights to tell all. And I could not fault him, or even resent him, save that I have sworn an oath and cannot allow myself to die.
[ sorry, but, he gives a soft snort at comparing herself to grell and hk-47, two people who have at least some (some!) personal slight against him, making this a totally ridiculous comparision for him.
he just rubs at his neck a bit, over the red eye buried in the peacock feathers. grotesquery plain to see.]
First of all, we don't need any sacrifices on Saturday, because hopefully now that the shithead metal man is gone, people might learn a lesson about not voting for funsies. I know they won't, so no snapping about how I'm naive, but . . . maybe.
Secondly, it seems a stupid exercise to go out and lay everyone's groesqueries out for measure. We've all bloody hands here. The difference between you and them is obvious to me: you said one thing in a panic. They proudly declared a lust for gore.
[he pauses, because. well. he doesn't feel like he's going to get anywhere with debating with harrow about the weight of her crimes. he's said both in memories and to her face that he does give a single shit about the past. it just doesn't matter. he does not ask for the layout of the crimes of her house. leave it in a grave somewhere.
he reorganizes his thoughts. ]
How about this. Maybe you should consider asking him to keep his mouth shut. He knows as well as anyone else that throwing someone else's secrets out to the wolves likely won't win him friends. As I said, I don't think he's a bad person. He's got his own shit in his past. We're all just working to try and do something a little different today and tomorrow.
And if he tries to start any shit with you, I will beat the everloving daylights out of him. Okay?
[He's definitely right - debating her on the crimes of her House isn't going to get him anywhere. If he asked her to confess all, at this point she likely would, but he can't offer her forgiveness for it, or make her understand how to live with it. Let the secrets be buried within her; leave them to lie in two hundred graves.
I will beat the everloving daylights out of him is much more straightforward, anyway.]
[He looks perfectly happy about this, except, after a second - the smile freezes a bit and
It’s chaos.
This bloody dirt road, the middle of fucking nowhere. Ice still shimmers off one of the carts - why hadn’t she fucking warned you that Lorenzo was a spell caster? - there’s shouts and screams and orders being barked through the air. You can’t see Nott. You can’t see Caleb, but you can hear someone yelling off, not too far away. What was her name? Keg? Is practically cowering, paralyzed with fear somewhere across the way.
You can see Beau, scrambling to? From? Somewhere. She’s going somewhere, but it isn’t-
Between you. a man. Lorenzo. You know his name. That he has your friends captured, somewhere. Somehow. You have to stop him, and,
It’s too fucking close is what it is. She’s bleeding too. You’re bleeding, the eye on your hand is dripping, making holding your sword a little difficult and you think
Fuck
There’s the brief flash of bright pain you always feel when you use the Maledict, that’s familiar, but this time it digs a little too deep, it cuts too far and you’re on your ass before you can tell what’s happening.
Lorenzo turns to you, readying that nasty looking glaive
You can feel -
Blood splatters out of your mouth with the impact.
You grip at the blade at the end of the weapon - the part that’s not stuck eight inches deep in your chest - uselessly. the blood on your hands making it slick, the eye bleeding, and bleeding and bleeding—
It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt, is the thing you think to yourself, blade in your chest, back on the ground, looking up at this man - his boot on your stomach now, except of course. It hurts. You gasp for air, but there’s only more blood.
“An example it is.”
He looks down at you, leaning in close - as his hand tightens on the grip of his weapon it begins to twist. Excruciating pain. You’re dead. You’re dead and your brain, your heart, your betrayer of a body hasn’t quite caught the message yet.
Your mouth fills with blood again and you spit in his face. It hits with a splatter and he turns, only briefly, reaching up to touch it.
It’s cold today. It’s still morning, and it’s cold. snow is starting to fall. The man - Lorenzo - smirks down at you, wipes the blood from his face
“Respect.”
Then he twists the blade hard and you not so much hear as feel a crack.
[Oh. She was just starting to be un-sad, and now she's a mess again. She doesn't - want to experience this. Not in the way she's felt of other memories, not wanting to pry lest she be pried, and not because of the pain. Her body has been torn apart and stitched back together so many times the pain of death means so little to her now.
No - she just doesn't want to lose him. She doesn't want to feel him slip away.
Another memory, the same scene of her starting to die desperately holding back a God from behind a wall of bone he saw before, the same 'I'm getting us out of here' promise, but now a resolution.
"Griddle - " you look up to watch her, when she says it, your vision blurry, wondering what she's planning to do. You can't really tell, but if she thinks has a plan, she - "Nav," you say gently. "I can't hold this for much longer."
"I don't know how you're holding it now." Gideon looks at you, then away, back in the direction of - what's back there? You only remember the enormous spiked railing.
She turns to you, again, and you can sort of see her - a blur of that vibrant red hair, blood, those striking eyes behind her shades. "Harrow. I can't keep my promise, because the only point of me is you. You get that, right? That's what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end."
"Nav," you say, suddenly frightened. "What are you doing?"
"The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole life, believe me. You'll know what to do, and if you don't do it, what I'm about to do will be of no use to anyone."
You can't see what's happening, but you don't need to. You hear the shouted "For the Ninth," and then you feel it, the rush of thanergy, energy of fresh death. You understand, without even needing to think about it, what's being asked of you. You're a genius, after all, and once you've learned a theorem, you never had to learn it again.
Preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact. Analyze it, preserve its structure. Remove and absorb it, take it into yourself without consuming it in the process. Fix it in place so it can't deteriorate. Incorporate it: find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed. A drop of blood will do to ground you. And then there 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.
Faintly, you can hear the sound of someone screaming.
"Okay," says Gideon. "Okay, get up."
You get up.
"Good!" says your cavalier. "You can stop screaming any moment now, just as an FYI. Now, first, make sure nothing is going to ice Camilla. I don't want an afterlife subscription to Palamedes Sextus' Top Nerd Facts.
"Gideon," you murmur incoherently. "Gideon."
"No time," says Gideon. "Incoming." The bone shield sighed, shuddered, and suddenly broke. The bone construct shuffles forward, but Gideon's voice tells you to take it down, so - you do. For all of its killing spree before, it dissolves now, like rain.
"There's my sword," Gideon says. "Pick it up - pick it up and stop looking at me, dick. Don't. Don't you dare look at me."
You do look, and see what is lying, bloody, pierced through on the iron railing, but you follow the instructions in your head, refusing to perceive it for what it is - just a mass, blurry and bloodied and dark. You pick up the longsword that is beside the form, but it's far too heavy, too awkward. Gideon steadies your swordhand, shifts your position. The sheer weight of it still stretches the muscles of your forearms, but despite the pain, you lift the sword together.
"Your arms are like fucking noodles," she says disapprovingly.
"I'm a necromancer, Nav!"
"Yeah, well. Hope you like lifting weights for the next myriad."
You are cheek to cheek; you can feel the rough of her hand on yours as you hold the sword aloft, her fingers wrapped around yours, steady with callouses. You look back at Gideon, and Gideon's eyes, as they always did, startle you - the deep chromatic amber and gold. She winks at you. You lose your nerve.
"I cannot do this."
"You already did it," says Gideon. "It's done. You ate me and rebuilt me. We can't go home again."
"I can't bear it." Your face is wet, your cheeks are wet.
"You're already two hundred dead sons and daughters. What's one more?" Before you stands Cytherea, watching them, her eyes wide and blue. Her lips were parted in a tiny o. She did not even seem particularly troubled, just amazed: as though they were a mirage, a trick of the sunlight.
"Now we kick her ass until the candy comes out. Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don't cry. We can't fight her if you're crying."
You have some difficulty getting your mouth to form words. "I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it."
"Yes you can," Gideon comforts her. "It's just less great and less hot."
"Fuck you, Nav!"
"Harrowhark," she says, serious for once. "Someday you'll die and get buried in the ground, and we'll work this out then. For now -- I can't say you'll be fine. I can't say you did the right thing. I can't tell you shit. I'm basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry. Even if I wasn't, I don't know jack, Harrow, except for one thing." She lifts your arm with the hilt clutched in it. Her fingers, rough and strong and sure, move your other hand into place above the pommel.
"I know the sword," she says. "And now, so do you." She tilted the blade. She brought you into position. She moved your head up and corrected your hips. Cytherea stood at the bottom of the stairs.
"How do you feel, little sister?" she asks.
"Ready for round three," your mouth said, without any input from you. "Or was it round four? I lost track." And they fought. Fighting was like a dream for you, like falling asleep. You do your portion, too, and take her apart, piece by piece, accelerating cancer inside her until she vomited a stream of black blood. But the weight of Gideon's arms on your forearms us growing harder to perceive. Her voice is in your ear, still, but it is sounding farther and farther away.
"There," Gideon pointed, to the conflagration, bulging, dark and malignant, inside her lungs. "Thanks, Palamedes." You could see what Palamedes Sextus had done to advance Cytherea's myriad old disease, what Palamedes Sextus had expended his life to do, and you could nudge it, just a little further.
"Sextus was a marvel," you admit, awed and griefstruck.
"Too bad you didn't marry him," says Gideon. "You're both into old dead chicks."
"Gideon-- !"
"Focus, Nonagesimus. You know what to do." And you did. You take her apart, piece by piece, accelerating the cancer inside her until she vomited a stream of black blood, delirious and unafraid in anticipation of her death. But the weight of Gideon's arms on your forearms us growing harder to perceive. Her voice is in your ear, still, but it sounds very far away.
"Don't leave me," you plead, pathetic.
"The land that shall receive me dying, in the same will I die: and there I will be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part thee and me," says Gideon, and also, "See you on the flipside, sugar lips."
You place your sword on Cytherea's breastbone, and you pierce straight through the malignant thing in her chest. Her ten thousand year heart gives out, and she sighs in no little relief as she dies. The sword clatters to the ground. And you run back and strain at the body of your cavalier, and pull and pull, so that you can take her off the spike and lay her on her back. There you sat for a long time.
You come to in a nest of sterile white, lying on a gurney, wrapped in a thermal blanket and wearing a green hospital smock. Your whole body is broken and pained, nauseated. There's a window near you, and out the window the blackness of space. The only true light in the room is a reading lamp, illuminating a chair where a man is sitting. He is simply dressed, with hair cropped close to his head. He is utterly nondescript except for the eyes - his sclera are black as space, irises are dark and leadenly iridescent — a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white. You don't know how you could tell who he was, but somehow, innately, you do.
You throw off the blanket, stagger out of bed, and throw yourself on the ground at his feet, pressing your forehead against the cold tiles, prostate before your God.
When you speak, you mean to speak with reverence, but instead your voice is thick with despair, wavering like a child, and you beg. "Please undo what I've done, Lord. I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav."
"I can't." He has a bittersweet voice, infinitely gentle. "I would very much like to. But that soul's inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I'd take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What's done is done; now you have to live with it."
You feel empty, like there is nothing inside you anymore but dark and bubbling hatred. You pick yourself off the floor and look at the Emperor in his dark and shining eyes.
"How dare you ask me to live with it."
The Emperor does not reduce you to a rubble of ash, as you partway wish he would. Instead, he offers you a choice. He will restore your House, the purpose you have devoted your life to, with a newly resurrected population and the resources it needs to thrive. And you can have safe passage back to Drearburh, or you can stay by his side as his Lyctor and fight for the future of the Empire.
You look at the window of the ship, your reflection interrupted by distant space fields pocketed thick with stars. You look away, afraid to see a trace of Gideon Nav, and afraid to see nothing at all.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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[She's just lying on the ground. And when he mentions a greatsword, she'll start looking around. Oh, thank god - a little friend followed her in here, carrying the sword. She takes a deep breath and says, in a much calmer and more tired voice - ]
. . . No, no. That isn't what I meant at all.
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He'll just cross his arms tightly then, waiting on the explanation?]
Go on, then.
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Have I really not - I had thought it was obvious. [The way she's clung to him this past week. She thought it was so blatant, so pathetic, her desperation for continued comfort so childish. And he hadn't even realized.]
All I could do is say and do the wrong thing. But you won't.
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That's nonsense. I don't want to hear that from you. You say far more right things than me.
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I would have told you what you wanted to know, had you asked, but there are parts for which I don't have the words. I am not - skilled in that. I have never had to be, because I have never wanted to be. I have guarded all of the secrets of my House, and I suppose I would have guarded them until the day I die if this place hadn't leaked them senselessly.
But I have never learned how to say - was it as dreadful for you as it was for me?
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he just pats her on the cheek.]
Don't make it sound like some secret dark magicks from beyond the realm of mortals, Harrow.
[gently, though.]
He knows you care.
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Secret dark magicks from beyond the realm of mortals would be preferable.
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[what do these nine eyes of mine see? sorry, you have been perceived.]
I'm going to be honest with you, and I promise I won't make a habit of the truth, but your little boney exterior act doesn't have a single one of us fooled.
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[She doesn't say this defensively, just evenly. It sounds like something she actually means.]
Or if anything, the act has been - this part. I have tried to behave in a manner that is unnatural to me, because I was told it could help me achieve my goals. I have tried a different strategy than I have tried before to attempt to - not be despised.
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[Since he's actually listening now instead of just frustrated, he just also lays on the ground, arms behind his head, thinking that over.]
It's always sort of an act, you know. The trick to the secret dark magicks, when it comes to these things. You're always making - there's always a choice. And you're making a slightly different one than before and at first it's hard, because you've never done it. Like learning to talk, or read or juggle. And so you do your performance, all the time, until it feels more natural than the other way.
[building a new person, as it were.]
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It is. . . a skill that must needs be practiced, you mean.
[She hadn't ever thought of it that way. But she's beginning to realize, compared to her skill and talent in all things necromantic, how . . . underdeveloped her muscles of being a human being are. Absolutely, she thinks for a moment, and don't forget about her physical muscles on her physical noodle body, which are equally terrible and might be improved with even one single squat. But she dismisses this passing thought, an irrelevance. Instead, she recalls something else, something she's a little ashamed of.]
. . . Do you know, earlier this week I told White I would kill him. Not in jest. It was not an act, but it was ill done.
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Yes, but I liked the drama of the stage metaphor. Good stuff.
[At the second bit though, he actually looks over. he doesn't sound judgmental or anything.]
. . . And you wish you could take it back? Or no?
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[Which is such a dark joke but she doesn't even explain it and it still works on a slightly less horrifying level than the one she means.
Anyway, as to White, that's. . . hard. That's a hard question to answer.]
I don't want him to die, or even to fear that he might. [She. . . she cares him.] But he saw something he wasn't meant to see, and I needed to silence him. [It just doesn't seem to have occurred to her that she could have just asked him not to say anything about it.] Because killing him would not have been feasible, I needed him at least to believe that I might.
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If you're-- I'm not very good at apology stuff, myself. [he is on pride for a reason. he so rarely believes he's in the wrong.] I suppose if there's anyone you were to threaten with death who probably will bounce back from it, it's White. You could just do what I did and make him do a little swear that he won't tell anyone anything? I actually think he'd stick to it.
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[Molly himself knows this is no guarantee, but still--]
I think he's a good guy. And we're all stuck in this place for now. Who's he possibly got to blab to? He doesn't strike me as the gossipy type anyway.
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[What the hell are you going on about, Molly. And also, a little less indignant - just clipped and cold.]
He could tell anyone, and why wouldn't he. Why not. Sutcliffe died, and HK-47 died, not because they were monstrous, but because they wore their grotesquery plain, for anyone to see.
If we need another sacrifice on Saturday, he would be within his rights to tell all. And I could not fault him, or even resent him, save that I have sworn an oath and cannot allow myself to die.
no subject
he just rubs at his neck a bit, over the red eye buried in the peacock feathers. grotesquery plain to see.]
First of all, we don't need any sacrifices on Saturday, because hopefully now that the shithead metal man is gone, people might learn a lesson about not voting for funsies. I know they won't, so no snapping about how I'm naive, but . . . maybe.
Secondly, it seems a stupid exercise to go out and lay everyone's groesqueries out for measure. We've all bloody hands here. The difference between you and them is obvious to me: you said one thing in a panic. They proudly declared a lust for gore.
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[Y'all. She's threatened to kill so many people since she's been here. It's fine.]
I speak of what he witnessed in my memories. The crimes of my House, laid bare. I have always known that one day there would be a retribution.
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[he pauses, because. well. he doesn't feel like he's going to get anywhere with debating with harrow about the weight of her crimes. he's said both in memories and to her face that he does give a single shit about the past. it just doesn't matter. he does not ask for the layout of the crimes of her house. leave it in a grave somewhere.
he reorganizes his thoughts. ]
How about this. Maybe you should consider asking him to keep his mouth shut. He knows as well as anyone else that throwing someone else's secrets out to the wolves likely won't win him friends. As I said, I don't think he's a bad person. He's got his own shit in his past. We're all just working to try and do something a little different today and tomorrow.
And if he tries to start any shit with you, I will beat the everloving daylights out of him. Okay?
no subject
[He's definitely right - debating her on the crimes of her House isn't going to get him anywhere. If he asked her to confess all, at this point she likely would, but he can't offer her forgiveness for it, or make her understand how to live with it. Let the secrets be buried within her; leave them to lie in two hundred graves.
I will beat the everloving daylights out of him is much more straightforward, anyway.]
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[his tail hits the ground a few times, perhaps glad the tension has drained a little bit.]
I'm taking a little lesson from Beauregard with that one.
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[Nodding. She approves.]
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[He looks perfectly happy about this, except, after a second - the smile freezes a bit and
It’s chaos.
This bloody dirt road, the middle of fucking nowhere. Ice still shimmers off one of the carts - why hadn’t she fucking warned you that Lorenzo was a spell caster? - there’s shouts and screams and orders being barked through the air. You can’t see Nott. You can’t see Caleb, but you can hear someone yelling off, not too far away. What was her name? Keg? Is practically cowering, paralyzed with fear somewhere across the way.
You can see Beau, scrambling to? From? Somewhere. She’s going somewhere, but it isn’t-
Between you. a man. Lorenzo. You know his name. That he has your friends captured, somewhere. Somehow. You have to stop him, and,
It’s too fucking close is what it is. She’s bleeding too. You’re bleeding, the eye on your hand is dripping, making holding your sword a little difficult and you think
Fuck
There’s the brief flash of bright pain you always feel when you use the Maledict, that’s familiar, but this time it digs a little too deep, it cuts too far and you’re on your ass before you can tell what’s happening.
Lorenzo turns to you, readying that nasty looking glaive
You can feel -
Blood splatters out of your mouth with the impact.
You grip at the blade at the end of the weapon - the part that’s not stuck eight inches deep in your chest - uselessly. the blood on your hands making it slick, the eye bleeding, and bleeding and bleeding—
It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt, is the thing you think to yourself, blade in your chest, back on the ground, looking up at this man - his boot on your stomach now, except of course. It hurts. You gasp for air, but there’s only more blood.
“An example it is.”
He looks down at you, leaning in close - as his hand tightens on the grip of his weapon it begins to twist. Excruciating pain. You’re dead. You’re dead and your brain, your heart, your betrayer of a body hasn’t quite caught the message yet.
Your mouth fills with blood again and you spit in his face. It hits with a splatter and he turns, only briefly, reaching up to touch it.
It’s cold today. It’s still morning, and it’s cold. snow is starting to fall. The man - Lorenzo - smirks down at you, wipes the blood from his face
“Respect.”
Then he twists the blade hard and you not so much hear as feel a crack.
Your eyes never shut.
And then it’s over. ]
no subject
No - she just doesn't want to lose him. She doesn't want to feel him slip away.
Another memory, the same scene of her starting to die desperately holding back a God from behind a wall of bone he saw before, the same 'I'm getting us out of here' promise, but now a resolution.
"Griddle - " you look up to watch her, when she says it, your vision blurry, wondering what she's planning to do. You can't really tell, but if she thinks has a plan, she - "Nav," you say gently. "I can't hold this for much longer."
"I don't know how you're holding it now." Gideon looks at you, then away, back in the direction of - what's back there? You only remember the enormous spiked railing.
She turns to you, again, and you can sort of see her - a blur of that vibrant red hair, blood, those striking eyes behind her shades. "Harrow. I can't keep my promise, because the only point of me is you. You get that, right? That's what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end."
"Nav," you say, suddenly frightened. "What are you doing?"
"The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole life, believe me. You'll know what to do, and if you don't do it, what I'm about to do will be of no use to anyone."
You can't see what's happening, but you don't need to. You hear the shouted "For the Ninth," and then you feel it, the rush of thanergy, energy of fresh death. You understand, without even needing to think about it, what's being asked of you. You're a genius, after all, and once you've learned a theorem, you never had to learn it again.
Preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact. Analyze it, preserve its structure. Remove and absorb it, take it into yourself without consuming it in the process. Fix it in place so it can't deteriorate. Incorporate it: find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed. A drop of blood will do to ground you. And then there 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.
Faintly, you can hear the sound of someone screaming.
"Okay," says Gideon. "Okay, get up."
You get up.
"Good!" says your cavalier. "You can stop screaming any moment now, just as an FYI. Now, first, make sure nothing is going to ice Camilla. I don't want an afterlife subscription to Palamedes Sextus' Top Nerd Facts.
"Gideon," you murmur incoherently. "Gideon."
"No time," says Gideon. "Incoming." The bone shield sighed, shuddered, and suddenly broke. The bone construct shuffles forward, but Gideon's voice tells you to take it down, so - you do. For all of its killing spree before, it dissolves now, like rain.
"There's my sword," Gideon says. "Pick it up - pick it up and stop looking at me, dick. Don't. Don't you dare look at me."
You do look, and see what is lying, bloody, pierced through on the iron railing, but you follow the instructions in your head, refusing to perceive it for what it is - just a mass, blurry and bloodied and dark. You pick up the longsword that is beside the form, but it's far too heavy, too awkward. Gideon steadies your swordhand, shifts your position. The sheer weight of it still stretches the muscles of your forearms, but despite the pain, you lift the sword together.
"Your arms are like fucking noodles," she says disapprovingly.
"I'm a necromancer, Nav!"
"Yeah, well. Hope you like lifting weights for the next myriad."
You are cheek to cheek; you can feel the rough of her hand on yours as you hold the sword aloft, her fingers wrapped around yours, steady with callouses. You look back at Gideon, and Gideon's eyes, as they always did, startle you - the deep chromatic amber and gold. She winks at you. You lose your nerve.
"I cannot do this."
"You already did it," says Gideon. "It's done. You ate me and rebuilt me. We can't go home again."
"I can't bear it." Your face is wet, your cheeks are wet.
"You're already two hundred dead sons and daughters. What's one more?" Before you stands Cytherea, watching them, her eyes wide and blue. Her lips were parted in a tiny o. She did not even seem particularly troubled, just amazed: as though they were a mirage, a trick of the sunlight.
"Now we kick her ass until the candy comes out. Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don't cry. We can't fight her if you're crying."
You have some difficulty getting your mouth to form words. "I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it."
"Yes you can," Gideon comforts her. "It's just less great and less hot."
"Fuck you, Nav!"
"Harrowhark," she says, serious for once. "Someday you'll die and get buried in the ground, and we'll work this out then. For now -- I can't say you'll be fine. I can't say you did the right thing. I can't tell you shit. I'm basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry. Even if I wasn't, I don't know jack, Harrow, except for one thing." She lifts your arm with the hilt clutched in it. Her fingers, rough and strong and sure, move your other hand into place above the pommel.
"I know the sword," she says. "And now, so do you." She tilted the blade. She brought you into position. She moved your head up and corrected your hips. Cytherea stood at the bottom of the stairs.
"How do you feel, little sister?" she asks.
"Ready for round three," your mouth said, without any input from you. "Or was it round four? I lost track." And they fought. Fighting was like a dream for you, like falling asleep. You do your portion, too, and take her apart, piece by piece, accelerating cancer inside her until she vomited a stream of black blood. But the weight of Gideon's arms on your forearms us growing harder to perceive. Her voice is in your ear, still, but it is sounding farther and farther away.
"There," Gideon pointed, to the conflagration, bulging, dark and malignant, inside her lungs. "Thanks, Palamedes." You could see what Palamedes Sextus had done to advance Cytherea's myriad old disease, what Palamedes Sextus had expended his life to do, and you could nudge it, just a little further.
"Sextus was a marvel," you admit, awed and griefstruck.
"Too bad you didn't marry him," says Gideon. "You're both into old dead chicks."
"Gideon-- !"
"Focus, Nonagesimus. You know what to do." And you did. You take her apart, piece by piece, accelerating the cancer inside her until she vomited a stream of black blood, delirious and unafraid in anticipation of her death. But the weight of Gideon's arms on your forearms us growing harder to perceive. Her voice is in your ear, still, but it sounds very far away.
"Don't leave me," you plead, pathetic.
"The land that shall receive me dying, in the same will I die: and there I will be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part thee and me," says Gideon, and also, "See you on the flipside, sugar lips."
You place your sword on Cytherea's breastbone, and you pierce straight through the malignant thing in her chest. Her ten thousand year heart gives out, and she sighs in no little relief as she dies. The sword clatters to the ground. And you run back and strain at the body of your cavalier, and pull and pull, so that you can take her off the spike and lay her on her back. There you sat for a long time.
You come to in a nest of sterile white, lying on a gurney, wrapped in a thermal blanket and wearing a green hospital smock. Your whole body is broken and pained, nauseated. There's a window near you, and out the window the blackness of space. The only true light in the room is a reading lamp, illuminating a chair where a man is sitting. He is simply dressed, with hair cropped close to his head. He is utterly nondescript except for the eyes - his sclera are black as space, irises are dark and leadenly iridescent — a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white. You don't know how you could tell who he was, but somehow, innately, you do.
You throw off the blanket, stagger out of bed, and throw yourself on the ground at his feet, pressing your forehead against the cold tiles, prostate before your God.
When you speak, you mean to speak with reverence, but instead your voice is thick with despair, wavering like a child, and you beg. "Please undo what I've done, Lord. I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav."
"I can't." He has a bittersweet voice, infinitely gentle. "I would very much like to. But that soul's inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I'd take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What's done is done; now you have to live with it."
You feel empty, like there is nothing inside you anymore but dark and bubbling hatred. You pick yourself off the floor and look at the Emperor in his dark and shining eyes.
"How dare you ask me to live with it."
The Emperor does not reduce you to a rubble of ash, as you partway wish he would. Instead, he offers you a choice. He will restore your House, the purpose you have devoted your life to, with a newly resurrected population and the resources it needs to thrive. And you can have safe passage back to Drearburh, or you can stay by his side as his Lyctor and fight for the future of the Empire.
You look at the window of the ship, your reflection interrupted by distant space fields pocketed thick with stars. You look away, afraid to see a trace of Gideon Nav, and afraid to see nothing at all.
"We can't go home again," you murmur.
The memory ends.]
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