[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.
At the very least, he's pretty sure he knows what Harrow's wish is now. He just sits there, hands in his hair for a minute, until all of the memories of blood fade away.]
[Her memories of what she just saw are so vague - she plunged that sword into Cytherea's chest, her Lyctoral powers working then in a way they had never worked since. She had embarrassingly cried in front of the Necrolord Prime. It wasn't a happy memory, but it didn't trouble her so deeply.
But she feels it this time. She feels that same fresh and raw grief she felt as she had kneeled on the floor, prostrate before her God, and begged for - what even was it? She could never pinpoint that strange hollow pain she sometimes feels, but it reminds her just a little of the way she feels when she thinks of someone putting a glaive through Mollymauk's chest. Her cheeks are hot and wet again, though she isn't weeping. Just heartbroken, a little, in a distant, unreal way.]
[He's sitting there, hand on his chest where the glaive was, but -- well, there's nothing there. Just the criss-crossed scars, that were always there. (a red eye off to the side of his chest, hidden by the shirt.)
He pulls his hand away, looks at it, and then sighs out - slinging the arm around harrow's shoulders instead.]
I'm all right. Is it wrong to say I've seen it enough now that it's just-- [ . . . Just blood.] Doesn't matter.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
[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.]
no subject
That was a lot.
At the very least, he's pretty sure he knows what Harrow's wish is now. He just sits there, hands in his hair for a minute, until all of the memories of blood fade away.]
. . . You alright?
no subject
But she feels it this time. She feels that same fresh and raw grief she felt as she had kneeled on the floor, prostrate before her God, and begged for - what even was it? She could never pinpoint that strange hollow pain she sometimes feels, but it reminds her just a little of the way she feels when she thinks of someone putting a glaive through Mollymauk's chest. Her cheeks are hot and wet again, though she isn't weeping. Just heartbroken, a little, in a distant, unreal way.]
Yes, I'm all right. And you, Molly?
no subject
He pulls his hand away, looks at it, and then sighs out - slinging the arm around harrow's shoulders instead.]
I'm all right. Is it wrong to say I've seen it enough now that it's just-- [ . . . Just blood.] Doesn't matter.
no subject
[She doesn't resist the arm at all, leaning against him, completely worn.]
no subject
[huff.]
Shouldn't have tried to take him head on. Not with just the five of us.
no subject