I can't say I'll shed a tear for that odd man. If it was meant to be a plot twist that he was unstable, it wasn't one. Mineo warned me off him the first day I was here.
But I am not content to be picked off one by one and do nothing but react defensively.
And with very few ways to defend ourselves against continued assault, yes.
[Ugh about covers it.]
. . . He probably would have drilled one or both of us, so I can't say I'm-- well, I can't say I'm in mourning. He did tell me at one point that he was jealous of me. That he'd like to see me lose something.
Let's not try it. Explore other avenues first, maybe.
[He sits up a little bit at the darkening expression?]
Ah-- I was sure that I did. But it was also before . . . [Beau.] So I considered the matter at rest. I'd lost plenty. Maybe I'd deserved to keep my face pretty.
[God. Anyway. Hey. Memshare. After what he just said I had to do it.
You sit on your bed in your sickly green hospital gown next to Ianthe Tridentarius, your face bare and unpainted, your head shaved bald. Two skeletons are holding up a mirror, one showing the back of your head and one the front. You are finishing your letters, scrawling in a cipher you know she will not be able to undo. She is frowning at you, her expression hard to understand, something like wonder and bemused shock.
"This may not work," she tells you.
"You have reminded me," you say tersely.
“I’ll say it again. The procedure could fail. Or it may work, but only temporarily. There could be any number of side effects — physical disorders — if you push your brain too hard, any surgery could simply heal over — and if you’re doing what I have a suspicion you’re doing, it could play merry hell with scar tissue. This is profoundly experimental. More to the point, it is totally fucking demented.”
Your eyes meet. You look down at the tray of tools in front of you — scalpel, saw, little bottle of water with a spray nozzle.
You're astonished when Ianthe speaks and her voice has almost something like concern in it. "Ninth. Maybe this is an eleventh-hour point to make, but I find myself making it. Tell me what you’re doing. Tell me the details of your grim, dark, and shadowy plan. If you don’t, I have no assurance that I am not about to have a front-row seat as you reduce yourself to a gibbering wreck - or lower. A vegetable. A hunk of wood. A Fourth House write-in advice column.”
You do not deign to answer her, so fixated are you on the work, on understanding each step of what you must do, and nothing else, because if you begin to think of ought else, if you begin to consider what might go wrong, you fear your nerve will crack and your will will crumble. Ianthe makes her voice as low and coaxing, and she presses: “Make me understand what this is worth to you, Ninth. Think about what you’ve promised. Consider what I am, and what use you might get from me. I am a Lyctor. I am a necromantic princess of Ida. I am the cleverest necromancer of my generation.”
That wakes you, for one moment, from your maudlin reverie. “Like hell you are,” you snap.
“So impress me,” says Ianthe, unmoved, though she stares at you with those changing eyes at you, as though she's trying to untangle something in your gaze, or reveling in the astonishing ugliness of your bare face.
“I will impress upon you this,” you hiss. “I asked you for a reason. That reason was not your genius, which I admit exists. Nobody who reverse-engineered the Lyctoral process could be anything but a genius. But I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe you are more than — a kind of necromantic gymnast, doing showy tricks without concern for the theory. You’re not of Sextus’s calibre either.”
“No,” says Ianthe lightly, “but Sextus’s head exploded, proving to the world that he hadn’t accounted for everything.”
You didn't know you had new depths of anger and grief left to uncover, but something in your heart clenches. "I may have been Sextus’s necromantic superior; but he was the better man. You are not even so worthy of that brain as to wipe its bloodied remnants from the wall,” you tell her. “You are a murderer, a conwoman, a cheat, a liar, a slitherer, and you embody the worst flaws of your House — as do I. Nonetheless, I did not ask you because you are a Lyctor, Third. I did not even ask you because you know significantly more about your subject than I do.”
“Tell me, because I am hugely bored of hearing all my flaws,” says Ianthe, pretending as always to be unbothered.
You stare into the mirror, and your black eyes stare back, dull and empty, a void. “I asked you because you know what it is,” and here, against your will, your voice shakes, “to be — fractured.”
“Harrowhark,” says Ianthe. “Let me give you a little advice. It is free and smart. I’ll walk this back now — I’ll adopt the sweetest good humour about everything you’ve done for me already —if you admit that you are running away. And running away is for fools and children. You are a Lyctor. You have paid the price. The hardest part is over. Smile to the universe, thank it for its graciousness, and mount your throne. You answer to nobody now.”
“If you think that you and I are not more beholden than ever,” you say, and hope your voice isn't truly as raw as it sounds to you, “you are an idiot.”
“Who is left? What is left?”
You shut your eyes for a moment, and then when you open them again, your heart stops. They are not correct. You are heterochromatic, with celestially mismatched irises. One black. One gold. Your chest clenches in horror and your stomach threatens to heave.
"We are wasting time," you command Ianthe. "Open me up."
“It will be worse for you in the end, Nonagesimus—”
Out of patience, uncharacteristic, you roar - "Do it, you faithless coward, you swore me an oath! Expose the brain — guide me — and let me handle it from there! There’s still time, and you thieve it from me!"
“All right, sister,” says Ianthe, resigned, and she reaches for the awl first. The hammer would be second; the hammer for her living hand, the awl for the dead. She rests it high on your frontal bone, and squints. "Time to absolutely fuck you up."
This faint red glow begins to warm in front of you, like a tiny tinder flash that begins to burn into a bright flame. Until there before you, you see a massive glowing red eye that just peers into you, inspecting you, piercing you, looking around, to you, within you. No words, no language. You immediately feel this sense of fear and odd desperation, but it begins to subtly pull away as you feel it connect to you. Like a single thought enters your mind, the light seems to swarm and fill your space. And all it says is-- without language, but feeling, emotion.
Flashes of something in shadow, large, ominous, monolithic. A city. A city that is moving under its own power. Hunting. Moving with will. Following. You feel the fear of Vokodo. You feel it trying to escape. You feel this city hungry and chasing. You flash into the streets of the city. You see paved roads. You see buildings and towers. And they flick and bend, organically, shift like they're alive. Roads pulse. This is weirdly familiar, but so alien. Thousands of minds within are the city. It doesn't make sense. Hungry, seeking. There's another flash. Within the minds of Eyes of Nine
And you hear this faint sound. This humming, like thousands of bees buzzing and as you listen, you begin to see scratches, shapes, spinning fractals that the mind can barely comprehend, flashes of the pages that you had looked at in that tome. (That tome?) And it's not buzzing; they're voices. They're screams. Hundreds, thousands of them, just faintly out of view.
"Welcome."
The eye closes.
None of this makes sense. Your mind struggles and you fail, leaving you cold, empty. Torn apart.
You feel as if you shouldn’t have seen this. You feel as if you needed to see this.
What are you doing here?
Help them. Keep reading. Marks and marks on the page, the scrawl of someone trying to copy a dream (nightmare) into language, frenzied and
You look at the back of your hand - the scars down your arms, the lavender skin, familiar - but the red eye upon the back. Well.
[That was a gag tag but actually I'm leaving it, because there is a big part of her that's like.
Oh.
The feeling before, of there being a puzzle she wanted to solve - it's there again, so strongly. None of the horror of it, of looking on it, the way her brain doesn't want to take it in, does more than just pique her curiosity. The tome, hmm? Nine eyes. Nine voices saying "welcome." Nonagon - something woke up, and then. . . what next? Out of all of that came -
Oh. Molly. That's right. Not a puzzle to be taken apart, but rather. Hmm.]
he is abjectly fucking terrified is what he is at the moment - recoiling from the memory like it's hit him, or, more accurately, really fucked with his head so badly that it feels like he's about to get one of the signature harrow nosebleeds.]
What in the fucking hells was that-- Was that yours?
[the hand was. clearly purple. also it had an eyeball on it? he should recognize that.]
[Too bad, because she was going to tell him it was something embarrassing. Then again, it is pretty cringe. Oopsie, my name's Lucien, I tried to summon an ancient nine-sided city eldritch being and accidentally fucked it up so bad I woke up in a ditch and became a clown. It's at least number two in the Top Ten Necromancy Fails Youtube compilation video.
Anyway, oh - she reaches for his hand and clasped it tightly, her expression firm.]
Molly. Envy was a fool to put you in the top five.
[And then later when you've managed to recover your instagram password from the horrible clown that's taken over your life, there's just a bunch of griefers following you who are like, oh, we liked your content as the clown actually? stop murdering people? really annoying.]
What are you-- [Oh, okay, hand is held, there are still thoughts of Eyes, and a very visible face journey from "aaaaaaaaaaa" to `what the fuck` to `fuck you`]
He-- He said I was the top choice, actually, but Douman would be a jealous asshole about it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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. . . Is it possible to get these things right at all?
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It all came together in such an ugly way. I'm not convinced that the three of them didn't kill one another.
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[He curls his tail around himself, picking at the collar of his coat for a moment.]
...Feels fucking sickening to continue to get these wrong. But that one. Vultures and scavengers, correct?
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[Ugh.]
I can't say I'll shed a tear for that odd man. If it was meant to be a plot twist that he was unstable, it wasn't one. Mineo warned me off him the first day I was here.
But I am not content to be picked off one by one and do nothing but react defensively.
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[Ugh about covers it.]
. . . He probably would have drilled one or both of us, so I can't say I'm-- well, I can't say I'm in mourning. He did tell me at one point that he was jealous of me. That he'd like to see me lose something.
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[Haha! But the second part of what he says darkens her expression.]
You never said so.
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[He sits up a little bit at the darkening expression?]
Ah-- I was sure that I did. But it was also before . . . [Beau.] So I considered the matter at rest. I'd lost plenty. Maybe I'd deserved to keep my face pretty.
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[God. Anyway. Hey. Memshare. After what he just said I had to do it.
You sit on your bed in your sickly green hospital gown next to Ianthe Tridentarius, your face bare and unpainted, your head shaved bald. Two skeletons are holding up a mirror, one showing the back of your head and one the front. You are finishing your letters, scrawling in a cipher you know she will not be able to undo. She is frowning at you, her expression hard to understand, something like wonder and bemused shock.
"This may not work," she tells you.
"You have reminded me," you say tersely.
“I’ll say it again. The procedure could fail. Or it may work, but only temporarily. There could be any number of side effects — physical disorders — if you push your brain too hard, any surgery could simply heal over — and if you’re doing what I have a suspicion you’re doing, it could play merry hell with scar tissue. This is profoundly experimental. More to the point, it is totally fucking demented.”
Your eyes meet. You look down at the tray of tools in front of you — scalpel, saw, little bottle of water with a spray nozzle.
You're astonished when Ianthe speaks and her voice has almost something like concern in it. "Ninth. Maybe this is an eleventh-hour point to make, but I find myself making it. Tell me what you’re doing. Tell me the details of your grim, dark, and shadowy plan. If you don’t, I have no assurance that I am not about to have a front-row seat as you reduce yourself to a gibbering wreck - or lower. A vegetable. A hunk of wood. A Fourth House write-in advice column.”
You do not deign to answer her, so fixated are you on the work, on understanding each step of what you must do, and nothing else, because if you begin to think of ought else, if you begin to consider what might go wrong, you fear your nerve will crack and your will will crumble. Ianthe makes her voice as low and coaxing, and she presses: “Make me understand what this is worth to you, Ninth. Think about what you’ve promised. Consider what I am, and what use you might get from me. I am a Lyctor. I am a necromantic princess of Ida. I am the cleverest necromancer of my generation.”
That wakes you, for one moment, from your maudlin reverie. “Like hell you are,” you snap.
“So impress me,” says Ianthe, unmoved, though she stares at you with those changing eyes at you, as though she's trying to untangle something in your gaze, or reveling in the astonishing ugliness of your bare face.
“I will impress upon you this,” you hiss. “I asked you for a reason. That reason was not your genius, which I admit exists. Nobody who reverse-engineered the Lyctoral process could be anything but a genius. But I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe you are more than — a kind of necromantic gymnast, doing showy tricks without concern for the theory. You’re not of Sextus’s calibre either.”
“No,” says Ianthe lightly, “but Sextus’s head exploded, proving to the world that he hadn’t accounted for everything.”
You didn't know you had new depths of anger and grief left to uncover, but something in your heart clenches. "I may have been Sextus’s necromantic superior; but he was the better man. You are not even so worthy of that brain as to wipe its bloodied remnants from the wall,” you tell her. “You are a murderer, a conwoman, a cheat, a liar, a slitherer, and you embody the worst flaws of your House — as do I. Nonetheless, I did not ask you because you are a Lyctor, Third. I did not even ask you because you know significantly more about your subject than I do.”
“Tell me, because I am hugely bored of hearing all my flaws,” says Ianthe, pretending as always to be unbothered.
You stare into the mirror, and your black eyes stare back, dull and empty, a void. “I asked you because you know what it is,” and here, against your will, your voice shakes, “to be — fractured.”
“Harrowhark,” says Ianthe. “Let me give you a little advice. It is free and smart. I’ll walk this back now — I’ll adopt the sweetest good humour about
everything you’ve done for me already —if you admit that you are running
away. And running away is for fools and children. You are a Lyctor. You have paid the price. The hardest part is over. Smile to the universe, thank it for its graciousness, and mount your throne. You answer to nobody now.”
“If you think that you and I are not more beholden than ever,” you say, and hope your voice isn't truly as raw as it sounds to you, “you are an idiot.”
“Who is left? What is left?”
You shut your eyes for a moment, and then when you open them again, your heart stops. They are not correct. You are heterochromatic, with celestially mismatched irises. One black. One gold. Your chest clenches in horror and your stomach threatens to heave.
"We are wasting time," you command Ianthe. "Open me up."
“It will be worse for you in the end, Nonagesimus—”
Out of patience, uncharacteristic, you roar - "Do it, you faithless coward, you swore me an oath! Expose the brain — guide me — and let me handle it from there! There’s still time, and you thieve it from me!"
“All right, sister,” says Ianthe, resigned, and she reaches for the awl first. The hammer would be second; the hammer for her living hand, the awl for the dead. She rests it high on your frontal bone, and squints. "Time to absolutely fuck you up."
She strikes, and everything goes black.]
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Harrow, what in the fuck.
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[No, she - missed this one. She just kind of blanked out for a second and she's back.
But yeah, lol!!]
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First of all, I'm quite pretty, fuck you--
[ ... ]
Couldn't see that one, could you?
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[It takes her a second. She looks nervous, but oddly she doesn't feel as nervous as she ought to be.]
No. What was it?
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You'll have to give me a moment to sort through it, I think.
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[Her tone is a little sharp.]
Would you like it, if I saw a memory of yours you couldn't see and took my time making cryptic comments about it? I think not.
At least tell me a subject matter.
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[To begin to understand it.
This faint red glow begins to warm in front of you, like a tiny tinder flash that begins to burn into a bright flame. Until there before you, you see a massive glowing red eye that just peers into you, inspecting you, piercing you, looking around, to you, within you. No words, no language. You immediately feel this sense of fear and odd desperation, but it begins to subtly pull away as you feel it connect to you. Like a single thought enters your mind, the light seems to swarm and fill your space. And all it says is-- without language, but feeling, emotion.
"Welcome." "Welcome." "Welcome."
"Welcome." "Welcome." "Welcome."
"Welcome." "Welcome."
Flashes of something in shadow, large, ominous, monolithic. A city. A city that is moving under its own power. Hunting. Moving with will. Following. You feel the fear of Vokodo. You feel it trying to escape. You feel this city hungry and chasing. You flash into the streets of the city. You see paved roads. You see buildings and towers. And they flick and bend, organically, shift like they're alive. Roads pulse. This is weirdly familiar, but so alien. Thousands of minds within are the city. It doesn't make sense. Hungry, seeking. There's another flash. Within the minds of Eyes of Nine
And you hear this faint sound. This humming, like thousands of bees buzzing and as you listen, you begin to see scratches, shapes, spinning fractals that the mind can barely comprehend, flashes of the pages that you had looked at in that tome. (That tome?) And it's not buzzing; they're voices. They're screams. Hundreds, thousands of them, just faintly out of view.
"Welcome."
The eye closes.
None of this makes sense. Your mind struggles and you fail, leaving you cold, empty. Torn apart.
You feel as if you shouldn’t have seen this. You feel as if you needed to see this.
What are you doing here?
Help them. Keep reading. Marks and marks on the page, the scrawl of someone trying to copy a dream (nightmare) into language, frenzied and
You look at the back of your hand - the scars down your arms, the lavender skin, familiar - but the red eye upon the back. Well.
That’s new.
It ends.]
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Oh.
The feeling before, of there being a puzzle she wanted to solve - it's there again, so strongly. None of the horror of it, of looking on it, the way her brain doesn't want to take it in, does more than just pique her curiosity. The tome, hmm? Nine eyes. Nine voices saying "welcome." Nonagon - something woke up, and then. . . what next? Out of all of that came -
Oh. Molly. That's right. Not a puzzle to be taken apart, but rather. Hmm.]
. . . Hmm. Could you see that one?
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well
he is abjectly fucking terrified is what he is at the moment - recoiling from the memory like it's hit him, or, more accurately, really fucked with his head so badly that it feels like he's about to get one of the signature harrow nosebleeds.]
What in the fucking hells was that-- Was that yours?
[the hand was. clearly purple. also it had an eyeball on it? he should recognize that.]
Shit! Shit! Fuck.
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Anyway, oh - she reaches for his hand and clasped it tightly, her expression firm.]
Molly. Envy was a fool to put you in the top five.
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What are you-- [Oh, okay, hand is held, there are still thoughts of Eyes, and a very visible face journey from "aaaaaaaaaaa" to `what the fuck` to `fuck you`]
He-- He said I was the top choice, actually, but Douman would be a jealous asshole about it.
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[You calmed down a little, bud? Having less of an existential crisis and more of a panic attack?]
Acknowledge it, or no?
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. . . You started calling me Molly.
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[Apparently, the answer is that we aren't acknowledging it. Which is fine.]
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