Chapter Text
It was easier, knowing that it was just a monster.
Gideon knew so little of people beyond the two-dimensional renderings in her magazines. Her trust bloomed easily, cradled in a stranger’s gentle hand. Its naïve petals trembled open under a shower of soft, sweet words. Despite her stunted sociality, she liked the people here at Canaan House – the Sixth and the Seventh and one of the Third – and the Fourth and Fifth, as they were – before. The Second was irrelevant, the Eighth irritating but strictly bound by orthodoxy, both tightly regimented against transgression. They were all fighting amongst themselves, of course, but fighting was familiar, a numbing background static. Gideon had never known anything but conflict.
For the first time in her life, she had grasped at the dangling branch of companionship – had tasted the fruits of its devotion, wet and bursting, on her tongue. But underneath, jaws wide open, writhed the hideous suspicion of a bloodstained tooth within each congenial smile.
Yet, somehow, it had been worse to believe that the murderer was Harrow.
How full Harrow’s teeth were, of Gideon’s blood – and how full Gideon’s teeth were, of Harrow. They had been gnawing on each other since they were disgorged, wet and squalling, from the fetid womb of the Ninth. She had torn Harrow open until the days all ran red together, and had been handed it back exponentially raw and gory. She thought that all their nerve endings must be tangled together; by the end they barely felt it anymore. It was a ritual. It was a tradition. It was a sacrament.
And Gideon had dreamed of Harrow comically, coincidentally, backflipping into Drearburh, or sitting her ass down in magma, or slipping and falling on hilariously oversized sword in a way that was not at all erotic, honest.
But Gideon had never imagined killing Harrow herself, not really, not until she found the head of Protesilaus the Seventh rotting in her dresser drawer. Not until she believed the Reverend Daughter was stained deeply with the maybe–friends that had been the Fourth, the Fifth, the Seventh.
Harrow was not a faceless, homicidal drone, like the insurgency of outer worlds in Gideon’s comics.
Harrow was her nemesis, and you do not kill your nemesis.
A nemesis thrashes you within an inch of your life and lifts the last inch with her bony blade, saying, smugly, “Better luck next time,” tipping up your chin to behold her in a way that makes you shiver with…well it had to be rage, didn’t it?
A nemesis sulks next to you in Reconstruction, in the aftermath of your battle, watching the nuns pull the shrapnel out of both of you, counting the plink of the bone shards in the dish between and always counting hers one less.
After you have, at last, escaped, a nemesis reads about your grand adventures in a magazine, and must admit that, after all, you were fantastic with a sword, that she never realized what she had in you, and that your biceps were, indeed, very, very big. Maybe she cuts out the glossy centerfold that bears your gorgeous image, so she can tack it up in her office and fume about it. Maybe she throws darts at your visage but can somehow never hit your handsome face. Maybe, when she looks at you, her mouth gets wet.
A nemesis retrieves your battered bones from your final heroic quest and inters them, hallowed, in the depths of the Monument. Perhaps she sucks back a single, stinging, tear; perhaps she says, in eulogy, “She was the best of us.”
Harrow had called this something different, in the saltwater pool. She had said, You are my only friend. And then, acknowledging both the means and the motivation, she had expected her only friend to drown her. She had called it mercy.
But Gideon knew, from her comics, that you do not kill your nemesis. And neither do you condemn her to die, defenseless, like a squealing rat in a trap. A nemesis is never abandoned to be mangled at the base of a ladder, to be pierced through with fifty whipping spikes, to be stirred into a bloody pulp while her adversary sleeps, uncaring, beside her. What hand other than Gideon’s own could deserve to fall so harshly? Who else could ever earn the right to be Harrow’s final end, and choose instead to be her salvation?
So it was easier, knowing that it was just a monster. It was a relief to be free of the politics and subterfuge; it was a sweet deliverance to pry up Harrow’s fingernails and find only Gideon’s blood underneath. It was so much easier, it was simple, it was obvious, to say the oath in the pool together – to swear to save Harrow from the demon she had thought that Harrow was.
Now there remained only a great and terrible beast threatening to rake her necromancer between its bloody claws. Gideon would set upon it like a mad and frothing dog, howling, She is mine, and she belongs to me.
The day had already stretched on for an eternity – siphoning at the laboratory door with the Sixth, her near–betrayal with the Eighth, accusing Harrow of the Seventh’s execution, learning she was instead the afterbirth of the Ninth’s own infanticide. But perhaps the most jarring realization was that Gideon was not the center of Harrow’s grim obsession, as Harrow had long been the rotting core of Gideon’s universe. Harrow was consumed with blind devotion to some other girl in some other saltwater pool. It was true, then, that she didn’t even remember about Gideon most of the time.
But that didn’t change anything about the oath, not for Gideon. It defined what Harrow wanted, but not what Harrow needed. Harrow’s reason for living slept within the Locked Tomb, but Gideon would be the mechanism of her survival. And as she shook off the salt from her skin in the sonic, she thought of Harrow saying, I am undone without you, and she couldn’t feel anything but brave.
Harrow was sitting at the sagging writing desk when Gideon wandered back from the bathroom. She was scratching at a complicated diagram deep within her skin–bound journal – a mess of curving struts and lines alongside cramped equations. Her short–cropped dark hair was flaked with dried white crystals; her pointed face still washed–out gray and crusted with paint around its edges.
Gideon sank down in the chair opposite and tried, pointlessly, to pat down the unruly red waves of her salt–tempered hair. “Sonic’s open,” she said, casually.
“One moment.” Harrow scribbled another long arc on her diagram with the stub of a lead pencil, and then made a small notation. “Mm,” she said quietly, to herself, and then, “Ah.” She added a short series of curving graphite strokes as crosspieces between the long arcs.
Harrow’s soft, small noises scratched pleasantly at the back of Gideon’s head, and Gideon felt her insides flush with an odd, domestic warmth. She settled deeper into the chair. The tips of her fingers tingled, her well–worn brain sank into pleasant buzzing, and her head, at last, dropped onto her chest.
Then she woke, with a start, to the monstrous construct coming through the door.
It seemed to burst in silently, despite its osseous confusion, a whirlwind of slashing whips and striking spidery legs. But Gideon’s blood screamed so loudly and abruptly in her ears that she wouldn’t have heard its wretched bellow anyways. She reeled and grasped frantically for her rapier; for the first time since the death of the Fourth she had carelessly fallen asleep without it laid on her chest. Her bare feet slipped against the polished stone of the floor as she whirled upright and stumbled. Her eyes stinging with the bleary edge of sleep, she searched wildly, desperately, for Harrow, begging to find her anywhere but a tangled mess of wet red ropes.
There was a flash of black robes and chalky white paint by the bathroom, and Gideon tackled Harrow to the floor.
The lights spun in a blinding corona as Gideon rolled them both roughly under the low black table, painfully slamming her own head into the thick glass of its underside. Any hopes of strategy and weaponry were obliterated in her intense disorientation. All she could do was clumsily cover Harrow with her big stupid body and pray to be eaten first.
“Griddle, what the hell – “ Harrow started to say, before Gideon harshly clapped a hand over her mouth.
There was a long, tense silence. Harrow’s eyes were wide and startled, burning dark within her still–wet paint. Above her, Gideon’s heartbeat valiantly attempted to hammer its way into Harrow’s waifish ribcage.
Finally, the hot red halo of Gideon’s vision receded, and her neck muscles unclenched enough for her to turn her head. She looked back at the doorway, ready to greet her annihilation.
Oh – oh – it – what ?
Gideon shook her head, bewildered.
The doorway was completely plugged with a massive, weird–ass bone ward.
The wooden planks were scabbed over with a thick and yellowed cortex, its corners reinforced with sprawling trabeculae. The enormous osseous struts and plates braced against the sloping stone ramp and webbed onto the rock slabs of the adjoining walls. She could see, now, in the periphery of her vision, that the numerous bay windows of their rooms had been similarly blocked and fortified.
These colossal bony arches had suggested, in Gideon’s sleep–addled terror, the eldritch spikes and skittering limbs of the monstrous construct.
The adrenaline seeped, cold and wet, from her hysterical delirium, soaking her skin through with sweat. Harrow softly cleared her throat and wriggled, uncomfortably, underneath.
Gideon slowly slid off and crawled out from under the table, then sat up, numbly, on the stone floor. She closed her eyes and braced for the well–deserved smack on the back of the head, waited for Harrow’s vitriol to pour in to her still–ringing ears.
A small, cool hand pressed against her forehead.
“Warm, but no fever,” Harrow murmured. “Are you having hallucinations?”
“No, I, um –“ Gideon said thickly. “I just got confused.”
She looked up, blearily, at Harrow standing above her. The necromancer was clutching her hands nervously together. The edges of her mouth twitched nauseously, like she was about to throw up, and fresh white paint crinkled fretfully along her forehead and at the corners of her eyes. It took a moment for Gideon to register this new expression as concern.
Harrow had cleaned herself up, but only repainted the top half of her face. It was a simple skull, a broad, white forehead arched over her own high cheekbones. She had outlined her orbits in black but not actually painted them in. Her infinitely dark iris–and–pupil looked bottomless against her soft brown skin, ringed by thick, black lashes. Gideon’s eyes were inevitably drawn to the unpainted expanse beneath – to the delicate point of her jaw, the slender column of her neck, and, most sharply, to her naked mouth. It was normally a thin, hard line, scabbed over in flakes of white, slashed black in the middle and cut across with a facsimile of skeletal teeth. Now Gideon could see that Harrow’s lips were a deep reddish–brown, like polished wood.
“You may be experiencing a traumatic resonance,” said Harrow’s oddly soft little mouth. She caught her full lower lip slightly between her teeth, which made Gideon feel strange, both because Harrow was still doing her worried face, and also for more nebulous reasons.
“I cannot offer any psychological relief, necromantically – but I have taken great pains to adequately ward our living quarters.” Harrow drifted over to the doorway and indicated her complex skeletal latticework. Her dark gaze probed Gideon intensely. “I hope that you will be able to rest.”
Gideon floundered silently in this novel stream of sympathy, unsure of how she was expected to respond. She settled for mutely pushing herself up off the floor and sinking back down into the haggard armchair.
Fortunately, Harrow ruined the moment by grossly wrenching a tooth from her own mouth. She yawned wide, and an identical molar pushed out, with a thock!, into the raw, red hole. A trickle of blood gathered at the corner of her unpainted lips.
She turned to the doorway and sealed the extracted tooth to its rim with a spurt of osteoid. Gideon now noticed that the door’s molding was thickly studded with a sea of pearly white tombstones, a vast dental graveyard.
“You didn’t paint all the way,” said Gideon, bluntly.
Harrow averted her eyes. “I don’t want to aspirate the greasepaint – in the event that I need to reinforce the door.”
Gideon gripped the weathered arms of the chair. Harrow never met a threat with anything less than blistering arrogance. She had always thrown herself haughtily against the edge of Gideon’s sword. So to see her now, in some small way, afraid – now that made Gideon fucking nervous.
“If it’s that dangerous, shouldn’t we join up with the other Houses?”
Harrow shook her head. “I’m still not sure whether the construct is being controlled by someone – or something – or whether we’ve just triggered another Lyctoral experiment. If it’s mindlessly attracted to thanergetic concentrations, too many necromancers in one spot could draw it into a thanergetic well.”
Gideon spied the handle of her rapier where she had, in her mindless panic, kicked it under the cavalier bed. She stood, and retrieved it, and gestured, with its tip, beyond the heavily warded door.
“Put me in, coach.”
“Absolutely not!" said Harrow, sharply. “You will stay inside!”
"Please," she amended, twisting her hands together. Her mouth formed around the word awkwardly, like she didn’t quite know how to pronounce it, like it tasted sour on her tongue.
Then, because she had to reclaim her dignity, Harrow continued, dismissively, “Save the meatheaded posturing for intimidating other House cavaliers. This has progressed into something far more sinister. It is now time for bone to meet bone.”
Gideon’s memory flared with a vision of Issac Tettares’ sodium explosion – how the necromantic sum of tiny, fearless life had been the destruction of a single whipping tendril – one of hundreds.
Wanting to drown her thoughts in anything but blood, Gideon waved vaguely at the intricate bone ward, and asked, “So, how does it work?”
“Theorems,” said Harrow, crisply. She started to dig around in her mouth for another tooth.
Strangely, and perhaps for the first time ever, Gideon wanted to keep hearing Harrow’s voice. She nudged at the floodgates. “You’re always saying theorems, but what ARE theorems?”
Harrow took her knuckle out of her mouth, wet with blood and spit, and wiped it on her robe. “In skeletal tissue, theorems are equations for flow rates, primarily.”
Her face was paved with passive disinterest, but her delicate brow arched with a faint eagerness that promised to make Gideon all too sorry she asked.
“Flow rates?”
“Flow rates, cell–to–cell coupling, frequencies of cell division – “
“Cells? Like – little prisons?”
Harrow turned to face Gideon fully and steepled her fingers together. Now Gideon was really in for it. She sat back down in the chair, laid her rapier across her lap, and buckled in for the long haul.
“In a manner of speaking, yes. At the microscopic level, all organisms are a patchwork of discrete living units – animalcules, if you will. Although they are individually contained, and in necromantic contexts become independently viable, these ‘cells’ stack together to form the ‘prisons’ of organic bodies.”
Harrow cleared her throat importantly and tugged back both sleeves of her robe, exposing her slender wrists. Oh, lord, she was going to start adding hand motions.
“In flesh magic, cells adjoin cells with a similar structure and function. Muscle cells pull, nerve cells animate, blood cells transport, immune cells attack, and so on. But because these softer tissues have no levers to hang or pull on – they have no skeletal framework, in other words – flesh magicians almost always make simple, abstract structures. Their purely organic products are incapable of composing or animating complex constructs. Flesh magic, at its root, is basic cell division and adhesion, the most mundane and juvenile type of theorem.”
“I’m guessing that you’re going to tell me why bone magic is superior.”
Harrow, in fact, sounded like she was gearing up for a well–practiced exposition. Gideon imagined that the Body in the Locked Tomb was a very good listener, being dead and all. Harrow probably loved to curl up next to its stupid frozen corpse and whisper all sorts of minute skeletal factoids in its rotted ear – just as Gideon had rambled about swordwork for hours at the feet of her mother’s desiccated skeleton. Harrow probably even made up little sycophantic dialogs for the Body to say back to her, like, “Ooh, tell me more about osteoid,” and “Got any more fun facts about collagen?” and “Gosh, Harrow, I’d love to lick your sweet little pussy, but my tongue’s just a shriveled–up corn cob.”
Harrow had started to pace back and forth professorially, tipping her hand out to punctuate a word here and there. She continued, “Bone is much sturdier than flesh because it is not, itself, a composite of living cells. Rather, bone tissue is the organic and inorganic byproduct – collagen impregnated with mineral – of the cells entombed within it. After depositing new bone, a fraction of these cells are transformed into osteocytes – the regulators of bone function. Within the bone tissue, each osteocyte is enclosed in an ovoid cavity, its lacuna.”
Gideon watched the pleasant way that Harrow’s naked mouth rounded out the word lacuna. The deep tenor of her instruction resonated warmly in Gideon’s chest. The dire motivations for the door ward had briefly submerged within Harrow’s bony obsessions. Now she moved confidently within her storm of robes, her dark eyes shining, her gestures bright and animated. The vaguest suggestion of a grin tugged at her imperious expression. Harrow was, against all odds, excited to have a living captive audience. Although Gideon wasn’t understanding a goddamn word, she found herself, bizarrely, only wanting to hear more of it. She leaned back comfortably in the chair and let Harrow’s lecture wash over her.
“Lacuna means ‘pool’, and indeed, the osteocyte floats within this cavity, suspended in water. Lacunae are connected by a dense network of canals, through which the osteocytes speak with one another. When bone is mechanically pressed or bent, the water moves within the canals. The osteocyte is displaced along its tethers, and its membrane is painfully stretched and distorted. And then – the osteocyte screams.”
“It screams?”
“Current necromantic thought is that what we hear as a scream is actually some sort of chemical cascade and release. If the bone is bent so badly that it starts to crack, the osteocyte dies, and the scream is its death rattle. Whatever its mechanism, the scream attracts other types of bone cells, ones that carve out the damage and replace it with new bone.”
“Wait, so you can actually physically hear something?”
“Yes, if you’re a bone adept. That’s why I said that skeletal necromancy is primarily flow rate manipulation. By pushing around the fluid components of bone, I can hear and artificially modulate when and where the osteocytes scream – thereby precisely sculpting the tissue’s creation or destruction.”
“Sounds like you and bone are pretty intimate,” said Gideon, trying to mentally rearrange boning, screaming, and fluids into some kind of sex joke.
“I do feel a certain…kinship,” said Harrow. There was a ripple, on her face, of a deep and distant melancholy. She turned back to the door, and said, very quietly, “What am I but a great dead tomb for two hundred living souls, screaming?”
Yikes. Gideon quickly scrambled for an academic line of questioning to steer Harrow away from that particular rabbit trail. The last time they had hopped down it together, she had impulsively kissed Harrow’s forehead, right between her nasal and frontal bones – on the cranial landmark that Harrow would have, more technically, called the glabella, if she was willing to admit that it had happened.
“So, uh, a simple shape like this – “ Gideon gestured to the door’s rectangular cortical sheath – “must be pretty easy for you.”
Fortunately, like all bone adepts, Harrow was easily tempted back into osteological commentary.
“Oh, quite the opposite! Abstract structures are the most difficult type of bone necromancy. Constructs are easy. Each cell of your body already knows how to make your skeleton – well, it knows how to make a cartilage model of your skeleton that it expands and ossifies as you grow. So, to make a construct –“
Here, Harrow grossly popped out another molar, with a sucking shthock!
“– I merely trigger and accelerate its native cartilage modeling, and then ossify it quickly.”
Harrow drew back her hand, as though she was going to throw the tooth down into a construct. Then she hesitated on the unnecessary consideration that Gideon might want some additional background information, beyond watching her mesmerizingly unpainted mouth.
“So, how are these cellular processes accessible outside of a living system? At least on Ninth House planets, thanergy keeps cells alive in perpetuity, in a sort of pre–apoptotic suspension. Thanergy can be cycled through a cell to power its function. To expand and grow the necromantic constructs, thanergy dispersal must also suck in organic and inorganic materials from the thanergetic environment. This is seeded and supplemented by the necromancer’s own vascular supply – the waste product of which is, of course, the blood sweat.”
During this extemporization, Harrow gestured around wetly with the molar, spattering a few drops of blood from its dangling root onto the floor. Gideon eyed the unused pile of plaque–coated, cavitated teeth of Ninth House ancients, festering on the low, black glass table in what was clearly supposed to be a candy dish.
“Is it necessary for the teeth to be so…uh…fresh?”
“It doesn’t matter for necromantic purposes. I’m using my own teeth for this ward because it’s easier to link the cells in the root pulp to my thalergetic signature.”
“You mean thanergetic?”
“No, thalergetic – life energy, not death energy. I’ve necromantically trapped them such that, immediately following cessation of my thalergetic signature, all teeth will expand into constructs automatically. Most of the teeth are outside –“
Gideon gulped, looking at the literally dozens of teeth studding the inside.
“But, in the event of my death – er – well, they won’t attack you as long as you’re not the most threatening thing in the room.”
Gideon again nervously gripped the rotted fabric of the armchair. “Hey, who’s the cav here? If you’re dead, then I’m definitely dead.”
“Mm.” said Harrow, noncommittally.
She threw the tooth down, and it unraveled into her full, defleshed skeletal mirror before it hit the floor.
Hand on her chin, Harrow surveyed the gracile frame of her self–construct as it swayed side to side, delicately clenching its weak, tiny fists. Then she looked closely at Gideon, uncomfortably running her dark eyes over the widely splayed knees, thick arms, and broad shoulders that barely fit in the armchair.
“Griddle, let me see your mouth for a moment.”
“Oh, no, you don’t. I have exactly the amount of teeth I want to have right now.”
“But I only…“
“EXACTLY the amount.”
“Very well.” Nonplussed, Harrow produced a scaphoid from the sleeve of her robe and began aimlessly fiddling with the tiny carpal bone.
“So,” she continued, “You must be wondering: why employ a bone ward that is – at least to a point – mechanically impenetrable? Why not just surround the room with an entire army of constructs?”
Gideon was not wondering this – she was watching Harrow fondle the pleasing bump of the scaphoid, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger. The necromancer was mindlessly transforming the nub of bone back and forth between a scaphoid and a lunate, pressing her thumb into the smooth crescent–shaped articulation of the adjacent carpal bone. She had no callouses on her hands at all. Her slender fingers looked very soft, very – precise.
“The limiting factor of constructs,” Harrow was saying, “is their animation. Admittedly, construct animation is a type of spirit magic, but it is the projection of one’s own living spirit – the fight or flight instinct of the sympathetic nervous system. When a necromancer pushes her fight component into a construct, it hones and attacks automatically. But once the necromancer’s brain is dead, she doesn’t have a nervous system, so her constructs become inert.”
Gideon shifted the rapier on her lap. “Once again, as your cavalier, I am dedicated to protecting your –“
Harrow surged ahead. “An abstract structure, on the other hand, will hold mechanically in perpetuity as long as its material integrity isn’t compromised. But because nothing as unnaturally large and irregular as this bone ward exists in reality – it has no native cellular programing – I can only construct and maintain it by calculating all of the thanergetic interactions by hand.”
She ran her hand affectionately over one of the sweeping trabecular arches that extended to the floor. “Mechanical strength of the abstract ward, broadly writ, is a complex interplay of compact bone curvature and trabecular bone energy dispersal. You were able to visualize these mechanical signatures as colored spots on the winnowing construct – although I still don’t quite understand how. I also have to estimate collagen–mineral interactions and osteocyte network structures on a far larger scale than exists in nature.”
Gideon nodded along studiously, noting primarily that osteocyte had two letter o’s, which made Harrow very intriguingly purse her naked lips twice.
“What were those cell things called again?”
“…Osteocytes?”
Gideon grinned cheekily. “Oh yeah, that was it.”
Harrow squinted at Gideon, a little suspiciously, but continued, “Further complicating an abstract construction, if the structure is damaged during a fight, I have to manually modulate the osteocytic response. Lyctors are thought to be able to perceive cellular voices so precisely that they can balance systems automatically, creating perpetually regenerating tissue structures.”
“You mean that ash stuff you pulled out of the keyhole this morning?”
“Yes, yes, Griddle!” Harrow clapped her hands together, only once. She narrowly caught what might have been an enthused smile and quickly twisted it into a disinterested grimace. She then cleared her throat, a little too indifferently.
“Perpetual bone. You certainly recall that removing it was – costly. Creating it would require an incomprehensible feat of engineering. And it would demand enough power to take that necromancer’s life – and maybe more.”
Her eyes unfocused slightly. “How it got there – I wonder…”
She worried her lower lip between her teeth again, delicately, and Gideon leaned forward in the chair with great interest.
However, Harrow merely turned and wandered back up the ramp to the bone ward, apparently academically spent.
Well, she had just enthusiastically ejaculated the sum total of her necromantic knowledge all over her entranced cavalier, which was a weird way to phrase that, Gideon.
Harrow pressed her palm to door’s thick, yellowed cortical bone plug. There was a slicing sthick! and she hissed slightly, stiffly spreading her fingers. Then she pulled her hand away, marking the surface of the bone ward with an irregular, five–pronged, bloody star. As Harrow turned her palm to wipe it on her robe, Gideon saw five thin, sharp, red–tinged spines recede back through her flesh, into her metacarpals.
“I didn’t know you signed your work.”
“This is a revenant ward,” Harrow said, her voice suddenly clipped.
“Oh shit, that ward can ghostbust, too?”
Harrow frowned. “Ghosts can only be repelled. They cannot be made to – bust.”
“Oh, I’ve seen a ghost bust all right,” Gideon mumbled, thinking fondly of Perverted Poltergeist #9 – a magazine special issue subtitled She’s spookier and spunkier than ever!
“Anyways,” Gideon continued, “I thought Teacher said the ‘ten thousand million unfed ghosts’ were all down in the Facility. This construct is just a brainless bunch of bones.”
“This is something we brought from home,” said Harrow, tightly.
“Uh – well, I didn’t bring any haunted dolls on this trip – other than you, of course.” For some reason, Gideon’s gaze slid over to her longsword, still hidden in the false floor of her travel chest.
Harrow tapped the center of the bloody handprint. The ghost ward crackled five jagged, bloody streaks out to the periphery of the door frame, and thick streams of blood wept down the edges of the molding, staining them deeply red.
With a deep, disgusted chill, Gideon suddenly recognized the five–pronged symbol. It was the same shape that densely matted the walls and door of the corridor that led to Harrow’s cell, back in Drearburh. The smallest symbols, near the bottoms of the walls, had been barely the size of an infant’s hand.
“Oh, gross – that’s your blood? I’ve been touching your old–ass, dried–up, rotten blood this whole time?”
Gideon gagged slightly. She had long been in the habit of smacking the crimson, leaden door of Harrow’s cell, in passing, as high and hard as she could, making it boom and resonate late at night when she knew Harrow had an early dawn at cloister.
“You thought it was, perhaps, paint?” Harrow inquired acerbically.
“I thought you had awful taste in wallpaper!”
It made logical sense that Drearburh would be haunted out the ass, but a paranormal plot point from the dirty magazine tickled curiously at the back of Gideon’s brain.
“How could we have brought revenants from the Ninth? Ghosts don’t get attached to people, they get attached to, like, the murder weapon, or –”
“These revenants are attached to the murder weapon,” interrupted Harrow, stiffly. “All two hundred of them, remember?”
Yikes, again. Gideon squirmed in her seat, not really ready for another lightening round of assuaging Harrow’s personhood. That particular endeavor had, not a few hours past, led to Harrow’s violent, salinified weeping, her desperate pleas to be struck deservedly dead, and to Gideon’s peculiar discovery that, despite eighteen years of greasy facepaint, the skin of Harrow’s high forehead was, in fact, incredibly soft.
Instead, cringing at her own unsympathetic tone, Gideon asked, “So, your ghosts might be visiting here – uh – tonight?”
“Oh, they try to inhabit me every night, for as long as I can remember. Typically, a simple blood ward keeps them out. But with the complex balance of thanergetic interactions sustaining the other wards, I can’t concentrate the energy as strongly.”
Gideon could handle bone monsters and flesh monsters, but ghosts were notoriously un–swordable. That went double for ghosts possessing the body of the necromancer she had just sworn, expressly, to not hit with a sword. She drummed her fingers apprehensively against the grip of her rapier.
“So, if they get in here and get inside you, I should just kind of prepare myself to be flipped inside out?”
“Not to worry,” Harrow waved off the question absently. “They are insane – all revenants are, after a time. But in the event of a possession, I’ll become necromantically inert. The ghosts can only control my physical body, and their malice is typically directed – internally. To prevent myself from ripping out my own throat, I’ll lock my joints if the ghost ward trips. But if I’m dead, unconscious, or necromantically exhausted –“
Here she looked Gideon very thoroughly up and down, in a way that made the back of Gideon’s neck feel strangely hot.
“– well, you shouldn’t have any problem restraining me physically.”
From deep within her sleeve, Harrow again produced the scaphoid bone, now separated from its lunate companion. Both tiny carpals were punched through the center and dangling from short, circular lengths of cord. She tossed them both over to Gideon, who caught them neatly in one hand.
“I think we’re both supposed to wear the friendship bracelets, Harrow.”
“Tie one on each wrist. These will allow you to pass my wards – in the event.”
In the event of what? The monstrous construct had grown fat and happy on making cavaliers watch their necromancers die, but it would be a blisteringly hot day in Drearburh before that happened to the Ninth. If that monster got into this room, the only way that Gideon was passing any wards before Harrow was if she was carrying Harrow on her back. And, no, Harrow didn’t deserve her loyalty, which must be why the necromancer was being so infuriatingly fatalistic – but Gideon had signed up to save her, so Harrow had better get fucking familiar with feeling safe.
Harrow was glaring at Gideon, dangerously. “Are you going to tie them on, or are my constructs going to hold you down and tie them on?”
Gideon huffed in frustration and tied on Harrow’s wimpy coward bracelets, just so the necromancer would calm down one teensy iota. It fucking sucked, being forced to cower here in bone–ward–topia, while that osseous asshole was out there, in the darkness, roaming free. In the morning, there would be a settlement of the Fourth and Fifth’s accounts. And there would be a reckoning for making Harrow scared out of her goddamn mind, regardless of how resigned she had become about her mortality.
Harrow was now apparently satisfied that Gideon would know how to run, shrieking and sniveling, from the warded room at the first sign of danger. She settled back at the worn writing desk, the chair turned slightly towards the warded door. After a moment of tapping her fingers nervously against its mottled surface, she stood and shifted her chair to face the warded windows, instead. Her ass grazed the seat for half a second, and then she grimaced, stood again, and turned the chair back to face the warded door.
Gideon was absolutely not going to spend the evening watching Harrow anxiously spin around inside a ward–watching panopticon.
She rose from the armchair and silently shoved the unused cavalier bed away from the foot of Harrow’s bed, past the writing desk, and up against the wall opposite. Then she retrieved the unusually tall, wide dressing mirror from the corner, carefully carried over its unwieldly bulk, and propped it on top of the cot. She gestured, grandly, at the setup.
“Sit at your desk, face the door, and see the windows in the mirror.”
“Oh – yes.” Harrow mercifully released the fingernail she had been biting down to the quick. A trace of tension lifted from her slight shoulders. “Very strategic, Griddle.”
Gideon’s cheeks burned pleasantly at Harrow’s compliment. “Mmph,” she said, brilliantly.
Harrow’s small pink tongue darted out to moisten the slightly plump lower lip of her shockingly bare, extraordinarily silky, perfectly soft little – God, Gideon, stop staring at her mouth! What the HELL!
“Tomorrow we need to move,” Harrow said. “Collect resources, hide out in one of the key rooms, maybe collaborate with the Sixth to reinforce it. We need to assess the construct’s mechanism before we confront it again.”
Gideon nodded. “You, Sex Pal, and Dulcinea hunker down in the key room – me and Cam go on the hunt.”
“No splitting up!“ Harrow interjected sharply. Her eyes darted to the side. “And no Seventh.”
Gideon whirled on her immediately. “You just said that she had an alibi! And, and – that you had downgraded her as a suspect!”
In the pool, Harrow had also said that she was hopelessly and pathetically and disgustingly in love with frostbite beelzebub, which Gideon had assumed meant that they could both see other people – not that they were even seeing each other.
“Something of an alibi, downgraded in some respects – you really do listen selectively, Griddle.”
Harrow glanced down at Gideon’s fingers tightly gripping the back of the armchair. She licked her lips nervously, which, Gideon sullenly revised, was barely sexy at all.
“The Duchess can be no threat to this construct, it certainly won’t attack her with Teacher there – “ Harrow offered, unconvincingly.
“Are you fucking kidding me? It’s deliberately picking off the weakest people! Dulcinea is at more risk than any of us! Why are you always so goddamn weird about her?”
Harrow was sitting very stiffly in her chair. After a pause, she said, carefully, “At first, I thought she was here out of House obligation. But her pursuit of the Lyctor keys – it still troubles me. Why would someone in so much pain seek to live for ten thousand years?”
“Why not? You’re doing it,” said Gideon, cruelly.
Harrow’s breath caught sharply. She looked down quickly at her lap, but Gideon caught the bitter flash of misery on her face. “I have my own motivations,” said Harrow, quietly.
Gideon swallowed the sudden lump in her throat and pushed her hand back through her hair. “Look,” she said, softer, “I’m going to be there when you need me. I’m not going to abandon you. You don’t need to act like some kind of – “
She stopped herself from saying jilted lover.
Harrow said, into her lap, “During the Avulsion trial, because she favored you, I thought she was trying to give you an opportunity to be – free of me. But she saw something in you, something I somehow never saw. She knew that you wouldn’t – and I still don’t understand why you didn’t – “
Harrow looked up, grimacing, and her face was shockingly open for a moment. Her eyes were wide with an unspoken question, two great black holes burning within the chalky white of her mask. Her brow creased its greasepaint in bewilderment. Then she quickly smoothed back into impenetrable glass.
“By all rights that siphoning should have killed you,” said Harrow, firmly. “Now I wonder whether I was the one she thought dangerous.”
She stood, abruptly, and stared Gideon down intensely. “If we are separated, you must be quick as a rat and a hundred–fold more clever. Some things that gleam in the darkness are diamonds, and some are worms.”
“I – what? What the hell would a rat do with a diamond? At least it can eat a worm.”
“Fine,” said Harrow, curtly. “Then perish.”
She sat back down, brusquely, at the writing desk, and roughly slapped open her skin–bound journal.
This particular page had seven numbered lines, each followed by a scrawl of Harrow’s crypt script. The only words that Gideon could recognize were the letter–number combinations appending each line, denoting Harrow’s code for one of the key rooms. The eighth line had been left blank.
Trying to smooth over their spat, Gideon asked, after a moment, “So, uh – whatcha writin’ there?”
“Reasons why our plan for survival should be dictated by an incorrigible flirt who falls instantly in love when given a crumb of affection,” sneered Harrow, dripping with sarcasm.
“Hey, I’m not the one who planned my life trajectory around a bag of frozen snow leeks becoming my girlfriend!”
“Well, remind me to never be tender with you!”
“Oh, as if, Harrow!”
It would have to be a pretty goddamn big crumb of tenderness to make her fall instantly in love with – Gideon immediately derailed that train of thought and punted it out of the airlock.
She couldn’t really be too harsh on Harrow for being captivated with a beguiling corpse – not when Gideon was similarly smitten, although her own half–dead crush was still shallowly breathing.
It was so easy to fall in love, when you were young – before broken hearts and shattered promises made you calloused and suspicious. It was so natural to sink, so deeply and completely, into infatuation – to feel that your affection was perfect, and important, and inevitable. When you were on the cusp of adulthood, your body was ready for it, but your brain was still squishy and reckless and impulsive. It made you want to be brave. It made you want to go to war. It made you want to live and die for something that seemed, for the first time, like it mattered. And it made you want to fuck, a whole lot. It was the sort of behavior that Harrow would call ‘reproductively adaptive – a relic from a time when such things mattered.’
Harrow was hunched closely over her paper, scowling as she scribbled in its margins. Gideon could tell that she desperately wanted to be left alone to sulk. So, of course, Gideon sidled up behind her and obnoxiously pretended to read off the list.
“Reasons why Gideon should be in charge: Hot. Strong. Tall and broad. Cool shades. Excellent sword skills. Incredible dancer. Desired by women, admired by men, praised by children.”
She reached close over Harrow’s shoulder – which made Harrow’s breath hitch sharply, for some reason – and tapped the blank eighth line. “You can put here: ‘Reasons why Harrow should be in charge: Due to small size, unlikely to be cannibalized first.’”
A flicker of diversion passed over Harrow’s face. “Is that a desirable quality for leadership?”
“You’re already holed up like it’s the apocalypse. If everyone else is this paranoid, we’re all just a few days away from eating each other.”
Harrow muttered, “If you had your way, you’d already be eating the Seventh.”
“Oh – oh my god! Was that a sex joke?!” Gideon was astounded into a broad, lopsided grin.
“Cannibalized…” Harrow murmured. She started to make a note on the eighth line, and then suddenly dug the tip of her lead pencil so hard into the paper that it tore. She quickly snapped the journal shut and shoved it back into the desk.
Gideon sank back down in the armchair opposite. Having exhausted all of Harrow’s available routines – lecturing, control, jealousy, withering sarcasm, and brooding – they were now just kind of looking at each other.
Gideon knew what she would like to be doing around this hour, but she also didn’t fancy being caught by the monstrous construct with her pants down, stickily clutching a dirty magazine. What else was there to pass the time in this dank bone dungeon? The room held just her and Harrow, crouched anxiously within their cancellous citadel – and the giant mirror against the wall, and Harrow’s huge–ass bed.
Gideon said, eventually, “If I knew we were having a lock–in, I’d have invited the Sixth over.”
“A lock–in?”
“You know, a lock–in, a sleepover – play some games, tell some stories, reveal some secrets, grow closer as friends and companions?”
“That sounds like a paper–thin premise from one of your pornographies.”
“Not necessarily,” said Gideon, thinking fondly of Sapphic Sleepover on the Seventh, which was, admittedly, her primary source material for the concept.
“I have no desire to engage Palamedes Sextus with any of these – sleepover sensualities.”
“I will make a public note that you did not say no to Camilla.”
Harrow seemed to flush slightly. “Camilla Hect would appear to be a sensible cavalier, not prone to frivolities – unlike some I have known,” she said, pointedly.
“Oh, really? I bet you one–hundred press–ups that the Sixth is having mind–blowing, we’re–all–about–to–die, crazy–awesome sex right now.”
Harrow choked, flustered.
“What, you don’t believe me? They sleep in the same bed, Harrow.”
Harrow fidgeted in her chair. “From what I can tell, the affections of Palamedes Sextus lie … elsewhere.”
“From what you can tell?”
“If you watch his eyes –”
“Eyes,” said Gideon dismissively, rolling her own in an exaggerated fashion. “Attraction is all about body language. And Sex Pal’s body says, hey Cam, this is statistically likely to be the end of the world, and I wanna open your encyclopedia to S.”
Harrow shifted again, cagily.
“S for Sex,” Gideon clarified, “Not Statistically.”
“You might observe the world more accurately if you ever looked at anything above the neck.”
“I watch bodies because people don’t punch you with their eyes.”
“Well, I’ve also assessed his – biological excreta.”
“Excreta?”
“Oh, yes, heart rate, pupil dilation, oral saturation, blood – er – distribution. That’s the reason for telling secrets in saltwater, of course – it amplifies the conduction of biological signals, drowns out any necromantic eavesdropping.”
“Stop listening to my fluids, Harrow.”
“Oh, Griddle, the machinations of your fluids have been my constant companion since your pubescence. I’ve had to tune them out completely. Otherwise, it’s like being dashed about in a great sewage pipe. You start gurgling at the faintest stimulation – suggestive crevices, two vaguely spherical rocks pushed together – “
“Gross, thanks.” Gideon stretched back in the armchair, tipping its front legs off the floor. “Anyways, given our impending evisceration, Palamedes’ mystery soulmate should have one–flesh, one–ended her ass down to Canaan House if she wanted to walk her fingers through his card catalog.”
Harrow tapped the tips of her index fingers together nervously. “One flesh doesn’t mean –"
Gideon sat the chair back down and leaned forward in it confidently.
“Harrow. This concept may seem weird to you because you have engaged yourself completely one–sidely to an ice cube at the end of time. But you can fuck other people on your way to the apocalypse.”
Before Harrow could comment, Gideon added, “Actually, that reminds me of a great sleepover game!”
Gideon eagerly rubbed her hands together, summoning up the classic party game she had read about in Sapphic Sleepover on the Seventh. Harrow groaned, apprehensively surveying the gleam in Gideon’s eye.
“Fuck, Marry, Kill: Dulcinea Septimus, Camilla Hect, and…let’s say…Coronabeth Tridentarius.”
One dark brow raised in slight disapproval. The necromancer did not appear be considering the prompt.
Gideon explained, “So the premise of this game is, you have to choose one person to fuck, one to –"
“Yes, Griddle, the rules were quite obvious from the juvenile phrasing. Your game, however, is unplayable.”
Gideon barked out a laugh. “Explain how.”
Harrow folded her hands primly in her lap. “Dulcinea Septimus is not fair game because she would, by definition, be killed instantly by either extramarital or marital – er – fucking. Camilla Hect I don’t think I could kill easily, based on her previous ease of restraint of my person. Coronabeth Tridentarius I could kill without question, but she would absolutely not fuck me in any circumstance, ergo, your game is trash.”
“Harrow, this game is hypothetical. And I will point out that, once again, you did not recuse yourself from an intimate Camilla encounter – in case you thought that would escape my notice.”
Harrow’s nostrils flared, and her cheeks darkened slightly. “Irrelevant. I will not play a flawed game.”
“If I can only pick people who are willing to know you carnally, I am drawing on a real exclusive population. Uh – no offense.”
“Unfuck your fuck game and I will play it, Nav.”
“Fine,” Gideon huffed. “Fuck, Marry, Kill: Gideon Nav, the Body in the Locked Tomb, and “ – here, Gideon shuddered involuntarily – “Ianthe Tridentarius.”
Harrow stared at her incredulously.
“Oh, what NOW, you don’t think Ianthe Tridentarius wants to fuck you? Harrow, that woman wants to wear you like a hat.”
Gideon couldn’t listen to people’s fluids, but she did notice certain crude gestures made towards her oblivious necromancer with sickly fingers and lurid yellow tongues.
Harrow swallowed thickly. “That – wasn’t the one I was confused about you including.”
“What else, dead people can’t get married?”
Harrow’s eyes darted away, and she said, in a slightly hoarse voice, “This is not a good game to play.”
“Fine,” Gideon scoffed. “You’ve already ruined it through excessive rules–lawyering.”
Harrow was, for some reason, very deliberately avoiding Gideon’s gaze.
“You do want to fuck the Body in the Locked Tomb, though,” Gideon muttered.
Harrow seemed, for a moment, far away, and Gideon saw a flicker of that small, astonished smile again – the one that transformed Harrow’s face into an affliction of beauty. It made Gideon’s throat feel weirdly tight.
“You know, I still find the whole undead corpse thing really creepy, but on some level, I envy you. Wanting someone so desperately for so long – when she wakes up, I bet you guys are gonna have some fucking incredible sex.”
Harrow flushed and made a weird strangled noise. For a moment, Gideon wasn’t sure if she was going to explode all of Gideon’s bones or spontaneously orgasm. These were probably close to the same thing for Harrow anyways.
In any case, flippantly combining Harrow and fucking incredible sex had saturated them both with a suffocating awkwardness. Gideon scrambled to fix it.
“I mean, not super wild sex, she’s ten thousand years old – not, like, some horny nineteen year old in peak physical condition that could probably fuck for hours, if she had the opportunity. Hypothetically.”
Yep, saved it.
Harrow finally said, “That’s – not the way it is.”
“Oh, no? I mean, she’s dead, but at some point she won’t be dead, and you think she’s hot, right?”
Gideon actually had no idea what Harrow considered hot, which bothered her.
Harrow twisted her hands in her lap. “The Body will not – desire me that way.”
“Why the fuck not?
Harrow glanced at the mirror against the wall, then looked down at her lap again. She said, in a small voice, “You know why.”
Harrow was not, in isolation, unattractive, but she coated herself in ugliness. Her tattered, rotting robes perpetually shook off acrid bone dust, which stung sharp in the nose and pricked the sinuses. The grave wax of her bracelets and ear studs stained her soft brown skin with a pale white sheen. Her constructs leeched out greasy fat, the yellow tint of fresh–cut bone, souring her flesh and drenching her hair until the sonic after. And then, of course, there was the blood – thick streams from her nose and ears, muddy trickles at the corners of her eyes and mouth, pinpricks on her skin that bubbled her chalk–white facepaint into crimson slime.
Harrow did not attempt to be observed. Harrow did not desire to be perceived. She was an imperial servant, without the Second’s overblown allegiance. She was a queen, without the Third’s pretentious grandeur. She was a zealot, without the Eighth’s arrogant fanaticism.
And, without the Seventh’s needy and conspicuous daintiness, she was a suffering monument to death.
Harrow just existed, loudly, in the world, and the world was forced to flow around her.
Gideon had never thought that Harrow might be insecure. Maybe, in the mirror, she only saw a jagged patchwork of two hundred wasted souls.
“Ohhhhh, no you don’t!” said Gideon. “I have another sleepover game we can play!”
She hurried to the bathroom and retrieved the pot of white greasepaint from the counter. Then she tugged Harrow out of her chair and, against the necromancer’s grumbling protests, stood her up in front of the mirror.
“This is a game for when one girl is bitching and moaning about how she’s so hideous and so ugly and no one will ever love her, and then all the other girls tell her how hot she is! This game is called – so far as I can tell – ‘You go, girl!’”
Harrow said, suspiciously, “Where are these girls going?”
In Sapphic Sleepover on the Seventh, after some mutual confidence boosting, the girls started going down on each other. Gideon decided it was best not to mention this.
Instead, she gave Harrow her most enthusiastic jazz hands and announced, “It’s time for a makeover!"
Harrow’s wrinkled nose and tiny scowl showed that she despised the jazz hands.
Also, Gideon had no fucking clue how to do a makeover.
She came around in front of Harrow, her back to the mirror. Dipping the brush into the white greasepaint, Gideon studied the expanse of bare skin below Harrow’s high cheekbones. God, why were her eyes being drawn to it constantly?
She lifted Harrow’s chin with the tips of her fingers, and Harrow trembled slightly. Brushing off an odd tingly sensation, Gideon swiped a long, white stroke from the pinnacle of Harrow’s cheek, along the elegant curve of her jaw, and down to her pointed chin. She repeated the motion on the other side, giving Harrow’s skull paint the appearance of an open, screaming mouth. Then she painted sweeping, spikey teeth along each cheek, interlocking between the yawning white jaws. The paint–smeared brush stroked roughly against Harrow’s naked skin, softly scratching the silence between them.
“Oh yeah,” said Gideon, quietly, admiring her bitchin’ skull work. “Your popsicle girlfriend is gonna go wild for this one.”
Now she only needed to paint a few more awesomely scary fangs over Harrow’s untouched lips. For yet unclear reasons, Gideon desperately wanted to cover up the soft bow of that ruddy little mouth. She brought the edge of her hand very close and started to paint in the nasal spine, stroking down towards the deep divot above Harrow’s upper lip.
“Not the mouth,” Harrow said, and her naked lips wetly brushed against Gideon’s little finger. Gideon bit back a tiny yelp and quickly took her hand away. She set the grease paint down on the writing desk, feeling, inexplicably, a little shaky.
Harrow looked up at her curiously. “There’s a risk of aspiration, remember?”
Gideon swallowed hard and stood back behind Harrow. “Makeup’s finished. Moving on to the clothes.”
This was also intensely challenging, because Harrow had exactly one outfit, repeated in several dreary shades of black.
Gideon rotated around to Harrow’s side, and then back behind her, stroking her own chin thoughtfully. “So, this is pretty much okay already...”
Harrow glowered up at her. “Don’t patronize me, Griddle. I’ve seen the kinds of magazines you look at.”
“Hey, I have been working with a very limited selection of literature here!” Gideon protested. “Since you never approved my purchase order for Dark Vestals to Feel Sexually Conflicted About.”
“That could not possibly have been a real publication.”
“I only ever got my hands on one bootleg copy, and it was badly traced!”
(Goddamn if Gideon didn’t fuck herself raw to it, though.)
She tapped the ghastly, pitted clavicle of Harrow’s rotted–out bone armor.
“For now, how about you take off this thing.”
“My exoskeleton?”
“You do have bones on the inside, right?”
Harrow shifted between her feet and sucked on the inside of her cheek, considering. “I suppose I could suspend decorum briefly for this – consultation.”
Harrow folded her robe around her shoulders and shuffled around inside, disarticulating the decaying ribs and os coxae with a series of squelching pops. The entire mechanism dissolved down into a knob of bone, which she shoved into a pocket.
Her robe now fell slightly closer against her body, although she still had no discernable shape. The stiff, drab fabric was densely speckled with tiny white fragments, and stained with splotches thickly soaked with blood and fat, still pungent from her earlier warding.
Gideon put her hands on her hips. “Harrow. Your lady has been wet n’ horny for ten THOUSAND years. You think she’s going to want to crawl up under your gross, stinky robe for two hours? You have to work with me here.”
Harrow sighed heavily and poked one small hand out of her threadbare sleeve to gesture at the dresser. “If you must, retrieve my ceremonial robe – it should be cleaner.”
Behind her, Gideon rubbed her hands together and started to turn towards the wardrobe. “Excellent. When your ice maiden sees THIS, she’s gonna say – “
Unexpectedly, Harrow pushed her robe off over her shoulders, and it fell to the floor.
“ – Holy FUCK, Harrow, you have tits and an ass!”
Harrow’s face pinched in startled confusion. She stuttered, “I do not think the Body will – say that.”
Before she could think, Gideon’s hands gripped Harrow’s shockingly unrobed shoulders, turning her quickly to the side and then back to face the mirror. A high, desperate noise squeaked out of Gideon’s throat. She hadn’t really seen Harrow, in the darkness of the pool, but now she could see fucking everything.
The soft curves of Harrow’s body were small, but so was the rest of her, and goddamn if she wasn’t proportional.
“You hit puberty? You hit PUBERTY? Oh, god, I thought it just didn’t happen!”
She had technically seen Harrow fully naked after the Avulsion trial, but Gideon only remembered the depthless panic in her eyes.
Those same eyes were currently boring deep, dark holes into the stone floor. Gideon could see, in the mirror, that Harrow’s high cheekbones were burned scarlet. Her small hand tightly gripped her other wrist. “I don’t really have … anything,” she mumbled.
Eyeing the gentle swell of Harrow’s breasts, Gideon said, insanely, “I mean, you have a mouthful –“
FUCKING HELL, why had she phrased it THAT WAY?!
Gideon quickly bent to pick up Harrow’s robe. This put her briefly level with the necromancer’s tight, round little ass, and she noted with shrill terror how closely it fit into her leather trousers.
“Let’s put this back on. Are you cold? You look really cold,” Gideon babbled, making direct eye contact in the mirror with Harrow’s nipples, which she could now see stiffly poking through the thin shirt.
“I am adequately –“ Harrow caught the reflection of Gideon’s wide, wild eyes, and asked, suspiciously, “What are you looking at?”
Gideon half–shouted, hysterically, “I didn’t know your rib thing was a fucking – brassiere!”
“Of course, whyever else would I have shaped it that way?”
“I THOUGHT you got it off a LADY SKELETON!"
“I – what? Skeletons don’t have –“
“You know, the breastbone!” Gideon raved, nonsensically.
“The term, Griddle,” – Harrow pinched the bridge of her nose – “is sternum.”
An incredulous smirk spread across her face, and she whipped around to face her cavalier. Her acute embarrassment was briefly eclipsed by the opportunity to dunk Gideon’s eternal cockiness into the shit.
“For all your bluster – you haven’t touched a single breast, have you?"
Then her brow furrowed. “But – you also have –"
Harrow reached out mindlessly and nearly touched Gideon’s chest, before she caught herself and pulled her hand away sharply, stumbling back into a deep blush.
Dropping the robe in fright, Gideon wallowed backwards and sat down hard in the armchair. She bent double, elbows on her knees, and gripped her head between her hands. She was never going to psychologically recover from this.
Thickly, she said, “Please just put the robe back on.”
There was dreadful pause, and then a quiet rustling in Gideon’s periphery as Harrow silently picked up her robe and shrugged it back over her shoulders. Her mercifully shapeless form sat back down, stiffly, at her writing desk. Her jaw was clenched, her expression steeled and tight.
In a voice that was not hateful, or furious, but only very sad, Harrow said, under her breath, “I should have known that would be disgusting for you.”
Oh, no, no, no. What was disgusting was Gideon’s sudden, blistering, animalistic urge to put her grabby hands all over – oh god, please, think about anything else! She scrubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, begging to obliterate Harrow’s unrobed visage. Stripped of her grimy bones and putrid cloak, with only a skin of thin fabric and tight leather underneath, it had felt like Harrow was wearing nothing at all.
Gideon was fucking spiraling. She had to pull back.
She racked her brain through her remaining cache of magazine–derived sleepover games. Oh, lord, why were they all so awfully sexual? Spin the bottle? Disastrous. Even if they added constructs, Gideon could only make out with a skeleton so many times before probability landed her on a soft, warm mouth. Would you rather? Cataclysmic. Gideon could only think of one impossibly deranged and dirty thing she currently would rather.
But wait! Overall, Harrow still fucking sucked, forever! Gideon was going to dunk the searing image of Harrow’s god–awfully soft little body headfirst into a big slimy bucket of the necromancer’s nastiest moments. She spun through her mental rolodex of Harrow’s best worst soundbites. This was how she always used to psyche herself up to push Harrow’s stupid, sneering face down into the dirt of Drearburh.
Fortunately, Harrow had, her entire life, said only truly repulsive things, such as:
Your cavalier drew on my cavalier.
But for the love of the Emperor, Griddle, you are something else with that sword.
I’m merely saying that you’re an incredible swordswoman.
Gideon choked. What she had meant to remember was Harrow saying, gruesomely,
I must no longer accept being a stranger to you.
In what way can I earn your trust?
Don’t price your life so cheaply.
Reeling, Gideon strained back further, to the way they were on the Ninth, before Canaan House sloshed them so weirdly together.
You don’t get to turn and leave quite so easily.
I wanted to wait…for the very moment when you thought you’d gotten away…to take it from you.
Gideon saying, You don’t own me. And Harrow responding, Oh, Griddle, but I do.
And then, this very morning, When I release you from my service, Nav, you will know about it.
Yes, oh, yes, that was the thing to push on. This slurry of well–trod contempt would flush out her inexplicably goopy insides and cool her hotly burning cheeks. An old familiar animosity settled bitterly in the pit of her stomach. She dug her thumb deeper into the wound. Harrow had said on the Ninth, It won’t be the last time I make you weep, and Harrow had said on the Ninth, I completely fucking hate you, and Harrow had had said on the Ninth, I want to watch you die.
And yet…Harrow never made good on her promise to see Gideon’s end. She just wouldn’t goddamn release her, not even into the jaws of death. Neither would she bribe Gideon into sworn silence in the Cohort, or imprison her, gagged, in the depths of the catacombs.
Knowing the truth about the long–dead Reverend Father and Mother, Gideon was a jagged thorn in Harrow’s feeble side, a poisonous cloud hanging over her dying kingdom. Her very existence was a threat, a curse, a liability. But despite fearing Gideon’s betrayal, detesting her, despising her, Harrow had only ever held up her face to be struck, and to strike Gideon back in kind. She just kept on bloodying her teeth beneath Gideon’s fists, biting her back fiercely all the while.
And that was weird, wasn’t it?
Gideon thought of the Fourth, and the Fifth, and the bodies in the incinerator. They had seen, perhaps, the face of the devil – and, knowing that secret, they had been eliminated.
Gideon’s forehead began to throb as she hunched in the bedraggled armchair, head still clutched in her hands. Canaan House had allowed her to step outside her dark and tiny life and examine its oddity, objectively, for the first time. The uncanny valley that Harrow had dug between them now yawned open into a vast and eerie crevice. The constant war they waged there, which had seemed, forever, natural, suddenly seemed not natural at all.
Maybe, in the pool, Harrow had not told her everything. Or maybe Gideon just hadn’t asked the right questions. But there remained one last, cruel trick from Sapphic Sleepover on the Seventh, and that would be the ace up Gideon's sleeve.
She raised her head and caught Harrow’s eye, the necromancer’s depthless form still slumped and miserable at the writing desk.
“Hey, Harrow – truth or dare?”
Harrow said, sourly, “Let me guess how this one works. Either I reveal yet another humiliating secret to you, or else you challenge me to – hmm, how would you put it – kickflip myself into a meat grinder?”
“That was pre–cav Gideon. Post–cav Gideon kickflips anyone who threatens you into a meat grinder.”
“Fine.” Harrow tipped up her pointed chin obstinately, but her demeanor was vaguely brightened with the opportunity to move on to anything else. “I’m feeling gregarious. Truth.”
Gideon once again found herself suspended in a strange and infinite landscape. It was the calm before the storm, the hover before the drop, the exposure of the gleaming pivot on which her known universe turned. It was the moment before she had asked Harrow the question – and the last gasp of innocence before she heard the answer.
This time, she was not shy, and she went for the throat.
“Why did you keep me on the Ninth?”
Harrow’s face wiped smooth – the dead, still surface of a barren pond.
She said, dispassionately, “I’ve explained this to you countless times. With the decimation of our population, the risk of becoming an appendix of another House – “
“Yeah, except the rest of the Ninth knew their kids were all dead, and they still got to leave.”
After a brief pause, Harrow’s voice clicked on again, dull and practiced, like a cassette sliding into a tape player.
“After my conception, our fertile members still numbered about six hundred. My parents assumed that we could simply – replenish our stock. They did not anticipate that the thanergy blast would grossly elevate the adults’ necromantic decay rate. That’s what I meant when I said the infants alone were enough to take out the planet. What could be partially conceived thereafter was highly genetically compromised, it wouldn’t have been salvageable even with vat womb technology – to say nothing of the shockingly accelerated aging. Rumors soon spread that everyone was infected with the creche flu, that the children were just vulnerable enough to die. It quickly lent itself to paranoia. Anyone who could leave, did – to the Cohort, as immigrants to other Houses, or, unable to bear it all, by their own hand. We were already dangerously poor, and this exodus bankrupted us beyond the point of return. The other Houses must know something of the creche flu, certainly – our only saving grace is that they don’t seem to care.”
“So what’s one more recruit?”
“Knowing that a rat has no pups is not the same as knowing that a rat has no head.”
“Yeah, yeah, and I’m just the girl who knew too much. You know, that always made sense to me, that excuse always seemed normal. But now, with all these murders, I’ve realized something. When you want to silence someone, you just kill them.”
Harrow said nothing, but there was a twitch within the murky depths of her placid expression.
“When you want to silence someone, you don’t train them up big enough to hurt you. You don’t teach them how to read so they know that there’s a universe beyond your shithole. You don’t teach them how to count so they can number every awful second of their pointless lives. And you don’t fucking give them a six foot sword and show them how to use it on you.”
“I told you, my parents were terrified of you from the moment you failed to die.”
“But you weren’t! You were fucking never scared of me, even when you should have been, because I handed your ass to you continually!”
The necromancer fiddled with a bone stud, intentionally disinterested. “The proportion of whose ass was handed to whom is debatable.”
Harrow’s indifferent hand–waving was very fucking unsettling. It suggested that either,
(a) The obvious solution of shutting Gideon up by collapsing her skull, or sucking all of the bones out of her body, or shoving her mandible up her own ass, had simply never occurred to Harrow (implausible, due Harrow’s countless unfulfilled threats to do just that),
(b) Harrow had an undisclosed affection for Gideon that prevented her from striking a fatal blow (absurd, because Harrow was jerking herself sore over Satan’s frozen corpse, and also because this scenario would not require Harrow to repeatedly get her shit punched in),
OR
(c) Harrow was hiding something (very fucking likely).
And Harrow had been all too willing to weep in Gideon’s arms about how her conception was a war crime, her existence an abomination, and how at only ten years old the guilt had nearly taken her life.
What must be the size and shape of the secret that Harrow still wanted to hide?
The strangeness of their whole situation was a sucking black hole, swallowing any light of logic, and Gideon hadn’t even noticed it until she was already standing on the edge. Now she peered into it with an agitated curiosity, and it instantly strung her out like a long spaghetti noodle. She was falling, forever, into the absurdity of their alignment, and it was bottomless, like Harrow’s infinite iris–and–pupil, like the impenetrable darkness between her naked, parted lips.
She pushed herself blindly up out of the armchair. The insanity of their history washed over her, wave upon incomprehensible wave, and Gideon forgot how to swim.
“You were the functional god of our planet, and yet nearly every day I was biting and scratching you, kicking your ribs broken, swinging at you with my sword and my fists and with everything I had – and god, did you ever give it back to me in blood and fracture ten times over. And every goddamn step back down to Reconstruction was an elevator straight to hell. But, but – you’d have your petty little retribution, and we’d both get necromantically reconstructed, and then we’d be back to, to – just fucking glaring at each other over snow leek mush in the dining hall! Throwing each other’s books and magazines into the incinerator! Trying to trip each other during the processional at church! Little kid shit, the very next day, like nothing happened, like we didn’t just try to gut each other!”
Gideon heard the calcified rattling of her carpal bracelets and realized she was flinging her arms around wildly. She racked her hand back through her hair.
“And the hammer never came down! You never killed me to bury your secrets. You never tightened security. You never even kept a closer eye on me. You just fucking kept – feeding me and making me train with the sword and letting me spend your money on dirty magazines. And I escaped the same way every fucking time. Security cuff lockpicked, cell busted open, run through the perpetually empty corridors, scam a shuttle call – why was it so stupidly easy to call shuttles? I nearly escaped to the Cohort thirty–three times. It’s insane! You see how this is all fucking insane, right?”
Harrow was buttoned up real goddamn tight now. Her drying white paint crinkled as her brow strained with intentional blankness. To anyone else, it would have appeared that she was simply sitting a bit stiffly. But to Gideon, Harrow was puckered up so violently it looked like she was about to be sucked into her own asshole.
Harrow only said, a little rigidly, “The functional word is nearly escaped.”
Gideon was almost on top of her now. “When someone threatens your survival, and you fucking hate their guts, you’re supposed to kill them! Nothing makes any goddamn sense anymore!”
There was a tense pause.
Then, from underneath, Harrow said, softly, “I never hated you.”
Well, wasn’t that a knife straight to the chest.
Gideon had started to forgive Harrow, here at Canaan House, even before they went into the pool together. She did it because she had to, so they could finally work together, so they could both make it out of here alive. She also did it, if she admitted it to herself, because she wanted to. Her contempt had always hung heavy around her neck; her bitterness was a foul, continual poison. And it felt nice to finally stand up straight, to taste something other than bile, to see Harrow clearly, without a cloudy red mist of hostility – to see Harrow looking back at her, somehow differently.
But hearing Harrow say, now, I never hated you – well, it didn’t make her hate Harrow again. But it did, in some small way, make Gideon hate herself – because of how precisely those words pierced in between the clumsy stitches on her heart – because of how much she instantly ached to believe it was true.
And that made her goddamn pissed.
“Oh, fuck OFF! You don’t get to take back eighteen years of drowning me in shit just because our impending doom made us finally play nice with each other!”
“I will admit to being tempted into animosity. But to call it hatred is reductive. There are – complexities.”
“Then fucking explain, Nonagesimus.”
Harrow looked up from within Gideon’s shadow. A little sweat was beaded up under the sheen of her mask, cracking it through with a faint nervousness. She nodded, tersely, at the armchair. Gideon held her palms up and retreated, then squished herself back down into its sagging cushions.
Harrow licked her naked lips, which swirled Gideon’s heated confusion against a tremulous, mushy feeling of – godammit, why was that still fucking happening?!
“Do you remember Ozymandias?” Harrow asked.
Gideon remembered Ozzy, all right. Ozzy was a giant bastard of a rat that Harrow found down in the catacombs when she was about five years old. She hauled him around with her everywhere, his yellowed eyes bulging in her childish grip, his fanged mouth weeping thick ropes of white saliva, his throat billowing with furious squeaks.
If Gideon had hated Harrow, then Ozzy had hated Harrow a hundred–fold over. He gnawed on her constantly, his gnarled claws gouging her small face, his chiseled teeth cutting open her tiny fingers, smearing her ropes of knuckle bones with her own blood. One of the high points of Gideon’s young life had been the memory of an even younger Harrow clacking her prayer beads stickily off–rhythm in Chapel, struggling to count them correctly as they slipped and stung against her rat–bitten fingers. That hilarious heresy had dragged Priamhark’s blistering glare away from Gideon for a merciful second, as he scowled down at his own pathetic spawn.
“Ozymandias,” Harrow continued, “was my first solo attempt. I carried him around for ages before I finally felt the symptoms. Elevated temperature, aching, vomiting, blistering rashes. And I took him back down to the catacombs, and I found a deep niche, and I waited for it to be over. But it takes a very long time to die of rat bite fever. And in the end, I started to feel the pull into the River, anyways. I was delirious, and I became afraid, and I ran back up to Reconstruction before the process could finish. Later, my parents explained that this was all very foolish, and that it wouldn’t have worked, of course. A rat can’t commit murder – it isn’t sentient. I wasn’t old enough to understand the details, yet. He had seemed alive enough to me.”
Harrow smoothed her hands against her trousers and looked down at them, away from Gideon’s bewildered stare.
“He hated how I kept him, god, how he hated me. But I could never begrudge his hostility, not when I had thought he might be my salvation. A kicked dog bites. It is in the nature of all things to seek freedom.”
This was obviously obscure and nonsensical as hell, in addition to being really fucking depressing. Gideon didn’t have the vaguest clue about what Harrow was driving at, or how it related to her original goddamn question.
So she just asked, “Did you let him go, after?”
“God, no. My parents thought he was frivolous. They made me drive a bone spike through his heart.”
Harrow’s entire sad little life really had been just rolling up one clump of shit after another, like the world’s most pitiable dung beetle. Not that it excused her being a turbo asshole, but dear lord.
Gideon sucked air anxiously through her teeth. She was still highly disconcerted and vastly confused, but she had to say something to all that. Should she lighten the mood a bit?
“Well, when we get attacked by ghosts later, I’ll fight off the two–hundred rat–sized children, and you can take the child–sized rat.”
Harrow kept staring down at her hands. Her white–rimmed orbits crinkled, a little sadly, at the edges.
“Animals can’t become revenants,” she said, into her lap.
Gideon squirmed in her seat. That one had been a swing and a miss. But she had already twice transformed Harrow’s sudden gloom into faint amusement, so she tried again.
“Here, I’ll make you a deal. When I die, probably not even in a cool way because I’m a fucking moron, I’ll evict all your ghosts and haunt you myself.”
There it was! The corner of Harrow’s (delicate, sweet little – fuck! FUCK!) mouth twitched up.
“I’m not sure that will be an improvement,” said Harrow, the tiniest bit diverted.
“Hell, yes, it will! I’ll do all sorts of cool ghost tricks! Like, uh – poltergeistically swap all your bone shit for sword shit! Appear hauntingly in mirrors! Get all up inside you and make you scurry around at people all freaky!”
“Whatever did I do to deserve you getting all up inside me for ten thousand years?” asked Harrow, dryly. Gideon was relieved to see the darkness of her eyes again.
“Well, you know, platonically. Don’t get me wrong, Harrow, you’re gonna be a virgin for nine–thousand, nine hundred and ninety–nine more years,” Gideon teased back.
“Oh, and in my myriadic year?”
“You’re going to have to settle eventually. And when that happens – oh, I’ll be there. As a ghost.”
Gideon hesitated on the punchline to their banter. What would be the most hilarious ghost prank to ruin the loss of Harrow’s crusty old Lyctor–ginity, which Gideon was definitely not now thinking about in highly erotic detail? A flurry of porno mags? An army of spectral spiders skittering over Harrow and her theoretical paramour?
Here she envisioned, unbidden, Harrow’s pointed face gasping under Ianthe Tridentarius’ yellow tongue. For some reason, this shot Gideon through with a hot surge of rage.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Griddle,” Harrow cut in, a hint of mirthfulness finally seeping into her voice. “Revenants are insane, you wouldn’t have to presence of mind to have intercourse! On top of that, your physical form would be transient, so even if I was a Lyctor, I wouldn’t be able to feel your –“
Harrow caught Gideon’s wide–eyed, incredulous stare.
“Oh, I – I misinterpreted –" Harrow gasped, a dark blush quickly splashing across her cheeks.
This evening of talking so openly had resulted in Gideon repeatedly falling into Harrow’s spike pits of cryptic sadness, only to be immediately strung up by the heel into a rope trap of her own impossible horniness. The suggestion that Harrow was also experiencing this jarring cycle was highly curious, and Gideon was absolutely not going to examine it any further.
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a while, during which Gideon actually examined Harrow’s vaguely sexual misinterpretation much further and dissected it down into hopeless little pieces. Finally, desperate to think of anything else, she cut the lustful rope around her ankle and flung herself back down onto the baffling spikes.
“You still didn’t answer my question,” she said, pointedly.
Harrow’s mouth set in a grim line. “As I have explained endlessly, your knowledge of my parents’ compromised state was necessarily prohibitive to your departure.“
“Right, right, the secret, the appendage, and you didn’t stamp me out like I deserved because you’re a notorious bleeding heart. Except – it couldn’t just be because I knew about your dead parents, because this was all happening when we were kids, and it was fucking weird, then, too.”
Gideon again paced the perimeter of their childhood battlefield. There was something very off about its texture, like it displayed the same two fake–ass dimensions from every angle. The more she stared at the illusion, the further she sunk into the dizzying comfort of conspiracy. It was so tempting to make sense of all those pointless years of conflict – so enticing to think they had not both shattered themselves without meaning.
Gideon said, “You know what my earliest memory is of you? When I was four, I was locked up in my cell being punished for some stupid shit I don’t even remember. And you were hanging out on the other side of the bars, because back then you still followed me everywhere, and you had a little ration bar you were eating. And I was so hungry, I was so fucking hungry, I just – took it right out of your mouth. You started crying, of course, just as I saw Priamhark coming down the corridor. I thought for sure he was going to disarticulate me, because you were fucking sobbing. But when you saw him, you just – stopped, and you laid there completely still, like a dead little doll, creepy as hell, until he went away. Do you know there’s not a single time I can remember them picking you up?”
“What’s your point, my parents found me repulsive?” Harrow said, sullenly. “I already knew that one.”
“Here’s another weird memory. When I was eight, the skeleton of my mother disappeared. And when I went to your mom, like, what the fuck did you do with my mom, she said that they got rid of the bones because they frightened you. And I ran up on you immediately, and you denied it, and – well, I won’t dwell on what happened next, we both still have the scars. Except – Pelleamena lied, didn’t she? You would never be scared of a skeleton. And I was punished for whaling on you, of course, but not like I should have been, not in a way that ever stopped me. Every goddamn day, we were shoving each other down the stairwells, scratching off each other’s faces, rolling around on the floor of the sanctuary just slapping and spitting. And, let me repeat myself – the hammer never came down! You’re the fucking heir to the Ninth House! Your parents should have whipped me bloody, they should have thrown me off the top of the drill shaft, they should have cut off every finger I ever put around your throat!”
Harrow was very focused on examining the backs of her short–bitten fingernails. The edge of her thumb was bleeding where she had been picking at it, silently.
“Feel free to start explaining all this at any time, Harrow.”
“As stated, my parents were highly anxious regarding your – "
“Then why did they give me a fucking sword?"
Harrow’s throat worked tightly, but she said nothing.
“When you were finally in charge, you should have defleshed me immediately – or shot me off into space – or at the very least sold me off to the Cohort with a bribe to keep my mouth shut, like I asked a million times. But you just kept on keeping me, and letting us tear each other open, forever.”
Harrow’s mouth twisted in a sour smile. “Ah, the Cohort. I expected you to land on that topic eventually.”
“I’m allowed to have hopes and dreams.”
Harrow said, sardonically, “Oh, yes, a grand dream – freezing in the belly of a drop ship, waking to black flak six miles above a forgotten world. When you died, they would have washed you out of the turret with a hose.”
“I’d rather get blasted out of an air lock on day one of boot camp than spend one more shitty second suffocating on the Ninth.”
Harrow winced, almost imperceptibly. Gideon backed off a bit, and her voice softened.
“Look, I know you’re, like, in love with the Locked Tomb, and that’s great for you. But back in Drearburh, I always felt like I was just…waiting to be destroyed. I should have died when my mother fell down the drill shaft. I should have died in the creche flu. I should have died every time I tried to escape, every time I put my hands on you. I should have died, here, too, instead of Jeannemary. I still don’t understand why I didn’t. If I joined the Cohort, at least I’d be destroyed in a way that matters.”
Harrow had been listening, all evening, with shocking endurance and composure. And Gideon had spoken freely, with a clear and easy frankness, with words both softer and harsher than she had ever said before. But, somehow, the Cohort was what made Harrow snap.
She was on her feet immediately, her chalk–smeared brow arching furiously over two blistering black coals.
“Destroyed in a way that matters? You think the Cohort would have destroyed you in a way that matters? You would have been the most useless soldier ever shat out of Trentham!”
Gideon shot back up, too, towering her full twelve inches over, and they were quickly chest to chest – well, more like chest to stomach.
“Is that fucking right? Without me, you’d still be getting your shit kicked in back in Winnowing! I’m the one who put you halfway to being God’s favorite asshole!”
Harrow glared up at her defiantly.
“I fully acknowledge the breadth of your technical skill. But there is a quickness in your skull and a softness in your ribcage that a conscript of the Cohort cannot have.”
“I’m not fucking – soft!”
“Oh, Griddle, but you are,” Harrow said, caustically. “Haven’t you ever wondered why the infantry uses swords, and not those ancient guns? A gun kills too quickly. With a sword, you die slow, you die stumbling, you die by leaking, you die by infection, and every moment your cells waste away, you leach out delicious, succulent thanergy. A thanergy bloom isn’t about volume, it’s about suffering. That’s why killing babies makes the most.”
Gideon had been ready to verbally thrash Harrow’s ass as much as one flesh, one end would allow. But something about the way Harrow said babies made her stumble.
“What does that have to do with the Cohort?” she asked, apprehensively.
“Babies have an awful lot to do with the Cohort. Did you imagine that every warm body that fell against your sword would be a frothing, mindless mercenary? The Cohort flips worlds, Nav. Infants, children, families, ordinary people – whole WORLDS, and everything on them. And after you sign that contract, you better be willing to cut them all down, or your unit’s necromancer dies. You wouldn’t be able to do it, not for a fucking second. You’d end up orbiting the Ninth again, rotting in the Imperial Prison for treason, and then you would be truly lost to me.”
Gideon’s heart started to sink down, down, down into her boots, and her gut rose up into her throat. The distant whine of an imminent despair prickled the hairs on the back of her neck.
“But in the comics –“
“Oh, yes, in the comics they only kill evil, faceless insurgents – it’s propaganda, Nav!”
“Propaganda?”
“Of fucking course it is! Why else would I have bought you all those magazines? I could have spent that money on something the Ninth actually needed!”
Harrow wheezed out a regretful laugh.
“And it was pointless! It was all completely pointless! I know you, now, Nav. I finally see you as you are. If a god–killer gave you even the faintest cry for mercy, you would lower your sword, no matter how much they made you bleed.”
Gideon said, hoarsely, “I could kill a god–killer. Without question.”
And Harrow replied, with a terrible enormity, “Then what am I, who have defiled the Locked Tomb?”
Harrow’s paint suddenly streaked with hot, angry tears, and her mask contorted with a hollowed anguish. She spat her words out, thick and raw, and Gideon heard, with rising dread, the truth.
“For eighteen years I have beaten you, and tortured you, and ground you into the dirt! For eighteen years I have placed your grip on my throat, waiting to die, begging to die, and nothing, nothing, I have done to you has ever made you close your hand!”
Harrow grinned painfully, hysterically, her dark eyes wet and frantic, and she was dangerously close underneath.
“Tell me, Nav, when do train up your own enemy? When do you soak her through with propaganda that seduces her to seek the world outside? When do you usher her gently to the exit, and dare her to slice you open before the shuttle doors? And when do you give her a fucking six foot sword, and show her how to use it on you?”
This question tore open a hideous chasm between them. And as that hole swallowed Gideon’s universe, it disgorged, at last, the terrible answer.
“Don’t you see?” said Harrow. “You were supposed to kill me.”
In an instant, Gideon was sucked down to the black hole’s infinite bottom, her atoms strung out one along another. Her knees buckled, her legs collapsed inward, her feet seemed to sink down forever into the stone floor. In the mirror, she caught the horror of her reflection, wane and startled. Now she appeared a lumbering, looming monster, and Harrow a tiny black smear within her outline.
Harrow had said, in the pool, I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand –
Harrow was saying something more, but Gideon’s blood howled in her ears, and her skull resounded with her heart’s deafening pounding.
“– twenty–seven flights down, and I had planned for you to throw me over – "
––– I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy –––
“ – it wasn’t deep enough for me to bleed out fully, it wouldn’t have counted – "
––– my whole wretched life – yours alone –––
“– another time, kneeling on your throat until you struck me – "
––– I deserve to die at your hand –––
“ – not a murder, per se, just an accident, so I had to stop it – "
––– God knows I deserve to die –––
“– that next time, you could have crushed my neck beneath your arm so easily – "
––– your mercy, yours alone, your hand –––
“– yet you still caught my wrist, and pulled me back, right at the edge of the balcony – "
––– my whole life – yours –––
Oh holy god, oh fuck, oh shit, it was an act, a fabrication – eighteen goddamn years of hell and it was all just fucking fake.
Harrow knew she was the Ninth’s living slaughter, their arrogant self–immolation. Mortally wounded from her birth, a rotting roadkill gouged open, she had laid her neck naked against Gideon’s blade, praying for a quick and merciful end. Of course she writhed and bit as Gideon gleefully mashed her fingers into the gaping sores, splayed out her torn and tattered guts, smeared on her clotted blood like it was warpaint.
And Gideon had felt, all the while, justified! righteous! superior! She was the persecuted hero, the fearless gallant, the first page of a bold, courageous story!
Her mouth cracked and dry, she could only say, shaking, “Oh my fucking god, I hurt you for nothing –“
The whites of Harrow’s eyes were stinging red, and wet, and their burning blackness swirled with an impossible torment.
“You hurt me? You hurt me?” Harrow clenched her little fists and shouted, hoarsely, “I am forty–two thousand bones, four–hundred hands, two–hundred blistering hearts! Do you really think you could have put your hands on me, even for a moment, had I not wished it with every fiber of my being?”
This outburst seemed to drain the fury out of Harrow’s misery, and she sat back down, limply, at her writing desk. She sniffed loudly and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
Her voice thick and clotted, she said, “The last time – before we got the letter – god, I got so close, but you still couldn’t do it.”
Harrow didn’t need to elaborate. Gideon fucking remembered. She had made a horrible, unforgivable mistake, and it haunted her. That time, they had fought on the final flight of stairs, with Harrow and her legion of constructs between Gideon and the descending shuttle. Harrow was a speck of sneering black within a yellowed sea of flailing limbs. In such close quarters, it was unthinkable for Gideon to strike the constructs with her blade’s edge; she would have cut Harrow through for certain. So Gideon had knocked the constructs down with the flat of her sword, and battered them to fragments with its hilt.
She was nearly to the top, with one more surging wall of white. She raised the grip of her sword, and she brought down the pommel. But at the last moment, the constructs crumbled, and there only stood, beneath her, Harrow – her body tensed and rigid, her face plastered with a grim resignation.
The descending hilt struck Harrow down cleanly, and she fell against the top step’s edge. And she fell wrong. The stairwell echoed with the sickening crack of her skull. She lay still against the stairs, and blood began to ooze from her nose, her mouth, her ears, not the dark, dead blood sweat of necromancy, but a fresh, bright red.
And there were twenty–seven flights of stairs back down to Reconstruction. There were two–hundred and seventy uneven, slippery steps. Harrow was light in her arms, and Gideon was fast, but death was so much faster, and it tore through the smallness of her body like starvation. Gideon wasn’t religious – God had never given a damn for her, as far as she could tell – but as she ran, holding Harrow’s lifeless body, she prayed, please, oh God, please, not even knowing what she wanted.
And on the fifteenth flight from the bottom, she knew that Harrow wouldn’t have the capacity to curse her departing shuttle.
And on the tenth flight from the drill shaft’s base, she knew that Harrow would never seethe with rage as she read Gideon’s bragging letters home.
And on the fifth flight from the end, she saw the light go out of Harrow’s eyes, staring dull and distant into nothing.
And then Gideon saw, fifty steps below, the lamp lights of Reconstruction, swinging in the dead–drop hole of the staircase center.
Back in the present, Harrow said, hollowed and bewildered, “When I woke up in Reconstruction, you were still on Drearburh, and both of your legs were broken. They told me you jumped.”
Gideon sank back down into the armchair, her head in her hands.
“You could have escaped, easily!” Harrow slammed her fists onto the desk. “I always made it easy for you! I made it easy on fucking purpose, Nav!”
Somewhere along the line, Harrow had become embedded in Gideon like shrapnel, lodged deep like a hook that hurt too much to pull out.
“It wasn’t – easy for me,” Gideon said, into her hands.
“I don’t understand why – "
Gideon’s head shot up, angrily. “Because you would have fucking died!”
“Yes – yes, I know!” Harrow nodded, frantically. “That was your purpose.”
“After that,” she continued, “I realized you would never do it on the Ninth. The retribution from the other Houses for killing an heir must have seemed to you too dangerous, too obvious. I knew I had to take you off–world, where my death would be inconspicuous. But we didn’t have the resources. And then, providentially, I received the summons.”
“I thought – the chance to become Lyctor – "
“Oh, the chance to bear my birthright’s atrocity for a myriad?” Harrow scoffed. “No. You were supposed to kill me on the way and take the shuttle. That’s why I didn’t take any House dirt – I let the deep space drain me. I had hoped, cravenly, that I would pass out, that I wouldn’t feel you do it. I didn’t realize that the ship would auto–pilot.”
Harrow rubbed her eyes tiredly. “Since we have been here on the First, how many days I have shown you my naked back, how many nights I have slept unwarded –“
“Harrow, I wouldn’t – I would never – "
“Yes,” Harrow said, ruefully, “You would never. I learned that eighteen years too late, and yet the Seventh knew you in an instant. The Avulsion trial was that single, golden opportunity. All you had to do was fail to submit while I was inside the senescence field. That siphoning should have taken your life, and I lingered inside the field, trying to push you into striking me down. And you were in agony. No one would have thought my death malicious. No one would have blamed you for refusing an impossible request. No one here would have wanted my worthless life in place of your own.”
Her voice deepened with a wonderous sorrow. “Even if I live ten thousand years, I will never understand why you would rather die than kill me.”
Gideon couldn’t bear to hear Harrow speak of her so reverently, not when Gideon was gripping her own head between her filthy, bloodstained hands. She couldn’t stand another second of Harrow implying it was benevolent, honorable, admirable, for Gideon to have fought her within an inch of her life and not taken the final portion.
Harrow’s cheeks were curiously flushed, now. She was saying, tremulously, “In that moment, everything I knew about you, about myself, about my life and my eternity – it all just – changed. I looked at you and I saw something more than I did the night before. Like a switch had been flicked somewhere. And the –”
Suffocating in her own wretchedness, Gideon cut in, desperately, “Why did you need me for your suicide?”
Harrow looked up sharply. “Not my suicide,” she corrected. “My murder.”
“What’s the fucking difference?!”
“The difference is essential. Nav, what do you know of the River?”
Welp, they might as well go careening down another unrelated path while Gideon bled out, impaled and heartbroken, in Harrow’s penultimate spike trap.
“Um, I guess it’s just like a fucking – soul soup – nirvana? But why –”
“And what of the Riverbed?”
Gideon clutched her head. “I don’t know! Sometimes in the comics the ghosts drag the bad guys down to hell – but what does that have to do with fucking anything?!”
Harrow said, with a terrifying calmness, “How many ghosts does it take to drag you down to hell? Perhaps, two hundred?”
Gideon blinked. “No – Harrow, no – "
“Oh yes, very much yes.”
“It’s just a story…”
“A story my ghosts have told me every night of my life. The Fifth’s spirit–talkers have confirmed what we know of the River’s layers. Very few souls sink down to the bottom – only those that are heavily weighted down with sin. And in that River’s basin is the gasping mouth of hell – the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, where the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day and night.”
“Oh, my god – "
“But there is a way out.” Harrow’s voice hushed, like she was sharing a grim conspiracy. “The only way to win the game is simply not to play. I must never go into the River. If I am murdered, I become, myself, a revenant – and my soul is bound to the mortal plane for all eternity.”
Gideon had thought their gruesome conflict finally over – leaving them to wallow in its senseless, bloody fallout. But with these words, she found her wrist still cuffed to Harrow’s necessary execution, and panic tore through her veins again.
“Why didn’t your retainers do it?” Gideon strained at the chain that bound her sword arm, ghastly and inevitable, to Harrow’s end.
Harrow waved her hand dismissively. “They cannot kill me in a way that matters. Despite my best efforts, the Ninth’s acolytes remain impossibly sycophantic. My death can’t be an act of pity. It can’t be a mercy killing. It must be murder. It’s something about the energy transfer – someone wants so badly for your soul to leave the planet that they pin it there instead. Perhaps the soul just lingers out of spite.”
“But I’m sure Crux would have – "
“We didn’t even tell Crux about it. He would have crushed me, instantly, in a stupid, ham–fisted way that didn’t work. He’s always been so crudely loyal to what he thinks is best – he would have cleaved me apart before I finished saying, ‘I need to die.’ And he was grossly overprotective of me, too, a liability concerning my arrangement with you – perpetual, brutal nonsense, always turning off the heat in your cell, poisoning your food – I don’t even know where he got the bomb for the shuttle –“
Gideon stared at her in shock. “I thought you did all those things. I thought you tried to kill me.”
Harrow looked surprised. “Of course not, why would I shorten my own noose?”
Gideon’s heart squeezed painfully as the balance tipped further in favor of Harrow saying, truthfully, I never hated you.
Dreading the answer, Gideon also had to ask, “Did Aiglamene know?”
After a careful pause, Harrow said, “The sword was her idea. She was always fond of you, and she wanted to get this all over with so you could be on your way to the Cohort. It was a gambit from the beginning. There was always a chance my revenant would get attached to the blade, and you would take it with you. But we found that you were resistant to accomplishing the process manually, so, eventually, there had to be a weapon.”
“I got that that sword when I was eight…”
“Oh, yes, this conversion has been in motion since my very conception. The hauntings began while I was still in utero. My mother had to be restrained for most of her pregnancy, it nearly drove her insane. My parents had used chemical gas, you see, for a purpose – they assumed that revenants wouldn’t get attached to a murder weapon if it was transient. But our House has never really understood spirit magic. Becoming a revenant is mainly about the intent. And the consequence was, the ghosts still got pinned to the thing that killed them – and that thing was me.”
Harrow sighed heavily and drew her legs up into her chair. “You were correct, earlier – my parents apprehended the process. They regretted the effects of my creation, and they taught me the way out. And try as I might, I could never blame them for any of it. Should I wish them suffer as I suffer? Should I wish them burn as I will burn? Let this be their salvation – that they did exactly what they believed God wanted – that they weighed his punishment for their destruction less than the consequence of leaving the Tomb unguarded.”
“But – but, why me? Why me? Why did it have to be me?”
“When you didn’t die in the gas, my parents felt it must be somehow divine, miraculous. They sent away to the Sixth House to see if they could find out something about the name, whether it was prophetic. The Wardens translate many dead languages for stelae construction, you see. And they found the name inscribed on an ancient waypoint, dating back to the first Lyctoral ascension.”
“The name?”
“The one given by your mother’s ghost.”
“Gideon?” she said, of herself – and Harrow flinched, which fucking hurt.
“Your name means - one who cuts down. So, you see why I never liked saying it.”
The one who cuts down felt her heart catch in her throat, and it blistered with the stomach acid that rose up after.
“The Reverend Father and Mother believed that the name was a sign. They used to say to me – ‘See how God’s judgement is pure and righteous. We sought a sacrificial lamb, and he has sent us an avenging lion. His wrath is merciful, and he has provided your salvation. Let this be the divine contingency – God’s will if you live, and guard the Tomb, else, God’s will if you are cut down.’”
“The Necrolord Prime could roll up right now and tell me to kill you, and I’d just spit in his face. Harrow, your parents were fucking insane – I’m not goddamn divine, I’m just some stupid baby that fell down a hole.”
“They were fanatical, perhaps, but not insane. They comprehended the situation. When I was small, I could not understand why they would never rescue me. But as I grew older, I realized – it was their small mercy that let your hands fall on me. It was their remorse for my condition that let you sharpen your sword against their hard–won genocide. I had even convinced myself that what they felt was some sort of affection – “
Harrow’s throat caught, and she finished in a high, tight voice, “ – but when they gave me the rope to hang myself, I knew that God’s will would always be more important.”
It was impossible not to reach for her, then. Gideon barely strangled the compulsion to vault out of the chair and catch Harrow up in her arms, to cling to her like she had in the pool, to wrap her up so tightly that she squeezed all the darkness out.
But Harrow was curled in her seat like a wounded animal, raw and scalded, the grief and guilt and sorrow hanging off of her like tattered strips of ruined flesh. She was burnt all over, and she did not want to be touched, least of all by the holy brute God had sent to peel her open.
Gideon could only tightly wedge herself down into the chair, and say again, thick and strained, “Harrow, I’m so fucking sorry.”
Harrow’s head jerked up violently, and the wet fury surged back into her. “Have I demanded your sympathy? Or should I crave your condescension? I am that loosed blood–dimmed tide! I am that drowned ceremony of innocence! I am that rough beast that slouched towards the Ninth House to be born! Strike me, spit on me, do anything but look on me with compassion as I grind you between my teeth! A monster that is pitied was made monstrous for nothing.”
“You’re not – This was done to you.”
“And I have continued it with extreme cruelty, and always at your expense. You were a dull knife held to my throat that would not cut – and god, how brutally I sharpened you.”
In the mirror, Gideon’s eye caught one of the warded windows. It had shifted, faintly, in its slight translucence – the sun must be setting outside. With a surge of cold, stiff fright, she recalled the tangled flesh, the whipping spikes, the sweeping claws that tore and punctured, circling like a vulture around Harrow’s precarious soul.
And Gideon had been, all her life, hesitating on her only purpose, pinning it alive and bloodied to the dirt of Drearburh, sinking her teeth in deep and shaking it like a dog, all while Harrow’s eternity clung to the very threshold of hell.
The immediacy of Harrow’s peril drove Gideon to her feet. The rapier was in her hand at once, and its grip blistered her palm like acid. Its poison shrieked and slithered through the veins of her forearm. She choked with revulsion, thinking of slitting Harrow’s pretty throat. How could she endure it, after? She would have to take Harrow and then herself.
She steadied the rapier and said, shakily, “Show me how to save you.”
Harrow folded her arms and chuckled, insanely. “A mercy killing is not a murder. I had already made the decision, but in secret – hoping to spare myself your well–deserved contempt. In telling you all this I have made my revening impossible and rendered all your years of suffering pointless. Now despise me in the fullness of knowledge.”
Gideon dropped the tip of the rapier, numbly, and it clattered against the stone floor. Hoarse and vile, she shouted, “Why would you fucking send yourself to hell? Just tear down your wards and let the monster in! See if a mindless construct can do the only thing I was worth to you!”
As soon as the words left her mouth she was desperate to swallow them back, and her heart was screaming, you’re all I have, and how I have hated you, and you’re all I’ve ever had.
But Harrow was not angered. She only said, tearfully, “This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. You were meant to kill me on the way and take the shuttle. And now it’s too late.”
“What’s too late?”
“The first days at Canaan House, after the shuttles fell from the dock, I was afraid, and I hid from you, and I looked – I looked everywhere. The shuttles are all gone. There is no communication system. No one is coming for the bodies. No one is coming for the survivors. The only way out is through. Someone must become Lyctor, and once they have paid the price, God will come to collect.”
Her dark eyes pinned Gideon down with a desperate, wet intensity. “At first, I was disgustingly selfish and thought I could still seduce you into murder, here, and become a revenant. But this construct – whatever its origin, whatever its sinister or Lyctoral purpose – it’s hunting you. It only left you alive so it could savor your destruction. You won’t survive it without me. I’m not strong enough, not yet, not until I rise to its level. And I promised you that if you saw me through this, you would finally be free of me.”
Gideon’s throat felt hot and raw. “And I swore to protect you with my life. Since when have you ever kept your promises?”
Just after the Avulsion trial, Harrow had said, I need to become Lyctor NOW, before –
And Gideon had not understood what came after. But now the shape of it was congealing with a horrifying immediacy.
Harrow set her jaw. “Nav, our entire generation is dead. There will be none after. You are the Ninth. You are all of the Ninth. And I will rot in hell for a myriad of myriads before I live to see the fall of my House.”
Gideon stared down at her, stunned into silence. The root and foundation of the Ninth House, Harrow was only eighteen – barely a woman, but not still a child. They had never been allowed to be children.
Harrow met her gaze, wearily, her white paint now streaked and cracked open. “How much heavier you hang on me than all two–hundred ghosts together.”
She smoothed her hands against the desk. “Well. Now it is settled. I have forced my own hand. I must become Lyctor.”
“How – let me – what can I – "
“Absolutely not!” said Harrow, strongly. “The sum of all necromantic transgression – a tidy name for a personal apocalypse. I have not seen the final fraction, but I can comprehend its form. Lyctorhood must be a terrible, consuming darkness. The first moment it is possible, you must run. If I am dead, you must run. If I am Lyctor, you must run a hundred–fold over. Do not look back, do not look upon me, do not let me see your face, do not let me draw you in. You have always known well that I am the worm in the darkness, glowing.”
“And you know I never run. I fucking promised you one end, I swore -"
Harrow interrupted, sharply, “Everyone else on the Ninth believed my life mattered more than their own. You were the only one who knew that it didn’t. Don’t you dare start believing any differently now. An oath made under coercion is not binding.”
She continued, with a frightening tenderness, “I have been, all my life, a coward. And because I was terrified of the fate of my soul, I weighed your suffering so much less than my own. It was easy, because I never cared for anything – before. But despite all my years of brutality, you have fought the good fight. You have kept the faith. And now, you will be the one who finishes the race.”
Harrow smiled, weakly, and it cut her face painfully open. “You’re going to be the one who gets out of Drearburh.”
It was impossible for Gideon to acknowledge all that; she just couldn’t fucking take it. It was too soft, too thick, too bitterly sweet for her to swallow down; she choked on it and it pushed back out of her again.
Before, Gideon had thought herself the hero of her own story, and Harrow a dirty smudge on the first page’s corner. And Harrow had hoped that Gideon would be the bloody footnote in the prologue of her revenant eternity. But now their sentences were impossibly entangled, citing ibid, ibid, ibid down the page forever. It was so tempting, so clean, and so perfect for Gideon to string them both back out together, tracing along those ancient storylines. The wizard ascends in power as the lone, eternal warrior. The sword is but the stepping stone, the sacrifice, the rough–hewn cog that turns the great wheel forward.
After a myriad, would Harrow still believe that Gideon’s tiny life was worth her eternal decision? The centuries must twist her remorseful benevolence into howling regret, and grind her guilty compassion back down into bitter hatred. Or perhaps she would merely forget. Gideon would live, and age, and wither, and die, before Harrow even left her Lyctoral infancy. Better for Gideon to burn, here, and flare out, to take the monster in her back, to have a beautiful, memorable death, to let her end be Harrow’s beginning.
And wasn’t that a strange compulsion? Harrow had only ever wanted to die, and Gideon had only ever wanted to live.
Gideon found that she was saying, miserably, “What will you do with ten thousand lonely years?”
Harrow said, distantly, “After a myriad, I wonder – will our Lord be sated with my servitude? Will he have eaten himself full, or will he still hunger? How sweet my flesh must smell when it is burning.”
She rose from the desk, stiffly, and drifted past where Gideon still stood holding her rapier with its point against the floor. She sank down onto the edge of the mattress at the foot of her bed, sagging against the great metal pole that held up one corner of its canopy.
She held Gideon’s gaze, expectantly. After a moment, she said, “You are quite far away.”
So, uh – this was highly unprecedented, but Gideon inched over to the canopy pole at the other corner and sat down on the foot of the bed very hesitantly. This seemed to be what Harrow wanted, because she laid back and was swallowed by the tangle of thick, dark sheets.
From within, resigned and exhausted, she said, “I can only pray that Lyctorhood is enough for God to forgive me and salvage my soul. And if, in the end, he is not satisfied, I can only hope that the Body wakes up.”
Because Harrow would not hear her say, I’m so fucking sorry I failed you, and because Harrow would not allow her to say, Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you, and because she had no divine power to say, Let me take your darkness for myself –
Gideon only said, softly, “Tell me about your girl.”
The sheets shifted around uncomfortably. “I do not think that topic will be of great interest to you.”
“I mean, I have to go back and protect her if you get squished, so I’d like to know who’s in there.”
“Oh –" Harrow’s voice floated up, a little breathlessly. “I didn’t think you had agreed to do that.”
“Well, you know. Someone has to keep the ladies happy.”
After a pause, Harrow said, from within the sheets, “When I was very small, I hated guarding the Tomb. I didn’t understand why an infinite God would require a child to prevent the apocalypse. How could an abomination plead his cause? And how could such cruel sacrifice try to save him? If God is really God, can he not defend himself when someone breaks down his altar? But, perhaps, there is more than one kind of annihilation.”
Her voice was slightly muffled, as though Harrow had now turned her head towards Gideon slightly. “Did you ever enter the passageway, where the nuns worship, and see the inscription on the door?”
“Fuck, no. That place always gave me the creeps. I could never get more than a few feet down before it felt like it crawled up under my skin.”
“The inscription says: Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor; I cast you to the ground, I laid you before kings, That they might gaze at you.”
“All that old stuff always sounds like it’s quoting something.”
“But its relevance remains. To be hated for the way you were made – to be hated by God for the way he made you – it shapes you. If all you will ever know is rejection, then why not become corrupted? Why not become worthy of the way the worlds see you? I began to feel for the Tomb, a resemblance – and an affinity for what must be its beautiful monster. But I was only the monstrosity. So, for many years, I felt unworthy to approach.”
“God resurrected someone too sexily and everyone hated them for being beautiful? That doesn’t seem realistic.”
“Well, you knew something of that on the Ninth, didn’t you?”
Gideon was thankful that Harrow was still buried in the mess of sheets and couldn’t witness her cheeks darkening. “Not much of a competition when everyone else is mostly calcified.”
“Do you deny it?”
Gideon didn’t, but Harrow calling her, indirectly, beautiful, fluttered around madly in her stomach all the same. Squashing down this squirming sensation, she asked, “So, why did you go in?”
“You had the sword a year by the time I was nine years old. I was already sick of watching you swing it around, knowing it had to be my end and my beginning. One day we fought halfway, hand to cheek, like always, and I could not endure another moment of dreading the execution. I decided to take matters into my own hands. You already knew that I opened the Tomb because I wanted to die – but that was a half–truth. I wanted to be obliterated. I didn’t even care whether the Tomb would annihilate me or God or the entire universe. But, incredibly, she spared my life. Eventually, I made it all the way inside, and I saw the girl who slept. I saw that she held a great, terrible sword, and that her body was bound with chains. I saw what God feared – that she could live again, and God could die. The River could die. Hell could die. And when I, too, died, I would fall, not into torment, but into emptiness.”
“How can you know all that so specifically?”
Half–dreamily, Harrow said, “I see her, sometimes, in the back of my head, in visions and hallucinations. I touch her ghostly fingers and feel the pull of atomic dissipation. And I hear her say, from time to time, My love is a consuming love - fall into me and be destroyed. I know, at first, I will feel everything, and then, at last, I will feel nothing.”
So, finally, Gideon understood that Harrow loved the Body like a knife, that she loved it like the heat death of the universe. The Body was a boot stamping on the face of God, forever.
And Gideon knew all too well how much you crave that roughest touch, when no one has ever touched you before. She was so familiar with that senseless yearning to cling to the fist that strikes you, to grasp at the hem of its robe and feel its terrible power go into you, to feel yourself on fire and believe that you are healed.
Still, she asked, a little numbly, “How can that ever be love?”
“I couldn’t feel anything less for the only one who can save me.”
This response dropped sourly into Gideon’s stomach, suffocating what remained of its fluttering. What she had sworn to save in the pool was just Harrow’s meaty shell. She had no control over Harrow’s eternity. She had lost that power the moment she knew the truth.
“Well, how do you account for the physical attraction? My longsword’s saved me hundreds of times but I don’t want to fuck it.”
“Now imagine that your sword was a beautiful woman.”
Shit, Harrow had a point on that one. Not understanding in the least her own motivations, Gideon grasped aimlessly, pathetically, for some other reason that Harrow couldn’t really be in love.
“But how can you be sure that she’ll wake up and feel the same about you?” she strained – thinking, as she said it, that this sounded unnecessarily cruel.
Harrow sat upright, abruptly, and she was flushed all over.
“The reciprocity is immaterial,” she said. She wet her still–naked lips, and Gideon strangled her unrepentant hindbrain against distraction at this apparently pivotal moment.
Harrow’s dark gaze pinned Gideon down intensely. “When you have feared and…misunderstood…someone so deeply, you become consumed with them. You are always aware of their movements, of their existence in your universe, and so your inner life is never your own – it is merely a space that you share with them. It makes you restless, excitable, reactionary. All your thoughts and behaviors become, in some small way, dependent on them. But there always comes a day when you are at their undeniable mercy. When you expect to be struck down with a fist, and they offer you, instead, an open hand – it lifts you up, and you see them clearly for the first time. All your malice evaporates. All your contempt is wiped clean. But you still have all the instincts and habits of obsession. And the feeling that rushes in to fill the vacuum of your hatred is – something that is the opposite of hatred.”
“Love?” Gideon guessed, hesitantly. She didn’t really know what love was, and she was starting to suspect that Harrow didn’t, either.
Harrow’s paint–smeared brow creased remorsefully, and she was gutted by that small, weak smile again.
“That’s the worst of it – knowing that it can never be love. It just feels like – an inversion. When you were enemies, it was so easy to eternally take and take, but now you are left holding this aching, squeezing feeling that you are desperate to pour back into them. The inversion makes you want to give things to them, things you could never ask of them, things you could never have. But you can never take back all your scorn. You know the deep scars you cut will never heal over. Your hand can never fall softly where before it stole and struck. All the sickening words you once spat at them turn to rotting sweetness in your mouth, drowning you in honey. Every moment, you can barely contain yourself from screaming out to them in tenderness. Your rancid heart is crushed with every beat, your lungs blister with every breath, and you are thinking, I am on fire, and it feels like burning. It feels like I will burn forever. And oh, how I deserve it.”
Harrow shook her head, a little dazed. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
“So, you wouldn’t wish it on me?” said Gideon, lightly teasing to ease the sudden tension, but her voice wavered.
“God, no. Imagine if we were both feeling it at the same time.”
Gideon felt all of the moisture leave her mouth. She was cut through with a flash of a stupid, possessive, impossible hope that she didn’t even know she had.
Before she could think, she had stumbled out, “Harrow, are you still talking about the Body?”
One moment, Harrow was sitting a few feet away, and the next, she was standing before Gideon’s corner of the bed. She must have moved, but Gideon didn’t see it; her body was frozen in place, and her mind was rapidly spinning a million miles away.
The canopy pole at the corner was mounted floor to ceiling, and its rusted black column hid Harrow halfway. Her mouth and brow were pulled taut with determination, and her depthless eyes betrayed no nervousness, which was exactly the opposite of how Gideon was feeling.
Harrow reached out, resolutely, and her small fingers firmly gripped Gideon’s big hands, which were now absolutely slimy with anxiety. She pulled them towards her slight body, towards where she was half–hidden. Gideon’s bone–ward bracelets clanked sharply against either side of the canopy pole, jarring her already stuttering heartbeat.
Harrow’s delicate thumbs pushed into the curve of Gideon’s calloused, clammy palms, and the light touch jolted all the way down to the soles of her feet.
“Gideon – " said Harrow, softly. Gideon’s heart was frantically slamming in her throat, and she choked against it with a helpless little gasp as Harrow spoke her name.
There was, in the distance, a sound of thunder.
An impenetrable grief washed Harrow’s painted face, somehow deeper than all the regretful shades she had worn before. Then a trickle of blood seeped out of her nose and pooled in the deep divot of her upper lip.
She said, “I hope, someday, you will forgive me.”
And the cords of bone grew into manacles around Gideon’s wrists.
As Gideon jerked back, startled, and found her hands bound around the metal column – as Harrow turned, gravely, to face the warded door – the corridor beyond echoed with the wretched, wailing bellow of the monstrous construct.
Gideon threw her full weight desperately away from the stone–mounted pole, straining her shoulders painfully against their sockets. She lurched back, unmoved, and her heart screamed with a hideous coherence.
When Gideon had sworn, in the pool, one flesh to be Harrow’s protector – when she had promised, one end to throw herself on top, and let the monster eat her first – Harrow had made her own equal and opposite decision.
The construct crashed against the outside of the door without warning, shuddering its osseous embracement, shaking down a shower of calcium dust from the rafters. Harrow was a shadowy whisper before the walls, swallowed by towering trabeculae, their shining plates and rods her tomb, their high and sweeping arches her cathedral. She pressed her palm against the blood–marked door, and the bone ward blazed with a quick blue fire. Its flames licked at the edges of the cortical plug and swirled at its corners in steaming pools, shrieked along its plaque–scabbed arcs, cut blistering trails where the ward webbed against the stone walls.
At once, the room reverberated with the chalk–squealed THUNK! THUNK! THUNK! of striking legs and biting whips against the outside of the door, bone shearing into bone. The air blurred and stung with a hot white mist of loosed hydroxyapatite. From far away, Gideon could see the cracked dark spots of thinning bone where the construct’s pounding armaments were already infiltrating. Their bruises pitted Harrow’s ward all over, a spray of mineral bullets targeting her ink–black head, now dripping red, her tiny clasp of guts and organs, her short, thin arms and legs that braced against the door and ramp, their soft flesh streaked with white–flecked blood.
Gideon’s throat stung, raw and sour, and she found that she was screaming – screaming at Harrow to loose her arms, to set her free beyond the door, to let her face the monster alone, to force its bony blades to pierce her throat instead – howling at Harrow to siphon her, to consume her, to use her up, and if she wouldn’t have her, even at hell’s threshold, to look back at me, oh, please, god, just look back at me – but her cries were swallowed by the construct’s roaring, by the creaking groans of the door ward underneath.
Her arms helplessly bound, her legs straining and kicking against the pole, Gideon crushed her consciousness back against the occipital portal that Harrow had siphoned. She found its bone still soft, and she forced her mind through the weak–patched hole, offering her body, begging to be taken.
And, for a moment, she latched on. Her veins strained towards the door and tangled, the blood inside them sludged and clotted, her cerebrospinal fluid bubbled at the base of her skull. Her visceral pleura scraped and skinned raw. The capillaries in her teeth and gums swelled and popped, and her mouth stained red with the same emulsion that now dripped thickly from her necromancer’s mouth onto the floor below.
Gideon’s vision streaked and doubled, and she saw the world that Harrow saw. The bone ward bloomed with blinding spots where the legs and whips struck in, each puncture radiating streaks of colored lightening. Its cortical scab, translucent, was an infinite network of cellular starbursts, bombs exploding over a cloudy landscape, lacunae fluorescing brightly cyan where the construct’s limbs pierced in.
Harrow’s slender fingers pressed against the door, and the network surged with a fierce fluidic fire, her power tearing back along the gleaming dendrites, flooding in each wounded crevice. The flakes and cracks that pocked the crumbling ward dissolved in pools of osteoclastic acid, and their tunnels quickly filled with fresh white bone.
The trabecular arcs above were ringed with cross–hatched webs of energy, leaching their bowing strains onto the bracing stone. They, too, blistered with microscopic scars, illuminating a tangled symphony of blue–fired cells. Each tiny crack that formed, in turn, sucked down and overflowed with osseous healing.
The walls that braced the corridor danced with light–streaked shadows, suggestions of constructs springing from the bloody pulp of the teeth outside, flinging themselves against a hulking nothing and bursting into fragments.
And, all around, reverberating in her chest, battering her eardrums, soaking her head with a splitting ringing, Gideon heard the sound of the osteocytes screaming.
But Harrow quickly pushed her out, and Gideon sagged against the pole.
Then, mercifully, Harrow looked back.
Gideon thought for one terrifying second that her necromancer’s eyes had been obliterated, but their capillaries had only broken, and her sclera were stained bright red, drilled through with two black holes. Her hair was spiked and wet with blackened clots, her paint was smeared a thick, dark whitish–red. Her nose and ears and mouth disgorged their thanergetic waste in chunky, crimson streams.
Her pupils shook within a wine–dark sea, and her brow and cheeks were deeply creased, a death–mask of incredible terror. Then Harrow heavily exhaled. The corridor outside erupted with the groaning births of flailing constructs, her surge of fear their only animation.
As she cast her fright beyond the door, the necromancer’s face fell slack with boredom, her mouth pressed grimly thin with its typical haughty impassivity. And Gideon knew, at once, that every time that indifferent scowl had sneered at her defeat, every time she had spat back into its soulless apathy – that Harrow had always been afraid.
Harrow said, firmly, “Gideon – finish!"
And then her mouth was full of blood.
Harrow turned back to face the door, and clasped her wrist, and drew out through her skin a blade of bone. She threw her arm back, wide, and judged the angle. Then she flung herself against the ward and plunged it home.
The contact struck Harrow rigid, like she had grabbed an electric wire. The color went out of her arm, and a bright red arc of arterial blood sprayed against the door. The cortical sheath below burst with a silver incandescence. The force jerked her small body back, only once, and her legs buckled underneath. With bottomless horror, Gideon saw Harrow fall against the door, and hang where her arm was rooted.
And in that moment, an instant and an infinity too late, Gideon knew what Harrow meant by an inversion.
The manacles crumbled around Gideon’s wrists, and the writhing sea of constructs outside the door fell deathly still. Gideon jerked herself upright and ran, stumbling, to Harrow’s crumpled body. A hideous scream caught in her throat, choking her mouth open. The roaring and scraping of the monster against the door was a distant ringing.
Harrow hung from her wrist like rotting fruit, her fingers soaked, her thin arm spattered red. Gideon grabbed her below the arms and tried desperately to pull her away from the door, but the blade of bone drawn from her wrist had melded in. She lifted Harrow up, off her knees, begging to ease the grotesqueness and humiliation of the hanging, but she was slippery all over, and her body slid slickly against Gideon’s palms and back against the door. Her blood had soaked through the fullness of her robes, and it squeezed between Gideon’s shaking fingers in thick, dark rivulets.
Finally, Gideon pulled herself under Harrow’s limp form, and belted her arm around the waist, dragging the necromancer back into her lap. She shuddered uncontrollably against Harrow’s lifeless back, clutching at her sodden robes. The air was sharp and sour with acetone, the stench of a dying exhalation. Gideon felt the bile rise tightly in her throat, her chest was heaving, desperate for air, unable to catch her breath, and her cheeks stung hotly with a silent wetness, and still, she could not scream.
And in that terrible, eternal silence, she heard a small and gleeful laugh.
Harrow raised her head, weakly, and lolled it back against Gideon’s shoulders, smearing her cavalier’s wet cheek with her blood. Her paint–streaked face split with a wild grin, her teeth stained crimson by her sallow, weeping gums. Gideon saw the red–blackness of her eyes, shining.
Then came Harrow’s voice – raw, high, and sing–song. “Perpetual – bone!”
Her bone–split wrist pulled out from the door. The ward, above, its bloodstained plug and sweeping arcs, illuminated with a blinding silver sheen. The reaction chained onto the window’s wards, and to those in the rooms beyond. The wards were all, at once, struck bright pearlescent, and they blazed back with a pulsing cobalt, bathing the rooms in soft blue light.
The hole in the ward from which Harrow drew her blade closed over with a shimmering sludge and sealed itself into hard, dry bone. Harrow let out another gasping laugh, incredulous.
Her voice was calcified, and when she spoke, the torn corners of her mouth ran red. “They said – they said only Lyctors could do it!” Blood bubbled out from her crazed smile.
The scream was still choking in Gideon’s throat, and her whole body flushed cold with impossible relief. She felt her own manic grin, and she wrapped her arm against Harrow’s panting chest, clutching the delicate curve of her jaw in one hand, her thumb wiping the stain from its high–boned cheek.
The monstrous construct bayed and howled beyond the door, struggling against the ward as though stuck in glue. It hurled itself against the walls, and Gideon shoved herself back with Harrow still tangled in her lap.
An avalanche of spikes pierced through the ward and showered the room with phalangeal fragments. Then the trunks of two spiked legs punched through, shearing deep trenches into their cortices, the gouges weeping out yellowed, rotten marrow. The ward flared silver–blue and surged around its punctures, strangling the thrashing movements of the construct’s limbs inside, sealing them tightly into the door.
The corridor echoed with a mighty cracking, a shattering fragmentation, and a squelching series of loud, wet pops. There was a frantic, heavy skittering, and the construct fled back down the hallway, many whips shorter and a few legs less.
Harrow was raving, now, and she had to draw huge, wet breaths, each of which made her leak a little more onto the floor. “I balanced the system – I balanced the whole fucking cellular system – a complete self–healing masterpiece – an incredible quantity of energy – math – mechanics –"
She looked up at Gideon with raw black eyes and swallowed back a mouthful of red–swirled spit. “Did you see me, Griddle? I am the greatest necromancer of my –"
Then she pitched over and disgorged a thick stream of clotted blood right into both of their laps.
Gideon pulled Harrow back against her chest, drawing up her knees and wrapping her legs around her necromancer’s body. She pushed back a clump of blood–soaked hair. Without even thinking, she pressed her mouth to Harrow’s slender neck, tasting sour copper, feeling the heartbeat there, throbbing hard with exertion and adrenaline, warm and alive.
Gideon finally found her voice – “Ok, ok, you’re okay, oh god, oh my god, fuck, FUCK!”
A sobbing wail keened of her like a dying animal. Her chest heaved against Harrow’s back, and she squeezed the slight ribcage frantically, pushing a little more blood through Harrow’s desiccated lips. Hot tears spilled down Gideon’s cheeks, messy and loud, and she couldn’t fucking stop herself from crying.
In her lap, cracked and dry, Harrow said, “Don’t be a big stupid baby just because you didn’t get to fight the skeleton.”
"I thought you were dead.”
Harrow caught a sharp breath. Something deep and uncertain settled in her eyes. And then it was gone.
“Yes, well," she said, with her usual mirthful mockery. “You must wait yet another day to dance on my grave.”
Gideon coughed out a wet laugh, swallowing down her tears. “I lied, earlier,” she said, pressing her soggy cheek to the side of Harrow’s forehead. “I don’t fucking know how to dance.”
They sat there, conjoined stiffly, for a few minutes, several unparsable tensions swirling together. Then Harrow shifted slightly in Gideon’s lap. She started to sink back, against Gideon’s chest, but then tightened herself back up and looked vaguely ashamed.
She said, slowly, “Well, I’d better get cleaned up.”
Gideon didn’t want her to be out of sight for even a second.
“Can I help?” she asked, flustered. “I mean, can you hold yourself up in the sonic?”
Harrow flushed. “I wouldn’t ask –"
“Sorry, I didn’t mean – you’d probably rather use constructs,” Gideon mumbled.
“I can't, tonight. I’m – necromantically exhausted. I can’t afford to lose any more blood.”
In the soft blue glow of the perpetual bone, Harrow’s blanched brown skin looked faintly purple, and a tangle of haggard veins struggled under its paper–thin surface.
Harrow caught Gideon’s expression, which had surged back from incredible relief into intense anxiety.
“Blood is made in the bone. I’ll draw thanergy from the planet and replenish as I sleep. Don’t –" She hesitated. “– don’t worry about me.”
“What if that thing comes back?”
“Griddle," Harrow grinned cheekily. “This is perpetual bone! No temporal construct could get in!”
Just then, they were startled into silence by a single, sharp knock, about three feet above the base of the door.
A child’s voice said, outside, “Harrowhark!"
Then came another knock, higher.
And then another, lower.
All at once, the warded door shook with a hammering cacophony, small, open palms forcefully slamming and little round knuckles loudly scraping, four hundred tiny fists rapping and pounding and beating against the warded wood.
The doorway sizzled at its red–smeared periphery. In the ward’s center, Harrow’s bloody handprint began to crack within its palm, the tip of each finger peeling off and curling back.
Above it all, a chilling flood of childish voices sang, discordant, "Reverend Daughter, Harrowhark the Ninth, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend DAUGHTER – "
Then, with a hiss and a pop, the five–pronged star flaked away completely – the unmistakable sound of the ghost ward breaking.
Harrow’s eyes were struck wide with terror. Her forehead burst with shallow red pores, and blue fire sputtered at her joints as she strained to lock them.
“I can’t!” she gasped, her bloodied fingers scrabbling desperately against Gideon’s arms. “I can’t!"
Gideon quickly pushed Harrow down onto her back. She leapt on top and pressed Harrow’s hips down with her own, just as they bucked up vigorously underneath. Catching the two flailing wrists, she held them back firmly against the stone floor. Harrow’s slight chest lurched up repeatedly, erratically, as though riddled from behind with a hail of bullets, and her head snapped back painfully. When Gideon saw her eyes again, their sclera still stained red, each pupil was choked with a hundred pinpricks of light.
Harrow’s blistered mouth gaped open, releasing a drool of thick, red slime, and two–hundred hideous voices poured out together.
The Ninth’s genocide wailed, with many mouths, “– the cowardly, abominable, murderers, sorcerers, all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death –"
“No –" said Gideon, crushing Harrow’s convulsing body against the floor, “Stop –"
The revenants inside Harrow shook her roughly and shrieked, overlapping, “– wasted with hunger, devoured by pestilence and bitter destruction –"
“Shut up! Just fucking – shut up!”
“– their worm does not die, and their fire is not quenched, they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh –"
Harrow’s face was contorted with anguish, her eyes burning wet around the whirling specks of light. Gideon could still see her in there, small and far away. It was obvious that she could hear what her ghosts were saying – and, worse, that she believed it.
A single, clear drop cut a clean path down Harrow’s sticky cheek. Stupidly, impulsively, Gideon released her hand from Harrow’s wrist and wiped the tear away.
Harrow’s freed hand swung up instantly and backhanded Gideon violently across the face, splitting open her bottom lip. Cursing herself, Gideon snagged the wrist and pushed it back against the floor.
As she held her down again, a fat, red drop leaked from Gideon’s burst lip and fell into Harrow’s howling mouth.
Harrow’s chest pitched upwards, and she retched dry. The noise that punched out of her was a sloshing whump! like a lead pipe hitting a plastic bag full of water. The pulsing lights in her eyes were flung out to its periphery, and they scattered, only a handful swirling back into place.
“What do you want with us, child of God?” The ghosts shouted up at Gideon, a few strong voices remaining, writhing Harrow side to side underneath. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”
The blood – there was something about the power of the blood.
Gideon sucked sharply on her bruised lip and tongued its split wound open. She quickly released Harrow’s wrists and pinned down the necromancer’s shuddering shoulders with two broad forearms. Her palms gripped Harrow’s cheeks tightly on either side. Then she leaned down, and – oh fuck, Harrow was going to hate this forever – she pushed her bloody lip right into Harrow’s mouth.
Harrow screamed up into Gideon, and then jolted still with a muffled gasp. She was, for a moment, completely motionless.
And then – oh my god, oh my fucking god, Harrow’s mouth opened wetly, and moved, and her lips pressed softly against Gideon’s own. Although Harrow’s lips were smeared with dead, blackened blood, and her mouth was cracked and dry, it was a kiss now, for one incredible second it was a real fucking kiss, the only kiss that Gideon had ever had. It tasted like rancid copper, and it was the only thing that she ever wanted to taste again.
Then Harrow shook back into herself and broke away very suddenly.
Bewildered, she said, faintly, “By the Emperor, how did you make a blood ward?”
Before Gideon could respond, Harrow’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she let a half–sleep take her. She urgently needed to be put to bed, but her choked airways still wheezed out bloodied snot and spit, and Gideon was terrified to lay her down.
She quickly pulled off the necromancer’s boots and peeled away her gore–soaked robe, not noticing at all (okay, noticing only a tiny harmless amount) how closely the thin, wet fabric underneath clung to Harrow’s body. Then she hooked a hand below Harrow’s knees, cradled her sagging shoulders, and carried her hurriedly into the bathroom.
Should she use the sonic? No, that was going to sandblast them both with bone dust. Setting down Harrow’s trailing feet and hefting the limp body against her chest, she reached into the shower and turned its dial on, full blast. Then she stepped them both under the torrential downpour, and its basin streaked red with Harrow’s watery blood.
“Blergh,” said Harrow, propped up in her arms. “Hrnghh.”
“You did so good,” murmured Gideon, bending down to press her mouth against Harrow’s sticky forehead. “Oh, my god, you did so good.”
Gideon held her up in the shower, tipping back Harrow’s drooping head and cupping water against her blood–clogged nose and mouth until it bubbled out clear. Finally, the drain below began to swirl only faintly red.
She turned off the water and Harrow shivered, violently, in the rush of cool air. Okay, well, she couldn’t go into the bed with wet clothes…
Gideon started to tug up the hem of the soggy shirt, but her hand cramped with fright as one thick knuckle brushed the tender skin of Harrow’s bare stomach. Nope, no way, that wasn’t going to work if Gideon still wanted to have hand bones after Harrow woke up.
She stepped them both gingerly out of the shower and knelt down beside the half–oval indentation carved into the floor. Laying Harrow back against her knee, she twisted the faucet wide open and dumped in the entire bottle of liquid soap.
After a few minutes – during which Harrow flickered in and out of consciousness, whimpering out heart–rending noises and clinging to Gideon’s soaked shirt for warmth – the bathtub billowed over with warm suds.
Gideon carefully slid Harrow down into the foamy basin, cracked her own knuckles, and began the highly jittery operation of removing her clothes without touching her at all.
She swished her hand around blindly under the scummy surface and made contact with something soft. NOPE. Okay, how about over – fucking NOPE again.
She quickly shuffled around to the end of the bathtub, plunged her hands back in, and felt her thumbs push into the arches of two bare feet. So, just above them must be – yes! Gideon snagged the hems of Harrow’s leather trousers and shimmied them down her legs, swishing her slightly side to side within the blood–pinked bubbles. With the final tug, the pants slid off, and Harrow slid down listlessly underneath the suds.
Gideon scrambled back to the head of the bathtub and hauled Harrow up by the neck of her shirt. The necromancer gasped and sputtered, but her awareness still drifted in and out hazily. Well, while Gideon was fisting the back of the shirt – she took a deep breath and pulled it up over Harrow’s head. Harrow’s arms were dragged up, her back arched, and Gideon slammed her eyes shut just as two beautifully small, round breasts crested out of the soapy water.
She peeked, after a moment. Harrow had submerged down to her shoulders again, her head resting weakly against the back of the bathtub. Gideon nervously checked inside the waterlogged leather. Oh, thank fuck, the underwear had come off with the trousers, so she wasn’t going to have to grope around near Harrow’s –
ANYWAYS.
Okay, so now Harrow was stripped naked under the water – a vision which Gideon had to forcibly smother her vulgar frontal lobe from imagining. But poking above the sudsy surface – and looking somehow even more nude than her body – was Harrow’s half–washed face.
The bloodied paint had flaked into her dark lashes, crusted at her hairline, and smeared up into ridges at all the corners of her face – the arches of her high–boned cheeks, the tender crescent of her jaw, the small, delicate point of her chin. The red–white grease was gathered into fine creases alongside the slope of her nose and within the tiny furrows of her lips.
Cradling Harrow’s jaw in one hand, Gideon dotted a washcloth with cold cream and painstakingly wiped clean the remnants of the mask. She was obliged, in tighter corners, where the cloth would be too rough, to gently push in the tip of her bare finger – and to brush the cracked white lips with the pad of her thumb until they again flushed a deep reddish–brown. Then she cupped soapy water in her hands and massaged the bone–flecked clots of blood out of the short–cropped hair.
Afterwards, Gideon sat back on her wet heels and allowed herself, for just a minute, to look – at the completely naked face she had seen, for the first time, just today – and which, if the Emperor was kind, and Harrow lived, that she would never be permitted to see again.
Now, how to dress her?
Gideon swished around in the foot of the basin and pulled the plug. She quickly turned her back on the receding waterline and rummaged around in the cabinet, selecting the biggest, fluffiest towel.
After a few minutes, she guessed that the bathtub had emptied, based on the guttural gurgling of the drain, and the guttural gurgling of a half–conscious Harrow vaguely complaining about the cold air.
Now Gideon just had to squeeze her eyes shut, turn around, take a few steps forward – oh god, don’t step into the tub – oh fuck, oh shit, stumble backwards, blindly fling the towel out in front of her, wheel her arms madly for balance, and fall down very hard on her ass.
She opened her eyes, just a slit, rubbing her sore butt. The towel had settled perfectly over Harrow’s supine form, still slumped in the empty basin.
Gideon smirked, just to herself. God, she was good at this.
She hauled herself upright and scooped Harrow up out of the bathtub, swaddling her tightly. Then she carried Harrow back into the main room, laid her down on the bed, pulled the thick bedsheet over top, and carefully tugged out the slightly soggy towel.
Excellent, now she was in the home stretch.
She poked around in Harrow’s dresser, pushing aside quite a few dangling chains of human teeth and several surprisingly intact skulls – none of them, thankfully, belonging to recently decapitated cavaliers. She shuffled the stacks of clothes around until she identified the loosest shirt and the baggiest trousers, both patched and sewn many times over.
There was an underwear drawer, too…
Gideon reached in, hesitantly, and her fingers tangled in something vaguely lacy. Fuck THAT, Harrow was gonna have to freeball it.
Returning to the bed, she reached up blindly underneath the sheet, stretched the waist of the trousers as wide as possible, and quickly shimmied them up over Harrow’s legs without brushing against any hint of her softness. She repeated this technique with the hem of the threadbare shirt, delicately tugging Harrow’s flaccid arms out through the sleeves.
Finally, Gideon exhaled deeply and flopped down backwards on the bed, having perfectly completed the herculean task of preserving Harrow’s saintly modesty.
Now, when the construct found them again, and eviscerated Gideon completely – because she’d be damned if she was going to let Harrow pull that self–sacrifice stunt again – Gideon could perish with her chivalry intact. And she would die a mega–virgin – with only one half–conscious kiss to her name, and without having witnessed a single goddamn breast.
After a beat, she rolled onto her side and studied her careful work again. Harrow’s drying hair was starting to curl into tiny dark ringlets. Without the paint – although it was deeply lined with exhaustion – Harrow’s thin, sharp–featured face looked almost – classical? Stately? Elegant, maybe?
Oh, shit, without the paint!
If she woke up with her face nakedly exposed … Well, that would probably be more humiliating for Harrow than the frankly egregious number of times that Gideon’s hands and lips had touched her cheek, neck, and forehead (and don’t forget her mouth!) in the frenzied aftermath of her deadly heroism.
Gideon scrambled out of the bed and grabbed the white greasepaint that she had set down on the writing desk, what seemed like a million years ago. She quickly swirled the brush within the pot and – not planning the shape of the skullpaint at all – smeared a hurried streak down Harrow’s bare cheek.
Harrow faintly whined and turned her face away. Her eyes fluttered open and then wearily closed again.
“You?” she croaked.
“Yeah, it’s just me,” said Gideon, hushed.
Harrow’s hand slithered up from underneath the bedsheet and weakly pushed the pot of paint away. Then she groaned and rolled over on her side, smearing the white streak against her dark pillow, and descended, mercifully, into an impenetrable slumber.
The sheets beside Harrow were damply stained where Gideon had briefly laid down. Gideon only owned three sets of clothes, hastily and badly tailored from Ortus’ cavalier uniforms. The first set had been bloodied after the morning’s siphoning, the second had been heavily salted in the pool, and the third set, which was currently dripping onto the floor, had been drenched in the shower after being slathered with bits of Harrow’s gore.
Underwear only for Gideon, then.
Keeping Harrow close within her line of vision, Gideon stripped off the wet clothes, dried herself roughly with the discarded towel, and pulled on a clean undershirt and a thin pair of boxers. Then she laid down on top of the sheets again, wriggled out of the wet spot – finding herself uncomfortably close to the softly wheezing lump of blankets – and began the steadfast, hours–long watch of making sure that Harrow didn’t stop breathing.
The waiting wasn’t too bad, really. For long stretches, Gideon would find herself lost in the many fine points and fragile corners of Harrow’s naked face, in the minute furrowing of her brow and sleep–drawn flickering of her lashes, in the way the space between her slightly parted lips was wet with the vapor of her steady exhalation.
Gideon really only noticed the passage of time by the gradual swell of color below Harrow’s skin. As Harrow healed, inch by inch, the dead skin peeled away from her crusted nostrils and flaked off from her dried lips, leaving her mouth, once again, undeniably soft.
The dangerous part of the watching was the thinking.
When the last remnants of her lifelong hatred were stripped away, Gideon felt the full force of the inversion. She understood, now, with frightening persuasion, how Harrow could look at a woman half–dead and sleeping, someone her entire life had been consumed with fearing and hating, and see that she was her death and her salvation, and find her impossibly beautiful.
Gideon’s brain swung into a tight orbit around this consuming emotion, her logical mind abraded by its convincing gravitational pull, until her rational thoughts about Harrow were completely eroded.
Then she found something infinitely more alarming underneath.
It was sickening in the aftermath of her near sacrifice, but Gideon found that she wanted Harrow carnally – more than she had ever admitted to herself, pushing her nemesis down to the floor in the heat of their battles, and in the dark hours of the evening after, in the final pushes of self–climax, when Harrow’s image would rise in Gideon’s broken mind unbidden, when she lied to herself that it was just because she was another warm body. Even here, at Canaan House, surrounded by sweeter smiles and kinder faces, what she still fucking desperately wanted was Harrow. She wanted the slender column of her neck, she wanted her narrow wrists and slim fingers, she wanted all the aching curves and swells of her smallness – she wanted to feel them press in under her fingertips, beneath her body, against her mouth, more gently than they ever had before. And oh, merciful god, she wanted Harrow’s perfect mouth, her small pink tongue, the parted wetness between her lips, she wanted the infinite depth of her eyes and her long dark lashes – she wanted to see them under her, and on top of her, and, oh fuck, in between her legs. But, more than anything, she wanted to look up from between Harrow’s wet and trembling thighs, and see her broken open, crying out Gideon’s name.
And, worse, Gideon found that her heart wanted Harrow in another way, so much softer than sex, so much deeper than friendship, a way that terrified her.
There was one other thought that she kept rounding on, again and again. In the stillness after the ghosts were ejected, Gideon had seen Harrow’s dark lashes flicker. The pupils underneath had returned to a pure, deep black. Then Harrow had closed her eyes again, fully human, and it was then that she had kissed Gideon back.
When Harrow finally began to stir, the warded windows had faded to a cold, pulsing indigo. It must now be the late hours of the evening. Gideon hastily roused and knelt over Harrow anxiously.
Harrow yawned, and squirmed underneath the sheets, and stretched her arms out wide. She hummed a few contented noises deep within her chest. Her eyes eased open, and her sclera had healed white. Then she focused her clear, comfortable gaze up at Gideon – whose guts and emotions were all writhing around tortuously like they were drowning in lava.
With a painfully adorable tiny yawn and even tinier stretch, Harrow sat up in the bed, facing Gideon, and folded her legs underneath. Their knees were now nearly touching, although Harrow didn’t seem to notice, and Gideon definitely fucking did.
“Good eveni – " Harrow started.
“I didn’t see you naked!” Gideon blurted out.
Harrow’s brow furrowed curiously. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you had. I already exposed myself to you completely after the Avulsion trial.”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t notice you that time, either!” said Gideon, quickly.
Then she cringed, thinking of Harrow’s earlier insecurities, and wondering if she should amend that it wasn’t like she didn’t want to notice, and actually she really wished she had noticed, when it would have at least been innocent.
The corner of Harrow’s mouth turned up, lightly amused. “You must think me impossibly prudish.”
“Well, I mean, the paint…and the clothes…”
“I wear the sacramental vestments for rank and intimation. But it’s pointless to dress up around you now. After tonight, I highly doubt you will ever feel threatened by me again.”
Gideon didn’t have the heart to tell Harrow that – absent her enormous necromantic power – being menaced by a tiny skeletal clown was not actually very scary.
Apparently invigorated by her rest, Harrow said, almost whimsically, “Have you exhausted all of your party games? I must warn you, I’m nearly out of secrets, and that last one almost killed me.”
Gideon looked at Harrow’s naked face – the face that she was, incredibly, allowed to look at now, forever – and the devastating desire of the inversion surged over her again.
Noticing that Gideon’s expression had washed with what must look like an intense nausea, Harrow said, “Or do we still have unfinished business? Do you want another truth, then?”
Gideon drew a big, shuddery breath, which Harrow surveilled a little apprehensively.
“If the Ninth’s children had lived – if you didn’t need to become a revenant – if your parents hadn’t set us against each other from the beginning –"
Harrow inclined her head in anticipation.
Gideon released the breath loudly and finished, really pathetically, “ – do you think we would have been friends?”
After a pause, Harrow said, with a soft tinge of sadness, “Don’t ask me that.”
“Would you have let me leave, and join the Cohort?”
“Of course.”
“You wouldn’t want me to stay?”
A sharp edge crept into Harrow’s voice. “You said it yourself, you were suffocating.”
“But if things had been better between us – wouldn’t you ask me to stay?”
“No!” Harrow exploded, out of nowhere, coming up on her knees. “Because you would do it for me, without reason, just like you’ve been doing it for me ever since we landed on this godforsaken planet! You’re so desperate to be wanted, by anyone, by the worst of us – even at the cost of your own life!“
It sucked, but Harrow was right, and that helpless longing leaked into Gideon’s vocal cords and spread out all over her face. But now she needed to hear Harrow say it, even if it was a lie.
“Harrow, please, just – tell me you would have asked me –“
“Stop! Just fucking – stop!” Harrow’s face pinched up painfully. “You were my tool, my artifact, my thing to be used! I treated you like you were nothing to me but – but property! I would never, in any universe, have asked you to stay!”
Then Harrow squeezed her eyes shut tightly, catching a sudden wetness, and she turned her head away.
“How could I have ever asked?” she said, thickly. “I don’t have anything you want.”
Her entire life, Gideon had felt a person–shaped hole in her heart where a friend should go. It was all too possible to ache, acutely, for something she had never known. She would laugh along with the hijinks and escapades of the charming personalities in stories – the comradeship of Cohort training on the Second, mischief in the royal court of the Third, intrigue and mystery on the haunted space stations of the Sixth – and pretend she was there with them, adventuring. These daydreams were the only way she could endure the dreary hours of evening. She had burned countless nights just staring at the walls of her cell, turning her sword over and over mindlessly, spinning off her own side–stories, contrived and ridiculous in their soft simplicity. The dirty stuff she read later spiced it up considerably, but she always came back to dreaming of the small, tender rituals that might have let her live fully in reality.
But the reality of the Ninth was just the tedious brutality of training, and the boring torment of church, and the dull sting of Harrow hating her, forever.
Harrow who had been struggling, every moment, to hate her, all because she needed so badly to die.
And it could have been fucking different.
“You don’t have anything I want?” Gideon shouted, hoarsely. “You think you don’t have anything I goddamn want?”
Harrow tensed, not opening her eyes, and her little hands clenched into fists on top of her thighs. Her brow furrowed, and she bit down hard on her lower lip.
Gideon’s heart was swollen, festering with everything that had been stolen, and Harrow’s silence pierced her open like a spear.
“I want see your smug, shitty smile float by in a corridor without twisting around and wondering where you’ve set the fucking trap! I want to make you lift heavy things all day, every day so you won’t be such a goddamn wimp! I want to show you how to hold a sword so you can kick my ass respectfully, for once!”
“No,” warned Harrow, helplessly, “It would never - "
But Gideon was already gouged open, and the words spilled out like blood in water.
“I want to stack all of your books on the top shelf of the library, and hide the ladder, so you always have to ask me to get them down for you. I want to deface your sermons with dirty comments that make you stutter and blush in Chapel. I want to fuck up my face paint so badly that you always have to fix it for me. I want to listen to you explain theorems to me – "
Here Gideon’s voice broke, and she sniffed loudly and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
“I want to listen to you explain theorems to me until – until I fall asleep with my head in your lap. And I want to put my arm around your waist in Mass and grab your hand during the processional and scandalize all the great–aunts. And when the heat goes out, like always, and you’re cold and alone in your cell, I want to find you in the darkness – and I want to – I want to – FUCKING goddammit.”
Gideon ground the bases of her palms against her eyes and forced the tears back in. Her voice was catching high and tight in her throat. “It was so dark, and so fucking lonely, and we could have comforted each other. We could have fucking comforted each other.”
Harrow’s jaw clenched tightly, and her throat worked, but she said nothing. Her eyes still screwed shut, she startled when Gideon’s hand closed hesitantly around her small wrist. The skin was soft, and cool, and Harrow’s pulse was beating frantically beneath the rough pad of Gideon’s thumb.
Harrow had said, Do you really think you could have put your hands on me, even for a moment, had I not wished it with every fiber of my being?
Gideon said, softly, “I want to touch you in a way that doesn’t hurt.”
Harrow jerked her hand away like Gideon had plunged it into molten iron. Her dark eyes snapped open, wet and violent.
“Don’t you dare, Nav! Not here – here at the end of everything!” she hissed. “Don’t you DARE make me believe that it could have been different! It would NEVER have been possible – "
Harrow’s shoulders heaved suddenly, and she choked out, “– because of my CONDITION!”
The bitterness of impotence rose in Gideon’s throat.
“If you think for one goddamn second I wouldn’t have busted in that tomb and shaken that chilly bitch until she woke up and saved you – or better yet, I’ll take that fucking sword and kill God myself. Then you can fall in love with something real.”
Harrow’s face was a blank, shocked mask, like she had just been slapped. Gideon’s cheeks burned, and her heart pounded in her ears with the admission, with the transgression on Harrow’s one true watery love. But what she had said was true, and she would never apologize.
Then Harrow’s face crumpled, lined with sorrow, and her voice shook. “I am a lamentation, I am a container for anguish, I am a pity of wretchedness, and now you would have me be borne out howling!”
She inhaled noisily. “Please, no more, Nav. I can’t bear it. I can’t carry any more regret.”
Her dark lashes flickered, and the faint blue light of the perpetual bone illuminated the sudden streaked wetness of her face.
Before Gideon’s self–preserving neural synapses could fire, her hands came up, and her thumbs brushed gently across Harrow’s cheeks.
Now that Gideon was spontaneously holding Harrow’s face again, she figured that she better keep holding it, for as long as she could. There had to be a very limited number of slots on Harrow’s you–are–allowed–to–perceive–me punchcard. This day was really burning through Gideon’s precious few lifetime instances of tender face–touching.
But Harrow’s stare was wide, and immediate, and her pupils were huge and infinite, and this time she didn’t pull away. Gideon saw the wetness push against the red rims of her eyes, and Harrow choked back a tiny sob. She left her small, soft mouth slightly open, and it was wet within, and Gideon could see, peripherally, the quick rising and falling of her chest.
If they knew they had a year, or a month, or even tomorrow, then, sure, fine, okay, they could have talked it out and cried it out and gradually absolved and repaid each other for a thousand individual cuts and blows. They could have pushed each other away as old wounds tore open, and then slowly spiraled back into orbit, eternally untangling the sticky web of trauma that bound them together. It would be grueling. It would be painful. It would be necessary.
One day, they might even find they could be friends. That would be a drop of cool water on Gideon’s tongue in an agony of flames.
But as it was, Harrow could be dead tomorrow, or else she could be Harrowhark the First, and then Gideon would never see her again.
And tonight, Harrow’s heart was cut open, vulnerable and shredded, in a way it had never been before. Goddamn if Gideon didn’t want to burrow in like a thirsty little weevil and see where the rabbit hole went.
Delirious with anticipation, drunk on the terrible impetuosity of the inversion, and absolutely terminally horny, Gideon said, abruptly, “Then just fucking pretend!”
Harrow’s tight brow arched in confusion.
Gideon felt her face split in a hysterical grin, and a short, insane laugh slipped out. She dropped her hands to Harrow’s shoulders and squeezed them jocularly.
“Just pretend, Nonagesimus! Pretend whatever you want! The weather forecast at Canaan House for the rest of all time is 100% partially cloudy cold–blooded murder, so it doesn’t even matter! Nothing fucking matters anymore!”
Harrow bit her lip nervously, like she thought Gideon had finally cracked.
“Pretend everything was different! Pretend – I was always your primary cav – pretend – we trained together, bone and sword, from the time we were infants, we were always perfectly devoted, an incredible and seamless team – pretend – we’re here on some fantastic, all–expenses–paid Lyctor–cation, which has so far been infinitely safe and boring, and we’re finally away from the watchful eyes of the Ninth House ancients for the first time, and – "
Gideon’s hand came up again and brushed a thumb against the corner of Harrow’s slightly parted lips. She finished quietly, “ – and anything could happen.”
Harrow’s throat worked again, catching a small, high noise, and – oh, fuck, for just a moment her gaze dropped to Gideon’s mouth.
“Tell me what you want.” The tears Gideon had swallowed back earlier made her voice deep and grainy.
Harrow’s eyes darted to the side. “I often want things I cannot have.”
“If by have you mean earn, or gain, or deserve, then you’re goddamn right, because you have sucked at that, historically, you have sucked so much at that. But I’m not talking about something you can get from me. I’m talking about something I can only give you. And you can fucking have me, Harrow – ”
Gideon swallowed hard and closed her eyes. “– because I want it, too.”
Harrow’s shoulders tensed, and her breath caught sharply. Gideon couldn’t bear to look at her face after that, to see her expression cloud over with haughty derision at Gideon’s groveling subservience – or, worse, disgust that she had offered at all.
Any moment now, the other pointy–toed boot was going to drop, and that boot was going to kick Gideon right in the butthole. Her broad arms trembled pathetically where they clutched at the rigid shoulders, savoring each second she trod further on Harrow's lingering emotional receptiveness, barely holding back a blinding desire to close the distance.
Harrow was right – it felt like burning. Gideon felt like she would burn forever.
She pled, “Pretend there’s no past, no future, only this moment. Just – tell me what you want.”
A long, blind silence stretched between them. Harrow was breathing rapidly and shallowly. She might be an ascending fury, or she might be a chased animal. Gideon’s heart pounded frantically in her ears, not knowing how to tell the difference.
At last, Harrow drew a scared, shuddering breath, and she gasped out quickly,
“Oh, GOD, I want your mouth again – ”
And then Harrow’s desperate lips were on her own.
The kiss was forceful, wet and open, and Harrow’s tongue pushed into Gideon’s mouth immediately. Gideon jolted with an astonished squeak like a rat being stomped. Her mind was hazily debating how enthusiastically she was allowed to return the kiss. But her body had already vaulted over the line, and she was gripping Harrow’s face tightly on both sides, crushing their parted lips together, licking back into her hot little mouth.
One of Harrow’s small hands clutched Gideon’s cheek, and the other clung to the back of her neck, tugging against the short red hairs. Harrow was straining to push herself further up and into Gideon’s mouth, but she could find little purchase as they knelt against each other on the bed, and she broke away, gasping.
Automatically, Gideon’s hands dropped to Harrow’s waist and pulled her halfway up one broad thigh, with her knees spread on either side. Now they were face to face, and Harrow was violently taking her mouth, forcing into her with her sharp little tongue.
Gideon’s long fingers fanned out along Harrow’s waist. A few of her ribs felt irregular, slightly knobbed under the thin shirt, as though Harrow had fractured them badly and inexplicably suffered through their natural healing cycle. Gideon suddenly felt sick and choked inside the kiss. She recognized the faint linear impressions that she had stroked on Harrow’s cheeks as the childhood scars from her own bloodied fingernails. Gideon’s face had the same rough landscape. Why in God’s name hadn’t Harrow healed herself properly?
She knew she should let go, she should have let go at once. But instead she wrapped her arms tightly around the slender waist and desperately pulled Harrow to her chest, kissing her roughly and deeply.
She felt Harrow’s legs squeeze together tightly as they were dragged further up her thigh, and a deep, desperate noise echoed into Gideon’s mouth.
Oh fuck, that got the juices flowing. A blistering spark lit between Gideon’s legs and was immediately extinguished with a small flush of wetness. Boohooing over cavernous regret was temporary suspended while she figured out how to hear that sound again.
She loosened her grip on the waist a little, breaking the kiss and letting Harrow slide down her thigh, back towards the bed. Harrow’s eyes were dark and wild, and her bruised mouth wetly parted with a question.
But before she could ask, Gideon coarsely jerked Harrow back up her thigh. This time a small cry burst into the open air before Harrow bit it back in shock, her cheeks flushing darkly.
A little shiver ran down Gideon’s spine and pooled wetly in her shorts.
She loosened her grip again, but Harrow had caught on and wound her arms firmly around Gideon’s neck. She bent to mute herself inside Gideon’s mouth, but that mouth was already pressing a soft, wet kiss to Harrow’s neck, routing her into an involuntary shudder.
Interesting.
Gideon opened her mouth against Harrow’s neck again, letting her tongue rasp over the delicate skin, and savored the sensation of Harrow jerking slightly against her. She was going to suck just one more little kiss beneath the ear, just one more along the jawline, just one more against the long column of her throat. She just needed to hear one more tiny whimper, one more little gasp as Harrow twitched against her thigh. Oh, fuck, Harrow had started grinding against Gideon’s thigh on her own, panting noisily, and Gideon found herself rocking roughly into the motion.
Initially, Gideon had felt relief as the kiss doused her burning like cool water. Except, holy shit, this was a grease fire, and throwing water on it had spread the flames fucking everywhere. The blaze was scalding her heart and stinging between her legs and driving all the moisture from her body, soaking her underwear. Gideon surged against the crushing instinct to rip her hands from the slender waist and shove them up Harrow’s shirt and down the back of her trousers, palming the unbearable softness pushing against her chest and thigh. She grossly coveted the fantasy of Harrow climaxing against her.
Mindlessly, carelessly, she groaned against Harrow’s neck, “I want to comfort you in your bed, I want to comfort you with my mouth and my fingers –”
Harrow pushed away instantly. Her sweaty hands fell to grip Gideon’s thigh, halting their mutual thrusting. “This was a mistake,” she gasped quickly, her wide eyes searching Gideon’s face in panic. “This oath has imposed on you a – a perverse obligation.”
But Harrow’s hand was right there on her leg, so, well – Gideon impulsively grabbed it and shoved it between the wet crease of her boxers. Fuck, she surged with arousal even at the faint, forced contact. “Does this feel like a fucking obligation?” she demanded tightly.
A strangled noise caught in Harrow’s throat.
Gideon mentally waved goodbye to her sacrum and steeled herself for the necromantic disarticulation of her ilium, ischium, and pubis.
Incredibly, Harrow slowly turned her wrist over, gingerly extending her fingers to cup the swell of the soggy fabric. Her fingers twitched against the wetness. She murmured absently, “This game is – dangerous – this game is – incredibly unhealthy.” Her pupils were blown enormously dark.
“So call a doctor tomorrow and let’s see what happens tonight.” Gideon’s cocky retort wobbled nervously. Her heart was hammering in her throat.
Holy GOD, Harrow had started rubbing her, torturing her with the compulsion to push back into the motion, even as the necromancer stammered, “I can’t ask – I can’t ask in good conscience – "
Conscience had never stopped Harrow before, but a no was a no.
Gideon lifted herself off abruptly, scooted back, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Sorry, I – I pushed too hard.”
Still kneeling on the bed behind her, Harrow asked thickly, “What are you going to do about … that?”
Continuing to call attention to the situation did not make it throb any less insistently. Gideon stood up quickly, and her bloodless head spun a little.
“It’s no big deal, I’m just gonna go – uh – wash up.”
Gideon was definitely not running to the bathroom to immediately rub herself raw, thinking of Harrow moaning into her mouth.
The bed lifted slightly, and Harrow whipped into view, bodily blocking the path. She was electrified with an incredible vibrational energy, her close–cropped dark hair messily spiked up all over.
Gideon avoided her intense stare and forced a congenial grimace. “Lemme just squeeze around ya for a moment so I can get some clean underwear.“
“I’ll take care of it.”
“That’s very kind, but despite what Camilla says, it’s easier if I organize my own sock drawer."
“I want to service you.”
What kind of necromantic underwear–folding serv – DEARHOLYFUCK –
Gideon’s brain skidded sideways off the tracks, spiked through the window, and plunged, full of glass and confusion, to the bottom of the ocean.
“Griddle.”
So this was what it felt like to be lobotomized.
“Sit down.”
Griddle sat down.
Oh, fuck, this was happening.
“Off.” Harrow had stepped between Gideon’s shocked, splayed legs and was tugging at the waistband of the ruined boxers while Gideon sat there stupidly.
Oh, dear merciful fuck, this was happening, this was happening, this was going to happen NOW, this was going to happening right fucking now. Gideon clutched at the bedspread. She really felt like she was going to start hyperventilating.
Harrow huffed in frustration. “Quickly, before I come to my senses.”
Gideon’s shaking arms gelatinously wrangled down her underwear, and a damp splotch spread on the sheet below. Fuck, could Harrow see how tightly she was throbbing?
Well, she definitely could now, because she had lowered herself to the floor between Gideon’s legs and was clinically inspecting her sopping wet vulva.
Finally, Gideon found her voice, and gasped, “Harrow, please don’t – kneel.”
Harrow scooted closer to the edge of the bed and firmly shouldered Gideon’s broad thighs apart. “Better access. Lay down.”
Fright and arousal swirling together, Gideon tipped back obediently on the bed, but kept herself propped up on her elbows. Despite her skittering heartrate, she ached to watch Harrow’s pretty little mouth close over her clit, and to catch the desperate darkness of her eyes. Even more perversely, she realized that the mirror opposite the bed would show her Harrow’s head between her legs.
Harrow exhaled shakily and wiped her sweaty hands on her trousers.
She carefully slid a slender finger on either side of the minor labia. Gideon’s heart jolted nervously, her center fizzling statically at the feather–light touch.
Then Harrow – flipped them both to one side?
“It’s at the top,” Gideon whispered.
The minor labia were both quickly flipped to the other side.
“The top – " Gideon urged, as gently as possible.
A top being something that Harrow was not, apparently.
The necromancer glowered up at her. “Shut up, I’ve seen more vaginas than you have.”
“On living people or on cadavers?”
Harrow crossly showed Gideon her middle finger, and then slicked its pad up between the minor labia, releasing a foam of wetness. She spread them apart delicately, and her hot breath pulsed against the tender flesh.
“There, right and left. I merely wished to…orient you in anatomical position.”
The ridiculousness of their terrifying, precarious entanglement struck Gideon with a giddy laugh.
“I can’t believe that Harrowhark Nonagesiumus gets to eat a girl out before I do.”
Gideon glanced down suspiciously. “Unless…while you were in the Locked Tomb…”
“Don’t be disgusting, Griddle, I’m not a necrophiliac.”
“Yeah, but you have aspirations of necrophili–AAAAAH!”
Harrow had deeply and decisively licked the entire length of Gideon’s cunt.
Harrow’s eyes widened. “Oh, apocrine!” she murmured. At once, Gideon felt the exhilaration of Harrow’s tongue again, searing her swollen expanse up and down in long, wide stripes that pushed shuddering waves into her core.
“Do I – hrgh – do I taste okay?” Gideon warbled, not really knowing what else to say to someone who was eagerly licking her vagina.
Harrow gave her a broad, slow lick, let Gideon see the froth of wetness on her tongue, and wordlessly swallowed. Gideon’s throat tightened, and a high, wobbly whimper leaked out.
Harrow leaned back and tortuously stroked the pads of two fingers up and down either side of Gideon’s entrance. “You’re incredibly engorged,” she panted. “The bulb of the vestibule, and the bulbospongiosus muscle over it, the crus and its superficial ischiocavernosus muscle, and of course the body of the clitoris, just obscenely swollen – "
Gideon’s traitorous body rewarded Harrow’s abysmal dirty talk with a trickle of fluid. Her clit was throbbing desperately from the lack of contact.
“So, logically, the erectile tissue of the clitoris must proceed internally to – "
Gideon’s wetness easily took two of Harrow’s slender fingers. They pushed against a spot on the internal anterior wall that jolted a sharp, radiating spark up to the back of Gideon’s neck and out to her fingertips.
Simultaneously, Harrow roughly dragged her tongue against Gideon’s pulsing clit.
“FUCK!” Gideon shrieked, bucking off the bed. She felt Harrow smile smugly against her and knew that the necromancer would be forever conceited about one–shotting her.
Oh merciful God, Harrow’s tongue was so much better than Gideon’s fingers. It caressed her clit with a coarse, unbearable wetness, soft and firm and flexible all together. Her cunt tensed lightly against the penetrating fingers with each impossibly tender, slick stroke of Harrow’s tongue. The clumsy inexperience of Harrow’s rhythm made her soft lips press against the clit erratically, and it tingled under her hot, wet breath.
Gideon tried to steady herself by tangling the fingers of one hand in the short black curls of Harrow’s head. But Harrow’s eyelashes fluttered at the faint tugging, her dark eyes rolling back slightly, and Gideon’s cunt seized on the fingers so tightly that it burned.
Desperate to cool the consuming flare of her atmospheric re–entry, Gideon shifted her gaze to the mirror. Harrow’s round little ass was pleasantly wiggling side to side. Wait, was she rubbing her legs together? Hold on, if one hand was inside Gideon –
Sure enough, there was a suspiciously hand–shaped bulge moving in the crotch of Harrow’s trousers. Better access, indeed.
“Take them off so I can watch,” Gideon said, thickly.
“Oh – why?” gasped Harrow against her, flushing scarlet.
“I want to think about you wet and open when I touch myself.”
Honesty really was the best policy. Harrow pulled her trousers down to her knees hurriedly, almost mindlessly. There was a brief, glorious flash of swollen, rosy folds and damp black curls in the mirror before she knelt back down on her own hand.
Gideon had always kind of figured that Harrow didn’t masturbate at all, given her persistently tight winding. But in the slivers of time amid an eternity of prayers and masses, between the clamoring demands and distresses of a dying world, Harrow had apparently discovered how to get herself off extremely quickly. After a brief outburst of precise, frantic stimulation between her legs, her eyes unfocused, and the rhythm of her tongue slowed and stumbled.
“Oh, fuck, are you going to come while you eat me out?” Gideon gasped, sounding unnecessarily shrill.
Harrow made a sharp, strangled noise against her, and then she kept making that noise, higher and faster. Absently, brutally, she took her mouth away and pressed her sweaty brow against Gideon’s thigh. Her fingers mindlessly stilled and then slipped out of Gideon’s cunt as she rubbed herself furiously with her other hand.
Gideon started to feel the immediate panic that you get when you see a cat trying to throw up. They were both in the eye of the hurricane, and Harrow’s probable post–nut clarity was the surge of the storm wall.
Obliterated in her frenzy of rubbing, her shoulders heaving, Harrow gasped at the precipice of a silent scream.
“Harrow, STOP.”
Harrow startled, shuddering savagely at the cliff of her orgasm.
“Stop touching yourself. Focus on me.”
Her voice held steady, but Gideon was petrified by the insolence of her demand. Her core ached furiously with the loss of Harrow’s mouth and fingers. Harrow looked up at her dizzily, panting.
Gideon roused her courage and ordered, sharply, “Let me see your hands.”
Holy shit, Harrow shakily raised both of her hands and placed them gingerly on Gideon’s knees. Her fingers were slightly reddened and damp with a mixture of the two of them. She averted her eyes guiltily.
Then she squeezed her thighs together tightly.
“No – keep your legs apart. Come up on your knees so I can see you.”
Merciful fuck, Harrow lifted her pretty little ass and spread her trembling legs apart underneath. In the mirror, her tight, swollen cunt was a vision of messy wetness, glistening all over and smeared into the crease of her thighs.
Harrow’s astonishing compliance made Gideon feel stupidly drunk with power. This must be how Harrow felt all the time. Still, she was terrified to move her gaze from the mirror and see Harrow’s face twisted into an incandescent rage.
There was a wet fluttering of fingers on her knees. Harrow made a small, questioning noise.
Gideon looked down instinctively, and her heart caught in her throat. Harrow’s cheeks were flushed, her mouth ruddy and open, panting lightly. Her dark eyes were vast with hunger. She stared up at Gideon intensely with an unmistakably unbridled lust.
A cool shiver of relief ran down Gideon’s spine. She shifted her reclining weight to one of her elbows so that she could stroke Harrow’s cheek with her other hand.
“I know, I know, the first time is tough to figure out, and you just want to touch yourself again,” she murmured softly.
Harrow pressed her cheek into Gideon’s palm and nodded fiercely. She started to slip a hand back down between her legs.
Gideon moved her hand from Harrow’s face and caught the wrist deftly, then placed it firmly back on her knee. She wound her fingers tightly in the curls on the back of Harrow’s head, tugging out a soaked gasp.
“Well, you know what they say, Nonagesimus…”
Gideon gently pulled Harrow’s open mouth back against her cunt.
“…Suffer and learn.”
Harrow choked wetly, stunned by the reins being ripped from her hands. But as she caught Gideon’s gaze, arousal spiked deep and immediate behind her dark eyes. She closed her lips over the stinging clit in a sloppy, sucking kiss, and Gideon shuddered in relief. Harrow’s smothered moan vibrated up into her center and wound like a burning coil.
Pulling back, Harrow dragged the flat of her tongue deliberately against the swollen clit in a long stroke. The slick softness of her tongue thrust a shivering thrill deep inside, drawing a slight jerk from Gideon’s hips. Harrow again licked her slowly, studiously, taking the clit wetly in her mouth. At the same time, she pushed three of her slender fingers into Gideon’s entrance. The spine–melting jolt from the wet velvet of Harrow’s tongue on her clit swirled sharply against the faint, pleasant burn of penetration. Gideon hissed slightly, and her hips moved against Harrow’s mouth again, her fingers twisting in the dark hair.
Harrow quickly caught the cadence of call and response, and soon she was licking Gideon deeply and eagerly. The soft, wet tongue bathing Gideon’s aching clit drove unrelenting spikes of bliss deep into her core. These coalesced violently with a savage, pulsing heat from the fingers stroking inside her tightening cunt. And, oh god, just the visual of Harrow looking up from between her legs, her brow creased with a faint, nervous concern, her dark eyes studying Gideon’s face, searching for Gideon’s pleasure, seeing whether she liked it, seeing how she liked it, and oh fuck the soft pink of her lapping tongue, the damp rose of her parted lips, and the wet darkness of her working mouth –
Gideon felt her nipples harden under her shirt, dragging tortuously against the spun fabric. Harrow was emitting a humiliating whine of need with every thrust of her fingers – wait, fuck, no, Harrow’s mouth was full of her wetness, Gideon was the one bleating pathetically. In the mirror, Harrow’s little toes curled tightly, her separated legs shuddered, and her mouth and fingers worked desperately between Gideon’s legs.
Finally, she just latched onto Gideon’s clit and sucked, her tongue softly abrading the tender bud inside her hot little mouth.
“Oh fuck, yes, suck on me, please suck on me –“ Gideon heard herself wail.
She clung to the bedspread to keep herself from bucking violently against Harrow’s mouth. The searing string in her core was rapidly winding, pulling her toward a blistering summit.
She wondered, distantly, deliriously – what would be on the other side of that mountain?
Awkwardness, certainly. Denial, likely. Derision – possible. Hatred…
Would Harrow hate her more after this night, more than ever? Would she die hating Gideon? Would she live, hating Gideon, for ten thousand bitter years?
The flaming ascendance of Gideon’s climax pulsed numbly in her lower body as her heart clenched.
Harrow had said, The inversion makes you desperate to give things to them, things you could never ask of them, things you could never have –
“We can stop this and do you instead – ” Gideon gasped, tightening her abdomen painfully, suddenly begging to extinguish her engulfing blaze.
Self–contempt churned bitterly in her stomach. How could she have been so fucking mindlessly lustful, so eternally goddamn selfish? She pressed her hand desperately to the side of Harrow’s working jaw, her thumb gently brushing the highness of its cheekbone.
Harrow gazed up at her darkly, deeply, looking wise and raw and broken. Her pretty mouth was closed softly over Gideon’s clit, sucking on it tenderly, soothing it with her tongue. Her fingers still pushed in firmly, not letting go.
Gideon’s throat stung with the grief of parting, making her voice high and small.
“We can stop this – oh fuck, we should have done you instead, I want to do you instead, I want you in my mouth right now, I want you in my mouth forever, oh god, Harrow, please –"
She forced down her climax and reached for Harrow fiercely.
“Please, just tell me what you want –”
Harrow intertwined her slim fingers with Gideon’s own as they clutched her face. The fingers of her other hand, inside, curled up and back precisely. Her soft lips pressed against Gideon’s clit, and she murmured gently,
“I want you to stay.”
And Gideon’s orgasm pierced through her like a white–hot bolt.
Her climax rushed out with a shout and poured back in with a continual, shuddering gasp. Her scalding core wound tightly and released over and over, pulsing with an unbearably pleasurable sharpness. Harrow’s steadily stroking tongue and fingers kept pulling her up a new peak as soon as she tumbled down the preceding one. Her broad thighs tensed and shook powerfully as she strained against crushing Harrow between them.
Finally, mercifully, Harrow relented and covered her shivering, swollen wetness with tender, open–mouth kisses. The euphoric ebb of the orgasm flooded out from Gideon’s center, saturating her head with a pleasant buzzing and tingling at the back of her neck. A cold thrill spiked out to her toes and fingertips.
After a moment of stunned exhilaration, Gideon stickily raised herself to a sitting position, feeling like her brain had been stirred with a fork. Then nearly came again when Harrow sat back on her heels, her swollen lips and flushed cheeks and pointed little chin smeared with Gideon’s wetness.
Harrow gingerly slicked out her three dripping fingers, then placed both of her hands obediently back on Gideon’s knees.
Gideon swallowed, hard.
“Can I see you again?”
Harrow’s short–bitten fingernails cut lightly into Gideon’s flesh, but she pressed her lips together tightly and came up on her knees again silently. In the mirror, her swollen slit was blossomed open, shining wetly and deeply pinkish–red within. The slight tremor of her legs betrayed her precarious condition. A few droplets were winding glistening trails down her inner thighs.
“Please – " Harrow said, suddenly, her brow creasing urgently.
“Please, what?”
“Please – please let me finish myself.”
A sourness of anticipation curled at the back of Gideon’s tongue.
“Absolutely fucking not.”
She swiftly pulled Harrow up onto her lap, shucking the rumpled trousers, and the necromancer’s trembling knees spread to straddle her broad thighs.
Gideon cupped her hand high between Harrow’s separated thighs, infinitely close but not touching. A damp heat tingled against her palm.
Harrow’s throat worked tightly.
“Griddle, ple –"
“Say my name.”
“Gideon –" Harrow gasped, and holy fuck, a string of her wetness sluiced between Gideon’s fingers. She clenched her jaw and steadied herself with a tight grip on Gideon’s shoulders.
“You were right,” said Gideon, coarsely. “This is a dangerous game. But you only ever picked truth.”
She twitched her fingers up slightly, still not close enough to touch, but enough for Harrow to clutch at her shoulders as she sensed their movement.
“Truth or dare, Harrow.”
Harrow’s heart pounded loudly in Gideon’s ear, and her hard, fast breaths feathered the tufts of red hair. Finally, Harrow broke with a gasping whine and ground herself down wetly against the roughness of Gideon’s palm.
“Dare,” she half–sobbed.
Gideon exhaled sharply. She positioned two fingers at Harrow’s entrance, teasing just the barest tips inside, reveling in its slick, scorching softness.
“I dare you to let me fuck you until you scream.”
Choking back a cry, Harrow shoved her tight, wet cunt down onto Gideon’s thick fingers, and Gideon instantly pushed up into her. She spasmed forcefully but took them to the hilt completely.
Oh, lord, they really should have started with one finger, Harrow was incredibly compact. But Gideon was already thrusting up into her fiercely, blistering in her furnace, consumed by the momentum. The pad of Gideon’s other thumb rubbed light, quick circles on Harrow’s swollen clit, and a hot trickle of fluid spilled into the palm of her penetrating hand. Harrow clung to Gideon’s shoulders, her eyes squeezed shut and her brow tensed anxiously. She pressed her lips tightly together and suffocated her cries into a long, strangled whimper. On the Ninth, the compulsive rituals of climax must have commanded a terrified silence from the Reverend Daughter.
Harrow’s small body was jolted slightly, repeatedly, as Gideon’s large fingers stroked firmly in and out. The swell of her chest rose and fell right at eye level. Her hard little nipples were poking stiffly through her thin shirt again. If Gideon pressed an innocent kiss to the center of the chest, then maybe, just maybe, she could unobtrusively nuzzle –
Well, the disadvantage of not being cut bald for this whole adventure was that Harrow was able to grip Gideon’s shock of red hair right at the scalp, administering an unnecessarily disciplinary tug. As her head was pulled back sharply, Gideon saw Harrow’s eyes open, her glare immense and dangerous. The rapid pace of Gideon’s thrusting fingers stumbled against its intensity.
Then – holy fucking shit – Harrow whipped her shirt right off over her head, threaded her hands back firmly into Gideon’s hair, and roughly pulled her surprised mouth to one naked breast.
WOW, boobs!!! Gideon had been right, Harrow did have a mouthful. She pressed a wet, open kiss over the breast’s exquisite softness, laving the nipple fervently and then sucking down hungrily as it puckered between her lips. The delicate skin rasping under her tongue made the back of her mouth water. Harrow aspirated sharp, high noises, her cunt tightening on Gideon’s quick, calloused fingers as they fell into an eager cadence with her greedy mouth.
Fuck, Harrow was still tightening, and soon she started to arch her back, pressing the celestial softness of her breast into Gideon’s industrious mouth, twisting her hands tightly in the red hair. Craving her for just a little longer, Gideon cruelly withdrew her hand from Harrow’s swollen clit. Instead, she caught Harrow’s chin and pulled her down into an aching kiss. Harrow kissed her back wetly, feverishly, moaning into her mouth with flagrant urgency, and Gideon saw the desperation of the orgasm deep within her open eyes.
Suddenly, Gideon pulled out her fingers and pushed Harrow away, up onto her feet. Before the brutal gasp of loss left Harrow’s throat, she was turned to face the mirror and yanked back down to sit on Gideon’s lap. Her sweaty head fell back against Gideon’s shoulder, and her tight little ass tensed on top of the clenched thighs as her legs were spread widely on either side. Having no other handhold, she reached one arm up and behind to tangle in Gideon’s hair.
Gideon snaked her sword arm around Harrow’s hip. Her large palm cupped the black curls plastered down damply on the mound. The tips of her two central fingers rubbed a few teasing circles against the reddened clit, then firmly pushed back up into Harrow’s cunt from the front. As she was entered again, Harrow bit back a gasp and her hips jerked forward. With her hand tightly curved, Gideon could grind the rough base of her palm firmly against Harrow’s swollen clit, pumping the fingers of the same hand thickly in and out. Her offhand cupped the other breast from below, pinching the nipple softly, enraptured with the swell of its gentle firmness. Harrow was slick and hot around her working fingers, her wetness starting to soak down between Gideon’s thighs and into her tight red curls.
Jealously, Gideon had wanted Harrow to see them both together in the mirror. Her own face was slack with lust, her mouth wet and open, her golden eyes glossy and sunken. With blatant carnality, she drank in the short brown expanse of Harrow’s stomach, the beautiful soft roundness of her breasts thrust forward, high on her chest, and her slender thighs spread open, trembling. The deep flush of near–climax patched Harrow’s chest and neck. Most of all, her delicately pointed face was open, ethereal, gasping with need, imploring, asking Gideon in a way she never had before. Gideon wanted to sear this moment into her forever, so that Harrow couldn’t pretend, in some distant, myriadic future, that this had all just been a cold, dead hand and a frozen kiss. She would remember Gideon’s warm, desperate hands on her breasts and between her legs, Gideon’s wild eyes over her shoulder, Gideon’s hungry mouth on her neck, adoring her, worshiping her.
“Harrow, look at yourself –”
The necromancer chuckled wryly, tightening her hand in Gideon’s hair. “You delight in torturing me.”
“You’re – gorgeous,” Gideon murmured, sucking a sharp kiss on Harrow’s neck. She saw it darken immediately and felt a surge of possession.
“If that icy cunt wakes up and doesn’t want you, she’s a fool.”
A deep envy rose in her throat, and she quickly muted herself against Harrow’s neck again, biting down slightly. A startled cry staggered out openly before Harrow could catch it. This kindled another small, sucking bite, and then another, harsher. She palmed Harrow’s breast roughly and pinched the nipple so tightly it must hurt just a little. Harrow’s cunt seized around the probing fingers, her small body jerking forward, and she at last openly gasped out the rising sounds of climax.
And Gideon suddenly felt very, very thirsty.
“I’m sorry, Harrow, I can’t wait anymore –"
She quickly pulled out her fingers and slid Harrow off to one side, pushing her further up onto the bed. Gideon flipped over onto her stomach, propped up on her elbows, and dragged Harrow’s knees up over her shoulders. At last, she buried her face between her necromancer’s legs.
Harrow’s thighs were slick on either side of her cheeks. Her wetness had the sharpness of pollen in water, the sweet tang of sweat on the back of the tongue. Gideon knew on some animal level the smell and taste of sex, and it saturated her. She felt feral and ravenous.
She swiped her long tongue through deeply a few times, then pushed it up into Harrow’s cunt as far as it would go. Harrow shrieked and bucked up against her, scrabbling blindly against the sheets. Gideon wound her sword arm around Harrow’s thigh and over her hip, holding her down, panting, against the bed. She marveled at the gentle divots that her fingertips pressed into soft flesh of Harrow’s stomach.
Gideon replaced her tongue with the two central fingers of her offhand, curling them up and back. She stroked firmly against the spot on the anterior vaginal wall that Harrow had pinpointed so adeptly. At the same time, she lapped the inflamed clit roughly, unceasingly, with the flat of her tongue. Harrow squirmed erratically, helpless under Gideon’s strong arm, begging senselessly. Her small hands knotted desperately in Gideon’s hair.
Moving her sword hand down into the dark curls, Gideon delicately tugged the clitoral hood back with her thumb. She teased the tip of her tongue directly against the reddened bud. Harrow twisted violently to one side, whimpering deliriously, digging her heels into Gideon’s back. But Gideon held Harrow’s hips down firmly and gently licked her exposed clit over and over, letting her feel the stinging sharpness of the pleasure. Harrow’s cunt spasmed tightly as she was filled completely, endlessly, by fingers that stroked in thickly and pulled out glistening. Her loud supplications slurred into a wordless nonsense.
Gideon had hoped, stupidly, romantically, that Harrow might say her name when she came, like they always did in stories. But she had worked Harrow over far too long and far too deeply. As Gideon sealed her lips over the naked bud and sucked down directly, she felt a crushing wave ripple out from her penetrating fingertips. Harrow gripped Gideon’s hair painfully, and heaved, and then arched in a whole–body convulsion.
Finally, ascendantly, divinely, Harrow broke in Gideon’s mouth, and her scream was a shuddering, agonized wail of relief.
The arm across her hips kept Harrow from bucking up too forcefully, but she was still able to clamp Gideon’s head tightly between her jerking thighs. Gideon soothed the rolling swell of the orgasm with her tongue as best she could while being trash–compacted. Harrow was surging up and sliding helplessly down each peak with a staggering, sobbing cry, her small body convulsing against Gideon’s mouth with violent aftershocks. Her pulsing compressions ejected trickles of fluid around the fingers still tightly rammed inside.
Gradually, the pounding waves of her climax abated, and Harrow began to whimper and startle against the cool, gentle strokes of Gideon’s tongue on her tender clit. Her legs fell apart limply as her tension melted back into the bed. Her dark eyes were glossy, her chest and neck deeply flushed. “Oh, my god,” she wheezed. “Oh, my god.”
Gideon carefully extracted her hair from the weakly clutching fingers and came up on her knees. Harrow jerked with a soft whine as the fingers of the offhand slid out, coated in shining wetness and trailing a long string back. “Fuck –“ she gasped, watching Gideon very deliberately put them in her own mouth and eagerly suck them clean.
“Oh, my god – " Coherence suddenly flashed across Harrow’s face, and panic spiked deep behind her eyes. “Oh, my god, we – oh, oh, my GOD – "
Gideon scrambled up on top of her quickly. She knew just how her body would fit over Harrow, the muscle memory of years of deeply physical fighting. Her hindbrain sloshed around weirdly inside the gooey sensation that replaced the usual titration of rage she felt in this position.
Harrow’s jaw was tensing, her nostrils flaring with rapid breathing, a familiar pinched expression crinkling at her periphery. Now, Gideon saw it for what it really was – grief, guilt, and fear.
Harrow tried to turn her head away, but Gideon gripped her face tightly, forcibly holding her wide, scared gaze. “I do not regret this,” Gideon said firmly. “I refuse to regret this.”
She kissed Harrow impulsively, deeply, pouring desire and compassion into the void left by the orgasm. She swallowed Harrow’s frustrated, tearful growl and softly stroked her cheeks. It was only a moment before Harrow relented – kissing her back at first reluctantly, shamefully, but soon fervently, needily, openly.
Gideon had pictured her first time as maybe shyly pawing at another recruit, or at least orally pleasing an older Cohort officer who knew something about negotiating seduction. Despite her cocky inner voice, Gideon had precious little experience in pursuit and aggression – except, of course, when it came to Harrow. That must explain how this whole thing had so easily slipped out of their hands, like a heavily–lubed – well, Gideon wasn’t even going to think about that.
She had certainly not predicted slam–dunking her virginity by gripping her childhood enemy between her legs, finishing coarsely in her mouth, and then stuffing her in every geometric configuration.
(That sort of dark fantasy was saved for when Gideon was running late for training and really needed to push herself over an orgasmic edge.)
After lifetime of hostility, it was inevitable that their coalescence would be a crude and harsh combustion – part raw hunger, part broken apology. It had the sort of spontaneous intensity that made you wonder – well, at least in recent years – whether their tension had been kind of sexual all along.
But then, there was the matter of the – feelings.
For Gideon, sexual release was a necessary exorcism of her horny little gremlins. Too long without, and they throbbed insistently in her lower body, whispering nasty distractions in her ear when she was training, or fighting, or worst of all, walking a half–step behind Harrow. After touching herself, she felt clean and clear–headed, sharp and logical.
She did not expect – especially in the aftermath of their rough convergence – for her heart to flood with an unbearably sticky affection. Her mouth filled with all of the honeyed words that Harrow had promised when she spoke of the inversion, and Gideon ached to say, darling, dearest, beloved. But she swallowed back her tenderness against Harrow’s mouth, clutching her face and murmuring into her, “Harrow, Harrow –", as though she could erase every time she had spat her name in hatred.
After what seemed like a very long time, Harrow broke the kiss softly, her fingertips still brushing Gideon’s jaw. She squirmed slightly, looking a little uncomfortable, so Gideon rolled off to one side. Harrow turned on her side, too, so they were facing each other. She was lying very still, looking at Gideon with a wide, expectant expression, like she was waiting for something to happen. Or perhaps she thought Gideon’s vision was based on movement, and by remaining motionless she hoped to avoid confronting whatever came next.
No matter, thanks to her vast pornographic education, Gideon knew exactly what to do after sex.
She rifled through the dusty text files in the back of her brain – Arguments I Have Won in the Sonic, Unrealistic Ideas for Spin–Kicks, Places Harrow Can Be Told to Stick It (Sexual), Places Harrow Can Be Told to Stick It (Not Sexual)…
Ah, there it was – PillowTalk.exe. Gideon confidently pressed “Play.”
“So...uh… sex, huh?”
Gideon looked sharply at the file location in her brain. It read: Program did not compile. User chose to ignore 12 errors and 57 warnings.
Aw, shit, what she actually wanted was PillowTalk_final_FINAL.exe. Gideon tried that program instead.
“I can’t believe how wet you got!”
Harrow blanched. “Oh – sorry –"
“No, no, it was awesome! It was incredibly – hot. I was really impressed. I didn’t expect it at all.”
Harrow blinked owlishly. “Vaginal lubrication is partially a blood exudate.”
“Oh, cool…” said Gideon, not really knowing what to do with that information.
This was probably a bad time to make a joke about flesh magicians.
“Harrow, I suck at this, let’s just make out again.”
Harrow pursed her lips, considering. Then the corner of her mouth quirked up.
“Mmm, I don’t know, Nav, you really taste like a vagina.”
Gideon grinned wildly. “I taste like your vagina, you little asshole!”
She grabbed Harrow’s cheeks and covered her mouth with a big, sloppy kiss, then planted wet little smooches all over her face. Harrow half–struggled against her, almost playfully, and an odd, high noise bubbled out of her chest.
Holy fuck, was that a goddamn giggle?
Gideon pulled back and saw that small, astonished smile again – the one she had seen in the pool when Harrow spoke of the Body. Harrow’s brow was smooth and her eyes were bright, and something blissful and contented and euphoric was shining out of her.
Gideon felt herself beaming like an idiot. She tucked a lock of dark hair behind Harrow’s delicate ear. Her insides were fully liquified, and all that was within her was a bruising, bursting, lovesick heart.
Something painful twitched within Harrow’s elation.
“Don’t look at me that way,” she said, softly.
“What way?”
“Like you – "
Harrow bit her lip and turned over quickly, facing away.
“Nothing,” she said in a very small voice.
Gideon hesitated. She had fucked it up, somehow. After a moment, she asked, “Can I still – hold you?”
Harrow had folded in on herself, but she nodded tightly. Gideon spooned up behind her, pulling Harrow into the curve of her hips and tangling their legs together. Her arms were wrapped around the slender waist, one elbow pressed into the bed underneath, and her large hands splayed over the soft stomach, feeling it gently rise and fall. Gideon’s chest hummed and glowed around the warmth of Harrow tucked against her. Oh, cuddling was nice, even though the necromancer was really just mournfully swaddled in her arms like a sad, squished spider with all of its legs curled up.
She studied the back of Harrow’s head for a while, listening to the quiet, stilted rasp of her breathing. There was a tiny freckle behind her ear, right at the tip of the dark curl that Gideon had tucked back. Well, surely it wouldn’t hurt anything if I just…
Gideon gently pressed her lips against the freckle, just behind the ear. Harrow shivered slightly, but she didn’t pull out of Gideon’s arms. Gideon released the breath she was holding. See, no harm done.
Oh, look, there was another little freckle at the nape of Harrow’s neck, a small misshapen star. Now it would be jealous of the first. It was always better to balance these things out. Gideon pressed a soft kiss against this spot as well.
Harrow stifled a small noise and jerked her knees up slightly, pressing her little ass back into the crease of Gideon’s hips. The fingertips of the arm slung over her waist inadvertently dipped down and brushed into the dark curls of her mound. Gideon quickly took her mouth from Harrow’s neck and moved her hand back up to its innocent position.
There was a moment of strained silence. Gideon’s stomach flipped nervously with the inevitability of being shoved away.
Then Harrow said, stiffly, “You may – continue.”
Gideon remained completely frozen, which, given Harrow’s proclivities for glacial maidens, probably worked in her favor.
Harrow cleared her throat intentionally. She tugged the deadweight of Gideon’s hand down below her waist again, extending two of its long fingers and placing their pads deliberately on her still–swollen clit.
“You may continue,” she repeated firmly, then added, hesitantly, “If…you wish.”
Oh…oh!
Well, Gideon wasn’t going to say no to a little hair of the dog, even though that dog did just do a big ol’ chomp on her heart.
Logically, if they just never stopped having sex, they wouldn’t have to address why this really should have been hate–fucking, warped midway through into friends with benefits, and crash–landed pretty damn close to making love.
Gideon grazed the clit with her fingertips, sensing its faint, ruddy heat and reveling in Harrow startling and gasping at the barest touch. “You’re still so sensitive,” she murmured, pressing her lips against the heartbeat throbbing in the slender neck. Then she sucked down on the pulse sharply, drawing out a little whimper.
She pushed her knee between Harrow’s thighs as they spooned together, spreading her legs slightly and letting her feel the warmth of Gideon’s center against the curve of her ass. She adjusted the arm under Harrow’s waist so that she could cup one of those beautifully soft breasts again, rolling the nipple gently between her rough fingertips.
Her other hand began stroking Harrow’s clit firmly, and she sucked softly biting kisses all over the back and side of her delicate neck. Harrow bucked gently into her hand with little panting cries, jolting against each tiny bite like she was being lightly shocked. Gideon dipped her fingers down to Harrow’s entrance, still slick and hot, and found a new flush of wetness. She smeared it up along Harrow’s clit and into her dark curls.
“Can I be tender with you this time?” Gideon whispered.
“Wait – “ Harrow said abruptly.
Gideon’s heart dangled over the edge.
“I didn’t – " Harrow drew a shaky breath. “I didn’t get to touch you yet.”
“I mean…” Gideon thrust her crotch lightly against Harrow’s ass.
“Other places, Nav.”
“You – want that?”
From behind Harrow’s head, Gideon saw the dark horizon of a deep blush.
“Can I direct it?” Harrow asked, penitently and a little sheepishly, like she knew she really shouldn’t be allowed.
“Harrowhark? In control? Groundbreaking!”
Gideon extracted herself and rolled over on her back, resting her hands behind her head. Harrow roused and knelt on the bed between the cockily splayed legs. Something greedy and curious swam to Harrow’s surface, the mysterious melancholy rippling back underneath.
Gideon gave her a lopsided grin. “At your command, my skeletal sovereign!”
A deeply wicked smile tickled at the corners of Harrow’s mouth. She steepled her fingers and tapped their tips together. Now she was in her element.
“Mm. Nav, take off your shirt.”
Gideon arched her back and pulled her undershirt off over her head, tossing it to one side. It felt a little unnerving to be fully naked with Harrow scrutinizing her from the foot of the bed, so she reached down to pull Harrow up on top of her and –
“Stop. Hands at your sides.”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you going to be good and let me touch you, or will you grope me immediately if I come up there?”
Gideon reluctantly fisted her hands in the sheets beside her hips.
Harrow sat back on her heels and shamelessly looked…and looked…and looked. Her mouth was wetly open, and Gideon could see the tip of her little pink tongue.
Sweat prickled at the back of Gideon’s neck. Completely exposed, she squirmed a little, like a very rare beetle that had just been pinned by a thirsty entomologist.
On the other hand…Gideon was not Harrow’s rarest beetle.
Gideon’s thoughts cast off from Harrow’s dark surveillance and drifted to the Body in the Locked Tomb. She could picture it remotely, hazy like a half–remembered distant relative, waiting in a watery catacomb for Harrow’s waking kiss.
The Body had, perhaps, a slim, curved waist and thin, delicate arms, not the husky core and clumsy limbs that could keep a construct from cleaving you apart. The Body’s skin might be soft and smooth, an icy dew, not coarsely studded with scars and dusted all over with red–brown curls. Maybe the Body had, in place of an insolent smirk and a brazen yellow stare, an ephemeral elegance frozen on a cold, dead face. The infuriatingly ethereal visage twisted Gideon’s stomach bitterly.
The Body must be a truly perfect beauty to make Harrow fall in love forever – to keep her from ever loving anyone else, no matter what they felt for her.
(Except, how had Gideon known what the Body looked like?)
“Do you like it?” Gideon asked, lamely.
“Do I like what?” Harrow murmured distantly, still scanning Gideon’s splayed form intensely.
“My – uh – me.”
“Your what – your body?”
Gideon grimaced nervously.
Harrow’s face pinched in confusion. “Why would you even need to ask me that? You have been obscenely vain your entire life!”
Her voice dropped an octave. “And, I must concede, your vanity is – logical.”
“I know I’m, like, objectively hot,” Gideon warbled, shrugging as best she could while still clinging to the fucking sheets. “I just don’t know if I’m your kind of…thing.”
Then she couldn’t resist adding, with a smirk, “You know, being alive and all.”
Incredibly, Harrow’s face flickered with something that might be amusement. She moved her knees higher between Gideon’s spread legs and leaned over the length of her body, placing one hand on the bed beside her head. The soft swell of her breasts hung temptingly close to Gideon’s chest, itching the palms of her unfairly restricted hands.
The slim fingers of her other hand pushed behind Gideon’s head and indelicately fondled the base of her skull.
“Three out of five,” she announced decisively.
“Oh, come on, I’m at least a four!”
“The score for your occipital surface is a three out of five,” Harrow said coolly. “It’s quite robust for a female. You must have a well–developed neck musculature.”
“Yeah, wanna see how long I can hold my head up between your legs?”
“Mm. Well. Good things come…”
Gideon expected Harrow to add ‘to those who wait,’ but she didn’t, for some reason.
She smoothly pulled back and settled between Gideon’s thighs. Her dark eyes peeked over Gideon’s mound of coarse red curls mischievously. A nervous thrill ran down Gideon’s spine.
Harrow pressed a few soft, wet kisses to the inside of one thigh. Then her tongue quickly seared up its sweaty crease in a long stripe. She licked up along the V–shaped groove of muscle over Gideon’s hips, terminating with a sucking bite over the dimple of her hipbone. Gideon bit back a soft yelp, and her cunt stung with a new surge of wetness.
For what seemed like a very long time, Harrow gently licked and softly bit along the creases of Gideon’s thigh and hip, her cheek brushing against the damp red curls. Gideon fisted the sheets and gritted her teeth as the minutes dragged by tortuously. Her unquenched arousal ratcheted with every wet stroke of Harrow’s tongue and faint nip of her teeth.
Finally, Gideon tensed her lower body tightly to suppress the burn of her neglected wetness. With a soft and terrible oh!, Harrow shifted and shoved both of her hands right under the curve of Gideon’s firm – hold on, where was she going with this –
Harrow’s head disappeared below Gideon’s line of sight. After an anxious pause, the barest tip of her tongue flicked against the untouched clit. A disproportionately strong jolt of pleasure clenched Gideon’s ass, making her hiss sharply, and she felt the answering squeeze of two little hands.
“Oh, you’re wet again,” Harrow murmured.
“I haven’t stopped being wet since the first time you kissed me!”
Gideon waited apprehensively for Harrow to take her clit fully in her mouth, or at least give her a goddamn conciliation lick. There was a hot pulse of breath, and an unnerving chuckle floated up from between her legs.
Then Harrow moved over to the crease of the other thigh and did the whole fucking thing over again.
Fuck, by the end of it – which was probably only minutes but seemed like hours – Gideon felt like one big swollen throb. Her knuckles were sore from gripping the sheets so tightly, her cunt burned, and her stinging wetness was running down into the crack of her ass.
“Harrow –" she gasped raggedly.
“Mm?” Harrow licked up along the trail of soft red hairs that ran down the center of Gideon’s abdomen.
“Are you gonna – you know…” Gideon cocked her head meaningfully in the direction of her vagina.
Harrow’s hands feathered gently on either side of Gideon’s ribs. Her short nails scratched lightly at the angular ropes of muscle slanted along their surface. Inexplicably, awfully, Gideon felt her nipples harden, which drew Harrow’s eye like a flare going up.
“Oh yes, I was just getting there.”
Aw, fuck.
“Actually –" Gideon started to say, before two slender fingers pressed against her lips.
“Suck,” Harrow ordered.
Gideon took the fingers tentatively in her mouth. Well, maybe Harrow was going to push them into –
Nope. The wet fingers pulled out and pinched down harshly on one nipple, while Harrow’s hot little mouth latched on firmly to the other. She curved a hand around each breast, palming the solitary softness of Gideon’s body.
Gideon usually wasn’t very sensitive up top, but now all of her nerves were swirling in an electric current. It didn’t help that Harrow was hollowing her cheeks like she was trying to suck poison out of a wound. She might as well have bitten down on two live wires attached directly to Gideon’s clit. Gideon’s fingers twisted in the sheets, all of her neck muscles strained, and her mouth gasped open stupidly, squeaking out nonsense noises. It was only when Harrow released abruptly, reaching down to steady herself on top, that Gideon realized how sharply she was arching her back.
Gideon fell back onto the bed, and the sheet stuck to her sweaty lower back. Harrow moved up to straddle one broad thigh, her knee pressed high between Gideon’s legs. Cupping the breasts again, she flicked her thumbs softly, repeatedly, over their slightly sore nipples. Well, sure, Harrow’s knee was now conveniently close to Gideon’s soaked, aching cunt. But that didn’t mean that Gideon was going to start desperately humping it like a goddamn – oh, wait, yep, she was doing it.
Harrow made a small disapproving noise. She shifted and pressed her thumbs along the hard creases of Gideon’s abdomen, wrapping her hands around the trembling transverse musculature on either side. Gideon whined pathetically, struggling to still the motion of her hips, her only source of relief.
“Can you control yourself for me?” Harrow murmured.
Gideon whimpered out an affirmative. Then she kept whimpering as Harrow switched sides between her soft mouth and slick fingers. This time Harrow fondled and sucked on the stiffened nipples tenderly, which was exponentially worse for the hot, wet sputtering of Gideon’s center. The fingers of Harrow’s other hand were splayed over Gideon’s abdomen, feeling it shudder with the effort of self–restraint.
For most of this, Gideon’s head had been thrown back in a blissful agony, but for one stupid moment, she looked down. Oh, god, the bottomless starvation in Harrow’s eyes – the way her dark lashes flickered when the abdomen contracted under her clutching fingertips – the way she was shamelessly moaning around Gideon’s softness, like she was being railed within an inch of her life –
“Fuck,” Gideon gasped, “You’re killing me – "
Harrow choked. She stumbled and then jolted upright, her expression muddled between lust and panic.
“Oh, god,” she stuttered. “I – I got carried away – I can fix this, I can – right away – "
She hurriedly shifted to move back down between Gideon’s legs.
Gideon quickly released the sheets and grabbed Harrow’s hips – okay, okay, she grabbed Harrow’s ass. Wow, her spread fingers covered those firm little cheeks almost completely…
Harrow shivered anxiously, grimacing. Her eyes looked a little wet.
“Hey,” Gideon said, softly. “I’m fine. It’s all part of the game, okay?”
“Okay,” said Harrow, in a tiny voice. Her face washed with relief.
She collected herself, and her expression tensed back into a confident, villainous mask.
“In that case…” She glanced behind pointedly.
“Mhmm?” Gideon said airily, giving Harrow’s butt a fun little squeeze.
“Your hands…”
“Great fit, right?”
“That’s it. Grab the headboard.”
“But –"
“The headboard is composed of a series of vertical bars. Put your hands around them.”
“FINE.” Gideon made a big show of flinging her arms behind her head and dramatically gripping two of the metal poles. “Then I’ll just lie here consumed with lust for the rest of the evening!”
“Perfect,” said Harrow, in a way that would have been incredibly slimy if it hadn’t also been so weirdly goddamn hot.
She lowered herself on top, spreading her legs on either side of Gideon’s narrow hips. It was hot and slick with sweat where their bodies pressed together, and Harrow burned on top of her like an incinerator. Her small, firm breasts had pulled up into tight peaks that dragged tortuously against Gideon’s chest. Her elbows propped up where the broad arms were held back, and she pressed a soft kiss to Gideon’s neck.
With Harrow now fully on top of her, Gideon started to slyly shift her thighs closed. She ached to rub them together, just for a second –
There was a sharp tug on the hair at the back of her head.
“What was it that you said to me earlier?” Harrow’s breath tingled on the rim of her ear. “Oh, yes – keep your legs apart.”
She sucked down hard on Gideon’s neck, and Gideon softly yelped as Harrow pulled her hair right at the scalp. The slight pain surged down directly to Gideon’s cunt, melting halfway through into an intense, wet pleasure.
Harrow broke the kiss and probed the lightly stinging skin with her fingertips. She smirked. “You’ll have to paint your neck properly tomorrow.”
Her sucking kisses bruised Gideon’s neck all over, tugging on her swollen center like a red–hot wire. Gideon hissed tightly and strained her grip on the bars, contracting the muscles of her back and arms, tensing her abdomen. Her shoulders prickled with goosebumps. She could smell her own arousal burning in the open air, sharp and pungent, like ozone.
“Oh, that made you flex everywhere –"
Harrow gripped the underside of Gideon’s restrained sword arm, pressing her lips softly to its swell.
“Well, if you’re going to do that,” said Gideon, “Let me do it right.“
She released the metal bar and flexed her sword arm properly. Harrow’s mouth opened wetly against the hardened biceps. Her fingers traced the defined peak of the elbow and stroked up along the veins that stood out in the forearm.
Maybe it was because Harrow knew Gideon’s sword arm – knew how harshly it had pressed against her throat, knew how painfully it had cracked under her constructs – and to have her touch it tenderly made the universe spin.
Or maybe it was because Harrow’s dark eyes were soaked with hunger, and her hips pressed down, anointing Gideon with her arousal.
But probably it was because, as Gideon flexed, Harrow gasped against her biceps, “Oh god, fuck me!“
And Gideon’s cunt clenched so violently that she nearly came without being touched.
“Hey,” she wheezed, “You wanna come up here?”
“Up – there?”
“Yeah!” Gideon flashed an eager, lopsided smile.
Harrow’s eyes darted away nervously. “How would that work?”
“Well, step one, sit on my face, step two – oh, you’re already doing it – "
Harrow had climbed up on top of her with alarming speed, hooking her feet behind Gideon’s broad shoulders and kneeling over her chin. Gideon wrapped her arms around Harrow’s thighs from underneath, and they dimpled softly under her fingertips.
“Seems like the Lady of the Ninth’s already thought about this one a little bit,” she said, smugly.
Harrow raked her hand back through Gideon’s hair. “Seems like the Cavalier Primary of the Ninth should shut up and eat me.”
Gideon flushed at hearing Harrow say her title, like it was real to her, like it had always been real. She buried her blush between Harrow’s legs and drenched herself in the smell of sex. Harrow shuddered over her in anticipation, radiating an incredible heat. Then Gideon swiped her long tongue through the swollen folds, and Harrow’s excitement frothed into her mouth.
Harrow lurched forward with a little oh! and caught herself against the headboard. Gideon sucked a wet kiss over the tender clit, and then gave it a slow, deliberate lick that tugged Harrow’s hips forward.
Gideon’s tongue quickly found an easy and instinctive rhythm, dragging against the sensitive clit with a pure and natural friction. Her mouth pulled gentle motions from the hips above; her stroking tongue drew out soft and wondrous exclamations. Harrow’s thighs trembled faintly, pushing against Gideon’s cheeks. Her softness pressed against Gideon’s mouth, streaking her tongue with its arousal, and its sharp tang was intoxicating. Gideon got so lost in the sensations of being underneath that a minute or an hour could have passed. Her own denial faded to a distant pang. All she wanted was to break Harrow open with an excruciatingly tender orgasm.
But then she looked up, longing to catch Harrow’s eyes, and found her looking away. Gideon had already grown intimate with that deep and perpetual stare, with the way it stripped her down to a pitiful yearning. Now Harrow’s chin was lifted up, her eyes hazy and half–lidded, staring into the middle distance. Her brow was furrowed, and her soft mouth hung slightly open. She was lost in imagination.
Harrow did seem overly familiar with this position. How often had she lain beside her frozen love and dreamed of them together, warm and alive? Perhaps even now she was thinking, if only Gideon’s mouth were your mouth, if only Gideon’s hands were your hands –
But she wouldn’t even think Gideon, she would think Griddle, or nothing at all.
God, it was pathetic, but Gideon felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes. She went to lick Harrow’s clit again and fumbled; she couldn’t fucking do it. Everywhere, it felt like burning – her sore arms, her stinging, untouched cunt, and most of all, her heart.
“Harrow – " said Gideon, thickly.
Harrow shook out of her fantasy and glanced down.
“Wh– um, what are you thinking about up there?” Gideon narrowly avoided saying ‘who’. She tried to sound casual – as if stopping sex to ask a weird, jealous question could ever be casual – but her voice cracked miserably.
“Nothing – " Harrow said, sounding flustered.
She pushed her hips forward and offered herself again, but Gideon turned her head to the side.
“Nope, this ride’s closed til you tell me what’s so damn interesting.”
Oh boy, this was going to end well and not be humiliating for anybody.
Harrow’s cheeks darkened, and she white–knuckled the headboard. “I – it’s really embarrassing, you wouldn’t want – "
“Try me.”
Harrow took a deep breath.
“I, um, I was thinking about – god, you’re so strong – and I’m still necromantically exhausted – and if you wished you could flip us in an instant and – take me any way you wanted…”
Saying this made Harrow get very wet, and she dribbled down onto Gideon’s chin.
“At the beginning, given our – history – you should have asked me to pleasure you for hours – until I craved it, until I lived for it, until it was the only thing I could remember – and it would never have been as much as I deserve – but somehow, you’re here, under me, completely of your own volition – "
She gasped wetly, “Oh, god, does that get you as hot as it gets me?”
This bizarre confession made Gideon’s heart swell to bursting, and also left her twice as confused as to the actual nature of Harrow’s sexual personality.
“Well, then…" Gideon made an educated guess and gave Harrow her most simpering and subservient look. “Won’t you finish yourself on me, Reverend Daughter?”
“Oh, f–fuck!"
All of the air punched out of Harrow like she had just been stabbed. Her softness instantly tightened over Gideon’s mouth, and one small hand flew down to grip her red hair.
Gideon pressed her palm against Harrow’s dark curls, and her thumb gently pulled back the clitoral hood. She licked quickly, eagerly, up along the swollen slit, sucking wetly over its vulnerable bud. Over her, Harrow jerked desperately against each stroke of Gideon’s tongue, half–gasping, half–moaning, her cunt clenching up intensely. She looked wild and electrified.
Abruptly, Harrow cried out, “Oh fuck, I need you – "
Her thighs began to shake uncontrollably. She pushed her soaked, tightened cunt down into Gideon’s mouth. With a deep, slow lick, Gideon felt against her tongue Harrow’s powerful contraction, her throbbing acceleration, and the exquisite burst of her release.
“I need you, I need you, I NEED YOU, oh god, FUCK ME, Gideon, GIDEON – "
The last Gideon Harrow screamed, and she heaved forward, catching herself hard against the bars. The evidence of her forceful ejaculation spattered against Gideon’s chin.
Gideon was thankful to have a strong jaw as Harrow staggered against the receding pulses, yanking her hair and thrusting erratically against her mouth. As her climax abated, Harrow sagged forward onto the headboard and struggled to catch her breath. Gideon licked her shivering wetness softly, cleaning off the remnants of her orgasm.
Far too soon, Harrow dizzily lifted herself off. She raised one knee way too high and immediately rolled off onto her back like a dazed turtle. But she quickly righted herself and crawled between Gideon’s legs. She looked very determined, and also like she was about to pass out.
Gideon started to say , “Maybe you should give it a sec –", then instantly shrieked “FUCK!!!”
As Harrow’s wet mouth finally grazed her starving clit, thickly swollen from the lack of contact, Gideon spiked so hard with pleasure that it felt like the whole thing had been ripped from her body. She contracted painfully and then flooded with an intense euphoria. She was going to finish immediately, and holy hell, it was going to hurt so good.
“NO, nope, come back up here, I’m going to drown you –"
Gideon tugged Harrow back up beside her, then rolled over so they were facing each other on their sides. She threw one leg over Harrow’s hips. “Like this, okay?”
Harrow gingerly drew two fingers up through Gideon’s soaked folds and along her engorged clit, smearing it with wetness. The gentle friction still stung, but now mostly pleasurably.
“Is this better?”
“Yeah, and I – um – I like to see you.” Gideon cupped Harrow’s face in her hands. “Plus, then I can do this.”
She kissed Harrow tenderly. Harrow began to fondle her delicately, and Gideon flexed her hips and softly moaned into her mouth. Each feather–light touch was a river of flame.
After a moment, Harrow pulled back from the kiss and pressed their foreheads together. She hesitated briefly, her fingers still gently caressing.
Then she whispered, “Truth or dare?”
FUCKING HELL, Harrow was doing this NOW?!
“If your dare is anything other than ‘jizz on my hand in the next thirty seconds’ you are going to be massively disappointed. Can we do this after?”
But Harrow looked dangerously serious. “Right now I know you’ll be honest with me.”
“Okay, uh – ” Gideon strained. “Truth.”
Harrow closed her eyes, steeling herself. When she opened them again, they looked faintly wet.
“A hundred times, I placed your blade at my throat,” she said, hollowly. “And a hundred times, you could have had justice. But you always chose mercy. I still don’t understand why.”
The answer was easy, now, and obvious.
“Well, it’s because I’m just like you – I’m fucking selfish.”
Harrow’s brow washed with confusion. Gideon softly stroked her cheeks and bent to say against her lips,
“Mercy was the thing that let me keep you.”
Harrow’s mouth fell open, and Gideon took it fiercely.
“Gideon,“ Harrow said into her, and her shoulders started to shake.
“God, yes, say my name – "
Harrow’s fingers began to brush urgently against Gideon’s soreness. She was breathing wetly, harshly, whenever their lips parted, and before they crushed back together, she was saying, “Gideon – "
“Oh fuck, please, say my name – "
Gideon’s hips shuddered brutally against Harrow’s increasingly frantic stroking. She was starting to throb furiously, just ahead of the peak of her climax.
Harrow’s face creased with grief and longing over something unfamiliar. A new desperation was pushing out of her. Her fingers still fiercely rubbing, she choked into the kiss, “Gideon, I, I – Gideon, I’m – "
Then her jaw clenched, and hot tears streamed down her cheeks, spilling over Gideon’s thumbs.
It is, of course, unforgivably rude to have a reality–shattering orgasm while the object of your affections is experiencing a massive emotional breakdown – even if they are still fucking you with incredible tenacity. But Gideon was far past the point of being able to stop.
The pads of Harrow’s fingers swiped up through her blistering wetness and streaked across her painfully raw clit. For an instant, she could feel every goddamn ridge of Harrow’s fingerprints. Then her vision cracked into white spots, obscuring the infinite drop to the bottom, and with a shout, she went over the edge.
The orgasm punched through the back of her cunt like a white–hot spear. Her core collapsed in on itself, a dying neutron star, and then detonated out again in every direction. Her blood evaporated, her nerve endings seared into nothing, and all the cells of her body burst open with a hot, blinding ecstasy. Her consciousness fractalized in delirious rapture.
She was distantly aware of oafishly rolling on top of Harrow and pushing her down into the bed, howling into her mouth, “Oh, FUCK, sweetheart!"
Even more distantly, she heard Harrow sob, just before her words were swallowed, “Gideon, I’m in l –"
A vague sense of metamorphosis pinged around inside Gideon’s empty skull and slammed into the Eject button. Gideon flailed around idiotically on top of Harrow, then yanked herself up onto her hands and knees.
“Oh my fuck, WHAT?” she wheezed hysterically.
Harrow cowered underneath her and tried to skitter backwards like a terrified crab. She struggled to draw a breath and immediately gagged on the tears still streaking her face, dissolving into a fit of wet gasping. She was, legitimately, hyperventilating.
Gideon’s own heart was pounding wildly, and she didn’t even know why.
“Okay. Okay.” Gideon tried to calm Harrow down by holding her cheek again, but her broad arms were still so wobbly that she just clumsily put her whole hand over Harrow’s face. She had to settle for cradling Harrow’s trembling hands, stroking the clammy little palms with her thumbs.
Finally, Harrow was able to steady her breathing and push herself limply up against the headboard.
After a moment, she said, tightly, “It’s nothing.” She squeezed her eyes shut, and her mouth bitterly twisted. “Only foolishness.”
Gideon’s tongue felt thick in her mouth. “Oh. Um. Okay.”
There sure was a lot of nothing happening tonight.
She pivoted to sit down beside Harrow, both of their backs against the bars.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she said, carefully.
After a moment, Harrow consented to lean against Gideon’s shoulder. She looked completely drained.
“Not yet,” she said, weakly. “Tonight, I just want to feel it.”
They rested against each other for a while, in companiable silence. Harrow slowly relaxed into Gideon’s side. Gideon wound their adjoining fingers together, and her thumb softly stroked the back of Harrow’s hand. She couldn’t keep Harrow’s darkness out – she didn’t even really understand what it was, with all its traumatic layers and complexities. But she could tether Harrow, here, within her hand, against her body, in a place where there was warmth, and light, and comfort.
Eventually, Harrow’s head began to nod onto her chest, and she periodically jolted against her exhaustion with a soft gasp. She itched her thighs together drowsily. Her arousal had dried sticky between her legs.
“Hold on.” Gideon extracted herself and slipped away to the bathroom, then came back with a wet cloth. She tenderly pushed between Harrow’s legs and gently wiped her clean.
“Oh – um.“ Harrow’s eyes were bleary with sleep, and soft with something else. “Thank you.”
Gideon grinned endearingly. “I always wanted to do that.”
She folded the washcloth over. “I’ll be right back, I’m just going to wash up, okay?”
“Mmhmph.” Harrow languidly shifted down onto the bed.
In the bathroom, Gideon inspected the damage in the mirror – a messily tangled mop of curly hair, skin streaked with sweat and fragrant with both of their ejaculations, and a neck bruised with dark kisses that made her shiver in remembrance.
She wet a cloth and scrubbed between her legs, hissing slightly as its coolness stung her well–used, swollen flesh. Shrugging on an undershirt and some clean boxers, she found that her arms and back were pleasantly sore, like they always were after training. She should really take a shower, but, like Harrow, she was starting to crash under the physical and emotional weight of the evening. Besides – and admittedly, this was gross – she kind of wanted to roll around in the smell of it. The sheets were a total loss anyways.
As she splashed her face with water, she thought about Harrow saying, at the end, “Gideon, I’m in–“ Maybe Harrow had meant to say, “Gideon, I’m insane,” which was almost certainly true given the incredible circumstances of the evening, but a weird thing to mention during someone else’s orgasm. Or maybe it was, “Gideon, I’m insufferable,” which had also been historically true, but probably not something Harrow would say about herself.
And, after all, there had been an “L” at the end.
Hadn’t there?
All of a sudden, the tap ran unusually cold, and the icy water bit at her fingertips.
Gideon wiped her eyes, and shook off the droplets, and blinked.
And blinked.
And blinked.
Before her, in the mirror, she saw the Body.
“Hmm,” said Gideon. “Whoopsie.”
The Body’s form was humanoid, but hazy – its outlines streaked and blurred, as Gideon had seen in the mind’s eye of her jealousy. Its flesh was a sallow gray, pressed in with shifting, shallow pores that might suggest the nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth.
Peel off the napkin, O my enemy. Do I terrify?
Although it stood extremely still, it was, at once, impossibly close and far away. The Body was a resonance, the Body was a static aberration, the Body was the collapsed vibration of an infinity mirror.
The Body stank, badly, of chlorine.
Damn, it did have a pretty sweet sword though. This was the only component that Gideon could clearly see. The weapon’s full length slanted from the amorphous hands to its point on the floor. The grip and cross–guard were pearlescent, and the pommel was studded with a single gem of clear golden citrine. The blade itself was blindly illuminated, luminously sheened and blazing blue, and it kind of looked like the whole thing was on fire. Gideon had to reluctantly give the Body props for using a two–hander and not a wimpy little rapier.
Strangely, the Body did not appear to be bound in chains, as Harrow had described, although it was difficult to make out the details. Given Harrow’s wide range of sexual proclivities, it was possible that she had just mentally added that detail herself.
Gideon’s feet were wet. They were, in fact, painfully frozen, soaked up to her ankles. How long had she been standing here with the tap spilling over? She reached down for the faucet, but the sink was gone and the cabinets were gone and the sonic and shower were gone, and the floor was a frigid basin. Her breath huffed out sharply in a crystalline cloud. The Body did not appear to breathe at all.
Gideon waded forward and found the mirror a gossamer illusion; it fell away in cobwebs on her hands. The walls seemed far away, and dark, and round. They echoed with the soft lapping of waves, as though she had entered a great oval cave. She thought, vaguely, of Harrow saying, Lacuna means ‘pool’.
She also thought, blearily, that she should probably start freaking out. That was the logical reaction to expecting her own roguish reflection and seeing instead a demon’s gleaming apparition – especially as she stood still dripping with the secretions of said demon’s kind–of wife.
She apathetically rattled the tanks of her sympathetic nervous system. They were completely dry of fight, flight, and fuck juice. After an evening of rapid–fire near–death experiences – both literal and orgasmic – Gideon was left without a single fuck to give.
Actually, she did have one fuck left to give, and it was this: It was real goddamn rich of the Body to show up too little and too late to be Harrow’s salvation, sucking on the last dying cigarette of the pack it stepped out to get eight years ago. It had finally sauntered back to its nest and found a cuckoo there – a big stupid baby bird laid in another bird’s nest. Gideon had looked up what cuckoos were – and then, what birds were – after Harrow had called her that awful name, back at the beginning. Cuckoos are brood parasites, you see – they grow faster, and bigger, and stronger, and they push the rightful chicks out of the nest to die. And that had been Gideon’s purpose.
But the nest had been abandoned when she found it, and the other scrawny baby bird so cold and alone. After years of pecking at each other viciously, they had finally figured out how to fit in the nest together. And it was nice – it was very nice. Gideon thought she might put some curtains up.
Gideon couldn’t save Harrow – not in the way she was supposed to, not in the way the Ninth House had intended. She hadn’t known the truth, and she would have never had the heart to do it, anyways. But she could hold Harrow, here, at the crest of eternity. They could cling tight together at the end of the world. And Harrow couldn’t see it, though she scanned the horizon – her eyes ever fixed on the fate of her soul. But you can love other people on your way to the apocalypse. Gideon had enough inside of her to feel it for the both of them.
The Body, on the other hand, could get the fuck out of their nest.
Its cloudy, shapeless silhouette was watching Gideon very carefully. Or maybe it wasn’t watching her at all. It was impossible to tell, what with its whole everything warping around like a bad shuttle transmission.
Gideon squinted at it. “Hey, can you pull yourself together? I’m getting kind of seasick.”
Gideon had never even seen a boat and had only recently seen an ocean. But she did want to size up the competition.
The Body said, in a voice like many waters rushing together, and from no discernable hole, “No one may see me and live.”
Gideon tightened her fists – if only because this implied that Harrow was going to die.
She shouted out into the darkness, “Oh, you only show yourself to the desperate little girls you string along?”
The Body considered for a moment. Then it said, in countless voices, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face.”
In an instant, the Body shifted, unrolling a glorious and infinite firmament.
And the Body had the face of a lion, an ox, and an eagle, and the Body was hidden with eight shrieking crystalline wings, and the Body was a great wheel turning in every direction, and the Body, all over, forever, was covered in eyes.
The Body said, improbably, “Do not be afraid.”
Damn, if this was the kind of freaky shit that Harrow was really into, Gideon was gonna have to get pretty creative in the bedroom.
Oh, sure, she felt the compulsion to fall to her knees in horror and rapture, the naked divinity tearing the threads of her sanity. And, clearly, this is what the Body expected. It was accustomed to twisting fear into worship.
But more than anything – especially because she was such a god–awful one herself – Gideon hated a fucking show–off.
“Hey, knock it off,” she barked. “I’m not going to suck your weird dick or whatever.”
The Body inspected Gideon curiously – as much as a huge, monstrous wheel could look curious – and then reassembled back into its vague humanoid form.
The voice of many waters said, “You have searched me, LORD, and you know me.”
The nebulous gray flesh of the Body began to ripple. With a sickening echo of thock! thock! thock! it tore open wetly all over, a soggy miasma of browns and blacks and greens and grays and blues. The Body’s form was no longer waves and reverberations, but a billowing, infinite sea of human eyes.
It opened up a cavity that might have been its mouth. The room echoed distantly with Harrow’s voice, saying, "What am I but a great dead tomb for ten billion living souls, screaming?”
“Oh, so you’ve been listening to us this whole time?” Gideon’s animosity spiked up into a white–hot rage. She sloshed quickly through the water towards the Body, but it still appeared neither closer nor further away.
Finally, she stomped her feet wide and yelled at it from a distance. “How about you listen to this, you motherfucking incompetent ice cube: Why did you even bother showing up? So you can wave your stupid sword around and act like it’s bigger than mine? We’re both fucking useless to her!”
Gideon’s voice cracked on useless, but she continued, hoarsely, “Harrow has been waiting for you, and needing you, and, and – pointlessly loving you for almost a goddamn decade. And because I turned out to be worthless, and because you didn’t ever wake up, she is selling herself to the cruelest God imaginable for ten thousand shitty years – all so she can pay for a crime that she didn’t even commit!”
“Do not be deceived,” The Body said, sharply, in many overlapping voices. “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.”
And then, “The soul who sins shall die.”
“A myriad of Lyctorhood has to count for something!” Gideon protested. “It wasn’t even her fault!”
The Body shrugged what might have been its shoulders. “God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment.”
The inside of Gideon’s mouth burned with bile and copper.
“Oh, and what’s your brilliant solution?” she spat. “Complete annihilation?!”
The Body lifted the gleaming point of its sword. Its rushing waters said, together, “I will cut them to pieces; I will wipe them from human memory.”
Hideously, it used Harrow’s voice again, saying, “Blot me out of the book you have written.”
“How long –“ Gideon started, and meant to finish, before I have to come kick your ass. But her throat stung with sorrow and tightened with an impotent fury.
The Body cast askance its twenty billion tiny eyes. “The vision is yet for an appointed time.”
“We don’t fucking have until an appointed time! In case you haven’t noticed all of the murder and self-sacrifice, it could be over for her at any fucking second. So since you absolutely do not give a shit, and I absolutely do, make yourself goddamn useful for once and tell me how to save her.”
Gideon had zero leverage to back any of this up – except for the chance her brazen assholery would lure the Body into helpfully monologuing. This was a shitty little trick that always worked on Harrow – a woman who (and Gideon thought this, now, with a tender affection) never heard herself say a word she didn’t like.
The Body suddenly vibrated extremely close to Gideon’s face. Its flesh reeked of the mucus of many weeping eyes. It dripped out, in a divergent array of sarcastic tones,
“Have you entered the springs of the sea?
Or have you walked in search of the depths?
Have the gates of death been revealed to you?
Have you seen the doors of the shadow of death?
Have you comprehended the breadth of the world?
Tell me, if you know all this.
Where is the way to the dwelling of light?
And darkness, where is its place,
That you may take it to its territory,
That you may know the paths to its home?”
Harrow’s tediously repulsive girlfriend was apparently also no stranger to the soliloquy. Harrow was going to have a grand old time being absolutely bored to tears before the Body (maybe, if it felt like it) blasted her soul to smithereens.
The Body finished, derisively,
“Do you know it, because you were born then,
Or because the number of your days is great?”
“Well, I am almost twenty years old," said Gideon.
The Body disdainfully rolled all twenty billion eyes.
There had to be some lick of sympathy in that impassive monstrosity, some relic of the compassion that had seduced Harrow so completely. Gideon dug for it, desperately.
“Look, Harrow’s been awful to me – we’ve both been awful to each other – because we were trapped and miserable and angry and fucking stupid – because everything was cruel and it made us cruel to each other. But she’s learning how to be good now, she’s figured out how to be brave – even though she can’t afford it, even though it could kill her soul forever. That has to land her somewhere in the middle – there has to be something between eternal torture and, and extinction.”
Gideon suddenly felt the weight of the tears in her throat. “Why can I forgive her, and God can’t?”
The Body cocked its head to one side. It vibrated forward through Gideon, spiking her heart rate, and then rapidly withdrew again to quantum ambiguity.
Its infinity of eyes shifted and bulked up in its arms and shoulders. Waves of glistening pupils fluffed up on the top of its head. Then its face slashed at the bottom with a familiar, lopsided smile.
Gideon’s outline said, in her own voice, “I know the thoughts that I think toward you, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.”
“Yeah, well,” said Gideon, sadly, “My thoughts count for fuck–all when she’s burning in hell.”
She raked her hand back through her hair. The mimic’s countless eyes watched her carefully, clenching and stretching the fingers of its corresponding hand.
“Hey, look,” Gideon said, wearily. “I don’t really know what your whole deal is – and, honestly, I got pissed off at you because I can’t do anything for Harrow except be really fucking scared. I don’t even know what I am to her, and I don’t really understand what you are to her, either. But what I swore was to be her cav, what I promised was to protect her. So I’ll go to the springs of the sea, or the depths, or the gates of death, or whatever you said it was – I’ll go in a fucking heartbeat – I just need a little direction.”
The Body’s infinite eyes melted back into its own grotesque shapelessness. It said, in a cascade of sharp voices, “Who will descend into the abyss?”
“I will,” said Gideon, firmly – and she felt deadly serious, more than she had about anything in her entire life.
The Body held up a dribbling hand, and cautioned,
“Two are better than one,
Because they have a good reward for their labor.
For if they fall, one will lift up his companion.
But woe to him who is alone when he falls,
For he has no one to help him up.
Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm;
But how can one be warm alone?
Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him.”
“I – I’m not really following that one. So you’re actually cool with me and Harrow, uh – ‘lying down together and keeping warm’ or – "
The Body’s multiplicity again demanded, “Who will descend into the abyss?”
Gideon tried to say, again, I will.
But what echoed from her mouth into the cave was her and Harrow swearing, in the pool together, “One flesh, one end.”
The Body rejoined, rapidly, in Gideon’s voice, “I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades,” and in Harrow’s voice, overlapping, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
It extended a weeping, blinking finger, and said in the voice of many waters, “Because of the blood of your covenant, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.”
She had no goddamn idea what any of that meant, but for the first time ever, it seemed like everything was coming up Gideon. And she was goddamn ready for it.
She rubbed her hands together gleefully. “Fucking sweet, where do I start?”
The Body surveyed Gideon curiously. It warned, “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Follow the ways of your heart and the desires of your eyes. But know that God will judge you for all these things.”
Well, Gideon had never been a good little nun, had she?
She smirked, with a shrug, and responded, “Then I will face God and walk backwards into hell.”
The infinity of eyes all closed together. The Body’s face bore Harrow’s small, astonished smile. Two eyelids opened just above its nose, now placed correctly – one iris Drearburh black, the other gold.
The Body was close enough to touch, now. It extended the grip of its blazing sword and pushed the pommel into Gideon’s hand. The metallic static tingled, sharp and cool, against her fingers. The sheen of the long blade, below, slaked off in bright blue flames.
The Body said, triumphant, and in a solo female voice, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!”
Gideon’s palm tore open with a shrieking perforation, and all the nerves in her sword arm erupted.
And then, with a sweaty jolt, Gideon woke up in Harrow’s bed.
Oh, god, please, no, had everything been a dream? Her blood ran cold.
Harrow shifted sleepily in the crook of her arm, and Gideon’s heart began to beat again. Harrow’s naked body was pressed stickily against her side, one leg thrown lazily over, one small hand twitching on her chest.
Gideon’s other arm, her sword arm, throbbed painfully along its core, like a long metal rod had been rammed into its bones. Her palm itched and ached in the middle. She clenched and unclenched her fist, carefully extending her arm and turning it over. Its whole length, wrist to shoulder, was scabbed in a jagged, tapering line. The skin was taut and silvered over with an unfamiliar scar.
“Is something happening?” Harrow mumbled, jostled awake, her voice still thick with sleep.
Gideon softly kissed the top of Harrow’s head.
“I figured it out,” she murmured. “How to be destroyed in a way that matters.”
Harrow snapped to attention.
“What? No! I forbid you to be destroyed!”
“But – I saw –"
“Absolutely not!” Harrow pushed herself up to eye level and fixed Gideon with a steely glare. “Are you going to be this post–coitally melodramatic every time?”
Post–coitally? Every time?
“I have decided to wait to be destroyed,” Gideon announced.
“Good,” said Harrow, firmly. She burrowed back down against Gideon’s chest, and every inch of skin she touched felt warm and perfect. “Prepare yourself to wait forever. I won’t take any more ghosts.”
“Then what can I do for you, my lightless flame?”
Harrow looked up from within Gideon’s arms, and she contained multitudes.
“You can live, Gideon,” she said, softly. “You can live.”
---
Later, on the Erebos, in between meeting God and forgetting, Harrow smears her wards and begs to be haunted.
---
Notes:
"She did not walk away, but stood there for a moment in the simple arrogance of showing the other girl her back - of giving Gideon, with a sword in her scabbard, unfettered access to the back of her rib cage." - Gideon the Ninth, Chapter 27
---"'It is the mouth to Hell,' said God [...] 'You'll find very few ghosts sink as far as the barathron. If I believed in sin, I would say they died weighted down with sin, placing them nearer the trash space.'" - Harrow the Ninth, Chapter 36
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“You don't fear dying. You can tolerate pain. You are afraid that your life has incurred a debt that your death will not pay.” - Harrow the Ninth, Chapter 15
---
"Harrow ignored her. '- but 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' [...] 'I owe you your life,' said Harrowhark, 'I owe you everything.'" - Gideon the Ninth, Chapter 37
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Gideon's canonical sacrifice at the end of Gideon the Ninth can be seen as an act of intense co-dependency and of her compulsive need to be wanted, or (as I prefer it), as an act of love. What I find even more interesting is Harrow's attempt to sacrifice herself, first - to hold off Cytherea so that Gideon can survive. I wanted to write a story where Harrow had the opportunity to do what she was willing to do, and to explore why she was willing to do it.
Oh, wait, actually, I wrote this story so I could tie up several alluring loose ends dangled throughout Gideon the Ninth, such as:
- How does necromancy actually work, biologically?
- Why did Harrow give her childhood enemy an enormous sword?
- How is Gideon able to almost escape so frequently and so easily?
- Where does Gideon get her dirty magazines?
- Why does Harrow fall so compulsively in love with the Body in the Locked Tomb?
- How does Harrow learn to make perpetual bone at the end of Gideon the Ninth?Well, ACTUALLY actually...
Okay, the truth is, I wrote this story because I really, really wanted these girls to fuck right after the pool scene, and I needed to work them up emotionally to the point where it would have been plausible.
Yeah, that was it.
Chapter 2: References
Summary:
One of aspects of The Locked Tomb series that I find most compelling is the interweaving of references from biblical scripture, classical literature, and, of course, the internet. I pay homage to that integration with the references from Inversion, listed here.
Chapter Text
Both Harrow's ghosts and the Body in the Locked Tomb (except when the Body uses Harrow's voice) speak exclusively in quotes from the Bible, denoted by bold text.
The true form of the Body in the Locked Tomb is depicted using the terrifying biblical descriptions of angels, taken from Ezekiel 1.
The Body also quotes a number of Bible verses thought to refer to the "harrowing of hell" (yes, like Harrow), in addition to other verses. These include Exodus 33:20, 1 Corinthians 13:12, Luke 2:10, Psalm 139:1, Galatians 6:7, Ezekiel 18:20, 2 Peter 2:4, Deuteronomy 32:26, Exodus 32:32, Habakkuk 2:3, Job 38:16-21, Jeremiah 29:1, Romans 10:7, Revelation 1:18, 1 Corinthians 15:55, James 4:4, Ecclesiastes 11:9, and Judges 7:20.
The "harrowing of hell" is a theologically controversial concept, wherein, during the three days between his death and his resurrection (also called "anastasis" - yes, like Anastasia the First, founder of the Ninth House), Jesus Christ descends into hell (often described as a "watery pit" - yes, like the River's stoma) and frees the prisoners who are trapped there. I suspect that our own lesbian space Jesus will encounter a similar challenge in future books in this series.
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Other References:
Animalcules – The word used by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a pioneer of microscopy, to describe cells
"Me: Look, I love you, But I made exactly the amount of cheese & crackers I want to eat right now. / Wife: But I only... / Me: EXACTLY the amount" – tweet by keith (@tchrquotes)
“Then perish.” – tumblr post by Spooky-Grimwhoire
“The TERM, Mark, is –" - “The Anime Club”, Gunshow Comics, by KC Green
“I’m never gonna financially recover from this” – Tiger King (2020)
“Feels like I’m wearing nothing at all!” – Stupid Sexy Flanders, The Simpsons S11 E 10: Little Big Mom
Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelly’s Poetry and Prose (1977)
Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or one hundred duck-sized horses? – a ubiquitous internet query
“From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” – Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ballet Turret Gunner”, The Complete Poems (1980)
“You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is... suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.” – Dana Scully, The X-Files S8 E10: The Rain King
“And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night” – Revelations 14:11 ESV
“But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” – Matthew 22:13 KJV
“You cannot kill me in a way that matters.” – viral Tumblr post by personsonable
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” – William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1989)
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” - 2 Timothy 4:7 NKJV
“But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.” – Ruth 1:16 NIV
“But Joash [father of Gideon] replied to the hostile crowd around him, “Are you going to plead Baal’s cause? Are you trying to save him? Whoever fights for him shall be put to death by morning! If Baal really is a god, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar.” So because Gideon broke down Baal’s altar, they gave him the name Jerub-Baal that day, saying, “Let Baal contend with him.” – Judges 6:31 NIV, from the biblical story of Gideon
“Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor; I cast you to the ground, I laid you before kings, That they might gaze at you.” - Ezekiel 28:17, about the fall of Satan from heaven
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.” – George Orwell, 1984
“She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak…But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.” – Luke 8:44,46 NIV
“A Sound of Thunder” – a short story by Ray Bradbury
“But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” – Revelation 21:8 NKJV
“They shall be wasted with hunger, Devoured by pestilence and bitter destruction; I will also send against them the teeth of beasts, With the poison of serpents of the dust.” – Deuteronomy 32:24 NKJV
““And they shall go forth and look upon the corpses of the men who have transgressed against Me. For their worm does not die, and their fire is not quenched. They shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” – Isaiah 66:24 NKJV
“What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?” – Matthew 8:29 NIV – a story about Jesus casting out demons
“Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.” – John 19:34 NIV
“So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’” – Luke 16:24 NIV
“Florals? For Spring? Groundbreaking.” – The Devil Wears Prada
“FINE. Then I will sit here consumed with lust for the rest of the evening.” – Kate Beaton, Hark! A Vagrant #176
“The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth / Peel off the napkin, O my enemy. Do I terrify?” – The poem Lady Lazarus, by Sylvia Plath.
“Everything’s coming up Milhouse!” –The Simpsons S10 E10
“I will face God and walk backwards into hell” – Viral dril (@wint) tweet
“I am large, I contain multitudes” – Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51
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