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You get used to dead things on the Ninth, right? It’s all the death. You’ve got the geriatrics toddling about in their robes, keeling over when the arthritis gets to them and they can’t kiss ass anymore. You’ve got the skeletons. The skeletons might be the nicest part, because at least you can count on smashing some shit whenever they make a point of invading your personal space. Your very valuable personal space, where you’re doing your level best to keep from joining all the dead things. There’s the sliding scale of Ortus to Crux, and then the horrible Y axis someone keeps jamming in to represent the local feral that bites too much to count as dead.
You get to be the population’s best known approximation of life. Like one of those dolls the evil witches poke with needles to make the hero flip out. This anecdote brought to you by being five and already having a bitching handle on archetypes. Needles suck, evil witches suck, and you’re awesome. Haters gonna hate, fuck the man. Except like, don’t, because the man is the dolled-up dark lord out of hell responsible for letting the local feral run around hissing.
You, lone proprietor of the Ninth’s one warm and beating heart, know all about dead things being dead. When the dead go deader and their meat isn’t falling off fast enough, Crux makes you take a brush to their femurs. Mega gross, mega distressing, and if you do it at the wrong time, a quick formula for getting kicked in the face by a skulking anemic jackass whose only pleasure in life is derived from sucking it out of everything else with a bendy straw. Except she wouldn’t know what to do with a bendy straw. You’d be a pro. Slurp slurp slurp goes the grey mush.
You get used to dead things.
It makes some kind of sense that to get there, they have to die.
You’re not stupid. Fuck off and etc. There’s a pulse, it blinks out, then whatever’s left keeps walking around, collecting leeks, shoving you into coffins, slathering on vile paint—the whole carnival shebang.
You see the nooses, and okay then.
Okay then.
They were already dead, and it’s not much of a secret. It’s not a huge change when Crux slams you into a heating vent and says no one will know and adds a whole lot of titles to your name that you’ve done a better job earning than anyone else around. What’s there to know? Ding-dong, bitches. There’s already a bell every day.
They’re dead.
Does that mean you can skip service?
Your ears get boxed for that one, but like. It’s a fair question? Unless they want to say that it’s not skipping when there is no service, but your legs are doing some kind of jig back to your cell, so who’s really winning there?
You’re used to the dead. One of the sisters vomited her last heart attack all over you at mass, so let’s all just roll with the punches and admit that you’re used to the dying, too.
No one even bothered giving you anything else to wear. Sonics aren’t magic, fuckers.
Death magic isn’t really magic either.
You keep calling it that because there’s a little black shroud of hissing not-dead who tells you, every time, that there are theorems, what even goes on in that head of yours, and you say Your mum and she says what the hell does that even mean and you don’t know but it gets her to look at you instead of the big dumb rock for another second.
It’s just a fucking rock.
Not alive, not dead.
It’s just a rock.
You’re just not supposed to touch it. She’s not supposed to touch it either, it’s the one thing anyone cares about with her, is don’t touch the big dumb rock, and what did she think was going to happen on a planet of death and dying with a side of rigor mortis what was she thinking what were you thinking what even goes on in that head of yours.
You were thinking no one’s supposed to touch the fucking rock.
Someone does, and it’s the most interesting thing anyone’s ever done in your life.
You were thinking about saying sorry.
Not very hard.
You were thinking her vomit smells even worse than the deader nun’s.
Which, truth.
You were thinking your hands couldn’t stop shaking and no one knew, no one was beating you over the two of you diving into the dirt and clawing each other to death so you could join everyone else and you’d never seen someone’s eyes bug out that way and it felt good, it felt really good and maybe you puked up something too in the afters, shut up.
Then you were thinking, score.
You’re used to dead things.
You’re not used to counting days without thinking of freedom and wondering if she goes if it counts as you killing again and you wake up sweating and sit outside her cell until someone shouts at you to go away and then you sit there a little longer until the shouts turn physical and you have a great vantage point to kick Crux in the shins.
You count the living things.
There’s you.
There’s a bitey feral bitchass gremlin the main villain of one of your comics would probably adopt only to be tragically-not-tragic murdered in the second act. There’d be a whole time skip, and the hero would run into the gremlin and ask what the hell even happened and they’d both know and the final page would be them strangling each other.
That makes two.
There are two living things.
You can hear her pacing and pretend it’s her heartbeat, because she has one, because she’s alive, because if she was a dead thing you couldn’t have almost killed her.
Two. Count ‘em.
Add in a planet of dead for spice, grind them up, and somehow it still tastes like snow leeks and grey.
She’s alive and they were already deader than dead.
.
Here’s the thing, right?
You know dead things.
They’re just dead. It’s just death. Just dying. Circle of skeleton recycling.
Harrow comes out of her room.
It’s still two. You lie to yourself a bit and say it’s still two, because if it’s only one you’ll have to do something, and doing things is not going well.
It’s two.
You. Harrow.
Then the other two walk out and pretend to make four, and you stare and stare, and then you stare some more when no one whips you for it while you try to put your head around how an upside down inside out world has pulled another dimension of nope out of the bag.
You think the only reasonable thought you can.
Harrow has completely fucked with the circle of skeleton recycling.
You get used to dead things on the Ninth.
You get used to necromantic fuckery and bones.
You get used to the smell when you’re sloughing off the fleshy bits to make bones faster.
Okay, so you don’t, but there’s a precedent.
You get used to Ortus’s depressed poetry.
You get used to Aiglamene never letting you help her up when her leg’s off.
You get used to Crux being a soulless tyrant.
It’s just death. It’s nothing but death, all the way down to the deepest, creepiest catacombs.
You get used to it.
You behold the moving corpses of the Reverend Father and Reverend Mother of Drearburh.
You chuck snow leeks up all over the floor.