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They’d settled back onto the Ninth like dust over an empty battlefield.
“Why here?” She’d asked. That great one, a beloved creature, the only god who had ever truly mattered.
Her breathing had rattled, the weight of her bones felt wrong in the familiar atmosphere as she stumbled up the first step towards the gates of Drearburh.
“Where else?”
A hum, “Will this still be home then, for you?” It was such a soft question, as though the ethereal woman were untouched by the fresh and drying blood of a fellow deity still on her hands.
Her eyes turned towards the sky, and through the darkness, that familiar flicker of Dominicus at the centre of the system. Her breath was cold in the air, frosted with every exhale and forming constellations like those they’d travelled. “No.” She’d said, tiredly.
Alecto cocked her head. Waited, unblinking.
“You promised me one last thing.”
“I did.” Her chest did not rise and fall with the need for oxygen to poor through her lungs and into her bloodstream, she scarcely moved at all. The stillness remained an aberration that unsettled her. “You have not yet spoken the last request aloud, Harrowhark.”
Harrow nodded heavily. Her eyes fell to the floor, to the ground of her planet and the earth under her shoes — to her hands, still covered in soot and blood and scars. And then, to her kingdom, to the steps above and the grand gates of the entrance to her home and the life it held within. “What will happen to them?” She asked. “Now that it’s done? Now that it’s over?”
Alecto followed her gaze, and then replied, “Whatever they wish to happen.” She smiled, such an unnerving beautiful smile. “I cannot be with them how I once was, but Humans are my darlings, I will see that they are happy, and it will bring me much joy to see them grow.”
Harrow felt her knees reach the ground, her hands bracing to steady her. A cloud of black ash lifted at the impact and hovered in the air. “All of them?”
Alecto was quiet for a moment, Harrow assumed she was observing her weak and keeling form, before she spoke again and confirmed, “All of them.”
Harrow was glad she was no longer standing, her knees would have suffered much worse that time around. She rested, her hair obscuring her face where it fell in black tendrils towards the barren soil of the Ninth House. Her hands balled in fists, her nails becoming littered with the soot and tar and bloodsweat of her homeland.
“Then my last request remains the same as it always has.” Harrow placed her trembling hands on her thighs and pushed herself upright to return her gaze to the God standing before her. “I wish to not be, I wish to cease. I wish for my life to end. For the souls pinned to mine like insects in an exhibit to be released from this endlessness that they do not deserve, that I do not —” She swallowed down the growing lump in her throat, remembered how to breathe, and then said, “I cannot bare it anymore. It is done, it is over, what remains for me to stay for? I have betrayed my god and sworn fealty to one anew, I have ascended where no one else ever dared, I have travelled half the universe and I have lost everyone who was ever dear to me. There is no one left.” Harrowhark’s shoulders closed in around her frame like shadows at nightfall. “And I am so tired.”
There, under a black cloak, and old, faded grease paint, she was still the scared little girl that had wandered into the unlocked tomb and approached desperation for a reason to keep on living. There, she kneeled, looking into the eyes of the creature she’d promised to live to see awoken, and Harrowhark asked. “Will you please let me die?”
Alecto was stone. A statue built out of the walls and rocks of the Ninth. Harrow waited so long she nearly began to fold in on herself again and sob, before Alecto said, “I do not like this request.”
Harrow’s jaw grew taught like a bowstring notched with an arrow. “You promised me anything.”
“I did.” Alecto agreed. “Anything within my power to give.”
“And is this not within your power?”
“I brought you home, Harrow.”
“Yes. To die.”
“No.” Alecto, for the first time Harrow had ever witnessed, looked sad. “To live.”
Harrow hardened her expression further. “I do not, nor have I ever, desired such a thing.”
A breeze moved and rattled through the hollow lungs of her House, as Harrow’s own chest slowly expanded and fell, and Harrowhark waited in the silence and the cold for her conviction.
Eventually, Alecto conceded, “It would not be… a difficult thing, to sever your spirit from the bodies it possesses, and to guide you myself toward the River.”
Harrow could have wept. The tears fell silently instead, a stream down her cheeks and onto her lap and the steps below. When her eyes opened again — she had not noticed closing them — Alecto’s attention had returned to Drearbruh. “There are people waiting on your return.”
“They will get over it.” Harrow knew it would not be a trial. Her friends were all gone, those who remained had new names, new eyes, and held little love for her now.
Alecto, sombre and spectral, turned back to her and said, “Very well.”
And then, Harrow died.
It felt like drowning.
She knew, in the moment, that it was not like this for most people. That slipping away was not often a violent affair.
Harrow felt each and every one leaving her like they were a last gasp of air when she was already six feet underwater — and breathing was choking and only losing them faster. It was horror and panic and loss unlike anything she had ever experienced.
Do not leave me. I cannot exist without you. I do not know how.
But not existing was the point, after all.
Finally, following too long spent in that agonising purgatory, in that perverted baptism, finally, the last.
A tug, a searing pain as though her very arm were being severed through, torn off, deltoid and humerus and clavicle.
And then it was quiet.
Harrow stood weightless in the space before the river, a scream dying in her chest, her own hands clawing at her throat. Alecto beside her, watching and waiting with those eyes that still burned to look at.
“What was that?” Harrow asked, shaking hands moving to smooth over her garments, before settling at her sides.
Alecto looked towards the water, the ripple and flow along the shore that felt like sand under Harrow’s toes. She replied simply. “They are gone.”
Harrow did not understand, she hadn’t understood much by the end, but by the saints, she had tried, and those shortcomings would not matter soon. Harrowhark Nonagesimus collected herself like an offering to the divine — and took a slow but sure step across the sand to the water’s edge.
A hand clutched at her wrist. She glanced down to find Alecto’s long, cold fingers clamped around her forearm. “I thought, perhaps, we could wait a moment.”
“What for?” Harrow asked, but a reply never came, and the grip around her arm, while gentle, did not loosen.
Harrowhark stood on the edge of an endless and eternal river and waited.
Minutes passed, perhaps days, it would all be the same to the two of them now, Harrow supposed. Despite it all, and it being such a living emotion, Harrow grew impatient, “What are we waiting f—”
Then, she felt it. Felt something, at the very least.
A tug, a lurching of external need and guilt, before the vision swam around her until it was replaced with the steps of Drearbruh once more, and the great doors up ahead… now cracked ajar.
Alecto released her hold.
Frowning, Harrow turned and witnessed her own limp form cradled in the arms of Gideon Nav.
“Saints, Harrow, what did you do,” it was choked, distraught, “That felt like my whole damn leg was being torn off. Was that really necessary, you ass? Couldn't have just let me retire like a normal person, huh? Didn’t think I’d suffered quite enough bodily trauma?” A weak, wet laugh, and then Gideon began to rock them both gently where she was kneeling. “Harrow. Harrow, what did you do?”
Harrow approached cautiously, “What is this?” She asked. “Is this a vision? An apparition?”
Alecto answered, “A eulogy, perhaps.”
Harrow watched as Gideon lent her forehead down to rest against that of her own empty, dead body’s. “Harrow, you can’t just go and leave me. That’s too much of a colossal bitch move, even for you.”
Her heart, which she swore she no longer had, fluttered and ached in her chest like those winged creatures from the planets she’d eaten. “This can’t be real.”
Alecto was silent.
“Why are you showing me this?” Harrow demanded, her attention enraptured as Nav reshuffled her corpse as though to needlessly make her more comfortable, her fingers brushing over her eyelids to coax them closed, as Gideon let out another pitiful and disgusting sound of mourning. “Why are you showing me this?” Harrow whispered. “This cannot be real. She cannot be real. Gideon Nav is dead. Kiriona is— is marred and ruined as a fault of my own sins and you think this image would be enough to convince me of— of what?” Harrow’s voice rose of its own accord, pained and desperate. “What is the purpose of this?”
Alecto watched her patiently, before she spoke, “Do you believe a few mere flesh wounds beyond my capabilities?”
“Gideon is gone.” Harrow insisted.
“No.”
“But she—”
“Wasn’t whole,” Alecto finished.
Harrow swallowed thickly, wanting to argue further but finding no reasoning to back a debate. She discovered her own hand reaching out tentatively towards the form of Gideon Nav and pulled it back to clutch against her chest before her fingertips could even touch the short waves of ginger hair before her. “You could have at least moved my body.”
Her god said nothing and remained impassive at the edge of the moment.
“You could’ve—” Moved me, hidden me, turned me to dust. It was one thing to expect those left who could recognise her to briefly mourn her absence, and another to expect them to witness her growing cold and lifeless. “How did she get here so quickly? How did she know where I was?” Their final mission had made them absent from the Ninth for months.
“She would have felt the detachment as you did, she would have sought you out through the bond with what little time remained,” Alecto explained. “And then, she ran.”
Gideon had not moved, Harrow watched her hold herself with such stillness she was certain it was a fault in an illusion. Until the larger girl unfurled, glanced around as though looking for vengeance to enact, a body to press her sword through, or perhaps even just for answers to a breaking heart. But there was no one. The space was cold and empty - aside from two invisible ghosts stood watching from the side.
Attempting to stand, Gideon reshuffled the weight of the corpse in her arms with a gentleness Harrow could not recall from even her own mother. Her cavalier’s eyes were red and watered as she hushed, “It’s okay, Harrow,” Her body still gave and bent like a sleeping child’s. “It’s okay, I’ll take you home.”
Gideon ascended the stairs to the castle as though the weight in her arms was making the journey a mountain, though Harrow knew her cavalier had burdened much heavier before.
Harrowhark followed at Gideon’s side, pulled like some haunted thing to the very top step. She was unaware of the other presences emerging from the gates until they reached out to prevent Nav stumbling. Faces she recognised, some she didn’t, who were no doubt drawn from the depths of Drearburh after witnessing Gideon bolting through its alleys and halls. The Ninth was agreed as their place of retreat, their safe house after all was done and settled — too many faces watched on as the Reverend Daughter was returned to the front gates of the castle.
“It’s okay, Kiri, I’ve got her.” A voice said, it was one her body was warmly familiar with, but that was still half a stranger to her. Pyrrha Dve reached out to take the strain from the younger cavalier but Gideon seemed reluctant to loosen her grip, even as she fell to her knees.
Gideon sobbed. “I don’t know what happened, she—”
“Shh, it’s okay.” It was not, it was not at all. This was supposed to be a gift, freedom, why were they all so…
And Gideon worst of all — after all the foul things Kiriona had said to her in the last few months before she’d had to leave on that final mission to irrevocably stain her soul. How Harrow had clung to her like a baby bat regardless.
Pyrrha glanced over her corpse methodically, and then quieter and blinking too quickly, said, “Dammit, kid, not again.”
Another approached, the body of Camilla Hect and the soul she’d still been getting to know, who placed a comforting hand over Pyrrha’s shoulder, “I’m sorry, Kiriona, I don’t think there is anything even I can do.” Paul frowned with more anguish than they had any right to.
Rage snapped and crackled into envy and brought to life a heart that had been dead long before Harrow had passed. She wanted. She wanted, and it was right there and her’s to take. She’d never been so jealous of her own body before, perhaps, bar one occasion, but that was nothing compared to seeing and witnessing with all the longing that came along with it.
Harrow turned to Alecto, still at the summit of the stairwell, and Harrow prayed. I have loved you. I have loved you as a disciple loves a deity, I have loved you nearly all my life, all of it that mattered — but I have loved her just as long. And I have loved her as a human.
Finally, Harrow said. “I want to be loved.”
Alecto smiled like a sunrise on an Earth Harrow would never get to see. “Then go and be loved.”
Harrowhark Nonagesimus took one last look at her body, and then moved to reach a hand towards her motionless chest and the frozen muscles of the aorta she found there, and instructed them to start beating again.
Harrow woke to her body trembling through every muscle and fibre, her bones chattering with the kind of ferocity that’s only ignited after being brought in from the unbearable cold and smothered in blankets and sat before a hearth fire.
Synapses reconnected and systems restored themselves until she could make out noise and sensation. She’d been pulled oh so tightly against someone's chest, a wet gasp of desperate disbelief rocked the both of them, and Harrow burrowed weakly into the scent and shoulder of Gideon Nav.