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“Turn around” Ianthe breathed. “Harry, all you have to do is turn around. I know what you’ve done, and I know how to reverse it, if only you’d ask me to. Just ask: it’s that easy. Dying is for suckers. With you and me at full power, we could rip apart this Resurrection beast and come away unscathed. We could save the galaxy. Save the Emperor. Let them talk back home of Ianthe and Harrowhark - let them weep to speak of us. The past is dead, and they’re both dead, but you and I are alive.”
—
“Doesn’t this make you feel so alive ?” Ianthe breathes avidly. Harrow glances over at her, squinting in the daylight. Ianthe is looking into the far distance, eyes bright with a hungry fervor, pinpricks of blood-red excitement high on her cheeks. Moisture darkened strands of her straw blond hair cling in tentacle-like swirls to her neck and forehead, caught fast in the mire of battle sweat and dust coating her skin. She hasn’t bothered to brush them away.
This system’s star has a rosy hue, burning colder late in its life cycle, and its rays slice mercilessly through clear skies, cheerfully illuminating the devastation in Harrow and Ianthe’s wake - a red carpet of blood soaked dirt surrounds them, littered with abandoned weaponry and cooling corpses folded into unnatural origami.
Warm and fizzing Thanergy blooms through the air, become as unnecessary to Harrow now as food. Still, the sense of it is pleasurably energizing, and it is thick ; anyone with even a whisper of aptitude would not need sight to know what has just happened here. There is a temptation to close her eyes and bask in it, but Harrow cannot justify using anything less than all of her senses in a combat situation, so her eyes are open. And, against her will, lingering on her battle companion.
The ruddy color of the daylight offsets Ianthe’s usual sickly pallor and the Eighth Saint glows in her dirty white robes, looking warm and alive here on this planet in a way she never does in the icy white-blue illumination of their shuttle.
Harrow hates her.
Ianthe’s head begins to turn, and Harrow quickly faces ahead once more, clenching her jaw just slightly.
“Never would have expected myself to be one for collaboration, but I can’t deny it’s a thrill. I’m almost horny about it,” Ianthe says. “Don’t you enjoy it Harry? Our power. Us, here, together.”
“ Us ? Whatever possessed you to think I would enjoy-” Harrow pauses. In the distance comes the sound of shouting and the mechanical rumble of one of Blood of Eden’s war machines. A ragged squad of foot soldiers are accompanying a final straggling tank, which lists drunkenly to one side, into defensive position between Harrow and Ianthe and the complex of buildings across the dusty field. Behind the soldiers, smokestacks and rounded roofs bleached white in the sun stand naked and brightly vulnerable despite the high wall surrounding them.
For the last two months, Harrow and Ianthe have been discretely working to pinpoint the location of a certain refinery key to Blood of Eden’s weapons manufacturing pipeline, and judging by the aggressive, teeming anthill of a defensive response their approach had kicked up, they’ve guessed right this time. Unfortunately for the rebels (and for Harrow’s own patience with the Eighth Saint’s entire personality), the two of them have been working the assignment discreetly in their miniscule Ziz class ship, retrofitted with a switch allowing the engine to burn either physical fuel or Thalergy. Today, Blood of Eden’s security forces had failed to identify the small craft’s approach as a legitimate threat until entirely too late.
The long barrelled tank gun rotates, training its dark mouth on Harrow. She chews the inside of her cheek in mild annoyance. The faulty vehicle must have been parked behind the wall until some soldier, reinvigorated by the sight of reinforcement transports gathering high on the hill behind the refinery, had gone back to rally survivors and trundle the thing out. Silly. At this distance, the hapless cluster of soldiers scrambling to readiness remind Harrow of maggots on a crust of bread.
As easy as a sigh, with not a hint of blood sweat, Harrow reaches out and quirks her index and middle fingers.
The crumpled bodies littering the ground around her shudder as one, then begin to writhe with direction and purpose, spiraling in on each other. They move like water circling a drain and sound just as wet, sloughing off unnecessary flesh and reducing to clean osseous matter as they reach the center of the tiny vortex in front of Harrow and funnel into the blood-wet ground. In the space of seconds the dirt around Harrow and Ianthe is empty of bones.
The sand in front of the tank boils for a moment, and then, gleaming pink in the red sun, a giant cylindrical maw of bone rises from the field as if not so much a new construct being born but instead a burrowing predator breaking up out of the ground to feed. Hungry rows of vicious calcium reinforced teeth, each the individual length of a femur, gape open as if on an indrawn breath.
There is a sharp boom; the tank gun firing. The projectile cracks through the construct in a shower of bone splinters and dust, and, knocked off-course, flies harmlessly past the necromancers. Harrow’s monster easily re-knits its web of flexible overlapping osseous scales around the exit wound and without further preamble swallows the vehicle and most of its accompaniment whole. The circular jaws contract, the teeth rotate like gears. The soldiers scream, briefly, and then they don’t anymore.
“I mean, look at you work , you’re certainly not ‘understated’,” Ianthe says, with the particular flavor of airy condescension she always uses to obscure some kind of genuine emotion. Harrow thinks; gross, and sends her construct winding through the sand to collect the few sprinting stragglers who managed to escape. It's a toss up whether Ianthe is still thrilling from the culmination of their hunt, or simply turned on as she already claimed. Most likely both: Harrow can faintly hear the pops of far away gunfire - Ianthe must be taking care of the reinforcements on the hillside. Killing the troops on the hill is as pointless as swatting a fly with no ability to sting, and just as easy. Harrow would probably have let them retreat, if only to give Blood of Eden less data on the geographic range of their necromancy, but Ianthe loves to flex and Harrow…well Harrow just works here, doesn’t she?
“You love this as much as I do,” Ianthe insists. Harrow pointedly does not respond, deciding she’s grateful for the previous interruption discouraging her from wasting the energy. But then Ianthe continues. “You were born to wield this power, this was always what was meant to happen. C’mon, Harry, just admit it was the right choice, the past-”
—
“The past is dead, and they’re both dead, but you and I are alive. And what are they? What are they, other than one more corpse we’re dragging behind us?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Harrow said.
—
“Fuuuck,” Harrow growls, grinding her hips forward. Between her thighs, Ianthe makes a muffled noise. Harrow coils her fingers tighter in those limp blond locks and yanks pointedly to remind her of the rules.
Harrow can feel the responding twitch of Ianthe’s fingers against the back of her thigh where her left hand supports the weight of Harrow’s pelvis hanging off the side of the mattress, but Ianthe makes no more sound and certainly does not protest.
Frustrated for a reason she can’t quite grasp, Harrow rolls her hips forward again twice, hard, still meeting no resistance. Ianthe’s head moves with her, neither countering the motion nor disconnecting. When Harrow holds Ianthe in place and rocks herself back and away, curious, she can hear the small, desperate hitch of indrawn breath as Ianthe’s mouth slides open obligingly. Harrow doesn’t give her time to inhale fully, and when she digs her heels in beneath Ianthe’s scapula to drag her back towards her cunt, she’s met with the wet velvet of Ianthe’s tongue, draped protectively over her bottom lip and teeth.
Harrow says, “Hnn,” despite herself and throws her head back, chasing delicious pressure against the passive topography of the older girl’s face. It’s especially exhilarating when her clit clips over Ianthe’s nose, partly because the direct contact causes an almost unpleasant frisson of intensity that makes Harrow’s thighs shake, but mostly because it’s a reminder that Ianthe definitely cannot breathe while doing this.
Harrow doesn’t usually let her in the first place, no matter how much she cajoles, but today somehow the 8th saint to serve the King undying had managed another grand career feat for the history books and goaded Harrow into bed. Prattle on insufferably enough, Harrow supposes, and eventually you’ll force someone to take the necessary measures to shut you up.
Harrow’s leg on Ianthe’s shoulder is jostled slightly, and Harrow loses the rhythm, her eyes snapping open. Ianthe should know better, should know that the slightest sensory change - even a draft shifting the air temperature - can take Harrow out of the moment. Ianthe should be doing her best to be consistent and accommodating if she’s so invested in making this a regular group activity.
But she doesn’t seem to be paying attention to Harrow. Ianthe’s own eyes are closed, her eyebrows furrowed tight around a familiar little worried crease in the perpetually unaged skin of her forehead, a groove of expression that will never be allowed to embed itself as the permanent wrinkle it seems to promise. Her right shoulder is moving.
Harrow freezes completely, feeling her own lip curl unpleasantly. Borrowed eyes flutter open to find hers, and the look in them is completely unexpected, something sickly warm and corrosively yearning. It makes Harrow think of stomach bile.
Harrow stares, long and loud and pointed, thinking about the colour of her own eyes. Ianthe’s shoulder stops moving.
“Were you touching yourself, just now?” Harrow asks, conversationally. Ianthe blinks, and then something shutters behind her eyes, the earlier uncomfortable glow extinguished, and ah, that’s better. She shrugs, and holds up her right arm in blithe affirmation, dislodging Harrow’s knee from her shoulder to slide into the fold of her elbow. Slender metallic phalanges shimmer damply in the low light. “And with the hand I made you, too,” Harrow sneers. The disdain comes easily now, well trodden pathways of emotion as soothing to walk down as recalling theorems. “Disgusting,” she says, “off.”
Ianthe rocks back onto her heels and Harrow extricates her legs, only fumbling slightly to catch herself with the ball of one foot on the frigid metal floor, despite the shakiness of her knees. She plants the other bare foot against Ianthe’s chest, cold toes against her sternum. Her calcaneus digs down to wrinkle and bunch the delicate lace of the white silk camisole the other girl wears, pulling. The edge of the garment catches briefly over Ianthe’s nipple and then pops down to expose her small breast. She makes no move to adjust the shoulder strap, doesn’t twitch or shiver. Ianthe has really embraced the first house wardrobe whole hog in the last sixty years, doing away with her lilacs and yellows almost entirely, which Harrow is fine with. White provides a nicer visual contrast to Ianthe’s blood, when Harrow gets into the mood she’s in now.
“Why do you think you have the right to use my construct for that ?” Harrow asks.
“That seems very not-rhetorical, Harry, I thought you didn’t want me talking,” Ianthe smirks, wet lips curling. “Are you looking for an answer?” In the low light, her entire mouth, nose and jaw shimmer with Harrow’s slick, but her eyes are contrastingly dull, and she avoids meeting Harrow’s gaze, the deference in direct contrast with her flippant tone. It makes that thing that perpetually simmers inside Harrow these days fulminate abruptly into a powerful boil.
Why does Ianthe think she is the one with a right to feel sorry for herself ?
“Actually, you’re right,” Harrow concurs, and kicks out, hard. Ianthe flops backward, one ankle twisting sickly with a crunch as she goes back and over it, unbalanced from her crouch. She catches herself on her elbows, a spark of rebellion visible in her tensed muscles, but Harrow is already crouching over her in the same instant. These days, Harrow is fast, with truly remarkable reflexes and a wicked sword hand. She leans down into Ianthe’s damp face, and says mildly, “I couldn’t possibly bring myself to care what you think about anything, even if the Emperor himself wanted me to report on it.”
Ianthe’s eyes narrow just slightly, but before she can be any more irritating, Harrow spits in her face. It lands, wet and heavy with mucus, across the side of her cheek and in her open mouth. Harrow follows it with a brusque strike of her palm, purposefully catching her mandible too low below the zygomatic arch so the full force of the slap displaces Ianthe’s jaw with a wet click of cartilage. She smears the saliva over Ianthe’s lips, mixing it with her own wetness, rotating her palm in a merciless grind until her fingers cover Ianthe’s nose and mouth again. “Your face looks so ugly all squashed up like this. It fits you,” Harrow observes. “Swallow,” she orders, and there is a tense moment of pause. Then, Ianthe’s eyes flutter shut and she does it, dropping awkwardly down from her elbows to lie flat on her back as Harrow bears down with both force and gravity. With her free hand, Harrow extracts the bone splinter piercing her tragus and invites it to change. The bone ripples obligingly, lengthening and flattening until Harrow holds a hooked dagger. She can form any blade she wants, but this one she keeps jagged toothed, dull edged. The serrations are meant to catch.
She made the mistake of letting Ianthe manipulate her into trying something different, and now it’s time to return to familiar ground between them. Ianthe’s white silk shirt is practically begging to be ruined, after all.
“You already know better, Ianthe. The only time I’ll tolerate my hands touching you is if they’re making you bleed.”
—
Harrow woke up in the corridor outside her rooms, on her side and broiling, gasping for air, soaked right through with sweat-her own-and blood-her own; the blade of her rapier leered through her stomach, punctured through from behind. The wound was not a hallucination or a dream: the blood was wet and the pain was terrible. Harrow’s vision was already curling up black at the edges as she tried to close the rent-tried to sew her viscera shut, cauterize the veins, stabilize the organs whimpering into shutdown but she was far too gone already. Even if she had wanted it, the imminent death letter would not be hers to read. All she could do was lie gasping in a pool of her own fluids, too powerful to die quickly, too weak to save herself. Harrow was only half a Lyctor, and half a Lyctor was worse than not a Lyctor at all.
__
“It’s okay,” Ianthe says, strong fingers squeezing Harrow’s wrists as she shakes.
Ianthe is patently wrong, it is not okay and it will not be okay, not ever, and certainly Ianthe is not the person to claim anything about okay-ness, Ianthe knows nothing about okay, probably doesn’t even know how to spell it.
Harrow snarls.
“John once told me that grief doesn’t grow smaller, but you grow bigger around it. Rather trite, at least the way he meant it, but I think of it because you’ve grown so great now, haven’t you Harry? You must see how grandly you’ve expanded. I mean, you’re practically obese with power.” Harrow doesn’t find this very funny. She tries to shove Ianthe away, upset her balance from where she crouches in front of Harrow’s seat on the floor, but Ianthe clings like a leech to her arms and won’t let her go. Harrow fists her hands instead into the front of her robe, digging and tearing at white cloth smeared bright red, which Ianthe allows without comment. Harrow’s fingers have already healed in the moments Ianthe has held her still; muscle, fat and skin swallowing exposed phalange tips - newborn, unpainted fingernails coagulating over top.
“Let me go,” Harrow demands.
“Not until I’m convinced you’re going to stop throwing yourself into the nice furniture. That vase you smashed was from an excellent collective of artisans on the same planetoid as a Blood of Eden base we cleaned up a couple hundred years ago. It became an instant collectors item when I got it, but unfortunately that also means it’s irreplaceable.”
Third house, so attached to their precious possessions , Harrow thinks wildly, surprising herself. It’s been nearly ninety years since she thought of Ianthe as belonging to anything but the first house.
“I won’t touch your pretentious furniture.”
“Forgive me if I don’t fucking believe you. You think I’m not familiar with your tantrums by this point?”
‘Tantrums’ are what Ianthe calls it when she barges in to find Harrow, haloed by the illegible shreds of whatever flimsy on which she’d been working out her most recent failed reconstitution theorem and the detritus of anything else breakable in her vicinity, lying gasping in a pool of her own blood courtesy of the tender ministrations of her most recent inventive construct. When Harrow gets like this, she designs them with single minded innovation, inspiration sharp as a razor’s edge as she pursues a destructive capacity capable of combating her healing factor. She’s had several centuries for inventiveness to blossom since that first foray into making her own skull a construct, although her motivation these days is far less hopeful.
One of the perks of being God’s third most senior Hand and Gesture is that when Harrow gives cohort generals a clear order not to allow anyone (even those rare souls foolhardy enough to try to interrupt) through to her chambers for a week, they don’t, on pain of death. The main struggle with this is that Ianthe - second most senior Hand and Gesture of the great Resurrector - doesn’t dislike pain, has a hard time dying, and has the most difficulty of all with staying the fuck out of both Harrow’s chambers and her business.
To be fair, this time Ianthe had happened to find Harrow here, in Ianthe’s own rooms. Harrow isn’t honestly certain how she got here beyond the fact she was already here when Ianthe came in, and now that Ianthe has so rudely yanked her out of the distantly floaty fog she’d been existing in, she doesn’t want to otherwise interrogate the circumstances too closely. Perhaps she wandered in here to break stuff, yes, that makes sense to Harrow.
Ianthe’s chambers at every outpost are extravagant, ornate, full of things ripe for the smashing, but on this station in particular they are filled with collectibles. Furls of gauzy golden-white fabric hang from the vaulted ceiling, partitioning the room into sections, and the low light of the wall sconces filtering through makes the divisions seem to be crafted from mist or smoke. When in its proper state, the room houses a formidable curated collection. Mounted to the walls or propped on marble and metal display tables are paintings, textile hangings, carved reliefs, sculptures, pottery work, even one metal acid etching, depicting a variety of scenes and images, none of which honor the emperor or the nine houses. There’s not a hint of bone or flesh among them.
This is Ianthe’s Blood Of Eden collection, liberated from many victories, in many cities, towns and villages on many worlds. Each curtain divided section of the room is bound by a thematic thread, and today Harrow has found herself in the alcove apparently dedicated to scenes of tenderness. There is a stone sculpture of two lovers embracing covered with tasteful fabric draperies (now on the cold floor, missing a toe and ear, chipped off on impact), a painting in gilt metal frame in which children play in a field against a bright yellow sky (now hanging at angle on the wall where she had nearly knocked it from its housing, splattered across the centre with a spray of synthetic ink from Harrow’s inkwell), several works showing children and animals (similarly decorated, but in Harrow’s blood), and the vase which had been circled by a repeated motif of hands, clasped, at an angle to show they belonged to two different people and braided patterns of some type of grain.
Lastly, Harrow’s eyes land on the greatest casualty of the day; the wood (real wood!) desk, now only two legged and splintered down the middle, worktop gouged with deep claw marks still containing the smeared, juicy remains of Harrow’s previous fingertips.
Unwelcome, the sight jogs her memory. This was the desk at which Harrow had been scrawling away at a theorem sequence for several sleepless days, building reckless speed and even more reckless hope, until she had paused to review and caught the miscalculation on the ninth sheet of flimsy, so early and so glaringly obvious. It’s a wonder she even reached Lyctorhood in the first place, if she’s doing work of this caliber now, so many centuries in.
For all its cloying triteness, this had been a quiet room in which to work during the week Ianthe had been away overseeing the opening of a new permanent cohort installation in the Thuban system, ideal because no one would think to look here for Harrow to interrupt her. That’s the reason Harrow is here now.
The floor around where Ianthe kneels over Harrow is littered with pottery shards, as well as a paste where clay and bone powder had settled in the tacky pool of Harrow’s blood, and the barely-recognizable shattered skeletal remnants of today’s construct - a torso length half cylinder of bone, demolished once Ianthe had grabbed Harrow’s shoulders and yanked her out the top of it. A few of Harrow’s own ribs are visible now, still trapped between the occasionally twitching teeth of the thing, so Ianthe must have been going for speed over finesse this time. The leverage couldn’t have been optimal to extricate her torso from its rounded confines. Harrow had designed it to move diabolically slow, to dig into the center of her abdomen, split her sternum, bond to her ribs and peel her ribcage open to the sides like halving a dinner roll with your fingers. The whole process would recommence whenever her ribs finally cracked off and new ones sprouted to take their places. It was not the most painful she had designed, but certainly some of her best pacing work in terms of the torturous inexorability of the opening process, and she had scratched the tips of her own fingers off again, scrabbling against the roughly porous outside of it once the first cycle really got started.
If Ianthe interprets those signs of Harrow’s struggle as regret after this many years living in each other’s pockets, there’s truly no hope for her abilities insight.
Ianthe, quietly observing Harrow taking in the chaos of her surrounds, says; “Yeah, you’ve made a big mess this time, Harry, the cleaners are going to be overjoyed” in a carefully neutral tone of voice.
Somehow this is the thing that pushes Harrow over the edge, and she feels tears welling to her eyes. She plants her bare feet on the cold floor, gathers up her knees in front of her and rests her elbows casually atop them, ignoring the shake in her arms and, hunching her shoulders defensively, stares pointedly upwards at the join of the wall and ceiling. Ianthe doesn’t try to keep her gaze, but instead releases Harrow’s wrists, scoots around behind her and slides closer on the sticky floor to drape her arms around Harrow from behind. She holds onto her own wrist to close the confining circuit of her arms around Harrow’s newly whole belly, nose pressed to her hair, breath warm against the back of her naked shoulder.
Harrow does not lean back into her. She does, however, feel herself deflate slightly from her upright posture, tears pooling silent and heavy now that Ianthe is no longer staring at her face. Her body shudders in what Harrow is determined not to label as a sob. It happens again, and several more times, catching irritatingly whenever Harrow tries to inhale. Behind her, belly pressed to her back, Ianthe breathes deep and slow, an invitation to a different tempo. Harrow stubbornly does not join her.
“Sweetheart, Harry, it was hard for me too at first, with Babs,” Ianthe says, seemingly genuine.
“You didn’t even flinch, you had ‘Babs’ as a snack,” Harrow moans, and then drops her head into her hands, first holding the weight of it, pressing resistance up into the leaden pounding of her eyeballs, and then curling her fingers, feeling the pull of hairs yanked free and the sting of skin splitting as she digs in with fingernails. Her palms are wet.
“Look, I can’t claim to have liked her, because as you know I never lie, but even I can’t deny that she was also a snack .” Ianthe says, solicitously.
Harrow growls at that. Ianthe hmms back, gentle and agreeable, and Harrow is undone. She hears a whisper, too small and tremulous to be her own voice but undeniable all the same; “I miss her.”
There is silence for a beat, a terrible stillness. Then Ianthe’s arm across Harrow’s belly comes up to cross diagonal over her chest, pressed hard and secure to her sternum between her breasts, fingers squeezing her trapezius possessively. Harrow lets out a shuddering exhale, and against her own volition her head drops back to rest on Ianthe’s shoulder, her breathing finally starting to slow. They sit, for a long time.
“Look, maybe -” Ianthe finally begins, and Harrow tenses up slightly. Ianthe pauses, warm breath tickling the back of Harrow’s ear, and gives her shoulder another calming squeeze, a gentle pet. When Harrow relaxes, Ianthe’s other hand snakes away, and Harrow hears the rustle of a sheet of flimsy being picked up behind her. She tenses again, cold lead weaving wiry into her muscles and stomach, but Ianthe doesn’t hesitate this time. “I know you don’t want to hear this Harry, but maybe it’s time to let her go. Stop trying, stop destroying yourself. She wouldn’t want this for you.”
Harrow reels away from Ianthe, tearing herself out of her grasp and crawling across the sticky floor with a galvanized swiftness. “And how-” Harrow spits, then sucks in a rapid breath and holds it until she can begin again. “How do you presume to know what she would want for me? How could you begin to understand her, you selfish, pathetic, self-absorbed cunt?” She says, managing to sound coldly measured even from her crouch on the floor, even while her pulse beats against her eardrums like pressure trying to escape her skull.
Ianthe sneers at her, and Harrow feels her nerves settle somewhat, back on familiar ground. Her mouth opens, around words sure to be exactly as harsh and eviscerating as Harrow wants.
But then Ianthe seems to catch herself, pauses. She chews at her lip, considering, and Harrow stares her down, can feel her own face burning dark with the flush of her anger. She hopes for Ianthe to say something snide, cutting or smug. Really, Harrow would have preferred anything other than what she actually says because when Ianthe finally opens her mouth, lips thin and face paler than usual and uncharacteristically guileless, what comes out is;
“I know she wouldn’t want to come home to find you strapped into a self-inflicted torture device, gasping in a pool of your own blood. I know because she would want the same things I want…because she loved you, too.”
—-
All Harrow could do was lie gasping in a pool of her own blood, too powerful to die quickly, too weak to save herself. She was only half a Lyctor, and half a Lyctor was worse than not a Lyctor at all.
Outside the plex, the stars were blocked by the skittering, buzzing Heralds of the Resurrection Beast, beating their wings furiously to roast everything inside. From very far away Harrow thought she heard the ring of swords and she flinched at each bright scream of striking metal. She had loathed that sound from birth.
Harrow prepared to die with the Locked Tomb on her lips. But her idiot dying mouth rounded out three totally different syllables, and they were three syllables she did not even understand.
“Nope, not her, I’m Ianthe,” answered a voice thin with strain. “Sorry to disappoint, as usual.” A broken laugh followed, devoid of humor, then warm hands were pulling and tugging at Harrow’s shoulders, dragging her weight forward off the rapier spearing her. Harrow still couldn’t see anything, her vision a fuzz of gray interrupted with rudely glowing spots of light. Still, through her haze and fog of pain, Harrow was compelled into a moment of violent clarity when the cold metal was wrenched free of her body. It felt like her entrails had slid out with the sword, and anything that had failed to exit through her low back was destined imminently to be puked out of her mouth. She couldn’t determine temperature anymore, but was certain she felt more blood gush out of her.
Then she was being cradled against a solid body and the hands were back, one - hard and bony - cupping under her chin to keep her head lifted, the other clutching over Harrow’s abdomen and Harrow could feel some kind of compressing force weaving outward like a blanket, corseting her stomach and circling behind her kidneys where everything felt cold and numb and burning. “Come on Harry, heal yourself,” Ianthe whispered, voice coming from just above Harrow’s ear.
“Can’t -” Harrow barely managed. She was exhausting every reserve, knitting screaming viscera just barely enough to bleed internally instead of externally, slowing the process only incrementally (which had been unfortunately accelerated by Ianthe’s well-intended intervention). Mustering the fine control to close open arteries would be an insurmountable task, much less generating more plasma or blood cells to fill them. If only she had more power, if only there were some source of Thanergy to draw on out here in deep space-
“Hey,” Ianthe whispered into Harrow’s hair, voice sounding so horribly strained, stretched from its usual smug assuredness to the thinnest thread, like matter being pulled over the event horizon of a black hole. “There’s a solution here, you know-”
But somehow Harrow knew this was unacceptable. She hadn’t read the imminent death letter but still she knew with a certainty deep in her bone marrow that this road would be one she could never come back from. “No,” she gasped, “no. Ianthe. You…keep patch for...me. Just. More time. Teacher can…help-”
The body under her tensed with sudden resolve. “Harry, Teacher is still in the River,” Ianthe contested, evading the first request. Her tone was conciliatory but, upon later reflection Harrow would think, underlaid by a new cold determination.
“You…help?” Harrow begged. She found, somehow after everything, she very much did not want to die.
“I want to help you, I really do, but I fear enabling you isn’t actually in your best interest so-” began Ianthe. At this point Harrow’s hearing started to fade in and out. Her head was bobbing in water, ears alternatively submerged and clear once more. She only caught the end of Ianthe’s ultimatum, “...be bullied into this anymore…won’t help unless you let me fix you.”
“Nn-...” Harrow gritted out when she felt fingers cupping her cranium, torn between the majority of her consciousness which laid so leaden she would be happy to sink into oblivion, and that small part of her hindbrain buoyed once more to more crisp, cortisol-fueled awareness out of sheer desperation and a keen instinctive sense of alarm at whatever Ianthe had been saying.
Ianthe’s next words would ring clear in Harrow’s memory and echo for a long time, their resonance as persistent and grim as the Drearburgh bells.
“You’re clearly incapacitated and unable to think for yourself. You haven’t been thinking clearly for a long time now. You’ll thank me for this later. Maybe much later, but eventually you’ll definitely see why I…” And Ianthe trailed off. Then both of her hands were on Harrow’s head, cradling her skull, pressing in and in and -
Harrow screamed.
And-
—
The sky of the first house is the same brilliant, cloudless blue today that it had been when Harrow had first seen it, so many centuries ago. The open courtyard’s tall marble pillars inlaid with intricate mosaics describing radiating geometries all seem to reach up, stretching to caress that blue blue sky. There is no wrought iron garden fence here today, nothing separating the greenery from the tile, and vines climb and sprawl across the open spaces in an artful impersonation of disarray.
Harrow and Ianthe are seated to the God-Emperor’s right hand in pride of place, Ianthe closest and Harrow a seat further out. They’ve been here for several hours welcoming dignitaries and representatives from the nine houses, and are likely not to be let up for several hours more, until the ceremonies move inside for the banquet. John loves a party, Harrow thinks distastefully.
Ianthe is just as bored as she is, but Harrow is leagues better at disguising it. Or maybe she still cares more about standing on ceremony, even after all these years, and for her part Ianthe still hasn’t learned to give a shit about anything aside from her own entertainment, even after all these years.
Case in point, Ianthe leans over into Harrow’s space, her golden fingertips slipping over the armrest of her seat to rest gently but blatantly on Harrow’s upper thigh.
The new Sixth house Master Librarian, currently making a flowery renewal of their oaths to serve the Emperor Undying, gazes unwaveringly at John Gaius on his elevated platform, while their Cavalier stares appropriately ahead. Harrow sees the aide at their left shoulder glance in the direction of her and Ianthe, gaze flicking nervously to Ianthe’s hand and then up, and when he meets her eyes Harrow stares back impassively. He blanches, and looks at the ground.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” says Harrow quietly. Their relationship is no secret, but does Ianthe really need to stir the pot on a day that’s supposed to be so auspicious? Not that Harrow cares particularly about the meaning behind the ceremony. In the months since the final resurrection beast was put down, all the saints have been working tirelessly, leading battalions of cohort soldiers reassigned to work parties, all under John’s uncharacteristically fussy direction to get the first house ready for repopulation on a planetary scale. Harrow is tired - never physically, but certainly mentally, and the sooner today is done the sooner Harrow can take a rest, her presence as a senior Lyctor required only for those inter-house land-apportionment squabbles severe enough the first house staffers can’t handle the deescalation on their own. And staffers shouldn’t need her and Ianthe for much. They already have a pretty good idea from communication with house heads how many citizens will be exercising their right of return within this first year. Of course all the houses are making a bid to establish colonies in what they think are the most favorable land locations, but part of all the terraforming was really to offer an even field of play in terms of natural resources. John really loves to make sport of inter-house power-squabbles, and has even placed bets about how it will all shake out against Ianthe - because the two of them deserve each other - and some of the newer Lyctors too green to know better. Tedious. Harrow wants none of it.
Ianthe is clearly of the same mind about today’s ceremony, because she mutters without turning her head, “Ughh, this oath of loyalty drivel is interminable. But at least this is pretty much it - after today, how about we visit one of those islands the saint of constancy raised, closer to the planet’s equator, and you can spend some quality time trying to make me actually cry again.”
“Hmm.” Is all Harrow says. It would be satisfying to see Ianthe covered in snot, red faced and sobbing messy, it’s been a couple centuries since Harrow was able to break her composure that much but perhaps a new environment would spark her creativity-
Ianthe knows her too well. Cold fingers tighten on her thigh, and Harrow turns to shoot her a frowning glance, but undermines the severity of the look by shifting slightly in her seat, pushing her leg into the hard golden palm.
“It’ll be sooo fun,” Ianthe coos, boldly leaning all the way into Harrow’s space and bumping her with her shoulder in a gesture that could be construed as playfully abrasive.
“Doubtful,” snorts Harrow at conversational volume, momentarily forgetting herself. From above on his raised dais, the King Undying shoots them a quelling glance, not entirely lacking fondness.
“Trust me,” Ianthe murmurs more quietly, smiling lips pressed to Harrow’s mastoid process just behind her ear. Her breath ruffles Harrow’s hair at the nape of her neck.
“Never.” Replies Harrow. She feels the word deep in her stomach, an ancient familiar twist, an echo of old agony become now a bitter ache. She knows it is true, but she doesn’t know how much that really matters anymore.
“That’s fine,” Ianthe acquiesces. “Just be with me, then. Stay.”
“I am with you, aren’t I?” Says Harrow.
“For now,” Ianthe laughs under her breath, just a hint of wryness to it.
“For now,” Harrow agrees.
—