Chapter Text
THE IRON FENCE - The corpse is gone. Nothing remains but a pool of red on the flagstones and a drying smear on the sharp black points. Hungry claws reaching up like they want to pull the sun from the sky.
DEBTOR - You know the feeling.
CORPUS - The stone, once cool, now blood-warm beneath you. The sun hot against the back of your neck and poorly cropped head. You are too used to the dark. It burns your skin which, with a prickle, heals.
1.
Scream.
2.Weep
3. [BELOVED - Impossible 20] Lay down and die.
> 4. [THE ROCK - Godly 17] Get up.
THE ROCK [Godly: Failure] - You try to move, but you can’t. You should get up, but you don’t. Are you just going to sit there until Dominicus swallows you up?
PSOCOPTERA [Easy: Success] - The system’s star will enter its red giant phase in approximately five billion years, give or take a myriad.
CORPUS - You will not last that long.
NEMESIS - Bullshit, you won’t last that long. You better make it to the heat-death of the universe and then I’ll punt your skinny, nothing necro-ass into the reality next door and you’ll do it all over again.
PSOCOPTERA [Medium: Success] - Despite a compelling argument made by Raphael Sise in his collected published lectures, the existence of parallel universes has never been proven.
NEMESIS - Literally didn’t ask.
THE IRON FENCE - It grips your attention like a black hole. Dark metal. Rusted. Broken and listing. Weeds grow up around the base, through the bars, a profligacy of life you have not and will not get used to. The iron is red. The blood is drying. The corpse is gone.
NEMESIS - This is pathetic. I told you not to look, and now there isn’t even anything to look *at.* Get up.
1.
Scream.
2.Weep.
3. [BELOVED - Impossible 20] Lay down and die.
4.[THE ROCK - Godly 17] Get up.
> 5. [NEMESIS - Trivial 2] Get the *fuck* up.
NEMESIS [Trivial: Success] - You get up. Your legs tremble from exhaustion and blood loss, but you aren’t dead, so you really have no excuse.
THE ROCK - Finally.
BELOVED [Formidable: Success] - There we are. Welcome back.
SALTWATER [Legendary: Success] - YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE BEFORE, BUT THIS PLANET KNOWS YOU. THE WAVES CRASHING AGAINST THE CLIFF CRY A NAME THAT YOUR BLOOD ANSWERS TO. IT KNEW YOU WOULD COME. IT KNOWS YOU WILL RETURN.
YOU - You stand unsteadily and take in the rest of the courtyard for the first time since the battle ended. There isn’t much left. The massive hole torn into the side of Canaan House threw rubble clear across the yard and into the sea. Aside from the broken fence, there is little left standing. Your shield of perpetual bone has long since crumbled to ash, along with the spider construct.
OSSEOUS - Sloppy work. Both of them. You do not tolerate sloppy work in yourself usually, but you cannot imagine being ten thousand years old and producing a construct that poorly composed. You would have hidden your face in shame.
NEFAS [Medium: Success] - The Lyctor’s body is still here.
MUSCULOSKELETAL - If you can call it that.
PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - Camilla the Sixth is not.
YOU - You feel something in your chest that might have been regret or sorrow, if the background radiation of your pain were not so astronomically high.
You are stranded on the First House and the Emperor is coming. You should probably do something to prepare to meet God.
1. [BELOVED - Impossible 20] Walk into the sea.
> 2. [PARASAGITTAL - Formidable 13] Figure out what happened to Camilla Hect.
3. Look for Ianthe. [Leave]
PARASAGITTAL [Formidable: Failure] - Camilla had been there at the end of the battle when—when the Lyctor died. Then you had lost time, the way you sometimes had as a child, and Camilla was gone, along with the corpse. You could not think of a reason Camilla would have taken it and not you, too.
NEFAS [Godly: Failure] - There’s an obvious reason. This was your fault. Bringing you would be monumentally stupid, and Camilla isn’t stupid.
NEMESIS - Holy shit, can you give it a rest? Cam wouldn’t leave you without a good reason. How do you even know she’s gone?
PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - There are new burn marks on the terrace.
OSSEOUS [Challenging: Success] - Which, along with the pattern of disturbance in the debris, suggests a shuttle landing and take off.
CORPUS - Unconscious or insensible for hours, at least.
NEMESIS - Whatever. You could at least check the House before deciding she left you for dead.
1. [BELOVED - Impossible 20] Walk into the sea.
2.[PARASAGITTAL - Formidable 13] Figure out what happened to Camilla Hect.
> 3. Look for Ianthe or Camilla or somebody. [Leave]
YOU - You step awkwardly through the hole in the wall and into the ruined atrium.
CANAAN HOUSE - Bits of glass and bone crunch under your feet. Light, fading gently toward orange, streams in through the broken skylight. The fountain, which the skeletons had only recently fixed, is smashed on one side and water runs in dusty rivulets across the floor.
This place is truly dead, now. Not a body waiting in stasis to be resurrected, but a place scraped clean of everything that once gave it life. There are no priests ambling along the hallways, no skeleton servitors performing their ancient duties, no pitiable heirs and cavaliers jockeying amongst themselves for status. Even the monsters are dead.
YOU - You walk through the House in reverse. First the Seventh’s sickroom, now a blasted crater. Sextus burned hot enough for the glass in the windows to begin to ripple and melt.
PSOCOPTERA - A damned shame.
PERCEPTION [Trivial: Success] - Empty.
DEBTOR - Add a stroke to the tally.
YOU - Next the priest’s quarters and the long hallway down to the communications room. Teacher is where you last saw him, as is Dyas, but Deuteros has gone. There is just another pool of blood in her place, staggering in drips and smears toward the door. Interesting, but not helpful.
SERMON - You don’t weep for her. Deuteros can share the blame with you in hell.
NEFAS [Formidable: Success] - You have never shared blame in your life and you do not expect to in death.
YOU - There is only one other place in Canaan House that might hold a living person. You return to the laboratory where Naberius Tern died.
THE SEVENTH LAB - More bodies here, in varying states of desecration. The corpse of Tern, betrayed. The corpse of Silas Octakiseron, prideful until the end. And the corpse of what used to be Colum Asht. His twisted remains make you feel sick and you avoid looking at them.
NEMESIS - Fuck.
SALTWATER [Godly: Failure] - THINGS HAVE LEARNT TO WALK THAT OUGHT TO CRAWL.
THE SEVENTH LAB - Even discounting the bodies, which you find difficult, the room is destroyed. Blood and scorch marks streaked across the lovingly painted walls. Pools of yellow fat congealing on the floor. The foot-tall letters of YOU LIED TO US looming over the destruction, which you are just beginning to understand.
SERMON - If you’d understood earlier, maybe this would have ended differently.
NEFAS - Or maybe not.
PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - Oh good, you’ve found Ianthe.
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “Oh good, you found me.”
She sits on the marble slab, her bare feet dangling girlishly. There are dark purple bruises beneath her eyes. She skeletonised the blood from her dress, but it’s still grubby with dirt and dust and doesn’t do much for her overall impression of illness. She looks hardly better than Naberius Tern.
Her right arm ends neatly just below the shoulder. The residual ends in clean, white flesh. There isn’t even a scar.
1. [BELOVED - Impossible 20] Beg her to kill you.
2. [PARASAGITTAL - Challenging 12] “I need your help.”
> 3. “You look like a corpse.”
YOU - “You look like a corpse.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “Back at you, sweet talker.” There are new, unforgiving lines around her mouth that make her seem much older than she had days, perhaps hours, ago.
NEFAS - Or maybe that’s the immortality.
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “Did you have fun exploring? Find anything exciting? I, myself, did a thorough inspection of our bedroom to see if dear Corona had gone there to sulk, but, alas,” she spreads one open hand, “no dice.”
DEBTOR - You have not returned to the Ninth quarters.
YOU - “Where did they go?”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “Haven’t the faintest. Maybe Teacher wasn’t having us on about the mad, vengeful ghosts. Strange they didn’t take the bodies though,” she murmurs.
NEMESIS - Whatever it was took one body.
YOU - “You didn’t see *anything?*
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - Her face shutters. She shrugs with her abbreviated shoulder. “I was somewhat indisposed.”
1. “Possible. Ghosts are very scary.”
> 2. “Yes, probably a horde of ancient ghosts devoured them while we weren’t looking, left no sign of their presence, and conveniently forgot to attack the two of us while we were *indisposed*.”
3. [NEMESIS - Easy 8] Call her a stupid bitch.
YOU - “Yes, probably a horde of ancient ghosts devoured them while we weren’t looking, left no sign of their presence, and conveniently forgot to attack the two of us while we were *indisposed*.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “Oh, forgive me, I forgot I was talking to the lauded genius of the Ninth House. What do *you* think happened, then?”
1. [NEMESIS - Trivial 6] *Please* call her a stupid bitch.
2. “I don’t know, but baseless speculation isn’t going to help.”
> 3. [PARASAGITTAL - Medium 10] Try to figure out what happened to the living. (+1 You saw the shuttle marks / +2 Camilla wouldn’t leave you.)
PARASAGITTAL [Medium: Success] - Someone has clearly been and gone. Someone *alive.* And if it wasn’t the Emperor or the Cohort, which surely would have taken you and Ianthe as fresh new Lyctors, then it must have been the enemy. Cytherea was carving a personal revenge quest, but she’d had allies, and the only people who would ally to kill the Emperor are the resistance factions on the front.
SALTWATER [Legendary: Success] - THE SINS OF GOD AND HIS DISCIPLES ROT THICK AND BLACK BENEATH THE FOUNDATIONS OF THIS HOUSE. THE SINS OF GOD LIE STILL IN THE DARKEST PIT OF THE NINTH. THE SINS OF GOD BURN LIKE A FURNACE IN YOUR CHEST. THEY ARE NOT THE ONLY ONES WHO WOULD SEE HIM PAY.
PARASAGITTAL - It would be unutterably foolish for non-necromantic combatants to try and hold even one Lyctor against their will, let alone two. But one half-dead Cohort officer, an injured cavalier, and Coronabeth Tridentarius? It’s possible. Moreso than shy, homicidal ghosts.
NEMESIS - And the corpse was just too sexy to leave behind?
SERMON [Medium: Success] - You don’t have all the information, but you’re certain you’re right. The only other explanation is that they vanished into thin air.
1. [NEMESIS - Trivial 4] I’m not picky. Call her an ugly bitch or a insane bitch or whatever polishes your knucklebones.
2. Trust Ianthe with your suspicions.
> 3. [ENNEAMETER - Challenging 12] “I don’t know, but baseless speculation isn’t going to help.” [Lie]
4. [PARASAGITTAL - Medium 10] Try to figure out what happened to the living.
ENNEAMETER [Challenging: Success] - “I don’t know, but baseless speculation isn’t going to help.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She rolls her eyes. “A Third magician never admits what they don’t know. *Much* more fun to lie.”
YOU - “I’m not a Third magician.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “No one is under any such illusions, believe me.” Her eyes drop to your side and she nods in your direction. “Are you planning on using that, or is it more of an accessory?”
SERMON [Godly: Failure] - What?
THE ROCK [Legendary: Failure] - What?
CORPUS [Medium: Success] - You’re carrying something.
PERCEPTION [Formidable: Success] - Your right hand is wrapped tightly around the handle of a bloodstained longsword. The tip of it drags on the floor behind you. You’ve had it since the terrace and just didn’t notice.
CORPUS - Your fingers ache.
NEMESIS - You’re *blunting the edge.*
NEFAS - Now that you’re aware of it, you can feeling a seething hatred emanating from the blade. It pours off the metal like heat. Your palm should blister and melt in the face of it.
NEMESIS - Don’t be so dramatic. It’s a sick ass sword, but it’s just a sword.
SALTWATER [Challenging: Success] - ITS HATRED IS DEEPER AND VASTER THAN YOU CAN COMPREHEND. YOU ARE JUST THE MOST CONVENIENT TARGET.
NEMESIS - Who the fuck *is* that?
1. [DEBTOR - Heroic 15] “It’s nothing.” Drop the sword.
2. [NEMESIS - Medium 10] Stab her with it. Just a little.
3. “I think this sword wants to kill me.”
> 4. “It’s mine.” Keep the sword.
YOU - You hand tightens around the handle—
NEMESIS [Godly: Failure] - The hilt.
YOU - —of the sword until your knuckles turn white. “It’s mine.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “God, the next myriad is going to be insufferable if this is the level of conversation I can expect from you.” She slides down off the slab.
PERCEPTION [Challenging: Success] - She sways on her feet and unobtrusively catches herself against the marble corner, like she didn’t want you to notice.
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “Whatever. I’m going to see if there’s any food in the kitchen before the cavalry arrives. Dismemberment really works up an appetite. Let me know when you’re done being boring.”
MUSCULOSKELETAL [Formidable: Failure] - Your arms tremble. Your whole body trembles.
CORPUS - The thought of food disgusts you.
NEFAS - You shouldn’t be alive.
BELOVED [Medium: Success] - Yet you are.
YOU - “Just because you cared so little for your cavalier, doesn’t mean the rest of us are as heartless.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She doesn’t even spare you a pitying glance. “And yet they’re both equally dead.”
1. Do nothing. Coward.
2. [BELOVED - Impossible 20] Cut your own throat.
3. [ENNEAMETER - Heroic 15] Deny what you’ve done.
4. [DEBTOR - Godly 16] Accept what you’ve done.
> 5. There has to be another option. Please.
YOU - You stand motionless as Ianthe brushes past you. Your flesh feels like stone. Or like ice, cold and heavy and fragile. The weight of the sword pulls you hard to one side and there is a peculiar phantom ache in the small of your back where your muscles are healing too quickly to strain. You imagine each restored fiber siphoning from the supernova in your chest until it dims from white to red to cool gray ash.
You don’t know what to do.
SERMON [Legendary: Failure] - What do you want from us? You already did it.
THE ROCK [Formidable: Failure] - You can’t change the past. You’ve tried.
PARASAGITTAL [Heroic: Success] - No… there must be something you can do. You’ve seen enough of the labs to apprehend the process and are now, nauseatingly, a living example of its success. You’re the greatest necromancer of your generation. You can fix this.
NEFAS - That kind of thinking is what got you here in the first place.
ENNEAMETER [Godly: Failure] - There’s nothing to fix. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Maybe listen to Ianthe for once, she’s obviously handling this better than you.
PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - Okay, you’re not that stupid. Nobody is handling this well.
PRECOCIOUS - You’re on your own.
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She’s getting away.
1. Do nothing. Coward.
2. [BELOVED - Impossible 20] Cut your own throat.
3. [ENNEAMETER - Heroic 15] Deny what you’ve done.
4. [DEBTOR - Godly 16] Accept what you’ve done.
5. There has to be another option. Please.
> 6. [NEMESIS - Easy 8] Get her ass. (+6 You’re not on your own.)
NEMESIS [Easy: Success] - Get her ass.
YOU - You take a labored step after her, heaving the sword up. The tendons tear in your arms and knit themselves together and tear again. The sword wobbles pitifully toward the ground, until you coax living bone from your ulna and radius and twine it up over the handle and guard, making it an extension of your body. The blade protests hatefully. It hurts, more even than the bone through your skin, hurts like a scream at the back of your head that never breaks or pauses for breath.
THE ROCK [Formidable: Success] You hold on tighter.
NEMESIS - Maybe you can get her other arm.
CORPUS [Challenging: Failure] - Your vision swims.
NEMESIS - Uh oh.
MUSCULOSKELETAL [Heroic: Failure] - The sword falls to the ground with a terrible ring of metal on stone.
CORPUS [Formidable: Failure] - You follow it down. You barely feel the impact against your chilled flesh. Sensations seem to come to you from the end of a long, dark tunnel, the pain blunted, the sound queerly muffled.
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She stops at the door and watches you with disgust verging on pity, a discomfiting predatory light in her confused brown-and-purple eyes.
CORPUS - You’re about to pass out.
PSOCOPTERA [Medium: Success] - Since you have arrived on the First, you have swooned, fainted, or otherwise fallen unconscious at 340% your monthly average.
NEMESIS - Fuck. Forgot who I was talking t—
YOU - You wake up and do not know where you are.
PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - The room is softy lit. You are lying on a what could charitably be called a bed, wrapped in something warm that crinkles when you move.
CORPUS - Everything hurts.
DEBTOR - Good.
PERCEPTION [Heroic: Success] - The sword is beside you.
NEFAS - It still hates you.
PERCEPTION - And someone else.
THE PLAIN-FACED MAN - A man sits beside your bed, alternately tapping on a tablet and scribbling notes down on a sheet of flimsy, like an overstressed aide trying to catch up on work. He has a remarkably ordinary, brown face and dark, nondescript hair. He could be anyone. Except that when you move, he looks up at you and his eyes are black as space with a thin ring of white around the iris, like a distant solar eclipse.
NEMESIS - Holy fuck.
LITURGY - That’s…
BELOVED - The Emperor.
THE NECROMANCER DIVINE - The Emperor of the Nine Houses, the King Dying, Lord Over the River, sets his papers aside and stands, discreetly brushing bits of cracker from his shirt onto the floor.
LITURGY [Medium: Success] - This is your god. You need to perform obeisance. Display respect. Prostrate yourself before his might.
YOU - You slip painfully from the bed, discovering you have nothing on but a thin, blue hospital smock. Your face is also naked. Before, this may have caused you some distress. Now, it seems hardly more important than the crumbs you crush under your knees. You lean forward and press your forehead to the tile at his feet.
1. Pledge your eternal loyalty to your Lord.
2. [DEBTOR - Challenging 12] Ask God to restore your house.
3. [SALTWATER - Godly 16] TEAR OUT HIS HEART.
> 4. [NEMESIS - Legendary 14] Beg for the life of Gideon Nav.
YOU - “Please undo what I’ve done, Lord. I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.”
NEMESIS - Don’t ask for some stupid shit like that. You’ve got more important things to deal with.
DEBTOR - You did once. You are no longer sure.
THE NECROMANCER DIVINE - His feet shuffle in front of you. He moves like he might drag you up from the floor, but hesitates, and stays where he is.
LITURGY - You are giving him an excellent view of the knobs of your spine.
PRECOCIOUS [Challenging: Success] - He is embarrassed for you and for himself.
THE NECROMANCER DIVINE - “I can’t. I would very much like to. But that soul’s inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I’d take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What’s done is done is done. Now you have to live with it.”
1. Weep.
2. [DEBTOR - Impossible 18] Accept that what’s done is done.
3. [PARASAGITTAL - Formidable 13] Explain to God that he’s wrong.
4. [BELOVED - Impossible 20] Beg him to kill you.
> 5. [SALTWATER - Heroic 15] HOW DARE HE ASK YOU TO LIVE WITH IT?
YOU - You lift your head and meet his bottomless eyes. “How dare *you* ask me to live with it?”
MUSCULOSKELETAL - When you stand, your limbs shake. It’s difficult to tell whether from fear or rage or simple exhaustion.
LITURGY - Are you trying to get yourself killed?
BELOVED - It won’t work.
ENNEAMETER - He might even be a little impressed.
PRECOCIOUS [LEGENDARY: Success] - He’s wondering the last time you had something to eat.
THE NECROMANCER DIVINE - “Because the Empire is dying.”
MUSCULOSKELETAL - Your body stills.
THE ROCK: Oh, is that all?
PRECOCIOUS [Medium: Success] - What else is new? Your world has been dying as long as you can remember.
SALTWATER [Heroic: Success] - GOOD. LET ITS BLOATED CORPSE FADE INTO THE COLD BLACK BEYOND, WHIMPERING AND FORGOTTEN.
THE NECROMANCER DIVINE - “If there had been any less need you would be sitting back home in Drearburh, living a long and quiet life with nothing to worry or hurt you, and your cavalier would still be alive. But there are things out there that even death cannot keep down. I have been fighting them since the Resurrection. I can’t fight them by myself.”
SERMON [Godly: Failure] - Skill issue.
YOU - “But you’re *God*.”
THE NECROMANCER DIVINE - “And I am not enough.”
ENNEAMETER [Legendary: Success] - Seems a little unlikely, doesn’t it?
SALTWATER [Godly: Success] - THE RIVER ROARS AND RISES AROUND HIS FEET. SUCKS AT HIS SHOES. REACHES UP WITH SALT-CRUSTED HANDS TO DRAG HIM DOWN. HE HEARS ITS RAGE AND CASTS HIS EYES AWAY. HE HOLDS IT AT BAY WITH MEREST THOUGHT AND FORGETS IT WAS NOT ALWAYS SO.
NEMESIS - Yeah, what kind of god needs help from your skinny ass?
YOU - You listen to God’s explanations, his promises and excuses, with half an ear. The bonfire where your heart used to be burns so hot that you have the vague, stupid impression that if you removed your smock you would see the light under your skin, pouring from between your ribs. It is difficult to think about anything else. When the Great Resurrector asks for your help to fight his endless war, you agree quickly in the hopes he will leave you alone.
THE NECROMANCER DIVINE - He does. He closes the door gently behind him with the distracted air of a man late for an appointment and promises he will send someone later with food.
CORPUS - As if you would be able to eat.
YOU - You lay back on the thin mattress and stare up at the smooth gray ceiling, the sword seething beside you.
PRECOCIOUS - Well, if he won’t help us, we’ll do it ourself.
PARASAGITTAL - There’s work to do.
NEMESIS - You are being such a fucking asshole right now, Harrow, you know that? Cut this shit out or I’m going to grab your brain stem and make you start punching yourself in the face.
MUSCULOSKELETAL - Not that it would accomplish much.
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She sits in a squashed, dingy armchair in the corner of your hospital room, her ankles crossed, one hand resting primly in her lap while the other dangles over the side of the chair like she’d forgotten about it.
SERMON - She is trying to talk you out of what you’re about to do.
THE ROCK [Formidable: Success] - And failing.
THE LETTERS - Besides her rests a stack of flimsy envelopes, all addressed in a code of your own creation save for the one at the very top. That one reads simply, “To be opened in the event of Harrowhark Nonagesimus’ death,” as though Ianthe were likely to forget who gave it to her.
PARASAGITTAL - You were as specific as you could possibly be and addressed every scenario that seemed at all possible, as well as several that didn’t.
YOU - The final letter is still in your hands. You trace the awkward shape bulging through the flimsy. Metal and smoked glass. You can’t bear to put it down. Not yet.
NEMESIS - This is pathetic.
THE LETTERS - “To be given to Gideon Nav.” No codes. Written as plainly as you could manage.
NEMESIS - Will you fucking *listen* to me for once in your stupid, stubborn little life?
DEBTOR - You can’t afford to.
YOU - In response to some asinine comment of Ianthe's, you say, “If you think that you and I are not more beholden than ever, you are an idiot.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “Who is left? *What* is left?”
YOU - You close your eyes against her question, taking fleeting comfort in the dark of your eyelids. You wish you could do this alone, but you can’t, and Ianthe is waiting for an answer.
1. [NEFAS - Impossible 18] Nothing is left.
2. [PARASAGITTAL - Heroic 15] But you can fix it.
3. [THE ROCK - Challenging 12] You haven’t given up.
4. [BELOVED - Medium 10] You can’t give up.
>5. [PERCEPTION - Easy 6] Open your eyes.
PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - When you look in the mirror, she is there waiting for you. One eye a terrible liquid gold. It glares at you, accusatory, but it is only your own self-recrimination you see behind it.
NEMESIS - Don’t look at that. Stop it. Stop looking at me.
YOU - “We are wasting time. Open me up.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “It will be worse for you in the end, Nonagesimus—”
1. [NEMESIS - Impossible 18] Look, I don’t like it either, but she’s right. Can you just listen to her, please?
>2. [Sermon - Easy 6] Shut this bitch up.
SERMON [Easy: Success] - You are tired of trying to be dissuaded from something you decided the moment God admitted he would not help you. You roar back at her, with all the force of your grief and broken faith, “*Do* it, you faithless coward, you swore me an oath! Expose the brain—guide me—and let me handle it from there! There’s still time, and you thieve it from me!”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She looks taken aback for a fraction of a second, then shrugs as if it’s all the same to her. She picks up the tools you have laid out and stands in front of you, the awl held a little awkwardly in her right hand, the skin of that arm a slightly different color at the seam where it meets her shoulder. “All right, little sister. Time to absolutely fuck you up.”
NEMESIS - *No!*
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She places the point of the awl upon your frontal bone like a kiss and strikes.
CORPUS [Heroic: Success] - The pain literally blinds you for several seconds, but you cling to consciousness with the effort of long practice. Pain is familiar. This is too important to let it defeat you.
NEFAS [Challenging: Success] - Navigating your own internals by touch and brute force, you shut off the nerves screaming their alarm.
CORPUS - The darkness lapping at your vision recedes.
YOU - Time goes soft. Bleeds. It seems barely seconds before you are confronted with your base and naked self, the wet sheen of gray matter reflected back at you in the many mirrors you hung at different angles, all you give you the best view of this pitiful, shrunken thing you take such pride in.
It disgusts you. But that is familiar, too.
PERCEPTION - She’s saying something. Pay attention.
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - Her voice seems far away. She points at different parts of the undifferentiated meat inside your skull and says their names. She recommends avoiding the frontal lobe entirely and cautions against digging too deep, unless you want to breathe manually for the rest of your unnatural life. She prods a spot on your parietal lobe—
CORPUS [Formidable: Failure] - —and for half a second your entire body believes it’s burning, invisible flames melting your flesh. You open your mouth to scream—
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She takes her hand away. “Whoops, clumsy me.”
NEMESIS - Harrow, you’re the reigning champion of bad decisions and this is maybe one of the stupidest things you’ve ever done.
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She finishes by showing you the temporal lobe, which requires a tense bit of maneuvering, and then looks at you expectantly.
1. Submit to her dubious assistance.
2. [PARASAGITTAL - Medium 11] Allow her to watch.
>3. [SERMON - Formidable 13] Send her away.
SERMON [Formidable: Success] - At first you cannot remember how to move your mouth. You cannot coordinate between your teeth, tongue, and lips. Then you remember your blunted nerves. You open the pathways just enough to slur, “Leave me.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - “You’re going to end up a vegetable and then who am I going to talk to for the next myriad?”
YOU - *”Leave me.”*
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She pouts theatrically, but steps behind the curtain and out of sight.
NEMESIS - Harrow. You don’t have to do this. You need to save the Ninth. You need to protect the Tomb. You’re going to fucking kill yourself. I don’t understand.
PARASAGITTAL [Challenging: Success] - Your primary target is the temporal lobe.
PSOCOPTERA [Medium: Success] - The temporal lobe, which governs functions such as sensory processing, visual recognition, and language, also contains the hippocampus, the structure responsible for encoding new memories and retrieving existing ones. It is shaped like a seahorse.
NEMESIS - What the fuck is a seahorse?
PARASAGITTAL - But there are a few other alterations you need to make before the final incision, lest you forget what you’re doing while you’re doing it.
CORPUS - Not recommended.
YOU - You cut into the places Ianthe indicated. You sever connections. Remove small pieces of your self, pieces that are less important than the goal you’ve set. The tissue fights you as the lyctoral healing tries to keep you intact.
You dig into the superior temporal gyrus and briefly go deaf, which frightens you, and then you begin to hear voices that cannot be there, which frightens you worse.
PERCEPTION [Godly: Success] - Your mother and father castigate you as a failure from somewhere behind you. The great bell of Drearburh tolls in the distance and, further still, below you in a dark tunnel that can’t exist inside the body of the spaceship, you hear the Rock rolling back into place.
PARASAGITTAL - Focus.
BELOVED [Formidable: Success] - You haven’t failed. You’re still alive.
PARASAGITTAL [Challenging: Success] - You smooth existing wrinkles and add new ones in their place. The crevices writhe like worms as they try to reassert their original form, so you lay a trap on the inside of your skull that will keep them in line.
DEBTOR - What’s a little more blood?
NEMESIS - Harrow.
PARASAGITTAL - Now the final cut.
NEMESIS - Harrow. Please.
YOU - You grip the scalpel tight and remove a carefully selected portion of your temporal lobe. You let it fall, a pink and white blur passing before you eyes. It hits the floor with a muted wet slap.
PARASAGITTAL - Nearly there.
YOU - The work blurs at the edges. You remember the broad strokes. Your skull opened. Your brain exposed. You know even remembering this is too much, gives you too many handholds to drag yourself back to where you started. You make another cut, and another, and another, until you forget to keep a tight leash on your nervous system and the pain rushes in like the River.
CORPUS [Godly: Failure] - You drop the scalpel with a gasp. Your hands fly to where the pain is greatest and find cooling blood and the raw edge of bone. The panic rises. Your *skull*—
PARASAGITTAL - It’s done.
DEBTOR - Nothing more than a stopgap measure.
SALTWATER - MORE THAN MOST WOULD DO.
YOU - You don’t know where you are. The last thing you remember is battling a Lyctor on the terrace of Canaan House, and now you're surrounded by the cold, metal walls of a spacecraft. Yet you can feel the fire of your necromancy running through you, which isn't possible. There is a roar like the crash of distant waves in your ears. And your skull, your skull, your skull... The only thing you can remember is—
“Ianthe.”
IANTHE, MAIMED LYCTOR - She steps around the curtain and catches you as you fall.
YOU - You wake and do not know where you are, again, the sheets tucked around you binding you tight like mummy wrappings. Your mouth is horrendously dry.
NEMESIS [Formidable: Failure] - Oh good, you’re alive. And not braindead. That means I get to kick your stupid ass without feeling bad about it.
YOU - You sit up, slowly, painfully, and peer with squinted eyes into the corners of the unfamiliar room. You are in a hospital bed, which probably means you are in a hospital, but you don’t feel any injuries. Just a full-body exhaustion and a curious fog obscuring the events that brought you here, which could have also been the exhaustion if you were not intimately acquainted with all exhaustion’s many nuances. You try to think about this, and fail.
NEMESIS [Formidable: Failure] - You got fucking lucky, you know that? I thought for sure you were gonna end up drooling in a padded room somewhere.
YOU - Where is Ianthe?
NEMESIS [Challenging: Failure] - Yeah, I’m going to kick her ass, too, for letting you pull that stunt.
YOU - Where is… Ortus?
NEMESIS [Legendary: Failure] - What?
YOU - You turn and swing your legs over the side of the bed and the sudden motion makes nausea flood the back of your throat.
NEMESIS [Heroic: Failure] - Harrow?
YOU - Thin yellow bile spills from your lips. You lean forward quickly enough that most of it ends up a foamy puddle on the floor, but some of it soaks dark blotches into the hem of the hospital gown where it barely covers your knees.
NEMESIS [Godly: Failure] - Harrow, stop it. It’s not funny. Answer me, god damn it.
YOU - You reach up to wipe your mouth, only to realize as your fingertips brush your chin that you aren’t wearing your paint. This drives a spike of panic through your heart that even the strange room and the fog wrapped around your mind did not. Your hands scrabble desperately over the mattress behind you as though your paintbox might be lying just out of sight, and they find cold steel instead.
THE SWORD - A furnace blast of hatred rushes up your arm and through the base of your skull, leaving all your hair standing on end.
YOU - You yank your hand away, try to stand from the bed to flee. Your knees buckle under your weight. You hit the floor with an ungraceful thump.
NEMESIS [Impossible: Failure] - Fuck. *Fuck.* Harrow? Harrowhark!
YOU - You lie panting on the floor with your face in your own sick. The taste of stomach acid is bitter on your lips. A small childish part of you wants to call for help, but help has never come for you before, and you can’t bring yourself to relinquish that last, small scrap of dignity.
Eventually you are able to push yourself to your knees, but no further. You wipe your face on the thin bedspread and sit with the backs of your thighs sticking to the cold, tiled floor.
NEMESIS [Medium: Success] - This is such fucking bullshit.
YOU - You can’t help but agree.
PARASAGITTAL - Looks like a success to me.
1. Lay there until someone notices you.
2. [BELOVED - Impossible 20] Just finally fucking die already.
>3. [NEMESIS - Heroic 15] Get up, Harrow. (+6 You're not on your own)
NEMESIS [Heroic: Success] - You get up. Idiot.