Chapter Text
Your head swam with the vastness of newfound knowledge not yet devoured. The Duchess Septimus regarded you with all the kindness from before, even with your open-fish mouth gawping. Digestion was not even close to beginning for you.
Abigail Pent had divulged the secret family tree of the Necrolord Prime with the kind of formality one might award indecent gossip, and you were struggling with your comprehension.
Your Lord’s daughter was the girl with fire red hair, no older than you at twenty and two, sitting beside Lady Pent. A product of a spoiled extramarital relation, Gideon Gaius had been squirreled off to the empty planet of the First and left to guard a decaying House her father had also abandoned. In that time, she nursed a festering welt of hatred for the man who had become God, and you were only slightly less dismayed to learn this sentiment was shared unanimously among the other Houses. God was not a popular man.
From the corner of your eye, you perceived Gideon as she smiled at you, blindingly, and you had to turn your head sharply to avoid catching it. That kind of fever was contagious. You would need to steer clear of any interaction with her since learning of her divine heritage - her plainness was infuriating, and frankly, it upset you greatly.
Your upcoming marriage needed to be practical, entirely divorced from emotion. Every new interaction ran the chance of sullying this. If you had to convince even God that you were going to give his daughter an heir to protect his (and your) precious Tomb, you had to look like you at least wanted to.
"So," you began after a very long stretch of time, then promptly stopped yourself. You stood up to pace, only to find you could not move from your seat. Your legs were all skin and no bone beneath you. You resigned yourself to the plush seat while you waded through the waters of your mind. "Allow me to rephrase your request, Lady Pent. What you are asking me, in truth, is to partake in an act of divine heresy."
Your heartbeat was echoing like a premonition in your ears. Surely every body present could hear you as you thundered.
"To the extreme," came Abigail's too cheerful reply amidst this chaos. "Why, we’re going to defy God, Reverend Daughter. We are all getting out of here."
***
Not quite knowing what to do with yourself, you scurried off to the Sixth in a daze. Their quarters were placed in a corridor on the same level as your own, a convenience you might have attributed to Sextus’ ceaseless practicality. He seemed keen to make an ally of you; you had no reason to mistrust him.
Their door was shut tight, and no noise leaked from beneath. You figured it would be safe to slip the letter under the door, follow it with a weeny construct, arrange it neatly on a low table, and bolt from the premises with great haste.
As luck would have it, the Sixth were home. Camilla pulled open the door without a sound to find you crouched at her feet, where the flimsy had crumpled in your attempt to shove it through her door.
“Never speak of this again,” you warned, stalking past her. You were in a wallpapered hallway with three doors, setting up a perfect mirror image of the Ninth residence. You snatched the note up and handed it to her while she muttered in delayed agreement. “Where’s Sextus?”
“You called?” Palamedes appeared with a shaving knife in one hand and a towel slung around the other, foam coating the lower portion of his face. Disgusted at his lack of preparation, you addressed the cavalier in her perfectly organised state.
“I have just found myself sitting down with Her D- with Gideon.” You stuttered over her name, and spoke in tones slow and deliberate to counter your brisk, arrhythmic internal state.
When Camilla only nodded, you continued somewhat recklessly. “Pent told me all that had transpired in my … absence. Her Highness, Gideon, is - she’s just another girl! A young woman. I am afraid I can no longer do what I came to do, for I am going to fail all of you, miserably.” The Sixth were statues in the face of your naked desperation. “I cannot be worthy.”
“Harrow, if I may,” Palamedes interjected with great calmness, but you were only half listening to him in favour of wildly spiralling on the inside. “All we are, each one of us, is a piece of an ancient puzzle that no one really understands. Gideon is no different, and though it would pain her sorely to hear me say so, she’s no more powerful than you.”
“We all have a part to play,” Camilla assured you, but there was a distance in her tone that betrayed something alive and beating hard. For the first time, you questioned their intentions.
The mug she had passed you smelled so strongly of vegetation that your nose scrunched involuntarily, but the heat breathed a new life into your trembling fingers. If they were out to destroy you and the Ninth in kind, it would not happen today.
“Is that so, Hect?” She smiled patiently at you, and the uncanny resemblance between her and Palamedes struck you painfully. There seemed an unfathomable familial closeness between them which tore at your throat to contemplate.
You had been alone for so long in your life that friendship was a vague and murky concept you didn’t trust, but sitting there in an armchair surrounded by pleasant strangers warmed you. With the smell of old books and sweet lavender wafting through the air, you dozed off into a shallow, dreamless sleep.
***
Waking from your impromptu nap was terrifying, but blessedly, you were alone. A butterfly of flimsy was sitting on the arm of your chair informing you in a neat script that the Sixth had left early. You had been instructed to lock the door behind you after you left.
In your quarters, Ortus rested on a divan. His leather bound poetry collection had been discarded in sleep. You slipped off your outer cloak to signify your return, clattered off the party shoes in the hall, and sat for a moment against the inside of your bedroom door.
All you had worshipped for your life - all the Ninth House had worshipped since her inception - was a fabrication. This reality hurt less than the realisation that God was just a man, and not even a particularly good one at that. The knowledge that you would soon flee all he had made unsettled you deeply.
A tap on your window shattered the reverie and saved you from a doomed spiral of your own induction. Annoyed but only vaguely, you rose to draw the heavier drapes against the noise of the First. A flash of fire stopped you.
In the distance, the great rays of Dominicus were beginning to fall over the ocean in a trail that blazed against your eyes. Closer to you, a freckled, brown arm waved madly up at you for your attention. When another stony shard landed on the lip of the window, you stretched on tiptoe to wiggle at the handle attaching the glass to the frame.
It took all your upper body strength to heave the window open. Once ajar, an evening gust like the warmest of days on Drearburh rushed in. You hooked your left foot into a notch above the bed and pushed up with your right foot until you were straddling the windowsill. The fall was dizzying; you closed your eyes against a wave of sudden nausea.
“Down here!” Disoriented still, you held fast with your hands and carefully edged both legs out of the room, where you now faced the water and Gideon. “Jump, you scrawny chickenshit!”
You, the scrawny chickenshit, did not jump. You gathered the pebbles waiting on the window’s edge in your hand meditatively, if only for something to do, and contemplated the extent of the damage of the fall. Bones could be easily mended, but looking like a fool?
“I will not jump, thank you very much.” Your voice was a squeak even to your own ears. You blamed your haughtiness on terror, mentally preparing for a landing that would hurt but ultimately heal. “Some of us value our lives.” You returned the stones shakily, your resolution growing.
Gideon shrugged and readied another rock for launching. The gardens were quiet and cool, and she looked so at ease amongst the carefully tended greenery. It would be so easy to join her. This last piece of stone she propelled into a nearby fountain, where it skipped across the water gleefully.
Like a discarded eyelash, you shut your eyes and wished on this rock with all of your might.
But Gideon had turned on her heel and left you watching, waiting.
***
From your vantage point on the outskirts of the dining hall, you guessed Camilla Hect of the Sixth had an open view of the Divine Daughter dipping the gaudy Crown Princess of Ida low in the centre of the ballroom. You could see only the mingled shine of their heads under the dimmed lights as one whispered prettily for the other’s amusement.
You found yourself hot to the tips of your ears, covered blessedly under the veil Ortus had pinned in place for you. Had you been exposed, the colour would have surely earned you a right chuckle from either of the Fifth. Or, the sharper knife: a knowing smile. At least the Sixth were otherwise occupied.
Camilla's eyes were taut on the couple in motion even as she moved, trained as the fine lines of muscle tracing her single exposed arm. Her knife was concealed in the one sleeve of her jumpsuit, which you thought was a tasteful if mildly excessive amount of skin on display for someone only poorly disguised as a party-goer. Then again, Camilla blended into the edges of the crowd with desired effect, and had the capacity to kill at a moment’s notice if needed, which was one thing more than you could boast.
Her necromancer stood watching the floor with his head inclined towards Her Highness from a balcony. Abigail deemed it appropriate to remove you both from the dancefloor during this welcoming celebration, under the guise of ‘saving you until you were needed’. Sextus had been placed lower in height and closer to the Divine Daughter than you, but you figured this was less by choice and more, no doubt, to counter his horrendous myopic vision. Under the gleam of the chandeliers, his bottle thick lenses reflected so much light they would rob even the most talented spirit magician of their vision.
You weren’t certain what it was you would be needed for at this mixer, and remained on high alert as you stood waiting alone, sipping daintily at the burgundy liquid in your glass. It was the same glass handed to you upon arrival by another fluid, rainbow sashed construct; you drank it at a snail’s pace, afraid of the consequences that might surge after the alcohol.
Palamedes was about as useful to this mission as the nine course meal you would be expected to choke down later was to you, and you feared you were of equal merit, but weaving effortlessly through the throng of bodies, Camilla the Sixth proved herself no fool.
You should have known better than to question the Warden's Hand on her train of thought - she had a stable body as well as a sound mind. Also, your cavalier had been bested by her in myriad ways on too many an occasion already, which was to say any occasion at all.
Your bone mule sat patiently still among the Fifth House delegation at their already crowded table. For a man so prone to nervousness, Ortus looked fatally calm, amiable even from the moment you both had been settled there by Lady Pent and her husband. You could see Magnus verbally jousting your up-and-coming Ninth poet cavalier with more success than either would have displayed with a rapier.
You had to assume the Fifth's surprising interest in your house did not, in fact, reside in your cavalier, but rather in the dark and enigmatic ecclesiastic practises of your House. Born to a nun of extreme devotion even by your standards, Ortus would surely have a tale or two to delight. Unlike you, he offered his stories readily.
Guilt speared your heart at the consideration of your newly tested faith. For so many years you had stooped low on pews and stood tall on alters alike, with sacred words of devotion never far from tongue or mind.
The same religion you had to recently cast aside in arriving here and in mingling with the child of the Necrolord Prime, only to find her so dissimilar to the version of her residing in your imagination.
Nonetheless, you questioned neither the knowing eyes of Lady Pent nor her smiling idiot husband-cavalier. She exuded competence to you; her movements were practiced and easy to the eye relatively untrained in deceit. You trusted the aura about her without question, in the way one might trust their own feet, which was only mildly ironic to you. After all, you were on the winning side of her plotting.
Having scant knowledge of the Fifth couple beyond those brief encoded letters you exchanged and your earlier revelations, and it being your first time out of House in any capacity, you gave no great protest to their gentle persuasion of the Ninth delegation.
You were to be stationed at the apex of the hall, departing on the signal of her two fingered wave with approximately zero knowledge of what it was you were to do. Once her signal found its poised target, you excused yourself politely from the table at large in search of a restroom.
The wretched lot of the Fourth stared slack jaw at you as you crept up from the table, perhaps assuming you hitherto lacked the capacity to speak. Ortus had affected the Skull of Desolation for tonight, which you hoped might entertain them more than your absence; it was painted in a hand you were both envious of and well pleased by. He passed you the briefest smile, as if he shared a secret you were now privy to.
As you rose, you could not help locking eyes with the cool stare of Ianthe Tridentarius, an act which froze your answering frown and transformed it into one of grim horror.
The larger Third twin was a lone figure hovering by the open doorway in a violet silk gown that hung ostentatiously from her shoulders. It thinned her collarbones and blanched her skin the colour of old bone. The moment she spotted you in that over decorated First House ballroom, she sneered and blew the smoke of her cigarette at you from a curl in her lip as you stated her down across the space.
The pang of missing home hit you full and heavy in the smoky haze of an atmosphere enshrouding her, so like the one you had grown up surrounded by, and if your eyes watered you hoped your pointed cough would explain it. Your only unadorned finger, the middle one as it happened, separated from your fist as though buoyed by a will of its own.
Before either of you could utter the verbal insult you so longed to pay one another despite the distance, Ianthe's sister pulled away from stage centre, and the music seemed to swell in preparation for a second dance. You hurried yourself out from her trajectory. For this new piece, Coronabeth was treading in a jaunty step to the very edge of the room while Gideon feasted her eyes; Camilla was conveniently standing right where Corona stopped.
You made your way up the grand staircase in a gait slowed by caution and curiosity equally. Their fingers touched in the briefest of moments as Camilla steadied the teetering Crown Princess, and you released a breath you hadn’t realised you were holding. Whatever Camilla had executed, it was precisely as she intended. You watched her stow something carefully up her sleeve by way of indication.
Peaking over the room entire, you beheld the teens wobbling small fruits encased in a jellied substance on spoons. A swell of music assaulted your ears, and you observed with absolutely no amusement as the girl's sugar sodden food trembled and dived back into her bowl, shocked. The Fifth were doing an excellent approximation of ignoring the rest of the room to chide the youngsters on their lack of table manners.
Had you paid any less attention to detesting the taller Third House twin, perhaps you might have realised the Fifth had assumed parentage of the young Fourth house scion and his cavalier before you sat at their jammed table. The pair were clad in so much metal jewellery you assumed they were hosting a punk afterparty to which you had not received an invitation.
You wondered how the Fifth planned to restrain the children from the dessert table for the remainder of the trip, let alone undertake such a heretic mission in earnest with toddlers in tow. They had the kind of smiling faces best suited to teachers or medics, but they at least donned the most ordinary plain garments of a complimentary chestnut colour. Such a colour was unlikely to contribute to your growing headache from the overly loud overhead lights.
You cast your thoughts aside, disturbed by a cry that rose up in the hall. The thunderous roar of applause was so great it hummed through your body like live electricity. By now, you had ascended to the top tier of the hall, and had an excellent image of the whole room. Coronabeth bowed low to her kindly dance partner, her eyes a twinkling lavender as she turned in your direction and pranced back to a table housing her sullen cavalier.
The Third had been placed near the Seventh, who were absent from the table but had left their purses and shawls displayed there for no reason you could ascertain; and the Second, neither of whom had bothered to show up to the introductory dinner. You assumed this was less an affront against Gideon, and more in protest to Abigail’s shenanigans. You had no inkling of the military presence of the Second in your own life, and would have to wait longer to assess their usefulness, if such a thing existed.
The Fourth boy hopped up next to partner with Her Holiness; your late arrival had not bordered on rudeness quite yet, though you imagined Gideon’s willingness to dance with the outer Houses might peter out somewhere around the Eighth. Yours would too. The Fourth necromancer lacked all of the confidence and most of the grace Coronabeth brandished as he assumed his place on the floor, but he was beaming as Her Holiness slapped palms with him.
You watched Sextus watching Camilla as she glided about the outskirts of the ballroom in a passing shadow. She paused and bent at the Third table to whisper something into the shell of Corona's jewel studded ear, and dodged a swat in return for her efforts of the Princess' ringed hand. With the outline of a smile, Camilla continued her own choreographed movement, sparing the pallid Eight at their otherwise empty table a visit. Once again, you found yourself a judge too quick in your mental critique of her route; it struck you that she intended to look determined in her path, not aimless.
Your attention had shifted slightly from the Divine Daughter and her tussle with Isaac. You realised you were not the only person with lazer focus on Camilla; the Eighth House adept, who you had never seen before this moment but knew instantly from his overbearing whites and general air of disdain, was tracking her every movement.
At some point, the Duchess Septimus had been wheeled in her chair by her cavalier in the direction of Silas and his enormous nephew. She seemed to be initiating a conversation with the men, waving her pale green veined hands like flags in the wind as she spoke. Finally, they bit, with twin sighs visible even at your height above them. The Eighth was drawn momentarily toward her; the Duchess indicated for her cavalier to sit, and whipped from the purse on her lap a deck of old playing cards. She promptly shuffled and split the cards evenly between the four, hands still fluttering delicately around her cards.
The Eighth exchanged the briefest of looks, the kind which smacked of resignation to a fate worse than death, and began to organise their little pile of cards, disgusted.
When the Duchess looked up from her hand after a moment of pause in the entertainment, she locked eyes with you and batted her eyelid in a private wink. Her cap of curls bounced around her head in a mockery of Corona’s bouffant, and you swore for a moment she glowed with all of the light of Dominicus.
Though you were all on your respective paths, you felt some great sense of unity in the room. Perhaps you really would be receiving that afterparty invite by the end of the night.
***
The apocalypse was upon you within the hour. All peace had been destroyed by a single beam of light, searching you out savagely. A request to dance would prove your untimely ending.
In that high and floating space, you had met your end in the form of sweet deception. It had kissed you square on the mouth like a lover and poisoned you fatally. You never signed up for a dance; the watching eyes were petrifying. A spotlight illuminated your eyes, too wide in your face, and you looked up boldly at the Divine Daughter’s request. She had a fair few inches on you in spite of the heeled pumps you wore.
Every pair of eyes in that hot, collapsing star of a room was fixated on a combination of you and her. Dancing. Together. She had called your name and your body sang in response. Smooth was the timbre of her voice, placid her features, and you were mesmerised by the stark beauty of the only child of the Empire. She led you around the room slowly with an undemanding gait, your hand in hers, exactly as you were so afraid she would.
Gideon repeated your name, invitingly, and this time it was just for you. It hurt you to look at her face, though you were compelled to.
She had an incredibly fine face to be regarding this close. Gideon's jaw was set with cocky firmness, but her broad grin offset what could have been an otherwise utterly douchebag face. This woman knew who she was to her core, and when she beheld you in that claustrophobic space, she saw right through the elegantly painted skull staining your skin and down, down into the chambers of your lightless Drearburh heart.
How had you convinced yourself you could belong here in the arms of this woman? Your devotion to the Ninth was limitless, and to your God once the same. Yet, when face to face with the filial offering of the Empire, despite each knowing of your arranged betrothal, you found you could not compete. No mere mortal could.
Still, you smiled a fool’s smile at her, your painted lip splitting with the new stiffness of your face, all because you simply could not help it. She metamorphosed out of plainness in an instant: her perfect lips stretched over perfect teeth, and there you fell in love with God's daughter, the immortal heir to the Seat of the Empire. Fuck.
She had a hand held palm to the sky for your taking, and so you grasped it and stepped away from her on the polished wood floor. You mourned the loss of her warmth in those few seconds of absence. Your legs were the legs of a newborn deer, and returning to her felt like falling into a large, downy cushion, the likes of which you were so unaccustomed to.
When Gideon softly dragged your lace clad fingers to press against her very full smile, the rate of your heartbeat spiked mortifyingly. You were swept backwards in her lean arms before you could turn yourself, panicked, and as you danced pressed against Her Divine Highness, the rest of the room fell to nothingness.
"Harrowhark," she said as she leaned in, ghosting by your ear, making you shudder. "How glad I am to see your bitchy little face."
***
Eventually, the moment between you shattered. It had to.
You plummeted out of Gideon's orbit like a dead star drained of thalergy, all the way back to the table housing the impressed Fifth and the awestruck Fourth. Dimly, you registered the whisperings of the teens either side of you, who seemed almost as delighted for you as they were envious. Ortus shot you a smile across the empty plates that disintegrated the paint on his mouth even further - he had been on the wine far more liberally than you, which you figured might have to change from this very moment - and even the gaze of Abigail and Magnus seemed approving in your rose tinted world.
You beamed and took a new glass to your mouth. The world was ever so slightly tilting as you sat, swimming yet motionless, among company you could no longer categorise as strange. You were aware of your own growing inebriation in that steady and invisible way of a tree climbing through the cracks in a building’s foundation. It no longer scared you.
At some point the Sixth joined your table, and the Fifth made their rounds hand in hand, and the Duchess arrived with her cav and her cards. You could not plot these points of time on a graph if your life depended on it. The Third even wandered over midway through a violent game of snap between Jeannemary and Isaac, who were both cackling breathlessly, too unfocussed to focus on winning.
The sprightly priest from earlier in the day took centre stage as evening waned into night with sincere thanks to you all for your commitment to the event. After two spoonfuls of rice and a measly smattering of uncooked leaves and several well filled glasses of blood wine, you were just lucid enough to notice the Third twins had regrouped somewhere in the corner, yet not sober enough to lipread the words they spoke in a conniving manner. Coronabeth flaunted a goodbye wave at you when she noticed your attention; thankfully, Camilla standing behind you caught it instead.
You received a pat on the shoulder from Hect as you all retired to your respective rooms a deep breath of time later. Sextus even caught your elbow with a gentle grip and murmured "nice work", which left you overwhelmed by one more newfound emotion. You were getting good at recognising them now.
"Time for bed?" Hect, saint in disguise as a regular woman, linked an arm with you and her necromancer each. You felt one of the knives you knew she kept in her belt press into your side as you leaned the entirety of your admittedly negligible weight into her. She, at least, seemed to have a smidge more tolerance to the alcohol that was besting you.
You and Ortus were escorted to your very bedroom doors, but from there Camilla allowed you privacy, insisting she must get back to her own quarters. She pulled an object from the loop of her belt and when she opened her hand to wave farewell to you, in it you saw the metal wink of a key.
You were so unused to a dignity as great as privacy; you rejoiced in having a space that was yours alone. When she left the corridor she did not head for her own rooms, and you found such a fact both curious and hilarious for reasons currently unknown to you.
Readying yourself for bed was a sobering task, but a task you relished in the luxuries of the First. You had left your curtains open to the night and moonlight now spilled into the room, like the water you could hear lapping below. You flirted with the notion of leaving open the window if only for the soothing sound, but feared the wildlife endemic to the First House. One particularly gigantic dragonfly had assaulted you upon arrival, and you did not want a nocturnal repeat of this fear.
You stepped up onto your big plush bed to grab the latch of the window; in a grotesque parody of your preparation for the evening, you found yourself gazing right into a pair of cautious golden eyes.
This time, you hesitated not.
***
You stuck the landing with the help of three cleverly placed constructs to cushion your fall. You didn't wait for Gideon's witty remark, but took one of her hands in both of yours. A little bit drunk still, half mad from desire, you pulled her back to circle you on the path. You danced faster without a thousand eyes to critique your form.
"Slow down," she laughed. The rest of her sentence was lost to the wind as you spun, but it pleased you greatly to catch the hitch in her voice. "You're giving me whiplash here, Nonagesimus." She didn't remove her hand; just rearranged it so yours sat on her shoulders as she lightly held your waist.
You understood you probably should have stopped letting adrenaline rule you, but the alcohol was now worn off, and something structurally indistinguishable from elation bubbled to the surface to claim its place. You were surprised to find you actually quite enjoyed the feeling as you fell. From devastating heights. For divine women so far out of your league they were stellar specks above you.
"Whatever for?" you asked, perhaps a touch too guarded. You slowed your steps only because she requested it, and because her laughter chimed bright as the night was dark. You felt in this moment that you might do anything for her, if she would only ask, and still you retracted.
“These mixed messages, for starters. I mean, you rushed out of that library today faster than a cat on a hot tin roof when you heard- when Abigail explained." She looked down at you then, and you caught a flicker of uncertainty in transit across her face. Was she nervous? Your own face you knew to be impassive, as you had always schooled it in reaction to bad news. You pulled yourself away from her to collect your thoughts away from her warmth. Deflated, she concluded, "uh. Y'know. What we have to do."
"Does it displease you, Divine Daughter? To carry out a false dalliance with a daughter of the Ninth House?"
"Fuck, don't call me that - I hate him. I hate him, Harrow, and me and you, we're equals here. There shouldn’t be a Ninth House. Or an Eighth, or a Seventh, or any of them - he’s a coloniser, and a shit one at that. None of us should be here, but we are, a cosmic spill he didn't even attempt to clean up. I’m going to fix his mess."
She sat with you on the ground, bright eyed from her outburst. Under the starry blanket of the First, you beheld Gideon relax in degrees. The weight of responsibility was a heavy one, and you knew it intimately. A long beat passed before Gideon opened her mouth again. You would have been content to recline in silence, even if you knew what words of comfort would benefit her.
“Maybe you’re just all action and no talk, Reverend Daughter?” There was a great glint of humour in her white smile.
In a distant alcove of your mind, you imagined your fingers tracing invisible lines on her arm. She was well defined, sculpted and strong, unlike any necromancer you were familiar with. Quashing the thought violently, you fretted two fingers around your left wrist, then laced your hands together over the brocade of your skirt.
“Similarly, I must insist you drop such a title.”
“Apologies, my bone witch.”
"There must be a plethora of suitors vying for your royal hand... " Coronabeth's shiny smile flashed pettily to mind. Begrudgingly, you could recognise her beauty for what it was; you couldn’t consider her a worthier wife.
"Many a dickhead, you mean. I hate dancing," Gideon's easy smile was firmly back in place. "This is the first ball I've ever attended in my honour. As it turns out, skeletons make great dance partners."
"I wouldn't know; the Ninth is entirely too geriatric for balls." (Gideon snickered at your choice of words.) "We're more inclined to celebrate in the chapel."
You were almost ashamed to admit this, as though it were some great failing of Drearburh. In truth, it was due to your existence that no youthful generation of the Ninth survived long enough to attend a dance. This seemed to you a burden you would always carry.
"Why are we skirting around this?" She had become softer; your mouth shrivelled to reply. The gold band around her upper arm caught the moonlight and your hands smarted to make contact with the expanse of her skin. You wished language could aid you; she seemed a black hole and a burning sun.
“Around what, Gideon?” you said in equal quietude. Fear made you condescending. It wasn’t just that she was gorgeous; it was that perceiving the entirety of her seemed an impossible task. A two dimensional photograph of a three dimensional space.
“This? Us? How miserable you’re going to be. I’m not asking you to love me, Harrow, or even like me that much. It’s not going to be easy to convince people we’re compatible, if we can at all. I mean, what’s our game plan here?”
As you suspected, your human infatuation was merely child’s play to her.
“You should take every pleasure you can from our current divestment while you can, Divine Daughter. You may rip me to shreds if it pleases you. I live to serve the Ninth, and once the Ninth is whole again, you will see no more of me. My duty will be consummated and our transaction complete.”
You knew humanity must seem so trivial to those beyond it. It still hurt to hear of your transience used so crudely as kindling for Gideon’s amusement. You brought yourself to the proud stand of a generation’s last hope, and fled from her like a lamb from her slaughterer to cry yourself to sleep.