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Gideon the First, Saint of Duty.
To be a Lyctor was to be ascribed titles, independent of will.
Gideon Twain was “Gideon Pyrrha” by Cytherea’s fancy, “Gideon the First” by Lyctoral mandate, and “Saint of Duty” by John’s request. The whole system was a mess of formalities. Whether or not one’s proclivities aligned with one’s designations was a matter of happenstance.
And yet, the other Lyctors had a funny way of embodying the exact opposite characteristics their epithets suggested, as if the very act of naming triggered an ironic reversal.
Not so for Gideon. He’d always been dutiful. So had Pyrrha—and he loved Pyrrha, that firebrand of a woman, then and now. Thus, he was doubly dutiful.
In those early days of necromantic study, he was the only scholar to fortify his body as faithfully as his cavalier. He did that for her out of humility and respect once he learned what had to be done.
His body was his first mission, and ever since, he’d thrown himself at task after task for the glory of the Necrolord.
He never returned unsuccessful.
As a young Lyctor, when the centuries still crawled like molasses, he built the Cohort from the ground up, poured his time, sweat, and blood into it. He whipped that red planet into shape and did the same for the first several generations of recruits. No soldier stood to be a weak, virtue-less link in the Emperor’s chain, not under his watch.
By year four hundred, the Mithraeum’s final bolts had been tensioned, his hand behind the wrench. He loved that vessel with all of his being, tended to it like it was his monastic charge. He cleaned the wreckage in the aftermath of lavish parties, and he pummeled asteroids to dust when they ventured too close. Without him, the ship would have fallen to decay in decades, likely by the neglect of the Saints themselves.
In his one thousand, seven hundred, seventy-fifth year as Saint of Duty, Gideon single-handedly staunched a multi-house conflict that, to no surprise, originated from Third House hedonism gone sour at the Sixth. Some nights, he dreamt of that glorious ride, Cohort ships at his back as he sent the Empire’s scholars that crucial warning: “The Triads are coming!” By his intervention alone, the Sixth House survived, and with abundance; they settled to take custody of every child born of their debauched nonsense from that day forward.
Fond, proud memories, all of them.
Alas, however, those were his youthful days. Ten thousand years had forced mundanity into the wildest of exploits, left him fatigued.
Perhaps that was all it was. Perhaps his old age was the cause of his subpar performance at this particular task. He chased and chased and chased, but she eluded him at every turn. She, equipped with unsightly, ancient weaponry, stalked at the corners of his vision with a panther’s grace and disappeared when he drew near.
He couldn’t figure out how she did it, how she slipped—literally—from his clutches. Several times, he cornered her, placed his hands around her throat, stared into her eyes, eager to watch them fade, but in each instance, he emerged on the other end of a lost stretch of time, in some foreign room or on some strange planet. He could tell by the cleanliness of his fingertips that she still lived.
Those moments repeated themselves like poetry. Over and over, he’d sink somewhere deep and struggle to resurface. He’d wade through a red-orange substance as viscous as wet concrete, and he’d reemerge at the whim of the spell, unable to free himself.
At first, Gideon had thought his enemy a hypocrite; had she ensorcelled his memory with theorems?
He’d been wrong. He learned that lesson when he tracked her to a Cohort outpost in another star system, where she hid amongst their ranks. This was in her early days as an Edenite elite; her face wasn’t yet worshipped the way it would come to be, but she donned a damn good disguise anyway. So charismatic was she that she converted a score of soldiers to her cause, and when Gideon Twain finally arrived for her head, he tore through them all just to follow her bootprints. He chased her deep into a bunker on that arid planet, and she riddled him full of pinprick bullet holes, and he saw how weak and human she really was. He asked her to her face if she had cursed him, and he knew by the vitriol in her stare that her denial was true. Compelled to respect her, he spoke her full name for the first time and asked her how she wanted to die, and—
he woke up in a pod somewhere off-world, handcuffed to the handle of an emergency door, the entire outpost reduced to a mushroom cloud on the planet’s surface.
Well-maneuvered, Commander.
He understood then that he was to blame for his own episodes. Whatever the cause, he swore himself to a new duty, to find that traitorous weakness within him and crush its windpipe. A myriad-worn veteran had no business trysting with failure.
Next time they fought had been in space, a far messier endeavor with the weaponry she’d gathered in the interim. Nuclear warheads and Herald bullets. Clever woman. No doubt she’d learned her share of tricks from her time as an infiltrator. A Cohort fleet at his heels, Gideon arrived at the scene of the coming battle, a massive Edenite station. Wake’s leadership had worked wonders on their aesthetic sensibilities, that much was true. They rained hell on one another, bomb after bomb, blood-spear after blood-spear, but he lobbed his projectiles judiciously; on principle, he wouldn’t end his most formidable foe like a coward, without looking her in the eye. Tedious as it was to retread the same ground, he smiled for the first time in centuries as he gripped that fistful of her shirt, held her up against the glass panel in the control room, and—
wet concrete, again, except it spat him out strapped to a steel door like a stretcher, hurtling through space without a haz. He saluted her in silence, the air sucked from his lungs.
It was another fine sleight of hand by that dark-eyed panther of a woman, but he did her one better; he’d come prepared, ready to observe his sticky blackout like a Sixth House scholar at a Third House banquet. He learned to swim through that thick reddish muck, learned to cut through it at an angle. No longer would he amble at the mercy of a trance. Instead, he would banish it like sand in the wind. Their next encounter would be her last waking day.
Thirsty for blood, Gideon sought the Commander’s personal spacecraft. He bubbled up through the River upon learning her whereabouts, landed himself back in the realm of Dominicus. How poetic, that their final fight might take him home. He latched himself to the outside of her vessel, let himself slam into it so she’d feel him coming, and wrenched his way through a hatch. In that air-tight oxygen chamber, he waited until she granted him entry—she was never one to refuse a fight, and oh, how his cavalier would have devoured her, if only she were there.
On the other side of those shrieking doors, his adversary appeared, red-haired and wild-eyed, cigarette between her crooked lips and submachine guns in both hands. “Say my name, lich,” she said, and he did, a final offer of dignity before he’d rend her limb from limb.
She opened fire from the hip, and he took those first few bullets with iron resolve as he stepped into her range. Fingers itching, Gideon cast aside his weapons and swatted hers to the floor. “Show me your fists,” he said, “if you’re half the woman you say you are.”
And together, they wrecked the whole damned ship. His blood pumped with a heat that he hadn’t felt in ages, and he fought her room by room. She was quick, but he was as tireless as a stag. His leathery knuckles smashed through walls and consoles, and her heavy boots kissed the side of his jaw, made him groan. He gripped her by the hair and flung her into cold metal. Elegant crimson streamed from her nose and painted those bared alabaster teeth, and Gideon grinned, a young Lyctor once more.
Finally, he had her at the limits of her stamina, her breath a series of staccato huffs as she stared up at him on her knees. What came next was predictable. With his fingers around her neck, he asked her for her final declarations, and at the very second the last word rolled off his tongue, he—
sunk into that mire, pushed down deep by the weakness within him. But he resisted. He clenched onto consciousness, knocked that trance from his mind as swiftly as he stripped the thanergy from a naked source. It happened so fast, a flawless, instantaneous parry, and yet—
when he surfaced, he was not where he’d been when he’d fallen, his shadow cast over the Commander of Eden as she breathed her final breaths. He was on the floor, instead, in a room he hadn’t seen before, eyes to the ceiling, feeling entirely spent. He’d given her a good fight, even while he was under—a true soldier indeed.
Gideon shot upright at once and tore through the pathetic rope binding that cinched his arms to his torso. He hustled to his feet and scanned the chaos of the room, shook off that blanket of lethargy, and readied his fists.
By the look of the décor, he was still on her vessel, in what passed as sleeping quarters, the bed a worn mattress on the ground.
Surely she hadn’t fled far.
But where—where—was his shirt?
The door swung open behind him and he wheeled around to find his enemy leaned against the doorframe, a freshly-lit cigarette between her fingers. “You’re finally awake. I didn’t take you for the type to pass out in the middle of—,” she said, but what was that outfit she was wearing? He’d never known her to wear such impractical clothing, anyone could run right through her with—
Gideon locked eyes with her then. Hers were wide with horror.
“You,” she seethed, and several dots connected, very, very fast.
And for the first time in his 10,000 years of necromantic existence, the Saint of Duty screamed.