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SOME TIME DIRECTLY AFTER THE EMPEROR’S MURDER, BUT DEFINITELY BEFORE THE EPILOGUE
Harrow woke to the faint sound of rap music blaring in the distance. She lay on the floor of her room in the Mithraeum and knew that she was dead, though she did not know where that death was, nor where anyone else’s death was currently laying. She knew the end had come and gone, and that another end was barreling towards her, or she towards it. She was alone and she had failed and then--
“Rise and shine, princess.”
And then the spike that had taken Gideon from her 1,000 years ago burst up from out of her chest and she did not scream.
“Fucked up a perfectly good necromancer, is what you did. Look at her.”
“I had nothing to do with this. If I did, then she did a lot more work than I thought.”
Ianthe stood over the dead body of Harrow and slapped that pointed little face with one golden palm.
“Can you two get a room.”
“This is my room.”
“Excuse me?”
“You could join us, I guess.”
“No thanks. Unlike you, I am not a tresbian.”
Harrow’s body was still soaking wet from the River. Was still covered in filth and body oil and bits of soup and a couple globs of the Saint of Joy. God was alive, somewhere, sometime, and Harrow was deader than a fucking doornail.
“God. This is so fucking stupid.” Ianthe curled her golden fingers into a fist and fractured Harrow’s zygomatic bone. “Hey, Harry. This b(i/u)tch might live in your head rent free, but I’m not fucking doing it.”
“How did you do that?””
“What?”
“How did you get the parentheses to do that.”
“Shut up, Nav.”
You woke up in your bed in the Mithraeum and I had never been so fucking relieved. Which is saying something, because of how often lately I’m in this situation of waiting for you to wake the fuck up again. You pushed your hand down into the plush comforter and watched as your hand was almost consumed. You looked to the left and saw me.
“Take 69.”
Your eyes widened, fear and hope.“What?”
“This is the sixty-ninth time you’ve done this.”
“Gideon?”
“Actually, I have no idea how many times it’s been, but I’ve been saying it every time, just in case.”
“ Gideon? ”
You continued to stare at me. You stared and stared and visibly fought the tears coming to your eyes. Your hand, the one swallowed by the comforter, balled into a fist and you lost it. Full on fucking lost it. You shook so violently I thought you were seizing again. I did this weird half-jerk where I tried to put an arm around you but stopped because I wasn’t even sure I was corporeal, then said fuck it, like it mattered if I was or not, and just tried to hold you together, physically if not mentally or emotionally.
You just kept sobbing, big ugly tears and sometimes you had face paint on and sometimes I didn’t and sometimes Ianthe was standing over us with her arms crossed making this sourpuss face and sometimes the rap music still blared in the background but Dad, you cried through fucking all of it to the point that I thought you were the source of the River. We just kept sitting there forever and never, and you just kept fucking crying! I couldn’t handle it.
“Harrow. Harrow stop please, your crazy is spreading everywhere and it sucks.”
You kept sobbing.
“It sucks Harrow!”
Ianthe phased into existence and said, “No don’t do that. She likes being yelled at.” Phased out of existence before I could tell her to shove her golden thumb up her ass.
You raised a hand to my black tank top and gripped, your knuckles going white with the force.
“Gideon…” You said in the smallest voice imaginable. You were like a frail little baby bird who had been grand slammed with a bat into space.
“I’m here,” I said, and then added, “I think.”
You looked up to me with my big stupid eyes. My big golden hellacious Dad eyes. No, they were mine, fuck this. But you could borrow them. That’s fine.
“Gideon... What did I do?”
“I think we’re both dead.” I said taking a wild guess based on the fact that I remembered watching Dad explode and then come back and then some for serious daytime tv drama shit happen and some good old-fashioned murder and then nearly drowning and then whatever the fuck else.
You looked away from me off into the distance. There was a mirror in your room and I wasn’t in it which was weird and I didn’t like it and then somehow just by willing it, my reflection appeared. But anyway you kept on looking and I could see the needle that controlled your personality flip from MEGA DEPRESSION back to SCHEMING and felt a little better.
You let go of my shirt and stood up. I held out a hand to the small of your back but didn't touch you. You managed on your own.
You walked around, counting your steps. Pulled a few books from a shelf and opened them but didn’t really read them. You looked a lot more confused and then turned and stared at me some more.
“Sextus…” you said and then more loudly said, “Sextus?”
“I haven’t seen Sexpal here, that I can remember at least, which I guess counts for fucking nothing.”
“Dulcinea!”
“Haven’t seen her either.”
Your voice weakened and then you said, “Pent?”
I didn’t answer but let you wander around some more and then once you started yelling for Ortus and fucking Matthias Nonius I knew something had shaken loose in your brain and fallen out of your nose and gently guided you back to your bed. You refused to lay down but you did sit and you gripped my hand and looked up to me again.
“Gideon… are we in my head?”
“I’m the pretty one not the smart one.”
You nodded like you agreed but like how crazy people accept the answer that planets are all made of cheese.
“I’m not sure. The only other person I’ve seen so far is Ianthe. It seems like we’re on the Mithraeum still, but definitely some fuck shit has been happening. I don’t think Ianthe has mastered becoming incorporeal and corporeal at will so like, I’m putting a vote in for us being in the capital city of your brain, Crazytown.”
For a moment your face pinched into the memorable Harrow of my youth. You looked disgusted, but then I frowned because you were probably disgusted with yourself. I squeezed your hand and whether you realized it or not, you leaned your head against me.
“I need to talk to Ianthe,” you said after another session of your private scheming. I rolled my eyes. “And I need to know how far I can walk without reality breaking down.”
As if summoned, Ianthe walked briskly into the room. She walked, not appeared, pushing the door open and looking like hell. Physics and laws of necromancy seemed to apply again. For now.
Ianthe walked directly up to you and I jumped out of the way when she parked it right next to you where I had been.
“I can’t fucking take him anymore so I really hope you’ve gotten your shit together enough to get your head back in the game.”
You stared up at her, like you had at me. I mean it’s fine, you stared at me longer, but she knew from that vacant expression you were still on vacation in Crazytown. She clapped her hands in between her words as she said, “Harrow. Get. Your. Shit. Together.”
“Whatever bullshit you have planned can wait, Tridentarius,” I said, “we had a Big Day yesterwhenever, and nobody wants to deal with it right now.”
She ignored me completely and said, “Harry. Look. Harrow. This is a pivotal moment for us. For us. God is fucked. I’m on my last fucking nerve. I need you. Okay? I need you.”
Oh I went off on her. “Who fucking gives a shit what you need! You saw my dead-beat dead-dad about to go to his final fucking destination and you pulled him back into the ring? The ref called three. He was fucking down for the count and you come in with the steel chair? Hello? Are you fucking listening to me?”
She fucking wasn’t. I threw a right hook at her and it sailed right through her face and out the other side. “Dad, damn it!”
“Gideon, calm down,” you said. Ianthe turned her head sharply, as if looking for me. As if I wasn’t standing right in front of her.
Ianthe put a hand on your shoulder while I continued to punch through her stupid blond head. “Are you still seeing Gideon, Harrow?”
“We’re not fucking dating but I don’t know what the hell else you’d call it!” I screamed and realized I was probably halfway to Crazytown myself.
“She’s… she’s right there. Ianthe what did I do?”
“You’re hallucinating. You’re severely fucked up and nobody can blame you for that. Hell, I’m impressed you’re still this together right now, considering your record, but listen. We’ve got a good lead on them but the Blood of Eden is after us. We won’t make it to Dominicus without you. You need to focus.”
“What?”
You looked around and I saw it too. Your room in the Mithraeum began to melt like hot bone gunge. All the little decorative bone bits and metal walls receded away, and though the walls were still bone and steel, still warded with blood, but they were Ianthe’s wards, not yours. And slap dash. You looked to the right, and instead of your dresser across the way there was solid wall. You looked left again and Ianthe and I were there, barely fitting into the small space of the shuttle’s med bay cabin.
“Good. You’re coming out of it. Good, don’t go back into your head Harrow. Let Gideon deal with that shit. I know it might feel good to be able to see her, but it’s not what she’s there for. You made a good, insane effort to find the loophole, but it failed okay? The best way to help her is to stay alive, and to do that, you need to come help me help God help himself.”
“Just… just give me a minute. I’ll be there. Go on.”
She left reluctantly but she left. You didn’t look at me. It felt weird to share the hallucination, to know what your crazy felt like but to not be smart enough to make sense of it like you did. You did, right? You were crazy but you were that cliche stereotype crazy where you always had a plan and it all made sense in the end. That was you, right?
“Harrow… are we in your head or not. Is this shuttle the hallucination or what? Are we dead?”
You sighed and stared up at the ceiling. I watched your skin ripple against your trachea as you spoke. “I wish I knew, Gideon. I’m just glad I got to see you one more time.”
Shit. You were giving up. No no, see if you gave up--No. Nah. Nope!
“Harrow. You need to get your shit together but for a completely unrelated reason to whatever the fuck Ianthe was talking about.”
You were wearing Ianthe’s clothes I realized, which was fucking awful. But you were clean and warm and mostly in one piece and my beautiful fucking sword was still laid in bed with you. Like a teddy bear given to terminally ill kids.
“Gideon…” You said my name slowly and I felt the strange, physical sensation like I was falling through the floor with the tilt of your head as it lulled to the side. “What are we doing this for anymore? I thought it was for the Ninth. It was. It is. But what does it matter now? I thought I was going to have the power to protect them. I am a Lyctor and I can’t even get out of bed anymore.”
“Listen. Listen, you need to learn something really fucking fast here Harrow,” I said, having absolutely no idea where I was going with this. “I’m fucking dead and in your head and apparently a hallucination but guess what? I’m still fighting. I kept fighting for you every microsecond in that fucking circus in space while extremely horny, extremely old people fucked so severely they almost destroyed the universe. We got through it. You need to learn how to put all your misery into sick jokes and dumb memes like me because I’m still here! I’m still here for you .” I choked but I wasn’t sobbing. Something flipped in my head and all I could see was my body falling to my death. It was making me insane. How could I do that to me? How could I-- “You’re literally everything to me and how fucking dare you check out on me? How fucking dare you let this happen and oh, God. Harrow, what the fuck? Why did you do that?”
Something snapped in you (which was probably me) and you came down onto the floor where I was huddled, and I tried to think of how stupid you must look in Sanityworld where you’re hallucinating me and hugging the air on the floor. Did you actually do it? Were you just lying comatose imagining it or were you actually on the ground, play-acting it all out? Were Ianthe and God even real? Was this shuttle real? What the fuck is happening? Oh, I can’t fucking do this, holy shit.
“Damn Harrow, you live like this?” I said, or thought I said because I was hyperventilating. Your usual scary resolve was back, and you were making every effort to calmly bring me down. “Harrow, I’m not even real. You’re just hallucinating me. I think. Fuck, I think Ianthe is right.”
You helped me up into the cot and pressed a cold, clammy hand to my head. I had a realization. “Wait. Why was Ianthe able to hear me sometimes? In the past? In the… in the other hallucinations? Or something?”
“She could hear you because she was the hallucination, those times.”
You waited for me to process and then, despite my extreme annoyance that some of my choicest jokes were wasted on Hallucianthe, I started to see how you did it.
“Oh fuck. Okay so, wait if you can do that--”
“Hush, Gideon. I’m still sorting it out but you’ll know when you need to. Hush.” I did, but only because you took my hand in yours and sat beside me and did not go to help Ianthe or Dad.
You woke back on the Ninth, in your squalid little room where you lifted weights and cursed my name under your breath in your youth. I chose home this time. I found it easier to hold onto you when I entered your memories, and not the other way around. It was a calculated risk, but man, I am good at math.
I hadn’t completely ascertained the logic to the neurogrid I had laid out, somehow, sometime in the past, but I felt good enough about it now to take control. You were still there, in my head, watching me. I realized that this did not always mean you understood what you were seeing, or when it was, or where. You saw what I felt. You were the series of synaptic impulses that my brain ordered to keep me alive. You were my breath and my heart pumping blood through my body. So really, you were just continuing the same job you had done previously. It was only that now, I was aware of it.
I watched, as I imagined you watched when it was reversed, you get out of your bed and look around. You realized it was not reality, or at least, it was not the corporeal space in which our body currently occupied. Something could be two things, as I was learning.
You picked up your weights and started doing reps from pure muscle memory. You got to twenty and then threw them down, put your hands on your hips, and looked around like someone was playing a bad joke on you. I tried it, materializing into your consciousness, and then you saw me standing before you. Then the rap music started playing again and it pulled us both out of it.
We walked down the hall towards where my parents hung themselves and suddenly it materialized into the shape of a shuttle’s mess door. It was bigger than the shuttle we had traveled to the Mithraeum in, and when the door opened, we found God.
He was lying on the ground of the shuttle, his legs and one arm spread out like you used to do in the piles of bone meal I made as a child, making Saints. Then we realized he was chained like that, held by wards and actual, literal chains.
The rap music was louder now, the source of it a console covered in biscuit wrappers and other shitty looking pre-packaged meals. With his free hand he held an empty wine glass. He was crying and singing along to a song we had never heard before:
Lamborghini Mercy
Your chick, she so thirsty
He began to sob and mumble Mercymorn’s and Augustine’s names and clinked the empty wine glass against the console and then the wine glass filled as if by magic.
“Oh, shit is supremely fucked all around, I see,” you said only to me.
Ianthe appeared out of a side room dragging a bag that was seeping blood. We did not ask and she did not explain. Instead she walked over to me and held my face between her hands and stared into my eyes. You were upset, ready to bust forward and take control, but I was confident. I had learned the trick and she wouldn’t see you unless I wanted her to.
“Thank fuck,” Ianthe said as she released me. She pointed to Our Father, who art on the Floor, and said, “he’s been swinging violently between mania and depression. I don’t know what the fuck to do with him, so I got him drunk and drugged him. Wasn’t willing to join the Fucked God Club but I did learn a few things from our predecessors.”
“Girls… girls,” God said in a pleading, almost normal voice. We looked down and he said, “I’m drunk and high at the same time, drinking champagne on the airplane.”
“I don’t know how he’s making wine, to be completely honest with you,” Ianthe said.
I heard you laugh.
“What’s the plan,” I said calmly. I could feel you behind me, hands on my shoulders, reiterating my words in a goofier tone.
“The plan is to get back to Third House, lay low until I can assess loyalties, and fucking pray Second House can get in position fast enough. I’ve already sent out all the emergency codes.”
“That’s a shitty idea. If we’re being followed, you need to protect your people. So do I. We need to meet in neutral space.”
You tuned out then, either because you were sick of Ianthe, or because you knew you weren’t needed for this part. It was interesting, how I could feel you now, how you tucked away behind my ear on the lower right. How I could feel your interest stretch back into my frontal cortex once the plan was settled and I was alone again, in the tiny but private quarter of the shuttle that Ianthe had allotted for me. You were starting to understand, as you walked through the paths in my mind, how you found it easier and easier to exist.
We stayed up that night, listening to Ianthe finally give up and join God in his drinking. The music kept blaring, and as you materialized before me all of your own volition, you smiled and looked at your hands as if you had created them yourself. You had.
“But will other people be able to see me? Won’t you have to fuck with them?”
“It depends on many factors,” I said and couldn’t help but smile. You were here and I had done it. Finally. But that was, of course, not the end of this story.
“Once I am in the Tomb, I’ll have the final piece. From there, it will be a matter of will. And there will be nothing he can do. He’ll have to send me in to get it done.”
“Harrow…”
“Once it’s done… I think I can bring you back. I think I can bring a lot of people back.”
“Harrow isn’t that the same thing… I mean. Isn’t that why the Tomb exists?”
“No, I did it better than God. No errors this time.”
From the down the hall and two closed doors, we heard Ianthe and God scream drunken lyrics:
No one man should have all that power!
You looked at me and I felt bad. I knew what you were thinking, because your thoughts were in my head. I had partitioned you, gave you privacy. You could have hidden it from me, if you wished. But you didn’t. I sucked my tongue against my teeth and put a hand on your thigh.
“We won’t make those decisions without each other. Never again.” I looked at you, hard and sincere. “ Never again.” It felt like my body was falling apart again. I was so afraid. Not to die or to lose you again. I had made sure both of those outcomes were now impossible. But if you did not understand… if I had to do it without you, well. Then I truly would be Godlike.
“I didn’t…” you started but we kept thinking together, all of our regrets swimming in my brain and swirling like soup. “I know,” we said, and then you pulled back into the partition so we could just speak normally.
“It’s just that I was doing what I thought was best for you,” you said. You materialized your glasses onto your face to hide your expression and I smiled because I don’t think you realized you did it. “I saw an option and I took it. It meant I could finally do something. It meant you could live. I was fulfilling that destiny shit, or I thought I was.”
“I know,” I said.
“But that was the wrong choice, Harrow.”
“Only because your life was mine to do as I pleased with it. I was very Not Pleased with that.” I tried to do that tone I had done, as a child. That strangely adult one that made me feel powerful. That made me feel like a Reverend Mother and not a little scrawny girl in black grease paint. So of course you laughed. It was nice to hear, even if it was my brain only remembering how you used to do it. It was a victory that I had it to remember. That I had heard it at all.
“All I’m saying is that, I’m happy with you how I am now. I don’t want you making any more choices you’d regret just to… just for me and--” Your face got serious and you took off the glasses. “Harrow listen… I know I’m not like, alive now but I still...” I let you trail off, I really didn’t know where you were going with this until you leaned forward, until your lips were on mine. I had to imagine it, of course. You had never kissed me like that, in life. But I had imagined it so many times, it was easy to mimic the sensation. Something past due finally given.
“Just remember that, okay. When you’re God 2.0 in the Tomb. Just remember that I’ll be with you even if you don’t bring me back. Okay?”
I started crying then, but it was a gentle cry. A welling of emotions pooled in my frontal lobe and you came up out of your little cranny and swept it into your space. You took them in and laughed and started to cry, same as me. We were one, feeling. The closest any two souls could possibly be.
Ianthe busted through our door, doubled over with one arm tucked against her stomach as she hurled what looked like blood (but was almost probably wine) onto the floor.
“Hey Tridentarius. Real or not real?” You said, voice only slightly cracking as you pulled your shit together. Her eyes got wide because she could see you. Hear you. You were sitting on my bed and she knew what you were, knew what I had done. She couldn’t believe it but she was so unbelievably drunk she wouldn’t let herself be sure.
“He’s swung back to depression, so it's no fun anymore. Thought this was the toilet. Sorry, Harry.”
Sad music kicked up behind her and she rolled her eyes in exasperation. “If I try to turn off the music, he gets so much worse. He can slip the wards, he’s just doing it to fuck with me. I think he’s trying to groom me into whatever the fuck Mercy and Augustine were.”
The two of us watched her clean up the sick, an act of contrition that surprised us. When she was done, I offered her a seat on the bed beside me, with you on my right. She sat, weary. You got up and left, and she looked relieved until you returned with a cup of water and offered it to her. She stared at the water like it shouldn’t exist. Like it was floating on its own in space. But it wasn’t, and that was the thing, wasn’t it?
“Don’t worry, Harrow won’t turn it into wine.”
She took the cup and stared down into it for a very long time until she took a sip.
“Ianthe,” I said, once I thought she had had a sufficient amount of water. She looked at me, wary but keen. I was banking on that. I was banking on her self-preservation. I did not need her loyalty; I only needed her to abandon God.
“Ianthe the First,” we said, our voice rising in strength, my eyes a perfect vertical half-and-half of black and gold. A promise and a threat. A reminder that I was no imitation. We were the real thing. “Will you be the first to serve me, my golden hand and gestures?”
Ianthe said nothing. She held our gaze for a very long time. She was doing the math, and I couldn’t blame her. Behind me, you rested your chin on my shoulder, and removed your glasses slowly, your half-black, half-gold eyes staring Ianthe down with that trademark smirk of ours.