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When the new lyctors arrived at the mithraeum, Augustine ended up mentoring the blonde one because he was a sensible man, at least relatively speaking (when one lives side by side with the likes of Gideon and John Fucking Gaius, it is not hard to be the sensible one). Mercymorn, for all her rationality and brilliance was—at the end of the day—always a sucker for a nun. Augustine had taken one look at the pale, emaciated, and hallucinatory nunlet and didn’t even need to see the absolute thanergetic fuckery surrounding her to decide that nope, he would not be dealing with that disaster any more than absolutely necessary. Instead, he turned to the budding psychopath by her bedside who had actually managed to figure out the lyctoral process in a matter of a few weeks.
The two infant lyctors reminded Augustine of baby turkey vultures: the blonde in attitude and the nun in looks. Augustine found he was content to provide his chick with the scraps of pre-digested raw flesh she desired in the form of theorems and life advice for the newly immortal and nigh all-powerful (and also some raw flesh—really, the girl was nuts for the stuff- the things she could do with synovial tissue must have really raised Cytherea’s eyebrows). He just forgot about the part where the chicks sometimes bite your fingers off.
All this is to say that when offered the choice of being swallowed by a stoma and not being swallowed by a stoma, well, Augustine is a sensible man.
Compromising with John was never his idea of a good time, but he was always the affable one: the one who makes the devil’s bargain for the sake of the greater good. Augustine is not sure what, exactly, the greater good is in this case, beyond, of course, his continued existence. So he swore fealty and prepared to go on as before, now with an increased awareness of the chick’s beak at the very least.
But John now knew he had a kid, and of all the outcomes he and Joy had planned for should John become aware of its existence, neither of them had predicted just how parental he would be. Naturally, God’s parental instincts manifested in wanting to raise his daughter’s extremely dead body and rip whatever remained of her soul from wherever it was—presumably still powering Harrowhark’s body—and putting it more or less back where he wanted it.
So here he now stood, on metaphorical thin ice and literal thick ice in the deep freeze where John apparently had the cohort stash potentially useful corpses which—jesus christ. Sometimes it just hits a man exactly where his life choices have taken him and sometimes that place is your best friend/worst enemy’s secret corpse stash to reanimate his daughter and make her the heir to his crumbling empire in perhaps the universe’s worst ever attempt at making up for being an absent father. Augustine had long ago realized that if he thought about stuff like this for too long, he’d lose it, so he didn’t dwell.
“The soul hasn’t been in the River long, and certainly hasn’t crossed it, so it shouldn’t be too hard to pick up,” God said, pulling up a folding chair to the side of the gray plex coffin containing the body of Gideon Nav. “What I’m doing is essentially just dipping my hands into the River to just, y’know, scoop it out, and put it in here,” he explained, gesturing with two hands in a scoop, as one would cup their hands to bring water to wash their face. His chick was watching attentively, mostly on John’s explanation (though it was well established that only John could do this particular trick) but with her gaze darting almost compulsively to the face of the person in the coffin. Briefly, Augustine thought that perhaps she was shocked or disgusted by the body, but of course that wasn’t it. She was a lyctor: seeing the dead and mutilated bodies of your friends and loved ones (and then mutilating them some more) came with the territory. The combination of longing and disgust on her face must have some other source that Augustine did not yet understand, and it was this that he made careful note of, rather than John’s enthusiastic explanation of resurrection to Ianthe, as if she was a particularly driven undergrad who had the misfortune of ending up in his lab.
In the past few days, the dynamic had shifted like this: his chick distanced herself from him, following John around instead, glad to be whatever he expected her to be, whether that was the role of a student or psychopomp. Had they been on good terms, Augustine may have deigned to point out to John that Ianthe was no fresh young coed ready to be impressed by his academic acuity or bold visions, and that the burning in her eyes was the light not of devotion, but of some machination that Augustine was starting to realize he may not fully understand. You know what they say, when you live in a spaceship-mausoleum lightyears away from the action, you do tend to get slightly out of touch with the day-to-day politics of said action, or something like that.
Augustine lit a cigarette and watched from a slight distance as God reached into the coffin and pulled up a thread of the River, looking almost benign (or as benign as it could) in his hands, then stood, seeming to pour it over the head of the dead girl in the box.
Augustine had only ever observed this process when it occurred en masse: God resurrecting the masses when this all began, or to repopulate a house or what have you. Now that he was looking closely, he was almost surprised to see that the body didn’t look any different: still extremely, noticeably dead. John did not look disturbed, and indeed, Augustine could feel the thanergy picking up in her body. What was absent was the thalergy: no marrow cells dividing, no lymphocytes wiggling around, no peristalsis. Still a corpse, but the soul was here.
The body opened her eyes, and for a moment, Augustine was terrified, as Alecto’s gaze pinned him to the spot, wide and upset.
God said, “Hello, daughter, we have brought you back from the River to your body.”
She looked at God—and he was God then, not John: all self-assurance and inhuman capability, the eclipse of his eyes shining with horrifying love as he stared at what was left of his child and ultimate demise—and then she looked away.
The face around Alecto’s eyes scrunched up in a way Alecto’s face would never dare to do, and turned away from God and focused on his chick. Gideon Nav’s eyes then squinted as if in thought, and a small smirk took up residence on a face that Augustine was trying very hard not to compare to John’s.
She spoke: “Hey, did you know that Ianthe is just an anagram for Hentai?”
And suddenly the emperor of the nine houses, the man who became God and the god who became man was choking on his own saliva and falling backwards into the standard cohort-issue folding chair he had chosen for his make-shift throne as he performed a miracle and wheezed softly “hentai?” as he experienced what may have been his most abrupt comedown ever from his divine omnipotence state of mind.
Augustine frankly didn’t know what he’d expected. “Well, I suppose that eliminates the need for a paternity test, hmm?” he said softly.
John wheezed again, but the body in the coffin heaved itself up to face Ianthe, whose expression had shifted from the reluctant longing and disgust of before to disgust and exasperation.
“No wonder Harry insisted on a vow of silence, you absolute philistine,” she snipped, and may have continued had the body not cut her off.
“No you’re right, I shouldn’t compare an unfuckable gristlemistress such as yourself to some of the universe’s most out-there porn, its disrespectful to the porn,” the body stated, grinning now. John’s kid had such a thick niner accent and Augustine didn’t know why he hadn’t expected that.
Ianthe look liked she had sucked on a lemon a good bit sourer than her usual.
God stood to the side of this conversation, eyes wide and squeaked, “How do you even know what hentai is?”
Ianthe, still trying to prove herself a loyal follower of the Emperor may have sought to do damage control at this point, but the dead girl now lounging in the coffin cut in too soon:
“Titty mags, Daddy-o. What else do you think there is to do in the ninth?”
While Ianthe rolled her eyes so far back that Augustine though she must have used some form of necromantic ability to manipulate her eye sockets that way, Augustine realized that maybe this doomsday device that they had concocted might just kill the Emperor without having to set foot anywhere near the locked tomb.