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In the ninth-thousand, nine-hundred, ninety-first year of the empire of the reborn, an announcement was sent to all nine houses. To the Ninth House, the House of the Sewn Tongue, the Anchorite's House, the House of Heretical Secrets, arrived this, written upon the finest organic material the tomb had never beheld before in lingering memory or crumbling record, golden glowing upon matte black void:
ADDRESSING THE HOUSE OF THE NINTH, ITS REVERED LADY PELLEAMENA HIGHT NOVENARIUS AND ITS REVEREND LORD PRIAM HIGHT NONIUSVIANUS:
Salutations to the House of the Ninth, and blessings upon its tombs, its peaceful dread, and its manifold mysteries.
His Celestial Kindliness, the First Reborn, begs this house to rejoice! For its love for the Creator, as established in the bond of tenderness made on the day of the Resurrection, and maintained in devout fervor in heart and soul by the house of silence, the house of the tomb eternally locked: rejoice!
Let joy ring throughout the empire for the daughter of our blessed lord, the Necrolord Highest, King of Nine Reneweals, Eternal Emperor! Let all of the empire of the reborn know that Her Divine Highness, Blessed Daughter of the King Undying himself, Kiriona Gaia, Heiress to the Ransomer of Death has been anointed.
It is further the will of our lord eternal, the King Everlasting, the Necromancer Prime, that the heirs and their sworn cavaliers of all Nine Houses be entreated to the site of the holy beginning. The Creator, the Resurrector, the Gentle Emperor humbly asks for the first fruits of your household Harrowhark Nonagesimus and Ortus Nigenad. For nine years from this message, once a year, to pilgrimage to the site of the blessed event, to attend the Divine Daughter's Renewal of the Rites of Rebirth. For nine years, culminating in the myriadic year of the glorious rebirth which rang through the Houses. Let the year of the myriad, the ten-thousandth testament of the foundational miracle of our Lord God, be a year of manifold blessings.
For in need now are the Emperor's Hands, the blessed and beloved of the King Undying, the faithful and the everlasting! The Emperor calls now for postulants to the position of Lyctor, heirs to the eight stalwarts who have served these ten thousand years: as many of them now lie waiting for the rivers to rise on the day they wake to their King, those lonely Guard remaining petition for their numbers to be renewed and their Lord above Lords to find eight new liegemen. The lonely Guard have sworn their oaths and upon the myriad, the tenthfold thousandth year of the Glorious Resurrection, request that the houses they have founded send their finest, to provide another generation for the Divine Daughter. As she is heir to the Gentle Emperor, his Celestial Kindilnesss, the Saints too beg for heirs of their own, from their own houses, to renew their legacies into a dawning age.
To this end, we beg the first of your House and their cavalier to kneel in glory and attend the finest study, in the company of Her Divine Highness, the Blessed Born, heiress to the Vindicator of Death. For nine years, an annual pilgrimage, then to ascend together upon the tenth. To this end, we beg the first of your House and their cavalier to aspire to that of being the Divine Daughter's bones and joints, her fists and gestures...
Eight we hope will meditate and ascend in glory in the temple of the First House, eight new Lyctors joined with their cavaliers; and if the Necrolord's Blessed Born Daughter blesses but does not take, they shall return home in full honor, with trump and timbrel.
There is no dutiful gift so perfect, nor so lovely in the eyes of the Kindly Prince, than to attend and ascend with the Divine Daughter. May the myriadic year be a moment of ten-fold thousand blessings upon the ten-fold thousand years of the Empire!
The Ninth House had built foundations into the cold, black depths. The news of the letter, a missive from the King Undying himself, swirled in whispers in the house of silence. The news stirred the dust from pilgrims and from tombs. The news of the contents did not.
Harrowhark knew this meant that her mother--and her father, but primarily her mother--was keeping the information secret. Harrowhark thus knew she would have to be extraordinarily crafty to uncover it.
The primary strategy failed.
The secondary strategy failed.
The tertiary strategy failed.
What will be referred to as the quaternary strategy failed.
The quinary strategy failed.
The senary strategy's attempt to improve upon the results of the primary strategy failed.
The septenary strategy failed.
The octonary strategy was in progress.
Before Harrowhark could execute her octonary strategy, however, a change occurred in her carefully scheduled life.
Her mother, better known as the Revered Lady Pelleamena Hight Novenarius, intended to make an announcement at muster. The church and been packed, for the standards of the Ninth House, with an entire generation pruned to a pair of children marked for necromancer and cavalier; to the halves of sword and shield. There were penitents in every row, filling in the church as if there were not two hundred bodies already in their tombs with souls in the river--two hundred breathing bodies less than there should be. The muster could not disguise the spaces living bodies should occupy. Harrowhark could never forget their absence, as it weighed the air of the tomb as if their bone had replaced it, each breath a fight against the drag downward of so many lives spent for hers to be a necromancer's path. To tilt the scales for her to have the aptitude, there was a price paid in death. There were no other children in all of the Ninth House. She was a generation unto itself, a doom delayed by a single lifetime. Ortus did not count. He was a floundering oaf, and far older than her besides. Yet, as the only resident of the Ninth House even remotely within decades of her age, he was her cavalier. That was how nepotism and inheritance worked. He had been carefully preserved for that very role, unsuited for it as he was.
The Revered Lady intoned, "The noble House of the Ninth has called you here today because we have been given a gift of enormous import. Our sacred Emperor--The Necrolord Prime, the King of the Nine Renewals, our Resurrector, has sent joyous tidings to our house. The Divine Daughter, Kiriona Gaia, Heiress to the Ransomer of Death has been anointed! Our Lord Undying seeks a new generation of Sainted Lyctors to--"
The silence of the House of the Sewn Tongue shattered. Harrow, seated before her mother in the front row, as befitting her role as the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, blinked as her worldview shifted around her. Even lyctorhood would not pay the debt of her birth, but it would be something.