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There is blood on your chin. It dribbles down from your mouth, soaks your neck and breast, pastes your shirt to your chest in great sticky swathes. Your hair is matted with it. Gristle catches in your teeth, and you pry idly at it with a broken, bloodsoaked fingernail. Your eyes – from the mirror on the wall of the Lyctor’s room, you can see your eyes. Hard to tell if they’re the same color they always were, or a shade deeper. Your eyes were always very similar.
You can hear voices outside the locked door. Showtime. You recline back on the chaise lounge, cross your legs, open your posture. Not for you, crouching guiltily over a corpse, starting at the first sight of company like an animal caught in the act. Not for you, the charade of screaming and sobbing and recrimination. You are a Saint now, and you will face your new future with dignity.
“I have killed and eaten Coronabeth Tridentarius,” you tell the Eighth, Sixth, and Ninth, and your voice does not shake. “Please don’t misunderstand. This isn’t a confession.”
--
One would think that eating your sister’s soul would actually give you something of hers, besides the now-obsolete title of Crown Princess. You don’t expect skills with the sword, of course, because Corona was patently useless at that, but would it have been too much to ask for you to gain some of her charisma? That was Corona’s real weapon, after all. That ability to flutter her eyebrows and feign fragility and bring the protectors running in droves. That sharklike knack for sensing who wanted her, and exactly what they wanted. Even when you were still too young to know who was a necromancer, it was her real power. Even back when you’d looked practically identical, it had always set her apart.
You do not have that skill. That much is obvious. The Emperor of the Nine Houses comes to visit you in your convalescece, and asks about your new arm, and you tell him winingly that it’s fine, you are ready and hungry to serve – and you can tell immediately that it’s the wrong answer. The Kindly Prince had put out a call for Lyctors who will sacrifice everything to stand at his side and defend him against the nonsense of the galaxy, but it appears that wasn’t what he actually wanted. Apparently what he actually wanted was Harrowhark, wounded and vulnerable and bereft, who knelt at his feet and begged him for her cavalier’s resurrection.
A disappointment. A pity. If you had known, you could have put on moderately convincing show. But no one had bothered to read you the instruction manual. You chastise yourself for that, in retrospect. You reverse-engineered Lyctorhood without a single helping hand. You should have known better than to expect one now.
Even God’s least favorite Lyctor is still a Lyctor, though. Even with a foreign new arm, and a severe dearth of martial prowess, you have a wealth of resources at your disposal. You meet your brilliant new eyes in the mirror, and tap a long fingernail against your teeth. “What to do now, sister?”
--
It’s less than a day before Harrowhark approaches you with a proposition. You accept, of course, as she had known you would. It costs you nothing, and offers you more than enough to catch your interest.
You had not expected her to explain anything to you. The former Reverend Daughter, now the Ninth Saint to serve the Lord Undying, has always been charmingly opaque. You don’t even bother asking the purpose of your endeavor first – you don’t know her quite well enough to know if negging is a tactic that will find purchase on her stony demeanor, but it’s always a lark to try. She will undoubtedly be more forthcoming if you don’t appear overeager.
When you finally ask, she surprises you by actually answering, earning her a few points in your book. You have always enjoyed novelty - you expect that you will need to enjoy it far more now that you are functionally immortal. She does lose several points with the utter insanity of the plan, though, the poor lovesick fool.
She loses all of them when she offers to do the same for you. To forget Coronabeth. To scrape every memory of her from your cerebellum, wring the last drops of her from your flesh, put up an inexorable wall between you and her. To let yourself live in a fantasy world, where you were an only child, where you had eaten Babs like you should have.
You should strike her down for even daring to suggest it. Your hands itch to do so – you are hard-pressed to stop yourself from throttling her where she stands, paintless face pinched and achingly sincere as she offers you what she believes to be a kindness.
“I would sooner die,” you tell her sweetly. “Honestly, Ninth, you shouldn’t have become a Lyctor at all if you’re going to be such a child about it.”
“Under ideal circumstances, I wouldn’t have,” she says. “Nor, I believe, would you.”
You regard her carefully, grateful for your height. Towering over her is a relief. She is, despite her insanity, too damn perceptive, and always has been. In a way, it’s not a surprise that of all the heirs at Canaan House, she’s the one who’s coming with you to God’s side. Even if she ends up joining you as a stunted vegetable.
“You presume too much,” you say.
“I don’t think I do,” says Harrowhark.
She will likely not even remember this conversation. You say anyway, “I had the resolve to choose, Reverend Daughter. Yes, I’d rather have used Babs, but since Cytherea had already killed him… well, it’s like they say: Idan girls make do. In a choice between ultimate power and my sister, I chose power, and I would choose power any time. I’d have been a fool to do otherwise, and I’d be twice a fool if I were to give it up now for a half-cocked chance at undoing my greatest accomplishment.”
She does not look convinced.
“I killed my sister,” you remind her. “Premeditated, in cold blood, without her consent. She begged me to stop, when she realized what was coming, and I didn’t stop, even when she was crying and getting snot everywhere. And then I ate her heart, and I don’t regret it. We are not the same, Ninth.”
She is still just watching you. Ah, well. You will have time to practice before you have this conversation again. If you ever do have this conversation again.
“Well then,” you say, and raise the instruments she’s laid out for you. “Time to absolutely fuck you up, sister.”
The endearment feels like bone dust in your mouth. You swallow it down anyway.
--
God takes you to see the bodies. You look out over the assemblage of coffins, mismatched and half-full, and try to belatedly give him the emotional show he is looking for. “Can I see her?” you ask, hesitantly. It is quite a stretch of your acting skills. You never hesitate about anything, as a rule. But you are making an effort to be more of what he wants, after your unimpressive first impression. Making up for your unlikeability through hard work is not a new song and dance for you, and relationships are all about compromise.
God is not very good at reading you. He gives you a sad little look and says, “I don’t recommend it. I’ve prevented rot, of course, but it can still be…” he makes a vague gesture. “Destabilizing. Emotionally.”
You would roll your eyes if you dared. You were already there when she died. You ate her heart. If you couldn’t handle seeing the corpse of someone dear to you, you would not be much of a Lyctor. It is, after all, the single requirement of the job description.
“We’ll bring her with us,” he says, putting a bracing hand on your shoulder. “Preserve her, as long as you want me to. Lyctor’s cavaliers get a place of honor on the Mithraeum. And maybe, in a few hundred years, when you’re ready… it can be healing, eventually. Provide some closure.”
He has done this before, clearly. Talked his Hands and Gestures through healing an unhealable wound. Amazing, then, that he’s so shit at it.
“Thank you, my Lord,” you say, with all the sincerity you can muster, and he winces and turns away.
--
Mercymorn the First is a miserable woman who is wholly unimpressed with you. You, who have been underestimated your whole life, should be used to people being unimpressed with you, but it rankles particularly now that you’ve attained the status of Lyctor. The greatest necromancer of your generation – Harrowhark hardly competes in her damaged half-Lyctoral state – and you are reduced to being insulted by a prim, prissy grapefruit-themed woman who pronounces everything with exclamation points. She calls your flesh magic juvenile, without any explanation of what could possibly be flawed; she dismisses your spirit magic as cheap tricks. Her scorn for your swordwork is unparalleled, except perhaps by your own own scorn for it. Corona had known how to look beautiful and hold a rapier. You have never been particularly skilled at the former, and the latter is increasingly not enough. But you are hard-pressed to do anything else, despite the amount of time the Saint of Joy spends nagging at you to magically unlock new skills.
You ask her, irritably, why she had even chosen you as her student if she finds you so lacking. “Like I had a choice!” she responds, twice as irritable. “Augustine snapped up the other one before I even got a bid in at the baby auction!”
This rankles even more. You are used to being passed up for Coronabeth. To be passed up for Harrow, pathetic as she is, is far more of an insult. “You must be devastated not to be mentoring her,” you agree, because dwelling on slights is below you when you have work to do. “You could teach her so many sour facial expressions.”
“Impertinent!” she snaps. “There was no good choice, was there? This is why I told him to impose an age limit.”
“I am twenty-two, honored sister,” you say blandly.
“Like I said,” she says. “An age limit. Or just not done it at all – it lost us Cytherea, and you two are a particularly piss-poor replacement!” She peers down thoughtfully at you. “Was it you, who killed her?”
“That would be the other one,” you say. No ego.
Mercymorn makes an unattractive harumphing noise. “That wretched worm. He must have known, when he chose her. That pathetic facade of fraternal sentimentality shouldn’t have fooled me for even an instant… I’m getting soft, aren’t I?”
Mercy can go off on tangents if you don’t carefully steer her back to the point. This can be useful too, but right now, there’s a particular thing you want to know. “Fraternal sentimentality?”
She looks at you balefully with someone else’s hurricane eyes. “Ask him yourself, if you must. Like I have the time to go another ten rounds about Alfred again. No thank you!”
--
It’s perhaps inevitable that you drift into Harrow’s orbit. You resent her presumption, her scheme, her lovelorn and selfish martyrdom, but the fact remains that you have no one but each other. She sees this too, and is as displeased with it as you are. Truly the only saving grace is that she does not remember your conversation about Coronabeth.
You try new stories on her instead, sharpening your skills. If you cannot excel with a sword, you can at least excel with words.
“She offered me everything if I’d stay my hand,” you muse to Harrow, one night in your shared bed. “Promised to come clean about her lack of talent – promised to make me the Crown Princess instead. As if there’s anything she could have given me that I couldn’t take myself. She was only ever anything because I let her.”
“I did not ask,” says Harrowhark, a miserable pile of black cloth crushed under the weight of Nav’s absurd sword. “And you are not particularly convincing.”
Damn, again? “Indulge me, little sister. For the sake of our continued cooperation over the centuries, at least. How can I better convince you of the sordid truth at the heart of me?”
Lightless eyes fix you. There is not a hint of gold in them. Is she happier not knowing what she lost? She seems miserable, but then again, you have a feeling that whether she was Ninth or First, Harrowhark has always been miserable.
“You are a liar and a conwoman,” says Harrowhark the First. “But also, you are far too willing to share details."
“Gideon,” you say spitefully, and enjoy watching the blood waterfall from her eyes, spoiling the paint she’d reapplied only hours earlier as she dabs at her face with confusion. “Gideon, Gideon, Gideon.” It’s your bed linens getting stained, of course, but still. It’s the little things.
---
It takes you a while to track down Augustine the First. He is avoiding you, you decide, which makes you all the more determined to seek him out. You hope that is not Corona’s influence on you, her soul polluting your with her awful little habits. She always did find nothing so irresistible as a show of disinterest. But you are not pining over Judith Deuteros. You are seeking to build a necessary relationship with your so-called older brother, with whom you will be collaborating for an eternity. It’s not the same.
“Of course he’s avoiding you,” says the Saint of Joy, when you ask her assistance. “The wretched coward. I doubt he’s had a real emotion in ten thousand years. That worm of man makes a flippant joke of what he can’t stand, and he avoids what he can’t turn into a jest.”
“And here I thought my swordwork, necromancy, and overall existance was the greatest joke of all,” you demur. “You certainly seem to think so.”
“Ugh,” says Mercymorn, as usual un-charmed by your wit. “You two are far too alike. You deserve each other.”
“In flippany, elder sister?”
“In pining over your dead siblings, you stupid child. And then being flippant about it, I suppose.”
Which explains a lot. Alfred, she had said months ago. You can surmise now who Alfred was.
You finally catch him by shadowing Harrowhark. He has to meet with her for lessons, though what he manages to teach her you can’t imagine. Mainly, you think that he must monologue at her, and try to interpret her blank, unnerving stare as adoration. You can only assume that is what John does.
“Ah,” he says, when he sees you. “The Eighth Saint. I’m afraid I’m too busy to kibbitz right now – poor Harrowhark won’t fix herself. Another time, perhaps?”
The polite thing to do – the Fifth thing – would be to leave. But you are not polite and Fifth. You are Third and hungry. You stay. Harrowhark leaves instead, taking advantage of the thick tension in the air to slip away.
“I thought we should talk,” you say winningly. “Brother to sister.”
He lights up one of his wretched cigarettes. “John’s horrible affectations of family don’t rest easily on you, Ianthe the First. I am not your brother.”
There is a name on the tip of your tongue. Do you dare to say it? You hold your hand out for one of the cigarettes. “Maybe not. In truth, I’m no one’s sister, either.”
He doesn’t give it to you. Just watches you with his dead, ashy eyes.
“Because my real sister is dead, you see,” you say, irritated. Tired of the game these ancient old fucks are always playing around you. The greatest necromancer of your generation, and you are nothing to them. “Because I killed her.”
Your words hang in the air, sharp and petulant. Your cheeks are flushed. It’s unbecoming, and becomes more embarrassing with every puff he takes of his cigarette.
The Saint of Patience finally says, “Maybe you can convince our little diet Lyctor of that. Maybe Gideon and John would believe it – they’re frightfully trusting, in their own ways. But like recognizes like, younger sister. Your wretched story is written on every inch of you.”
“Fratricide recognizes sororicide?” you jest, with an ironic salute. “What an exalted club we form, older brother.”
He winces. Reaches for a cigarette. “Go away, chick. You’re a gaping wound, and I’m much too tired for pretending not to see it. And I certainly can’t heal it, if that’s what you’re after.”
Offensive. “I am a Lyctor,” you tell him, doing your best to mask your petulance. “I have no wounds I can’t heal myself. I chose this-”
“She chose it,” he says. “Didn’t she? Tell yourself what you must to survive it – Lord knows Joy and I have done the same over the millenia, after Alfred and Cristabel did what they did to us. But don’t rub your lies in my face. It’s terribly gauche the way you try to own it. Just give it up, chick, and stay out of my sight.”
Hypocrite. Asshole. You are beginning to see why Mercymorn despises him so.
“Tell me, elder brother. Did any of our siblings willingly choose Lyctorhood?”
He regards you thoughtfully. “Plenty of them, but Gideon’s the only one left now. The rest of us… the rest of us merely endure.”
He is gone, leaving only a wake of smoke behind him, before you can even muster a response.
--
Mercymorn is still unimpressed by your swordsmanship. Not just unimpressed – despairing. She sets you a deadline.
“My so-called cavalier did not know how to fight with anything but her looks,” you remind her, frustrated. “I cannot learn the rapier in five days.”
“Unfortunate for you!” she says. “Next time, try eating someone who has even a modicum of skill! Honestly, this whole trial was a farce. No age limit, no supervision – it’s no wonder we only got two defective children out of the whole affair. I’ve already told John I’m not wasting my time with a half-baked Lyctor who can’t fight, and he agrees with me, so kindly fuck off!”
You fuck off. You go to your quarters, thankfully empty of Harrowhark for the moment, and you take up the sword that belonged first to Babs, then to Corona, and now to you. It’s warm in your hand; you know just how to grasp it firmly but flexibly, how to raise it into a perfect fencing position. Your back straightens; your feet shift. And then – nothing. You can’t fathom what to do next. Classic Coronabeth: all show, no substance. Classic Ianthe, that you are a Lyctor at the height of your powers and still you have to structure your life around her deficiencies and whims.
She certainly looked better holding the rapier than you do, of course. You lock the door, check your wards – it would not do for Harrowhark to burst in on this part. You enjoy the superiority of being the more stable one, between the two of you, and this is dreadfully embarassing.
It’s child’s play to draw more flesh to your hips, your limbs, your chest. You’ve done it for her enough times, and fat has always been one of your favorite mediums. You draw bursts of energy from her feverishly burning soul to your adipose cells, instructing them sternly to store and preserve for once rather than burn and wither. Next, your hair – you release the strands currently on your scalp, letting them float to the floor around you, and stimulate your confused follicles for more growth, more pigment production, and that little twist in keratin shape that produces a curl. You run a hand over your already rounder belly and thighs, gently reach out to the epidermis and call your melanocytes into action to bronze your skin.
Just a few biological processes. Even before Lyctorhood, you could have done the bulk of this, albiet with more effort. But you never had made these modifications to yourself, even when puberty swept the two of you into its whirlwind, and Corona nearly made herself sick sobbing about how you’d barely look alike any more. You’d finessed her appearance, but never your own. Like ancient gods dividing up your domains, or bitter spouses working out a divorce settlement, you’d each had your realms: beauty and glory and acclaim for her, knowledge and real power for you, and never the twain should have met. To ape her beauty for herself would have been an overstep as unthinkable as if she were to begin submitting classwork under your name.
But now… you look into the mirror, see your sister staring back at you. Watch her intently. In the end, she had surprised you. What else had she held back?
“Help me,” you whisper to your reflection, and feel foolish for doing so – as if it was already not foolish enough to stand here in her skin.
Corona just gazes at you, your slight smirk dancing on her lips. Inscrutable. Incomprehensible.
You take up the rapier again, and try to imagine that this is normal. That you are Coronabeth Tridentarius, and you are on your way to one of your silly little practice sessions with Babs that she had thought she was so clever for hiding from you. You would hold your sword beautifully aloft – you would bow to your opponent – you would circle, and when they struck, you would parry. With no opponent, you would practice drills – your feet would move with graceful surety, and your blade would dance. You’d glide – you’d lunge – you’d extend – you’d advance – you’d retreat –
You realize, with a horrible shock, that Corona actually had known how to fence. What else hadn’t you known? You will never know, now: that’s supposedly the tragedy of death, isn’t it? You, naturally, had been more concerned with the actual loss of her, but this is a new misery to add to the pile. You will never know what else she kept from you.
--
Mercymorn is begrudgingly satisfied by your improved skills with the sword. Your reaction time still stutters, ocassionally, and especially when you remember that this isn’t your arm, but it is a marked enough improvement that your deadline is halted. Now only Harrow is defective, and you should be glad to outshine her so easily. Somehow, you are not.
“You won’t last ten minutes with the Heralds,” you warn her, watching from bed as she struggles to lift that outrageous bone-covered sword into some semblance of a battle-ready position. “Are you so sick of life on the Mithraeum already, that you’re running headfirst to your death?”
She ignores you.
“Surely you haven’t done everything on your bucket list already, Harry. Are you really prepared to die a virgin? I could help you, if you just let me.” You lick your lips, for the theatrical effect. You are nothing if not thorough in committing to a bit.
“Your help is rejected on both counts,” says Harrowhark primly. “I do not intend to die – but death would still be preferable.”
“A brutal rejection,” you sigh. “You’ve struck me down with your cruelty, Reverend Daughter. Has it occurred to you, in your infinite selfishness, that you endanger us all? I know you don’t care about me or our older siblings, but are you really so faithless you’d allow yourself to let our Lord down, rather than accept a helping hand?” And: “Put that down, darling, you’re seconds away from vomiting on my floor, and you never clean it up properly.”
She does not put her horrible sword down. But she does reinforce the layers of bone protecting her from the naked blade, and that seems to keep the nausea at bay.
“I do not intend to die,” repeats Harrowhark. The stubborn little wretch. As if intending ever mattered a whit in this awful universe. You realize, with a start, that perheps you don’t understand your new sister either. And perhaps she, too, will die before you ever do.
--
You take matters into your own hands, in the end. Someone has to. You have not had a private audience with Teacher since the Erebos, thinking it gauche to be overeager for his company, but you seek him out now, find him in his quarters on one of the few nights where he doesn’t seem to be nattering away with Harrowhark.
“Ianthe,” he says, surprised. “Is everything alright?”
Such is the level of your relationship with the Emperor of the Nine Houses. You really should let Harrowhark die, the better to worm your way higher in his affections – but practicality, as always, wins out over pride.
“It could be better,” you say, and you deliberately take God’s hand to your cheek, hold it against the mandible and jaw, and watch him for comprehension.
To your disgust, his first reaction is sheepish embarassment. “I’m flattered, Ianthe, but you’re very young-”
“That is not even remotely what I am trying to convey, my Lord,” you tell him, repelled, and keep his hand there, willing him to understand.
And understand he does. His impossible eyes narrow, and his fingers tighten on your jaw. “The Sewn Tongue… what a throwback. Harrowhark did this?”
You just look at him. Who else?
He dissolves it with a burst of lemony brightness, power coursing along your jaw and tongue, and when your mouth is free, you tell him everything.
“Well,” he says thoughtfully. “No wonder Gideon didn’t make any headway. That should be easy enough to solve, though.”
--
The next time you see Harrowhark, her eyes are golden and sharp and miserable. The misery is not new, but you imagine the depths of it are. Now she knows exactly what she’s miserable about.
Good.
She tries to kill you, of course. With her powers unlocked, the scales of bone fall off that absurd sword, and she wields it like the brawler that Nav was. Her mouth is tight and her teeth are clenched as she presses forward with vicious, arcing blows, wrists wreathed in tendons to support its weight. But she has had access to the fully array of Lyctoral powers for only hours, and you have been honing the craft of defending yourself with Corona’s sword for months. When she fails to mete out her so-called justice, when you knock the blade from her hands and web her with adipose tissue, it is entirely her own fault for wasting valuable training time on a delusion.
“You killed her,” she spits.
“You killed her,” you remind her, though she’s hardly forgotten again. Her memory is perfect now, and therein lies her solipsistic little tragedy. “Twice over, if you count forgetting as a murder, which I imagine most of our siblings would. This place is a shrine to the memory of their lost cavaliers, after all.”
“This place is a tomb,” she says scornfully. “And so am I, now.”
“But Harry, darling, you love tombs.”
Her golden eyes fix on you. “The favor I promised you is null and void,” she says formally. “As are any other arrangements between us. You have not done the service you promised me.”
Well, you can’t argue with that.
“I would have been better off attempting the work alone,” she continues bitterly. “I thought – I was foolish to think that you would understand. That you knew what it was to love and lose.”
You smooth the ever-growing hair from her sweaty forehead. “I told you many times, Harry. In a choice between Lyctorhood and a cavalier, no matter how beloved, I will always choose Lyctorhood without hesitation. It’s just good sense.”
--
There is one more thing to do, to become a full Lyctor. The problematic new arm has to go, and you have just the idea for a replacement. Corona’s coffin lies in state just a few doors down from Cytherea’s, and unlike Harrow, you are not afraid of ghosts. You ward the door so you will not be disturbed, and you grow a few extra construct arms to lift the heavy gold-leaf lid, and you look upon your sister.
John knows his stuff. She is as remote and perfect as the day she died. That is not to say that she looks like she is merely sleeping, of course. Her throat is cut. Her chest cavity is a gaping savagery – you never were neat with your meals. But there is no bloating, no rigor mortis, no decay. No thalergenic hum of bacteria or parasites stealing her flesh from you in tiny mouthfuls. She is yours for the taking.
So you take her arm. After everything she took from you for years, after everything you’ve taken from her now, it’s a fitting way to end things. What is an arm, compared to a life and a heart? You remove your own with a single blow, and before her desperately writhing soul can seal you back up, you bring her severed limb up to the join. It’s like two lover’s hands meeting, slipping easily into a comfortable hold. It is like sliding into bed with her at the end of a long day. It is like being children again, in the rare moments when no one was watching. No separation between you and her, no competitions to win or tests to pass or adults to manipulate. Just you, and her. The arm doesn’t look right on you – it’s too plump and tanned to pass as your own – but it handles like a dream. Of course it does – your body and soul knows the truth. Her flesh is yours and always has been. Her heart – maybe it’s true that you never did know her heart. But her flesh?
You were always going to be one flesh, one way or another. There is simply no use in crying about it.
You consider leaving your discarded arm with her, but it’s hardly a fair trade. You decay it down to dust and ash instead. You press a single kiss to Corona’s golden, untroubled forehead, and seal up her coffin for good. We endure, Augustine had said.
You brush your shared blood from your Lyctoral robe, and prepare to fight a planet.
--
Here is how it really happened.
You were always so easily absorbed by your studies. Much as you affected carelessness, Canaan House thrilled you with its mysteries. You would bite through your lip with excitement, lose yourself in lab challenges for hours on end, wear poor old Babs to the bone uncaring of his exhaustion. When you uncovered the final step of the megatheorem, you were lost to the exaltation of unravelling a riddle. You barely noticed me reading over your shoulder – and why would you? I was always draped against you, back then, our flesh as inseparable as two separate bodies allowed. You never had a high opinion of my intellect either, darling, so why would you think to fear anything as I absorbed the same words you did?
What would you have done, if I hadn’t acted first? I could see you chewing your lip, evaluating your choices, as if there was any choice at all. As if there’d have been a choice even if Babs were still alive. One flesh, one end, sister. Perhaps you would have tried to take one of the other cavaliers, but that would have been a travesty, a mockery, and their necromancer would have been dreadfully upset. I’d have been dreadfully upset, and you never did have much patience for my tantrums and fits.
I spared you the headache of planning, the nightmare of intra-House diplomacy. I spared you the theatrics of a dramatic, drawn-out farewell – you always yawned your way through my suicide threats before, and I didn’t want to die feeling cross with you over it. I cut my throat cleanly with Babs’ rapier, touched a bloody finger to your lips, and only then, as I collapsed to the floor, did you notice.
You made such a fuss about it, darling. Trying to heal me, as if merely sewing up my body could stop the thanergy cascade in action. Railing at me, screaming, calling me all sorts of names – I may not have died cross, but you certainly were. I didn’t blame you. You were so clever that surprises always seemed to strike you as a kind of personal attack. How dare you, you presumptuous bimbo, you hissed, so affronted that I could do something you couldn’t predict. So furious at me for stealing the lead in what was supposed to be your arena, your crowning moment of glory.
Well, you did it to me just the other night, with that awful little challenge to the Sixth. Turnabout is fair play, dear one. It’s true – without you, I can do nothing. Without you, I am nothing. But with you… with you, we both know that we are a force to be reckoned with.
We were one once before, before either of us could remember. Before our cells separated, before our differentness began to emerge, we were one and we were the same and we were at peace. Can you blame me for wanting to go back? As a child, hatching our deception for the first time – as a fetus, desperate to absorb you back into me until hands pulled us cruelly into the world and split us apart. As a grown woman, dying in your arms, eagerly awaiting that final merging.
In retrospect, you didn’t need to eat my heart. A lick of blood was more than enough. But I’m so terribly grateful you did, sister. You sat beside me, and you worked your magnificent magic, and you ripped it from my cooling corpse and swallowed down every last bite of it, your final gift to me. That much, at least, you understood.