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Once upon a time, there was a little girl, and she was very sad, because her parents had died.
No, wait, that’s not right. You can do better than that. Among your many terrible debts, you owe exacting honestly most of all. You simply cannot afford the luxury of self-deception.
Once, there was a little girl, and her parents were very dead, because she was sad.
That’s better. Still terrible, eternally and unerringly so. But better, because it is true, and the daughter of the Ninth desperately needs something true.
---
You are not so foolish as to think that you can defeat Silas Oktakiseron in a straightforward, honest duel.
Thankfully, you have never cared all that much for honesty or straightforwardness.
You came to this school to uncover secrets and become a Lyctor of the Prince Undying, and you’re chock full of secrets.
(you will never be chock full of secrets. They congeal in you, melt into each other like layers of lacquer, and ooze from your pores in a noxious cloud.)
--
Before the little girl appeared a savior in white robes, a white circlet upon his head. He wiped the tears from her eyes and kissed her forehead and said, “Nobody has to know.”
--
The Cavalier hovers at your side now, golden eyes fixed on you even when you manage to look away – which is difficult, given the magnetic hold she has on your gaze, but sometimes the magnet reverses polarity and your gaze slides off of her instead, unable to land. She does not speak, or if she does, you lose what she says in a rush of blood from your ears.
When you draw your sword from her chest it always catches on her splintered, exposed ribs. You are, objectively, garbage with a sword, but it is her sword, so your inadequacy hardly matters. How terrible and beautiful, to have the gift of her mastery, unearned and unasked for. To have her aegis spread over you, to squeeze her skills from her and triumph, again and again against your peers, when you deserve nothing more than to be ground into the dirt of the dueling arena.
--
“Little one, who bears up alone in such deep sorrow. I don’t deserve your faith,” said the savior. “But you honor me with it nonetheless.”
--
Ianthe Tridentarius says, “Don’t you ever wonder what it’s about, you stupid little drowned kitten?”
“I have coursework to attend to,” you say primly. “Grades do not earn themselves. Duels do not win themselves.”
“Of course they do,” she says. “They do if you’re Harrowhark Nonagesimus.”
“You fundamentally misunderstand what it is to be me,” you say tiredly. Ianthe exhausts you. She has not beaten you in a single duel, and her elegant, foppish swordwork is, frankly, almost as obnoxious as her voice. You cannot imagine what wisdom she thinks she has to impart on you, and you do not intend to find out.
“You fundamentally misunderstand what it is to be a Lyctor,” she snipes back, which is very typical of her. Ianthe delights in battering at your walls of faith for sport, and in turn you derive, perhaps, the slightest satisfaction from the way that they remain standing despite her assault. This, more than anything else, constitutes needing each other.
The Cavalier, resplendent in her white uniform, looks at you beseechingly. You look away.
--
“Someday, I hope that you will join me by my side,” the savior said. “It will require a sacrifice, but you are no stranger to sacrifice, eh? And I can see clearly that your heart is pure, and your desire to serve me is noble and true.”
--
“Do you even understand what you’re fighting for?” Ianthe demands, sweaty and flushed and almost lovely on the arena battlefield. Golden moths circle the killing field in great, glorious clouds, and she could almost pass for one if them, in more forgiving light.
You risk a glance upwards – a dangerous endeavor, since the castle that hangs above you has a way of drawing you in, making you lose time. Moments turn into hours, sometimes, when you lay on the mirror-lake arena floor and gaze upwards into its twinkling parapets.
Here is what you know: that the castle holds eternity, and you have always so desperately wanted something eternal to hold onto. That your Beloved dwells within its walls, wrapped tightly in layers of stone and masonry like the pistil in the center of a rose, and that you will tenderly unpeel each and every one for her, when the time is right and you are worthy to bask in her presence.
“I looked upon the face of divinity once,” you say, thickly, through the blood trickling into your mouth from your fountaining nose. “I will see it again.”
--
So inspired was the girl by this show of grace, that she straightened her spine, and her parents' spines too, and she stood at her pulpit the next day with new resolve and nobility. She vowed to live, in his honor, and to strive faithfully towards his service with all her heart.
--
A chip in the wall of your faith, finally: when Ianthe Tridentarius's webs of trickery and underhanded manipulation finally wrest her a single victory in a duel, you are undone.
If you were better, more honest, more worthy of the sacrifices made in your name, you would be, at most, wrathful. You do not like being beaten, and you do not like cheap tricks, and you do not like Ianthe Tridentarius, with her louche bearing and her dangerously unbuttoned uniform jacket and her snide insinuations that she's the savior you've been searching for all along. But you are not wrathful. You are despondent, because with her victory, she takes the Cavalier, and you find very suddenly that you are a nothing. The Cavalier glides from your side, and is, unquestionably, no longer even remotely yours - you see the shift in her bearing, as she becomes smoother, more proud. Ianthe's Cavalier, not yours, from the moment the rose on your chest scattered and her her eyes slid away from you. Ianthe dispassionately pats her head, like she's tossing a morsel of affection to a tolerated dog, and looks at you the whole time, hungry for your misery.
You are supposed to be fighting for your Beloved in the catle, for the honor of your House, for the fulfillment of your savior's hopes for you, for your own glorification, for the fulfillment of your parents' terrible bargain. You are not fighting for the Cavalier - like most people, she would be better off without you. And yet, you hunger for her. When you challenge Ianthe Tridentarius, you cannot pretend you are doing out of chivalry, or pride, or anything but your own naked hunger to regain what you desperately wish was yours.
You win, of course. You're the best necromancer or your generation, after all, and you're always such a little bitch when you're angry. She returns to her place at your side, half a step away no matter how close you try to come. But you know, now, that you are compromised. And, as always, you can't un-know it.
--
But was that really such a good idea?
--
Your greatest shame is not that you sometimes draw the sword from the Cavalier when there is no duel to fight. Your greatest shame came earlier, with three nooses dangling from the chapel rafters, or later, with John Gaius’s gentle hand prying shards of ceramic from your bleeding temple. But the unsanctioned swordplay – no pun or entendre intended – is high on the list.
Still, you cannot stop yourself. You have never been good at denying yourself pleasure when giving in hurts more keenly than abstinence ever could. You swath yourself in robes of office and she follows, gleaming and white, a half step behind you, until you sweep like a miserable little bat to the rusty cage of the gondola. There, ascending through rough-carved drillshaft stone towards the moonlit heights of the arena, she kneels before you, golden eyes going fogged over with the pallor of death, and you transgress, willfully, wildly.
Her ribcage unfurls for you, a puzzle box unlocked, a telescope lens uncovered. The rapier emerges from within her, pulsing with arterial blood and viscera, and seems to grow towards your hands, as desperate for your touch as you are for hers. When you draw it from her, her chest hates to see it go – it clenches and grows teeth in the lacuna left behind, gnashing fruitlessly in its wake. You are struck, often, with the terrible desire to replace the sword with your own pitiful arms, to replace what you keep stealing with the pale imitation that is all you have to offer, to give her a semblance of wholeness and fullness. But when you reach out, she seems to recede just the slightest bit into the distance. It makes sense, you suppose. The Cavalier is sworn to protect you, by virtue of the very first duel when you won her loyalty and found your hands clenching and spasming with the unexpected weight of it. It would be anathema for her to allow you to injure yourself upon her sharp edges.
Nonetheless, it would be a superhuman feat to keep you from pain, practiced as you are in the gestures of martyrdom. The sword is yours, as she promised from the first day you won her service, and she cannot stop you picking it up by its sharp edges, relishing in how it bites into your fingers. Still, it’s mostly fruitless. Your black robes hide most of the stains, and when she takes your feverish, blood-slick hands in hers and presses her corpse-cold mouth against them, they don’t exactly heal, but the blood stops flowing, and you are left with only manageable, eerily bloodless gashes.
You wish you could say that that’s not half the appeal of cutting yourself on her sword: the way she trembles to put you back together again.
You perceive everything she does dimly, through a wall of glass or a fog of condensation. This, you imagine, is what love is. If you saw her with perfect clarity, you feel certain that it would shake you apart until even her icy lips could not piece you back together again. It is better, you tell yourself, that your mouth fuzzes with cotton when she takes your hand, and your ears ring when she speaks.
--
But is that really how it happened?
--
“It isn’t real,” says Camilla Hect calmly, your blade poised at her throat. “Took me a while to realize, but now we just need to get a message to the Warden. They’re playing everyone, Ninth, and you're falling for it. The Prince Undying isn’t what he seems.”
The broken jawbones scattered across the floor of the arena are still and silent and empty. The black rose on her breast shivers with each barely restrained inhale and exhale. Wondering what you'll do to her, maybe, with your victory won. She wants the Cavalier dead, you recall. Or gone, and what’s the difference? She – they – the whole wretched, grasping lot of them want to tear her from your grasp and take her somewhere you cannot fathom.
And you have always been so very selfish.
--
There is a woman who holds court in the crumbled ruins of a burned-down old building, camped out on a sunny balcony and luring in any student foolish enough to heed her siren call. Those who visit her, who hear her inane prattling, seem to forget their responsibilities to the Houses, along with any shreds of their decorum, and turn up later with black roses on their breasts, spouting heretical nonsense. You, with that in mind, simply don’t visit her. It is, perhaps, your first time resisting a destructive temptation, but you don’t get points for finally breaking your patterns. You just get another day, and then another, of threats to yourself and the Cavalier, of being two hundred dead, of the incessant twittering and whispering of teenage shadows.
She finds you, instead, and forces the issue. She speaks to you, but she looks only at the Cavalier when she does it, and her eyes are cold and tender and longing all at once.
Much of what she says, when you fight, is lost to you in the usual gush of intercranial hemorrhage. You remember the faint outlines of her rambling monologues about duty and memory, and the detailed, frozen portraits in their gilded frames that hang and look down on you as you whirl and strike with athleticism that neither of you have any right to posess. You remember her crying out to the Cavalier, an unfamiliar name. You remember the Cavalier’s blank placidness, and how it enraged her. You remember how she wept and laughed as she forced you back with her relentless blade.
"I lost you long ago, didn't I, darling?” you remember her saying in agony, or maybe it was “he lied to us,” right before you swept the rose from her chest. In her final moments, her lips rounded out a word with no meaning – Loveday– as her hand reached out fruitlessly towards your Cavalier. What happened next - how the Cavalier responded, the hurt and shock on your opponent's face - you can be forgiven for not retaining it. Mostly, you remember the deafening clang of the paintings falling from their delicate suspension, frames crashing emptily to the stone floor as the portraits captured within them them belatedly dissolved. And you remember the act, of course, the wet ruin of her chest cavity as you plunged the rapier through her flesh, and then the burst of rose petals, sickly sweet and rotting, as her body dissolved around you, choking you in their noxious perfume. You vomited, profusely, and the Cavalier condescended to rub your shoulders in detached little circles.
If her final words were a warning, you don’t dwell on them. You have far more important things to attend to.
--
Chairman Gaius’s office is a wonder of architecture. Carved stone ensconces him, scrapes the sky, froths and crashes and ebbs again to create the tower atop which his office perches.
“Another cup of tea, Harrowhark?”
You shake your head mutely. So does the Cavalier, who is never very interested in food. She’s watching him instead.
He serves you one anyway, and you take a biscuit.
--
Your fellow duelists gather atop the tallest tower overlooking the gleaming sea, and they open locks. There are rings and rings of keys, and there are locks inset into every surface, the tables, the chairs, the teacups. It’s maddening. You can’t look away.
“The Cavalier,” says Ianthe, like you’re stupid, which is how she always speaks. “is a tool of great power, Harry. Liminal spaces, and hell, do you even comprehend?”
Your stomach heaves, possibly from the intentionally indecent sight of her salaciously running a cool metal key against her scrawny sternocleidomastoid. “Demonstrably. But she is also – a girl.”
Judith Deuteros frowns. Her slender fingers leaf mechanically through keys, searching for the right one. “That is not what cavaliers are for, Reverend Daughter.”
“Your opinion has been noted," you lie.
“Cavaliers are separate,” she insists, disapproving. The setting sun catches on the brassy contours of her keys, of that heavy locket she wears around her neck. “They are not for – domesticity. For wanting. For touching.”
“A bit strongly stated,” says Palamedes Sextus, clicking the lock before him open and closed, open and closed. His brow is furrowed, and he has been writing in some sort of journal with increasingly incomprehensible scribbles. “When it comes to this kind of myth, who can say how folklore has degraded the original meaning? I am of the opinion that they might have been-”
“Heretical,” says Oktakiseron, slamming his keys down in a bright, jangling tangle. “Heretical, heretical. Sextus is a sentimental fool, but not one of you is free of sin.”
“Elucidate, then, Master Templar,” says Palamedes with deceptive mildness.
“Cavaliers are for shielding. Cavaliers are for fueling.”
Ianthe snorts. “You’re wrong, all of you, though the milk boy comes the closest." She pockets her key, and turns from your assembly to face the setting sun, dramatic in silhouette. "Cavaliers? Cavaliers, my dears, are for eating.”
--
You find, after a time, that the sword very much cuts both ways. That is: you can pull a sword from her, glorious and shining, but she can also pull one from you, in a great ecstatic rush that has you falling into her arms, soaked in blood sweat and weaker than usual at the knees. The blade she produces from your shriveled heart is not beautiful and strong and brave. It is a bulky monstrosity of steel, functional and unadorned, though you can't imagine what it should be adorned with. Certainly not a skull puking up another skull.
When you hold her blade in your unworthy hands, you feel, for very short moments before reality intercedes, like a hero or a savior. You feel like you are hers, and she has entrusted you to fight for her. Your own sword is more powerful, truthfully - it shatters your fellow duelists' blades like brittle osteoporous bone, leaving them helpless before you - but it is inarguably yours, and yours alone, and that is more than enough to make it loathesome to you. It humiliates you, that she sees your rotten and contempible self with enough clarity to bring it into the stark sunlight of the arena. It mortifies you, that you exist at all. You do not make a habit of flinching from the truth, but some truths are too terrible to look at face-on. When you fight with your own sword, you are not her champion, you are just Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and you have never particularly enjoyed being Harrowhark Nonagesimus.
Someone else might think it beautiful, that the sword forged within you is so unbreakable, and that she handles it without flinching. But you, who know the furnace where it was cast, have awe in only the most functional and practical way. It is awful. And that is why you draw hers instead, and so fight with one hand behind your back rather than face yourself at full power. Some self-deceptions are load-bearing, in the end.
--
Posters of gaudily colored flimsy advertise a theatrical revue by those irritating, fluttery teens in the drama department. You, of course, fervently despise theater, and the Cavalier despises what you despise and loves what you love. You are here to become a Lyctor, to triumph in duels and achieve new heights of necromantic mastery in the already dazzlingly high arena. You have no time for artistic distractions of a dubious quality.
--
Once upon a time, there was a man, a prince, a knight, a hero. An ordinary man, called upon to save the kingdom, no, the world. And of course he saved the world! That is what brave knights do.
But - and this is crucial, mind you- the world doesn't just stay saved. People are bullshit, and everything alive is also dying. The world needed saving again, and again, and again. And can anyone blame him if each act of heroism, each greedy villain and dragon and baron vanquished, took a little more out of him? If after an eternity of selfless love and service, he became drained, and tired, and so very hungry?
The world loved him back. Everyone loved him, why wouldn't they, but especially the world who he had saved. The world loved him, and she saw him suffering, and said, "my brave knight, my beloved, my chosen one - have a little self care, as a treat. Eat of me, and be sated, and grow strong again."
And he loved her back, so she did as she commanded. He had saved her so many times, after all. He was hers, and she was his. Why shouldn't he let her save him too?
But is that the truth? Or the truth he tells himself?
--
John Gaius is good. He has drawn you here, to this temple of learning and this classroom of faith. He has suffered you to learn at his hand, has allowed you to infringe upon his time with your loathesome graspingness. When the unexpected assault from that unrelenting, mysterious duelist with the spear left your dorms a smoldering, dusty ruin, he has condescended to allow you to shelter in his inner sanctum, to pollute it with your miserable stain.
The Cavalier too, of course. They are acquainted, as is appropriate. She bows her bright head towards his – so much taller even than him! – and touches his forehead to his, and he looks at her with an unfathomable sadness tinged with something else. That is not your business, you know. There are things that are not yours to ask.
Alone in your dorm, you ate rarely. Under his wing, there are dinners, and merrily bubbling pots of soup that the Cavalier tends with deadly serious care, and endless saucers of tea and crumbly biscuits that turn to cremains in your mouth. It is frightfully domestic. Ianthe laughs, to see the thermoses and lunchboxes that sneak into your schoolbag, and then eventually stops laughing and starts giving you concerned little looks instead, which is arguably worse.
“Starvation is bad for the soul,” he tells you earnestly, eyes crinkling up. “You’re a growing necromancer, and I know better than most the toll that takes on the body. Your cells are eating themselves, Harrowhark. If you don’t fuel up, you’ll wither away, and nothing is worth that.”
Then I shall wither, you think, wistfully, but know better to say that aloud, to him. That is a desire for the privacy of your bedchambers, where you tentatively reach your hand out to lay tremulously close and achingly far from the Cavalier’s still and silent wrist. In her cot, lying at an angle instead of standing looming over you, she looks almost human, almost vulnerable, and you long so dearly for her touch to finally alight on your skin and turn you to dust.
You don’t touch her, not outside the arena – you are not quite so depraved as any of that. And you don’t say any of it to John Gaius. And so he pushes you another biscuit with a long-suffering smile, and you pretend to enjoy it.
--
Once upon a time, there was a brave knight who saved the a damsel in distress, and an inevitable price he paid. Nothing comes free, after all, just like the witches are always warning. He saved her, and he lost her, the heroic sacrifice that fueled a myriad of the greater good. What is more tragic than a knight who can save everything but the one he loves?
--
Your Cavalier is not yours, not really. She tells you that she is yours, when she speaks and you are sensate enough to comprehend it, which is rarely. The other duelists, too, tell you she is yours, that you won her fair and square. But you know the truth - the daughter of the Ninth is meticulous in seeking out the truth. Here it is: nothing you have ever done is fair and square, and she is as remote to you as someone you once – as a transgression you once disastrously flirted with, perhaps, or as an inverted, suspended castle with straight white teeth springing forth from each fortification.
Ianthe implies things, lewdly, revelling in the repellent smacking of her lips as she makes her grotesque implications. Oktakiseron and Deuteros imply it in their stony disapproval, their carefully averted eyes. Sextus conveys it in piercing glances, in misplaced pity and sympathy. They are, all of them, wrong. She is not yours, and she will never be yours in any way that matters. She is a signpost, a vision, a temptation. A promise that if you do not lose your faith, if you do not let yourself tarnish and rot under the harsh sun so far from your natal catacombs, if you calcify your strength and nobility, then – what? A castle, a coffin, a girl – Your nose runs hot and salty at the thought, a clear warning against the line of thought you can never quite help but pursue.
Here is what you try so hard to believe: Faith does not require you to know what lies at at the end of the path. Faith requires only that you keep putting one foot in front of another, even when the grit works itself into your weeping skin and the fragile tendons tear and wobble and the calcaneus grinds to dust.
Still. You question.
--
He loved her. Of course he loved her – that’s what knights do. He loved her, and he never gave up on her, not even when she wanted to give up on herself, because that was love. She built mazes of thorns and fortifications of stone around herself, and he battered them down, and never gave up trying to find her again. Or he built her a high, impenetrable tower in the castle they shared, but only to protect her, from those who wouldn’t understand, the ravening mob of illiterate filth who would hate her, would consume her and take her away. He built the towers and the walls and the thicket, he built it all, only to keep her immortal, unchanging, preserved, a perfectly sculpted morsel in a temperature controlled refrigerator. A beautiful sleeper in an intricate glass coffin. Love requires sacrifices. She taught him that.
And she was worth the world, but that meant that the world was worth her, too. That's just math. What use was any of it, without her? A few of her children, given back to her. A few townspeople, to revive a princess, a queen, an empress?
And what use was the serene body she left behind, without her? What was the point of venerating something that was, in the end, only meat?
--
You categorically, emphatically, do not like theater. But John Gaius likes theater, and he invites you, and so you go, the three of you. You sit in a darkened room and shiver, though there is no chill. The Cavalier sits beside you, polite and focused, and John keeps looking at you, embarassed little glances to assure himself you are enjoying it properly. For his sake, you try to, though the children twirling about behind the shadow-screen onstage with their insipid, condescending rhetorical questions makes your orbital bones ache and fills your mouth with the sharp taste of copper.
“Truly, some art forms are worth keeping around forever,” says John Gaius, sated, when the ordeal is blessedly over. “Aren’t you glad we went? Trying new things isn’t all bad, eh?”
The Cavalier does not say anything, her eyes chilly and vacant, so it falls to you to lie, “It was tolerable.” And he beams, and you know you have done as well as someone like you can do.
--
But is that really the truth?
--
She is not yours, but neither are you his. This is not a matter of pride or stubbornness on your part, though you imagine John Gaius thinks it is. This is your devotion, the bitter dregs of it still vibrating with the compulsion to do no more harm, to walk lightly on this fragile earth that was already so cursed with your presence. This is your love, such as it is: when John Gaius tells you over tea that you would make a fine Chairman one day, that since he has no daughter to carry the mantle when he has moved upwards he has often thought that you might suffice to fill his shoes – you resist the urge to take what he is offering you and gulp it down whole with your hungry, unworthy lips.
He is upset, of course. No surprise. Most sensible people, you have learned since leaving Drearburh, find you upsetting. It is further proof of his goodness that he puts it aside, that he cradles your head in his hands nonetheless and picks the shards of glass from your unbleeding skin. When the Cavalier tends to your wounds, she does it with focused, childlike, uncomprehending intensity. But when John Gaius tweezes ceramic from your temples, when each shard crashes into the metal surgery tray like a scale falling from your eye, you think he does understand, at least a little, who and what you are, and the fact that he does not turn away is unbearable. Each dull clink takes a piece of it with you, and when they are all gone and he smooths your overgrown hair tidily behind your ears, you are achingly revealed. He knows, now. He knows, and he does not turn away from your selfishness, your hunger, the terrible fire of your greed that has incinerated everything that was every good and pure.
“It is not a sin,” he tells you, very seriously, “to want things.”
There is nothing untoward about the kiss he fixes upon your wiped-clean forehead, though it burns like a brand nonetheless. There is nothing inherently objectionable about his embrace, except the undeniable fact that you are not a creature for embracing. Perhaps you had once tried to be, reaching instinctive, uncomprehending arms out towards the distant figure of a father or mother, but even then it was aping something that was not yours, and it was right and proper that the gesture was never returned in kind. You have always destroyed the things you love, so it is terrifying that John Gaius gives you the opportunity to love him, and unforgiveable that you take it, and cry on his worn and ratty dressing gown, and allow yourself to want. Looking back on it even hours later, you seethe with shame that you could have permitted it, that you could imagine it. Somebody once told you that you had a destiny, that there was something you had to do, some great work ahead of you. You wish desperately that you could remember what your purpose is, so you could fulfill it and then finally be done with the awful business of living.
--
Once upon a time, there was a girl, and she was very sad. Does it matter why? Does it fucking matter if it was because of her parents, or me, or the weight of her own awful existence? She was sad, and she was you, and you were so fucking desperate for something real that you didn’t care if it was terrible and monstrous, only that it was true.
--
On the rooftop, sea stretching out on all sides, a hand tight in yours but slipping fast through your damnably weak arms - she wants to die, and Ianthe warned you about this too, hadn’t she? “That’s what they’re for,” she said just yesterday, and seemed almost sad about it, as the horses shied uneasily away from her. “She knows it, even if you don’t, you naive little waif. Do you think closing your eyes and wishing very hard will save either of you from it?”
“You presume too much,” you said then, automatically, and she gave an unlovely snort and brushed the hair from your forehead. She looked, for a terrible moment, like she was going to kiss you there, which would have been utterly atrocious. A kiss from John Gaius had shattered you into glittering shards, lovely and lethal. You did not dare imagine what a kiss from Ianthe Tridentarius would do to you.
Now: the Cavalier twists in your grip, bones breaking and regrowing in her frantic spasms. She is so desperate to escape, to fall to the garden below with its looming fenceposts, to return to something you can’t comprehend, but you – you have never been good at letting go, even when you should. You build platforms and arching railways of bone around her, arabesques and curves to adorn and honor her glorious form – a cage, but what isn’t a cage, here? You do not let her fall, and you do not let her die, and for that, she hisses in your face, bestial and sharp and almost comforting despite the pounding in your head, her docility stripped away for once.
You wait for her to destroy you as she paces like a trapped animal, as her white garments snap and trail behind her, as her long leaden hair tangles with silver braids and catches beneath salt-corroded epaulets. “You’ll tangle,” you say, stupid lovelorn fool that you are, and reach your greedy hands to fix it, forgetting yourself for a moment. She reminds you, when she pulls away, when she stalks inside. When you regain yourself and follow her back in, she is remote and glacial and docile as always, and you know that you have failed a test, and you don’t even know which of your many sins caused your downfall.
--
There was a girl in a coffin, and she was never going to wake up, and you knew it. It was a Rule, a solid osseus constant in a universe that was fleshy and writhing and miserable, and even God himself couldn’t break it, because there are some things even God can’t do.
You saw me like that and you broke, Harrow, you split right down your middle. Your nun exoskeleton cracked, and you were a kid too, raw and filmy with amniotic fluid, supplicating yourself before my suspended, entombed, miserable form. What a pair, we were.
That probably made it easier for him, in the end. You were so hard when you were angry, but so soft when you were despairing, and he sure knew how to work that. He made you a promise, and sold you a fantasy, and you lapped it up. For me, Harrow, that’s what you claimed, but for you, too, wasn’t it? You wanted so very badly to be the prince, to be the hero, to save me for once. To save anything, instead of the other way around.
Is that when you stopped seeing me, Harrow? Such a short meeting. You looked away away from me and up at him, as he held your hand so courteously, and slipped the ring onto your finger and the robe around your shoulders and the leash around your neck.
I hated you for that, Harrow, for leaving me and going to him, but what else was new?
--
There is one last duel, to achieve Lyctorhood, to fulfil your promise to your savior, and to earn your place at your Beloved’s side. The Prince Undying has promised it, and the Prince Undying has not been wrong so far. All you need do is ascend.
You meet the eyes of the Cavalier over your teacup, briefly, before she looks away, mouth turned mournfully down. You fiddle with the letter, its fine wax seal.
You have been waiting so very long for this moment. There is, logically, nothing worth giving it up for.
--
But is that really what happened?
--
“There are cavaliers,” says John Gaius patiently, and the entire arena, the entire world, seems to be holding its breath for him. “and then there are necromancers. And if you’ve made it this far, you should already know what a cavalier is for.”
Of course you know, now that it's staring you in the face. You've always known, not that you let yourself really see it. Not that you heeded the piercing in your head and the roiling in your gut. Sextus had tried to warn you, and Deuteros, and Oktakiseron. They had met you outside the gates, pried letters into your leaden fingers, tried to convince you to stay your hand and turn back.
Ianthe had tried to warn you too, in her own way. She had torn the Prince Undying’s summons from your hands, shredded it piece by piece, as if that could ever keep you from this. You had simply looked at her, blank and unmoved, and she had scowled, and said something that made your nose run red with blood, and when you looked up from your bloody fingers, she was gone, and the Cavalier was tidying up the scraps. You think you saw her tuck one of the flimsy fragments into her bloodless rosebud mouth, though you aren't particularly inclined to trust the evidence of your eyes when it comes to her.
You were warned, and you did it anyway. And now you undeniably know and everything is worse for it. Your life really is a frictionless hoop of totally fucking up, isn't it?
You stand before Gaius, who is the Prince Undying, and of course he’s the Prince Undying, you knew that, didn’t you, you blind, miserable baby? Who is the savior of your childhood, who loved you then with bemused tenderness and loved you now with a hungry ambition. And he shrugs on his shimmering white robe of office and spins his coronet of bones around his temple and says, “Nothing for it, I'm afraid. Hesitating doesn’t really do any good. I’d give you a thousand years to prepare if I thought it would help, but you really do have to eat the frog at some point, eh?”
“And by the frog,” you say slowly, the obvious still struggling to pound its way into your astonishingly thick skull, “you mean – the eating.”
“The consumption,” he agrees. “Body and soul. I know you’re sad, Harrowhark. It’s – you never really get over it, trust me, I know. But Lyctorhood, serving me – it demands sacrifices. You will have to put yourself first, for once, and I know that’s not easy, for you especially. But it’s worth it, in the end. You’ll forget her eventually, I promise.”
The way forward looms in front of you. The castle of eternity, where your Beloved surely sleeps, where your lifelong yearning drought would be slaked, and she could finally be touched and kissed and woken. Redemption at the hand of your Prince and savior, the fulfillment of almost a decade of striving and blind faith. And behind you, only ruin and devastation and humiliation. Dead parents, and a dead home, and the awful charnel that you traill with your every step. And a Cavalier, of course, a perfect half step behind you, standing still as the most gallant statue with her hand gracefully still on the hilt of her sword.
The choice is clear. I didn’t really expect you to do anything else, Harrow. No one else did, certainly, and this has happened many, many times. Choosing him would be the sane choice, the hopeful choice, the virtuous choice.
You have never been virtuous or hopeful or even particularly sane. You draw her sword in a great rasping, splintery crash, and say, “I would sooner die than forget her.”
And then you go forth and fight the man who made you.
You very nearly win, for what it's worth. Each blow is a heresy, but you are fueled by something more vital than faith or worship, and you drive him back, and for one shining moment, I dare to think that you might actually beat him.
But he doesn't play fair any more than you do. You always had that in common. His eyes are absolutely bullshit levels of sad, Harrow, when he crooks his finger just so and the Cavalier moves at his command. Her cold arms snake around you, and you barely have time to thrill at her long-awaited touch before the sword is in her traitor hands. She doesn’t look happy about it, but she never really looks happy, does she? Especially not around him. She looks blank and inhuman as she stabs you in the fucking back. You fall and her arms dissolve around you, and then you are not a Lyctor, not a savior, not an heir to your house – just a girl of seventeen, stabbed and bleeding with the scent of roses and lemons choking your blood-spattered breath, and John Gaius says regretfully, “Ah, well. Not everyone’s cut out for Sainthood.”
A perforated aorta does funny things to your head. I should know. He pulls your heart's sword from your chest – the fucking nerve of him, I’d kill him if I could – and you scream, long and terribly low, at the sight of it, at the sharp pain of absence, at whole damn thing. It’s not right, Harrow, you screaming like that, you being in that much pain. You’d always been so stoic, back when the two of us used to fight, never giving me the satisfaction of seeing you falter. I don’t like seeing you like that. Betrayed. Vulnerable. Empty.
You watch him hold out his hand for her, and your blurring vision stutters – hair glitching between short and red, and long and blonde. She is so tall, so strong, and she comes to his side, obedient as you and I never were, as she probably never was in life, face tilted towards the warmth of his golden eyes. You remember – you remember the coffin. You remember the blood. You very nearly even remember me, Harrow.
John Gaius spares you one more look. He is very close to you, suddenly, and his hands brush your temple one last time with awful kindness. “I know you tried,” he says, so tenderly. “It’s beautiful, really, how hard you did. I did too, once. But she was only ever -” he gestures at the Cavalier, radiant and unearthly still. “Sleep well, Harrowhark. I’m sorry.”
And when he drives your sword into the earth, the hungry mouths roil up from the stone, and their teeth are so furiously ravenous that you nearly miss what happens next: nearly miss the Cavalier’s almost indistinguishable cry as she rocks with the impact, as the mouths begin to tongue at her ankles.
--
Is that really the truth to satisfy the Daughter of the Ninth?
--
The Prince Undying takes the sword from within your chest, and batters at walls of stone and enamel, at a doorway and a rock that take everything he throws at them and keeps standing. You feel each blow in your cavernously empty ribcage, in the stuttering of your bloody lungs, until it snaps altogether, and a piece of you goes with it. You feel it in the increased from of blood sloshing through your heads, in the blurriness of your eyes
He looks at it, bemused, and then disappointed, and just days ago, you would have felt the urge to apologize.
“Well, that wasn't the ticket,” says the Prince Undying with forced cheeriness, letting the hilt of you clang to the floor and folding himself back into his shabby little couch. He looks up at the Cavalier, the wet indentations the mouths have made on her endlessly regrowing flesh, the blank howl of her mouth, and he winces a little. “Fuck. Sorry, love. It was worth a shot. Maybe next time, we'll get the juice flowing again. You'd like that, wouldn't you, Annabel?"
She is not looking at at him. She looks very briefly, at your crumpled form, but she doesn't look anywhere. She is a broken doll, and she is not there, not in any way that matters. How does he not see that? How did you not see it, all that time?
"We'll get it eventually," John Gaius continues bracingly, oblivious to the buzzing in your ears. "That will be nice, right? Get me back to 100%, so I can put it all right? I know you've been lonely, sweet girl. I know you don't enjoy the game. But you've been brave for me, and I can be brave for you a little longer too, alright?"
She makes a noise that could be a whimper, and you will your broken body to rise.
You have never been very good at letting go.
--
Is that really how it ended?
--
In the end, you finally see me, Harrow. It takes you an eternity. It takes a very literal backstabbing that even your blind great-aunts could have seen coming, and a very literal backstabbing, but you do it, you magnificent bastard. You crawl your broken, miserable ass across an arena for me, and you engage all three muscles you've earned in the dueling, and you leak blood the whole damn way. It's gross as hell, blood and sweat and tears and blood sweat and blood tears commingling in a truly disgusting slurry that hopefully at least lubricated your stumbling, crawling journey. But you do it. You pry open my coffin with tenacious, bloody fingertips and fix your awful, beady little eyes on me at last.
“Good morning,” I say, and also: “Took you long enough.”
You take me in, in all my glory. Zits and all. Hardly a fairytale prince, I know, a bit of an adjustment after her, but I'm still a fucking catch. And I'd never fucking stab you, so that should be a nice change of pace. I wait for you to swoon. “Are you real?” you say instead, and my heart breaks for you all over again.
“Real as any of this is, sweetheart," I tell you, and watch your bloodstained brow furrow. "You think you could dream up these guns?”
You’re so small, is the thing. So tiny and beaten-down and fragile now that you’re actually in front of me, in the flesh.
“Yes,” you say immediately, which I'd make fun of you for if I weren't so utterly, shamefully floored by your nearness. “Gideon - “
The stone around you is shifting. The earth is stirring, and its hungry mouths gape for more. They want us, Harrow. They won’t be satisfied till they’ve eaten every inch of us, and I don’t blame them. Who wouldn’t want to eat you?
“I’m glad I finally got to meet you again,” I say, before I can lose my nerve. “It’s been hell without you, Harrow. Please – whatever you do, gloom mistress, don’t put me back there.”
“I’d sooner die.” you say in a ferocious outpour, face sleeting with far more moisture than you should be losing at this point. “I’m sorry, beloved, I’m so sorry – it’s not too late, just take my hand - “
I’ve waited an eternity for you to ask for that, Harrow. Such a little thing, but you were always so stubborn. It’s a joyous relief to will my atrophied dead arm back to motion, to grip your skinny little necromancer’s wrist tightly and feel your bony fingers close around mine in turn. I couldn’t hold you properly all those months, not with those silver shackles so tight around the Cavalier's uniform cuffs, the gleaming white cloth binding me till I choked, and it was killing me, the whole time. I should have been there for you, love. Fuck you, and fuck me, and fuck this whole goddamn world that tried to tear us apart.
I hold you, and it’s very nearly enough. It would be enough, if we only had eternity too, but you turned your back on it for me, didn’t you? In a way, it’s your fault that it ended, that the stones around us crumbled and the mouths gnawed and the waters of the River rose to tear us apart, to drag you into the yawning stoma with its freaky-ass gnashing teeth.
Don’t cry, honey. I'm not mad about it or anything, not at you, You know I’d rather die with you seeing me, than live an eternity removed from your sight. It’s not even a contest. You have to choose what you’re going to make real, and you, Harrow? You’re the realest thing I’ll ever see, so real it makes everything around fuzz out in comparison. Maybe you’re right, babe, though you were very wrong too and I’m never going to let you live it down. Maybe that is what love is.
--
Is that really how it ended?
--
“Another round of trials, I think,” says John Gaius an impossibly short time later, pen tapping idly on his fancy-ass stationary. “But perhaps a new setting this time. The Mithraeum, instead of the First? Perhaps the gravity of the atmosphere would help sell the urgency. I’m getting tired of them making the wrong choice.”
Not the wrong choice, if you ask me, which he categorically didn’t. Not the wrong choice at all, love. Just not the one he made.
“Ianthe is coming along nicely though,” he continues thoughtfully. “I really think she could do it, on this round – and Judith too, maybe, if I play my cards right. It’s just a matter of…” he pauses, put off his grand train of thought. I can’t imagine why. “Darling, I’m not sure you’re aware of the meaning of the gesture you’re making, but it could unintentionally imply a sort of inappropriate manual gratification-”
This fucking guy. Just call it a jerk-off gesture. I switch to just straight-up flipping him the bird.
That, finally, is enough to get him to notice. “Gideon?” he says, and to his credit, he doesn’t sound afraid, or despairing, or even peeved to get me, instead of his perfect Cavalier. Just baffled. He never did know what to make of me. Which checks out, actually – I wasn’t his, not like she was, and not like he wanted you to be. I was only ever yours – your tragedy, your fuel, your carrot, your stick. Your aching void in need of filling, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
“Surprise, bitch,” I say. “Bet you thought you’d seen the last of me, huh?”
I spent a long time in that coffin, Harrow, a long fucking time. Things weren’t real there, they didn’t really touch me, just flowed through me – but I’ve felt your hand now, clasped in mine, and I feel the solid, sharp weight of my old sunglasses as I fish them out of his desk before his baffled eyes, and slip them on, and give him the middle finger salute again for old time’s sake, and walk my ass into the bright sunlight.
I told you, didn’t I, Harrow? I promised I’d never let you forget it, any of it, ever again. The good and the bad, the real and the unreal, the sweet and the sour. The obnoxious and the sanctimonious and the vicious and the tender. I don’t know where the hell you landed, if you’re alive or dead or somewhere in between, but who gives a shit about that? I’m alive, and it takes a hell of a lot more than an immortal douchebag or a myriad’s-old blood ward or the fabric of reality to part me and thee.
See you on the flip side, sugarlips.