skeletonize: (1)
💀 ʜᴀʀʀᴏᴡʜᴀʀᴋ ɴᴏɴᴀɢᴇsɪᴍᴜs 💀 ([personal profile] skeletonize) wrote in [community profile] collectedmemes 2020-08-09 08:26 pm (UTC)

( with everything else, the trails of blood leaking from her ears almost seem like the least strange thing, but the more harrow's brain turns that fact over and over again, the less it makes sense. necromancy? no. even if her body had the ability, it took years of education, research, study, and practice to conceive of, memorize, and enact a necromantic formula — she wouldn't have the wherewithal, and even if she did, one had to trip through a few more states before they started bleeding from the ears.

subarachnoid hemorrhage? she's no querulous scribe of the Sixth, but harrow has been the watchful boatman for enough passages from this side to the River to know most of the causes. she has no proof, but it's the only medical reason that makes sense.

her expression to the retort is not necessarily angry as it is exhausted — a gloved hand separates from the flowing folds of her sleeve to impatiently gesture, as if to literally brush it away. the situation has robbed whatever relief she might have felt at being reunited with her cavalier after the longest period of separation from her since they were both miniature and snot-nosed (though there is still some shard of relief still wedged in there, like a piece of very tenacious shrapnel). in its place is a whirlwind of confusion and nerve-tingling alarm.

it tests what small amount of patience harrowhark possesses. )
Can you, in respect of what is going on, for once cease in trying — in vain, I will add — to be humorous and make some damned sense?

( but even as she is saying it, her brain continues to ceaselessly work, turning over all bit and scraps of information presented to it and forming every permutation of possible solution it could piece together between them until something sticks. she gives pause, remembering the actual phrase (not nav's bastardized version of it) and its origin, scribbled on a piece of flimsy in a study by a necromancer and his cavalier some ten thousand years ago.

as they searched for what she had been searching for, back in canaan house: the lyctoral secret.

because one tends to act similarly, given the sudden understanding of something, even in different circumstances, harrow is almost a mirror image of how she had been standing before another newborn lyctor, crouched before a wall which stretched out, dripping and red: YOU LIED TO US. )


Oh, fuck. ( her gaze sharpens its focus, and she pulls out her journal, flipping through its myriad pages. ) The megatheorem.

( first of all: she's irate that palamedes sextus was right. he would never let her live it down, and she hates him doubly more than she already did for that. but also: it makes sense in a way that she hadn't wanted it to, viewing the trials which had all required the willing cooperation between necromancer and cavalier to merely be metaphorical and not literal. she doesn't have all of the pieces — she hadn't done all of the trials, gotten all of the keys, read all of the theorems — but she can see the shape out of it out of the ones she has inscribed in her diary, all gathered together and overlaid over what she saw before her. she lowers it, staring at gideon now with her dark eyes a storm of many different things: confusion, denial — betrayal? of the worst kind, and one she was very familiar with: when one betrayed themself. )

... No. This is wrong. I — I wouldn't.

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