hellonspectacles | The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

Entry tags:

game: darrow

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

Palamedes keeps up a careful, steady pace as he walks across the city from the boardwalk to his apartment building. It takes every ounce of his not-insignificant self-control for him to do so, every instinct telling him to run until he is out of breath, or to stop where he is in the middle of the road and put pen to paper to make sense of what Gideon has told him.

Gideon didn’t die. The revelation is so great that Palamedes hasn’t even begun to consider what strange Darrow mechanism had caused the memories to enter her mind. What she had told him, as they shivered over their chipped mugs of tea, had been more strange, more wild, more world-changing than solving Darrow’s mysteries ever could be.

And there had been other things, too—stranger and more wild, that hinted at thousand-year conspiracies and a fundamental rottenness at the heart of all he has ever known.

Palamedes doesn’t even notice if Cam is home when he flies into the apartment and makes a beeline for his room. Technically, the Master Warden is incapable of forgetting an idea once it has taken root; in practice, like all good scholars, he believes in writing everything down.

He closes the door and leans against it with his eyes tightly shut, only to see familiar words emblazoned across his eyelids. He lied to us.

When Pal had asked Gideon if she knew what these revelations meant, really meant, she had said she did, but Palamedes doesn’t think that’s quite true. It isn’t her fault; Pal hasn’t expounded much on those last few minutes of his life, telling himself it is because he doesn’t have enough evidence to support his theories, but knowing, deep down, that his avoidance has a lot more to do with his own fears.

Still, they all understand pieces of it: Cam knows nearly as well as he does how they had picked at the lyctorhood theorem, trying to make it less awful in its conclusions, trying to make it right; Harrow, in her wild effort to keep some piece of Gideon whole, had, as usual, found a solution by awful instinct; Gideon, poor Gideon, now knows more intimately than all of them the sort of indifference their God is capable of.

Now, Palamedes Sextus has to put it all together and present his awful, terrifying, wonderful conclusion.

He sits down at the desk in the corner of the room and begins to write.

He doesn’t stop until morning.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I saw Pal is all Gideon needs to say. Three words send the structure she'd been trying to maintain for the last week into shambles, the texted evasions and grimly willful silence she'd kept up all swept away like so much dust. The Warden is as clever as she is, nearly as superior a necromancer and--acrid as the taste of it is in Harrow's mouth to admit--the one who'd understood the lyctorhood theorem first and best and most completely. If anyone knows what Gideon's recovered memories mean, if anyone can understand the importance of it, it's Palamedes Sextus.

In agony, Harrow lies awake all night, sick with something she refuses to call fear and cannot begin to think of as hope, even obliquely. She stays in the spare room, leaving Gideon to their bed, and in the morning she gives her only the barest, numbest nod as Gideon heads out the door for her morning run. The knock that comes only a half-hour later fails to surprise her; getting up from her curled position on the couch, Harrow walks to the front door to meet her doom.

"Warden."

“Reverend Daughter.”

Harrow looks like she hasn’t slept. To be fair, Palamedes also hasn’t slept, and it shows—his eyes are red-rimmed and over-bright, his clothes are rumpled, and he buzzes with an exhausted, manic energy. He had made only one stop between his apartment and this one, and now he proffers the purpose of his detour.

“I brought tea,” he says. And then, without preamble, “I need you to tell me precisely what happened when you visited me in the River. No detail is too small.”

Automatically, Harrow takes the tea when it's held out, the cardboard sleeve rough against her fingertips, the paper of it and the cup still shocking to her in its flagrant waste. That she can still feel offense for something so small is an almost childish relief; in the light of everything else, it's even close to painfully normal. Pal's question lands hard, but the directness is better than the stilted dance she and her cavalier have been performing for the last few days.

"I was not expecting to find anything at all," she says. "A glimpse, at best, of the mad face of your ghost, if I were lucky. Some evidence to share with your cavalier to end her...to end what I thought was an insane devotion." Slowly, she lowers herself to sit on one of the chairs in the living room. "Instead, I descended into the River and found myself in your remembrance of Canaan House."

“Well, you couldn’t have known what we’d planned,” Palamedes quips, pretending to hear an apology in her answer where there is none at all. To be fair, her assumption about the fate of his ghost had been entirely reasonable; the Contingency had been entirely unprecedented. A pity, really, that he'd never had the chance to write a paper about it.

He follows her into the apartment and perches on the edge of the sofa across from her. “It looked like the drawing room where Dul— Cytherea was camped out, I presume? Given the lack of time to plan, I’d meant to make the surroundings as simple as possible. Nothing that required imagination.” He takes a gulp of his tea, and then he’s on his feet again, unable to sit still for very long.

“Did I show you anything I'd been working on?" Surely he would have made some progress on the Lyctoral theorem--and hopefully he'd shared something with Harrow.

"Because what you planned was impossible, Sextus," Harrow says, the immediate urge she has to bicker about this a welcome distraction after the last few days--even as she knows where Pal intends for it to lead. "Keeping yourself together by the proverbial skin of your spectral teeth, generating a projection, a bubble even of limited size and restricted detail..." She trails off, making an abrupt, exasperated sound. "It defies every theory about the River, as well you know."

Taking a sip of her tea, she watches him pace, aware of the energy vibrating through nearly every inch of his angular, rail-thin frame. His eyes are the calmest thing about him, in that moment, though even the thick lenses of his glasses do nothing to diffuse their intensity. "It did," she says. "A static rendering of everything within your line of sight. The structure held for...a foot beyond that in any direction, roughly, but that leeway space was blank. Almost gelatinous to the touch, though you cautioned me not to push too firmly." Pressing her lips together, she raises one eyebrow. "I heeded the advice."

Harrow knows what he's asking when he asks about the work, and now with her mind restored and more evidence before the both of them, the guilt she feels at their wasted opportunity is sharp and terrible. "Not immediately," she says, hedging for even a minute's more reprieve. "You first had to tell me about the sequel you were writing on the wallpaper to the single readable book within your construct. The Necromancer's Marriage Season."

Palamedes still gets a little thrill every time he remembers that the Contingency worked, and this time is no exception. He grins and cuts Harrow a sly look. “You know as well as I do that impossible is just a unique sort of challenge. But thank you for the compliment.”

He stops his pacing as she begins to describe the bubble, fascinated to hear about it in such detail for the first time. While he is aware they had interacted there, of course, they have both had their own reasons for not dwelling on their otherworldly meeting. Pal has only asked her now because of the sheer importance of what her answer might hold. Now he nods along eagerly, his eyebrows leaping up when Harrow describes his literary project.

“…Emperor’s bones, I must have been incandescently bored. Thank God you found me when you did.”

He says the words lightly enough, but there’s more truth behind them than he’d like to contemplate. For all the Contingency’s, well, contingencies, they had never expected that Cam wouldn’t be able to find a necromancer for such a long period of time. Even a very clever and well-prepared spirit couldn’t exist indefinitely in a liminal space between life and death. If Harrow hadn’t come along when she did, Palamedes’ psyche would likely have been ripped to shreds before long.

"It is rarely wise to default to looking for approval in another's words, Warden," says Harrow with a roll of her eyes when he grins at her, but she can't make it sound quite as chiding as it ought. For as unbelievable as the plan had been, as monumentally foolish, as doomed to fail as it might have been in the hands of another--it had worked. Neither of them could forget that.

Palamedes accepts the next part of her tale with as much bemused enthusiasm as Harrow might have expected, an echo of the frantic relief she'd seen in the River flickering in his face when he speaks again. It's an added burden to her load of guilt, even though they've been down part of this road before: she and Camilla should never have been separated, and even if they had, Harrow should have retained enough of her faculties to find the cavalier of the Sixth again. Her desperation had nearly destroyed everything, everyone, a failure she thought until only a few days ago she was beginning to finally put right. It's a moment before she can answer him.

"It should have been sooner."

Palamedes is flapping his hands dismissively before Harrow has even finished speaking. Though he generally tries to be kind in the face of the Reverend Daughter's self-pity, he doesn't have the patience for it now. "Through no fault of yours," he says pointedly. "What matters is, you found me, and for that I am forever grateful. Now," he stops to face her head-on, pressing his palms together under his chin, "You said I didn't immediately show you my work. But I did eventually show you something?"

Again, Harrow has to fight down the panic that claws at her throat when he looks at her, his stare not as intense and flaying as it had been in the River--how God takes, and takes, and takes--but still harder than it should be to withstand. "You started to," she says. "We began to talk about the work, whether I had done it...correctly. Adhered to the theorem you had begun to work out, and had confidence I could finish. But we were interrupted."

She takes a breath, unable to turn away from the focus of the Warden's clear and lambent eyes. "Unbeknownst to me, I brought something into your projection. Something dangerous."

Naturally, Palamedes is disappointed by the answer—how could he not be? He’d love nothing more than to sit down with that other version of himself, the one who had had eight months of timeless spacelessness to sort through all the data. Together, surely, they could figure out how to make the theorem work.

But Pal sets that aside quickly enough, for Harrow’s story contains yet another fascinating mystery. “What do you mean you brought something in? From the River? That shouldn’t be possible.”

"You said that then too," Harrow says. "Impossible or not, it happened." That his disappointment is replaced so quickly by a new wave of intense excitement isn't much of a balm to her sick, heavy sense of regret at the myriad ways she'd failed--the things they might have done, the strides they could have made, if they'd both been just a shade more aware of the urgency required--but it's something.

"The Sleeper," she says. "A specter from my own projection, the warped Canaan House I built in the River. It was...tied to me, though I didn't know it at the time, and so it followed."

Palamedes knits his brows together. “A specter—you mean a revenant? One that was tied to you? What did—“ He stops himself before plunging into a litany of questions, shaking his head sharply. “Honestly, Nonagesimus, this all sounds fascinating, and I want you to tell me about it later, but that’s not why I’m here.”

He rubs the bridge of his nose absently. “Was there anything else? Any indication I gave of what I’d discovered? Say, a scrap of paper you noticed, or a throwaway comment I made?”

"A revenant, yes," she says. "Pent referred to it as an invasive soul, when last we spoke." Harrow only half-regrets the impact invoking the necromancer of the Fifth is bound to have on him, though Abigail's presence in her construct, the cheerful way she'd acted the psychopomp as if born to it, has been a point of discussion between them before. She sees the questions fill his face, the struggle to keep them contained for the sake of staying a more important course. It's painfully familiar.

"There was no time, Sextus," she says, and feels the regret of that anew. "The Sleeper was at the door, we were attempting to hold it back--I was, you were telling me to go--and there was..."

She pauses, then, her dark eyes widening. "Something changed, just before I left," she says. "Your focus...shifted." Her cheeks flush scarlet. "You kissed my forehead."

Harrow’s admission is surprising enough that Palamedes stops short and looks at her sharply, flushing with something like second-hand embarrassment. “I really did lose all sense of decorum in there, didn’t I?” he says wryly, only to go suddenly still again as his eyes widen.

“My focus shifted…” he repeats slowly, mind going back to the conversation that had brought him here. Half to himself, he murmurs, “Gideon didn’t became fully conscious until weeks later; though she wasn’t yet aware when your body was with Cam, I still assumed that she remained on the surface, as it were. But what if…” As he trails off, his grin widens.

Edited 2021-11-22 03:56 (UTC)

"You did," she says, though there's more directness than offense in her tone, a faint hint of regret in her expression despite the blush and the embarrassment they're both sharing. "But you also thought of me as a different Harrowhark, at first." The twist of her mouth is rueful, before her expression smooths again. "The one you knew, when I had no concept of who you were at all."

His stillness breaks through the misery starting to descend over Harrow again, a distraction she pulls her focus towards knowing it has to be important. The longer he talks, long hesitancies and fractured sentences thrown out as they occur, the more each piece begins to take shape into something that feels distressingly like possibility. "The boundaries are thinner within the River," she says, taking on the pain of the reminder--Gideon aware, Gideon trapped inside her, Gideon safe but at a cost neither of them knew--and willing it to transform into hope, unworthy as she is of it. "If Gideon was there, present enough..."

“…I realized she was there.” Palamedes’ expression lights up like the sun. “Fuck, I’m good. And you,” he gestures at the Reverend Daughter. “Harrowhark Nonagesimus, forget being the greatest necromancer of a generation, if you’d had access to the resources of the Sixth—hell, even the Third or the Fifth—you’d be the greatest necromancer in recorded history.” He claps his heads together. “Don’t get me wrong, what you did to your brain was barbaric, but theorizing that partitioning off the memory of Gideon would also partition her soul was genius. Insane, but genius.”

He takes off his glasses and cleans them on his shirttail. “You’ve probably ascertained that I finally spoke to Gideon.”

"Sextus," she says as the praise starts to flow, smug self-satisfaction warring with the sudden urge to crawl somewhere dark and secret and wait for it to be over. It's everything she wants to hear, nothing she deserves, and when he claps his hands and the praise shifts into criticism, it's as good as a reprieve as Harrow thinks she'll get. Humiliating, that such a small thing could come as a relief, but it does.

"It was a brute-force solution," she says, a thing she's said before in justification and excuse, the only explanation she had or cared to provide when the memory of it was restored to her. "But it worked, and it worked beyond my own capacity to understand it. But it...if you spoke to Gideon, you know what it did to her." Palamedes removing his glasses, denying himself even briefly the benefit of their assistance, makes forcing the next few words out easier. "I thought I was making myself her sanctuary, not her prison cell."

A wide range of emotions dance across Harrow’s features in a short period of time, and Palamedes misses all of them, too intent on following all the threads that spun by Gideon’s memories, all at once.

“Brute force is the word for it,” he says dryly, then shakes his head. He still doesn’t like what Harrow did, but the specifics no longer matter to him in quite the same way. “Did you know that you’re not the only lyctor to have…compartmentalized one’s cavalier? I gather that in all the chaos on Mithraeum, Gideon ran into someone else like her—that is, a cavalier conscious in her necromancer’s body. Pyhrra Dve. Bloody River, what I wouldn’t give to speak to her. Hell, I’d sit through an hour’s worth of Cohort propaganda in exchange if I had to.”

Pal’s almost breathless from chasing his own thought process, but he again stops short at Harrow’s final comment. Returning his glasses to his face, he looks at the other necromancer thoughtfully. After a long pause he says, “And what’s the difference between a prison and a sanctuary, really? One is meant to protect the people outside from the person inside; the other shelters the person inside from the dangers of the outside world.”

"Who," says Harrow the minute the question leaves Palamedes' mouth, only to stop short when he answers only a moment later. It is and isn't what she expects--and yet, somehow, it begins to explain something. Her jaw tightens, her fingers clenching against a sudden, instinctive urge to run from the threat her brother Lyctor--and quite possibly his passenger, a woman she had no right to call sister, had no right to call anything at all--had posed to her again and again. "The Saint of Duty," she says, through gritted teeth. "Ort--Gideon the First. She was his cavalier."

With the way Palamedes looks at her, his grey eyes still and thoughtful and brutal behind his glasses, Harrow's glad of the effort it took to keep herself calm in the sharing of those facts. Her lips thin. "Are we truly arguing semantics, Warden?"

"That's the one," says Palamedes with a snap of his fingers, when Harrow mentions the other Gideon. He sees the flurry of emotions cross the girl's face, but knows better than to comment. Clearly the relationship between Harrow and her fellow Lyctor had been complex. "Quite the coincidence, isn't it? I assume you had no idea?"

Though he still has plenty of questions about Pyhrra, Gideon the first, and whatever was going on aboard Mithraeum, they aren't actually his priority at the moment. Pal smiles a little, his expressed laced with sadness. "You started it," he says, half a joke. More seriously, his gaze soft, he continues, "You kept her alive. Were the circumstances ideal? God no, but they weren't of your making. I wasn't supposed to spend eight months clinging to sanity on the edge of the material universe while Camilla was left to glue back together a fraction of my skull." He makes a helpless gesture, something briefly flickering through his grey eyes that betrays his own guilt at what he put his cavalier through.

But he quickly returns to Harrow, to kindness and logic. "Nothing happened the way we would have wanted to. But that's because we were all told to take a vacation to a haunted house on an abandoned planet, where, unbeknownst to us, we were then expected to kill each other.

"Given the variables at play, I think we did all right. We deserve top marks in for ingenuity, at least."

"Of course I had no idea," says Harrow, willing her voice to skew just far enough into irritation to be believable. She racks her brain, quickly, trying to think of some clue she might have missed, some way in which either of the pair might have tipped their hand or scattered some clue in her path. "The third of the Emperor's Lyctors is not prone to idle conversations. Or intentional ones. Not with me."

Palamedes draws the parallel she expects, the line between their circumstances both of them know and neither of them have mentioned--not this clearly. They are a mirror of one another, but skewed, imperfect and cracked; both of them having done the unimaginable, and left their counterparts with the aftermath. The guilt that crosses the other necromancer's face is terrible, another knife among many, and Harrow can't school away the echo of it that momentarily clouds her own expression. "I kept her alive," she says, wishing it sounded like enough. "The variables should have been different, for us all, but...we managed. For as much as that is worth."

"If you ask me, it's worth quite a bit." Palamedes is still again, his hands in his pockets and his eyes serious. "Thanks to you, Gideon Nav remains her indefatigable self, even if it did take a few false starts to get her to that point. And we're all better for it."

He cocks his head to the side, wondering briefly how much more of his thought process he should share. Eager as he is to discover what she thinks of the alternative form of Lyctorhood he has begun to theorize, he remains aware of the Harrow's unsettled state. After a moment, though, he decides to plunge ahead. "Have you yet considered what this partitioning of souls might mean for the Lyctoral process?"

Harrow colors faintly--at the praise, such as it is, and the unspoken complexity between her and Gideon that she knows both the Sixth are aware of and yet have the decency not to point out in so many words. "We are," she says, more quietly than she ought, but it's all she can manage for the moment.

Palamedes fixes her with another piercing look, curious and dissecting all at once. It takes work not to think of it as a threat, and as always Harrow only half succeeds. The question, when it comes, is one she knows she'd been anticipating; one that's been on her own mind, in every excruciating detail, ever since she and Gideon had been jarred awake by the sword and all that had come with it. "I have," she says, and her voice is grim. "Among all else, it means there was always another way."

Palamedes had no doubt that Harrow would know what he meant, but still he beams like a proud teacher at a star pupil when she gives the correct answer. “Which brings us to the main event, and the primary reason for my unscheduled visit.” Where she is grim, he is cheerful—but is that not often the case? He goes to retrieve his messenger bag where he had abandoned it next to the door, crouching down to shuffle through it. Once he finds the yellow legal pad he’s looking for, he rises and returns to Harrow.

He doesn’t hold it out to her quite yet. Old habits die hard.

“Ianthe Tridentarius is a moron.” He pauses, frowns. “No, that seems unfair to the unintelligent, many of whom are perfectly nice people. Ianthe Tridentarius is brilliant, but her insights are spectacularly uncreative. Which is worse, really. Plus, her theorem work is sloppy, which there’s really no excuse for. The court of Ida is swimming with tutors, for Emperor’s sake, and while they may be second-rate flesh magicians, by and large, they must have taught her something. Anyone as clever as her with decent training and an eye for detail should have noticed.”

Pal begins to flip through the notepad. “Her version of the lyctorhood theorem isn’t only ghastly. It’s inefficient. I’ve never seen a necromantic equation on this level that lets so much thanergy go to waste.” He stops on his most recent page of notes, full of crossed-out theorems and wild question marks, and holds out the pad to her. “Of course there’s another way. We would have found it, too, if we had only had enough time.”

"Obligation dictates that I rise in defense against any slander towards my sister Lyctor," says Harrow, her tone implying something entirely the opposite. When Palamedes offers the pad, she takes it, sitting up a little straighter as her eyes meet his. Something that could be a smile flickers, too briefly, at the corner of her mouth before she looks down at the scribbled equations and dashed-off notes.

Messy though it is, the math is clear, his conclusions sound. "Pen," she says after a moment, holding up one hand. When one is placed in her hand, she clicks it on, making a minor adjustment to a formula, adding her own notes below some of his where they're crammed into the margins. "You're right," she says, and while it stings a little to admit like always, it's no less true. "This hemorrhages thanergy. Choices were made in...haste, Tern's slaughter chief among them, but..." Harrow lets that thought trail off. "It can be done better."

Palamedes merely smiles when Harrow offers her half-hearted defense of Ianthe, a smile that lingers when she pointedly holds out a hand for a pen. As it happens, Pal has one tucked behind his ear, which he offers to her without missing a beat.

His smile briefly grows when Harrow grants her approval of his work—the Reverend Daughter never says you’re right lightly, after all—before he grows serious again. He moves to stand behind her so that he can peer over her shoulder at their work. “I will grant that the Princess’ theoretical capabilities far surpassed what I would have guessed, but her ego got in the way of her accomplishment. Shocking, I know.” He purses his lips. “Honestly, what’s more interesting is that the original Lyctors—your elder siblings?—“ he lifts his brows, “made such similar errors.”

Pal’s fingers twitch, aching for a pen of their own. He bends down to retrieve another from his messenger bag, along with a spare notebook, and goes to sit on Harrow’s sofa. “The Lyctorhood theorem has always, at heart, been a question of power.” He smiles briefly, a little darkly—there’s a pun in that statement, and not the funny kind. “How does one produce enough thanergy to fuel a necromancer’s unlimited powers in perpetuity? The Lyctoral well is one solution.” Absently, he begins to sketch a little well—stone base, thatched roof, bucket, and all. “What if, instead, there was a Lyctoral wheel?” Once the well is done, he starts to sketch a little water wheel. “A continual exchange of thanergy between two souls, instead of the continual consumption of one by the other?”

"Siblinghood was only one of various metaphors," she admits, uncomfortably, "but it was the one that seemed most frequent." The Warden turns away and begins sorting through his bag, and doesn't see the discomfort on Harrow's face deepen briefly into something a little closer to disgust, another small piece fitting itself into the monstrous whole taking shape in her head. "I think the Emperor took a kind of...satisfaction in thinking of us as his children. In more than the oblique ecclesiastical sense, perhaps."

Her face is back to something approaching normal by the time Palamedes sits down again and begins writing, and though Harrow raises one eyebrow at the cartoonish sketches he draws midway down the page, she listens intently to the train of his thoughts as he verbalizes them. "A cycle," she says, looking from one notepad to the other. "Rather than a storehouse of energy. Something that can be shared and thus replenished. It's a far more sustainable solution, so...why not?"

Only one person can answer that, she supposes, and He's not here. The thought sits heavy in her chest.

Palamedes exhales through his teeth without looking up from the page where he sketches. The matter of Gideon’s divine origins lurks at the back of his mind, of course. How could it not? One of your dearest friends is a child of God is a lot to take in. To his own shame, his first thought when Gideon had shared news had been, so that’s why you’re so difficult to kill, though he’d had enough tact to avoid saying that aloud. After his initial surprise, he had been left with an ache in his heart that lingers, even now.

Yet for all the horrors she has seen, many at the hands of the Emperor, Palamedes almost wonders if, by dint of His absence, He treated Gideon better than he did his spiritual children.

He keeps those thoughts to himself. Whatever form his relationship with Harrow has transformed into, it isn’t one where discussing Gideon’s strange paternity will ever feel natural.

“Fuck if I know,” says Palamedes, who swears more than anyone suspects, but is particularly inclined to swear on a day like today. “Though if I were to hypothesize, I would say that it has something to go with John Gaius’ pathological desire for control.” Pal presses his lips together, expression darkening. “What an absolute shithead.”

Camilla is, in fact, home -- which is how she thinks of it these days, not even noting her own technical incorrectness in her head, though technically she still has her other apartment. The two of them live a spartan enough existence that it's not a strain on funds so much as a little ridiculous.

Then again, she has learned many, many times that having something you don't need is much better than the alternative.

Even had she been more obviously present than she is, legs crossed under her and curled into the corner made by the back and arm of the armchair, reading, Cam has seen Palamedes do this exact same maneuver in their rooms in the Library, the sound of the door opening barely registering before the next one -- his office, usually, there -- is clicking closed. She's well aware he wouldn't have processed her either way.

"Hi, Cam," she teases the shut door softly, but it's with a very warm smirk.

It does make her wonder what he's gotten hold of.

There are two ways this always goes: either he re-emerges wild-eyed relatively shortly, asseverating some hypothesis to her in a manner suggesting he is both entirely sure he's correct and would like nothing better than for her to rip his thesis to pieces
OR
he doesn't emerge for -- well, she's never actually let it run its course. Days, at least, if she didn't intercede.

That first option usually takes at least an hour, so she reads for a little while longer -- it's Pre-Resurrection history of the United States at the moment, A People's History it calls itself, advertising itself as extracanonical to what's normally put in textbooks -- and then goes for a run and a shower, not being particularly quiet in case he is contemplating her opinion on anything.

No stir or any sign of emergence from the room. Not even so much as snacks disturbed.

Camilla makes tea and, while it steeps, sits a container of hummus on a plate and surrounds it with olives and cheese and crackers: easy to eat while busy, but nutritious. Then, plate and cups balanced, she tries the door handle.

It turns for her. Palamedes is writing at top speed, pausing every so often where notation doesn't flow quite the same way. Cam has to fight a strange and irritating flip of her stomach: she'd recognized the behavior, but she still hasn't seen him at it in quite this particular intensity, the near-possession of academia, since ...before Darrow. She approaches without sound, identifying a reasonably safe spot to set down the plate and cup as she does, so that by the time she's a halfstep behind she can put them down pragmatically without making him move his things.

On an impulse, she lets herself reach to rub the cord of muscle at the curve of his shoulder and neck: she can almost see the cramp from his hunching.

"What've you got, Warden?"

Edited 2021-11-09 06:58 (UTC)

When Palamedes has sunk this far into his work, it takes a lot to pull him out. Back in the Library, it wasn’t uncommon for scholars to knock on the Master Warden’s door and get no response; the clever ones who were really desperate for an audience learned to seek out the Warden’s Hand ahead of time, as she was one of the few people who knew how to draw him out of even the deepest research or most complex article. One or two of them have even grumbled about it, whispering that it’s all an act, a way for Palamedes to ignore people he would rather not talk to, and for Camilla to hoard more power than she has a right to. But while Pal can’t claim that he has never ignored a knock at his door because he finds the knock-er particularly obnoxious, his complete obliviousness is rarely staged.

The simple truth is that when Palamedes Sextus is in the zone, he’s in the zone.

Pal has never really understood why, in such circumstances, he notices Cam even when everyone else fades into the background—it’s a puzzle he finds mildly annoying for its lack of logic. The truth is that he just always knows when Cam is nearby, regardless of the circumstances. It’s like the air currents have changed direction, or a dying lightbulb has suddenly decided to return to life; her very Cam-ness changes the atmosphere.

Without looking up from his notebook (it’s half-filled, his hand is starting to cramp, but he doesn’t dare stop working the theorem until he’s satisfied that he’s wrung everything out that he can on his own), he smiles just faintly as the door opens and Camilla steps in. His gaze flickers to the plate and his stomach grumbles; dutifully, he reaches for a cracker and crams it in his mouth.

Once he’s filled up another page, Pal finally stops—at least for now. He flexes his fingers and tips his head back slightly so that he’s looking up at his cavalier.

“Do you remember what was written on the wall of the last laboratory we found at Canaan House?” The two of them have spent so much time pointedly avoiding any in-depth discussion of their last few hours in that dreadful place, but now, strangely, the question comes easily to his lips. Now, it’s important.

Edited 2021-11-10 03:38 (UTC)

She smiles a little, satisfied, when he takes a cracker, and looks over his shoulder a little. Camilla's no necromancer, but she's both learned enough -- both by training and by interest -- and has seen enough of Palamedes' theorems to know some basics; unfortunately, whatever it is that he's writing about is not basic. There's something going on with energy transmutation, and the symbol for soul, but she can't see that well -- he is substantially taller than her, after all -- and she's definitely not sure why he'd come bursting in having to write down a treatise on some kind of -- siphoning? Revenant transfer? It's not as though Darrow is teeming with inspiration about necromancy, for very starters.

"Your upper trapezius is a trigger point nightmare," she says mildly, feeling one such knot loosen under her slow push of blood into the area, as he scribbles away. "You have got to stop hunching."

Camilla blinks when he tips his head back and asks the question abruptly, eyes turned up at her. That room...yes, she remembers that room. How do you forget the last place you saw the dearest person to you in the world? How do you stop reliving how you managed to lose sight of them? If there's a way, even with him alive and familiarly cramping up all his muscles, she hasn't figured it out.

She had known he had figured something out, was the worst part. She'd seen the way he was at that wall, even surrounded by all that horror, Ianthe boasting about eating Naberius Tern, Coronabeth keening in the corner; and later, Silas and poor Colum...She'd felt it. She just hadn't known yet what it was.

She hadn't known it was her losing him.

"You lied to us," she says, slightly distantly, remembering the big black letters, the angry declaration, the way Palamedes had rubbed one thumb over the texture of the paint. She hears her voice almost as though it's someone else's, filtered back through all she knows now about the Blood of Eden, about the Empire, about God. "It said, you lied to us."

“You sound like Archivist Zeta, minus the boldfaced hypocrisy.” Frankly, Palamedes probably learned to sit at a desk care of his mother; that has never stopped her from chiding him for his posture. He makes a small mmph—half discomfort, half relief—when she expertly presses the tension away.

Cam answers, and as easily as the question had come to his lips, her reply—and the sense memory that comes with it—knocks the breath out of him. He gives a short nod, the silence stretching for a moment or two whilst he finds his voice. “Without careful examination, one might have assumed that the paint was as old as the rest of the room—or, at the very least irrelevant to the situation at hand. But it was very recent. Recent enough that the painter had left their DNA behind.” He chews on his lip. “The DNA contained markers for Heptanary cancer. I wasn’t even looking; I would have recognized it blindfolded and wearing thermal gloves.”

He turns around in his chair, resting his elbows on the back of it and his chin in his hands. “A riddle, then. Who was he and what did he lie about?”

"Worse people to sound like," she says, although it's perturbing that both he and she have thought that about something she's said recently. Or makes her feel old, anyway. Cam purses her lips with satisfaction at that little oof of pain and ensuing relief. "If you want Nonagesimus to use the misalignment of your vertebrae as a debate point against whatever it is you're saying, by all means," she teases, backing up to perch on the edge of the bed.

When he explains, after a moment of silence, Camilla's eyes widen with self-cursing recognition, breath huffing out an an exhale as she realizes why that idle run of his hand had brought him to such uncharacteristic stillness.

Heptanary cancer. Of course. Dulcinea had had it; of course he knew it. And so did Cytherea; both Seventh, both cursed by the same bloodline. Whatever he'd done, and she had a reasonable idea, Palamedes had advanced it enough for that grotesque tumor she'd spotted to give her a fatal weakness.

She'd been assessing so many threats -- and so much new information, the way it clicked into place with what they'd been batting back and forth -- and she hadn't been able to make sense of it. She'd known something had just happened in his mind -- stupid, stupid.

It doesn't matter. It happened. The next part happened. They're here, now.

Camilla squints a little into the middle distance while that battle -- it exists mostly in pieces in her mind, some of the vivid, sparse moments useful and some of them very much not -- and the months afterward play themselves out behind them. "Gave away your riddle," she says, thinking about how many times as a child she'd been so proud to be part of the Emperor's truth and chest hurting. "The word was you, not he."

She glances up at Palamedes, partly because, if he doesn't already, he'll know by her look that she's just being unnecessarily glib. Partly because she always feels a little more anchored looking at him. Inconveniently, she still hasn't wholly retrained her mind to not retreat inside a box within a box in her mind when faced with discomfort, but sometimes she wants to be present.

"We got to hear her monologue, too," she reminds him, pressing her lips together, then amends, "A little. Which makes our antagonist Emperor John Gaius, and the lie --" She tips her head, smiling a little, something like gallows humor. "Well, I've come to realize he may have lied about quite a bit more than most of us were ever aware, but given the place and time, and some of what I saw then and since, I have to assume it had to do with Lyctorhood."

Palamedes cocks an eyebrow, his lips moving just slightly as he replays the question in his head. “Oh, bollocks. I really need to work on my delivery, don’t I?” He huffs quietly. “And you’re quite correct; the reliability of the Lord our God, Emperor and kindly Prince of Death has been thoroughly discredited.” The words come out with more bitterness than Pal intends. He had never been a devoted believer—in fact, he tended to be vocally skeptical, even by Sixth standards, of the Emperor’s infallibility—but he had always believed on some level that their God was an imperfect but loving Father who had humanity’s best interests at heart. Now, the very last vestiges of that assumption of good faith have been stripped away, and Pal is afraid of what other beliefs might come tumbling down as a result.

“But there’s an original sin at the root of it, isn’t there? An original lie. She—“ Pal can’t bring himself to say Cytherea’s name, still— “she didn’t say it, exactly, but she was so angry, Cam.” He stops, taking off his glasses and pressing his thumb and forefinger against his closed eyes, unsure for a moment if he can get out the rest. It’s important, he reminds himself. “Like she’d discovered a person she loved had been killed for no good reason.”

Glasses still off, he meets Cam’s gaze again. “It’s obvious when you think about it. The Lyctoral theorem as it currently stands isn’t only ghastly—it’s a mess. And the King Undying is a lot of things, but He doesn’t strike me as sloppy.”

Then he asks what surely must sound like a non-sequitur. “Have you managed to speak to Gideon recently?”

It doesn't quite make her laugh, but the corner of her lips turn up at Palamedes' huff. The expression transforms into something a little more wistful at his bitterness, not because it makes her sad to see -- although it does -- but because she shares it. More, probably, than Palamedes could know. Camilla had always been more devoted in cavalierdom to Palamedes and, if pressed for something larger, the Sixth House and the cause of truth and knowledge, than she ever had been to serving either the Emperor or God. But He existed in the background, the arbiter of necromancy, the giver of the gifts she saw used every day. After Canaan House, and the trials, after eight months with Blood of Eden -- even after the torture they'd inflicted out of fear and bias -- she's beginning to feel things crack around the edges. A resentment, even, a simmering anger she rarely lets show for how much of her life has been spent not knowing. And yet none of it matters here in Darrow.

But maybe it gets to. Palamedes caring means -- well, at very least it means she has her closest confidante to talk to.

She winces a little at imagining that last conversation between him and -- Cytherea. Cytherea. She's hammered the name into her head over and over to stamp out everything of Dulcinea she'd attached to her, the words of her saved letters, all the resentment she'd held against her and Gideon for those early days in Canaan, stubbornly working at the Gordian knot of feelings for her dear friend and the woman she thought was her. It's impossible, but she's managed to at least dull her feelings for Dulcie behind the wall of rage she can't help but still feel for the Lyctor who killed the people she loved most and so many others she had grown to care for.

"Like she was accessory to it," she elaborates. She'd had so much time, in those weeks without speaking, to contemplate the wool taken off her eyes. The worth of a cavalier. All that they -- that Palamedes -- had refused to engage with -- but in the end, wasn't it the justification for that entire social structure? While at the same time grieving, berating herself for losing him: yes, she thinks she can imagine how the Lyctor felt. That roiling anger at Cytherea almost touches pity for a moment, understanding, with all that Palamedes is saying and all that she's seen and learned. There's something so terrible and unwanted and world-shifting in that momentary compassion; it's nauseating. "There was a moment," she says, distantly. "I would have had her if she'd been anything but a Lyctor, but she had -- an entropy field up, I guess, I couldn't get my knife through her skin." She skips neatly over the part where she'd been letting her hand flay to try and run down her thanergy. "She said, I had a nice girl as a cavalier once too. She died for me. What can you do?. At the time, I was angry, and fighting, and she was too near to killing us all. And maybe it was just a taunt. But I think she might have meant what more could I do to her after that."

Cam shakes her head, as if it'll rid her of the memory, of that and so much more. Her eyes go back into focus when Palamedes says the equation's a mess, and she searches his eyes for a moment. "I have," she says slowly. She's been focused on Gideon being the child of God, some of its implications, but now other details fit themselves together like a stack of blocks, all at once. She lifts her chin at the papers he's been scribbling on. "You think she was right. They were right, the ones -- trying to get into the Ninth. That there's more, some exchange, and it was kept secret."

“If she had known anything about you at all, she would have never called you a nice girl,” Palamedes observes, and though he smiles, it isn’t a very nice smile. It’s a smile that could remind someone that being the greatest necromancer of one’s generation means one is capable of terrible things, even if one is as careful and kind a person as the Warden of the Library always strives to be.

He’s turning his glasses around in his fingers in silence when he hears the all-too-familiar crack of a tiny screw losing its structural integrity thanks to Palamedes’ slow, constant assault. The sound breaks the tension in his expression, and he holds them up with an apologetic wince. “…I’ll take care of that later,” he says, setting them aside.

His eyes brighten when Cam reveals that she has spoken to Gideon—it’s a lot of take in, of course, and Cam’s mind must be roiling in the aftermath as much as his own, but that does make it much easier to catch her up. “I think—no, I know—there’s another sort of lyctorhood, where no one needs to die. The theorem isn’t meant to create a perpetual furnace; it’s meant to create a perpetual wheel, no destruction necessary—“ he gestures at his papers— “well, sort of, it’s an awful metaphor, but I’m still stuck at the ‘awful metaphor’ stage of figuring it out.”

He scrubs his hands through his hair. “I’ve suspected as much for a while now, as it points to a different source to fuel the theorem, one that doesn’t lead to horror and bloodshed. But we didn’t have any proof, and no way to test it, not until Gideon woke up one day and realized that she didn’t actually die.” Pal flashes a smile that’s just a little manic with competing emotions: excitement, and weariness, and horror, and awe. “Harrow became a Lyctor, and despite that, Gideon Nav kept existing. And of course God knew it was it possible. He invented the fucking thing.”

It's a chilling smile, but not one that surprises Camilla. She, after all, has always been capable of relatively terrible things; it's just that most people don't understand how capable until she's dislocating their arm behind their back.

"If I'd gotten over her fawning all over Gideon on the landing pad, we'd have probably spotted that earlier," she grouses. If there's anyone she feels like she failed as much as Palamedes at Canaan House -- and it's not that she wouldn't have loved to save the Fourth or the Fifth, or anyone really, but it doesn't feel like a personal failure -- it's Dulcie. It was genius, and beautifully brave too, not to mention them and what they were to her, and it meant she trusted they would know something was wrong. And instead Cam had wasted so much time baffled and betrayed and seething, believing their dearest friend for years was capable of the cruelty of ignoring Pal and flirting with Gideon in front of them.

For all the self-flagellation she's capable of inside her head, though, the actual comment is light, just a little wry. The Warden's on something big here. He doesn't need her regrets.

Him breaking his spectacles makes her smile a little bit, anyway. Every time. She leans from the bed to snag them by the arm, gesturing for him to continue and leaning back to dig in the thinner nightstand drawer, one of many places she's hidden the little plastic tubes of glasses repair kits that they sell at pharmacies here. As he talks, she sets down her tea and finds the tiny screw and miniature screwdriver, better able to listen for something to do with her hands anyway.

She nods, slowly, taking it in. A perpetual wheel. It's less horrifying, for one thing, but for some reason, she'd just accepted the idea that cavaliers had been created to die. One flesh, one end is a beautiful idea, and she's extraordinarily lucky to have someone like Palamedes sworn to her, someone entirely uninterested in her ever even getting injured, but there's idealism and there's practical reality, and somehow -- as nauseating as it was, the more they'd found, the more she'd realized it made sense.

The idea that perhaps power just doesn't work like that, that it should never have been used that way and that there is an alternative, is -- well, Cytherea was absolutely right, as much as she resents that. It's actually more horrifying.

"She wasn't the only of the original Lyctors to figure that out," she says suddenly, which is apropos of nothing, except that it absolutely is connected in her head, and she leans forward, eyes bright. "Well. I don't know if it was that lie that did it, but it seems like a good candidate. There's -- those eight months in Blood of Eden custody weren't for nothing. It's --" She takes a breath, trying to explain rationally. "They're terrorists, yes; they do terrible things. To them, necromancers are -- most of them probably don't think you're human beings. But they're people who've been forcibly displaced and had their homeworlds destroyed for thanergy and a war no one knows the rationale for. They've been roped generationally into some sort of life contract to the Emperor -- the Second knows all about this, I guess -- and they never knowing he was immortal. I got in with their commander so I could find out more, try to filter it all out. And here's the thing. Lyctors are helping them. Currently. Judith is still alive because of one."

"Pal, they have -- they still have -- a broadcast signal into the Houses, a sort of news channel, and it's somewhere on the Sixth. On the Sixth! They knew things about us, too, things no one who hadn't been to the Sixth would know, but it was like sitting in history class. Some of what they were describing hasn't existed on the Sixth for thousands of years. As if they'd learned it from Cassiopeia herself.

I think -- whatever the Emperor has done, whatever reason he had for deciding cavaliers were expendable, that that was better, the repercussion has been coming for millennia."

“Fuck.” Camilla has told Palamedes bits and pieces about her time with the Blood of Eden, her stories, unsettlingly, turning a theoretical threat into a society made up of real people. None of her stories have been pleasant, and none of them quite dislodge his long-time belief that the existence of BoE is a tragic and inevitable result of a myriad of Cohort expansion, and yet still a group that must be stopped.

But Cam always tells her stories carefully, leaping over narrative lacunas that frighten him. He doesn’t dare ask what those gaps might contain.

This time, the gaps are still there, but what’s outside the gaps is so enormous and world-turning that Palamedes barely notices them. Obviously the lyctors had colluded with BoE at some point—ergo, Gideon Nav—but he is startled to discover that the alliance had continued. More shocking still is the realization that it might go further back than he had imagined.

“A broadcast signal? Where—? How—?” Palamedes had a thousand questions, but they’re quickly drowned out by a deeper, more instinctual horror. After a lifetime of hearing truth over solace in lies, it feels like a betrayal, a violation, but by who? Who can he even be angry at? Strangely, maybe irrationally, given the source of the information, he finds it isn’t Blood of Eden. Maybe Blood of Eden is just the name for the people who have understood God’s betrayal the longest.

And none of it had to be like that. “You lied to us,” Palamedes recites with a small shudder. He remembers his horror at discovering what the avulsion chamber was meant to do, remembers Coronabeth keening over Naberius’ dead body, remembers Cytherea saying, we loved him like a brother, like a god. “He sure fucking did.”

He lifts his chin then, eyes bright and determined, even if his gaze remains slightly unfocused without his glasses. Only now does he notice, and only distantly, that she's fixing his broken frames. “Cam, we have to make this work.” He gestures at his notes. “We have to prove—“ What, that there’s another way? That necromancy can do something besides breed power and corruption? Pal swallows. “We just have to.”

"I don't know," she says seriously, and almost laughs, because she's also been desperate to know how it's set up. Of course they both want to know where the receiver is on the Sixth. They've both been all over the Library, know it as well as anyone, and if someone's still maintaining something like that -- or maybe it's simply just very sturdy, basic technology and doesn't need much maintenance, but. "That's one thing I don't know," she shakes her head. "How it was set up, how it's been maintained, who knows and who doesn't..." She gestures uselessly. "The only thing I can think is that it's hidden among the various external structures, so only maintenance constructs ever see it." It's not the meat of the question and she knows it. Things are always double-stamped, triple-checked, peer-reviewed, everything in the name of transparency. There's a lot of jostling for importance and credit, but the idea of a conspiracy on the Sixth is unsettling.

But in some way that she can already hear Judith calling radicalization in her head, she isn't entirely sure that the conspiracy isn't most of how the Empire's been set up, and this gesture -- not even approval, per se, just one little act of rebalance -- a tiny light in the name of truth. Camilla, feeling a little adrift about all this, nods morosely at Palamedes' comment. Most people who aren't close with the Warden are taken a little aback when they first hear him swear, which tends to amuse her as he really does do it quite often; but it does betray that his anger is real.

Pal sits up straight then, though, rallied, his silvery eyes lit almost from within with a determination and passion. She's seen it before, of course she has, but it never fails to amaze Camilla, after all these years together, how he can take something as devastating, as world collapsing as all this and come back, bearing the flag of innovation and change. She can't help but love him for it, that insistent, contagious passion to work for more, for better. She couldn't do anything but march behind that banner.

Right now, she leans forward, smiling a little, and puts his repaired glasses back on his face. "Then we'll do it," she says, as though it's that simple. Maybe it is. Her believing there was no other option but to do something brought him back from the River. Why not change the Empire as they know it? "I'll help you with whatever you need."

She leans her head back, thinking, and recovers her tea. "In the name of making you prove your thesis, how do you know Gideon wasn't still alive because of Harrow's lobotomy? And you can't say because it was stupid."

Palamedes practically beams in response to the question. Naturally, the young scholar believes in the ethics of building a better world--believes it wildly and deeply--but he is still a product of an upbringing in which debating finer points of necromancy was more common than discussing the morality of what they did. Compared to all the earth-shattering issues swarming his mind, explaining his theory behind a seemingly impossible theorem feels like child's play.

"I never said it didn't," he answers cheerfully. "If I'm entirely honest, we may never know for sure if Gideon's soul remained intact thanks to that stupid," yes, he said it, "attempt at brain surgery, or some underlying tendency of the theorem. Gideon's story proves that the power of the lyctoral well may be available without a dead cavalier to fuel it, but, unfortunately, not how. And it's not like we can run a double-blind study." He makes a face, able to imagine a couple of scholars who would be happy to do just that, even if their proposals never made it through review.

"Though I hate to admit it, the lobotomy may have helped. Leave it to Harrow to discover the most ham-fisted way of doing something brilliant. But--" and now he picks up his notebook from his desk and brandishes it. The top is labeled GIDEON PRIME // PYRRHA DVE, followed by a page full of half written, quickly abandoned theorems. "Our Ninth House friends are not the only ones to have found themselves in such circumstances."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject