hellonspectacles | The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

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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.

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“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.”

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The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

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