The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

[hellonspectacles]

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.

Comments

[undonewithout]

"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."

[hellonspectacles]

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?”

[undonewithout]

"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.

[hellonspectacles]

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.”