Chapter Text
Prologue
It is a strange thing to decide that your life has no value and you would be better off dead when you are still a child. But Harrowhark Nonagesimus had known she was a monster for a long time; her parents had told her as soon as she was old enough to understand. The knowledge that two hundred children had died to fuel your conception was not entirely conducive to mental health and emotional stability. "You must deserve their sacrifice, Harrowhark," her mother had said. "You must live a life that justifies what we have done," her father had told her.
Harrow had come to the depths of Drearburh, to the very tomb which her house had been set to guard a myriad ago by the Emperor Undying, the Lord of the Nine Resurrections, and had set out to kill herself in opening it. It was not the first time she had come; she had been here many times before, carefully undoing the profligate panoply of traps and bone wards and barriers that had been placed a myriad ago to keep that which lay within sealed away forever.
"I pray the Tomb is shut forever," she whispered in the dark as she slipped through the outer doors and into the huge cathedral cave that lay beyond. "I pray the rock is never rolled away." She paused a moment to light the electric lantern that she carried with her. "I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest with closed eye and stilled brain." She had said those words almost every day since the day she had first been able to speak them, and today, even as she prayed them, Harrow set out to wake that which was buried.
It had taken a year of effort, a year of determined necromantic work, initially done for the sake of ending her own life and, she hoped, the world with it, but later continued to satisfy a ravenous, morbid curiosity. She would see what lay within the Tomb with her own eyes or she would die in the attempt, or she would see it and die. It was going well so far. Except for the minor detail of the red-headed child who was trailing after her like a ghost.
"Griddle, stop following me!" Harrowhark Nonagesimus hissed into the gloom.
"I'm not," the other child insisted.
Harrow was less than convinced. "You clearly are. If you don't leave me alone, I'll…" She cast about mentally in search of some threat that might force the red haired girl -- Gideon Nav -- to retreat. "...I'll tell Crux!"
Gideon's face went white, and she hesitated.
"And I'll tell Aiglamene," Harrow elaborated.
Another moment of hesitation, and then Gideon found her resolve. "I'm not following you," she insisted.
"Then what are you doing?"
Gideon thought about it. "I'm… going the same direction you're going, behind you."
They stared at each other. Harrow's black-eyed glare all but bored into Gideon's skull as if she could force her pursuer to flee by sheer force of disdain, and neither said anything.
Harrow looked away first. "That's called following, Nav," she snapped.
She had already rolled away the stone. That had happened after a particularly vicious fight with Gideon which had ended with what had seemed like half the girl's face beneath her fingernails. She felt a distant sense of satisfaction at the dismantled wards and traps that littered the chamber leading up to the stone which had been rolled away.
Harrow made her way down the long tunnel and into that final chamber where a saltwater moat surrounded a frozen mausoleum. They crossed the pool and approached the open-topped coffin to peer at the thing that lay within; the body that lay in chained repose within the coffin stared up at the ceiling with open eyes the same color as Gideon's, its arms wrapped around a sword, body and limbs alike bound in ice.
Her breath caught in her throat as she stared for she didn't know how long, moving to gain a better, unobstructed view, and for a little while, she forgot that Griddle was following behind.
Her heart thumped in her chest and thudded in her ears. She could feel it in her temples. Heat bloomed in her face, her cheeks, her chest.
It was the most beautiful woman Harrow had ever seen, and she stared and stared and stared. Harrow felt like… she wasn't sure what. It was new and strange. She licked her suddenly, uncomfortably dry lips. She leaned down towards the body's perfect face, unsure of what would happen if she continued but unable to look away from that face.
In that moment, Harrow knew that she wanted to live. She wanted to live forever just in case the body in the tomb ever woke up. She wanted…
Her warm lips brushed against the body's cold mouth, and then…
"Ew," Gideon said. "What are you doing?"
Harrow jumped away from the Tomb, away from the perfect woman who lay within, and then there was pain. A streak of white across her vision. Pain like a fire behind her eyeballs, like a headache inside the roots of her teeth. Her whole world tilted. She was falling. Gideon fell beside her with a cry. They were both bleeding heavily.
She had missed a trap. Harrow had been absolutely confident in her success, in the thoroughness of her efforts to find and disarm every last one of them, and she had missed one, and now there was pain and blood and a low geologic rumble.
Across the saltwater moat, the stone was rolling back into place.
It was almost funny how far away her decision to end her life seemed in the face of slowly bleeding to death in a place where no help could ever reach you. Curiosity about the thing in the tomb had stayed her hand for a year, but now, actually facing the death she had been courting for so long, it was different. She couldn't die here. She wouldn't! She needed to live until the Body woke up! She cast about in her memory for some way out, some way to undo what had been done. She knew that there were techniques for using another person's thanergy to heal yourself, but thanergy was released by death, and as they lay within the innermost chamber of the Locked Tomb, each of them mortally wounded, Harrow found, much to her surprise, that she did not want Gideon Nav to die.
Thalergy. The theorem could be altered to use thalergy. She could use it to heal herself. It would have to be a transference of thalergy -- of life energy -- and it would have to… it would have to be a two way transfer. Gideon lacked the disposition for necromancy, but Harrow could force the link, and talk her through the process. That could work, couldn't it?
"What are you doing?" Gideon asked, and her voice came out with a pained wetness that definitely was not a good sign.
Harrow tried to focus, tried to remember the all but perfunctory lessons she had once been given to at least have a theoretical grasp of flesh magic. Her mouth twisted as if she had tasted a lemon, because for the very first time in her life, she wished that she had paid more attention to the forms of necromancy that were made to deal with meat. "I am trying to save your life," she said.
"Can you save my life in a way that's less weird?"
Harrow glared at her patient, trying very hard to ignore her own injuries as she worked. "Shut up and try not to bleed to death, Griddle."
"My flesh is *literally* crawling, Nonagesimus," Gideon said in that petulant tone that Harrow had come to despise over the years of their… acquaintanceship. Gideon wasn't wrong, however; her skin really was writhing beneath Harrowhark's inexpert and clumsy efforts to repair the torn meat and ripped flesh.
"This has not escaped my notice," Harrow replied.
If flesh magic wouldn't work, she would have to find something else. Anything else. It was that or death.
The body sat up with the low crackling grind of a glacier breaking apart. Chunks of ice and chunks of frozen skin and meat rained down from her back into the coffin. Neither girl turned to look. They were both too busy dying, and trying not to.
Harrow tried a dozen different theorems and their variations in an effort to save herself and her companion in that final chamber with the chained body and the ice. She got it wrong again and again and again. She remembered a sense of rising desperation as she fumbled at a process she didn't understand in an effort to save both herself and this other girl who by all rights should have been nothing to her, but was her only peer. At one point there was a sense of doubled vision as she saw through Gideon's eyes. And then, after yet more panicked tumbling, there came a wonderful, delicious energy that Harrow suspected was Gideon's soul, and when she realized she was consuming it she tried to feed her own back into Gideon all in a panicked rush.
The world grew colder and darker. Her limbs grew ever heavier. It was hard to tell if it was blood loss or if it was because she had emptied herself. The golden eyed Body in chains watched them all the while. The Body's mouth opened and a voice from its lips asked:
"Is this really how it happens?"
Darkness and warmth.