[Almost defensively, that he would even ask, but not exactly. Maybe, perhaps, almost gently, but only the slightest trace that she can't avoid. If it were her, gentleness now would be her undoing, so she'll only give the amount that she can't help.]
[Oh. Well, then. She lifts her gaze to him, in that case.]
The will to survive, the resolve to spite those tormentors who would see you broken or dead, is an admirable one. Never doubt that I believe this to be the case. Never doubt that I admire you for refusing to be what he intended to make you.
[... white doesn't know if it's all that admirable, because it's like he told harrow before: wanting something is more satisfying than actually getting it. he has no regrets over killing his lifelong abuser, but achieving it left him feeling hollow in a way he can't explain.
more than that, though, receiving any kind of praise is? very overwhelming? which is why white looks away, trying to make it appear casual and utterly failing.]
... O-Oh. Well, thanks.
[this is probably why everyone thinks white is a loser]
Anyway. . . it's memshare time for White. You gave me a nasty one, so I'm giving you one right back.
You are in a large green swimming pool in a darkened room, made of marble, the door guarded by skeletons of your own creation. Beside you in the pool is the looming, angry, distrusting figure of your cavalier. She has followed you here, when you asked, but you know she is itching for a fight. You and she have fought so many times before - you grew up as children together, and your brawls were legendary, brutal, as nasty and bloody as two children who truly hate one another can be. But what you must do now is more difficult. Neither you nor she will not survive here, any longer, without a modicum of trust between the two of you, and there is only one way you can gain that trust.
"The Ninth House has a secret, Nav," you tell her, attempting to make your voice as calm and reasonable as you can, despite your mounting terror. "And we could never discuss it, unless - this was my mother's rule - we were immersed in salt water. We kept a ceremonial pool for the purpose, hidden from the rest of the House. It was cold and deep and I hated every moment I was in it. But my mother is dead, and I find now that — if I really am to betray my family's most sacred trust — I am obliged at the least to keep, intact, her rule.”
Gideon blinked. "Oh shit," she says. "You really meant it. This is it. This is go time."
"This is go time,” you agree.
Gideon swept both of her hands through her hair, trickles going down the back of her neck and into her sodden collar. Eventually, all she said was, "Why?"
"The reasons are multitudinous," you say. "I had — intended to let you know some of it, before. If I had told you my suspicions about Septimus' cavalier on the first day, none of this would have happened.”
"Why the hell didn't you tell me about him before you sent Jeannemary and her necromancer down to the facility to look for the guy who was in a box in your closet? Why didn't you take the moment to say, I don't know, Let's not send two children downstairs to get fucked up by a huge bone creature.”
"I panicked,” you admit. "At the time I thought I was sending you down a blind tunnel, and that the real danger was Sextus and Septimus; that either one might ambush you, and that the sensible solution was to take them both on myself. My plan was to get you clear of a necromantic duel. At the time I even thought it elegant."
The paint is dripping from Gideon's face. "Nonagesimus, all you had to do was say that Dulcinea’ s cav was a mummy man —"
"I had reason to believe," you say, with not a little bitterness, "that you would trust her more than you trusted me." Gideon glowers at this answer. "I wanted to do enough research to present you with a cut-and-dry case. I had no idea what it would mean for the Fourth House. The Ninth is deep in their blood debt and I am undone by the expense. I — I did not want to hurt you, Griddle! I didn't want to disturb your — equilibrium."
"Harrow," said Gideon, staring at you. "If my heart had a dick you would kick it."
You do not understand how this conversation is going so badly, how all of your explanations only make this worse. "I did not want to alienate you more than I already had. And then it seemed as though" you have no idea how to admit this next part, the tiny, fragile growing atom of trust that had sparked between the two of you "we were on a more even footing. Our — we — It was too tenuous to risk. And then. . . ”
"Harrow," says Gideon, slowly. "If I hadn't gone to Palamedes - and I nearly didn't go to Palamedes - I would have waited for you in our room with our sword drawn, and I would have gone for you. I was so convinced that you were behind everything. That you'd killed Jeannemary and Isaac, Magnus and Abigail."
You're stumbling even more "I - I didn't. I don't. I would never have - and I know."
"You would have killed me," Gideon accuses.
"Or vice versa," you admit. Because, even with all the power at your command, you don't know yourself capable of killing Gideon Nav.
Gideon spends a moment weighing this over in her mind. "Okay. Question time, then. If it wasn't you, then who did all the murders."
You float in the water, thoughtful. "I can't say, sorry. That's not a fruitful line of inquiry. We're being pursued by revenants, or it's all part of the test, or one or more of us is picking off the others."
Gideon moves on to another question, more terrible. "What do you know about the conditioner pathogen that bumped off all the little kids, that happened when I was little, before you were born?"
You're silent for a long time, and when you speak, it feels like some else's voice coming out of your mouth, telling a story that happened to someone else. "It didn't happen before I was born. Or at least, that's not precise enough. It happened before I was even conceived. My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fulfill the role as heir to the Locked Tomb. But we hardly had access to the foetal care technology available to other houses. She had tried and had failed already, and she was getting old. She had one chance, and she couldn't afford chance."
"You can't control whether you're carrying a necro," Gideon protested.
"Yes, you can," you said slowly. "If you have the resources, and are willing to pay the price of using them."
"Harrow," Gideon said slowly. "By resources, are you saying. . . "
"Two hundred children," you intone, weary. "From the ages of six weeks to eighteen years. They needed to all die more or less simultaneously for it to work. My great-aunts measured out the organophosphates after weeks of mathematics. Our House pumped them through the cooling system." Gideon is silent, but you can't watch Gideon as you explain this. You need to explain this as an academic, as a theory. "The infants alone generated enough thanergy to take out the entire planet. Babies always do, for some reason."
You watch Gideon, staring at you, hold her knees to her chest and go under the water. She stays under as the long seconds tick by, your mouth becoming drier and drier.
When she emerges, your voice is weak and hoarse. "Say something."
"Gross," says Gideon, vaguely. "Ick. The worst. What can I say to that? What the fuck can I say to all of that?"
"It let me be born. And I was -- me. And I have been aware, since I was very young, about how I was created. I am two hundred sons and daughters of my House, Griddle -- I am a whole generation of the Ninth. I came into this world a necromancer at the expense of Drearburh's future, because there is no future without me."
"Why leave me," she demands. "They murdered the rest of the House, but they left me off the list?"
"You were meant to die, Griddle, along with all of the others. You inhaled nerve gas for ten minutes. My great-aunts went blind just from releasing it and you weren't even affected, even though you were just two cots away from the vent. You just didn't die. My parents were terrified of you for the rest of their lives."
Gideon floats in stunned silence; you wish more than anything you could see what she was thinking, but you can't, you don't know. But when she asks the next question, it's the most terrible one she could ask. "And do you think you're worth it?"
To your credit, you don't flinch. "If I became a Lyctor, and renewed my House, and made it great again, greater than it ever was, and justified its existence in the eyes of God the Emperor -- if I made my whole life a monument to those who died to ensure that I would live and live powerfully --"
Your words echo, so portentously, through these marble halls; you can hear them hammering back at you, and they chip you away.
"Of course I wouldn't be worth it. I'm an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to be torpedoed into the center of Dominicus for. If any other Houses knew of what we'd done, they would destroy us from orbit. I am a war crime."
You stand up, letting the water and paint drip away from you. "But I had to be a necromancer of their bloodline, Nav. . . because only a necromancer can open the Locked Tomb. And only a perfect necromancer can undo the wards and roll away the rock. My parents didn't understand that, and that's why they died. That's why, when they knew I'd done it, that I'd rolled away the stone and gone through the monument and seen the place the body was buried - they thought I'd betrayed God."
"Are you telling me, that when you were ten years old, ten years old, you busted the lock on the tomb, broke into an ancient grave, and made your way past hideous old magic to look at a dead thing, even though your parents told you it would start the apocalypse?"
"Yes," you say, calmly.
"Why?"
"I was tired of being two hundred corpses. I was old enough to know how monstrous I was. I had decided to go look at the tomb, and if I didn't think it was worth it, to open and air lock and walk, and walk, and walk."
"But you came back," Gideon says. "I told the Reverend Mother and Reverend Father what I'd seen you do. I killed your parents."
The guilt in her voice unmoors you - you're caught off-guard by it, never once suspecting that all of these years, she'd actually thought she was responsible for her parents' suicide. "My parents killed my parents, Nav. I should know."
"But I told them - "
You cut her off. "My parents killed themselves because they were frightened and ashamed. They thought it was the only honourable thing to do."
There's anger in Gideon's voice when she says "I think your parents were frightened and ashamed for a long time."
"I'm not saying I didn't blame you," you admit. "I did. It was much easier. I pretended for a long time I could have saved them by talking to them. When you walked in, when you saw what you saw. . . I hated you, because you saw what I didn't do. My mother and father weren't angry, Nav. They tied their own nooses. They helped me tie mine. But I couldn't do it. After all I'd convinced myself I was ready to do. I made myself watch when my parents - I could not do the slightest thing that my House expected of me. You're not the only one who couldn't die."
"Harrow," Gideon says again, her voice catching. "Harrow, I'm so bloody sorry."
This - this, you cannot tolerate. This you cannot live with. Your eyes snap open, and you grab Gideon by the shirt, suddenly furiously angry, and you shake her, wanting to scream.
"You apologize to me? You apologize to me now? You say that you're sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second goddamn thought! I have spent my life trying to make you regret that you weren't dead, all because I regretted that I wasn't. And you have the temerity to tell me that you're sorry? I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot, I brought you to this killing field, and you pity me!"
Your anger, white hot, begins to give way to a swirling despair, a choking grief that overwhelms your core. "Strike me down. You've won. I have lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die by your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you."
And at that, Gideon wraps her arms around you with that astounding strength of hers, and you hold your breath, and you prepare yourself for the relief it will bring you when she holds you under the water, drowns you, suffocates the life out of you. For it to end this way, finally, finally, is such a relief.
As the seconds drag on, and you are not drowned, with dawning horror you instead realize that actually, you are receiving a hug. You thrash and claw against this new indignity, attempting to break free, attempting to tear her off you, and then you collapse, the fight gone from you with a suddenness and replaced with an exhaustion that is cellular. You lie limply and damply in her arms, defeated. She kisses you on the nose.
"Too many words," says Gideon, confidently. "How about these: One flesh, one end, bitch." The oath of a cavalier to her necromancer. You flush darkly, but Gideon lifts your head so you cannot hide away. "Say it, loser."
when it's over, white is left staring in shock. not quite horror, as he's long past the point of being appalled by things like genocide, unfortunately—although maybe there's some horror on harrow's behalf, for the misery it's brought her. (because he might not have much empathy for strangers, for some nebulous moral concept, but the people before him are another story.)
still, while he doesn't know what he expected, it wasn't this.
after a few moments, white opens his mouth, and with all his eloquence—]
[Hey, here's something kind of not chill. She stares back at him, not shaken or upset in any way, just a little bewildered, caught off guard. Blood is dripping from her nose; she brings a hand to her temple automatically.]
. . . Are you all right? Have I said something to offend you?
[She - she doesn't know exactly what he means by that. How many tragic backstories can a person have? A few, probably. But she suspects - it's likely his reaction, how unsettled he is, or the fact that there is really one thing she would not want it to be. Her hand shakes a little as she considers the implications.
Steady. Be rational. Because - he saw her explain it to someone. Meaning that - if that's what he saw - she has never explained that, not to anyone.]
[Her shoulders hunch a little, as she sighs, and something like relief is etched on her face, as she realized - yes, she never told that person the one terrible, unforgivable thing. She never spoke, to the person White is speaking of, of the secret of the Ninth House children.
She has not been revealed yet, because she never breathed a word of that to him.]
Ortus Nigenad, of course. The - hallucinations. It's alright. I don't mind that you saw. I only told him because I would need his help disguising them.
[... well, white is growing increasingly alarmed. okay, so harrow is for sure just wiping out any acknowledgment of this "gideon nav". aaaaaaaaaaaaaah, what is wrong with harrow's head?]
Um... uh...
[he looks up as if the ceiling will give him answers this time, even though it failed him during the trial.]
[Oh. Well. She goes sort of slack and horrified at that. No more waving him off telling him its fine, just. Stunned silence. Because she knows exactly what that means.
She had never spoken a word of that, however. She had never spoken even a word, except to her God. So how. . . how could he see a memory of her confessing to Ortus Nigenad?]
I see.
[Her heart hammers, terrified for a moment, and then her expression hardens.]
Mark me now. If you ever breathe a word of this to anyone I will kill you. First I will ruin you, and then I will watch you die. I swear it by the Tomb.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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[Almost defensively, that he would even ask, but not exactly. Maybe, perhaps, almost gently, but only the slightest trace that she can't avoid. If it were her, gentleness now would be her undoing, so she'll only give the amount that she can't help.]
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[support's not exactly something he's used to.]
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The will to survive, the resolve to spite those tormentors who would see you broken or dead, is an admirable one. Never doubt that I believe this to be the case. Never doubt that I admire you for refusing to be what he intended to make you.
[1/2]
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more than that, though, receiving any kind of praise is? very overwhelming? which is why white looks away, trying to make it appear casual and utterly failing.]
... O-Oh. Well, thanks.
[this is probably why everyone thinks white is a loser]
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Anyway. . . it's memshare time for White. You gave me a nasty one, so I'm giving you one right back.
You are in a large green swimming pool in a darkened room, made of marble, the door guarded by skeletons of your own creation. Beside you in the pool is the looming, angry, distrusting figure of your cavalier. She has followed you here, when you asked, but you know she is itching for a fight. You and she have fought so many times before - you grew up as children together, and your brawls were legendary, brutal, as nasty and bloody as two children who truly hate one another can be. But what you must do now is more difficult. Neither you nor she will not survive here, any longer, without a modicum of trust between the two of you, and there is only one way you can gain that trust.
"The Ninth House has a secret, Nav," you tell her, attempting to make your voice as calm and reasonable as you can, despite your mounting terror. "And we could never discuss it, unless - this was my mother's rule - we were immersed in salt water. We kept a ceremonial pool for the purpose, hidden from the rest of the House. It was cold and deep and I hated every moment I was in it. But my mother is dead, and I find now that — if I really am to betray my family's most sacred trust — I am obliged at the least to keep, intact, her rule.”
Gideon blinked. "Oh shit," she says. "You really meant it. This is it. This is go time."
"This is go time,” you agree.
Gideon swept both of her hands through her hair, trickles going down the back of her neck and into her sodden collar. Eventually, all she said was, "Why?"
"The reasons are multitudinous," you say. "I had — intended to let you know some of it, before. If I had told you my suspicions about Septimus' cavalier on the first day, none of this would have happened.”
"Why the hell didn't you tell me about him before you sent Jeannemary and her necromancer down to the facility to look for the guy who was in a box in your closet? Why didn't you take the moment to say, I don't know, Let's not send two children downstairs to get fucked up by a huge bone creature.”
"I panicked,” you admit. "At the time I thought I was sending you down a blind tunnel, and that the real danger was Sextus and Septimus; that either one might ambush you, and that the sensible solution was to take them both on myself. My plan was to get you clear of a necromantic duel. At the time I even thought it elegant."
The paint is dripping from Gideon's face. "Nonagesimus, all you had to do was say that Dulcinea’ s cav was a mummy man —"
"I had reason to believe," you say, with not a little bitterness, "that you would trust her more than you trusted me." Gideon glowers at this answer. "I wanted to do enough research to present you with a cut-and-dry case. I had no idea what it would mean for the Fourth House. The Ninth is deep in their blood debt and I am undone by the expense. I — I did not want to hurt you, Griddle! I didn't want to disturb your — equilibrium."
"Harrow," said Gideon, staring at you. "If my heart had a dick you would kick it."
You do not understand how this conversation is going so badly, how all of your explanations only make this worse. "I did not want to alienate you more than I already had. And then it seemed as though" you have no idea how to admit this next part, the tiny, fragile growing atom of trust that had sparked between the two of you "we were on a more even footing. Our — we — It was too tenuous to risk. And then. . . ”
"Harrow," says Gideon, slowly. "If I hadn't gone to Palamedes - and I nearly didn't go to Palamedes - I would have waited for you in our room with our sword drawn, and I would have gone for you. I was so convinced that you were behind everything. That you'd killed Jeannemary and Isaac, Magnus and Abigail."
You're stumbling even more "I - I didn't. I don't. I would never have - and I know."
"You would have killed me," Gideon accuses.
"Or vice versa," you admit. Because, even with all the power at your command, you don't know yourself capable of killing Gideon Nav.
Gideon spends a moment weighing this over in her mind. "Okay. Question time, then. If it wasn't you, then who did all the murders."
You float in the water, thoughtful. "I can't say, sorry. That's not a fruitful line of inquiry. We're being pursued by revenants, or it's all part of the test, or one or more of us is picking off the others."
Gideon moves on to another question, more terrible. "What do you know about the conditioner pathogen that bumped off all the little kids, that happened when I was little, before you were born?"
You're silent for a long time, and when you speak, it feels like some else's voice coming out of your mouth, telling a story that happened to someone else. "It didn't happen before I was born. Or at least, that's not precise enough. It happened before I was even conceived. My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fulfill the role as heir to the Locked Tomb. But we hardly had access to the foetal care technology available to other houses. She had tried and had failed already, and she was getting old. She had one chance, and she couldn't afford chance."
"You can't control whether you're carrying a necro," Gideon protested.
"Yes, you can," you said slowly. "If you have the resources, and are willing to pay the price of using them."
"Harrow," Gideon said slowly. "By resources, are you saying. . . "
"Two hundred children," you intone, weary. "From the ages of six weeks to eighteen years. They needed to all die more or less simultaneously for it to work. My great-aunts measured out the organophosphates after weeks of mathematics. Our House pumped them through the cooling system." Gideon is silent, but you can't watch Gideon as you explain this. You need to explain this as an academic, as a theory. "The infants alone generated enough thanergy to take out the entire planet. Babies always do, for some reason."
You watch Gideon, staring at you, hold her knees to her chest and go under the water. She stays under as the long seconds tick by, your mouth becoming drier and drier.
When she emerges, your voice is weak and hoarse. "Say something."
"Gross," says Gideon, vaguely. "Ick. The worst. What can I say to that? What the fuck can I say to all of that?"
"It let me be born. And I was -- me. And I have been aware, since I was very young, about how I was created. I am two hundred sons and daughters of my House, Griddle -- I am a whole generation of the Ninth. I came into this world a necromancer at the expense of Drearburh's future, because there is no future without me."
"Why leave me," she demands. "They murdered the rest of the House, but they left me off the list?"
"You were meant to die, Griddle, along with all of the others. You inhaled nerve gas for ten minutes. My great-aunts went blind just from releasing it and you weren't even affected, even though you were just two cots away from the vent. You just didn't die. My parents were terrified of you for the rest of their lives."
Gideon floats in stunned silence; you wish more than anything you could see what she was thinking, but you can't, you don't know. But when she asks the next question, it's the most terrible one she could ask. "And do you think you're worth it?"
To your credit, you don't flinch. "If I became a Lyctor, and renewed my House, and made it great again, greater than it ever was, and justified its existence in the eyes of God the Emperor -- if I made my whole life a monument to those who died to ensure that I would live and live powerfully --"
Your words echo, so portentously, through these marble halls; you can hear them hammering back at you, and they chip you away.
"Of course I wouldn't be worth it. I'm an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to be torpedoed into the center of Dominicus for. If any other Houses knew of what we'd done, they would destroy us from orbit. I am a war crime."
You stand up, letting the water and paint drip away from you. "But I had to be a necromancer of their bloodline, Nav. . . because only a necromancer can open the Locked Tomb. And only a perfect necromancer can undo the wards and roll away the rock. My parents didn't understand that, and that's why they died. That's why, when they knew I'd done it, that I'd rolled away the stone and gone through the monument and seen the place the body was buried - they thought I'd betrayed God."
"Are you telling me, that when you were ten years old, ten years old, you busted the lock on the tomb, broke into an ancient grave, and made your way past hideous old magic to look at a dead thing, even though your parents told you it would start the apocalypse?"
"Yes," you say, calmly.
"Why?"
"I was tired of being two hundred corpses. I was old enough to know how monstrous I was. I had decided to go look at the tomb, and if I didn't think it was worth it, to open and air lock and walk, and walk, and walk."
"But you came back," Gideon says. "I told the Reverend Mother and Reverend Father what I'd seen you do. I killed your parents."
The guilt in her voice unmoors you - you're caught off-guard by it, never once suspecting that all of these years, she'd actually thought she was responsible for her parents' suicide. "My parents killed my parents, Nav. I should know."
"But I told them - "
You cut her off. "My parents killed themselves because they were frightened and ashamed. They thought it was the only honourable thing to do."
There's anger in Gideon's voice when she says "I think your parents were frightened and ashamed for a long time."
"I'm not saying I didn't blame you," you admit. "I did. It was much easier. I pretended for a long time I could have saved them by talking to them. When you walked in, when you saw what you saw. . . I hated you, because you saw what I didn't do. My mother and father weren't angry, Nav. They tied their own nooses. They helped me tie mine. But I couldn't do it. After all I'd convinced myself I was ready to do. I made myself watch when my parents - I could not do the slightest thing that my House expected of me. You're not the only one who couldn't die."
"Harrow," Gideon says again, her voice catching. "Harrow, I'm so bloody sorry."
This - this, you cannot tolerate. This you cannot live with. Your eyes snap open, and you grab Gideon by the shirt, suddenly furiously angry, and you shake her, wanting to scream.
"You apologize to me? You apologize to me now? You say that you're sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second goddamn thought! I have spent my life trying to make you regret that you weren't dead, all because I regretted that I wasn't. And you have the temerity to tell me that you're sorry? I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot, I brought you to this killing field, and you pity me!"
Your anger, white hot, begins to give way to a swirling despair, a choking grief that overwhelms your core. "Strike me down. You've won. I have lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die by your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you."
And at that, Gideon wraps her arms around you with that astounding strength of hers, and you hold your breath, and you prepare yourself for the relief it will bring you when she holds you under the water, drowns you, suffocates the life out of you. For it to end this way, finally, finally, is such a relief.
As the seconds drag on, and you are not drowned, with dawning horror you instead realize that actually, you are receiving a hug. You thrash and claw against this new indignity, attempting to break free, attempting to tear her off you, and then you collapse, the fight gone from you with a suddenness and replaced with an exhaustion that is cellular. You lie limply and damply in her arms, defeated. She kisses you on the nose.
"Too many words," says Gideon, confidently. "How about these: One flesh, one end, bitch." The oath of a cavalier to her necromancer. You flush darkly, but Gideon lifts your head so you cannot hide away. "Say it, loser."
"One flesh, one end," you murmur weakly.
The memory ends.]
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when it's over, white is left staring in shock. not quite horror, as he's long past the point of being appalled by things like genocide, unfortunately—although maybe there's some horror on harrow's behalf, for the misery it's brought her. (because he might not have much empathy for strangers, for some nebulous moral concept, but the people before him are another story.)
still, while he doesn't know what he expected, it wasn't this.
after a few moments, white opens his mouth, and with all his eloquence—]
Uh.
Holy shit.
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. . . Are you all right? Have I said something to offend you?
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pieces are starting to click together, and he's not sure if he likes the conclusion he's forming?]
You didn't see anything, did you.
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What did you see?
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[and white isn't so stupid that he can't remember the name—a name he's already seen earlier.]
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Steady. Be rational. Because - he saw her explain it to someone. Meaning that - if that's what he saw - she has never explained that, not to anyone.]
To whom.
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You called her Nav.
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[Her shoulders hunch a little, as she sighs, and something like relief is etched on her face, as she realized - yes, she never told that person the one terrible, unforgivable thing. She never spoke, to the person White is speaking of, of the secret of the Ninth House children.
She has not been revealed yet, because she never breathed a word of that to him.]
Ortus Nigenad, of course. The - hallucinations. It's alright. I don't mind that you saw. I only told him because I would need his help disguising them.
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Um... uh...
[he looks up as if the ceiling will give him answers this time, even though it failed him during the trial.]
What the fuck?
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Don't be concerned, please. I'm used to managing them. Where there is any doubt, I always ensure someone else sees what I see also.
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You confessed what your parents did to make you a necromancer!
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She had never spoken a word of that, however. She had never spoken even a word, except to her God. So how. . . how could he see a memory of her confessing to Ortus Nigenad?]
I see.
[Her heart hammers, terrified for a moment, and then her expression hardens.]
Mark me now. If you ever breathe a word of this to anyone I will kill you. First I will ruin you, and then I will watch you die. I swear it by the Tomb.
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All right, all right. I promise my lips are sealed.
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[So. She just. Gets up and starts walking out the door. Sorry that this. . . went so badly.]
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