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You were lying face-to-face with her, centimetres from the wet sheen of her skin that ought to have made an imprint on your pillow, facing that crinkled lower lip. Her eyes, which the night lights had turned the sick amber of a healing bruise, stared through you. The Body was troubled: in that hovering place so close to the end of your life, it seemed only natural that you should reach for her. The fear of death had remade your worship into desperation, or maybe desire. You reached one hand out for that frozen tangle of hair at the back of the skull; you closed the gap between you, and you kissed that lovely corpse mouth.
Of course, you could not. There was nothing there. Contact made her drift away, just as with any of your hallucinations. You had not touched her. Maybe you had not even reached for her. The Body watched you with an expression you were terribly afraid was pity.
You said, “Please,” and you reached out again. A wave of dizziness rocked you. You pushed at the robe lying crooked at the slope of her shoulder; you pressed your hand low to her belly. Her dignity was untouched by this gross urgency, this coarse frenzy; or maybe, again, you had not done it. You said again, “Please.”
— Harrow the Ninth, pp. 333-334
The scrap of black-eyed meat repeated, ”Please.”
She did not need to; the rock that had been made meat had heard her supplication, lips against lips, Éton kálemi1. The chain of a kiss. They would come. Not long, now—though, what was long?
The scrap of meat asked for something else.
Mercy was not their gift, but the rock that had been made meat knew many things, once, long ago. They knew the trembling in the hand that touched their own—and cold sweat holds me, and shaking grips me all—and the petition of a mouth against ice.
And they knew the hunger, the hunger, the hunger.
The eater was here, his soft sorrowful song pouring down against the shuttered window, kaì pothéo kaì máomai2. His fingers were upon them, huddled in their flimsy cage. And the scion of the great crime, the child born of death, pleaded for salvation. It feared to die.
And so, they would come. But rock was not merciful.
Rock was not merciful.
And yet they dallied; and yet they reached down to the hand that reached out to them, and moved the hand to their supplicant’s own body, low on the middle part. The scion shuddered, wide black eyes watching, so like something the rock made meat had seen before, in another life. And there was no softness in rock, yet the rock made meat wondered; and they consented to be looked upon.
The rock that had been made meat guided the hand down, lower; their supplicant gasped—“Beloved, Beloved”—moved against their hands—lay transfixed, beside and below them, trembling and waiting.
“You are safe, Beloved,” The rock promised. “No harm will come to you tonight.”
Her body understood; their bodies understood. Her fingers moved under the rock’s own. Her eyes begged.
And so the rock consented to bend to her; consented to kiss her, to soothe her agony, fire racing under skin. The lips were warm against their own, a distant fever moving from their supplicant’s mouth into theirs and traveling into the frozen heart of her, all' ágit, o phílai, ánchi gàr améra,3 breath into the frozen lungs. The touch awakening her own half-remembered shape.
The scion was speaking, whispering quickly into her mouth: “O beloved corse, O Holy Corse of the Locked Tomb—“
She had a name, once. What was it? She had known may things, once; known the opening of—throats? Of flowers?
She placed her other hand on the delicate stem of the neck, the shimmering vein of life. The scion stopped talking, lifted her chin, pulling taut the fragile flesh, the frail chest rising and falling. The rock made meat traced her hand upwards, palming the soft column, the shy channels of blood laid out for her. She traced the rose-blushed petals of the mouth with the digit—with the thumb. That’s what it was.
The scrap of meat beneath her keened. “—Yours, I am yours, I am—Beloved Corse, dispose of me as you see fit, for I am yours—“ And this made the rock made flesh terribly sad. And the body—the body on the rock—the one whose name had been forgotten—pushed her thumb between those delicate lips; watched the dull gloss of the nail disappear. Watched the supplicant squirm and arch and flutter her eyes. Felt a shade of heat as the supplicant pressed the tip of her tongue to the pad of its thumb, with its whorls and ridges and channels. Such details, worked into her. As she touched, they became clearer.
The heat—the heat burned against her hand, the frozen hand, and within it, she felt—
She felt. Felt the quick wet movements, the fevered flesh, the unsteady rasp of breath, and the body drawn like a bow between her two hands.
“Please,” The rock made meat said, wondering, wondering; at the glitter on the curve of those eyes, at the burr of breath in the throat that was frozen, “Keep going.”
Those star-kissed—star? Kissed?—eyes widened, and then looked up at her, hungrily. And the rock made meat felt the tug in her chest—the want, and the name. Harrowhark’s eyes drifted shut, and that mouth tilted up, and her throat and tongue worked at the finger in her mouth, eyes closed in beautiful submission.
And the rock—nameless—felt, and felt.
“Harrowhark,” She said, tasting the name on her long-sleeping tongue. Harrowhark’s eyes opened, soft and unfocused with feeling. She pulled her thumb from Harrowhark’s mouth and stroked the parted lips, and Harrowhark kissed the pad of the thumb. “Harrowhark.”
Yet—What was her name? The stone, the dirt—the dirt. E tu, cuor di terra.4 No; not her name.
“Beloved—“ Harrowhark managed, “Take— what you want of me—“ She made a sound, a hiccup of a caught gasp. The small, frightened animal of her body accelerating. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, which had fallen to slits. Her gasps wracked her body—but she didn’t cry. How did the rock made meat know that? Humans had always been so hard to tell apart.
—first-draft dream of mine—
And she knew.
“I have to go away for awhile,” The rock that had been made meat, beloved of the child of death, warned. I will be with you soon.
The scion writhed, gasping, “I have done wrong,” A flush hot beneath the bare brown cheeks. “I have— sinned.”
“How?” She asked. For all that was not permitted was not possible, here.
And the scion did not answer, but rather spasmed, arched, shattering, too surprised to even speak—and then sagged. Relief. Those thick, dark lashes fluttered low, though the scion fought to keep them open.
Sleep, first. What was to come would be a test.
The rock that had been made meat reached forward, stroking her fingers over those heavy eyelids, her thumb down the narrow bridge of the nose—an echo of another life, another death. Mercy. Release.
Pàr d’ íesi tà ptéra.5 Alecto rose.