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Parietal.
Her fingertips ghosted over the powdery surface of her construct. Though willed into existence from a long-inert decorative fragment she’d discreetly picked clean from the wall of the transept, the newly formed skull held an intrinsic power she could almost feel vibrating against her palm.
Temporal.
She felt her breath hitch in her throat, as if she expressly forbade the sound from spilling into the empty room. Her silence was not born of fear or regret or remorse, but rather of rapturous enjoyment, of sickening fascination. The idea of a witness to her current state was almost too much to bear, hence her retreat to the darkest, quietest, most isolated corner of her private chambers. No one would dare disturb her there.
Mandible.
It took a tremendous amount of strength not to reach up with her free arm and mirror her reverent touches on her own jawbone. Harrowhark couldn’t remember the last time she’d blinked, unable to tear her eyes from the cavernous black of the eye sockets, hanging like twin suns in the middle of the sea of cream-colored calcium.
Ramus.
Her agonizingly slow, carefully calculated touches sent an electric ripple of feeling through her body; the stray peach fuzz on the back of her neck stood at attention, and her forearms were stippled with goosebumps. She couldn’t stop even if she wanted to.
Molars.
Incisors.
Canines.
A flash of gold in her mind, and Harrowhark felt her grasp on the skull tighten almost imperceptibly. At the acknowledgement of this thought, however, a new feeling began to bubble forth within her, burning in her throat like caustic acid, and like oil and water she was at once at war with herself, and she held the skull in her hand as tightly as she could, and, with every bit of force she could muster, hoisted it above her head and threw it to the ground, shattering it to pieces with a splintering crack. A small cloud of powdery dust burst forth and then settled around the remains of the skull, broken into innumerable pieces along the sutures and seams, and Harrowhark stood above it and looked down on the bones in white-hot, petulant, childish rage.
It took a moment for Harrowhark to regain her sense of composure, to silence her stuttering, irregular breaths, to bring her thumping heart back to equilibrium. When she felt the white-hot lessen and subside, though, she bit her lip, closed her eyes in pitiful resignation, turned her back on the scene, and walked away in silence.
♇
The seventeen flights of stairs leading down to Nav’s cell gave Harrowhark an optimum amount of time to think about how desperately she wished she were doing anything else. Even seeing Nav would sour any day, she thought, would constitute a waste of the next few hours that would predictably be spent fuming in the library alone, trying to suppress the bile rising in her throat at the thought of her. But to bare herself before her, to make a request so foolhardy and damning in its implications… as she walked, Harrowhark made a mental calculation of how long it would take her to freeze to death outside of the airlock.
Three flights to go. Harrowhark wished she could turn back.
Two flights to go. Harrowhark’s eyebrows furrowed together and she took a sharp, curt breath in through her nose to steel herself.
One flight to go. Harrowhark threw her shoulders back and strode forward, trying desperately to exude the aura of effortless regality she knew infuriated Nav more than anything else.
Standing in front of Nav’s door, she rapped on the surface with three sharp cracks that echoed cacophonously throughout the drillshaft, and waited with bated breath for a response from within.
None came.
Harrowhark rapped again. “Nav?” she offered, more as a formality to announce her presence than to elicit a response. Again, none came.
Harrowhark huffed, before sloughing off a fragment of bone from her chestpiece and slipping it deftly into the gap of the keyhole; upon its clattering to the floor, Harrowhark slowly and carefully weaved the fragment into the form of a long, spindly skeletal arm, which reached up from the floor to carefully unlock the door from inside. When Harrowhark swung it open with an echoing creak, and when her eyes beheld a sparsely-decorated room with its expected occupant nowhere in sight, Harrowhark was left puzzled and slightly trepidatious. A bedroom with no Nav was almost always an ill omen, she’d come to find, and so when she stepped back and decided to storm her way down the extra five flights of stairs to where she hoped Nav was moping, she assured herself that she was going to make Nav regret having wasted her time.
As Harrowhark stalked through the gloomy darkened halls of the Ninth House catacombs, searching incessantly for that shock of orange hair, she found herself wondering about the best way to phrase the question she knew would provide Nav with gloating material for the next six months, at least. It didn’t take long for Harrowhark, in the haze of her fugue, to stumble and nearly trip over something on the floor, and when she regained her balance and cast an accusatory glance to see the offending object, only to see Nav herself sitting comfortably on the floor with legs outstretched… Harrowhark felt a flush burn in her cheeks behind her greasepaint.
Gideon Nav did not stir, but only looked up at Harrowhark with those piercing amber eyes, and the color made Harrowhark want to break something.
“I guess we’ll talk later, Mom,” Gideon said under her breath, smirking up at Harrowhark’s enraged face. “Looks like I’ve got company.”
“Nav,” Harrowhark spat, trying desperately to envenom her voice as much as possible. Gideon said nothing in response, but only gazed up at her, raising a quizzical eyebrow.
Harrowhark smoothed out the folds of her dress and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, in a display of nervousness quite unlike her, and one that she hoped to everything holy Nav hadn’t seen. When she broke the silence that had bloomed between them, her voice was sharp and harsh, not unlike a master issuing a command to an unruly cur.
“Give me one of your teeth.”
Gideon blinked, perhaps expecting a second half to the order; when Harrowhark refused to elaborate, Gideon’s face split into an uncomfortably confused smile. “What?”
“Give me one of your teeth,” Harrowhark repeated, more insistently.
“No?” Gideon’s affirmation sounded more like an incredulous question, and Harrowhark scoffed at the indignity of having been told no.
“I demand that you give me one of your teeth,” Harrowhark tried.
“This isn’t getting you anywhere,” Gideon said. “I’m not gonna give you one of my teeth; that’s absolutely insane.” Gideon paused, then shot Harrowhark a smarmy look. “I’m not letting you grow a new Gideon, especially since one is bad enough.”
Harrowhark scoffed. “Oh, trust me, I’m well aware of how hellish managing one of you is, and I would never wish upon myself the indignity of forcing myself into the prison of dealing with two of you. I assure you I can think of far better things to do with my time, like poking out both of my eyes with a sharpened stake of bone.”
At these words, Gideon rose and leaned back against the rock wall behind her, lips turned in a soft, sarcastic smile. “Chop, chop, then. We don’t have all day, Nonagesimus.”
Harrowhark crossed her arms. “I wouldn’t grant you the satisfaction,” she spat back. “After all, without me looking after you and reigning you in after your feeble attempts to flee your cage, the duty would fall on Crux to discipline you; I hardly think you’d last the week.”
“Why the hell would you want one of my teeth?” Gideon asked, disregarding Harrowhark’s previous comment. Harrowhark felt a single bead of sweat cut its way down her temple.
“If you’re unwilling to comply, I don’t think you deserve to know what my intentions are.”
“Oh?” Gideon raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Well, now you have to tell me.”
“Absolutely not.”
“What, you think I can’t take it? You scared to tell me your real icky, scary reason?” At this, a spark of realization flashed through Gideon’s eyes. “Is it a sex thing?”
Harrowhark felt the disgusted shiver in her entire body, and she let it show; the grimace must’ve been evident enough to stop Gideon in her tracks, an impressive feat in itself. After taking a deep breath and ridding her thoughts of Gideon being in any way related to ‘sex things,’ Harrowhark smoothed her robes and glared up at Gideon again.
“Rest assured, Nav,” Harrowhark growled, “I have no intention of telling you, as it is not your station, nor your place, nor your right to ask such questions of me. If you’re incapable of reasoning with that fact, if you simply must have an answer, then take solace in the assertion that my response is: ‘Fuck you, that’s why.’”
Gideon had to stifle a chuckle at the profanity, and Harrowhark’s painted lips pursed even further than Gideon had thought possible, but she did not speak. Instead, Harrowhark seemed to be pondering an idea; Gideon could almost see the gears turning.
“You’re not gonna take one from me while I sleep,” Gideon supplied, “because I know that’s what you were thinking.”
Suddenly enormously furious, Harrowhark spluttered indignantly in the way of someone whose carefully laid plans had just been dashed thoroughly through no fault of her own. Harrowhark took a step towards Gideon, raising a finger in her rage as if to strongly tell Gideon off, but quickly found that her venom would not come in the articulate way she had expected: all she could manage was an exasperated “Ohmygod—fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, I hate you.”
Gideon smirked. Harrowhark deflated, embarrassed heat flushing the back of her neck.
“No matter what you say, Nav,” she said, in a voice almost like a whisper, “and as you should be painfully aware of by now, I am not one who gives up easily.”
Harrowhark drew herself up to her full unimpressive height, a flicker of self-aggrandizing indignation sparking to life in her chest. “You belong to the Ninth, and therefore you belong to me. I can do with my property whatsoever I choose, and rest assured, I will extract it from you one way or another. With or without your approval. Asking you was a waste of my time.”
Harrowhark turned to leave, assured this was a lost cause, but Gideon reached out a hand and gently grabbed Harrowhark’s shoulder; Harrowhark slapped it away, and Gideon cursed under her breath at the sting. The two girls stood in the darkness of the catacombs for a beat more, before Gideon’s voice broke it. “You can try and beat one outta me.”
Harrowhark spun around to face her again, expression wild. “Excuse me?”
“You can try,” Gideon said, in a voice slow and smooth, “to beat a tooth outta me.”
The punch came quicker than Gideon had expected it to, but only barely made contact; in the darkness, Harrowhark’s fist glanced off of Gideon’s chin, and the impact was perhaps only sufficient enough to tousle her hair at best. Gideon stood for a single disoriented second, before dissolving into a fit of giggles. Harrowhark almost stamped her foot in childlike fury, and felt embarrassment warm her cheeks.
“It’s dark!” Harrowhark bellowed out to the room, before turning away from Gideon in a rage and making a mental note on which organ of Gideon’s would result in the most painful death if heavily perforated. In between her giggles, Gideon managed to choke out, “If you want, I can let you try again!”
“Perhaps instead,” Harrowhark supplied, “I can tear one out of you hands-free, form it into a set of bone knuckles, knock out every single last one you have, then return the original to you.”
“Oh, thank you,” Gideon said, smiling widely and struggling to stifle her remaining laughs. “That’s my leek-eating tooth.”
At this, Harrowhark lunged forward to punch Gideon again, this time square in the chest; Gideon was prepared, though, and deftly caught Harrowhark’s fist within her own, making Harrowhark yelp out in panic. Gideon twisted her arm gently, and, with a strangled cry, Harrowhark wrenched her fist from Gideon’s grip, massaging her wrist and breathing heavily through her teeth.
“You…” Harrowhark tried to say, yet the insults of the magnitude which she sought wouldn’t come to her; she doubted they existed at all.
The pair again stood in silence, staring at each other in the eerie silence of the Ninth catacombs; Harrowhark’s bruised wrist fell to her side as her fingers flexed, and Gideon did her best to suppress her smirk at the sight of it.
“I…” Harrowhark began, breaking the silence in a voice tremulous with rage. “I loathe you, Gideon Nav. I hate you. With every fiber of my being, with every cell in my body, I despise you to your very core. I hate you, and I have always hated you, and I will spend every single day of the rest of my life reminding you how much I hate you, and when I am dead and my skeleton is boiled, I will take my leek trowel and I will carve ‘I hate you’ in the rock and dirt of the Ninth, in letters so big that those arriving in shuttles will get nervous at the sight of them.”
Harrowhark turned once more to face the exit, throwing her head and shoulders back, and clenching her fists so hard the knuckles went pale. “You are to meet me in the shuttle field in one hour.”
As Harrowhark walked away, Gideon looked after her in silence. Underneath the carved archway to the crypt, however, Harrowhark stopped, placing a hand on the cool slippery rock. When she spoke again, there was none of her usual venom; instead, she spoke in a slow, calculated, matter-of-fact tone that suggested to Gideon she was utterly, entirely, and deadly serious.
“If you do not comply, I will kill you.”
And with that, Harrowhark strode forward out of the room and was gone, leaving Gideon alone in the dark.
Gideon swallowed.
♇
Harrowhark probably should’ve laid traps, but she forgot. As she sat on the lip of the metal balcony overlooking the vastness of the open landing field, over its rock and dirt packed hard by centuries of construct toil, shining dully in the feeble light of the floodlights, she calculated all the open spots where sprouting bone arms from nothing would probably serve a huge advantage. But in this moment, she reasoned, she didn’t care enough. She didn’t have time anyway; she had spent the past hour walking around the pit’s perimeter in a petulant rage, fantasizing about how thoroughly she was going to skewer Gideon. Harrowhark’s mind was too clouded by the white-hot rage of embarrassment for the happenings in the crypts, and was preparing itself for the nausea of seeing Gideon’s face again; it had no energy left for rational thought and preparedness.
Harrowhark’s feet swung gently in the air underneath her perch, and she let out a shaky breath. No matter how she spun it, Harrowhark was certain this was a bad idea.
a voice called her name. harrowhark snapped to attention and turned and leaned over the metal balcony to gaze down into the drillshaft at the church below but she saw nobody there.
When the sickeningly familiar tromping sound of Gideon’s footfalls echoed from behind her, when that infuriatingly grating voice called out “You waited for me? Aww, honey, that’s so sweet,” Harrowhark practically leapt to her feet and stuttered out some assemblage of words and vowels to wrench herself back into the present. Gideon Nav stood before her, her face split with that lopsided smile that enraged Harrowhark beyond all reason, her wrist resting gently on the gleaming butt of her sword, held to her waist in a thick leather scabbard.
Harrowhark wanted to grab the sword and smash Gideon’s face in with it. But instead, she simply managed, “You’re late.”
At this, Harrowhark dropped a fragment of calcium onto the space by her feet; it sprouted instantly into a thick weave of humerus, radius, and ulna, and it affixed itself to the spiderweb of bone criss-crossing Harrowhark’s chest underneath her robes, lifting her bodily off the ground like a cargo crane and dropping her into the pit below, before dissolving away into nothingness. Gideon scoffed at the display, and simply sauntered downwards into the pit, closing her fist around the grip of her sword and pushing the pommel forward with her thumb, drawing it only an inch.
“Which decrepit old nuns will be joining you today?” Gideon called out. “I’m noticing your lack of retainers begging to kiss your robes and wash your feet.”
Harrowhark drew in a curt breath, wondering whether or not to even dignify the jab with a response, before replying, “They’re not needed here. I did not see it fit to draw unnecessary attention to the situation and to afford you undeserved relevance and importance.”
“Ouch,” Gideon fired back. “You only bring along your motley little crew when I’m trying to escape this rock for real?”
Harrowhark removed her robe, dropping it to the floor around her feet. “That’s the only occasion in which your presence here is relevant, Nav. Servants should stay out of sight unless needed; likewise, you are insignificant until you’re not.”
Gideon fully drew her sword now, feeling the familiar weight pull against her biceps, feeling her grip close around the leather as she held it low in her right hand. “I hope you know,” she said cooly, “that I’m gonna kick your ass regardless of how many people are watching. Don’t count on Crux or Aiglamane to bail you out, Nonagesimus. ‘Cause it’s not gonna happen.”
Harrowhark reached up to her ears and pushed the bone studs out into her palms; tightly closing her fingers around them, she glared back at Gideon. “I have no intention of calling for help, Nav. I assure you I am perfectly capable of breaking you by myself.”
In a flash of motion, Harrowhark threw both her earrings at Gideon; as they flew, Harrowhark yanked and twisted them into long, thin strips of bone, sprouting protuberances that grew into wiggling ribs in the blink of an eye, intent on wrapping themselves firmly around Gideon. Gideon tightened her grip on the sword with both hands, before swinging wildly, catching the traps in mid-air and shattering them to pieces, showering her with chips and fragments, splinters of constructs that painted the black rocky floor in flecks of white. Gideon barely had time to react, for Harrowhark then raised her hands with a grunt of exertion, and from each individual shattered splinter came a mess of phalanges, carpals, and metacarpals, until the floor was suddenly awash with skeletal hands, grasping and clawing desperately at Gideon’s ankles. One succeeded in grabbing hold of Gideon, and she slid her sword point-down against her ankle to yank it free of the hand’s grasp, before bolting away and dodging fingers, kicking them to pieces wherever she could.
When she found herself on solid ground again, Gideon charged at Harrowhark, raising her sword up and over her shoulder as she went; Harrowhark panicked and quickly retracted the shards of hands back to her, weaving them up into a solid shield of bone to deflect the sword, which glanced off and collided with the rocky ground below. Gideon’s body moved with the force of the deflection, and Harrowhark quickly detached a piece of the shield, splintering it off even further and affixing the edge of the sword to the floor like glue. Gideon drew herself back up, trying in vain to wrench her sword out of Harrowhark’s grip, and in so doing, failed to notice Harrowhark’s fist cutting through the air to land squarely on Gideon’s jaw. The properly aimed impact was deceptively powerful, and Gideon’s vision went white for a moment, before the shredded bone finally cracked to uselessness and Gideon regained control of her weapon; Harrowhark broke off more of the shield, this time affixing it to one of Gideon’s ankles, and using the pause to run away to the opposite side of the arena.
“Nonagesimus!” Gideon howled in frustration. “Fucking let go of me!”
“Why the hell would I do that?” Harrowhark shrieked.
Gideon attempted the same maneuver she had used to free herself from the hands, but Harrowhark was prepared this time; taking extra care to manipulate as carefully as possible, Harrowhark funneled the interior of the bone shackles into needle-sharp points, stabbing into Gideon’s ankles from the inside. Gideon screamed in pain, and Harrowhark felt a smile tug at the corner of her mouth.
As Harrowhark flexed her hands, the corset encircling her chest split off into rods of bone, snaking their way through the cracks in her broken shield and reinforcing it. With this newly strengthened material, Harrowhark split off a large disc that hovered in the air before her; from the outmost edge of this disc sprouted several dozen razor-sharp teeth, and with a yell that reverberated off the walls of the pit, Harrowhark sent the disc spinning and flying directly at Gideon. As Harrowhark had prepared, however, the split-second lapse in concentration had allowed Gideon the strength to snap the shackles from around her ankle, though the needle-thin shards remained embedded in the leather surface of her boot; Gideon turned to see the saw blade hurtling towards her head, and instinctively blocked its path with the flat edge of her sword, its calcified teeth grinding to dust against the fuller of the blade as it magically spun on. Blinding pain radiated from her ankle as Gideon bore the brunt of the impact; as she held off the force of the disc, Gideon twisted her body quickly and used Harrowhark’s force to slide the disc down the length of the blade, sending it whizzing past her face like a missile and colliding with the rock wall behind her, completely shattering into a fine powder.
Harrowhark watched the destruction of her saw blade and nearly screamed a curse at Gideon. She was breathing hard, her vision swimming slightly and her forehead damp with sweat; when she reached up to dab it away, her palm came away shimmering scarlet. Harrowhark furiously wiped it away on the leg of her trousers, before splitting off a smaller chunk of her shield and twisting the bone into the shape of a human skull, its mouth wide open in a silent scream. As Harrowhark worked, Gideon took a few steps closer to her; the pain in her injured ankle was intense, but manageable, as she readied her sword again, clinging onto it with as much force as she could muster.
Harrowhark punched the air in front of her, and the skull flew forwards directly at Gideon, its hideous mouth agape in what seemed a desperate attempt to bite Gideon. As it flew, Gideon swung her sword again, hitting the skull directly in the maxilla and shattering it into countless pieces, sending the splintered remains of the two halves flying and skittering across the rocky terrain. Harrowhark split off another smaller skull and shot it forwards; Gideon again shattered it to pieces, advancing towards Harrowhark like a freight train.
Harrowhark didn’t want to admit she was scared.
When she was merely feet away from Harrowhark, Gideon tightly gripped her longsword again, bellowed out a colossal yell, and swung at the shield as hard as she possibly could; even though the bone was fortified, it cracked and splintered under the titanic force of Gideon’s swing, the whole thing shattering to useless pieces around Harrowhark. As her blade connected with the bone, however, Harrowhark realized that Gideon’s body would keep moving, and, paralyzed with fear and indecision, she simply… stuck out her leg, catching it on Gideon’s injured ankle.
Gideon shrieked in pain, toppling forward in the direction of her relentless charge, and as she lost her balance, she fell forward, face-first, directly into the slick black wall behind Harrowhark. The crack of impact reverberated throughout the entire drillshaft. Gideon’s body crumpled, her face dragging downwards along the stone wall and coming to rest on the ground below.
Harrowhark said nothing, made no sound apart from the pants of exertion her necromancy had cost her.
Gideon didn’t say anything, either.
Gideon didn’t move, either.
“Nav?” Harrowhark said, barely above a whisper.
Gideon didn’t move.
“Nav?” Harrowhark said again, more insistent this time.
Silence.
“Nav??” Harrowhark said, worry seeping into her voice despite her better judgement, as she moved to kneel down next to Gideon, wobbling slightly as she went, and hovering her hands an inch above her body.
Gideon shifted slightly, a throaty, wet, gurgling cough breaking the silence. Harrowhark felt like she would collapse. “Oh, thank the Emperor, Griddle, I’m so sorry, oh God that looked like it hurt, oh, thank the Emperor, thank you, thank you, thank you…”
Slowly, and apparently painfully, Gideon turned onto her back, and Harrowhark caught her first up-close glimpse of her work: Gideon’s nose was shattered, and was spewing blood onto her mouth and chin, and her forehead was sporting a wide gash that was gushing blood into her eyebrows and onto her eyelids. Her right eye was already beginning to bruise in a nasty fashion. She looked absolutely fucking awful.
Harrowhark moved against her better judgement, leaning closer to daub away some of the blood from Gideon’s upper lip with her shirt sleeve, but Gideon moved too quickly; in a move that betrayed the severity of her current condition, Gideon extended her arm and punched Harrowhark in the chin as hard as she could muster. Harrowhark, caught off guard, careened backwards with a startled cry, the back of her head colliding with the ground with a sickening crunch that made stars dance in her eyes. Harrowhark felt bile rise in her throat and her chest heaved, but she swallowed it and choked back breaths as she watched Gideon rise to her feet agonizingly slowly; she had to brace herself with a palm against the rock wall, before she turned to face Harrowhark directly, and Harrowhark was terrified to see that, in between the dripping blood, Gideon’s eyes were amber fire. Each of Gideon’s steps seemed to take an eternity, as she nursed her injured ankle and blinked away thick droplets of scarlet, before she finally stood directly next to Harrowhark.
In a motion that looked as though it would kill her, Gideon lifted her injured foot and placed it on Harrowhark’s solar plexus, pressing down with a not-insignificant amount of force and holding her in place. Harrowhark struggled to form a breath around the shape of Gideon’s boot, and she stared up with widened eyes at Gideon, who was more angry than perhaps she had ever been. And then…
Gideon dug the heel of her boot into the shattered remains of Harrowhark’s bone corset, and as she did so, she hawked back her head and spat directly onto Harrowhark’s face. A glob of spittle and blood splattered across Harrowhark’s left cheek, and she felt her stomach twist in an attempt to burst from her chest; curiously, she also felt her cheeks scorch to life, but considered it indignation and humiliation. Harrowhark wished she were capable of lifting her arms to clean her face, but as she limply raised them her head spun violently, and so she let her arms thump back down to the floor pathetically, let the saliva drip from her cheek down past her ear.
Harrowhark was beaten, and not only was she beaten, she was thoroughly fucking humiliated.
Gideon glared another second down at Harrowhark, vitriolic and self-assured, before she gently removed her foot and gingerly placed it on the ground again, turning away to hobble slowly back to the wall, against which she braced herself readily with a spare hand. Without a word, she bent down to retrieve her sword from the ground where she’d dropped it after crashing into the wall, and step by excruciating step, Gideon Nav followed the path to the entryway to the landing field, leaving Harrowhark alone on the ground.
Harrowhark lay silently, sweating blood, dripping spit, her limbs exhausted, and her head throbbing so hard she felt she’d puke.
It was a catastrophe of epic proportions. Harrowhark slowly closed her eyes, resigned and fuming.
Gideon 1, Harrowhark 0.
♇
It had taken Harrowhark nearly an hour to lug her half-concussed corpse onto the sofa in her private library. She had made explicit mention to Aisamorta and Lachrimorta prior to the fight that she was to be left alone under any and all circumstances; so assured was she of her impending victory that she saw their inevitable and cloying prostration as an avoidable distraction. Now, thoroughly kicking herself for her hubris, she had been forced to descend back into the cavernous House alone, leaning heavily against the slick black walls and shuffling along the ground with dragging feet, attempting desperately to keep her insides from painting the outside. The glove on her right hand, soaked and sticky with her own blood, left crimson streaks on the wall as she propped herself against it, lurching herself forward with shambling steps like one of her more hastily-made constructs.
the shock of blonde hair nearly led her into the drillshaft more than once. yet she followed it like her life depended on it.
The trek had been gargantuan, and when Harrowhark finally hoisted herself across the threshold and collapsed backwards onto the threadbare sofa, a shock of pain from her injured head jolted her from her back onto her left side with a startled yelp. As Harrowhark lay there, whimpering from pain and blinking away exhaustion, she felt her breathing begin to slow.
Harrowhark wanted to throw herself from the airlock. She wanted to open it and walk.
Nav was nowhere to be seen; in all likelihood, Harrowhark thought, she had gone straight to her cell, packed her belongings while reveling in her newfound and ill-gotten victory, and sauntered back upstairs to the desecrated landing pit, where a conveniently-arriving shuttle would whisk her away from this hellhole, away to freedom.
The supposition was ludicrous, but Nav was ludicrous. She had attempted to escape before, and now that her road had been cleared, Harrowhark supposed she’d seen the last of that ginger-haired freak.
Harrowhark’s already-nauseated stomach became a deep, gnawing pit, as she lay there and began to contemplate a life without Nav, as she had routinely done every day since she was barely old enough to speak. As she lay there, however, marinating in disgraced silence, a thick oppressive brain-fog, and a truly horrific pounding headache, Harrowhark felt something slip down the corner of her eye and slide across the hook of her nose; when she raised a trembling hand to wipe it clean, a single tear hung on the scarlet fabric of her glove.
Harrowhark stared at it, baffled—beyond baffled—as her breath caught in her throat, struck dumb by the impossible tear. Yet as she stared, she felt the sickening pressure in her throat, the stinging behind her eyes, and the feelings became more and more acute the more she was aware of them, and then suddenly her face was awash in silvery tears: exhausted, frustrated, miserable, terrified tears.
Harrowhark wasn’t sure for how long she lay there, crying pitifully in near silence to an empty room.
the body kept her company. she knelt by the bedside and smoothed her hair. harrowhark couldn’t make out her face through her tears. that made her cry harder.
Over time, though, Harrowhark’s sobs quieted, her rattling breaths reduced to a small chorus of sniffles and whimpers. Her gloved hand dangled loosely over the side of the sofa, and a small puddle of blood grew on the dusty stone floor below it as it dripped steadily like a tap. When Harrowhark felt her shaky breath return to her, when she had no more tears left to cry, she felt her lips move of their own accord, whispering out three words to the silence of the library: “Fuck you, Gideon.”
Harrowhark blearily opened her eyes and attempted to blink away the headache which made her vision dance with blackened spots, and drew in a shuddering, sticky breath.
“Fuck you, Gideon,” she said again, louder this time.
A fire began to grow in her chest. She felt a familiar frown carve itself onto her exhausted face, and her eyebrows narrowed in impish frustration.
“Fuck you, Gideon,” she repeated, her gravelly voice echoing louder within the library.
With a monumental effort Harrowhark willed herself to stand, slowly pushing herself from her position and resting a hand on the arm of the sofa; her vision swam and she nearly fell backwards again, but she managed to remain upright and take a shaky step away from the couch.
“Fuck you, Gideon.” Her voice was raspy and throaty, and yelling made her head pound in the most delicious way.
She crossed the library floor to a desk she had occupied the previous night, and gripped shaking fingers underneath the lip of its writing surface; as she attempted to tilt it forwards, to unseat it from the floor, to flip it over and spill its papers onto the ground below her, it proved stubbornly resistant and remained steadfast, its drawers all rattling tauntingly within their slots. Harrowhark felt a greater fury than she had ever felt at the stupid piece of shit desk.
“Fuck you, Nav!” The shriek reverberated around the stone, piercing her ears and shredding her already-raw throat.
Harrowhark instead grabbed the back of the chair tucked into the open space of the desk and, with a gigantic grunt of effort, nearly threw it across the room; it didn’t fly as she’d wanted, but only skidded backwards and toppled over onto the floor with a cacophonous clattering sound that made Harrowhark’s teeth ache.
Harrowhark screamed. The wail echoed through the room, hanging in the air like a noxious fog, and when Harrowhark’s throat died, the scream died too, sputtering out like a candle run dry of its fat.
She was alone again. She was standing in an empty library, chest heaving, scarlet-tinged sweat dripping from her forehead, her muscles screaming from exertion. And she was utterly, completely, wholly alone.
“lay back down.”
Resigned, unravelled, Harrowhark shakily collapsed back onto the sofa with a deep and exhausted sigh, laying on her side again to face the empty room. She lay in silence for a moment, breathing hard and gazing at the toppled chair, waiting for her heart rate to slow.
Then, she closed her eyes as tightly as she could manage, and began to think.
Where had she gone wrong?
Her first mistake, she supposed, had been challenging Nav to a duel in the first place, instead of taking what she wanted. It would’ve been supremely easy to have claimed her boon without any of this additional effort, and as Harrowhark laid there, she kicked herself again for not simply invalidating Nav’s autonomy and yanking out her molar the second Harrowhark had tripped over her legs in the crypt below her cell.
A flash of fire in her stomach, the same she’d felt as Gideon stood above her.
Harrowhark’s breath caught in her throat, and she blinked away Nav’s intrusion and reigned her mind back.
The hands. She needed to remember the hands. Harrowhark made a mental note to remember, before the next inevitable confrontation, to inject bone shards into the rock as to restrict Nav’s movement. Anything, she supposed, to get even a second’s advantage on Nav.
Affixing the weapon to the ground. Harrowhark took a deep breath in through her nose and exhaled it slowly, splitting off a small chunk of her corset to float in the air towards her beckoning hand, stretching and oozing in midair. Harrowhark willed it into an oval shape, wide enough to latch itself onto the ground, and strong enough to form itself around Nav’s blade, holding it in place. The bone took the familiar form of a hollow vertebra, identical transverse processes jutting out to the sides to hold itself to the ground, as the enlarged vertebral foramen beckoned to be filled with cold steel.
Decent, Harrowhark thought.
The bone spikes. Harrowhark was quite proud of herself for the bone spikes. As she pondered them, the vertebra bubbled and stretched, restructuring itself into a long, thin needle, hanging aloft in the air like the blade of a rapier.
Next, the disc.
Harrowhark thought of the disc, and she thought of the efficacy of its implementation, and she thought of the razor teeth which studded its edge, and she thought of Nav and she thought of Gideon’s teeth and she sat straight up on the sofa, pressing her back firmly against it.
All thought in Harrowhark’s swimming head was whisked away, leaving only deep blackness, the perpetual inky void of a starless night sky. The bone Harrow had been manipulating clattered to the ground, inert and still, skidding underneath the sofa.
Harrowhark thought of her trophy.
That’s what it was, Harrowhark supposed… wasn’t it? A trophy to be won from Nav, a mark of honor that she had bested Nav in combat, that she had outsmarted her, muscled her way to a victory against the considerably stacked odds…
Harrowhark licked her lips.
She had beaten Nav, hadn’t she? She had analyzed the fight, had realized that Nav couldn’t win the fight if she couldn’t move, and had taken action to limit and eliminate her movement in turn… by all accounts, she’d won the fight. The only thing that cemented her loss was that she had attended to Gideon—Nav—after she’d injured herself against the wall.
As Harrowhark’s mind worked, procedurally slid from thought to thought, she gently lay flat on her back on the sofa, with the back of her neck resting against the arm as to alleviate the throb of the headache which still gripped her. Her hands rested on her waist, staining the hem of her shirt with the cool moistness of the scarlet glove.
Harrowhark thought.
Trophies are meant to be won in battle. Harrowhark had won. It was her own cowardice, her own worry, which tore her victory from her; by caring for Nav, she had disgraced herself, killed herself before her enemy had gotten the chance to. If she was to win the trophy, she must prevent the same mistakes from occurring again.
That’s why it had to be a tooth, Harrowhark admitted. That’s why it had to be Nav’s tooth; Harrowhark needed proof that she had gotten close enough to the beast, and removed its agency, removed it of its killing thing. Harrowhark needed to exert control, needed to assert that the thing which dared stare her in the face would be forever changed, because of her and her influence.
The next fight, Harrowhark vowed—for she was suddenly enormously certain that there would be a next fight—Harrowhark would exhibit none of the same petty care for Nav that she had exhibited tonight. She would exert her power over Nav, the power of her goddamn birthright, and she would whip the cur into submission and she would stand over it and she would grind her boot into Nav’s chest and she would…
The shiver that ran through Harrowhark’s body at the thought of spitting on Nav’s body was enough to jolt her back to reality, enough to make her realize her breathing was erratic, her eyelids fluttering, her chest hammering.
Her nerves were alight with a dull throbbing, centered on the fire in her stomach, alight at the thought of Nav.
In the moment of realization, when Harrowhark acknowledged the fire for what it was, for what it meant… for who it was meant for…
Harrowhark hadn’t realized the tiniest sliver of her midriff was showing through the crack in her ensemble; she only became aware of it as her gloved hand slid across it, the fabric catching on her skin and sending a shiver up her chest which made Harrowhark shudder. As she felt her breathing ease, as her heart stayed its flutter, Harrowhark gently twisted her body to the side, leaning over the side of the couch to look for the small chunk of bone that had fallen from her grasp.
Resting on the floor underneath the sofa was a six-inch long human canine tooth, gleaming white against the dusty gray of the floor below it, so perfectly crafted it looked hewn from marble.
Harrowhark stopped breathing entirely.
Canine.
In her mind’s eye, a flash of gold.
Harrowhark’s hand flexed as the tooth animated before her eyes, melting into a sphere and levitating from the floor, moving up until it hung in the air before Harrowhark’s enraptured eyes. As she sucked in a short breath, she flexed her hand again, and sculpted a molar from the mass of calcium.
Flex. Incisor.
Flex. Canine.
The muscles of Harrowhark’s waist and hips were taut, held tight in place, the dull heat radiating from her stomach up to her lungs, down to her thighs. Harrowhark licked her lips again. Willing the tooth to glide to her chest piece and rest against a rib of her corset, Harrowhark grasped a finger of her blood-soaked glove and gently slid the fabric away, revealing the deep brown of her hand underneath. Her fingers were long, thin, and trembling.
Harrowhark swallowed in anticipation.
First, she placed her newly bare hand against her chest and felt the erratic rise and fall of her breath, felt the deep thrumming of her heart as it assured Harrowhark’s choice of action with every pulse. Then, as slowly as she could muster, she slid her hand down her chest to her stomach, feeling the heat of anticipation flow through her arm and up to her shoulder. Down further still, to the sliver of waist showing through, and she felt the near-invisible peachfuzz of her skin against her fingertips.
As her fingertips gently and carefully snaked their way underneath the waistband of Harrowhark’s tightly fitted pants, as she felt the wiry bristles of pubic hair sliding against and between her fingers, the canine tooth animated again, rattling quickly against the gleaming white of Harrowhark’s ribcage. Harrowhark’s eyes slipped shut and her lips parted almost imperceptibly at the feeling of it, at the feeling of warmth which spread from her core to her thighs, up her hips, to her waist, to her stomach and beyond. One end of the canine lifted itself from Harrowhark’s shirt, as if yanked into the air by an invisible puppet string.
Harrowhark slid her hand further underneath her hem, hiding her wrist beneath the black synthetic fabric, and she carefully pressed the butt of her palm against the slope of her pubic mound, fitting her hand and fingers to the curve of her skin, as she parted her legs and began to work her fingers up and down, sliding against her skin in a slow rhythm.
With each passing second Harrowhark’s thoughts dissipated into the static of her brain, as the grip slackened on each one, and she focused solely on the slow grinding motion of her hand, on her stuttering breath, on the clattering of the bone over her heart.
Harrowhark’s eyes fluttered open as she slid her hands against herself, and her gaze fixed upon the tooth, halfway hanging in midair and resting its point squarely against the fourth rib of her corset. Harrowhark gently slid up the sofa cushion to prop her shoulders against its arm, and, with her free hand, attempted to raise the tooth from her chest; it was yanked into the air unceremoniously, and bubbled and flexed with the lapses in Harrowhark’s concentration, but largely held its shape as it hung there.
Harrowhark’s fingertips brushed directly against the nub of her clitoris, which sent a shockwave of sensation up her spine and elicited a loud whimper from Harrowhark’s throat, and the tooth violently shook and flexed, a large process extending from the canine’s crown for a split second before falling back into place. Breathing hard, Harrowhark stared up at the tooth from underneath heavy-lidded eyes, before she swallowed nervously and repeated the motion, her hips jerking upwards off the cushion as she let out another high-pitched whimper, her grip on the tooth faltering for a moment, before finally failing, as it clattered back down onto her chest.
Harrowhark lay there, breathing heavily, keeping her right hand firmly underneath her hemline.
Something wasn’t working.
Slowly and carefully, Harrowhark instead slid forward on the sofa cushion, bending her knees and placing her feet firmly on the far arm, while her head sank down onto the sofa to give her an unobstructed view of the cavernous library ceiling. With a deep breath, she lifted her left hand again, suspending the tooth in midair; her right middle finger slid gently between the folds of Harrowhark’s labia, and began to work again.
Harrowhark would’ve hated the noises she made at the feeling of touching herself like this, if she had the energy to care.
As she rubbed, gently glancing against her clitoral hood and slipping between the folds of her labia minora, Harrowhark worked: she formed the canine into a molar again, seeing how it caught the dull light of the library candles and taking in every detail of its shape and form, before stretching it into an incisor and marvelling at the glinting of the sharp edge, before sprouting a canine again, enraptured by the vicious point which hung above her like the tip of a cavalier’s sword. Again and again and again she cycled through them, molar, incisor, canine, molar, incisor, canine, until it became second nature to her, and she was capable of flicking between the forms with a single finger of her left hand. As she worked, she abandoned her stimulation and instead focused purely on rubbing her clitoris with four fingers, left to right in a violent action; the feeling was so intense Harrowhark felt she might choke on her own saliva. With half a mind, she prayed nobody from the House would be insensitive enough to barge through the doors of the library.
If they did, Harrowhark’s occupied animal brain considered, she could just kill them.
Breathlessly, whimpering loudly, Harrowhark quickly removed her right hand from her skin and pressed it against the crotch of her pants, violently cutting herself off from stimulation. Her chest stuttered up and down with ragged breaths, as her mind raced through a million different iterations of absolutely nothing; the tooth gently floated down onto her stomach and rested against the crease of her hips, sporting the edge of an incisor half-sharpened into the point of a canine. Harrowhark slipped her right hand out from underneath her hemline and gazed up at it: her fingers were still shaking and slick in the flickering light, strands of wetness stretching like cobwebs between her fingers. Harrowhark stared up at them, connecting and separating her wet fingers for a moment in fascination, before offhandedly reaching up with her free left hand to brush her sweaty forehead dry.
When her left hand came away sticky with scarlet, Harrowhark’s half-addled brain had an idea.
Harrowhark willed the tooth into the air one last time, forcing a canine to sprout from the calcium; then, she began to change its form, faster and more efficiently than she’d ever done up until this point. The osseous structure was hardly even recognizable anymore, phasing between states faster than Harrowhark’s eyes could keep up; in truth, she had lost track of which phase it was supposed to occupy, and was primarily occupied with simply changing it from one shape to another.
She flashed between the transmutations as quickly as she possibly could, before the scarlet warmth began to seep down the creases of her forehead and into the corners of her eyes, and Harrowhark reached up with her right hand and collected as much blood in her hand as she possibly could, smearing her own wetness across her forehead as she did so. Greedily, hungrily, Harrowhark slipped her hand back underneath her waistband and began to rub again; the feeling made Harrowhark’s eyes roll back in their sockets, her mouth fall open as a silent gasp stuck in her throat. She didn’t even bother sculpting a tooth with her left hand anymore and simply clenched it into a fist, forming the bone into a tightly packed sphere that hung above her as she rubbed, as her hips bucked and jerked off the sofa cushion, as her mind wiped itself of anything apart from how thoroughly intense the stimulation was.
Release was coming. Harrowhark felt it in her toes first, and it spread to her ankles and her calves, up to her thighs and her hips, and then it was in her waist and her chest and her heart and up into her throat and her brain, and Harrowhark didn’t dare stop, and she rubbed and rubbed, and the bone sphere contracted into itself with a strength so great that tension cracks spiderwebbed across its surface as it hung in the air above her.
Without conscious thought, without active effort, Harrowhark’s lips formed a word around the shape and sound of her orgasm, and it was perhaps the last word she ever wanted to say. As she felt her wrist cramp, her thighs flex, and her stomach burn, as she felt her orgasm rip through her, she found herself gasping out the name of her whipping girl, her property, the last woman alive she could be prevailed upon to recall in such a moment.
When Harrowhark came, she came for Gideon.
♇