CW: parental abandonment issues, allusions/implications of child neglect
The scene is familiar to what Gideon shared during her AMA. In a large cavern, dimly lit, skeleton constructs of bone and ligament toil in the fields.
Option A (Gideon): The bone farmers look taller, larger than life, this time. They tower over the fields, sentinels of the House that keep everyone still living alive. The child—you—linger on the edge, ducking around the corner of a side passage when a tall man in worn finery sweeps past looking over the fields. You're small, and you're used to hiding, and you know his habits. You wait, counting out three repetitions of prayer, before showing your face again. He's gone, and the farmers continue their work, untroubled.
You casually stroll casually down the rows of the field, inspecting each construct for something, some spark of recognition? Of newness? For whatever reason, you choose one of the constructs as your most likely subject and continue strolling in that direction. By pure happenstance of course, you pause near them, not immediately next to them so as not to spook them or be thoughtlessly raked up with the soil. A small safe distance away, you sit cross legged and look up and up and up into the treated skull of the construct.
The thought crosses your mind: are you my mother? You begin to talk as though she is.
Option B (Farmer): If you're familiar with farming, then the scene isn't so strange if you get past the lack of sky, the low light, and oh yes the minor issue of lacking skin or muscles or even a brain. Yet you think and you act and you know what to do. Your strength comes from the theorems holding you together since you don't have back muscles or glutes or magic of your own. Necromancy nestles all around you, fed by the energy stored in your dead bones, and propels you to... farm what you cannot eat.
The work doesn't hurt, however, with everything you lack. It's simply what it is, going through the motions along with every other skeleton on the field, and slowly emptying the furnace of your bones to feed the House that fed you. A small girl, dirty and smudged, with a mess of red hair and brilliant gold eyes 'sneaks' up to you where you work and sits nearby. Out of the way, not impeding anything you need to do. Simple company, and she talks.
CW: monster bone construct, minor injury, telepathic connection (mind & body), optional body horror/murder Note: adapted quotes from Gideon the Ninth
It is a naked and empty room. One wall is windowed all along its length to let you see into the chamber ahead, and that wall has a door in it marked with two things: one, a sign on the front saying RESPONSE, and two, a little plaque on the top marked OCCUPIED. This has a bleary glow of a green light next to it, indicating that Response is probably not occupied. Looking through to Response—a bleak, featureless chamber, characterised only by a couple of vents on the far side of the square—the floor is an absolute shitshow of bits of broken bone.
The other wall—filled with brackets to prop up books that have long since been removed—has a door too, and this one is labelled: IMAGING. The Imaging door has the same plaque as Response, but with a little red light instead. Imaging also has a little plex window whose outside is smeared with old bloody handprints.
Those handprints belong to the short stick figure necromancer with you, someone you might recognize from Camp Camelot the same way you might recognize any other cryptid. Harrowhark Nonagesimus. She explains the scenario neatly—the two rooms, the two doors, the second set of eyes she needs. Her hand has to remain on a tall metal pedestal in IMAGING for the door to RESPONSE to open. Construct after construct has been destroyed in that empty chamber by means unknown. Until you can serve as her eyes.
The Imaging door wheezes shut, presumably as Harrow places her hand upon the pedestal, and the Response door grinds open: the skeleton steps forward, bone feet crunching on a carpet of other bones. As it steps through, the door plunges shut behind it, and the little light next to Occupied turns red.
Whatever happens next happens pretty goddamn fast. The lights in Response flare as the vents started choking out cloudy puffs, obscuring the far wall: you press yourself so close to the glass that your breath makes it misty and wet. There is no sound from within, and there should be (it must all be soundproofed) which simply makes it all the more absurd when something enormous and misshapen comes raging out of the fog.
It is a bone construct, you can tell that much. Grey tendons strap a dozen weirdly malformed humeri to horribly abbreviated forearms. The rib cage is banded straps of thick, knobbly bone, spurred all around with sharp points, the skull—is it a skull?—a huge knobble of brainpan. Two great green lights foam within the darkness there, like eyes. It has way too many legs and a spine like a “load-bearing pillar, and it has to crouch forward on two of its heavyset arms, fledged all over with tibial spines. The exterior arms are thrust back high, and you can see now that they do not have hands: just long slender blades, each formed from a sharpened radius, held at the ready like a scorpion’s tail. It rampages forward; Harrow’s skeleton patiently waits; the construct falls on it like a hot meal, and it disintegrates under the second blow.
The construct turns its awful head toward the window, fixes its burning green gaze on Gideon, and gets very still. It lumbers toward her, gaining speed, when the red light for Occupied turns green: there is a low and doleful parp from some klaxon, and then the construct dissolves. It becomes soup, not bones, and it moves as though sucked into some small grating toward the centre of the room. It is totally gone, along with all the fog, when Imaging springs open and Harrow finds her cavalier with their jaw dropped open. It takes a few moments of explanation. Harrow cross-questions the measurements and looks disgusted with all your answers. Before Gideon has finished, Harrow is pacing back and forth, robes swishing around her ankles like black foam.
“Why can’t I see it?” she rages. “Is it testing the skeleton’s autonomy, or is it testing my control? How much multidexterity does it want?”
“Put me in there,” you say.
That brings Harrow up short, and her eyebrows shoot to the top of her hairline. She frets at the veil around her neck, and she says slowly: “Why?”
You know at this point that some really intelligent answer is the way to go; something that would impress the Reverend Daughter with her mechanical insight and cunning. A necromantic answer, with some shadowy magical interpretation of what you just saw. But your brain has only seen the one thing, and your palms are damp with the sweat that come when you are both scared and dying of anticipation. So you say, “The arms kind of looked like swords. I want to fight it.”
“You want to fight it.”
“Yep.”
“Because it looked … a little like swords.”
“Yop.”
Harrow massages her temples with one hand and said, “I’m not yet so desperate for a new cavalier that I’m willing to recycle you.”
The cycle repeats with more skeletons sacrificed to the bony monster and more frustration until—
You unsheath your rapier with a silver whisper, slipping the knuckles of your left hand through the obsidian bands. The Response door breathea shut behind you.
“Harrow,” you say, “if you wanted a cavalier you could replace with skeletons, you should’ve kept Ortus.”
From whining speakers set in each corner, Harrow cries out. It isn’t a noise of annoyance, or even really a noise of surprise—it is more like pain; you find your legs buckling a little bit and you have to stagger, shift yourself upright, shake your head to clear the brief bout of dizziness away. You hold your rapier in a perfect line and wait.
“What?” The necromancer sounds dazed, almost. “What, seriously?”
The vents breath out huge sighs of fog. Now that you are in the room, you can see that they are blasting moisture and liquid into the air, stale-smelling stuff; from within this cloud the construct is rising—leg to horrifying leg, to broad plates of pelvis, to thick trunk of spine—to the green motes of light that swing around, searching, settling on you. Your stance shifts. From Imaging Harrow grunts explosively, which nearly gets her cavalier knocked ass-over-tits.
[...] “The good news: the blows that rain down on you are not as heavy as you expected from something so enormous. They come down hard and fast, but no harder than the hand of Naberius Tern; lighter, for the lack of muscle. Osseous matter never weighs as much as blood and flesh, which is one of the problems with pure construct magic.
The bad news: you can't do jack shit to it. Your light sword can barely deflect the blows. You have some small hope with your obsidian knuckle-knives—one good strong backhand bash and you knock out part of one arm, snapping the blade off near the tip—but then watch with a sickening weight in your gut as the blade reforms.
“Nonagesimus,” you holler again between attacks, “this shit is regenerating!”
There is nothing from the speakers. You wonder if Harrow can hear you. You leap to the side as the construct falls forward, slashing heavily—it slams into a pile of bone that has built up from Harrow’s previous failures, and a chip careers out like a bullet and nicks your arm. From the speakers, the girl cries out again.
“Nonagesimus!” you say, alarmed now. The construct wallows in its nest of victims, then reared up again. “Hey—Harrow!”
The speakers crackled. “Stop thinking!”
The memory blurs forward, and you're in the same place. Fighting the construct, round after round, with a necromancer in your head telling you what to do. To close one eye and squint. To strike an exact location on the construct to prevent it from regenerating. Hopefully you know your anatomy.
Outcomes Success: Victory leads to the revelation of a small gleaming black box. Its screen ticks up until the lid swings open to reveal a chunky solid key, dyed scarlet red. Along with uncharacteristic praise from Harrow, the reward for all your hard work.
Optional Emotional Gutpunch: You stumble, bloodied and exhausted, head empty and pleasantly buzzed, down darkened corridors. The lights pop on harshly above you, clunking off behind your steps, until you reach a central room with hallways branching off it and a ladder up toward the access hatch. There, at the foot of the ladder are two people'a bloodied broken corpses. Sad, crumpled corpses of people who've been perfectly kind to you.
CW: self-sacrifice, death. Optional monster bone construct, body horror. Note: adapted quotes from Gideon the Ninth
The world vibrates around you—you, your necromancer Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and Camilla Hect, possibly the most badass woman and cavalier you've ever met. A six inch wall of bone stands between you all and whatever makes the WHAM WHAM WHAM noise against the barrier. Harrow's covered in blood sweat, pouring down her painted face.
Each of you have a terrible plan.
Harrow's: Take the Sixth, get into a brace position, and I’ll break you through the wall. Bones float. It’s a long drop to the sea, but all you have to do is survive the fall. We know that the ships have been called. Get off the planet as soon as you can. I’ll distract her as long as possible: all you have to do is live.
Camilla's: Let me out. I can provide the distraction. The other plan isn't going to work. If we could hold her off and wait on the shore, yes. But we can't.
Yours: You pace, studying the space you are boxed into. The dead leaves. The cracked flagstones. [...] The powdery grey drifts of bone. The iron spikes on the railings. [...] "Nav," Harrow says, "what are you doing?"
"The cruelest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me," you say. "You'll know what to do, and if you don't do it, what I'm about to do will be no use to anyone."
You turn and squint, gauging the angle. You judge the distance. If you do it right, you can fall forward, right on the iron spikes.
Which plan do you choose? The correct ending, the one that plays out to complete the memory, the one where anyone lives at all, is the last, but you can play out the others in battle against a lyctor and her construct—both so powerful that one of the best necromancers of her generation and two of the best cavaliers are child's play. Harrow with bone nearly unconscious, Camilla with twin knives and a bad arm, and you as Gideon with her broadsword and a bad knee.
CW: body "swaps", 10,000 years of drama & trauma, murders, potential mass murder, death, gore, references to suicide, skippable reference to dubious consent Note: quotes from Harrow the Ninth. Full scene dialogue available here
However long you've stood there, however much you've heard, you definitely hear and see through the gap into the next room—
“So what,” says the Emperor, “Gideon—you tossed Wake out the airlock—she and the baby died en route?”
“No,” says Mercymorn thinly. “It didn’t.”
You push out of the robes. Ianthe tries to reach for you; you slap her hand away. It is seven steps out of that little foyer to the centre of the room where the Emperor sits. You stand, breathing hard, your battered two-hander clutched in Harrow's hands (your hands), not knowing what to do with her arms (your arms), and not knowing what to do with her face (your face). There is this huge, insane roaring in Harrow's ears (your ears), like close-up electrical static, and it was like you are watching that body move from outside—as though you and Harrow are both out of the driver’s seat and someone else is in there.
But nobody else has their hands on the controls. It is just you.
Everyone turns to look at you both. Nobody says a word. You stand behind the chair with the dead body in it, a dark hole at the back of its neck. The cigarettes make thin grey ghosts curl up toward the light.
“I’m—” you say.
The world revolves.
“I’m not fucking dead,” you say, which isn’t even true, and you are choking up; everything you've ever done, everything you've ever been through, and you are choking up.
And the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stands from his chair to look at her—at you; looked at you face, looked at Harrow's face, looked at your eyes in her face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in Harrow's ears (your ears) resolve into wordless screaming. His expression is just—gently quizzical; mildly awed.
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Are You My Mother?
Option A (Gideon): The bone farmers look taller, larger than life, this time. They tower over the fields, sentinels of the House that keep everyone still living alive. The child—you—linger on the edge, ducking around the corner of a side passage when a tall man in worn finery sweeps past looking over the fields. You're small, and you're used to hiding, and you know his habits. You wait, counting out three repetitions of prayer, before showing your face again. He's gone, and the farmers continue their work, untroubled.
You casually stroll casually down the rows of the field, inspecting each construct for something, some spark of recognition? Of newness? For whatever reason, you choose one of the constructs as your most likely subject and continue strolling in that direction. By pure happenstance of course, you pause near them, not immediately next to them so as not to spook them or be thoughtlessly raked up with the soil. A small safe distance away, you sit cross legged and look up and up and up into the treated skull of the construct.
The thought crosses your mind: are you my mother? You begin to talk as though she is.
Option B (Farmer): If you're familiar with farming, then the scene isn't so strange if you get past the lack of sky, the low light, and oh yes the minor issue of lacking skin or muscles or even a brain. Yet you think and you act and you know what to do. Your strength comes from the theorems holding you together since you don't have back muscles or glutes or magic of your own. Necromancy nestles all around you, fed by the energy stored in your dead bones, and propels you to... farm what you cannot eat.
The work doesn't hurt, however, with everything you lack. It's simply what it is, going through the motions along with every other skeleton on the field, and slowly emptying the furnace of your bones to feed the House that fed you. A small girl, dirty and smudged, with a mess of red hair and brilliant gold eyes 'sneaks' up to you where you work and sits nearby. Out of the way, not impeding anything you need to do. Simple company, and she talks.
It's Me & You
Note: adapted quotes from Gideon the Ninth
The other wall—filled with brackets to prop up books that have long since been removed—has a door too, and this one is labelled: IMAGING. The Imaging door has the same plaque as Response, but with a little red light instead. Imaging also has a little plex window whose outside is smeared with old bloody handprints.
Those handprints belong to the short stick figure necromancer with you, someone you might recognize from Camp Camelot the same way you might recognize any other cryptid. Harrowhark Nonagesimus. She explains the scenario neatly—the two rooms, the two doors, the second set of eyes she needs. Her hand has to remain on a tall metal pedestal in IMAGING for the door to RESPONSE to open. Construct after construct has been destroyed in that empty chamber by means unknown. Until you can serve as her eyes.
The Imaging door wheezes shut, presumably as Harrow places her hand upon the pedestal, and the Response door grinds open: the skeleton steps forward, bone feet crunching on a carpet of other bones. As it steps through, the door plunges shut behind it, and the little light next to Occupied turns red.
Whatever happens next happens pretty goddamn fast. The lights in Response flare as the vents started choking out cloudy puffs, obscuring the far wall: you press yourself so close to the glass that your breath makes it misty and wet. There is no sound from within, and there should be (it must all be soundproofed) which simply makes it all the more absurd when something enormous and misshapen comes raging out of the fog.
It is a bone construct, you can tell that much. Grey tendons strap a dozen weirdly malformed humeri to horribly abbreviated forearms. The rib cage is banded straps of thick, knobbly bone, spurred all around with sharp points, the skull—is it a skull?—a huge knobble of brainpan. Two great green lights foam within the darkness there, like eyes. It has way too many legs and a spine like a “load-bearing pillar, and it has to crouch forward on two of its heavyset arms, fledged all over with tibial spines. The exterior arms are thrust back high, and you can see now that they do not have hands: just long slender blades, each formed from a sharpened radius, held at the ready like a scorpion’s tail. It rampages forward; Harrow’s skeleton patiently waits; the construct falls on it like a hot meal, and it disintegrates under the second blow.
The construct turns its awful head toward the window, fixes its burning green gaze on Gideon, and gets very still. It lumbers toward her, gaining speed, when the red light for Occupied turns green: there is a low and doleful parp from some klaxon, and then the construct dissolves. It becomes soup, not bones, and it moves as though sucked into some small grating toward the centre of the room. It is totally gone, along with all the fog, when Imaging springs open and Harrow finds her cavalier with their jaw dropped open.
It takes a few moments of explanation. Harrow cross-questions the measurements and looks disgusted with all your answers. Before Gideon has finished, Harrow is pacing back and forth, robes swishing around her ankles like black foam.
“Why can’t I see it?” she rages. “Is it testing the skeleton’s autonomy, or is it testing my control? How much multidexterity does it want?”
“Put me in there,” you say.
That brings Harrow up short, and her eyebrows shoot to the top of her hairline. She frets at the veil around her neck, and she says slowly: “Why?”
You know at this point that some really intelligent answer is the way to go; something that would impress the Reverend Daughter with her mechanical insight and cunning. A necromantic answer, with some shadowy magical interpretation of what you just saw. But your brain has only seen the one thing, and your palms are damp with the sweat that come when you are both scared and dying of anticipation. So you say, “The arms kind of looked like swords. I want to fight it.”
“You want to fight it.”
“Yep.”
“Because it looked … a little like swords.”
“Yop.”
Harrow massages her temples with one hand and said, “I’m not yet so desperate for a new cavalier that I’m willing to recycle you.”
The cycle repeats with more skeletons sacrificed to the bony monster and more frustration until—
You unsheath your rapier with a silver whisper, slipping the knuckles of your left hand through the obsidian bands. The Response door breathea shut behind you.
“Harrow,” you say, “if you wanted a cavalier you could replace with skeletons, you should’ve kept Ortus.”
From whining speakers set in each corner, Harrow cries out. It isn’t a noise of annoyance, or even really a noise of surprise—it is more like pain; you find your legs buckling a little bit and you have to stagger, shift yourself upright, shake your head to clear the brief bout of dizziness away. You hold your rapier in a perfect line and wait.
“What?” The necromancer sounds dazed, almost. “What, seriously?”
The vents breath out huge sighs of fog. Now that you are in the room, you can see that they are blasting moisture and liquid into the air, stale-smelling stuff; from within this cloud the construct is rising—leg to horrifying leg, to broad plates of pelvis, to thick trunk of spine—to the green motes of light that swing around, searching, settling on you. Your stance shifts. From Imaging Harrow grunts explosively, which nearly gets her cavalier knocked ass-over-tits.
[...] “The good news: the blows that rain down on you are not as heavy as you expected from something so enormous. They come down hard and fast, but no harder than the hand of Naberius Tern; lighter, for the lack of muscle. Osseous matter never weighs as much as blood and flesh, which is one of the problems with pure construct magic.
The bad news: you can't do jack shit to it. Your light sword can barely deflect the blows. You have some small hope with your obsidian knuckle-knives—one good strong backhand bash and you knock out part of one arm, snapping the blade off near the tip—but then watch with a sickening weight in your gut as the blade reforms.
“Nonagesimus,” you holler again between attacks, “this shit is regenerating!”
There is nothing from the speakers. You wonder if Harrow can hear you. You leap to the side as the construct falls forward, slashing heavily—it slams into a pile of bone that has built up from Harrow’s previous failures, and a chip careers out like a bullet and nicks your arm. From the speakers, the girl cries out again.
“Nonagesimus!” you say, alarmed now. The construct wallows in its nest of victims, then reared up again. “Hey—Harrow!”
The speakers crackled. “Stop thinking!”
The memory blurs forward, and you're in the same place. Fighting the construct, round after round, with a necromancer in your head telling you what to do. To close one eye and squint. To strike an exact location on the construct to prevent it from regenerating. Hopefully you know your anatomy.
Outcomes
Success: Victory leads to the revelation of a small gleaming black box. Its screen ticks up until the lid swings open to reveal a chunky solid key, dyed scarlet red. Along with uncharacteristic praise from Harrow, the reward for all your hard work.
Optional Emotional Gutpunch: You stumble, bloodied and exhausted, head empty and pleasantly buzzed, down darkened corridors. The lights pop on harshly above you, clunking off behind your steps, until you reach a central room with hallways branching off it and a ladder up toward the access hatch. There, at the foot of the ladder are two people'a bloodied broken corpses. Sad, crumpled corpses of people who've been perfectly kind to you.
How to Save a Life
Note: adapted quotes from Gideon the Ninth
Each of you have a terrible plan.
Harrow's: Take the Sixth, get into a brace position, and I’ll break you through the wall. Bones float. It’s a long drop to the sea, but all you have to do is survive the fall. We know that the ships have been called. Get off the planet as soon as you can. I’ll distract her as long as possible: all you have to do is live.
Camilla's: Let me out. I can provide the distraction. The other plan isn't going to work. If we could hold her off and wait on the shore, yes. But we can't.
Yours: You pace, studying the space you are boxed into. The dead leaves. The cracked flagstones. [...] The powdery grey drifts of bone. The iron spikes on the railings. [...] "Nav," Harrow says, "what are you doing?"
"The cruelest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me," you say. "You'll know what to do, and if you don't do it, what I'm about to do will be no use to anyone."
You turn and squint, gauging the angle. You judge the distance. If you do it right, you can fall forward, right on the iron spikes.
Which plan do you choose? The correct ending, the one that plays out to complete the memory, the one where anyone lives at all, is the last, but you can play out the others in battle against a lyctor and her construct—both so powerful that one of the best necromancers of her generation and two of the best cavaliers are child's play. Harrow with bone nearly unconscious, Camilla with twin knives and a bad arm, and you as Gideon with her broadsword and a bad knee.
Cards on the Table
Note: quotes from Harrow the Ninth. Full scene dialogue available here
“So what,” says the Emperor, “Gideon—you tossed Wake out the airlock—she and the baby died en route?”
“No,” says Mercymorn thinly. “It didn’t.”
You push out of the robes. Ianthe tries to reach for you; you slap her hand away. It is seven steps out of that little foyer to the centre of the room where the Emperor sits. You stand, breathing hard, your battered two-hander clutched in Harrow's hands (your hands), not knowing what to do with her arms (your arms), and not knowing what to do with her face (your face). There is this huge, insane roaring in Harrow's ears (your ears), like close-up electrical static, and it was like you are watching that body move from outside—as though you and Harrow are both out of the driver’s seat and someone else is in there.
But nobody else has their hands on the controls. It is just you.
Everyone turns to look at you both. Nobody says a word. You stand behind the chair with the dead body in it, a dark hole at the back of its neck. The cigarettes make thin grey ghosts curl up toward the light.
“I’m—” you say.
The world revolves.
“I’m not fucking dead,” you say, which isn’t even true, and you are choking up; everything you've ever done, everything you've ever been through, and you are choking up.
And the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stands from his chair to look at her—at you; looked at you face, looked at Harrow's face, looked at your eyes in her face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in Harrow's ears (your ears) resolve into wordless screaming. His expression is just—gently quizzical; mildly awed.
“Hi, Not Fucking Dead,” he says. “I’m Dad."