Introducing Gideon Nav, Cavalier Primary to the Ninth House, Keepers of the Locked Tomb...

[ninth_cavalier]

...House of the Sewn Tongue, The Black Vestals. We pray that the tomb is shut forever. We pray the rock is never rolled away. We pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest, with closed eye and stilled brain. We pray it lives, we pray it sleeps, we pray for the needs of the Emperor All-Giving, the Undying King...

One minute Gideon is doing the stupidest and most perfect thing she has ever done, heroically sacrificing herself so her necromancer can eat her and achieve true Lyctorhood and break Cytherea the First's body into so many little shards of bone and ribbons of fat and flesh that even her own mother (thousands of years dead, and most likely a huge bitch) couldn't recognize her, and the next she's—standing. Whole, the aches in her leg and shoulder gone, her sunglasses perched on her nose, the comforting weight of her longsword¹ on her back. She takes a breath, just for the novelty of it, and looks around.

The first thing she notices is how clean it is. No blood, no mold, no grime, no layers of bone dust. When she breathes, she just breathes air, and it feels like extra clean air, which—she looks further around—is probably due to the actual grass on the actual ground. In the distance there are trees. With birds in them.

Is this—this can't possibly be what the inside of Harrow's brain looks like. The inside of Harrow's brain is undoubtedly as spooky as the outside of Harrow's brain, because where would she even have found the imagination to dream up something this—idyllic?? There's nothing even close to it in any of her experience on Drearbruh, and Gideon would know, having been there and actively making that experience worse for all of Harrow's sorry little life.

No, what she's looking at is—a house. A big, boring, white-painted house, not a bone to be seen. "Okay," says Gideon. "What the fuck."

Anyone looking at her will see a tallish (though not for Mansion standards), broad-shouldered and very ripped butch woman, dressed all in black (black tank top, black pants, black stompy boots). She has short-cropped red hair, medium-brown skin, and her face has been painted with stark black and white skull makeup, atop which she has incongruously perched very old-looking aviator sunglasses. Slung over her back is the aforementioned sword.

¹ Typist note: the books consistently refer to this as both a "longsword" and a "two-hander," and from the way its weight and length is constantly emphasized I interpret it to be more toward zweihander than longsword. Also, bigger sword sexier.

Comments

[futaille]

"Classical philosopher from my world. Lived over two thousand years before I did. Platonic Forms are named after him. Allegory of the cave and all."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Huh," says Gideon. "That is weird." She tries to think of a definitive test, one that would mean they're definitely not from the same dimension, even if he was like, way in the past. "What's your sun called?"

[futaille]

"Oh, we're creative and just call it the sun. The actual word varies based on one's language, though."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah, then definitely not the same," says Gideon. "Our sun's called Dominicus."

[futaille]

"Oh, well, then that's..." He pauses. "Huh. There's actually still a bit of a connection there, in a way." He ponders the best way to explain this without everything getting hung up by the mansion translator, then again, proper names seem to work. "Your name for the sun is a word in a classical language on my world that children at school still have to get painstakingly taught. But it also altered itself to become the name for the first day of the week in a lot of languages, mine included. Dominicus becoming Dimanche, in my case, and similar things in others." He takes another sip of his shitty wine. "There are other languages, though, where the first day of the week is named after the sun."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Woah." Whatever is happening to Gideon's brain, it means she is not equipped to process this, and it also means she is immediately trying to process it. If Dominicus is a language ancient to him but present to her, but he's from Earth, where they don't even have lightspeed travel—she can kind of feel her brain working, and then giving up with a cough like a dying engine. "Time," she decides, "is a flat circle." She drinks more Wine, bestowed with the capital because it is more wine than any other wine.

[futaille]

He's content to nurse his lower-case wine. "That's an interesting way to describe it. People do seem to go and make the same mistakes over and over again, at least."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon, who had made the same exact mistake thirty-six times before she'd turned eighteen, nods wisely at this. It hadn't been what she meant, like, even a little bit, but damn if it weren't a great point.

...She has a little trouble stopping nodding. "Hey," she says. "Whatever your name is. What's drunk feel like, and how do you know if you am it?"

[futaille]

Well, if she wanted to ask an expert, she certainly has. "Drunk feels a lot like you are feeling right now." He himself is not remotely close to drunk yet, as his alcohol tolerance is significantly higher, but he very much knows drunk when he sees it.

[ninth_cavalier]

"Huh," says Gideon. "And how do you--not that I'm saying I want to, mind, I'm totally good and this is a thing I'm definitely enjoying--how do you stop feeling it?"

[futaille]

"Time," he says simply. "Sleeping helps just because it takes up some of that time and you won't be feeling it during. But there's no real quick method to not be drunk."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon is pretty sure alcohol is a chemical that effects your blood, and as such any half-decent flesh adept could sober themselves or anyone else up pretty fuckin' quick. Unfortunately this also prompts her brain to imagine a flesh adept sobering her up—wine, or maybe even more unsettlingly just the alcohol itself filtering up through her epidermis to pour down over her skin like sweat, or like blood when Harrow overexerts herself, covering her in a thin, pinkish sheen. Her stomach informs her that if she doesn't stop thinking about that in the next five seconds, she's going to regret it, and so is Grantaire. "Sleep," she says, and stands up abruptly.

[futaille]

Grantaire stands up, too, ready to assist in case she needs help with balancing. "Do you have a room? And if so, do you need help getting there?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"'ve got a room," says Gideon. She's a little unsteady on her feet, but she has a swordsman's balance, and more bothered by how much this feels like extreme blood loss than worried about falling. She takes a few steps, then stops. Finding it, on the other hand, in a mostly unfamiliar Mansion, when all her landmarks keep moving around—"'S'upstairs," she says, "near Sagramore's?" Maybe Grantaire knows where that is.

[futaille]

Well, that's convenient enough. "I can help you up near Sagramore's room, yes. Hopefully we should be able to find it from there." He downs the last of his glass and walks over. "Are you ready?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Hang on," says Gideon, and crosses back to the storage closet. It is, disappointingly, still a storage closet. She sighs, absolutely despondent. "Never any fucking horrors. Okay, let's go."

[futaille]

Grantaire nods and heads out and upstairs towards Sagramore's room, keeping his pace slow in case they pass Gideon's on the way as they approach. "If you want to check any other doors for horrors as we go by, feel free."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon doesn't actually know which door is Sagramore's, so there's a nonzero chance she'd open his, and it's late enough at night¹ that that could mean walking in on him and his husband, and she's trying to stay on his husband's good side for reasons she can't really remember right now. "Nah," she says, instead of explaining all that with her distinctly fuzzy tongue. They reach her door, and she opens it. Grantaire may note that it looks like a perfectly unused room, except for a mirror propped up on an empty bookshelf with two small pots of greasepaint next to it.

"Thanks," she says, turning to Grantaire, "for the Wine. And the directions."

¹ Is it?

[futaille]

"It was no trouble," he says cheerfully. "If you feel like shit in the morning, drink water and have a good greasy breakfast."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon commits this advice to memory, tries to remember if Grantaire is a bow guy or a handshake guy, gets confused halfway through doing one or the other, and ends up patting him gently on the cheek. Then she turns and crosses to her bed, flopping down face first.

[futaille]

He laughs to himself and closes Gideon's door before heading off and leaving her to sleep it off.