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

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon admires this little bit of sword work. If she kills someone, could this guy make her sword haunted? That sounds like a question for a little later in a relationship, like after you know a guy's name.

"Nope," she says, "sure isn't." She sighs. "Let's try this: I'm Gideon Nav. I'm from the Ninth House, which would signal to most people I've ever met that I'm an unfun nun obsessed with bones, but actually that's my necromancer. I'm the eye candy." She holds out a hand for him to shake, remembering too late that he'd bowed to her earlier.

[lightbearinglord]

Already feeling faintly regretful, Lan Wangji looks at Gideon's hand. He is clearly expected to do something with it, some social ritual that is unknown to him. The idea of touching someone he has just met isn't particularly appealing, but neither is the idea of behaving rudely without intending to. "Young mistress Nav," he says, a little on the grim side due to the aforementioned reasons, and also due to his hope that this title isn't egregiously offensive¹. "My name is Lan Wangji. I am from the Gusu Lan clan. What would you like me to do with that?" He nods at her hand.

¹Much to consider after his recent conversation with Magnus...

[ninth_cavalier]

"Uh, sorry," says Gideon. "We usually—shake it, but I can see you're not the shaking type." She high-fives herself, awkwardly, which at this angle is really just clapping, and then keeps her hands pressed together as she bows. "Lan Wangji. Nice to meet you. And—please don't, with the young mistress stuff, just Gideon's fine. There's only one young mistress on the Ninth, and she's not here." Unless—"Wait, she's not, right?" she says hopefully. "Short little waif, same makeup as me, expression like she's constantly forcing herself to eat the world's sourest lemon?"

[lightbearinglord]

The widespread insistence at the mansion that titles and honorifics are unnecessary is one of the features of life here that continues to irritate him the most, but if that is what Gideon wants, Lan Wangji will adhere to it. "Gideon," he agrees, keeping his voice neutral, and then pauses. He also arrived here without someone important. That person followed him not long after, but he knows better than to give false hope. Consider Tress, for instance, still without her Charlie. "I have seen no one of that description."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon sighs. "I figured," she says. "That'd be too easy, right?" She gives him a little smile.

[lightbearinglord]

He could say that whoever she is hoping to see may well arrive in time, but again, there is no guarantee of that, so Lan Wangji only nods. It might be the hope in her voice, or the makeup, or the fact that he is coming to realize -- despite said makeup -- how young she is, but he allows his curiosity to carry him, and asks her, "You thought I was from the Eighth House. Why?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Your clothes, and your sword," explains Gideon. "I mean-by rights no necromancers use swords, except Coronabeth, but she's a special case." She allows herself 0.8 seconds of mental mooning over Coronabeth, and then 0.2 seconds of feeling weird about mooning over someone who's dead now. "You said you use spiritual power. The Eighth trains their adepts to specialize in speaking to and making use of spirits and thanergy itself, rather than flesh like the Third, or bone, like us."

[lightbearinglord]

Obviously Lan Wangji is not a necromancer. That is not even an accurate term for Wei Ying's cultivation, despite the more pertinent similarities. He frowns a little, but with interest rather than irritation. "I do not make use of spirits," he says, "but I can speak to them with my qin. Otherwise, we teach that they should be liberated, suppressed, or eliminated, depending on the severity of the haunting."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon blinks at him, though he won't be able to see it beyond her shades. "You just—get rid of it? All that potential power?" Her tone is not judgmental, just surprised. A soul is a resource, and it takes so much effort to raise one in the first place, much less speak to it, that the idea of anyone just letting that go is like cooking a meal and then dumping it down a trash chute. If, you know, the meal was also a person, and at the bottom of the trash chute was the vast Soup to which all souls returned as unnamed and unnameable thalergenic energy.

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn." Lan Wangji's eyebrows lift just a little with suppressed skepticism. "Resentful energy is dangerous. I will do what I can to return a spirit to the reincarnation cycle, but it is not always possible."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Well, sure, but everything's dangerous," says Gideon, "and whatever isn't dangerous is boring." She grins.

[lightbearinglord]

There's a tiny flash of something like irritation in Lan Wangji's eyes, although it's not exactly irritation he's feeling. It may be closer to sorrow, or regret. She is so young, and she reminds him of someone too handily in this moment. That boy thought anything boring was a waste of his time, too. "Do not be so careless with your own safety."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon can't help it. She bursts out laughing, a startled, hacking sort of cackle that dissolves eventually into waves of endless giggles. She clutches at her stomach (right where she should be full of big bloody holes!), bent double, tears prickling at the corners of her eyes. "Fuck," she manages, when she can breathe again. "Thanks. I needed that."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji watches this patiently, his brows pulled together in a concerned frown. He has had a lifetime to grow weary of young people with no regard for their own lives. Gideon cannot be much older than Sizhui. "I am serious," he says, once she has finished.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon pushes her sunglasses up into her hair so she can widen her eyes at him comically. "You? Serious? But you struck me as such a comedian."

[lightbearinglord]

Someone else with golden eyes? It doesn't bear comment aloud, but Lan Wangji does note this feature with a little bemusement. Crowley will be taken aback, he suspects, and Qi Yuanjun as well.

For now, he only maintains his typical inscrutable expression and says, "Then perhaps you should heed me when I do deign to be serious."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon straightens up, a little. She's never been reprimanded so mildly, and certainly nothing about Lan Wangji is anything like Aiglemene, but all of a sudden she's thinking about her old swordmaster anyway. She salutes. "Sir, yes sir," she says. "It's just—if you knew where I just came from, you'd get why it was funny."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji was not angry, but he does soften just barely at this response. He knows himself enough to recognize the little pang of tenderness he's feeling as he looks at Gideon. "I will escort you inside," he says, because it is not particularly warm outside these days and because she is certainly not wearing enough clothing to protect against that, "and you can tell me if you would like."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Okay," says Gideon, falling in behind him as she always does--two paces behind, a half-step to the left, shoulders straight. "It's complicated. And depressing, depending on how easily you get attached to, uh, people, and them being alive."

[lightbearinglord]

There are so many possible responses Lan Wangji could make to that. He leads Gideon toward the mansion at a brisk but unhurried pace and settles for saying only, "I have lived through a war." By that, he means that he does, in fact, get attached to people, and to their being alive, but that she is unlikely to shock or offend him with stories of the opposite happening.

[ninth_cavalier]

Right, duh. You're not the only person who's ever lost people, Griddle. Man up. She feels a little foolish and dramatic for even bringing it up, now, but she says finally, "This wasn't a war. Wars have sides. This was like—dropping a bunch of rats into a pit and watching until they start eating each other." Prime entertainment, on the Ninth. She suddenly feels a little sick.

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn." Lan Wangji goes slightly grimmer at that description. He doesn't stop walking, but he does spare one glance back at Gideon. "You came here from that?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon nods. "Hand-delivered from the jaws of death. Kind of, um, rolling myself toward the jaws of death like a squeaky chewtoy." She pauses, and then explains, "it was the only way we could win."

[lightbearinglord]

This qualification does very little to reassure Lan Wangji, obviously. He is quiet for a moment as they walk. He cannot say that Gideon is wrong. There are scenarios in which self-sacrifice is the only option. That doesn't mean he must like it. "You will be safer here." Bored, perhaps. But safer.

[ninth_cavalier]

"Cool," says Gideon. "Only, uh, I really fucking don't care about that, so long as H—the others I was with aren't."