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[we_bring_hell]

Harrow knows every inch of the Ninth; knows it better than anyone else, for is she not the one who climbed the Anastasian Monument?

Perhaps that is how she found this door.

Squinting in the brutal light and slightly heavier gravity, Harrow Nova runs through her rapier forms. She is small, hardly the typical necro suitcase of the Ninth, but she is lithe and fast and ruthless. She is slim but muscular in cast-off dusty blacks; her abbreviated, pinned back robe flares behind her like raven wings.

She's been wielding the black blade for seven years, but the chain in her offhand is new and she has to integrate it into her repertoire. The chain is pure black Drearburh steel, every link a death's head, the weighted end a carved butterfly of pelvis in lead-filled bone. It is heavy--she is not--and once it gains momentum it moves like a living thing, an unforgiving dance partner.

She will master it. She will supplant the cavalier primary. She will accompany the Reverend Daughter to the First House.

Comments

[acrookedpath]

Wuxian was kicked out an airlock to fall to the surface of the Ninth about a month ago, was found half-delirious amid a pile of constructs he'd ripped apart two weeks after that, and has -- well, not exactly settled on this creepy-ass planet, but come to an uneasy truce with the Reverend Daughter. She won't send a message to the Sixth saying hey, FYI, your adept you tried to execute by dumping him on my house is still alive, and he won't try to dismember any more skeletons. At least not the ones they need for farming.

Never mind that Wuxian's pretty sure whoever kidnapped him was probably from one of the more dangerous splinter sects on the Fifth -- there was that whole thing he and his cavalier did to them a while back, after all -- but whatever.

God, he misses his cavalier.

There is no way in hell he's ever going to assimilate so much that he paints his face, but he kind of likes the all-black situation the Ninth's got going for it. (Though he still ties his hair back with a long red ribbon.) So here he is, dressed in a black hoodie and loose black trousers, watching Harrow as he turns over a couple of bone chips between his fingers.

[lightamidchaos]

Lan Wangji is fuming.

He is a scion of the Lan family of the Eighth House. He is renowned for his brilliance, regarded as a quintessential example of everything an adept should be, known for the strength of his determination and his diamond-clear adherence to the principles of the Eighth. Even here, in this -- this place, his pristine white robes shine as if showing the purity of the Eighth itself, as they should.

But he is alone, despite the impropriety of it all, because his utter fool of a cavalier is not here.

He has never liked the cavalier he had been assigned, but Su She is sufficient in strength to support soul siphoning, and it is not as though he needs him to do anything else. This level of incompetence, however--

His mood is not improved in the slightest by noticing one of the Ninth.