💀Penumbral Lady💀

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.

Observe Harrowhark Nonagesimus, flopped full-length on a sofa in Milliways, moaning into a cushion. She looks like a heap of coal-filthy laundry, like a bad black snake trying to wriggle into a crack in the fabric of reality and never return.

(When I release you from my service, Nav, you will know about it.)

She fucked up.

(It's just me. Go back to sleep.)

She fucked up so bad.

(Never work with children, Griddle. Their prefrontal cortexes aren't developed.)

She wants to die. For one golden moment she had done something right. Something worthy of what she's been given.

(Death first to vultures and scavengers.

It was good. You were good.)

She is a dullard. An imbecile. A fool. She had screamed herself hoarse upbraiding herself, then left Griddle with that viper Septimus to go do--what? Nothing useful. Nothing to bring back the flower of the Fourth. All she'd done is give Dulcinea Septimus more time to thieve the loyalty of her cavalier.

She wants to die, but she isn't allowed to die, not until she has redeemed the deaths of two hundred (and two!) children. Not until she's sold her poor mortgaged soul to the Emperor and the Corse of the Locked Tomb and renewed the Ninth. All of their hopes ride on her, and she is sinking under them, and the golden eyes of Gideon Nav are all their eyes; the eyes that can't believe that God and chance have entrusted their fate and their fidelity to this failure.

(Harrow, I hate you. I never stopped hating you. I will always hate you and you will always hate me.)