💀Penumbral Lady💀

Harrow is working. Very seriously. She is not mooning over her new relationship with Gideon even a little bit; she has too much work to do.

She is, however, wearing a skull with accents of deep, almost black purple, with a starburst or floral pattern just below her temple, that she has never been seen to wear before.

Other than that sentimental embellishment, however, she is entirely focused on Obaeg's Toward a Common Haemographology. She is making copious notes in the margins--courting future simian fury--and thinking that she should have found this for Moiraine before they started working on her weave notation.

You would need an advanced degree in Nonagesamics to realize that Harrowhark is ecstatically happy this morning, but even the layman can tell that her usual spikes are retracted somewhat. Not the spikes on her boots--Gideon liked these boots, and she has no intention of wearing anything else for a while. But the metaphorical spikes.

Aside from her boots she is back in her standard habit--black trousers, black long-sleeve shirt with the high collar. No gloves. Her hair is freshly cropped back to her scalp. Her face is painted with exceptional care, in what Harrow considers the sexiest pattern, because Harrowhark has opinions about things like that. This one is called The Chain and has considerable, immodest flourishes. She has edged the perimeter of the painted skull with midnight purples and deep blood reds, an even greater departure from propriety.

She is writing in her journal, and since she writes in code there is no way anyone can tell she has doodled One Flesh One End approximately one hundred times. She has been eating oatmeal, and by God she even ate the raisins.

Things are good. For now, for once, things are good.

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.

The Bar has not relented in her attempts to get Harrow to eat something with slightly more calories than air. After many false starts, she seems to have struck gold with potatoes, a vegetable Harrow has never had before.

Mashed was a success; soup went well, too. But chips--ahhh, chips. Hot, salty, taste like almost nothing at all. Harrow may never eat anything else again. After several false starts in the dipping sauce area she has made peace with a light sprinkling of vinegar. The only problem is they make her gloves and her papers greasy.

Therefore, find Harrowhark Nonagesimus at a table with her journal and a skeletal hand, drawing spirals and... God help us... eating chips with a fork. It could be worse. The hand could be feeding them to her.

Harrowhark is in the bar, wearing the style of facepaint known as the Vanitas, with no lower teeth and sharp angular edges. It's good to be back in her makeup, even if the consecration was a greater undertaking than anticipated.

Although she is formally painted from the neck up, she is wearing some of the more informal clothes her room had supplied; soft trousers and a hoodie all in black. She is not wearing gloves today, because her palms are wrapped in bandages, but it is the kind of wound she is used to dealing with and it is healing quickly. The pinpricks of pain around her lips are worse, if only because it's been a very long time since she underwent the ritual of the Sewn Tongue.

She is diagramming spirals on paper, working in ink rather than blood right now. She can't spare any blood currently. She has refreshments to share, if you like faintly cucumber-flavored water and very bland, crumbly biscuits.

The room is spartan; sufficient to her needs. There is a single painting on the wall, painstakingly straight. It seems to be a mounted jigsaw puzzle of a tower at sunset. There is the faintest smell; some kind of organic ash, mixed with the oil of a mechanism. It's not unpleasant.

Her robe has somehow transitioned to the closet, and there's a skeleton on a stand in the corner; she recognizes the ribs. It grins at her familiarly. In the closet there are rows of long-sleeved shirts much like her usual habit, and some other shirts she frowns at. In a drawer there are trousers and spare niqabs and gloves and socks. Her journal is here on the desk.

This is all burying the lede: perpendicular to the white, crisp bed is a second one. There is also a set of free weights in one corner for some reason.

On the table by the bed is a device she only vaguely recognizes the function of, but it seems to be active. She presses the universal glyph for play. After listening to the strange yet familiar apocalyptic hymn, she lets the songs keep playing, but only the second one holds her interest.

She finds another CD in the drawer and puts it in; the first words send prickles up her spine; it's about running away and checking into a spartan room to hide from loss.

Half the words she hears mean nothing to her, but the other half pierce her through.

I write down good reasons to freeze to death
In my spiral ring notebook
But in the long tresses of your hair
I am a babbling brook

She plays it all the way through, and then again, and then again, and then again, and then she listens to the seventh song until she knows it word-perfect, even the words that are gibberish to her.

---

A new Milliways day finds Harrowhark at a table in the bar, studying her notes, black trousers and shirt and niqab. The key to room 99 is on the table before her, and she sings tunelessly under her breath, when that day is coming who can say, who can say. In Canaan House, time is frozen.

The first few times Harrow has come to Milliways, she gave every sign of a carefully cultivated appearance. Tonight is different.

She's wearing black trousers and a black, high-collared shirt; there's no sign of her robes or the bone corselet she usually wears. Even her gloves and bone rosary bracelets are missing. Her facepaint is worn away, sweated off and smeared into an indistinct grey in many places. For the first time her bare skin is visible on her hands and places on her face; it's a muddy, pallid brown. Her short-cropped black hair is mussed.

She is clutching her journal like a lifeline; she moves slowly but she's steady, in the way of someone who learned long ago to make her body steady when it wants to shake. She finds her way to an overstuffed chair and drops into it, staring at her papers in a way that suggests she is looking past them.