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In her room, Gideon sleeps, and dreams.
She's sinking, drowning, but not in water; it's too dark to be water, and too thick. Ink mixed with ash; blood; sacramental paint. It slips in through her nostrils and washes her brain clean of thought; it sprouts a thousand miniscule mouths and gnaws away at her grey matter, starting at her temporal lobe and squirming like maggots, sometimes one thing, sometimes a multitude, until it's hollowed her out, leaving the inside of her skull empty and gleaming white. Rest, it whispers, curling out through her cochlea to drip down the column of her throat. Rest. You are safe. Some of the blood is her blood, now, growing mouths of its own as it sinks into the sinews of her shoulders, wriggling down her coracobrachialis, separating flesh from bone with the precision of a butcher and the sinister care of a flesh mage. There is nothing more for you to do, Gideon the Ninth. Your part is done.
No, she wants to say, no, I should be a part of something, a part of someone—these arms are not my arms, this skull is not my skull, I have given myself over to—!! But her lips have been sewn shut with the black corpse-thread of Drearburh, and her tongue is a dead thing which no longer remembers the shapes and sounds of words.
She wakes up standing in an upstairs hallway in nothing but boxers and a tank top, so cold that her breath hazes the air in front of her. Moonlight streams through the window and dances along the blade of her sword, which she is holding in both hands; not angled vertically, like she would to begin a fight, but perfectly horizontally, straight out from her chest, like a spiritist would use a thanergy dowsing rod. Searching; smelling the air like a hunting hound.
She's sinking, drowning, but not in water; it's too dark to be water, and too thick. Ink mixed with ash; blood; sacramental paint. It slips in through her nostrils and washes her brain clean of thought; it sprouts a thousand miniscule mouths and gnaws away at her grey matter, starting at her temporal lobe and squirming like maggots, sometimes one thing, sometimes a multitude, until it's hollowed her out, leaving the inside of her skull empty and gleaming white. Rest, it whispers, curling out through her cochlea to drip down the column of her throat. Rest. You are safe. Some of the blood is her blood, now, growing mouths of its own as it sinks into the sinews of her shoulders, wriggling down her coracobrachialis, separating flesh from bone with the precision of a butcher and the sinister care of a flesh mage. There is nothing more for you to do, Gideon the Ninth. Your part is done.
No, she wants to say, no, I should be a part of something, a part of someone—these arms are not my arms, this skull is not my skull, I have given myself over to—!! But her lips have been sewn shut with the black corpse-thread of Drearburh, and her tongue is a dead thing which no longer remembers the shapes and sounds of words.
She wakes up standing in an upstairs hallway in nothing but boxers and a tank top, so cold that her breath hazes the air in front of her. Moonlight streams through the window and dances along the blade of her sword, which she is holding in both hands; not angled vertically, like she would to begin a fight, but perfectly horizontally, straight out from her chest, like a spiritist would use a thanergy dowsing rod. Searching; smelling the air like a hunting hound.
