[she squints at the screen, and then it flickers to life. it gives a first person account, with handy dandy narration! wow. just like an audiobook.
There is a man sitting across from you. He is young, but the way he holds himself and the way he speaks to you reminds you so much of Crux that you can't help but hate his guts. He's two years younger than you, and he's a massive bitch. And right now, he's holding you hostage in his white room, with white floors and white furniture.
Not literally. You could leave. But you don't, because you're curious.
"How many in your generation, Gideon the Ninth? Not infants. But your peers, your age group." He asks.
Not infants. Maybe Glaurica had kept some secrets after all. Or—more like—her spirit chose to shriek back into existence solely to complain about the two things that had been of utmost importance to her: her sad dead sack of a son, and the sacred bones of her sad dead husband. You don't answer.
He - Silas - presses. "Yourself? The Reverend Daughter?"
"What do you want, a census?" You ask, annoyed.
"I want you to think about why you and Harrowhark Nonagesimus now represent an entire generation," he says, and leans forward onto his elbows. His eyes are very intense. His nephew - Colum - is still braiding his hair, which only somewhat lessens the effect. "I want you to think about the deaths of two hundred children, when you and she alone lived."
"Okay, look, this is wacky," you say. "You’ve picked on exactly the wrong thing to slam Harrow with. If you want to talk about how she’s a corrupt tyrant, I’m all ears. But I know about the flu. She wasn’t even born yet. I was, what, one year old, so I didn’t do it. There was vent bacteria in the creche and the schoolroom hall, and it took out all the kids and one of the teachers before they found out what it was."
"Vent bacteria does not kill immunoefficient teenagers," says Silas.
"You’ve never seen a Ninth House teenager."
"Vent bacteria," says Silas again, "does not kill immunoefficient teenagers."
It makes no sense. He doesn't know that Harrow was the last baby born. The Ninth House had been jealous of its dwindling population for generations. Bumping off any child, let alone its youngest crop of nuns and cenobites, would be a horrifying waste of resources. The creche flu had been an extinction event.
"I don’t get it," You say. "Are you trying to make out like the Reverend Father and Mother killed hundreds of their own kids?"
He doesn't answer you. He takes another long draw of his water. Colum has finished the braid and pinned it back, perfecting the usual severe silhouette of the Master’s pale head, after which he measures tiny spoonfuls of black tea into a jug to steep cold. He then lowers himself down onto a stool a little way away from the table, close to the door and faced to the window like a true paranoid. The cavalier takes a pile of what looks to be darning and begins to run a nervous white seam up a pair of white trousers. The Eighth House must all be martyrs to stains, you think.
"The Ninth House is a House of broken promises," says Silas. "The Eighth House remembers that they were not meant to live. They had one job—one rock to roll over one tomb; one act of guardianship, to live and die in a single blessedness—and they made a cult instead. A House of mystics who came to worship a terrible thing. The ruling Reverend Father and Mother are the bad seeds of a furtive crop. I do not know why the Emperor suffered that shadow of a House. That mockery of his name. A House that would keep lamps lit for a grave that was meant to pass into darkness is a House that would kill two hundred children. A House that would kill a woman and her son simply for attempting to leave is a House that would kill two hundred children."
You feel grimy and unsettled. "I need a better motivation than the fact that the Ninth House sucks," you say. "Why? Why kill two hundred kids? More importantly, why two hundred kids and not me or Harrow?"
Silas looks at you over steepled fingers.
"You tell me, Gideon the Ninth," he said. "You are the one who tried to leave in a shuttle they planted a bomb in."
You're silent.
"I do not think any scion of the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father should become a Lyctor," says Silas softly. "The open grave of the Ninth House should not produce its own revenant. In fact, I am unsure that any of us should become Lyctor. Since when was power goodness, or cleverness truth? I myself no longer wish to ascend, Gideon. I’ve told you what I know, and I assume you will understand when I say I must take your keys from you."
Silas was a bag of assholes. He didn't know what he was talking about. Here - let me tell you this. Immediately after that he tried to steal something from me after his cavalier promised me I wasn't going to have to fight anything, and took my sword. So take all that with a grain of extremely crystallized salt.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hardrocklife) wrote2023-02-06 04:41 pm
no subject
[aaand memshare week probably isn't going to get him to like movies any more. he gives that screen a wary look, hand on the hilt of his sword.]
no subject
and then the present gideon just goes:]
Oh, what the fuck.
no subject
That's some allegation.
no subject
Silas was a bag of assholes. He didn't know what he was talking about. Here - let me tell you this. Immediately after that he tried to steal something from me after his cavalier promised me I wasn't going to have to fight anything, and took my sword. So take all that with a grain of extremely crystallized salt.
no subject
no subject
no subject
What's this "Lyctor" thing he was talking about?
no subject
Think necromancer but holy shit, they've got a gun! and the gun is more power. Capital N necromancer.