#kirianthe

For the moment its attention is directed elsewhere, enraptured by something to the north, but she can always see it, in sleep or awake: a depthless blackened pit, save for a white circle around the iris. It is the timeless solar eclipse in which she dwells, bound and hypnotized, something she cannot look at for too long, lest it overtake her. She wants to be rid of it, to cut out the part of her brain that contains it.

She’s weak, losing her feet in the crevices of the mountain until one particularly nasty fall sends her cheek scraping the ground, a thin patchwork of blood staining the stone. She lies there as her eyelids slink across her corneas, wanting so desperately to succumb to the dark–

Strong arms envelop her from behind. “Hey, nuh-uh,” says a familiar voice – the only thing keeping her out of the darkness, in recent days. “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

That suggestion is starting to feel like a comfort. Gideon must realize this, as she adds: “Which is in like, a really long time, by the way.”

Harrow is not sure if that’s true. She runs her tongue across her lips, cracked and raw, a desiccated vessel for her speech. She can’t open her eyes, even as Gideon turns her over to cradle her in her arms. A drop of saline falls onto Harrow’s neck, and she can’t even bring herself to wince as it mingles with her open skin.

“Remember the Ninth, Harrow? You gotta get back there. All those stupid nuns are waiting for you. Aiglamene and Ortus - and even Crux, okay? They need you to come back and boss them around. I need you to do that.”

Harrow coughs. “You hate that place.”

“I’d go back,” Gideon says. “For you. I’d do that, okay? So you gotta stay alive.”

“There’s… nothing left,” Harrow says. “All I can see is a blacked-out sun and the end of all things and a lot of cows with complex social relationships, for some reason–”

“No, uh-uh, wrong. You gotta remember. Think, Harrow! Remember what you need to live for!”

Harrow blinks, a vision filling her mind to replace the Eye. She thinks of chains around a body, of golden hair and pallid skin and a beauty she can’t name.

“The girl in the tomb,” she breathes.

Gideon watches her, a long-fought sadness in her expression that has nothing to do with Eyes or Rings or the thirst that parches their stomachs. It’s a feeling that Harrow thinks she may have understood once, in a time before the Eye.

“Then let’s get this over with,” Gideon says. “Yeet that motherfucker into the sun. Or into, like, lava, whatever. I can’t carry it for you, but… well, you get it.” She scoops Harrow up, calves bulging as she brings them up the mountain and towards the cragged doorway of the volcano. Up two stairs, then five-

And like a worm from a trough of pig slop, Ianthe emerges.

“Mustn’t go that way,” she says, back hunched as she sits atop a boulder. She’s still wearing that tiny yellow nightgown, now caked beige with dirt and grime, greasy tendrils of hair hanging across her face. She’s even thinner than she’d been when they’d seen her last, one strap dangling off an emaciated shoulder, but the grin she wears is wider than Harrow has ever seen.

She takes in the sight of them for an instant, as if weighing what best to do with them. She lifts her chin, the picture of puissance. Harrow doesn’t like it, the way she looks at them like a conquest easily won, and her unease intensifies as Ianthe turns her gaze directly onto Harrow, a targeted hunger stirring in her irises.

“Hi, Harry,” she says. And lunges straight for her.

The move is so sudden that she drops out of Gideon’s arms, and Gideon lets out a surprised cry as she stumbles backwards. Harrow and Ianthe go tumbling across the stairs and into a corner carved in the rock. Harrow clenches the ring above her head as Ianthe clambers across her, golden arm flung across Harrow’s chest, eyes burning blue to purple and back again. When her other hand closes around Harrow’s throat, it feels unsettingly like a caress.

“You– took an oath,” Harrow chokes out.

“You’re appealing to my honour?” Ianthe says, expression gleeful as her golden hand circles Harrow’s wrist. “How trite.”

“Causing the end of the world is– even more cliché–” Harrow says against Ianthe’s fingers, gliding ever tighter against her platysma. As she grapples with the potential of actually greeting her own demise, a swath of orange hair appears in Harrow’s periphery.

“Get your flat ass,” Gideon says, voice deadly, “away from my necromancer.”

She hits Ianthe with the blunt edge of her humerus, Ianthe slamming into the wall as Harrow tears herself away from the fight.

In an instant, she’s running– or stumbling– up the stairs and towards the archway, the sounds of the fight vanishing behind her. She must be moving more slowly than she thinks, because by the time she reaches the doorway, Gideon has caught up.

“...Knocked out,” Gideon says, as explanation for Ianthe’s absence. Then, casually: “She’d be kinda hot if she wasn’t so horrible. What a waste.”

Harrow has nothing to say to this, though the feeling of flesh-fingers crawling up her neck returns, a pungent recollection.

“Should we get on with it?” Gideon asks.

Harrow looks up at the doorway, and down at the ring clutched in her fist. Then she walks forward, and gets ready to stare into the sun.

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