001.

[outsidebones]

The movie we are watching today features Harrowhark Nonagesimus as a very young child, perhaps six or seven. She's a quiet, serious girl, precocious for her age, able to understand complicated theorems and concepts. Despite her age, she stalks the gloomy halls of the underground stone castle with confidence, and every person she meets behaves as though she is more than royalty, something more akin to a saint or a saviour.

Her mother and father, despite their regal bearing, receive respect but not quite the effusive devotion Harrowhark receives. But they also don't treat her the same way the others do. They are polite, quick to praise her, obviously very proud of her accomplishments, but there's a chilly remove to their actions; they don't treat her the way people who love their daughter would. Her father tries, from time to time, to be gentle with her, but there's a sorrow in his face when he does. Her mother struggles to look at her. She's been told, or overheard, that they were different, once.

Today is a day where they venture, as a family, to the sacred pools that run beneath the House. The pools are ice cold, and they flow from the tomb where something terrible is kept, but they are private, and Harrow looks forward to these times. In this sacred space, her mother and father bring her, and they wade into the ice cold water and are together as a family and speak on matters that are not to be spoken of anywhere else.

She wades into the icy depths with her mother beside her, taking her hand to guide her steps, and they speak of the things Harrow has accomplished in her short time alive and of her duty to the House. Here, in this place no one else can hear, every time, her mother and father remind her of why she's alive. She knows the story, has known since before she was old enough to speak, but she must never forget, so she listens as they explain.

The Ninth House needs a necromancer to guide it. Once, this House was feared and powerful, but it has never been rich, and it does not have the resources the other Houses have, nor the numbers. The only necromancers remaining on the planet were her mother and father. And the other Houses couldn't learn the truth, or they would come and press their advantage, take over and end their way of life. With no necromantic heir, they would have no way to avoid that fate. And her mother had tried, but every heir she had ever conceived had been lost. Even if she had been able to succeed, the Ninth House would be doomed if any heir was not a sufficiently powerful necromancer.

So they made a decision, a terrible decision. They traded the House's future for a better one. There is power in death, and there is more power in a lot of death, a lot of sudden, violent death all at once, but most of all, the death of children, of infants, generates for at least a moment power like a supernova. There were two hundred and one children on the Ninth House, from teenagers to infants. Her parents explain the theory to Harrowhark, walking her through the calculations and the precise methods, so she can understand exactly how they did it. It was poisonous gas, pumped into the nursery. The gas was so toxic Harrowhark's aunts, who pumped it in, went blind from the exposure. All of the children dead in an instant, all of them but one, and all of that death was channeled into an embryo, forming the pieces of the heir the House needs more than it needed the non-necromantic children.

So Harrow was born, and, thankfully, their hopes were correct. Not only a necromancer but a prodigy capable even at a tender age of great feats. But the numbers are dire; an entire generation was lost to what everyone believes was an outbreak of disease or an accident. No children have been born to the Ninth House since, and its population grows older and older. And yet, it will all have been worth it, if only Harrowhark grows up to fulfill her duty and becomes great enough to draw the Emperor's notice. She can do all of this, and then the sacrifice of two hundred children will not be in vain. Someday, when she dies, the pieces of her she borrowed from them can be scattered and at last at rest.

She holds her mother and father's hands and together they recite a prayer for that day to come; the same one she's always been taught. A prayer that she will live out her life in service to the tomb and then will be buried in two hundred graves.