005. epilogue

[outsidebones]

You come to in a nest of sterile white, lying on a gurney, wrapped in a thermal blanket and wearing a green hospital smock. Your whole body is broken and pained, nauseated. There's a window near you, and out the window the blackness of space. The only true light in the room is a reading lamp, illuminating a chair where a man is sitting. He is simply dressed, with hair cropped close to his head. He is utterly nondescript except for the eyes - his sclera are black as space, irises are dark and leadenly iridescent — a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white. You don't know how you could tell who he was, but somehow, innately, you do.

You throw off the blanket, stagger out of bed, and throw yourself on the ground at his feet, pressing your forehead against the cold tiles, prostate before your God.

When you speak, you mean to speak with reverence, but instead your voice is thick with despair, wavering like a child, and you beg. "Please undo what I've done, Lord. I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav."

"I can't." He has a bittersweet voice, infinitely gentle. "If I tried to remove her soul from you, it would destroy both in the process. What's done is done. Now you have to live with it."

You feel empty, like there is nothing inside you anymore but dark and bubbling hatred. You pick yourself off the floor and look at the Emperor in his dark and shining eyes.

"How dare you ask me to live with it."

God does not rend you to a pile of smoking ash, as you partly had wished he would. Instead, he takes his hand and rubs his temple.

"Because," he says. "The Empire is dying. If there had been any less need, you would have been sitting back in Drearburh, living a long and quiet life with nothing to worry you or hurt you, and your cavalier would still be alive. But there are things out there that even death can't keep down. I have been fighting them since the Resurrection. I can't keep fighting them on my own."

"But you're God," you protest.

And God says, "and I am not enough." You sit with that for a moment, and he adds, some genuine sorrow in his voice. "It wasn't meant to happen like this. I intended for the new Lyctors to become Lyctors after thinking and contemplating and genuinely understanding their sacrifice — an act of bravery, not an act of fear and desperation. Nobody was meant to lose their lives unwillingly at Canaan House. Canaan House. But - Cytherea. . ."

The Emperor closes his eyes. "Cytherea was my fault," he says "She was the very best of all of us. The most loyal, the most humane, the most resilient. The one with the most capacity for kindness. I made her live ten thousand years in pain, because I was selfish and she let me. Don't despise her, Harrow — I see it in your eyes. What she did was unforgivable. I can't understand it. But who she was. . .she was wonderful."

"You're awfully forgiving,” you say, with naked spite in your voice, because you will never, ever stop despising her, "considering she said she was out to kill you."

"I wish she’d said that to me,” says the Emperor heavily. "If she and I had just fought this out, it would have been a hell of a lot better for everyone." He seems lost in thought, and you, too, are silent. "The loneliness of deep space takes its toll on anyone, and the necrosaints have all put up with it for longer than anybody should ever be asked to bear anything."

He leans back in his chair and looks at you. "I know you became a Lyctor under duress."

"Some may call it duress,” you say, voice dripping with venom. You expect to feel something, but you don't. You feel nothing at all - a great and gnawing emptiness. A tiny voice in the back of your head is saying, Someone will burn for this, but alas, it is only your own.

"You aren't the first," says the Emperor. "But — listen to me. I will do what I haven't done in ten thousand years and renew your House." You're stunned, unaware how he could have even known about that, the sorry condition your House finds itself in, its dying state. "I'll safeguard the Ninth. I will make sure what happened at Canaan House never happens again. But I want you to come with me. You can learn to be my Hand. The Empire can gain another saint, and the Empire needs another saint. I have three teachers for you, and a whole universe for you to hold on to — for just a little while longer."

The King Undying has asked you to follow him, and all you want is to be alone and weep. "Or — you can go back home again," he says. "I have not assumed you'll agree with me. I will not force you or buy you. I will keep covenant with your House whether you come with me or stay at home."

You can see a vague reflection of yourself in the window, interrupted by distant space fields pocketed thick with stars, and for a moment you think you see a flash of gold in your eyes. You turn away, afraid you might see a trace of - something, or worse, that you'll see nothing at all. You touch your cheek and are surprised to find your fingertips come away wet with tears. You can't return home, not yet.

"I will be your Lyctor, Lord, if you will have me."

You remember that much. You remember that, and then - you must have fallen back into your catatonic state, undone by your injuries and the sickening Lyctoral process. You spend the next - days, weeks, months - in and out of consciousness, lying in your hospital bed, your world the white and sterile box of the hospital quarter on board the flagship Erebos. At some point, someone shaved your head bald; it's growing back in patches of black stubble, and then one day it's falling past your ears.

When you wake, you feel a different person. The anger is gone, like it simply dripped away. You feel grief, raw, but numb, far away, like you can't place it anywhere. It gives you headaches.

God often comes and sits by your bedside; on one day, he delivers to you the thrice-damned sword. You keep trying to wield it, but every time you wind up spilling the contents of your stomach onto the floor. You become certain the sword hates you, and you it, and yet you keep trying. Uniformed attendants busy themselves around you, sometimes bidding you to sit up and drink water or eat, and other times ignoring you. They had tried to remove your sword, once — they had tried to take it away on some pretext you could not exactly remember — and you attacked them in a frenzy. They no longer try to take it from you, now. You now sleep beside it, like it was your large steel infant.

Sometimes you would lie for days, sleepless, supine on your cot, astonished and shivering before the vista of stars and black space outside your window; other times you would fall asleep and would wake to find yourself standing, and would not remember how you got there. Sometimes you would forget who you were, and at recalling yourself, weep like a child.

On the best days, you would hallucinate, and you would behold the Body. You had dreamed of her often, but had not hallucinated her so vividly since you were a child. She would press her cool dead hands to your brow, and you would feel her skin as though it was really there. She close your eyes and bid you sleep, a mercy, a relief, but when you saw her, your brain would itch, as though begging you to focus on something you needed to recall.

After some weeks, God comes to see you again. Whether or not you were ready, your convalescence had reached its natural time limit - it was time to leave the ship.

“The choice I offered you was always a false one,” he admits to you. “I’m sorry. The Resurrection Beasts always know where I am, and wherever I am they turn themselves to me and start moving, slowly, but never stopping. And they don’t turn to me alone, though they focus on me most strongly. They hunt whoever has committed," he pauses here, delicate, "the indelible sin.”

You stare at him. “Which indelible sin?”

“The one you committed when you became a Lyctor,” says the Emperor.

“Then they will be coming for me,” you say, your head spinning. “If I returned to my House they would follow me there.” You felt the doors of Drearburh slam shut. You realize now that you will never see the Ninth House again.

“No Lyctor has ever returned home, once we understood the repercussions.”

“And so the intention is to teach me how to fight these things?”

“Not before I teach you how to run,” says the Emperor. “It’s a rough lesson to learn. It’s never complete. But I’ve been running for ten thousand years, so I will be your teacher.”

After a moment he lays his hands on your shoulders, and you find yourself looking up into his weird and ordinary face.

“What he is saying,” says the Body distinctly, standing behind him, “is that you have to learn that sword.” The Emperor turns to follow your gaze over his shoulder, but he would never see what you see; you know that she has never been no more than a figment, a symptom of your madness. Still, you can't help but respond to her.

“I can’t. I can’t, beloved.”

The Emperor says, “Harrow?” but you’d mostly forgotten he was there.

“You are walking down a long passage,” says the Body. “You need to turn around.”

“I am standing in the dark,” you tell her, desperate. Each of the Body’s eyelashes are wet with frost. “There’s nothing there. I must have misapprehended the process. I am half a Lyctor. I am nothing, I am pointless, I am unmanned.”

Hands fall heavy on your shoulders. You looked from the face of the woman you love to the face of the Resurrecting King.

“Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing,” he says, meaning to comfort you.

As he speaks, his mouth looks strange. A hot whistle of pain runs down your temporal bone. Your body is numb to grief; perhaps you had felt it once, but you cannot feel it anymore.

“Ortus Nigenad died thinking it was the only gift he was capable of giving, and I have wasted it like air.”

The Resurrecting King took on the expression of a man working out a very difficult and emotionally taxing anagram. He says, “Ortus,” again, this time his mouth appearing to form the correct syllables, but the bile sputters up into your throat, your mouth, before the Body passes her hand over your eyebrows and the bridge of your nose and you slip from his imperial grip. You fall almost senseless to the floor.

“Ortus Nigenad,” says the Emperor again, almost wondering; but then you know nothing more, except that you hadn’t thrown up on God, which had to count as consolation.