epilogue 2

[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. His hair is cropped close to his head, and in the light it shines a nondescript dark brown. Sensing you are awake, he looks up from his tablet at you and stands. He approaches you, and you see that his sclera are black as space. The irises are dark and leadenly iridescent — a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white. The pupils are as glossy black as the sclera. 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.

"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, I 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, "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. "Most of my Lyctors have been destroyed by a war I've thought best to fight slowly, through attrition. I have lost my Hands. Not just to death. 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. That's why I wanted only those who had discovered the cost and were willing to pay it in the full knowledge of what it would entail."

Suddenly, you realize what a fool you are. You are asking all the wrong questions. "Who else beside me is alive, Lord?"

"Ianthe Tridentarius," says the Emperor, "minus one arm."

"The Sixth House cavalier was only injured when I left her," you say. "Where is she?"

"We haven't recovered any trace of her, or her body. Nor that of Captain Deuteros of Trentham, nor of the Crown Princess of Ida. All the Houses will have questions tonight, and I can hardly blame them." With gentleness, he adds - "I’m sorry, Harrow, we couldn't recover your cavalier either.”

Your brain throbs. "Gideon's gone?"

"Everyone else is accounted for,” he says. "We have had to settle for partial remains of the Seventh House and the Warden of the Sixth. Only you two were confirmed alive. It doesn't help matters that I can't even go down there and search."

This makes no sense. "Why can’t you go back? It seemed to be the whole of Cytherea’s plan.”

The Emperor says, "I saved the world once — but not for me." He leans back in his chair and looks at you. He has a ridiculously ordinary face: long jaw, high forehead, hair a dull and leaden brown. But those eyes. He says, "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 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." Your 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."

But you know this isn't true. There is a reason the Emperor cannot return to the First House, as surely as you know you will never see the Ninth House again. "We can't go home again.”

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 Gideon Nav, or worse, that you'll see nothing at all.

So the universe was ending. Good. At least if you failed here, you would no longer have to be beholden to anybody. You touch your cheek and are surprised to find your fingertips come away wet, and that the Necrolord Prime has chivalrously lowered his gaze.

"I will have to go back eventually. I need to find out what happened to my cavalier's body. I need to know what happened to the others. But for now," you say, "I will be your Lyctor, Lord, if you will have me."

And the Emperor says, "Then rise, Harrowhark the First."