Chapter Text
In the 986th year of John Gaius, beloved friend and living God, his third saint entered the River and died there. His body on the other hand did not.
Standing on what was left of a remote moon, amongst what was left of its colony, in what was left of her necromancer and best friend, Pyrrha Dve watched as the Resurrection Beast and its Heralds removed themselves from the atmosphere as quickly as they had arrived. They hadn’t ever been ambushed by an RB quite as successfully as this before, usually they had years, months and weeks of notice and preparation time. Time to run and hide or time to stand and make one more stupid, valiant effort to fight and ultimately die.
Now Gideon was dead, the colony was decimated, and Pyrrha was alone in all the universe.
She had a duty of care to these people; her necromancer’s presence here had brought this fate upon them. As they mourned their losses she neatly tied her grief up, put it away to be dealt with later, and arranged their transport to a nearby Cohort installation in preparation for resettlement. The admiral there did not question her orders that they be treated as refugees and cared for as she might care for the Saint now in their midst. She also didn’t question Pyrrha’s order that a necromancer accompany her to the next nearest Cohort ship.
When that turned out to be the Erebos, she also didn’t question why Pyrrha changed her orders to the next-next nearest ship. And so, from stele to stele Pyrrha and Lieutenant Ramona Cuatros piggybacked their way back to Dominicus.
When they parted ways on the Second, Pyrrha left her with a salute and a kiss.
She then commandeered a shuttle just big enough that the journey ahead would be marginally bearable and made way for the Ninth House for one last farewell to the lover and child she and Gideon had murdered six years ago, barely a moment in the 10,000 years they had suffered together.
After that, well, there was nothing really for it. There was nothing left for her to do, nowhere left for her to go, and no one left who would want to see her. She could no longer help with John’s work with her necromancer gone and she didn’t want to see Cytherea, Mercy or Augustine and have them think there was some hope for their cavaliers. She’d fought alongside them long enough, seen their bodies fighting Heralds while they were in the River. The uncanny way they moved, their eyes seeing but not comprehending. Like a puppet whose strings have been cut but against all odds kept dancing to the puppet master’s tune.
No there was no chance. Pyrrha was the only one left and knowing that would only hurt them. She would go, say one last goodbye to Anastasia and Alecto, to Wake and their baby. Then she would drive the shuttle into the sun.
Her arrival in Ninth atmosphere was reminiscent of that time eons ago, when she had visited Anastasia and helped paint the nursery, nothing at all like the savage moments when they’d boarded Wake’s shuttle and what had come after.
She was patiently tapping in clearance codes and waiting for approval to land when a voice like the Tomb itself crackled over her comms.
“The Ninth House is closed to all penitents, leave our airspace at once or face the consequences.”
“It’s a good job I’m not a penitent. Observe the identification code, this is a cohort vessel. Kindly give me clear for landing.”
“We are not expecting supplies for another fortnight.”
“Well, that’s good because I haven’t got any for you. Check my code, this is cohort clearance level one.”
“I have no reason to believe this is not a faked code. The Ninth House will not be breached under my watch.”
“Who am I speaking to?”
“I will not divulge the secrets of the Ninth House to a possible insurgent.”
“Your name and rank are a secret now? Or do you fear rebuke when I report you to your House leaders?”
“Marshall Ignominius Crux fears nothing, you disgraceful whelp.”
“Okay Marshall, I didn’t want to have to do this, but clearly I’m talking to an insane person,” Pyrrha said cheerfully as she typed in yet another clearance code. “You’re gonna have to dust off some extremely old protocols this time, check that code in your logs. You’ll find it right at the very beginning under lyctoral comma personal. I invoke the will of the Emperor. I am the Saint of Duty, you deny entry to the Emperor’s hand.”
There was a long, long moment of static interrupted only by the equally crackling sound of the ancient Marshall’s laboured breathing.
“Please hold for landing clearance.”
Pyrrha in fact did hold for a full ten minutes and when no further messages came she decided to risk it. She brought the shuttle in for landing in the hope that the Marshall’s admission that they were not expecting a delivery meant the landing pad was currently unoccupied. If it was not the subsequent crash would be an interesting experiment on how lyctoral healing worked when you were no longer really a Lyctor. If, worst come to worst, she survived the crash then she likely only had another couple of weeks hanging out here until she could hitchhike back to Trentham on the aforementioned supply shuttle.
The landing pad of the Ninth House was bleak. It had admittedly been a time beyond comprehension since the last time Pyrrha had been here, but she had naively expected that the despite it’s unsavoury beginnings the Ninth would have flourished in the interim as the other houses had.
Instead, it seemed even more desolate and uninhabitable than it had when they had first prepared it for the Tomb’s construction.
Perhaps the most concerning aspect of this was that there wasn’t a soul in sight. No one to observe the safe landing of the shuttle, no one to greet their unexpected guest.
This close to the surface there appeared to be no sign of life and approaching the edge to stare down into the drill shaft, Pyrrha could observe no movement below. Enough had been said here about graves and tombs, Pyrrha would not sully the historied poetic traditions of the Ninth House with her own attempts. Besides which, it did not so much look like somewhere long dead, but rather like somewhere nothing had ever lived.
Just as she was about to doubt that anyone at all survived on the Ninth House, a great lowing came, echoing up the galleries from the monument below. It almost obscured the sound of shuffling footsteps entering the landing field.
Pyrrha was not so immature as to draw on a stranger, but she did turn with her hand ceremonially placed on the rapier at her hip.
“Oh good, the welcoming committee. Though I take it you are not Marshall Crux,” Pyrrha said.
The woman who approached was in her late sixties and perhaps because of her many scars, sharply handsome like a finely crafted blade. Hair grey like thunder and cropped close, dressed up in the rather miserable raiment that had come to pass for armour here.
“Your Reverence, I am Captain Aiglamene of the Ninth House Guard. I apologise for my late arrival.”
“Not to worry, those steps can’t be easy on that leg.”
Captain Aiglamene only hummed in reply to that, and instead gestured for Pyrrha to follow her.
“I will lead you to Drearburh proper, and the welcome that awaits you there. You must excuse my House being ill prepared for such an auspicious guest, your arrival has set the penitents abuzz.”
“You really couldn’t tell.”
“This is a solemn place; what is quiet for some is raucous for us.”
As they spoke, Aiglamene lead them away from the stairs she had arrived by and instead to the rickety old elevator they had used to move building materials about thousands of years ago. It looked to be the same one to Pyrrha’s recollection, apart from the fact that it added a slight colour to their surroundings being red with flaking rust rather than exclusively black, white, and grey.
“In all honesty I didn’t want all this fuss, it’s always a bit of a to-do with a Lyctor about and I am not here on any official capacity.”
“May I be so bold as to ask why you are here?”
“I’m looking for a body.”
“Those we have in abundance.”
“A specific body. Six years give or take, a… friend of mine was travelling nearby when her shuttle malfunctioned in orbit, I thought she had died in its destruction, but I have a mad hope she might have lasted long enough to make it to the planet. I want to pay my respects if I can.”
Aiglamene had stopped dead, her stillness not like any she had exhibited previously. Suddenly her eyes, already intent, took on an almost frenzied look as they passed over Gideon’s face.
“She was your lover?”
“You know who I’m talking about?”
“Yes, it’s not every day that a body falls from orbit down the drill shaft.”
“Could you take me to her?”
“I can take you to her niche. Her body has been treated according to our customs.”
“She would hate that, but I don’t blame you. You wouldn’t have known. Please could you, before we go to see your Reverend Mother?”
The captain’s face changed minutely, but Pyrrha could not tell how she felt about it one way or the other. Perhaps she had had express orders to take her to Drearburh straight away.
“Since it is the Saint of Duty asking me, I shall. But we will go the back way, to avoid being discovered.”
She stopped the elevator seemingly at random and then lead them a long, circuitous route into the Anastasian Monument. The captain never once faltered or second guessed herself, and Pyrrha had to acknowledge that if she might have been interested if her own wounds weren’t so fresh.
“I was here once, painting a nursery, mint green I believe,” Pyrrha said, hoping to break the tension and bring some levity to their sober procession.
Captain Aiglamene did not deign that with any response, choosing instead to ignore the lyctor beside her. Pyrrha had to respect someone whose lifetime of learned reverence could be undone in just a few short minutes of Pyrrha’s presence. Showed a sort of self-respect which was few and far between.
They were passing chambers which had been intended originally as personal quarters for the Tomb’s builders, they appeared to be no longer occupied but still filled with the detritus of generations. Pyrrha did wonder where the citizens were, where were the families. They traversed a maze of corridors, some so thick with dust that it felt like a carpet underfoot and it’s disturbance sent both Pyrrha and the Captain into coughing fits. After a time they approached an area that even Pyrrha was familiar with.
“We’re near the tomb, aren’t we? Can we take a detour?”
“This is already a detour.”
“I hate to impose.”
“Somehow I doubt that my Lord.”
Pyrrha grinned and turned down the passageway which she knew would bring her to the rock.
The Ninth House had made some significant embellishments in the centuries since Pyrrha had last been to the Tomb.
The rock itself was, as always, a great immovable boulder taller even than Gideon, impossible to move without the many magics John had worked upon it. It’s surrounds we’re now carved with a hundred sculls, staring blankly down on any penitent who dared approach.
Pyrrha dared. She even went so far as to lay her hand upon it and smiled sadly as she said “I’m sorry I won’t be there to see you A. L.”
The captain observed this without comment whether verbal or visual, but when Pyrrha turned away she marched away at a pace far quicker than they had approached and it sent her wobbling on her recently healed leg.
From the Tomb it was not far to the niches, they were mostly occupied by the ancient inhabitants of the Ninth house. Aiglamene explained as they walked that they were placed here so that time and nature could work to remove the flesh and organs without damaging the bone, afterwards they would return to their labours as constructs and work the leek fields.
For something to say, Pyrrha shared some insight to the methods of the other houses; the Captain was familiar with the Second form her time at Trentham.
“Let me guess, you were in the territorials?”
“Strike force, for my sins.”
“You look too sensible for a Brandishment Baby,” said Pyrrha with a smile she knew could charm a construct.
“An’ there’s a term I haven’t heard since I was a child.”
“Not that long ago then.”
“Your Grace, please,” Captain Aiglamene said with an extremely aggrieved sigh.
Aiglamene slowed to a stop before a niche set far apart from the well tended niches of the Ninth House penitents. It was closed to the open air like the other occupied niches, but where they were each adorned with a plaque declaring the name of their occupant, this one was unmarked.
Pyrrha caught her hands trembling as she reached for the catch and bunched them into fists before she could expose her weakness. Captain Aiglamene seemed to have caught it anyway; Pyrrha’s theory was proven when Aiglamene reached out a calloused hand and opened it for her.
Inside Wake lay almost entirely skeletonised. Pyrrha would have known her even if they hadn’t buried her with the possessions she’d fallen from the shuttle with.
She drew the broadsword from the grave, observing its familiar heft and notches in the cross guard. She touched her thumb the blade to test it and felt it bite into the flesh of the pad, she drew the digit away and watched her blood soak the blade as the wound seamlessly closed itself. Well, that answered that question.
“This was mine, I didn’t realise she’d taken it until-“
“You are welcome to take it with you when you leave. Though we are not inclined to sentimental wastage here, there is a certain superstition attached to your friend here and what came down with her.”
There was that inscrutable expression once more, but Pyrrha only had a moment to study it before the sound of shuffling had them both turning towards its source.
“Gideon,” Aiglamene said, making Pyrrha turn her face minutely in her direction, just long enough to gauge that she was talking to the child and not to Pyrrha. “You should be at service. The bell rang.”
The child peered around the corner and up, up, up at Pyrrha. It mumbled something into the wall, which had Aiglamene hobbling over to it. And all the while Pyrrha could barely think, barely breathe.
“What was that?”
“Harrow was mean.”
“You know it does you no good to say that about Lady Harrowhark.”
“I know,” the child said.
“Why are you down here?”
“Came to see,” the child began but trailed off to an inaudible mumble looking nervously around the captain at the open niche. Pyrrha self-consciously closed the door, unsure the damage that a clear view of a desiccated corpse could do to a child whose breakfast, lunch and dinner were farmed by an army of skeletons.
Aiglamene turned at the clang of the niche door, looking at it significantly before meeting Pyrrha’s eyes without even a hint of the mixture of fear and respect she had become accustomed to in the last 10,000 years.
“She’s come to see her mother’s niche.”
It was dark in the catacombs of the Ninth but even in their strange, fluorescent insects that covered the ceiling and walls she could see the child’s red, red hair. Pyrrha could almost imagine the ways she might grow to look like Wake, but right now she looked like no one so much as that gap-toothed child in the picture of Wake’s, her niece.
“She’s our-“
“Gideon,” Aiglamene interrupted before Pyrrha could say anything so damming. “You can stay at the niche for now. I’m going to take our visitor to see the Reverend Mother and Father. Come straight to my rooms afterwards.”
“Am I getting punished?”
“No. Come straight there after, no dawdling.”
Aiglamene took Pyrrha by the shoulder and did her level best to march her from the crypt despite the vast difference in their strength and size.
“That’s my mum’s sword,” the child called after them. Pulling Pyrrha to a halt that not even God himself could compel her to move from.
“I’ll sharpen it for you, okay?” Pyrrha said, feeling unaccountably shy.
“Okay,” the child replied and then after glancing at Aiglamene. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Only then did Pyrrha consent to being drawn up the stairs and away from Wake’s niche.
“You’re Gideon’s father?”
“I- yes, I think so yes. Gideon it’s my- it’s my name. How did she?”
“When our necromancers called your lover’s spirit that name was all they could get out of her. They thought she was calling for her child,” Aiglamene said tossing her head back to suggest the child they had just left behind.
“How did she survive the fall?”
“God himself only knows. She was in a bio-container strapped to the woman’s chest when they found her, or so I hear, I was only discharged three years ago. By all rights she shouldn’t have survived a lot of things, but I expect being the child of a Lyctor accounts for that now.”
But Pyrrha didn’t know that it did, what she and Gideon had done all that time ago, the power Gideon had. It shouldn’t have been hereditary; it came from her soul burning inside him. It raised questions that Pyrrha was not capable of exploring and the only people in the universe who could, she wouldn’t trust within a parsec of their child.
“Will you take her with you?” Aiglamene asked, interrupting that line of thought.
“I, I don’t know, I’ll have to speak to her carers. It’s not an easy or safe life, as a Lyctor.”
“She has no carers; she is not safe here and her life so far has been far from easy. I don’t know if I can trust you, I don’t know you at all. But I worry that she will not survive her childhood on the Ninth, it’s a miracle she has so far.”
“She’s being abused?”
“Grievously so. I have done what I can to shield her since I returned from Trentham, but it is not within my power to stop the worst of it. I said that everything that came down with your lover is treated with superstition, Gideon included.”
“She’s just a kid.”
“That of all things would not stop the people of the Ninth.”
They walked a different path this time, towards areas of Drearburh that were more frequently used but no less decrepit than the rest until they came at last to the grand doors that allowed entrance to the chapel proper.
“Should I just take her then? You could bring her to the landing field, I’ll take her with me when I leave.”
“Tell the Reverend Mother and Father first, she is a bondswoman of the Ninth you’ll need their blessing for her papers to be released. They won’t deny the Saint of Duty, at least I don’t think so.”
“Where will they be?”
“Leading the service.”
The chapel was silent but for the sound of a hundred clicking knuckle bones - some on strings, some in the hands of the arthritic penitents - when Pyrrha entered with Captain Aiglamene at her back.
The great cavernous hall was built to hold far more people than were currently inhabiting it and it did not escape Pyrrha’s notice that the youngest among them appeared to be not all that younger than Aiglamene. Apart from a rotund young man in a position of honour at the head of the hall, beside the empty thrones of the Reverend Mother and Father.
The voice giving the sermon was immediately recognisable.
“Marshall Crux, I presume?”
“It is, but this isn’t right. He never led the sermon before, and they never would have let him with an honoured guest present.”
“This is giving me the heebie-jeebies, where would they be if not here?”
“Only their personal chambers.”
“Show me the way, if they aren’t observing ritual then I’m not going to either.”
Aiglamene lead her down the aisle past Marshall Crux who went a vibrant shade of puce when he was summarily ignored by their saintly guest as the two of them strode past him to the small door at the back of the chapel hidden behind a truly gruesome statue of a skeleton. She half thought he would come to stand between them but a single dark look from Pyrrha had him retreating behind the lectern.
They followed the narrow passageway, far more opulent than any part of the Ninth, up to the series of doors which led to the many chambers belonging to the Reverend family. Genuine electronic light, not just the sickly light from their glow worms, spilled out through the gaps around the door at the far end of the hall.
Pyrrha pushed past the Aiglamene and stopped them halfway to the door.
“Captain, I need you to know that no matter what happens here I intend to take Gideon with me. Can you prepare her things right away?”
“What should I tell her?”
“Tell her that I- I don’t know, just don’t tell her who I am to her yet. I want to explain myself.”
“I will,” Aiglamene said, she made to turn back the way they had come but hesitated. “Will you let me know how she is, tell me how she grows?”
“Sure thing,” Pyrrha said with a grin. “I’ll send you piccies and a lock of her hair, though I didn’t take you for the sentimental type.”
“That’s the last thing anyone would call me, I just need regular proof she’s safe before I come after one of God’s disciples.”
“I like you, Captain Aiglamene. I have half a mind to take you with us.”
“Perhaps a few years ago I would have come but not now. The people of the Ninth, what little there are left of them, need me here. My duty is not yet over.”
What could Pyrrha do but kiss her?
The captain was prepared for any attack, but she was not at all prepared to be kissed. Her lips were tacky from the ceremonial paint which tasted sour and chemical. She did not reciprocate but did not seem overly angered by Pyrrha’s action.
“You don’t behave how I would expect of a Saint.”
“You think I’m bad but you haven’t even seen half of it,” Pyrrha replied and backed up to the illuminated door. “I can find myself back to the landing field from here, I’ll meet you there within the hour.”
With that Aiglamene disappeared and Pyrrha turned, drawing herself to Gideon’s full height and affecting that expression he had that always set the cohort admiralty scrambling.
She hadn’t had a minute to herself since she arrived and barely any time to even consider that the child she’d been mourning the past 6 years was alive. It was like something out of that soap Cassie used to watch way back before the end and beginning of everything.
She couldn’t make sense of her thoughts, she was deliriously happy to know that she’d lived, devastated that she’d been so mistreated by her erstwhile foster House. Pyrrha felt like utter scum that she’d been so caught up in her own grief that she’d never forced Gideon back here, never even tried to recover Wake’s corpse. Known what it would have meant to her but did nothing. If she’d had even the slightest care for what Wake’s wishes for her body would be she would have found their child earlier.
Then there it was, the bubbling nervous excitement. She was a mother, she was a mother. She was about to be the primary carer for a child she didn’t know, and had only just met.
She had always wanted to be a mother, secretly. Barely told a soul about it, only Gideon.
She was suddenly faced with the prospect and it both thrilled and terrified her.
She’d have to settle down. For the first time in well, ever. Children need stability and a home. Where could they go? Somewhere they wouldn’t be known, the last thing she wanted was any of the others getting word of this. They could go, anywhere, anywhere at all that was safe. There was that moon that Gideon - hah Gideon Senior - had always liked, little place with a settlement, not much Blood of Eden presence. Just Pyrrha and her daughter.
She couldn’t wait to get to know her.
Pyrrha let that thought buoy her as she turned the handle prepared to face anything but what she would actually find on the other side.
It was quite absurd how serenely they swayed hanging there, the weight of them flexing the ropes so they creaked in a deafening symphony. They looked like nothing so much as a pair of empty robes hung up to air, so slight were the Lord and Lady of the Ninth House. Their cavalier was almost comically large, held up by two ropes, and even then the ancient beam was groaning under his mass. Their faces were bug eyed, but not yet swollen, this had happened in only recently. If Pyrrha had been just minutes sooner, she could have stopped them.
Pyrrha felt the hot hand of fear on the nape of her neck like she never had before, not even in those final moments before Gideon had killed her.
She hadn’t noticed the child. Her eyes inexorably drawn to the larger bodies, had skimmed over the tiny form perched on a chair and a pile of teetering books. Tinier by far than Pyrrha’s own recently discovered child, she couldn’t tell if this was due to age or extremely early onset necromantic wasting. But they were a tiny bag of bones, clear even under their child-sized official robes and skull paint.
And they were gripping their miniature noose with their eyes trained on Pyrrha, seemingly unseeing.
“Hey now sweetheart, I know I’m a stranger but just you let me take that,” Pyrrha said as she slipped the noose from around their neck.
They were catatonic, but somehow feverishly hot and shaking imperceptibly except to touch. Pyrrha felt perversely as though she was going to be sick, but she was well-versed in pushing down her own horror to get the job done.
“Alright, I’m just gonna lift you down, is that alright?” Pyrrha asked but the child made no indication whether or not she had even heard her, and when Pyrrha lifted her from the chair and onto the floor her little legs gave out beneath her.
“Woah now, I’m sorry sweetheart, is it alright if I carry you? Ok, no dice, I’m gonna take that as a yes but if you want me to stop just say so or if you can’t say just hit me round the head and I’ll drop you like a tonne of bricks, ok? Hm, ok?”
So, Pyrrha took the tiny form in her arms, and curled her head against her chest so that there was no chance she would see her parents, though the damage had already been done in that regard.
Pyrrha walked a sleepers walk down the corridor and when she entered the chapel once more, most of the Ninth House had vanished. She wasn’t long through the door before she was ambushed.
“Saint you may be, but you will not lay a hand on Milady Harrowhark, not while I still stand. Surrender her to me at once or face the death you have outrun for a myriad.”
So Pyrrha punched him, just the once, with her myriads experience and knocked him to the floor. He was still as a stone, and just as conscious, until she bent to check his vitals and found a strong pulse and the slow, shallow breaths of a man giving it z’s.
Behind the now prone form of the Ninth House’s Marshall, the young fellow from earlier and three nuns huddled together, attempting to avoid notice despite their size. One was already crying, the other two were stoic, their unseeing eyes bound with cloth painted with a facsimile of what lay below.
What a pathetic showing.
“Sorry about that, he was very rude to me when I was trying to land.”
This did not have the calming effect Pyrrha had anticipated, and instead the crying nun began wailing more aggressively and comically attempting to shield the enormous man with her small frame. He had begun to shake and sweat like a man on the come down and frankly Pyrrha had little patience for any of it.
“Your Reverend Mother and Father, and the Cavalier Primary, have killed themselves. I would offer you my condolences but as they had compelled their child to go the same way, I’ll just give you a good riddance. I don’t know what they’ve done or what you know, I did not come here for any punishment or retribution. But I will take it as this, your Reverend Daughter is coming with me.”
And with that Pyrrha stormed down the aisle and out of Drearburh. This time she avoided all distraction and called the elevator immediately. As the ancient mechanism lifted them towards the surface, she talked quietly to Harrowhark.
“I’m sorry princess, this is all very strange but I’m going to take you somewhere you’re going to be safe.”
When they reached the landing field, Aiglamene was already there and so was tiny Gideon, climbing on the shuttles rear thrusters.
“Lady Harrowhark?”
“She’s coming with me too.”
“What?”
Pyrrha opened the rear hatch to the shuttle and placed the tiny child inside, buckling her in when she made no move to do so herself. She then retreated outside the shuttle and standing out of earshot, beckoning for the Captain to join her.
“The Reverend Mother and Father are dead. Killed themselves, their cavalier too. Something about my presence here I would expect, do you know anything about that?”
Aiglamene looked sour for a moment staring at Harrowhark and the Gideon.
“I’ve had my theories, but I can’t know for certain. I was not here at the time and I wasn’t party to it. But, until six years ago there were two hundred children under eighteen on the Ninth House and now there are two. I will tell you more of what little I know later but for now,” Aiglamene hesitated and looked up into Pyrrha’s eyes with her own deep brown gaze. “I think it’s best if I take you up on your offer and come with you.”
“I always get my girl,” Pyrrha said with a wink.
“My Lord, you are a menace to the galaxy,” Aiglamene replied.
“I love terms of endearment, but you can just call me Pyrrha.”
“I thought your name was Gideon?”
“It is, Gideon Pyrrha. We Lyctors have no arithronyms and with Gideon Junior about this is probably easier.”
“You’re not telling me the whole truth.”
“Nope.”
“Will you?”
“Maybe one day.”
Aiglamene grumbled, then gestured her head and Gideon came running. She snapped Gideon into the seat beside Harrow and leant down barely showing a tremor at the pain that must cause on that leg. She put a hand on Gideon’s head, a move which woman and child both instinctively shied away from but settled into eventually.
“Gideon, I need you to be perfectly silent alright. Not a word to Lady Harrowhark until I say.”
“Why?”
“Don’t ask questions, you still want me to teach you broadsword when you’re big enough to lift it right?”
“Yes.”
“Then do as I ask.”
Aiglamene left with a quick direction that she would pack a bag for herself and Harrowhark.
Pyrrha emptied out the emergency survival kit into an open locker and began filling the bag with hastily dug up dirt from the hard packed landing site. It wasn’t consecrated grave dirt, but this wasn’t Pyrrha’s first rodeo, and it would work in a pinch.
Once it was full, she placed it on Harrows lap, and when she didn’t respond, wrapped the little girls arms around it until she was hugging it to her body. In the first move she had made while Pyrrha had known her, Harrow buried her face into the bag and didn’t look up again.
Pyrrha turned to face her child for the very first time and smiled warmly at her.
“This must be really weird, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Did Aiglamene tell you why we’re here?”
“You’re gonna take me off the Ninth.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re an important person to me and I want to take you somewhere safer. I’m-“
In that moment Aiglamene returned, closing the shuttle door behind her and triggering the lights inside the shuttle which set Pyrrha’s Ninth companions hissing and squinting. By the time she looked back, the harsh fluorescent lights had transformed Gideon’s eyes from the golden-brown they had been in the low light of the Ninth to a brilliant yellow-gold.