One Flesh, One End

Continue threads from elsewhere.

Desolation. That's what Harrow feels when the King Undying tells her that what she wants most is impossible. Not even what she wants, but what she needs. She cannot live without Gideon Nav, and she will not. Unending life, in spite of being what she had sought after in the beginning, is now unthinkable. She looks up into his surprisingly normal face, his unearthly eyes, and lets her gaze drop.

A horrible certainty rises in her, and becomes a morbid hope. Her face is serene with unspeakable grief, none of her wild plan showing as she asks to see the body of her cavalier. He grants her this, and she walks like a woman to the gallows down the ship to the cold storage. He has the grace to leave her alone with her grief, of course, and she opens the door with her heart in her throat.

The chill of the corpsetorium echoes the cool calm of her mind. Her chest aches, her throat is sore from screaming, but the sight of Gideon, hole in her chest, laying on a slab like so much dead meat does not inspire the crushing grief she had expected to. It fuels her. Motivates her to think harder, to dissect the theorems she studied and the one megatheorem that led to this cursed conclusion (damn Sextus for being right).

Harrow has no idea how long she sits there, her mind working in overdrive, peering inward to slowly pull out the stitches she had made in her own soul only mere hours before. It feels like only seconds at the same time it feels like eons. She has to do this carefully, slowly. I will not live without you. she thinks to herself and to the traces of Nav that exist inside her. She repeats it like a mantra. I told you that I am undone without you. We are both undone if I must go on alone.

It's the most delicate work she's ever done, and it hurts. It's a pain right down to her marrow, like she's trying to peel layers of calcium off of her own bones. At the end of it, it feels like she's holding a doll in her metaphysical hands. A little gauzy imitation of Gideon Nav. She pulls it free of herself, feels blood drip from her forehead into her eyes, and with all of the ferocity she had to hold back during the excavation, she slams the soul back into its rightful body.