necrosavior: (profile; shades)
Gideon Nav ([personal profile] necrosavior) wrote in [community profile] polylogs 2022-02-04 01:36 am (UTC)

Gideon Nav | The Locked Tom | OTA

Ⅰ. ARRIVAL

CW: sexual content

Churches are nothing new. Her childhood home is, more or less, one large religious site. Gideon sat through (and slept through, when she could get away with it) more services than she can remember. Somewhere after 1,000, she'd given up trying. There are been better things to count. Canaan House. The Mithraeum. Gideon has only seen non-religious settings coming here to these islands.

Which is all to say a dreary church with old grime is nothing new. The stained art is more colorful, something the Ninth House would never go for. She stares at it, parsing out different people and stories. A lot of them, most of them, mean almost nothing to her. Someone else's religion. Someone else's saints. Someone else's god.

The tits hinted at do her in. Once she's seen the somewhat abstracted image that reminds her of her dirty magazines, Gideon can't stop returning to it. With eventual utter horror. Gideon wishes Harrow would perform brain surgery on her, except for the fact that it would mean explaining what and why she wants something purged from her mind. It's horrifying to Gideon. It would possibly kill Harrow.

Multiple attempts to press the image out of her eyes with her fists do nothing. The content is suggestive, and sure there's only one lady. That's a moderate problem for her tastes. The shudder-worthy scene is possibly of her—conception isn't quite the right term. Gideon is the result of more of a one-two punch. Something she went from knowing nothing about to excruciating detail. No one sat Gideon down for 'the talk.' She's sure if they did, it wouldn't be to explain that one day God and two of his saints did the horizontal tango.

Gideon taps her head against a hymnal, but the more she tries to forget what she heard, the more it comes to mind. Not in an abstract imagined sort of way. The kitchen is sans an enormous number of killer wasp corpses the size of people or bigger, but it's in the background, with the dining room (and the dining table, why, why, why, that's where people eat food!) in the foreground. The kissing is really promising a lot more, and Gideon would still believe it was her imagination except that she would never include Ianthe in her imagination of anything. Much less—that.

She focuses on breathing, but even without having ever been very religious, she shudders. After all, one of those men is her dad.

Ⅱ. COME UNDONE

For someone who has seen her own corpse before, this should be less surprising. Gideon's soul gives up, flips the bird, and leaves her body. Leaving her standing there wondering if she's going to see Harrow's stick arms and legs when she looks down. Because that's her right there all right.

Which is how a not-so-mummified Gideon corpse beats her to the punch. "All you have to do is ask," it says, "She'll do anything if you ask her to."

"Will you please shut up?!" Gideon asks. With the questioning tone, inflection going up and everything. The mummy either has nothing else to add or is just as obliging as Gideon. It shuts up.

Feeling the flush on the back of her neck and in her cheeks, Gideon rues the decision, more or less, not to wear face paint. Sunglasses only cover so much. As embarrassing as it is, Gideon starts making her way through the crowd, too large for most people to physically stop. Hopefully no one takes the mummy literally.

Ⅲ. IMAGINARIUM

Gideon stares at the thick solid key. If it were not so deep scarlet, the color of fresh blood, the color of the uniforms in the cohort, the people-sourced ink staining all over Canaan House, it would be nothing special at all. Even if the smaller plain key to the laboratories were on the shelf, Gideon would recognize it. Seeing it out of place confuses Gideon.

Oh, it likely means something. Nothing's come from home that doesn't mean something. The sword she takes with her everywhere means everything. This key's memories are all ruined what happened the last time Gideon went behind its door. What she woke up to.

That's what she expects when she picks it up. Jeannemary staining a ten thousand year old bed previously neat and tidy. Not...

The thing looks like a myriad of constructs all come together to build the construct to rule them all. It is, Gideon knows, a resurrection beast. Yes, it scares her shitless, no matter how many of them they fight. Them. Together. Other lyctors leave their bodies behind, not having a living cavalier in a body of her own. Not Harrowhark Nonagesimus. She and Gideon run/swim/float toward battle. Leaving the physical logical world makes the images lose their sense.

The resurrection beast is its own source of gravity, pulling them every faster toward its spiky clattering skeleton—exoskeleton? Gideon isn't sure—and the simple joy of battle sings in her blood. Harrow does her necromancer thing, like in Response, like fighting Cytherea, and the resurrection beast is made almost entirely of googly lights. It's long hellish work, but working together seamlessly, though cut and bleeding, bruised and smashed in ways not understandable, time stops working. There's only now, this moment, this slash, this block, deconstructing the resurrection beast one piece at a time, until they sink so low the depths swallow it whole.

Harrow takes Gideon's hand, smiling with religious (and something more) ecstacy, and guides them out of the River.


Gideon isn't sure what the key showed her. The future? A future? An idle daydream? But her heart yearns for it, feeling empty and lost back in the shop holding the red key.

Ⅳ. GARDENS

Gideon ate the cotton candy at the carnival. Food isn't always food. Or isn't always only food. So long as it isn't poisoned (and the stuff here in the garden looks better than many of the things she's seen promised as food in the city, sometimes a little sooty if nothing else), how bad could it be?

She grabs a plate (which is so small; how many servings can they have?) and starts loading up. One of everything please.

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