You’d been stabbed from behind, and you’d collapsed backward onto the rapier’s hilt. Its foible pointed upward where it protruded from your torso.

And you’d gone and left me behind.

I arched up on your hands, rested your weight on your feet—the blade stayed stuck—and I pushed up against the corridor wall, and I got you to stand. Your legs were trembling. The only thing I could think of to do was to wad up your hands in the robe, give myself a count of three, and push the rapier tip backward as hard and as quick as I possibly could. The noise that resulted—I’m not doing it justice when I say it went SCHHHLIIIIICK, which also doesn’t describe the pain of a full foot of steel being pushed back through your innards and out the small of your back as carefully as I could do it, which wasn’t very. The sword fell to the tiles with a sad rattle, and I took a couple of moments, and by the time I reached down to get it you’d just—healed up. No more pain. No more stab wound.

“THESE TWO ARE INTENDED FOR YOU,” said Harrowhark Nonagesimus. “They are to be opened only in the event of my death or of the other happenstance, though I have very little hope of you not opening them the moment my back is turned. The other twenty-two are written in an unbreakable code only I can decrypt, intertwined with a false chamber-code that, if even merely beheld, curses you, your family, and the restive bones of your ancestors, for as long as the name of Ianthe Tridentarius is whispered in necromantic hearing. Twenty-four, in all.”

“I would have just gone with a blood ward, personally,” said Ianthe.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Four, Epiparodos

“All right. When did you become aware of what was happening to you? When did you realise what was going on with the other soul?”

It was easier to answer questions mechanically. “In the first days. I knew she would be absorbed. I understood that I would inadvertently destroy her soul—the process was already underway. But it hadn’t finished. I had time. I decided to remove my ability to so incorporate her … by removing my ability to comprehend her.”

Easier, now, to recall it. A litany. The same singsong recitation as the Eightfold Word. It could almost live apart from suffering. “I took the part of my brain that remembered her … that understood her soul … and I disconnected it. Then I made rather crude systems—so as not to be accidentally reminded … knowing that the pathways might reopen if they were knocked about. I had an accomplice … someone who knew how to manipulate the fatty tissue of the brain better than I possibly could. I made my skull a construct, programmed to apply pressure to specific lobes. And it worked, Pent. It worked,” she said. “It was stupid. A brute-force solution. But it worked.”

************ : log created on : Friday August 21 2026 @ 18:05:05
00:00:00.000 : [sys] running on x86_64 / Windows 11 x64 (version 10.0.26200)
00:00:00.000 : [sys] Command line: C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\American Truck Simulator\bin\win_x64\amtrucks.exe -mm_pool_size 8192 -mm_max_resource_size 100 -mm_max_tmp_buffers_size 1000 -nointro -unlimitedlog
00:00:00.000 : [cpu] AuthenticAMD [AMD Ryzen 5 5500 ] - 1 package, 6 cores, 12 threads.
00:00:00.000 : [cpu] logical_id : 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

From the passageway just behind Harrow—the corridor that ought to have led to the mortuary—a voice crackled through its haz mask: “Nice try.”

A dry, unassuming click; an enormous blast that rattled around Harrowhark’s ears, and a crunch as the projectile meant for her cracked into the sheet of solid bone she flung upward from behind her feet. The sheet exploded with the impact, sending chips flying through the air and knocking her forward onto that freezing cold floor and its carefully wrought diagram.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Five, Chapter Forty-Seven

Nona looked at the truck ahead, which was about one truck length away, and the truck behind, which was about one truck length behind. She walked forward to stand on the hard shell driver’s cabin, and with a little run-up she jumped forward and sailed through the distance to land on the truck in front. This hurt her feet briefly—it also hurt the thin metal shell on top of the truck, which dented. She looked up at the sky, and she bellowed: “You said you wouldn’t do anything weird!”

Nona the Ninth - Day Five, Chapter Twenty-Seven

At the time you did not wonder how the body had breached your wards, which you dutifully reapplied each night with fresh blood. You considered the corpse; you bracketed thick bone clamps to its dead ankles and dead wrists; and then you strode down the corridor, and when Ianthe answered your crabby knocking with a sleepy, “Nonagesimus, what do you—” you did not give her time to finish her sentence, but dragged her, by the icy gold of her skeleton arm, back to your bedroom.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Four, Chapter Thirty-Eight

Glutinous time unglued. There was a crack as the Sleeper fired, and a sharp metal spang, and nothing hit Harrow in the head. A shadow rose before her, and it was all the shadows of the room. The candles were no longer columns of great blue light, but had sunk to billowing black flames. She was frozen by the sound of a great bell: BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG.

The First Bell of Drearburh, of the House of the Ninth, sounded loudly in that laboratory atrium. And a figure stood between Harrow and the Sleeper.

The figure wore a cuirass of black laminate that had not been favoured by the Cohort for years and years. Fibre armour, matte and unpolished, shadowy, rather than shining obsidian, with small overlapping plates layered across its surface. The rest of the armour was more timeless: black canvas breeches tucked into black greaves of leather and plex, and the stiff, unpretentious frieze hood of Drearburh, not worn up, but loose on the neck. Worn-out black polymer mitts, no more sophisticated than Griddle’s.

“God’s preserving her … or God created her, or both. Good luck seeing anything through that. His aptitude’s like a punch in the nose, Sextus. Once he gets his fingers on something you’ll never find any other fingerprints on it. Too much noise.”
But Crown’s exquisite face had puckered again. “But that was the whole point. When Blood of Eden picked her up—that was why they thought she was strange—Gideon never showed any sign of decomposing. She was always like a corpse that had been dead for only minutes. They wrapped her in plex and dropped her in rivers, trying to see if that would do anything … I was there. It was awful at first,” she added, “and then it simply started being very funny … Shh, Judith. I’m here.”

Nona the Ninth - Day Five, Chapter Twenty-Four

************ : log created on : Friday August 21 2026 @ 16:54:40
00:00:00.000 : [sys] running on x86_64 / Windows 11 x64 (version 10.0.26200)
00:00:00.000 : [sys] Command line: C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\American Truck Simulator\bin\win_x64\amtrucks.exe -mm_pool_size 8192 -mm_max_resource_size 100 -mm_max_tmp_buffers_size 1000 -nointro -unlimitedlog
00:00:00.000 : [cpu] AuthenticAMD [AMD Ryzen 5 5500 ] - 1 package, 6 cores, 12 threads.
00:00:00.000 : [cpu] logical_id : 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11