By the time they had gotten to the beach Nona was depressed, but it only took her feet being in the salt water to make her happy again. Camilla never came in with her. This was because there were heaps and heaps of jellyfish in the harbour, with their beautiful bodies transparent at the crown and deep indigo at the very tips, and they weren’t at all afraid to come up near to you and brush you. On Nona, this made the place they touched tingle a little, but nothing else. That was why Nona had always swum at dusk, because Cam said the jellyfish sting killed most people within minutes. The water seethed with them because the harbour was closed, and nobody was fixing the barrier nets.

[...]

Nona swam to the nearest pillar, found her footing on a big metal screw, and waited, buffeted by the waves and the brushing lappets of three comfortably stinging jellyfish.

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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
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You grasped for her, thoughtlessly, with your construct; you were astonished by the speed with which Hect drew those big, balanced knives from each shoulder, and hurled herself at your skeleton like a stone from a sling. Her first sweep with the butt of a knife shattered the ribcage—it coalesced back; you now disdained skeletons not made of permanent ash. She swept in with a foot, aimed at the fragile place beneath the knee, and sent your construct stumbling forward. You said, “Cease,” but she levered one knife into the base of the spine, severed it, pulled the spine back toward her with a twang—and you heard your voice rise to say: “I need to know you are real!”

Harrow the Ninth - Act Four, Chapter Thirty-Three

It was fine and dandy. Turned out that when it approached, its wings lifted it high enough to expose a fat, savage stinger on the end of that abdomen—the sawlike mouth shot a high-pressure squirt of transparent liquid directly into our eyes, which I narrowly dodged by swinging your blood-sodden arm across your face—fun times, because the liquid turned out to be insane monster acid. I heard the robe sizzling away on contact, then I heard your skin sizzle too—felt the strips fall away from your arm, first of cloth and then of actual dermal layer—and I took a couple of steps back and I bit about three holes through your tongue, but our pain receptors were still all f**ked up. I’m not saying it didn’t hurt like a top-notch bitch, because it did, but when I shook the worst of the unholy insect spit off our mess of an arm I found your skin growing back as I watched. Hell of a party trick, Nonagesimus, I mean, damn.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Five, Chapter Forty-Four

PKaR]o

************ : log created on : Friday August 21 2026 @ 05:31:53
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

Maybe a little reduction in the temporal lobe, a few out-of-order bumps in the temporal gyrus that might have been there already. As a last act of pettiness, Ianthe coaxed a new crop of that lightless black hair out of the scalp, and fidgeted with the follicles so that they would squirt out a little extra, cursing the Ninth House nun to almost ceaseless haircuts. It was the little things that mattered.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Four, Epiparodos

She opened her eyes and said, “Lady Pent. Tell me about your childhood bedroom.”

“It was the size of this sitting room, perhaps,” said Pent promptly. “Two beds with their heads against the far wall from the door. I liked to have my younger brother sleep in my room sometimes, when I was small. Primrose walls in paste-on flimsy, not wash—a pretty chroma of the Prince Undying, but a little cockeyed—a Vit-D panel in place of a window, with a repeated design on it. My grandfather’s arm bones over the door. A little reinforced table where I played at dolls or read, with a cubby beneath it where I was meant to crouch in case a zonal jet made it past the winnow. Phosphorescent stars painted on the ceiling, a peg on the wall for my gloves and robe. I haven’t thought of it in years. Why?”

“Initial test,” said Harrowhark. “The flexibility of metaphysical solipsism aside, I have hardly any knowledge of the Fifth House and how its people live there. The more nonsensical your answer, the more likely you were to be a construction of my brain.”

That they were Sextus and Hect was at first only educated conjecture: they were wearing their librarian greys, and one had the battered old rapier that had seemed to be all the Sixth House could proffer for this trial, and the other had ink stains on his fingers. Their faces had been obliterated by point-blank gunshots.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Two, Chapter Twenty-One