They had already been dimmed to preserve power, as apparently the defence mechanism locked inside a Lyctor did not need light to fight by—nor senses of any kind, in fact; Mercymorn said they did not even feel pain. Unlike them, you generally needed light and felt pain, but you were the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Four, Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Harrowhark,” he said, “You are a Lyctor. You generate too much light, or too much darkness, for me to look at you and make out any strong detail. But there are details I have surmised: you were awake during your first time in the River, and you performed necromancy, and believe me when I tell you only one other person has ever done that their first time in. Keep in mind that she was an adult necromancer who went on to found the Sixth House. You have achieved incredible things.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Two, Chapter Fourteen

Your immediate reaction was to cocoon yourself in a thick shell of tendon-fused bone. This would have been a good trick if it had worked. Nothing responded. Your exoskeleton slid off your body as though embarrassed by you. The bone studs in your ears were numb. The bone chips you kept tucked in niches throughout the bathroom did not twitch as you pulled on them. Every bone in reach was dormant and immobile. You were far more naked than if you had simply taken off all your clothes, which you had in fact also done. And the Saint of Duty stood in the doorway with his spear, and his sword, and his tender green eyes in his hard concrete face, as though your wards were nothing.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Three, Chapter Twenty-Four

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The corpse has still failed to rot. The princess says they are leaving it outside in significantly fluctuating temperatures, under observation, and it still fails to rot.

As Yet Unsent

She took too long. Nona took her sword. She had to use her hands to bend Crown back, enough to get at the scabbard. It wouldn’t pull free—it was at the wrong angle—so she cut it out of its scabbard. The blade parted the scabbard and came out. It was very heavy on her wrist, and dragged a little on the truck floor with a bright, awful screeching.

Nona the Ninth - Day Five, Chapter Twenty-Seven

At her expression, Pent said: “I needed somewhere to keep the children, at the beginning.”

“The who?”

“You summoned Jeannemary and Isaac along with the rest,” said Abigail calmly. “I worked out how to return them to the River first thing. They didn’t want to go, but I overruled them. I would have done the same with anyone else—if only Silas had asked me; what has happened to his soul worries me horribly.”

You stared at each other: you at the foot of her bed, sword as still as you could make it, its weight a comforting and familiar pain—her sitting up in the fallen bedclothes, eyes like ice and frozen ground. You knew how you would do it: she was still fool enough to keep two jewelled candlesticks by her bed, thick with topaz and delicate flecks of polished tarsal, and from these you would smash two ropes of petrous bone straight into either side of her skull. You might run your finger up the inside of your sword blade, curling bone matter from there as though it were butter, fed and strengthened with your own heart’s blood. You might scatter it and thrust squamous pegs of thick phalange through her palms, the fissures between her tibiae and fibulae. At that point you’d get on top of her, use everything you had ever learned from watching Mercymorn the First, and fuse her spine like a hangman’s rope.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Three, Chapter Twenty-Three

************ : log created on : Thursday August 20 2026 @ 23:39:27
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

The bone fence shattered. It was impossible. Harrow now clearly remembered the wall of bone she had summoned up around herself, Gideon, and Camilla Hect, in those dreadful final moments on the garden terrace. She had been almost spent, and yet her barrier had held off a determined onslaught by one of the Emperor’s fists and gestures for at least a minute. Cytherea had been ten thousand years old and heir to limitless necromantic power. The Sleeper had a baggy orange suit and a gun collection. Yet now she shouldered her way through Harrow’s wall with irritable, disgusted motions, as if it were an unexpected curtain of cobweb in a catacomb archway. The bone barely even seemed to break; it simply flaked away in chunks, like old plaster from a ceiling.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Five, Chapter Forty-Nine