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
