Chapter Text
This is the story of how I died.
Don't worry, it's actually a very fun story, and the truth is it's not even mine. This is the story of necromancy - the rise and fall of an empire - and most importantly, of a girl. The greatest necromancer of her time, Harrowhark Nonagesimus. It's a long story (and a good one) and it starts, of all things, with the last flower of the kingdom.
It was a long time ago (a hell of a lot longer than I can remember, so thank God for storytelling), back when the kingdom only had one necromancer. I don’t know who she was, or how she came to be, but as the story goes she planted a garden of flowers upon her death a myriad ago. Lending to them the last of her power, she filled them with thanergy, and where the garden thrived, so did the necros. Half of the kingdom was born a necromancer the following generation, previously unheard of, with that magical garden to sustain them. It was a brilliant, creepy miracle that lasted for centuries.
But people grew greedy, as people often do, and one by one, the flowers from the magical garden disappeared. Some were burnt to ashes by jealous people who had no aptitude for the magic, and some were dug up to be relocated in new kingdoms, where they always shrivelled and died anyway.
The flowers never produced seed or grew sprouts; they were made to last, not to replenish, and soon the Dominicus kingdom relied on one death-flower alone.
Now, an important backstory to this is the existence of the witches - or shadow cultists, as the kingdom calls them. In case you hadn’t noticed from the derogatory nickname, the kingdom didn’t really get along with them, but the two communities had a long-standing truce provided they kept out of one another’s way. It was a pretty foolproof way to keep the peace, but as we’ve learned, peace never lasts long.
One day a pair of twins were born to the witches, an ill omen if ever there was one. No, neither of them is Harrowhark, I’m getting to that bit - although the twins are pretty important to this story, too. Ianthe and Coronabeth.
Ianthe was born a necromancer, the first and only born necromancer of the witches, and as soon as they figured out what she was, she became their greatest asset. Peace always grew boring after a while, and here in their grasp, the witches held a glimpse of power.
They needed to sustain her - to keep her alive and strengthen her necromancy. They were far away from the flower, and both the child and her magic were weak. If they wanted to be able to use her in the future (terrible, I know), they needed more power.
So the coven leaders, Pelleamena and Priamhark, staged a heist and stole the flower. I promise I’m getting to the point here. They siphoned all the thanergy from it until the petals were ash and the garden was dark and bare, and they managed to transfer that energy to a baby; a living thing to channel the power needed to sustain their necromancer. Yeah, that’s Harrowhark. I told you we were getting to it!
But their spellwork didn’t go as planned. It worked too well, and Harrowhark was so much more than a death-battery for their gifted child. She was ten times as powerful at least, a born chosen one, and suddenly the witches had a new favourite to covet, raise into a symbol of power.
Meanwhile in the kingdom, the loss of the flower was taking effect. It was a gradual death, like an apocalypse on 0.5 speed, while necromancy grew unruly and ravaged its users to bits. I shouldn’t be too graphic here, but imagine being torn apart from the inside out. Withering skin! Spraying blood! Your own bones exploding out of you! Okay, okay, I’m done. Back to the story.
The necromancers shut off from the rest of the town so their non-magic counterparts might be safe, and within several weeks all trace of them was gone. Guards set out for the culprits, but their ranks were depleted without necromancers. Soon enough the kingdom retreated in on itself, all broken and mourning, and tried to rebuild their civilisation without the necromancy it was founded on.
One night, and the whole world fell to pieces. Humanity is so much more delicate than it looks.
Even with so few left to go searching for them, the witches were paranoid about being found, and hid their infant necromancer in a secret tower. There, she could grow up mastering necromancy, and bring the coven to full power once she came of age. Even as a child, she was the greatest necromancer the kingdom had seen in ten thousand years. Still she remained behind those high walls, becoming greater with every passing year.
She could raise her people to greatness the way that she rose skeletons. She could topple empires and raise the dead (or reanimate them, anyway). She was Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and there was almost nothing standing between her and conquering the whole world.
All she had to do was leave the tower. And that, I’m afraid, is where our story begins.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the coveted child of the black anchorites and the most powerful necromancer in a dead pool, was almost good enough. She had been working up to this her whole life, and at almost nineteen years old, almost good enough was starting to sound good enough to her. She had no more time to waste.
It started at sunrise, as did everything, when she woke to watery sunlight streaming through the open windows. The light turned the space white and dull with the glare, and she resisted the urge to put her head under the blanket and go back to sleep. She had things to get done.
The Phantom was lying in her usual spot beside Harrow, close enough to be a comfort without raising the question of why her touches didn’t feel like anything. She tilted her head when Harrow turned to look at her, perpetually wet-looking hair spilling against the pillow. It never left a mark on anything, no matter how hard Harrow had tried to make it.
Harrow reached for her, running fingertips through the air where her hair should have been. She tried not to reach for her, most of the time. She hated feeling her hand go through nothing, hated remembering. But this morning she reached for her, and had her watch the attempted touch with delicate, sad eyes. They were gold, like shiny coins, and Harrow had always hated that about them.
She got out of bed slowly, like it was a death sentence instead of another day like all the others. She went about the morning like it was a ritual, dressing in the usual cobbled-together black robes she had sewn herself when the old ones grew too small for her. The Phantom stood in front of her like she was helping as Harrow adjusted the bone studs punched into her ears, sliding bone jewellery onto every inch of herself that she could arm. Earrings, bracelets, a rib cage corset and pelvic bones settled over her hips. It wasn’t really armour - most of it wasn’t necessary - but it was what she did, what she always did. It was routine, and routine was good.
It was very easy to do the exact same thing every day without putting any thought into it, much easier than it would have been to waste time asking, when should I get up today? What should I wear when I do? Should I clean the kitchen before I make something for breakfast?
It was the mundane that scared her, those little questions of choice. She hated to have a choice in things that didn’t matter, and would surely hide under the covers until nightfall if she was faced with it.
The Phantom knew her routine as intimately as she did, having been her faithful hallucination for a good seven or eight years now. She knew that Harrow would avoid cleaning the rooms of the tower until she suffocated in them if she could, and she knew exactly the ways to coax her into it, to trick her into picking up things off the floor and tucking them away where they needed to be. They played that game for what felt like an eternity - Harrow huffing and scowling while the Phantom directed her to the places that were the messiest. She wrestled her way out of the chores after what felt like millennia. The sun was just peeking golden over the horizon.
The next part of the morning was the books, heavy old tomes that would have been thick with dust and rime had they not been the next part of Harrow’s daily routine.
They were written in a crypt her parents had taught her: it was the crypt of the witches, the coven they had headed in their youth, and it was the only language Harrow knew. Her parents had written the tomes out by hand themselves when she was too young to understand them, and had left her with them when she was older and had nothing else.
Now, she poured over them religiously day after day, making notes in the margins or on paper of her own as she revised theorems she already knew forwards and backwards. She needed to know them from all directions, see it from perspectives that great necromancers could only dream of. If she was not the best, beyond all other bests, then there was no hope.
The Phantom grew useless when the theorems came out, though when the windows were foggy Harrow had often caught her tracing unfamiliar symbols against the glass. Surprisingly, they took shape, and held for several seconds before fogging back over. She’d never written anything that made sense to her; Harrow’s hallucination, for some reason, spoke a commoner language.
On days like today, when the glass was clear and the sun high, the Phantom knelt beside her and pretended to take interest, or sat on the window seat where the buttery sunlight could touch her in ways that Harrow never could. She was distracted, sometimes, watching the gold of the light on her wet hair, her frosted eyelashes. She was framed like an angel in a way that only the sun could do justice to any subject; like she’d been made from it, somehow, a golden blossom unfurling like warmth and fire. Sometimes, Harrow could confess to hating her a little for that, too.
When she got through a few chapters of theorems - the sun usually high enough, at that point, that the window cast a shadow over the top of the Phantom’s head - she went to the box that she kept under her bed. Her fingers brushed the fibrous braids of a rope as she reached for it, and she jolted away like she'd been stung, at last finding the hard eges of the box she was looking for.
It was heavy, with a proper metal clasp like a toolkit, and long enough for her to have fashioned cardboard divides for within. One section held chalks, soft and worn enough to crumble under the right amount of pressure. Another held paints, these with a chalky texture too, and brushes with stained and rigid bristles. Harrow so rarely asked for replacements that they were all falling to bits.
Today, she reached for the paints, grabbing a selection of the tiny pots and a single brush for all of them. The Phantom winced, as she always did, to watch Harrow dip the brush in each pot without bothering to clean it. Not that it mattered. They had all mixed to various similar shades of off-gray by now.
Harrow ascended the tower staircase to the uppermost floor, where the window had no glass and let in twice as much sun. It was the main room to the tower, now that Harrow refused to venture further down than the sanctuary of her room, and the walls and floor were covered all over with paint and chalk and various older mediums that were harder to wash away. The crypt her parents had shown her how to write stared at her from every angle of the room.
And onto the next part of the day, seeking out the empty spaces and painting symbols and theorems, over and over, connecting one to another with sweeping lines and curved arrows.
This was the part where the separate colours had once come in handy, she was loath to admit. Her eyes tracked the room, finding bright colours that merged more and more into gray with every mark. She had never done well at keeping paint pristine.
She spent too long on that, marking out equations she’d scrutinized a hundred times before. Some of them were long solved, spread thin to search for new hints or flaws, and others she’d been puzzling over for years already to no avail.
If she thought about it, she’d think it was useless, and that everything she did was pointless. But that was why Harrow never thought about it. Just went about the same routines as always, undisturbed in her illusion of rigour.
After a while, she ran out of space, and went traipsing out to the stairwell again. The walls there were taller, but with the help of constructs she could reach the top. And it was good practice, too. Her handwriting was near illegible at best, and when she was controlling a skeleton to make the symbols it was downright appalling.
Practice, practice, day after day. It was the only way to get it right, and all she had was time.
The Phantom forced her to eat at some point - Harrow knew she would cook lunch herself and force it down Harrow’s throat if she could, but passionate as she was, she still wasn’t real. Looks of concern and gentle nudging was the best she had to offer her, and Harrow had to heed her out of tradition. The same lukewarm, flavourless soup she always had, no reason to think about it. No reason to think about any of it.
Having exhausted herself with this continued bout of not thinking about anything she did, she settled on a cushion by the window seat upstairs, the Phantom sitting cross-legged above her. She took squares of bone from her pockets - she was always armed beyond the teeth, even when she didn’t need to be - and threw them carelessly into the vast and empty centre of the room, letting them spring into full skeletons without much effort at all.
It had certainly taken a lot more effort when she was younger, she’d give herself that, although she had trained herself much better then. She would give anything for that kind of rigorous change in pace now, but reminded herself not to think about hallucinations passed.
Don’t consider the possibilities, don’t remember anything. Just the routine, same as always.
Two skeletons circled one another, both puppeted by her. It was so boring to try and predict her own movements, and too difficult to think hard enough to create a fair match. It was always slow and miserable sparring, one blow at a time to keep herself from completely overloading with the mechanics of it.
Sucker punch. Block. Uppercut. No block, just to see how strong the hit would be. Skeleton #1 landed a punch squarely to the mandible of their counterpart, and their jaw came clattering off. Nice, clean. Harrow filed the move away as the fight continued, even though in a real fight she wouldn’t be the one fighting a skeleton. The partners leapt and twisted around the jaw, now making an obstacle on the floor. There would never be a real fight anyway.
The Phantom always watched these fights with a certain measure of boredom that could have almost been disguised as interest. It was a fine line, sometimes; often Harrow herself found herself scruitinizing a movement only to realize, hang on, this was the worst activity she could possibly think of herself doing. Yet she continued.
Sometimes, Harrow wondered impossibly if her hallucination had seen her thoughts, her memories. Maybe that boredom was the same as hers, longing for something more than puppet vs puppet, making torturously slow circles. Maybe the Phantom was, too, longing for a real fight again.
The days took far too long to pass, even with a thousand bits of routine crammed into the hours. The old grandfather clock opposite the upstairs window offered no consolation, caught at 32 minutes past eleven as it had been for what felt like millennia now. When the grandfather clock said it was half past eleven? That meant Harrow had the same old things to do as always. Going over the same theorems again, making new diagrams. If she was desperate, she had a tiny stack of books in her room that were not written in crypt, instead in a common language of a kingdom.
She had never learned how to read it, and hated the thought of teaching herself, but incompetent as she was, there was a dull sort of quiet to be found in tracing out letters that she didn’t understand. She had been through all three books a hundred times and hadn’t retained a thing from them yet.
Sometimes she filled buckets with soapy water and hunted out bits of the walls that had grown redundant, washing out old theorems to make room for tomorrow. It would be dry by then, ready for her to work out something new. Or something old, rather, over and over again.
The sun was still not set, and the world outside the tower was quiet. Harrow found herself in the bathroom, standing on her toes in front of the mirror while the Phantom perched to the side and watched her bring the razor over her head, fine clumps of her hair coming to gather on the tile around her feet.
She didn’t shave it to the bone, as she once had, leaving enough for it to be considered more shaggy than shaved. Still, the Phantom came to stand behind her when she got to the back, her reflection warped in the mirror. Her hands came to Harrow’s, like she would have been guiding them if she could feel it.
She had always done that, her ‘help’ a placebo effect to Harrow’s fear. She had suffered incredible razor burns the first time she’d done it by herself, and she’d been terrified to try it again. But the Phantom had held her, and she’d pretended to feel it, and it hadn’t been so bad. It was seamlessly easy now, but Harrow never had the heart to refuse the help of her only friend.
The Phantom was watching her as she cleaned up, with the same unreadable expression she’d had all day. Harrow had a feeling that she knew exactly what Harrow was pointedly not thinking about, but she was too busy not thinking about it to explain it to her. A few more hours. Then she’d concede.
Harrow went to the window, leaning on the sill and looking out into the forest. She was momentarily aware of the Phantom’s presence behind her before it faded into the background, and all she knew was the rhythmic sway of the trees, the kiss of a cool breeze, and a wash of nostalgia at the old feeling of waiting.
She was always waiting, under all the tradition and ritual and distraction. She was waiting to be older, and waiting to be good enough, and it was all a ball of yarn she’d been tugging to unravel for years: so large it seemed impossible, until she grew numb to the action, and now the other end of it was in her palm and she didn’t know what to do.
Waiting was all Harrow knew, and when she grew tired of it, she only found something new to wait for, a new fantasy to be delirious about.
There wasn’t much to her life but getting stuck in the rhythms of it, working up to everything she was born for. It had never been difficult before, except for once. Several brief and beautiful years when she forgot what she was and what she was doing this for.
Oh, she had paid the cost for those years. She’d lost everything to that stretch of time, when she hadn’t been made for anything but life. When she’d stopped working and started living, exploring instead. It was behind her now, and she did her best to forget about it. Most of the time, she forgot. But it never went away. Tragedy was like that; underlying everything from the time it happened to eternity. One night, and the world fell to pieces. One misstep, and the world would never be the same.
Harrow still tried not to think about what could have been, if nothing had gone wrong. If sin came without cost. She was afraid if she asked herself that question - what if it never happened? - she’d find herself wanting, and have too little regret over what had come. She was afraid that if she asked herself, she would do it all again.
The breeze blew against her, and if she pretended hard enough, it was the Phantom’s breath, ghosting over her ear from behind. She was real, leaving a tangible impact on Harrow’s life rather than an imaginary one. She leaned back into it, just a little, and watched the forest move as it always did.
“Eighteen years,” she said quietly, not realizing how long it had been since she’d last spoken until she felt the rustiness of her vocal chords. A few days, maybe. Weeks; it wouldn’t be unheard of. “Almost nineteen. It’s a long time to wait.”
She wasn’t talking about herself. She had been a child for several of those years, too young to know what she was waiting for and too innocent to care. No, her waiting had started later, filled with theorems and necromancy and fighting to be good enough. Her people, helpless without her, had been waiting far longer than she had, and thus far had nothing to show for it.
The Phantom said nothing. She had never spoken to Harrow, not since she’d appeared like a mirage or ghost all those years ago, only never to disappear. Harrow had learned to talk with her, to understand her facial expressions and the little micro changes in those animal eyes. They had invented signs between them, too, just a few basic gestures to get things across. They weren’t always parallel lines, the person and the shadow, the girl and the hallucination, and it was better to be insane than to be lonely.
But the Phantom made no move to sign anything to Harrow now. She was looking out the window, her eyes following Harrow’s, and her hair was swaying with the breeze, not quite in time as it should have been.
Harrow lapsed back into silence with her, and gazed quietly out the open window. For a moment, she indulged in imaginings; a fantasy of leaving the tower she’d never set foot outside of before, walking through the forests she’d grown up watching, feeling the sun on every inch of her, and the wind, and hearing the birds. She imagined it, imagined going out into the big wide world to prove herself. For a moment, it seemed real, perfect.
Then she heard an old voice saying words she wasn’t allowed to believe in, and it all seemed a little less about proving herself. The imagining stopped. Back to watching the trees, no thoughts in her head.
Beside her, the Phantom leaned into her, and Harrow pretended to feel it, to feel anything at all.
The warm summer air hit her like her mentor’s loving hand, and she gritted her teeth into something like a grin as she skidded down roof tiles and hopped over gutters. Somewhere behind her came a musical laugh, her partner in crime undoubtedly noticing the smile.
“You know, there’s really no point to all this jumping over rooftops,” Coronabeth called out, punctuated by a dull thud as she landed on the roof behind her. “We could just as easily take the front door. It’s all theatrics to you, though, isn’t it, Gideon?”
Gideon laughed, vaulting a chimney for the hell of it. (Okay, maybe she was proving Corona’s point a little.) “We’d get caught that way. Better to enter from above. No one’ll know.”
“We didn’t need to race rooftops the whole way, though.”
Corona was breathless, but then again, so was Gideon. Her muscles burned and ached deliciously, setting her heart roaring and making her giddy. God, this was perfect. She was so ready for this.
Gideon reached out, knocking Corona playfully on the shoulder. “I know you love a show as much as I do. Now, come on. Those forbidden valuables aren’t going to steal and debase themselves.”
Corona cackled behind her as Gideon set off again, running and launching herself from one rooftop to the next. They were higher, now, rising toward the kingdom’s centre, and that meant they were almost there.
“You still haven’t told me what the valuables are,” Corona pointed out, chasing her onto the rickety gutter of an otherwise pristine-looking building. “Are you that worried I’ll take it and split without you?”
“Of course not,” Gideon said, pausing to take a break and roll her shoulders while Corona caught up. “I’m just enjoying the suspense of the endeavour. And referring to them as valuables. Sounds very upper class, y’know?”
Corona rolled her eyes playfully as the two of them started off again. “I’m not sure you know a thing about the upper classes, Gideon. Let’s hope I don’t regret risking my tail for this.”
Spotting guards on patrol underneath, Gideon skidded to a stop and wedged herself into a shadow behind the statues at the front of the library building. She’d assumed they were gargoyles, but they were even more grotesque up close. She didn’t really feel like examining them too closely while pressed up against them.
“Shit,” Corona breathed, ducking into place behind her as best she could. “You’re really, really good at not getting caught.”
Gideon snorted. “Baseline requirement for being a thief, sweet thing.”
Corona huffed good-naturedly at her, and Gideon leaned out to check for the guards. The coast was clear. Pulling herself back up, she gestured for Corona to get out the ropes she’d brought, then set off up the roof, following the path she had already planned out to the skylight.
The library used skylights near-religiously, the roof pockmarked with them every several metres. It probably made for good lighting in there, or something, but honestly, it was just really bad design to have a skylight over a locked and guarded chamber filled with valuables. But who was Gideon - the wannabe thief of such valuables - to judge?
Her footsteps clattered over a few missteps, but she managed to keep from any sort of disaster by sinking down to hands and knees, crawling the last several feet to ease the skylight open. Corona shuffled into place beside her once she had it, swearing as her knees slammed into the rough surface.
In her hands was the rope, one end tied to the base of the statue at the edge. It was further from the skylight than Gideon would have liked, but with only two of them to pull off the job, this would have to do. She reached out, pulling the braided fibres through her fingers almost idly.
“You sure you want me wearing this? I’m not as delicate and lightweight as I look,” she said in warning.
Corona shrugged, the same stubborn fire in her face as when she’d first suggested she be the one to lower Gideon in. “I’m not so delicate, either, now, am I?” She grinned fiercely, and Gideon conceded with a shrug.
“Suit yourself. If you drop me, though, I’ll have you sued for damage to a masterpiece.” She flexed a little, distractedly, and worked on tying the ropes around her in a way that would hold.
Corona snorted. “I hope you’re more on your game with your stealth than you are with your flirting, Nav.”
Gideon rolled her neck experimentally, tugging on the knots she’d made to test them. “One way to find that out, princess.”
Gideon had never worked with a partner before, though she’d been thieving most of her life. Living on the streets would do that to you - and though Aiglamene had been there to give her the bare essentials on occasion, she wasn’t exactly the world’s most generous maternal figure.
Gideon had figured out the basics of pickpocketing as soon as being a desperate, innocent little girl wasn’t enough to get by on, and her skillset only expanded from there. That wasn’t to say she thrived, but honestly, as long as she wasn’t withering away to nothing in a gutter somewhere, she counted that as a fucking victory.
Now, Corona was right, and it was all a bit more for show. Stealing food was easy enough she didn’t even need to fret about it anymore, and she set her sights higher; nice bits of jewellery to pawn off, sexy tunics to make her more irresistible to the guards if they ever caught her. And then there was today’s heist, a lifelong dream coming true.
The ropes tugged at her midsection as she let go of the rooftop, bit by bit lowering down into the chamber below. She tried to keep her breathing as quiet as possible as she scanned the room for anyone who could potentially bust her. The door was closed; the room was empty. There was likely a guard on the other side, but so long as she kept quiet enough not to warrant suspicion, she was golden.
It was a small room, and pretty boring as far as secret locked chambers went. Bookshelves were arranged haphazardly against the walls, but they were little misshapen shelves like you might get in a bedroom rather than the towering, ornate bookshelves boasted by the rest of the library.
There were cushions thrown over some of the rugs, and bits and pieces left lying around that made the room look almost homely. Not that Gideon of all people would know. She had only ever stolen from homes.
A few more scans, picking up useless information like the anatomy posters on the walls and the helmet on the floor, she spotted what she was looking for; a satchel under glass casing. Even dangling halfway up in the air in the middle of the room, she could read the inscription of the plaque on the front: The confiscated workings of forbidden necromancy.
Oh, these workings were a legend on the streets. Necromantic theorems were nothing to get excited about, even after the death of necromancy nearly twenty years ago, but these were notes taken by a woman without necromantic aptitude. She’d been found with them maybe two years after the apocalypse, and was immediately suspected as having taken the flower that caused it all.
They hung her for causing the apocalypse, and realized they were wrong once she was dead. Which was a bit of a shitty justice system, but in their defense pretty much everything had gone to shit with the mass dying-off of every necromancer ever.
Still, it was all mysterious as hell. The confiscated workings had been outlawed regardless of the trial, locked away in this boxy little room ever since, though Gideon didn’t doubt that all the nosy librarians had gone poking through it at some point. Either way, everything was still nestled in the same satchel it had been confiscated from in the first place. Making it really easy to steal, now that she was in here without getting caught.
Corona’s grip faltered on the rope in the last foot before Gideon hit the floor, but she managed to land softly enough that the sound would hopefully be shrugged off as nothing. She rolled over the ground, racing right for the corner. No time to lose.
Easing the case away from it - she’d been right to bet that the library wouldn’t splurge on alarms for theorems that no one could use anymore - she picked the satchel up and cradled it in her hands. Miraculously, the paper inside didn’t turn to dust when she breathed on it, or even when she touched it. Too curious for her own good, she pulled the book out to look at it.
It was a thick book, bound with leather and bulging with enough pages that some of them must have been added in after the original pages were all filled. Some of them were torn or stained, and when Gideon opened up the cover, she found a single delicately pressed petal of an ancient black-and-silver blossom.
She felt a tug on the rope at her waist, and came back to herself, stuffing the book back in the satchel before slinging it over her shoulders. It was exactly what she’d come for, and exactly what she needed. Her job was done.
Or it would have been, if Corona hadn’t tugged her again, harder this time.
She was already rushing back toward the skylight, and the movement made her lose her balance. She slammed into the floor, skull cracking on the hard surface, and cried out before she could think to stifle it. Ears ringing, she dragged herself forward the rest of the way and prayed to God that Corona took the hint.
Another tug, and slow as hell, she was lifted into the air. Fuck, her head. That was going to bruise for sure; she’d be lucky not to get concussed.
A voice called out from outside the doors, and Gideon froze with fear. The doors creaked, not opening all the way, and the same voice called out, louder this time. “Palamedes?”
Corona was definitely a lot slower bringing her up than letting her down, which, given the scene she’d made, was going to be a bit of a problem. Gideon reached above her head, grabbing the highest bit of rope she could manage, and tugged herself up. Everything hurt, and not in a fun muscles-burning kind of way, but goddamn it, she was getting out of this.
There were padded footsteps somewhere in the room, the creaking of a smaller, less ostentatious door, and Gideon doubled her efforts.
“I’m alright, Cam - I thought it was -”
The voice died off, then ended in a wordless choke as the speaker undoubtedly saw Gideon hanging from the skylight with the stolen satchel around her shoulders. Quite a sight, probably. The voice let out a wordless shout of horror, and the massive double doors at the entrance burst open like they’d been kicked down by a God. Gideon kept climbing. Why were the ceilings so high…?
“STOP RIGHT THERE!”
Gideon did not stop, there or otherwise. Panicked yelling started somewhere below her, between the guard and whoever the other voice was - Gideon hadn’t even noticed another door in the room, but he hadn’t been hiding out to catch her, so there must have been one somewhere - but she paid them no attention, busy scaling the barely-shifting rope.
She pulled herself out onto the roof, where Corona was already rushing to untie the rope from the end of the statue. She groaned, heaving herself up the rest of the way, and forced herself to get up with no small amount of curse words.
“Leave it, Coro,” she called desperately. “We gotta get outta here.”
She produced a knife from her belt and hacked through the makeshift rope harness, letting it fall away from her. The satchel was still slung over her, promising as anything she’d ever known.
Corona came rushing back, and for a moment her face was void of anything but the fierceness of her eyes, the flare of determination. Her smile appeared a second later, as though she’d merely forgotten about it for a moment.
“Got what you came for?” she asked.
Gideon grinned, despite the burn in her arms and the ache in her skull and the fact that she was about to run a very long way, preferably very fast. She patted the satchel at her side and tucked it a little closer.
“Everything I’ve ever wanted,” she quipped. “Now let's get out of here before they decide to sentence us to the same fate as its first owner.”