Work Text:
Have you heard the sound of a heart breaking?
Tick-tick tick-tick.
Footsteps in the hall. A flash of fiery red. Palamedes slung out his hand, pinched, and held. Gideon Nav’s body stopped mid-step, pinned to air like a butterfly to glass. Muscles tensed and ready, mouth open in a half-cry that settled in the silence like the weight of the Tomb.
Palamedes surveyed his work, and he saw that it was good.
The door to Dulcinea’s sickroom loomed like a tombstone, and Palamedes raised his head to face it. He cast a final glance at the Ninth House cavalier, feeling his pores open; his focus narrow; his body surge with something more than brevity, more than resolution.
Gideon hung behind, stuck fast in a web of thalargy that wrapped around each limb like iron spikes. It tugged like thread at his wrist, and he savored the connection. He could feel her heart beating.
Tick-tick tick-tick.
Everything felt more intense. Palamedes swore his skin was peeling. He stepped into the sick room, leaving the door open. In the pit of his gut, he regretted leaving the poor Ninth girl out there to witness. But it needed to happen. He needed the link to ground himself. He just hoped he could release her fast enough; or else they were all doomed.
The false face of his childhood crush stared up at him serenely, and Palamedes felt a wave of fury wash across his body. He pushed up his glasses.
“Hello, handsome,” she said, her voice low and mocking. Palamedes straightened his back. He sent a link out to the version of Dulcinea Septimus who was standing before him, but he couldn’t get a single read on her. Some kind of magic block. No matter; he hadn’t expected it to work. He needed to concentrate.
Time was running out.
“I wish I had talked to you right at the start,” he said, raising his head up.
“Why didn’t you?” she said, and Palamedes steeled his heart. It cut like a nail through the sole of his shoe.
“I was afraid. I was stupid.”
He began to reach out to the rest of the room, pulling energy from every source he could touch. His hands shook, so he stuffed them in the pocket of his robe. He could hear his blood rushing; a distant ringing in his ear.
“My heart was broken, you see. So it was easier to believe that things had simply changed between us.”
He shifted his weight, feeling the press of the room around him. Each object screamed to him - a chorus of ghosts, each trying to tell a story. He pushed past them all, reaching blindly for the Lyctor. It took incredible strength to leech on; to wiggle his necromancy into her body without being detected. It would have made him feel skeevy if the situation wasn’t so damn dire.
“That Dulcinea Septimus had been trying to spare my feelings - coddling an ignorant child who had tried to save her from something she understood far better than I ever could.”
An acrid, bitter taste filled his mouth as he let his energy wrap deeper into her skin. Past the dermis; epidermis; into the poisoned blood that slowly wrecked her body for millenia. Her blood felt wrong; like it knew she was never meant to make it this long. Was never meant to die for ten thousand years.
“I cared about her, and Camilla cared about us.”
Palamedes felt his throat clench. He couldn’t lose focus. Couldn’t picture Camilla’s warm steel eyes and the easiness in her stance when they were alone together. He had to dig deeper - he needed the marrow.
“I thought Dulcinea was saving us the heartache of watching her fail, and die, during our task.”
His heart clenched in his chest. He could almost picture Dulcinea’s handwriting. The letters that brought him such comfort and heartache now brought him clarity. He wrapped the thread of necromantic energy around one of Cytherea’s bones and pushed.
He barely registered the words leaving his mouth. His lips felt like putty trying to form words while focusing so intently on the diseased marrow deep within the Lyctor’s body.
“There are two things I want to know,” Palamedes said, keeping his voice even and steady. He could feel the tug of Gideon Nav’s body fighting and failing to break free from his hold. Each attempt thrummed through him like the reverberation of a drum in a hollow cave or a dropped book in an echoing library. He felt his heart clench again. He slowed his own heartbeat, trying to find the right balance point between the rivers of thalargy shifting around him. He narrowed the stream tethering him to the Ninth House cavalier and widened the one leading to the Lyctor whose beguiling eyes had fooled them all.
“Why the Fifth?”
He felt Cytherea’s heart rate spike. He followed the curve of her meat, subtly tweaking her cellular patterns as he went. His head began to pound mercilessly, and he knew his time was running short.
For a moment, he felt like two souls. One speaking out loud, keeping the Lyctor distracted, while the other prodded and pushed at the molecular level. He could see it all before him like the notes he painstakingly took throughout his youth - white and red blood cells, plasma, platelets - the arrangement of nerve clusters and lymph nodes - the mapping of veins within the human body. Everything he’d learned, everything he’d tirelessly poured over - to save Dulcinea.
“Where is she?” he asked, letting his energy spill out like contrast dye through the Lyctor’s body until he could feel her lungs light up like a beacon in the night.
The Lyctor remained silent. Palamedes pushed harder, feeling his guts twist as he opened his channels as far as they could safely go without detection. He had to be very careful; mixing up the two signals could be catastrophic for the Ninth cavalier. He needed to keep the girl frozen on a narrow stream. He needed to make it easy to let her go when the time came.
“I repeat,” he said, his voice edging towards anger. “Where. Is. She?”
“I thought she and I had come to an understanding,” Cytherea sighed, but Palamedes no longer heard her. Not really. Certainty felt like an iron bar weighing him down. His suspicions were right; he was right all along. Dulcinea - his Dulcinea, his reason for becoming the man he became - had been dead from the onset of this cursed gathering.
Have you heard the sound of a heart breaking?
Palamedes kept her talking. This was the delicate work; picking the exact tumors to fill with fluid, the right veins to swell, and the exact amount of hell to inflict on the murderess Lyctor’s lungs. Advanced bacterial infection. Neoplasms in the skeletal structure. He pushed each process along, speeding up the intensity by looping her own thanargy against her. He used the dead cells and rot to clear a path, then bombarded her body with life energy - forcing the diseased cells to multiply again, and again, and again.
“I made the decision to kill you the moment I knew there was no more chance to save her. That’s all,” Palamedes said, eerily calm. He felt finality settle in his shoes, buried between each fold of his robes. Life without Dulcinea was no life at all. Camilla would understand. Camilla had to understand why he needed to do this. Why he needed to break her heart.
The Lyctor laughed, then coughed, and then laughed again. Spittle flecked her lips, the color of cottage cheese. A gasp, and a thin line of red reached like a claw from the edge of her mouth.
Tick-tick tick-tick.
“I just had to buy enough time to do it slowly enough that you wouldn’t notice,” Palamedes said. “To keep you talking.”
The Lyctor coughed again, great and heaving and wet. She stopped laughing, confusion and rage clouding her face. Another cough and a burst of red sprayed from her throat, coating her delicate hand with dark blood.
“Young Warden of the Sixth House, what have you done?” Cytherea asked, her lips pretty and red with her own blood.
“Tied the noose,” Palamedes said, clasping off his necromantic stream long enough to begin opening his own channels. He traced his way up his own body, across his bones and veins, through his organs and up to the roots of his teeth. His body hummed in response, and it was good. “You gave me the rope.”
Cytherea grasped at her neck, her chest, and she bared her teeth as every joint grew inflamed at the same time. Chills made her hands tremble.
“You’ve been in a terrific amount of pain for the last myriad,” Palamedes said, steeling himself for the final portion of his plan. He pictured Dulcinea’s handwriting, lovely and perfectly imprinted upon his mind. He hoped she was waiting for him somewhere out there. “I hope that pain is nothing to what your own body’s about to do to you, Lyctor. You’re going to die spewing your own lungs out of your nostrils, having failed at the finish line because you couldn’t help but prattle about why you killed innocent people, as though your reasons were interesting.”
Palamedes began to sweat profusely, blinking rapidly as he felt the pulse of magic swirl through him. He could feel the narrow window of opportunity approaching, and he hoped to hell he had the strength to finish what he started.
“This is for the Fifth and the Fourth - for everyone who’s died, directly or indirectly, due to you.”
He opened up the channel between them again, planting the final time bomb deep within the rapidly multiplying cells of her infected lungs. Popcorn bursts of pus choked the Lyctor, filling the room with the smell of rot.
Tick-tick tick-tick.
“And most personally,” he added, feeling his legs weaken beneath him as he pulled up sharply on the streams of life energy flowing between the three sources. He wished he could apologize to Gideon, but he couldn’t afford to wait. It was now or never. “This is for Dulcinea Septimus.”
The Lyctor’s coughing grew more frantic, but her arrogance betrayed her. She never saw his plan coming.
“Gideon! Tell Camilla-“
I’m sorry. I had to. You are better than all of us. I lied.
I didn’t want you to watch. I couldn’t let her go. I’m sorry.
Don’t leave me, Scholar. I need you.
I don’t want to die.
“Oh, never mind. She knows what to do.”
Come find me.
Tick-tick.
Boom.
Palamedes cut the stream tethering him to the Ninth woman, and then the world exploded into a neutron star.
He expected this to hurt. He didn’t expect just how much.
Thanargy ripped down his body like an electric shock, bursting the veins in his arms, his legs, the corners of his eyes. His body absorbed all the heat in the room at once, shattering bone and swelling his liver to twice its size. Runny-egg mucus filled his throat and mouth, and he couldn’t tell if it was blood or vomit or his own liquified meat that spewed out.
Ice cold flames licked up his legs, spreading white and furious. Cold white death burst forth and filled the room with blinding light - more blinding than his clouded eyes could perceive. Shadows severed his optical nerve, and he felt as though his brain twisted in place.
Radical thanargetic fission. A living bomb.
His body flew into shock, pain overriding every sense but fury. Palamedes felt his stomach collapse, acid burning through his large intestines, and he screamed with a throat that no longer made a sound. He couldn’t even choke on his own blood. He couldn’t taste his own ashes.
He didn’t know when his glasses fell off. His vision failed; with horror, he realized his conscious mind was still processing. He couldn’t escape the terrible sensation of death closing its claws around him. His heart throbbed and ached and seized all at once.
His eardrums burst, but he could almost make out the sound of his own skin splitting and skull cracking - of the fake Dulcinea screeching - of blood spraying like a shaken soda from every cavity of his body against the ceiling and walls.
Of the roar of the River coming for him.
Of Camilla’s heart breaking in two.
It was the last thought that he attached himself to with his last moments of conscious thought. Camilla, who always knew what he needed before he needed it. Camilla, who comforted him after the real Dulcinea gently let him down.
Camilla, who would crawl backwards through hell for the things she believed in.
He hoped she would still believe in him.
As the swift tide of the unliving rushed over him, teeming with ghosts, Palamedes Sextus followed the tiny pinprick of memory across the jagged battlefield that was once a sick room.
Beyond the chunky viscera and scrambled-egg brain splatter, he found a thread; a thread that twisted itself into a rope, into a lifeline, and anchored him deftly into a piece of his own skull.
Quiet filled his soul for a brief, shining moment. And then the agony returned.
His soul shrieked into the infinite void, reliving those dark moments of his passing from life into something not-quite-death. Veins bursting. Eyes searing. Blood welling from every pore, horrible and debilitating even with no body to re-live the sensation. Repeating, repeating, until his spirit stirred with madness.
Somewhere out there, his Camilla fought like her heart was breaking. He could not feel her.
He felt the fragment of bone around him crack, and he clung like a child in fear of falling into the River’s rushing waves. He understood in horrific detail how easy it was to lose control and lean into the pain and madness; to reach out and allow the revenants to consume the gristle that remained and force the soul into a raging cage. He clung ever tighter, desperate to stop the agony but even more desperate to avoid such a terrible fate.
Somewhere amidst the chaos and confusion and pain, a quiet voice beckoned him.
“Brave boy,” it said, nearly like a tease. “There’s another way. If anyone can do it, it’s you.”
An image impressed itself against his spirit. Palamedes Sextus, or the soul that was left of him, grew very, very still. As the ghosts gnashed at the feathered edges of his fractured essence, he pressed himself deeper into the bone and dreamed of a thick, rubbery bubble sinking deep into the River's death-like grip.
He had a lot of work to do.