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The Blood of Eden infantry have more restraint than any army Camilla has encountered. After curfew, the bunks go silent as the dead. There is not a single whispered word. In the swordsman’s spire, back on the Sixth, Camilla would drift off to the sound of low voices and footsteps in the hall. Even in their quarters in Canaan house, she could hear the sound of the sea, the rattle of skeleton servants, or Palamedes scribbling notes onto flimsy, working through the night. Onboard this ship, there is only the drone of the life support, uniform and low.
Her new room is too large for one person, with too little furniture, and a bed with no canopy. Camilla lays on it like she is the guard in a panopticon, or a body on an autopsy table. She’s never had a room to herself before. If there wasn’t a cuff around her ankle, she might appreciate the novelty.
Palamedes rests in the bag around her neck. She stares at the ceiling tiles, and breathes methodically, in and out.
Among the Blood of Eden, Camilla is a revenant of her former self. She paces aimlessly around this vast ship, and tries to convince herself that Palamedes is safe, that the weight of him around her neck, the yolk of her plow, is not for her comfort alone. His soul is not adrift in the river, and she is not adrift in this great big universe. Camilla Hect is still the guardian of the Master Warden. Keeping him has a purpose beyond sentimentality.
It feels wrong to leave Palamedes in the bag all night, but if she removes it from her neck, then she risks someone taking him. It’s not as if he needs fresh air. It’s not as if he’d enjoy the stars through the plex window. He is not even a him, right now. The bones are a tether, not a person.
A familiar lump forms in her throat, and heat rises behind her eyes. She blinks over and over, willing the tears to finally fall, but they do not. They never do. The thoughts which made despair swell in her chest, lose their sting. The tension in her body dissipates, leaving her with an unsatisfying, hollow feeling.
Coronabeth is probably sobbing herself to sleep right now. She is in a constant state of weeping catharsis over her sister, and over Judith’s condition, and over “the whole rotten thing.” Her grieving is enviable, but Camilla can’t give in. Palamedes remains around her neck, simultaneously dead and alive. This whole plan is a sparring match, and it's success relies on her recognizing the tempo in which to strike. She cannot give in to despair while she is coiled and waiting.
The digital display on the wall reads 11:48pm. Camilla is desperate to stop thinking and go to sleep, and desperate times call for desperate measures.
She slides a hand into her shorts and strokes her fingers between her legs. She’s not even a little wet, but hopefully she’ll get there. She’s spent months cooped up with the others, under near constant surveillance. Her body has been denied long enough to respond quickly, and deliver her that rush of oxytocin, to put her right to sleep. She closes her eyes, and lets her breathing quicken, as she teases her fingers along herself.
The exhaustion from training reduced most cavaliers in the Swordsman’s Spire to a basal and animal version of their former selves. Camilla thought it was a zen experience to be worn down her to most basic desires, over and over again. Her world shrank to a relaxing pinpoint of eating, sleeping, fencing, and occasionally fucking.
He was little taller than her, and built like an ox, but she had him scrabbling at the tile with every press of her fingers inside him. He made loud, near wailing sounds, as she fucked him, drowning out the sound of shower, and probably echoing down the hall. It was absurd. She was about to tell him that he didn’t need to stroke her ego, when he came with a cacophonous moan. His splatter of cum was washed away instantly under the flow of the shower. Camilla bit him as a reward.
In bed, alone, she is still not wet, but her furious fingers on her clit are getting her somewhere. She feels like she’s going to rip the orgasm out, as if coming is a reflex, and she can force it with a mallet to the knee. She scrabbles at her own cunt the way the cavalier scrabbled at the shower tile, like she’s falling down a cliff-face and grasping for purchase.
Camilla focuses in on the memory of water hitting her back. She replays that final weeping moan, his exclamation that he was going to cum, just a little more, just a little more. The sounds of his cries soften in her mind. His voice shifts into something as well worn as the clothes she left in Canaan house. The cavalier thins and stretches until he is Palamedes. Camilla’s hands press into his waist. His breathing catches with every thrust. His glasses rest on the mattress at his side.
Camilla tips over the edge. She pants and shakes. Her cunt pulses against her fingertips, but there’s no real satisfaction. The throws of pleasure dissipate just as suddenly as they rose, abandoning her in a room that’s too big. She catches her breath. Sweat drips from the back of her knee and down her calf. The sheets stick to her lower back. The bones slide from their resting place on her collarbone, off onto the mattress by her cheek.
Coming with her Necro’s bones around her neck, is in retrospect, a tad disrespectful. Judith would report: “The sixth’s enmeshment has dire consequences on the psyche.” Harrowhark’s little brain would hemorrhage at the thought.
Camilla takes Palamedes and returns him to the center of her chest, just under her collarbones. This fragment of him so unfortunately light. She misses the weight of his head on her chest. She misses sleeping under the sprawl of him and knocking into his slender limbs in the night.
Camilla slides her hand back into her shorts and wets her finger tips with the slick at her entrance. She is slower this time, more sensitive after coming once. She rests her other hand over his bones.
Amid more admirable qualities, such as a genius intellect and enduring empathy, Palamedes has a taste for the bawdy and disrespectful. While Camilla considers herself indifferent to propriety, Palamedes gets off on defying it. He likes feeling transgressive. He likes when things aren’t what they should be. He likes bending the rules. If Palamedes could see her in this moment, he wouldn’t balk or scold or write her off in a report. He’d ask why, with a smile, and Camilla would say because I want to, and with the kind of softness she reserves just for him, I miss you.
Maybe Judith has a point. Camilla touches herself in spite of this.
One night, when they were still on the Sixth, she’d had him pressed to the mattress, grinding her cunt slow against his cock. She slid up the length of him, pausing at the head, before sliding slowly back down again. The soft friction wasn’t enough to make her come, but it was enough for Palamedes, and watching him lose it was worth the sacrifice.
He had wads of sheets balled up in his fists, so tight he risked pulling the corners of them off the mattress. He’d leaked a puddle onto his stomach, cock so hard it was purple at the head, and drooling a near constant stream of clear slick. He breathed in an uneven, punching rhythm, chest rising and falling desperately.
He grasped Camilla by the hips, grip as tight as it was in the sheets, and Camilla ground herself harder against him. She was losing her fucking mind at the sight of him, a desperate, spasming disaster beneath her.
“I’m close,” Palamedes gasped. “Cam, you divine—fucking—creature.”
It didn’t matter that he barely got the words out, speaking was a compulsion for Palamedes, and sex only made it worse. He cursed and muttered broken phrases, laced with praise and awe, Camilla mostly ignored him. She was drowning in her own pleasure as she dragged her clit against him, controlled and steady. Until, he said:
“Keep fucking me. Please.”
And came spectacularly.
His grip turned bruising on her hips, as he pulsed against her cunt, making an unrestrained mess of his stomach and chest. Camilla sat still and watched as orgasm devastated him.
Once he’d relaxed with a sigh, and stopped shaking, she pressed two fingers against his neck, to check his pulse. He slapped her hand away with a laugh. She smiled and imagined being buried inside him like this, all soft laughs and little moans. It made her light headed with want.
“Do you want me to actually fuck you?” Camilla asked, though she suspected that she knew the answer. Her and Palamedes had been toeing the line of asking for it outright. She’d bent him face down against the desk just last week, alluding to taking him over it, and he’d fucked his fist while sitting on her hips, rolling forward like he was riding her. All in the name of testing the waters.
Palamedes blinked at her, brain still coming back to the world of the living. She rose up, just high enough to be clear of him, and worked herself quickly. She was incredibly, deliciously close. Palamedes pulled her down into a kiss, and finally begged for it against her lips.
Camilla, in her BoE bedroom, is throbbing under her own fingers, free hand clutching at the bones on her chest. It is cruel and unfair that he is not here to be touched, that all she has is this lifeline to clutch at, while she clenches against her own hand. Her heels dig into the mattress. She’s so wet that her fingers slide uselessly over her clit. She has to wipe her hand off on her thigh, before returning to her task with a huff.
They’d tried it with him on his back initially, but the angle had been too uncomfortable for him. Doing this with Palamedes made Camilla buzzy and nervous. He was tougher than he looked, and she knew he could bare some discomfort in bed, but she didn’t want him toughing this out. She wanted to dissolve him, and laying on his back, it wasn’t going to happen.
Though she could no longer see his face, he was beautifully displayed for her, laid out on his stomach with his hips propped up on a pillow. He was so long, thin enough to kiss each vertebrae down to his tailbone. She did so with careful reverence. Bless this body, bless the man within it.
“Are you studying for an exam?” He’d asked. He’d been patient. Camilla was stalling, her heart beating fast as a rabbit’s. She kissed the dip of his lower back one last time.
“Cam.”
He took the first finger with ease, sighing against the intrusion. Her own body, her surroundings, past and future plans, were irrelevant in comparison to the heat inside him, to the way he’d made himself vulnerable and exposed to her. He was rippling and alive under her hands, around her hands. She added another finger, felt him clench and hold his breath.
“Breathe,” she whispered, placing a hand on his ribs. He exhaled immediately, as if her command was a synapse, keeping him alive on reflex. She angled down on her next stroke and felt his broken moan like it was her own. The silicone cock was already harnessed on her hips, hanging heavy between her legs. There was a part of her, in the heat of the moment, that wanted to stroke it, but she decided to keep her hand on Palamedes’ back. It was easier to stay calm when she focused on him.
He took her fingers well and asked for more, always more. Beloved, greedy, sensation driven, Palamedes. Camilla loves him more than anything. She hoped they’d never part, that she’d stay buried inside him to the end of time, feeling his heart beat in her hand.
Camilla did not know the cost of lyctorhood, while they play-acted at being one body. When she finally sunk her cock into him, there was no invitation to a higher purpose. There was no Canaan house, there were no priests, or skeleton servants, or laboratories, and there was no sea, but there was a consumption. She disappeared into Palamedes’ body. She kept her breathing in time with his as she thrust in and out, so they could be one beast, with a single set of lungs. At the time, they did not know how right it was for the cavalier to be buried within the necromancer. It felt equally unnatural and inevitable, dirty and fantastic.
Camilla fucked him with an even time, watching her cock sink inside over and over and over. Palamedes was reduced to soft heavy breathing and his inaudible rambling was muffled by the pillow under his head. She asked if this felt good. She asked if he needed anything. He was beyond coherence, embarrassingly close from the prep, and rocketing towards an orgasm that threatened to kill him. Camilla has always been a good cavalier.
The memory is simultaneously too much, and just enough. Camilla comes, with a bag of bones around her neck, and nothing else. It tears her limb from limb, rips her apart with a vengeance and wrecks her like the crashing waves of the First House. She is unraveled, undone, untethered in the wake, shaking with aftershocks. She opens her mouth to moan, to release the tension she’s held back, but it comes out as a sob.
She realizes that she’s crying, tears streaming down her face. She sobs again, broken and weak, out of control and reeling. The bag on her chest slips back onto the mattress by her cheek, too light to make a sound. Camilla’s universe crumples up and inverts itself.
She believed that she could carry Palamedes without strain, but the lightness of his bones is monstrously heavy. She believed that a lifetime of medical training would prepare her to scrape his flesh from the fragments of his skull. She thought she could face the viscera of his perfect body turned inside out, blasted and splattered in the rubble of that fucking bedroom, but she should have known better.
Nothing can soften this. Nothing makes it bearable, not prior planning, or mutual agreement, or the bonds of an oath. Collapsing, Camilla understands what it takes to become a lyctor. It is naivete which leads you to believe that with enough preparation, you can be ripped apart without pain. The truth is that carrying a soul is agony, and it is excruciating to be left behind.
If this is the what wracks Coronabeth, Camilla doesn’t envy it. She doesn’t even remember how to breathe, too caught up in the current of apocalyptic misery. She needs the rise and fall of Palamedes’ ribs to remind her. She needs her own bed on the Sixth, to remake her into the woman she was. She needs to be free of this low droning ship, and this unnaturally silent night.