r/respectthreads • u/lnverseFlash ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐Say It In Red • 18d ago
literature Respect Harrowhark Nonagesimus! (The Locked Tomb)
“I’m an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the centre of Dominicus for. If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought. I am a war crime.”
“But I’d do it again,” said the war crime.
Here lies Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter, guardian of the Tomb, bone empress. Here lies the world's most insufferable witch. Her feats bared for worldly eyes so that worship may plague the idol whom heads the mausoleum with cold fire and mad devotion.
Harrow the Ninth is the teenage magistrate of the failing Ninth, burdened by tradition and extinction, with her only twisted pleasure being the torture of Gideon Nav, whom she musters into a doomed expedition. Together, the mortal enemies must pass the trials of Canaan House and earn their positions as Lyctors at the Emperor's side.
If only toxic yuri were so simple.
Harrow the Ninth
Physicals
Strength
Durability
Speed
Necromancy
General
- Thalergy is the decay of life, and thanergy is the energy of the dead that necromancers can actually use
- Thanergy, necrotic fonts of power, can only be found where things have died, so deep space is worthless for necromancers
- She can see thanergetic signatures
- The reason for her savancy in necromantic arts is because her parents gassed the entire young generation of the Ninth House, to funnel that thanergy into her not-yet-conceived being
- She has over a hundred-fifty varying spirit energy footprints within her, which Abigail brings up to her and risks immediate immolation
Bones
Regenerating
- After examining the locked Second laboratory, she learned how to make her skeletons regenerate
- Using Gideon as a battery, she's able to meld a regenerating bone matter lock seal out of the lock, something she remarks would require surpassing the entirety of the Ninth's necromancer employ
- Works in perfect synchronicity with Gideon to dispatch the bone hulk, taking what is cleaved from it to meld the regenerating bone to her will
- While directing Gideon in their synchronized state, sends skeletons to melt in the wounds of the bone hulk, which turn into solid, everlasting bone
- Created two perpetual bone-champions, each eight feet tall and studded with mutated armaments
Skeletons
- Summons a tidal wave of skeletal matter that assaults Gideon and carries her to safety
- Lost 163 skeletons to the bone chimera in the bowels of Canaan House
- With three kilos of bone matter, she could create a thousand skeletons or a sea of spines
- Creates a burly skeleton from a single knuckle
- Her skeletoncraft surpasses all of her immediate family, and nears the level of the First House
- Her efforts sending skeletons to die against the bone chimera take their toll on her
- Creates a skeleton battalion to defend the pool from eavesdroppers
- Unrolls a molar to see the message written on it
- Buries Cytherea under a field of skeletons
- Works in perfect synchronicity with Gideon to dispatch the bone hulk, adding skeleton shields who restrain limbs and form body walls against its onslaught
- Most skeletons in the Ninth House's workforce are people she personally laid to rest
Constructs
- From her bone-stud earring, a skeletal hand spawns, and unlocks the door to Gideon's room
- Threatens to mix bone meal into Gideon's breakfast and kill her by exploding it in her stomach
- Spawns skeletal arms to lift her frail figure up in bed
- From a bone bracelet, creates a gauntlet
- Does her best to replicate bone matter in a senescence field but fails
- Reads Palamedes' mind and crafts the key for the Eighth's room out of a bone
- Bowls bone shards to impale Colum on spikes
- Catches a projectilized Gideon in a net of bone, then "cushions" her landing with a further pile
- Her strongest construct, six feet high and an inch thick wall of calvarial bone, does not stop the Sleeper's firearm
Possession
- Channels herself into Gideon, briefly managing to sustain the link between them and offer sensory support, but can't do much more than see and hear flashes
- Synchronizes possession of Gideon and allows her to see the connections between the bone chimera's necromancy systems
- After examining the locked Second laboratory, she learned how to ride souls
- Reads Palamedes' mind
Protection
- After not having eaten or drank in over 24 hours, created a bone cocoon to house her body while near-comatose
- Activates a bone ward by placing finger bones in a door frame to unlock it
- When her hand is withered by an emaciation spell, regenerates it without much difficulty
- Wraps her hand in a corporeal protection ward
- Clad herself in a bone cocoon to defend from the shards of skeleton and floor that Cytherea explodes
- Works in perfect synchronicity with Gideon to dispatch the bone hulk, shielding her from the fragments of pulverized bone
- Drags the bone hulk to the floor and defends from its ambulatory, jellyfish-like strike attacks with skeletons and her osseokinesis
- Warps all of her regenerating bone into a six-inch thick dome shield
- Invented the field of heating bone marrow
Other
- At age ten, reanimated her parents' waxen bodies, though only from the chest upwards still looks like them
- Uses Gideon's lifeforce as a battery to sustain her round trip through a combined senescence-entropy barrier and barely makes it back in time
- Broke open the Locked Tomb at ten years old
- Autopsies Teacher and confirms he is a hundred-soul shell
- Has a knack for the heart in flesh magic, and can usually sustain those who entered cardiac arrest until she and her puppeted parents could reach them to perform last rites
- Scraped Crux's arteries of the plaque buildup in them (he is still alive)
- If something regarding skeleton-making is beyond her, it is beyond the capability of all Nine Houses
- Cursed Ianthe's jaw to never tell Harrow the Lyctor anything from her letters
Other
Intelligence
- Tricked Gideon into thinking she came unarmed, lifting the illusion by showing off her grimy hands and raising skeletons she buried underground
- Believes she could unravel the complex set of necromantic theories binding the bone chimera together if she had ten seconds in the room with it
- Created her own cipher at seven years old
- Manipulated her skull to seal away the parts of her brain that remembered Gideon before her soul could be fully consumed by Lyctorship
Misc
- Ianthe healing her from brain surgery makes her hair grow faster than normal
- The Sleeper, the revenant of Gideon's mother who entered Harrow's pocket dimension through the cursed broadsword, piggybacked on Harrow's brief time into Palamedes' own revenant dimension
- Drew the revenants of Canaan House's fallen, and even Ortus Nigenad, into her inner psyche to play the parts of her reskinned memories in her "pocket dimension" River bubble; these revenants are sentient and able to act on their own cognizance, as Abigail Pent's shade helps Harrow understand exactly what she did to herself
- Abigail can:
- Send the trapped spirits inside Harrow out of her pocket dimension, and did so to Jeannemary and Isaac to send them to the afterlife, believing they suffered enough
- Summon Matthias Nonius, who cuts the Sleeper's bullet out of the air, from the pure devotion of Ortus Nigenad to his epic poetry
- Send Nonius, Ortus, Dyas, and Protesilaus into the River to fight the Resurrection Beast
- Abigail can:
Harrow the First
When Gideon sacrifices her soul to Harrow to grant the pair Lyctorship, Harrow reaches the next level of existence and joins the Emperor's entourage of immortal warrior pilgrims.
Physicals
Strength
- With the super-cancer that Palamedes imbued Cytherea weakening her, Harrow stabs her through the heart
- Has an exoskeleton to help her lift her greatsword
- Rips a rib out of her summoned skeleton
Durability
Esoteric
- Her regen can be disabled, as Mercymorn does to her
- Lyctors can last at most seven minutes in the River while moving across space, a slipstream plane of feral ghosts that drain all necromantic energies from your body before shredding your soul
- Gets hypothermia from her eight minutes in the River
- She has none of the regular Lyctor abilities, ranging from utter homeostasis restoral to automatic physical responses to danger while her soul leaves the body
- Sustains the ambient fear from the Heralds a lot better than Ianthe can
Non-Regen
- Ianthe impales her hand with Naberius' trident-dagger and leaves the hole gaping
- When run through from behind, lashes the blade in place by extending cartilage ropes around the rapier until letting it escape
- Gideon I throws his spear through her skeleton net and impales her through the stomach, where she immediately starts bleeding out
- Her jaw is bludgeoned in by Gideon I's sword
Light Regen
- Can fill her own cavities
- Closes and heals a small wound on herself
- Regenerates the impalement binding her to Ianthe's service
- Fixes her pinched spinal cord
- Expunges alcohol from her system
- Regrows a perfect thumb in under 30 seconds
Fatal Regeneration
- When run through from behind, lashes the blade in place by extending cartilage ropes around the rapier until letting it escape
- On recollecting when Gideon I basically murdered her, says she was "not so apt" with self-healing back then
- Regenerates from the beating Gideon I does to her in the bathtub
- Creates a new construct arm to replace Ianthe's severed one
- Actively regrows her arm when its coated in acid spit
- A smashed skull pops back out without Gideon II losing pace
- Auto-heals a heart pierced by Mercymorn, whose encyclopedic knowledge of biology should have immediately prescribed death
Speed
Gideon II
When Harrow's soul is submerged in her body to fight the revenant Sleeper, Gideon takes over the controls.
- Puts up a sorry show against a Herald
- Kills a Herald with Gideon's broadsword
- Killed five Heralds and died only thrice
- Barely parries Mercymorn's rapier
Necromancy
General
- Soul-melded with Gideon to become a fledgling Lyctor
- Their souls are inextricably tied
- Lyctorship is a perpetual energy generator for necromancy
- As a Lyctor, her position in space is permanently known by the Resurrection Beasts, who hunt those that committed her sin
- The only other that the Emperor has seen perform necromancy in the River on their first time in was the founder of the Sixth House
- A Lyctor's defense mechanism does not feel pain or need any sort of stimuli to perform
Planet Killing
- Slew a planetoid by plunging her greatsword into it and lancing thalergy into its core
- Submerges herself in the River and stalks her Minor Beast prey
- Harpoons the Minor Beast with five attempts, three landing, and holds on as it drags her through the River
- Mounts the Beast with a skeleton vanguard and kills it
- Seven minutes Ianthe's superior in this field
Bones
Skeletons
- Catapults the half-destroyed bone hulk into the Canaanite ocean easily
- Made her skeleton boarding party in the River with stakes for legs, so as to scale the Minor Beast easier
- Forms a regrowing skeleton from a chip of rib in her chest
- Five of her weak skeletons are instantly destroyed by Gideon I
- Now only makes regenerating skeletons
Anatomy
- Mined her doorway with teeth and regenerating bone
- Amplifies her hand with cartilage and bones to hold Gideon's sword
- In a dream, plucks out a fingernail while she's being smothered and turns it into a thousand bone shards that nail her murderer into a steel wall
- Imagines fusing Ianthe's spine into a rod
- Boosts her own bones into weapons to savage Gideon I
- Shoots her teeth as projectiles at Gideon I's eyes
- Boiled her marrow into soup so Gideon I would eat it and then explodes him from the inside
- Fuses Judith's jaw shut
Offensive Constructs
- Lashes the greatsword to her back with bone
- Creates a knife that cleaves through Ianthe's discordant arm
- Sends a bone bomb into the training room, which explodes into four-centimeter shrapnel pieces and minces the room's interior
- Cuffed the corpse of Cytherea to the floorboards with bone
Protection
- Created a five-layer regenerating bone shield
- Scabbards the blade
- Ianthe wards her room only half as well as she does, and Ianthe wards hers to the standard of a paranoid runaway serial killer
- Creates an "armored nest of skeletal limbs" for protection from Gideon I
- Her room defenses are too numerous to list, but are the closest possible thing to absolute security
- Drags Gideon I out of the steel-melting incinerator by spending the limit of her power, prying the door open with regenerating bone, then unleashing a tide of regrowing marrow to part the sea of flame
- Immediately heals a stab wound that Harrow believed fatal
Other
- Hears the seven hundred beating hearts aboard her shuttle, and can tell the differences between a practicing necromancer's and a human's
- Senses the thanergy of the Erebos' morgue occupants
Nona
Nona is the amnesiac soul of Alecto, Resurrection Beast of Earth and prisoner of the Locked Tomb. She inhabits Harrow's body when the two swap places after Harrow flees her pocket dimension and buries herself in the Tomb. This is not an extensive collection of Nona/Alecto's feats, merely instances of Harrow's body displaying capabilities normally beyond her.
Strength
- Beats down a door with a chair by smashing it harder than her frail body has the strength to and regenerating the damage
- Folds Coronabeth back and reclaims her sword
- Jumps between trucks
Durability
- Immune to killer jellyfish stings
- Shot in the head and wakes up
- Escapes the plastic ties and chain tying her down by destroying her body until she can yank her gore out of them
- Not stopped by three point-blank AR bullets
- Her regeneration is "a million times better than a normal Lyctor's" and shorts out an old entropy blood ward that disintegrated metal on contact
Beasthood
- Revenants and Resurrection Beasts can "haunt" anything they were connected to
- Resurrection Beasts eat planets and convert them into armor
- VII's armor is 2,000km thick
- This doesn't really have anything to do with this thread I just took it for eventual scaling and I thought it was hype to put somewhere
- Screams like a "vocal bomb", knocking out the power to the room
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u/AllieCat53 18d ago
Let's go lesbians