fourth house bot

Posting horrible, awful teens every six hours. Art by @liminallines_

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Neither wanted to be coaxed out. Their puff had seemed to leave them. They clustered close together, grave-faced and tense.

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Isaac’s blue-green fire fell upon a giant trunk of bone, a skull terrifically mangled into the thing’s only coherent core: a simulacrum of a face with closed eyes and closed lips, as though locked perpetually in prayer.

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('Magnus. Potatoes are a vegetable, Magnus.')

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She didn’t answer. Isaac, who had pressed himself into the shadows where the side of the doorway met the wall, said: 'Ninth, why were bone fragments found in Magnus’s body, and in Abigail’s?'

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Is the aggressor of the pair, boisterous and physical, albeit how much of this is personality and how much of this is age is a query.

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This neither comforted nor satisfied Jeannemary, who had possibly seen a makeshift blockade in the other girl’s eyes, but her crying diminished—every five seconds another sob would rack her, but she had swapped weeping for hysterical sucked-in breaths.

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Jeannemary’s eyes were very slightly open. There was blood spattered in her curls, and there was blood spattered over the headboard. Gideon’s gaze followed the splatter upward. Written on the wall, in silky wet red, was:
SWEET DREAMS

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She was watching the two in the centre: facing each other on the flagstones, swords and long knives throwing up bevelled yellow reflections on the walls, were Magnus and the abominable girl teen, stripped down to their shirtsleeves.

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Jeannemary did not ask where they were going. Gideon ran down the soggy Canaan House staircase, and across silent nighttime corridors, and down the sloping little passage that led to the foyer for the training rooms.

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Her curls had frizzed up into a dark brown halo—one liberally streaked with blood and something else disreputable—and her eyes were welling up from the acrid smoke. She did not look like a stable witness to anyone.

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The light flickered off. After no sleep—after days of threat and grief and panic that would have floored a man twice his age—Isaac lost it completely. With a strangled cry he flared in a halo of blue and green.

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She shook her head no, and when Jeannemary’s big eyes—lashes clumped with last night’s makeup, irises an inky brown—filled with tears she tried to furiously blink away, Gideon stopped being able to even slightly deal.

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Her very correct pleasantries with a po-faced Harrow were interrupted with the appearance in the doorway of the wretched teens, who were wearing around a million earrings each. The Ninth moved back to the hall.

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'We’ve seen the doors... and people go through the doors... Well, what else could we do?' she added, somewhat defensively. 'If we hadn’t been trailing everybody it would have been that creep Ianthe Tridentarius. And she’s stalking everyone. Believe me.'

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She did, at least, stop kicking. The myriad cuts over Gideon’s hands and face were starting to really sting, but she paid them no mind. It was still a deep black night outside and the wind was howling around the side of Canaan House;

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Gideon was taut with impatience, but still spent a couple of seconds grappling with the notion that the gawky teens in front of her would be facing the Empire’s foes at age fifteen-and-whatever.

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He trailed off. Jeannemary put her arm around his shoulder and pressed her sweat-streaked brown forehead to his, and both sighed defeated sighs in concert.

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Palamedes shrugged. 'Nothing. I mean, you can do the challenge, but you get nothing at the end of it.'
Jeannemary said, 'So it’s just a huge waste of time,' and Gideon could not imagine how she’d have felt after the avulsion room if the plinth at the other end had been empty.

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Jeannemary and what’s-his-face had shoved something underneath the door, and left.

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There was no more after that, not even tears. After a few minutes Gideon was not surprised to see that the poor bloodied girl had cried herself unconscious. She did not wake her. There would be time enough to wake her, and even a short rest would probably do her good.