You had said, “Augustine the First has trained me in the River. My necromancy there is nonpareil, and has been since the first. When the Beast comes, I will be ready to meet it, on its turf.”

God had looked at you, and he had quirked his mouth in something like a smile, and said: “You’re even stubborner than I am. I thought I’d cornered the market.”

There were many days when you felt his disappointment as a vise, as a long-imagined hessian pressure against the bones of your throat. There were equally as many days when his nightmare eyes relieved your dry exhaustion like a long, chilly drink of water. Your love for God was akin to your love of the beautiful riverbed edge of the iliac crest. Your love for God was like those moments of reprieve, immediately after waking, when you were not sure who you were; those moments of living in another Harrow’s skin, a Harrow who understood everything with a purity of completeness. It was a relief, to worship thus. You had once thought your capability for adoration had been consumed when your eyes had bent upon that face in the Tomb, dead and irresistible, the interment of beauty. You were relieved to find some scraps left over.

You raised the hood of your mother-of-pearl Canaanite robe over your head. The sunshine beat down through it and pattered prismatic light over your face. Birds shrieked above. They were not large creatures, and you were not afraid of them, but you almost pitied them. It was an uncomfortable thing, to remove the soul of a planet like this: it would be the first time you had done it, and the first time you had killed any planet alone. The creatures would not die immediately when the planet did. But they would—slowly—come to change, and in the end they would be thanergy mutants who could not reproduce. A rather Ninth House death, and the death that came for all flipped planets, in the end.

The forest floor was gnarled and uneven—for the first hour you walked stoically, and you sipped your water. When you grew tired, you spent the second hour in the arms of a large, hulking, ambling skeleton, and you had to brush away the branches and leaves as a second skeleton stormed ahead, cutting down all this boil of thalergy as it went. It was with an ache like nostalgia that you thought of Drearburh, and home: that you thought of the vast gyre at the very apex of your temple, which seemed like a pinprick from the bottom tier, that thin, watery cloud of pumped atmosphere and the dead of space beyond. You thought of the murmurous prayers within the chapel. You thought of the Secundarius Bell, its booming profundity, its black tongue’s clangour, of waking to the CLANG … CLANG … CLANG.… as some ancient bellringer hyperextended his biceps in trembling, sacred eagerness to yank that rope.