God’s victory and death was a girl. Maybe a woman. At the time Harrowhark had not known how to tell, and the gender was only a self-interested guess. The corpse lay packed in ice, wearing a white shift, her hands clasping a frost-rimed sword, and she was beautiful. The formation of her muscles was perfect. Each limb was a carved representation of a perfect limb, each bloodless foot the lifeless and high-arched simulacrum of the perfect foot. Each black and frosted lash lay against the cheeks with perfect still blackness, and her nose—it was the pinnacle of what a nose should be. None of this would have broken Harrow’s spirit except that the mouth alone was perfectly imperfect: a little crooked, with a divot in the lower lip as though someone had softly pressed a dent into the bow with the tip of their finger. Harrow, who had been born for the sole privilege of worshipping this corpse, loved it wildly from sight.

So the death of God had been Harrow’s death too. She had been careless with her visits. Her parents had … found out … about what she had done, what manner of sin she had committed, and they reacted just as they might have if she had admitted to smashing up the oxygen-sealant machine with a hammer. Faced with apocalypse, they chose to die by their own hands before another death could claim them. They weren’t even angry. It was with a calm and earnest understanding that her mother and father and their cavalier tied five nooses—one for Mother, one for Father, two for Mortus, one for her. Then they hanged themselves with barely a gasp and barely a kick. It would have been better, really, if Harrow had hanged herself up beside them. It would have been best if she had crawled into the tomb beside the woman she loved and let the freezing temperatures take their course.

But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.