collected | application

Player Info
Name: Vee!
Contact: lycanthropic / sharisper#0002 on discord
Who Invited You? Sib!
Other Characters: N/A

Character Info:
Name: Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Canon: The Locked Tomb Trilogy
Canon Point: Gideon the Ninth, post-Chapter 31
Age: 17 years

Background: Ten thousand years ago, in an event still largely shrouded in mystery and vagaries, mankind nearly went extinct. In order to save the human race from this looming inevitability, the man who would become the first necromancer, Emperor, and God enacted an enormous event of initiating necromancy known as the Resurrection. In this event the star Dominicus and all of its nine planets were revived in death. From these planets the first Eight Houses were made, and the Ninth soon after, though it was never really intended to be a permanent House of their necromantic empire. At first the Ninth had but one duty: to guard what lay within the Locked Tomb until death. But in defiance to this mortal order, the Ninth House lived, propagated, and eventually came to worship with cult-like fervor that which they safeguarded. After so many years, nearly all have forgotten this secret origin of the last House—now they are Nine, and they wage a holy war of expansion and death on behalf of their God and Emperor, the Resurrector, the King Undying, and Necrolord Prime.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus’ birth was, in itself, a war crime. Her parents, the Reverend Father and Mother of the Ninth House, faced a dire situation: they had already suffered several failed pregnancies, and time was not with them. They not only needed to produce an heir, but they needed to produce a necromantic one, and one which they could preferably pin the hopes of their dwindling and decomposing House upon. In order to do this, they committed an atrocious necromantic sin—at the same time that Harrowhark was conceived, nerve gas was pumped through the vents where two hundred of the Ninth’s next generation, ages one through nineteen, slept. The thanergenic bloom from that horrific mass execution bore fruit. Harrowhark was born not only with necromantic ability, but with prodigious potential. And she was born to a house where she and two other youths made up their entire generation.

The truth of her existence was not kept from her. Harrowhark knew from a very young age that her life—and the future of their entire House—had been mortgaged on the deaths of two hundred children. This knowledge festered in her like a wound that would not heal. For her first ten years of life Harrow ravenously consumed all necromantic knowledge she could get her hands on, testing what she learned on the unfortunate Ninth indentured servant Gideon Nav, her only peer in age and sole survivor of the gas which had claimed the lives of all the other Ninth children.

After that, she set her attention to the Locked Tomb.

When Harrowhark began to try to enter the Locked Tomb, she had already decided she wanted to die. She was “tired of being two hundred corpses,” disgusted with the monstrousness of her own existence. She wanted to look upon what lie within the tomb to see “if it was worth it” to continue to exist; if not, she planned to climb all the stairs out of Drearburh and walk through the airlock. It took months for Harrow to open and enter the Tomb, bypass the network of complex and deadly necromantic wards, cross the water, and make her way into the crypt proper. When she did, she found that the horrible secret which lay buried in the Locked Tomb was, in fact, a girl. Upon seeing her face, Harrow decided to live—she decided that she would live forever, if she could, just in case she woke up. She fell in love with a Body which had been laid to frozen sleep for ten thousand years.

Gideon Nav had witnessed Harrow entering the tomb this final time, and in an act of childish revenge, informed Harrow’s parents. When called to them, they listened to her story, called their cavalier primary to their bedroom, and tied four nooses. Their cavalier dutifully hung himself when commanded, as did the Reverend Mother and Father in their fear and in their shame for what Harrow had done. But Harrow did not. Gideon found her a short time later sitting on the ground among their corpses, stunned at the wide-reaching consequences of her actions.

Unwilling to allow the death of the Reverend Father and Mother to place their House in political jeopardy of being absorbed by another, Harrowhark performed a complex and forbidden form of necromancy to preserve and puppet their bodies silently through their daily motions with only a chosen few of the House aware of the deception. For seven years this proceeds, until Harrow receives a letter from the Emperor himself. It calls all scions of the Houses and their cavaliers primary to the House of the First, where they will undergo what is necessary to become Lyctors—the immortal hands of the King Undying himself. Seeing this as both an opportunity to secure salvation for her diminishing House and live forever for the Body of the Tomb, Harrowhark prepares to go… and after the disappointing disappearance of the very underwhelming cavalier primary, Ortus Nigenad, Gideon Nav is trained to serve as her cavalier primary—with her freedom from the Ninth House leveraged as a reward.

Upon arrival to Canaan House on the First, the eight (nine, technically) House heirs and their cavaliers are given no instructions on how to achieve Lyctorhood. Harrowhark wastes no time in mapping the premises, discovering a secret lab hidden beneath a metal hatch, and testing her skill at the necromantic trials sealed within. Though she begins her attempts at these trials alone, she soon learns that they are impossible without the aid of a cavalier. Her history with Gideon is a long and fraught one, but they soon work together in order to solve the trials and obtain the keys that are awarded to those who succeed at them first. These keys open doors to Lyctoral labs which provide the complex theorems behind the trials—and, perhaps, pieces of what it means to become a Lyctor.

The necromancers’ quest for immortality, as one might expect, goes awry. Starting with the Fifth, paired necromancers and cavaliers begin showing up dead under mysterious and brutal circumstances. Mysteries continue to pile up and compound as the picture of Lyctorhood becomes more clear and more of those within Canaan House wind up in the morgue. At Harrowhark’s canonpoint, though she has many thoughts and theories on the matter, she still doesn’t now how one achieves Lyctorhood. She still does not know who exactly killed necromancers and cavaliers, or for what reason. But she has learned one thing: despite her best attempts to do so, she cannot do this alone. She and Gideon Nav bare their souls and secrets and reforge their brittle relationship into the complex and codependent relationship of necromancer and cavalier:

“One flesh, one end.”

Survivability:
(+) METICULOUS: “Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.”
When confronted with a mystery or an obstacle, Harrow confronts it how any good necromancer should: with the full force of a highly analytical mind. Necromancers are by their very nature mathematicians and scientists of their own art, and in this attribute, Harrowhark is emblematic of them. On her very first night in Canaan House on the First, Harrow had mapped out nearly the entire floorplan of the parts of the palace accessible to its guests, numbering and annotating every door. She is an “obsessive and secretive scholar,” jealously hoarding all secret or forbidden knowledge she can get her hands on; she is a prodigious note-taker; she mentally chews over quandaries of complex necromantic theories like a dog with a bone. To Harrow, the world is a complex and interwoven network of knowledge that is extant, ready to be learned and documented, and which is still shrouded in mystery, waiting to be solved and kept jealously for the betterment of herself and her House.

(+) TENACIOUS: “You’re not the only one who couldn’t die.”
Harrowhark lost her ability to give up or give in at the age of ten. She is determined and driven, sometimes almost to a manic extent—it is not uncommon for her to press herself to and past her limitations, causing her to at multiple points physically exhaust herself as a result. She tries every door, tests every theory, exhausts every possibility. This attribute of hers is a strength born from a weakness: for Harrowhark, it is impossible to be anything but perfect, composed, and powerful. Her single life will never be worth all that was sacrificed to give it to her, but she also does not allow that sacrifice to be in vain. Harrow is what she is because she has a constant and inexorable drive to be better than what she is at any given moment, by any means necessary.

(-) MISTRUSTFUL: “I have no intention of collaborating.”
Harrowhark Nonagesimus is paranoid. It comes in varying shades and hues, but it is a constant shadow to her in her life. Her House is in a desperate position, and she as the Reverend Daughter navigates the complex inter-House politics with all of the mindfulness of someone bloodied swimming among sharks. If Harrow were allowed to make such a decision, she would get through everything in life alone and on her own merit, but her experiences in both the Lyctor trials and the harrowing survival experience of Canaan House has begun to teach her differently. Still, she is impossibly sparing with her trust—not everyone can be a cavalier she has grown up with in lock-step her entire life. If she struggled to work together with the more well-meaning Houses in a situation where their needs were met, their challenge was not described as competitive (and could entirely be completed cooperatively), and there was only a vague threat of horrible, bloody murder, she will struggle even more in a situation where resources are limited, trust is meant to be broken, and hauntings plainly bare teeth.

(-) CONTROLLING: “Don’t be feeble. Necromancy is control.”
Going hand-in-hand with her mistrustful mein and analytical mind, Harrowhark is the type to constantly assess those around her. With mental acuity, physical ability, and motivation all taken into account, she is the type to want to know as much as possible on every individual in the room and know exactly who poses the most risk to her. By this point, even at the tender age of seventeen, her need for control on any given situation is compulsive. She has spent seven years puppetting her parents’ corpses to the tune of veiled normalcy, foiling Gideon Nav’s many escape attempts off-planet, and carefully planning all number of plots to achieve her goals for herself and for her House. It shows. Harrow can be entirely offputting in these moments where her worse habits become obvious, deepening the trench of mistrust between herself and others.

Powers: Necromancy is a versatile system of magic with a vast range of application; under its macabre umbrella are many specializations which channel their focus into the manipulation of various aspects of human beings. Flesh, blood, bones, spirit, soul—a skilled necromancer equipped with the appropriate knowledge and theorems would be able to masterfully wield any of these attributes, in both the living and in the dead.

There are, of course, limitations to necromancy. It requires either “thanergy,” which is an energy created “wherever things had died or were dying,” or “thalergy,” its living component, and it requires great concentration and energy from the necromancer. Upon exerting herself necromantically, Harrow will break into a “blood sweat,” and will progress gradually to bleeding from the nose, ears, eyes, then to coughing up blood, and then to losing consciousness, depending on how deep the exertion goes. Whether a form of necromancy uses thanergy or thalergy depends on its type. Flesh wizardry or the creation of blood wards use thalergy—they consume the power of living blood, skin, muscle, fat, and keratin. The creation of bone constructs and bone wards requires thanergy instead, depending upon the inherent energy in the “seed” of bone. Inherent to the necromantic aptitude they are born with, all necromancers have a “sense” of thanergy and thalergy around them.

By Harrow’s own admission, her knowledge of necromancy is deep rather than broad. Though she has a theoretical understanding of its other applications, she is by Ninth predilection a prodigious bone adept. Her skeletal constructs are described as “models of their kind: beautifully made, built to spec, animated and responsive.” In addition to the accuracy and acuity of her constructs, Harrow has an unchallenged ability in scale; where a standard bone adept might form a single skeleton from an arm, she is able to conjure a full construct from a knuckle. She is also not content to rest upon her laurels; throughout the first book, Harrow improves upon the theorem for her constructs, constantly fine-tuning them. She also uncovered an ability to weave interlocking theorems, giving her the ability to conjure constructs which can regenerate from physical damage as well as design constructs of monstrous proportion and greater physical strength.

It should be noted that, though useful, bone constructs have their limitations as well. Without the weight and strength of flesh, muscle, and blood, their blows are considerably weaker than one might anticipate.

It should be noted that, just as necromancy itself is broad, skeletal necromancy is not constrained to raising constructs. It can be as versatile as the mind of the necromancer. Harrow has formed a cocoon of osseous material, regenerating barriers of bone, shaped bone like putty, and unraveled the enamel off a tooth to reveal a message written on the inside. Bone adepts can also set broken bones and return lost teeth back into the jaw—it’s up to the mods whether or not this can still be done. I assure you that it is not at all painless or pleasant.

There are a few other forms of necromancy that Harrow uses, though she would employ them very rarely. She has upon a handful of occasions siphoned the soul of her cavalier, converting thalergy into thanergy and essentially using her as a necromantic battery. Harrow thoroughly despises this application and will avoid using it at all costs. She also learned in one of the Lyctoral trials to “ride the living soul” of another person (her own words), allowing her to project her consciousness into that of a willing participant, giving her access to their senses, movements, and certain stimuli (such as pain and “noise” of the actions of the brain). She cannot read their thoughts or control their body, but if she sifts through the barrage of information, she can gain personal insight on something of interest. She is also shown to once be able to see an object in the mind of another and recreate it, though it took immense concentration and an understanding of the object’s cellular composition on the other individual’s part which is most likely not recreatable.

Other than her masterful necromantic skill and keen mind, Harrow has no other abilities. She's actually pretty puny.

Inventory:

• Her journal: an incredibly thick little book which is almost certainly bound in tanned human leather


• A small case filled with alabaster face paint and charcoal grease paint


• A Ninth prayer rosary: knucklebones strung on a cord


• A spare set of Ninth vestments


• As many bones as I can get away with. Harrow is the kind of person who would have them by the trunkful. A trunk full of human bones? If not, the four above are fine!

Samples:
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