deer country: application

[necrosaint]

Character Base

• Character Name: Harrowhark Nonagesimus
• Age: 18
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: The Locked Tomb, circa the end of Harrow the Ninth (2020).
• Items Coming Along: A set of bone earrings and a necklace. Knucklebones threaded on black cords that serve as prayer beads. A First House robe in mother of pearl. A black cloak with a hood, and a black voile veil.
• Content Warnings for Character: Suicidality, hallucinations & delusions, emotional and physical abuse, gaslighting and religious trauma, self-loathing, uncertain and shitty power dynamics.

Character Background

• History: link
• Core Relationships:
Gideon Nav: Her cavalier primary; her once whipping girl; her childhood enemy; her only friend. Harrow's cold, clueless heart loves Gideon fiercely and fervently, but once despised her simply for living.

Mercymorn the First: The older Lyctor—a type of immortal necromancer—who was supposed to be training Harrow. To some extent, she did train her, and in other ways Harrow learned what not to become when observing her mentor.

Ianthe the First, whilom Tridentarius: The other girl who became a Lyctor alongside Harrow. They've been through a lot together, and Ianthe helps Harrow mutilate her own brain to 'save' Gideon. They are definitely sister Lyctors and have a loose alliance, but they are not friends. Most of the time.

The Necrolord Prime: Also known as 'God,' 'the Emperor of the Nine Houses,' and 'John.' What they are now is very complicated; he was both her God and someone who served as a teacher-mentor-father-figure. He was also trying to have her killed.

The Body: The dead girl in the tomb, who Harrow has hallucinated on and off; she receives guidance from the Body, and she loves her purely and utterly.

Palamedes Sextus: Along with Ianthe and Harrow, Palamedes is the third of the greatest necromancers of their generation. He was the first positive relationship with another necromancer Harrow had, and theirs developed into a playful and easygoing rivalry rather than a true one.

Character Personality Through Key Moments

Positive and negative are hard to delineate with Harrow; thus we have a muddling of events (time blends together easily in Harrow's mind, and some of these are distinct episodes months apart that mold into one) where two are mostly one and then the other. I apologize for how disjointed this section is; it wanted to be written how Harrow would have thought it and perceived it!

protasis.
When Harrowhark is four, her mother takes their family into a sacred pool and explains to her how it is she has come to exist. The fact that it turns out to be that two hundred children had to die in order to make it so that Harrow could be is what creates the first glimmers of Harrow's intense self-loathing. It also instills in her a belief that she must deserve to live, and therefore must be absolutely perfect (let's shorthand that to perfectionism). All of those souls died so that she could be.

Most of her necromancy is taught to herself, in the Ninth House's library, from this age onward. She can do many things that she should not be able to do, because she doesn't know that she can't do them; this makes her an incredibly powerful and hard-working, driven necromancer, because she is secure in her skills and her skills only. Necromancy is the one thing she is good at, and being good at necromancy results in a great confidence in young Harrow ... that is almost entirely a shield against the fact that she is borderline suicidal even as a young child, very insecure and unknowing of what it is to properly be a child, or to be properly loved.


epitasis.
At nine, Harrow is more suicidal than she is driven. She is grief-stricken and she is tired, and she is only a child and doesn't understand how to cope. She wants to know if her creation is worth all the death and suffering, and she breaks into the Locked Tomb to find out once and for all if she should continue to exist, if the Ninth should continue, or if she should throw herself out an airlock, which she plans to do if disappointed.

She doesn't know how she does it, but she has enough of a belief in her own capabilities—again, that raw confidence—to know that the tomb will open for her. It does, and when Harrow looks up on the girl in the ice in tomb, she experiences love for the first time. (It destroys her, and she learns to hate it, but that comes later.) This is how we learn Harrow is capable of all-consuming, fierce devoted love, and it backs up her intense devoutness to the cult of the Locked Tomb and to the worship of the God of the Nine Houses.

But Gideon Nav saw it all, and when the dust settles over what Gideon saw and says and sees and does, Harrow's parents are dead, Harrow should be dead, and Harrow is running the Ninth House in secret with help from adults who mean well but perhaps make the best choice for the House ... and not the best choice for the child. Harrow should have died with them, but she finally eagerly wanted to live, for the lives that had been lost for hers to exist, and for the Body in the Tomb.

Learning to puppet her parents' corpses at nine is the thing that best shows Harrow's great intelligence and necromantic talent, and it barely wears on her energy, on her capacity to do necromancy.

It breaks her soul.


peripetea.
Gideon is all Harrow has ever had, and Gideon has tried to leave her eighty-six times. On the eighty-seventh, Harrow realized she technically could not stop her, and was saved by God's summons to Canaan House (though the battle beforehand was impressive, and showed both Gideon's fighting skill and Harrow's incredible necromantic prowess). She never tells Gideon how she truly feels and the reader does not find out until much later, because Harrow is distrusting and paranoid.

The eighty-eighth time, it sort of works. Gideon sacrifices herself to save Harrowhark and Camilla Hect; she does it so Harrow can become a Lyctor. She's done it mere days after Harrow takes Gideon as her true cavalier, and tells Gideon the truth—if not the depths—of her own feelings about Nav: that she is her only friend, that she cannot live without her, that she did not want to lose her. That her cruelty has always been about her own pain. That she used Gideon, that she abused Gideon, to help ease her own suffering. But Gideon was also the only person in the world that mattered to her, and she needed her.

She had wanted Nav to kill her; Nav forgave her.

But for the first time Harrow trusted someone utterly.

Harrow could have become a new and better person, then. She could have clung fiercely to that forgiveness and moved forward, been emotionally reborn free of pain—and these were all things she wanted, as she wanted that genuine cavalier and necromancer relationship with Gideon.

Instead Gideon died so that she could live. Gideon was the one who deserved to live. Harrow, she firmly believes, should have died. She finds a way to stop herself from destroying Gideon, from fully absorbing her into her own soul as a wellspring of Harrow's immortality, because where she had once been selfish and haughty, she is now placing someone higher than herself. This is where she lets in Ianthe Tridentarius; this is where she and Ianthe swear to each other multiple vows, and she comes to trust another person for the second time—in this instance, not out of desire, but because to 'save' Gideon, she has to trust Ianthe. This is where she sabotages her Lyctorhood to save Gideon the only way she can.

This is where she forces herself to promise to live and becomes intensely focused on her own survival. (She writes herself a letter commanding it.)

Because if she does not live her cavalier will die, and there cannot be a Harrow without Gideon. She cares about the Ninth still; she is still dedicated to the Tomb. But suddenly Gideon is more important, and that changes everything.


catastasis.
Ianthe lost an arm, at Canaan House, shortly after she became a Lyctor. The grafted arm she has received does not suit her. In a sudden, fierce moment of clarity after the first sleep she's gotten for a week, Harrow catches Ianthe trying to remove it—and steps in and does it for her.

Then she grows her a new arm, purely skeletal, Ninth House-style.

Ianthe has already done everything for Harrow she said she would do. Harrow does not need to do this. She does it because at some level she cares about Ianthe, and at some level she is someone who wants to help, at least those who have helped her. She has embraced the idea that she is a necrosaint, a Holy Fist and Gesture, and she should use her talents, even if they are broken and mangled compared to the other Lyctors and even if she is about to die, for some form of good. It works; Ianthe is thrilled by the arm and can use her rapier properly, be a proper Lyctor (even if Harrow, still, is not).

With this, as with many exchanges with Ianthe, we do see that Harrow is capable of playful banter. Of being a friend. There's just that line of paranoia and fear through everything she does.


catastrophe.
After everything falls apart, and at the moment of their impending deaths—at the moment of the possible impending end of the Nine Houses— Harrow remembers what she's done. She remembers Gideon, and cries for her. She think she is going to have to wake in a world where Gideon is no longer, because she's going to be forced to make the choice that lets one of them live and the only one of them who can live is her. It is a dutiful motion more than anything; Harrow thinks that it's the best course of action for the Nine Houses and for Gideon's memory—respect at last for what Gideon truly wanted her to do.

Then she's told that maybe Gideon isn't gone, and we see Harrow truly hope.

And, for once, be utterly at peace with her decision as she chooses instead to let the River swallow her and wash her ashore in the Locked Tomb of the back of her mind until she or Gideon (now controlling Harrow's body) figures out what they can do next.


Of course, that's not the last shore she washes up on, is it.

Deer Country Attributes

• Canon Powers: She is a necromancer as best explained here, subset bone adept, and will be keeping her canon abilities. (Harrow's brand of necromancy does not include actually being able to resurrect the dead!) Mostly she does not use aspects that are not related to bones, but manipulating bone is what Harrow does best. She can make massive (or average sized, or small) skeletons out of teeny shards of bone, as well as create new and independent shapes out of bone.

She is a lyctor but an incomplete and kind of shitty one, as her healing must be consciously done and that's the only reason I'm not nerfing it! Either that partial Lyctorhood or her Darkblood ability will let her knit her own injuries shut consciously. Because of her original necromancy and the little lyctoral boost, Harrow can use her abilities on others to heal them. She is only comfortable doing this with connective tissue injuries; bone and their ilk. Prior to her Darkblood status she couldn't do anything at all about illnesses, nor would she think to try even now.
• Blood Type: Darkblood
• Omen: An azawakh dog, female, named Stasya
• Blessed Day: September 9th
• Patron Pthumerian: Never Mind — when she learns about him, Harrow will be fond, and hope that he is fond in turn.
• Blood Power Manifestation: An addition to her canon powers but much weaker than her incredibly protagonist-strength necromancy; Harrow will also gain telekinesis independent of using bone constructs to move things for her, because what her already weak body/strong brain situation needed was something else to make her never need to use her own musculature for anything. It will mostly be on a very small and particular level, not at major distances or with great strength -- more like being able to manipulate a lock to open than to throw a table across a room she could make a skeleton do that.

Writing Samples

One: another game's TDM from April
Two: harrow crashes gideon & god on deer's tdm

The Player

• Player Name: Kit
• Player Age: Old. Definitely over 18.
• Player Contact: alexipharmaca
• Permissions: Here.