harrow the ninth is really like. what if orpheus didn’t turn around. what if he wasn’t going to turn around. what if he kept his face pointed resolutely ahead and trusted that she was there even not knowing what he was hoping for. what if orpheus had to be cajoled and threatened and eventually forced to turn around. what if eurydice hadn’t been told the rules and also had a crippling fear of abandonment and spent the whole time pleading with him to look at her. what if orpheus trusted that she would follow him but eurydice couldn’t trust that he would care. what if orpheus was told point-blank that eurydice was almost certainly not actually behind him and he chose to keep walking anyway. what if eurydice touched sunlight again and orpheus wasn’t there. what then.
Griddlehark mushing AU here we go: Harrow comes from a well regarded but dirt poor (like most mushers) mushing family. Her dad regarded as a solid racer and a pioneer but also a crank, no major titles to his name, mom once won the Yukon Quest in a freak Libby Riddles esque incident. Harrow bound and determined to keep the Ninth House kennel’s bizarre Alaska husky × borzoi × visla (I don’t know I’m saying things) lines going and pretending her parents are alive to keep the meager sponsorships they do have. Gideon of course is the scutwork neighbir orphan who they maybe sometimes let run a third string dog team (but Crux sabatoges her). Ortus, the promised heir, can’t run dogs for shit and wants to be the next Robert Service. Harrow is a genius at breeding dogs and engineering sleds, but she’s hamstrung by being an invalid with the athleticism of a used tissue. She literally lashes herself to the sled and wins races through sheer force of will. Gideon is–of course–a born natural. Gideon finally gets sick of it and goes to work as a handler for a serious, well-heeled musher on the road system and gets the chance to run a second string team of standard Alaska sled dogs in the Iditarod. I want there to be a dog napping in the middle of the race. Are we seeing my vision
There is literally a pair of blonde twin sisters who run the Iditarod every year. Just have to do a one-to-one swap and make them gross & co-dependent
Ninth House kennels keeps a fully articulated skeleton of every dog that passes away so they can do weird vector math on running speeds and pelvis angles
The fantastic thing about this is that Alaskans are baseline pretty weird and you better believe that people who dedicate their life to ekeing out a living running dogs in the wilderness are even weirder. If I met a handler nicknamed Babs I wouldn’t even blink. If I saw his musher bite him, I *would* blink, but I think I’d go back to the Alaskan default of minding my own business pretty fast. “My mom died under mysterious circumstances and I grew up totally alone, running dogs is the only thing that makes me feel free” pretty standard musher bio tbh
You are Gideon Nav. Except you’re not. You are Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia, First Lieutenant of the Cohort, Heir to the Emperor Divine, First of the Tower Princes. And you are mega dead.
You learn that you are a revenant, that your spirit is unnaturally attached to your body by someone known for resurrections. You learn that your skin turns away bullets, and that you are the perfect soldier. You learn that your name is something else in a language of a culture you had no idea of. You learn that you are, apparently, wanted after all.
It is everything you have ever wanted.
Plus the dead part.
And Ianthe being there.
You go from planet to planet, fighting and talking to the Saint of Awe. You both are missing parts of yourself, figuratively and literally. New Rho is no different, but you need to play dead here. Someone enters the room. You are lying on a bed, and the only thing that you want anymore is for your necromancer to kiss you. And someone presses their lips to yours. You see Harrowhark Nonagesimus.
