RESURRECTION : UNKINDLED - リザレクション：アンキンドルド

Character and world concepts were visualized using Nano Banana/AI-assisted tools.

The House Pattern

Everything a student of Sankt-Ebon wears is issue.

OF THE ISSUE AT SANKT-EBON

At intake the new one is taken down the bone-stair to the press-room, and the press-room is dark, and nobody is measured there.

This is remarked upon by every child in their first winter and by none after. The issue fits. It fits to the breadth of a finger at the shoulder, the wrist, the waist and the throat, on a body nobody has put a hand or a cord to, and it goes on fitting as the body changes; and when a student is asked how this is managed they find they have a confident answer ready and cannot say where they got it.

House issue does not fray where the house stitched it. Hems let go, seams open, cloth burns and splits — but only where the wearer’s own curse has been at it. A sleeve eaten to the elbow, a crop cut short by what the arm beneath it is becoming, a hem gone to threads: every one of those is the student’s own doing, written on them in cloth, publicly, every hour of every day.

Therefore the oldest instruction given to a warden of this house: do not dress them. Issue them, and let them do the rest, and read what they have written.

OF COLLARS, CHOKERS AND BANDS

Every student is given a thing for the throat at intake. A band, a ribbon, a beaded cord, a strap with a stone hung from it — no two alike, and the difference is not ornament, for the shape a student’s neckwear takes is decided before they arrive and nobody has ever learned what decides it.

It is not locked. There is no clasp that cannot be worked, no knot that cannot be picked. It is simply never taken off, and those who have tried report nothing worse than a bad night and a strong disinclination to try again.

A student without theirs is not punished. They are looked at.

1.The Name(Title): Magoteyl “Magot” Wickham - Lyceum Outfit

The Embroidered Blouse

[CANON] Black, long-sleeved, gothic. Silver floral embroidery. Ruffled chest piece. Flared ruffled cuffs.

House issue, the long pattern, given to those put down for the full term.

The silverwork on the breast and sleeves is a flower in five parts, worked small and repeated — a low spiked thing with a crowded head, which the students will tell ye is a rose and which is not a rose. It is the red brush that comes up between the courtyard stones and will not be pulled, rendered in thread, by somebody who had looked at it closely enough to get the thorns right.

The ruffled piece at the chest is doubled, and the doubling sits over the breastbone and nowhere else. No other garment in the press-room is doubled anywhere.

The Flared Cuffs

[CANON] Long sleeves ending in wide, flared, ruffled cuffs.

Cut wide at the wrist and left open, against all sense in a house of rain.

A narrow cuff holds what runs into it. A wide one lets it fall clear and lets it be seen falling. For a wearer whose gift opens the forearms, the sleeve is therefore not a sleeve; it is a sluice, and whoever cut this pattern knew before he did what the wearer’s hands were going to do.

They dry badly. They have never once been dry.

The Fingerless Gloves

[CANON] Black, fingerless, on both hands.

Leather to the second knuckle and no further.

The house issues them cut this way to every hand in the Lyceum, and the reason given is grip, and the reason given is a thin one. A covered palm learns nothing. The gifts that live in the hands want skin on the thing they are working — iron, stone, another man’s wrist — and the house has been careful, in its quiet way, never to put a barrier between a student and the lesson.

His are worn through at the heel of the right hand, where he braces when he kneels.

The Shorts

[CANON] Black, ending just above the knee. Silver zippers. Strapped hardware with metal eyelets.

Cut short above the knee, so that the leg is bare where a man goes down on it.

Hung about with more metal than any garment needs: zips that open onto nothing, strapping that fastens nothing, eyelets set in rows through which no lace has ever been run. The press-room issues them so and offers no account of it.

Worth noting, if ye are the noting kind: a man who can bend iron is never without iron, and it has been sewn to him since he was small, and nobody ever told him so.

The Knee-Highs and Garter Straps

[CANON] Black knee-high socks held up by buckled leather garter straps.

Issue, and issue that must be fastened by the wearer each time.

Nearly everything the house gives a student goes on without a decision. The straps do not. They have buckles, and buckles have holes, and a hole must be chosen.

He wears his on the third hole, both legs, tight enough to mark, and has done since he was small enough that the straps went round twice. It is one of perhaps four things in his life that is his own doing, and he has never noticed that he counts it.

The Combat Boots

[CANON] Black, lace-up, leather.

Heavy-soled, hard-toed, laced from the instep to the top of the ankle.

They were issued to him long after the rest, which is the only piece of his history the press-room can be said to have recorded: the house gives a child shoes, and gives a man boots, and the exchange is made without ceremony on an evening nobody marks.

Half-laced more often than laced. He falls asleep in them.

The Braids

[CANON] Long black hair, complex braids along the crown, two braided tails forward over the shoulders, the rest loose down the back.(Not issue. Included because it is read as issue by everybody who looks at him.)

Plaited tight enough to ache, every morning, by a man with no mirror and a window that goes black at night.

The two that come forward over the shoulders are chewed ragged at the ends. He will deny this under any question.

A warden who wishes to know how a student is faring need not ask. He has only to look at the crown of the head, and count how many of the small plaits have been let go.

1.1.The Name(Title): Magoteyl “Magot” Wickham - Loincloth

The Loincloth

[CANON] Plain dark greyish-brown cloth, wrapped at the waist, knotted at the left hip, frayed edges. Worn beneath everything; the only thing left on in the Bath Chamber.

Undercloth, press-room issue, one to a student, given at intake and not replaced.

It is the only thing in the whole pattern that is not black, and the only thing that is not ornamented, and the only thing the house has never once asked after. Students lose boots and are given boots. Students burn blouses and are given blouses. Nobody has ever been issued a second undercloth and nobody has ever needed to be.

His is frayed to a fringe at every edge and has gone soft as a moth’s wing, and he keeps a twist of leaf and a small wooden pipe in the knot of it, and it is the oldest thing he owns.

1.2.The Name(Title): Magoteyl “Magot” Wickham - Hollow Hound Fiend Form

The Skin, and the Cracks

[CANON] Dark greyish-purple throughout, split by long glowing pinkish-violet fissures that run up the ribs, over the shoulders and across the upper chest, lighting him from within.

They are not wounds and they do not bleed. They open when the shape comes on him and close over like a lid put on a grate when it goes.The pattern is the same pattern that crawls in the seams of the Hound’s own armoured chest, in the same places, to the same depth. He has not seen the two side by side and so has not yet understood what that means.Struck hard, they flare white at the edges, and the light comes out of the man and not off him.When he is opened deeply enough, what comes out of the cracks is not blood. It is the Dark Flame, pouring slowly down the belly and off the hip, falling and never reaching the ground.

The Horns

[CANON] Two large ridged horns curving forward and down out of the temples, warm and absolutely solid to the hand.

A smaller copy of the cage that frames the Hound’s own muzzle — same forward curve, same deep ridging, stopped short.On the beast they close in front of the face and make a wall. On Magot they stop halfway, so that he keeps his face and gains the architecture of something that does not need one.He touched one in the Coldstone Yard and made a noise he was not proud of. He has not touched them since.

The Pointed Ears

[CANON] Drawn back and up into long points, swept close to the skull.

The shape the fiends of this house all share. Wuelogh has it. Emmerich wears it as a bat’s, laid flat. The Bride of Blood had no ears at all and the absence was worse.The hearing that comes with them is not better. It is wider. In the yard he could hear rain landing on the far terraces and on the clock-tower face and on the roofs across the valley, all at once, all of it equally near, and none of it useful.

The Violet Veining

[CANON]Fine branching veins of glowing violet running across the cheekbones, the brow and the temples in a close net.

They follow no vein a body has. They are in the skin rather than under it.They brighten with the cracks in the chest, so a man standing in front of him can read exactly how hard he has been hit by looking at his face, which is the one thing Magot has spent his whole life arranging not to allow.

The Wings, and the Embers in Them

[CANON] Massive tattered bat-like wings off the back, leathery, ribbed, torn through in long rents, with glowing embers caught and smouldering in the holes of them.

They answer before he decides. That is the first thing he learned about them and the thing that frightens him most.The embers are not fire. They sit in the tears in the membrane without spreading and without going out, and they give no heat, and they are the same embers that drift up out of the sky of the Weir of Sighs and burn nothing when they land.Where the membrane is torn fresh, the embers around the tear go out, one after another, tk, tk, tk. Nobody has said whether they come back.

The Chest Plate and the Pauldrons

[CANON] Jagged dark spiked plate across the bare chest, with matching spiked pauldrons at both shoulders.

It is not worn. There are no straps, no buckles, no points, nothing a man could unfasten.It grows the way the Veinlickers’ armour grows — out of the thing itself, part of it, and it cracks along the same lines the skin cracks.Fangs break off in it. Three of the Bride’s are still in the left pauldron.

The Bracers

[CANON] Dark spiked bracers on both forearms.

The only part of the shape that behaves like equipment: he crosses them over his head to take a heavy blow, and they take it, and the shock goes down into a body with no ground under it and simply stays there.Beneath them the seams of his Ferromancy open as they always have, and the blood runs down inside the plate and out at the knuckles where nobody can see where it came from.He has noticed this. He has not decided yet whether it is a kindness.

The Claws

[CANON] Both hands end in long black claws.

They go into stone. They go into bone. They came away from the Bride’s wing-roots with shredded membrane hanging off them in ribbons.Two of them were sheared to the quick in the first exchange of the fight and were whole again before it ended, and he did not feel either the shearing or the mending.

The Sash

[CANON] A heavily tattered sash of dark red and black cloth wound about the waist, hanging down over a dark minimal undergarment beneath.

Of all of it, this is the piece that looks made— woven, dyed, worn, torn by use rather than grown.It is the only part of the shape that could have belonged to a person, and it is already old. Edrahm Ashenwake knelt in a swamp with his hands in a hound’s ruff, and wept, and told him it would be a short sleep. Nobody has asked whether he was wearing anything red at the time.

The Tail

[CANON] A long thin pointed tail from the base of the spine, moving slowly and by itself.

It does not do what he tells it, and it does not do anything he would object to.It moves the way a thing moves that is thinking about something else, and in the Coldstone Yard it went on moving for some while after Magot had stopped.

The Greaves, and the Pink Runes

[CANON] Both legs encased to the thigh in thick jagged dark metal, etched the whole length with glowing pink runes.

The runes are cut, not grown, in a hand that meant them to be read.They are not in the Lyceum’s script and they are not in the Chancel’s, and the one line of them that circles the left knee is also, in part, cut into the rim of the Twin Mother’s basin, under the waterline, where the stone is broken off.Magot has not seen the two together. He has seen each of them once.

The Talons, and the Hovering

[CANON] The feet morph into black clawed demonic talons, which hang a hand’s breadth above the ground and do not touch it.

He hovers without choosing to and cannot land without choosing to.The water under him stays dry in two small circles.Throughout the fight for the Coldstone Yard his talons touched stone exactly once: when he set them, planted, and tore the Bride of Blood’s wings out of her back.

2.The Name(Title): Lonnero Larmefort

The Leather-Like Tunic

[CANON] Fitted, black, leather-like, worn over the undershirt. Lace-up neckline. Silver vine-like embroidery tracing the centre seam, hem and cuffs.

Issue of the short pattern, given to those whose gift is in the legs.

Fitted close at every point, and the fit is not for appearance. A loose garment on a body moving at the speed his moves does not stay a garment for long; the house learned this early and stopped giving the running ones anything that flaps.

The silverwork is a vine, and it runs in one unbroken line from the throat down the centre seam to the hem, and then round the hem, and then out along both cuffs. One line. Thread it with a fingertip and ye will find no beginning and no end to it, and nobody at Sankt-Ebon has ever been able to say which of those it lacks.

The Frayed Undershirt

[CANON] Dark grey, frayed, worn beneath; shows at the lacing of the neck.

Grey, where everything else is black. Older than the tunic over it, and not replaced when the tunic was.

The fraying is at the collar and the shoulders and nowhere a garment ordinarily wears. It is where the wind gets at a man who has gone faster than wind is used to, and it comes apart from the inside outward, thread by thread, and cannot be mended because there is nothing left to take a needle.

The Chest Strap

[CANON] A leather strap crossing diagonally over the chest. Frequently buckled crooked.

One strap, shoulder to opposite hip, over everything else.

It carries nothing. It fastens nothing. The running ones are all given one and every one of them learns the same use for it, which is this: at the far end of a hard stride, when the hearing has gone and the ground is not where it ought to be and the body cannot be trusted to report where its own parts are — a man can find a strap. It is the one thing on him that is in a straight line.

His is buckled crooked more often than not, and he does not notice, and nobody tells him.

The Choker and Ring

[CANON] A simple black choker with a small metallic ring or pendant.

His marking piece. The plainest in the cohort — a band and a ring, no stone, no work on it.

The ring turns. It has turned since intake and it will turn when the cord has rotted off his neck, and it makes no sound while he is still and a thin continuous whirring while he is at speed, which is the only warning the house has ever given anyone that he is coming.

The Wrist Bands

[CANON] Multiple thin black bands around both wrists.

Not issue. Cut from the frayed hems of his own undershirts and knotted on, one at a time.

He adds one each time he arrives somewhere he had no business reaching — a landing crossed before the door closed, a stair taken whole, a courtyard entered from the wrong end of the house. He has never explained this to anyone and he has never been asked.

There are a great many of them now. He has stopped being able to get the oldest ones off over his hand.

The Belts and Hip Pouch

[CANON] Crisscrossing leather belts at the waist; a small pouch at the right hip.

Three belts where one would hold, crossed and buckled through one another.

The pouch holds a stub of candle, a flint, a folded rag, and a thing he does not take out in company.

The Boning-Knife

[CANON] A dagger at the left hip.

Thin, single-edged, narrow at the spine, with a worn bone grip and a blade honed back to a sliver along one side from long sharpening.

It came up out of the undercroft kitchens in his first winter and nobody came looking for it. It was made for taking meat off a bone and it has never once been used for anything else, and he says so at every opportunity, and the saying so has started to sound like a thing he needs to keep saying.

Trousers and Boots

[CANON] Fitted, distressed black trousers tucked into scuffed black leather lace-up boots.

Tucked, always, at the ankle. A hem that catches is a hem that kills a man moving at his speed, and he was taught this by the only teacher this house provides.

The boots are resoled oftener than anybody else’s in the Lyceum, by his own hand, badly, with whatever the undercroft has lying about.

2.1. The Name(Title): Lonnero Larmefort - Loincloth

The Loincloth

[CANON] A single length of tattered dark grey cloth wrapped about the waist and knotted at the hip. His only garment.

Not issue. It is a washhouse rag, and it is the same rag, and he has been knotting it the same way at the same hip since the two of them were small enough to be frightened of a dark house.He strips to it the way other men take their boots off — as the end of the day rather than the beginning of anything — and he does it in Magot’s chamber and nowhere else.It has been washed perhaps twice since the orchards rotted and he becomes unreasonable if anyone suggests a third.

3.The Name(Title): Dobrin Krasnovar

The Elaborate Top

[CANON] Textured black gothic top: puffed sleeves, high ruffled collar, silver buttons down the front, corset-style lacing along both flanks, buckled leather straps around both upper arms, tight heavily embroidered cuffs trimmed with black lace.

The long pattern at its most complete, and more besides. Where the press-room issues one fastening this garment has three.

It is a construction rather than a garment. Counted honestly there are better than forty closures upon it, and each must be worked in order, and the whole takes a considerable while to put on and rather longer to take off.

This is understood in the house as vanity. It is more usefully understood as a man who has decided that nothing about him shall ever be in disarray, in a place that takes people apart, and who gets up early to see it done.

The Layered Cravat and Brooch

[CANON] A large layered cravat pinned with a dark gemstone brooch.

Folded in four and pinned high, so that the throat beneath it is not visible from any angle.

The stone in the brooch is dark and faceted and does not give light back. Hold it to a candle and the candle is not reflected in it; hold it to a lamp and the lamp is not either. For one whose gift is in the bending of shadow this is either a tool or a symptom and he has never said which, and the cravat is folded over his marking piece, and nobody in the cohort has seen what shape his was given.

The Silver Rings

[CANON] Multiple silver rings on the fingers of both hands.

Plain bands, unmatched, of differing weights and widths.

He puts one on and he does not take it off. He has been asked what they are and has answered, each time, that they are rings.

A student who had been counting — and there is one in every generation of this house who counts — would find that the number of them has only ever gone up, and that it goes up on the mornings after a bed is found stripped.

Belt, Trousers and Thigh Strap

[CANON] A textured dark leather belt with a silver buckle. Fitted black trousers with vertical rows of silver studs down the outer seams, dangling lace-up strings, a buckled leather strap around the left thigh.

Studded in two rows down the outside of each leg, which catch the light when he walks and throw a doubled shadow when he does not.

The lace-strings hang loose and have never been tied. In a man who fastens everything, that is not an oversight; it is the one place he has chosen to leave open, and he has never been seen to look at it.

The Polished Boots

[CANON] Black leather, lace-up, with silver accents on the toe caps.

Polished. In this house.

There is standing water in the cloisters, moss on every stair, mud to the ankle in the Mossed Courtyard, and this one young man’s boots come up out of all of it black and bright, every evening, because he sits with a cloth and sees to them in the time the others spend being frightened.

It has been remarked that he keeps his boots the way a soldier keeps his boots on the night before a thing. It has been remarked, and then it has been let alone, because he is not a friend to anybody and that is the arrangement he prefers.

4.The Name(Title): Mashiro Sootley

The Buttoned Top

[CANON] Fitted black gothic top, silver buttons down the front, low neckline, elbow-length sleeves finished with dark lace trim.

Issue of the long pattern, cut open at the throat.

The press-room gives the voiced ones a low neck and gives no account of it, and the voiced ones work out the account for themselves soon enough: nothing lies across the windpipe, nothing presses on the great cords of the neck, nothing is in the way of a thing that comes up out of a person whether they will it or no.

It is not a kindness to her. It is a kindness to the sound.

The Elbow Sleeves

[CANON] Ending at the elbow in dark lace.

Cut short, so that between the lace of the cuff and the top of the long glove there is a hand’s width of bare forearm on each side.

That strip of skin is the most marked thing on her and nobody looks at it, because it is marked by her own fingers. When the Dirge comes up and she has decided that it is not going out, she takes hold of her own arms there and she holds, and she has been doing it since she was small.

There are old crescents in that skin. There are newer ones over the old.

The Beaded Choker

[CANON] A black beaded choker.

Her marking piece, strung loose on a cord, the beads of black glass.

Loose-strung, so that they sit apart and touch one another only when she moves — and so, when she opens her mouth and lets the thing out, every bead on that cord goes at once. They crack. They split along their middles and fall off the cord into whatever is underfoot.

She has rethreaded it more than once. Nobody has ever seen her do it and nobody has ever seen her gather the pieces, and yet the cord is always full, and the beads are always black glass, and they have always come from somewhere.

The Long Gloves

[CANON] Long black fingerless gloves, running nearly to the elbow.

Fingerless at the second knuckle, as all house gloves are; long at the other end, as hers alone are.

The right one is sound. The left has been split across the knuckles and mended and split again, which is a strange wearing on a woman whose gift is not in her hands, until ye have seen what she does with that hand when the Dirge is not an option.

The Pleated Skirt and Waist Hardware

[CANON] Black, multi-layered, pleated, lace-trimmed, with strapped leather hardware at the waist.

Layered in three, so that the pleats of each fall into the gaps of the one beneath, and the whole of it moves as one piece and makes no noise doing it.

The house gives the voiced ones quiet cloth. Wool that does not rustle, lace that does not scratch, leather that does not creak. A student who has carried a scream since infancy learns early to live in silence, and the press-room has been attending to that for longer than anybody can account for.

Stockings and Garter Straps

[CANON] Sheer black thigh-highs on garter straps, over dark ankle socks.

Sheer, and torn through at one knee or the other more often than not, and never replaced before they have gone entirely.

The Brown Boots

[CANON] Scuffed brown leather, lace-up.(The only brown worn by any student in the house.)

Not issue. There is no brown in the press-room and there never has been.

They came off a dead man in the Mossed Courtyard in a season nobody discusses, and they were too big for her then and they are the right size now, and she has never once offered an account of either fact.

Asked about them she says: they are boots. Pressed, she says: they are quiet boots. Pressed further, she does not say anything, and she has a way of not saying anything that ends the conversation.

5.The Name(Title): Tama Tolkavara

The Patterned Sleeves

[CANON] Long sleeves of patterned fabric, ending in dramatically layered ruffled cuffs.

The weave carries a figure: a narrow repeating thing, worked dark on dark, legible only when the cloth is held at an angle to a flame.

It is a door. The same door over and over, the width of a thumbnail, down the whole length of both sleeves, and it is shown open.

No student has ever asked the press-room what the figure means. Students do not ask the press-room anything; there is nobody in there to ask.

The High Collar

[CANON] High collar with ruffled lace trim; button-down chest.

Standing, stiffened, closed to the jaw, and of all the pattern’s pieces the one she is most particular about.

She has worn it closed since well before there was anything beneath it to keep covered, which is worth remarking upon, because there is something beneath it now.

The Corset

[CANON] A wide lace-up corset at the waist.

Boned, laced through at eleven pairs, drawn and tied by the wearer each morning.

Of the blinking ones it is said — by those who were here before, and there are very few of those — that the corset is not for the figure. A body that goes out of the world and comes back into it does not always come back in the same order it left, and the ones who go through often report a sensation of needing to be held together on arrival, and a thing laced tight around the middle will do that, and will do it without having to be asked.

Hers has burst its lacing twice. Once on the day the arches fell. Once on an evening in the courtyard, and she has told nobody the rest of that.

The Voluminous Skirt, Chains and Harness Straps

[CANON] Highly voluminous, multi-layered, pleated, heavily lace-trimmed, with hanging silver chains and buckled leather harness straps at the front.

The fullest skirt in the house, and the loudest — it takes up a doorway and announces her in it.

The silver chains hang free at the front in three loops of differing length. They are not fastened to anything at their lower ends. The blinking ones are given them and are not told why, and work it out in their own time: when ye come back out of the dark and ye are not certain ye have come all the way back, ye look down, and ye count the loops.

Hers come out cold. Not every time. She has never been able to establish what makes the difference, and she has been trying for a long while.

Stockings and Ankle Boots

[CANON] Sheer black thigh-high stockings; simple black leather ankle boots.

Low, plain, thin-soled, and the only footwear in the Lyceum with no grip on them at all.

A student who crosses a courtyard by walking needs a boot that holds the ground. A student who crosses it by going round the outside of the world does not, and the press-room appears to have known which she was before she did.

5.1.The Name(Title): Tama Tolkavara - Undercloth

The Undercloth

[CANON] A minimal, tattered two-piece of dark greyish-brown cloth: a simple frayed bandeau wrap across the chest, and a matching ragged loincloth knotted at the waist. Worn beneath everything; what remains in the Bath Chamber.

Undercloth, press-room issue, one to a student, given at intake and not replaced — the same cloth as every other student’s, the same colour, the same fraying.

Hers is in two pieces. No other undercloth in Sankt-Ebon is, and the house has never offered an account of it, and the blinking ones are the only ones who are given them so.

They are not tied the way the others are tied. The knot at her hip is doubled and drawn back through itself in a fashion that cannot be shaken loose by anything short of a blade, and she ties it that way every morning without thinking about it, and she has done so ever since the first time she went into the dark knotted and came out of it otherwise.

6.The Name(Title): Armand Delacendre

The Crop Top and Mesh

[CANON] Sleeveless black crop top exposing the midriff, with black mesh panelling at the sides.

This was a blouse once. The press-room issues no crops.

The long pattern was given him at intake like everybody else’s, and the long pattern did not survive him. Cloth over a body that burns from the marrow outward goes at the midriff first, then the sleeves, then the flanks, and it goes from the inside, so that a garment comes apart with no mark of flame on the outer face of it at all.

When the sides went for the fourth time the house stopped replacing the cloth and set mesh into the gap, which is not a garment, which is a vent.

The Leather Harness

[CANON] Crisscrossing black leather harness, silver studs, metal O-rings, worn over the top.

Straps where the blouse’s own closures used to be.

When there is not enough garment left to fasten to itself, a thing must be put over it to hold what remains onto the body. That is the harness and that is its whole purpose, and the studs and rings are the press-room doing what it always does, which is making the remedy look like it was meant.

The Bracers

[CANON] Thick black leather on both forearms; the right one laced corset-fashion.

Heaviest leather in the house, doubled, on the two limbs that take the worst of him.

The left is sound. The right has been laced rather than stitched because stitching will not hold on a thing that splits from within at the seam each time the violet comes up it, and lacing can be drawn in again afterward by the wearer, alone, with his teeth, which is how it is generally done.

Under the right bracer the arm glows through its own flesh. The leather has gone translucent over the forearm in a patch the shape of a hand.

The Choker and Purple Stone

[CANON] Black leather choker with a dangling purple gemstone.

His marking piece, and the only one in the cohort with a stone hung from it.

The stone is purple and it holds light rather than giving it, and it brightens while he burns and goes dull a long while after he has stopped, which makes it the one honest instrument in the Lyceum for telling how much of him is left.

There is a purple orb set at the head of the warden’s cane. There is purple in both of the warden’s eyes. Nobody has ever been able to establish which came first, and the one person who could say has not been asked, and would answer, because he answers everything honestly.

Trousers, Zippers, Chains and Straps

[CANON] Fitted black trousers with exposed metal zippers down the centre fly and front thighs, silver studs, draping silver chains across the hips, dangling buckled leather straps encircling the legs.

Metal to the knee, and all of it on the outside of the cloth.

Zips that open down the front of each thigh, where the burning runs hottest, and which are left open as often as shut. Straps that hang in loops and catch on everything and have never been shortened. Chains that hang slack across the hips and swing when he dashes and leave little bright marks on the stone where they strike.

He is the loudest student in the house standing still.

The Buckled Boots

[CANON] Tall, chunky black leather, secured with multiple heavy buckle straps.

Thick-soled, high-shafted, buckled in four across the instep and the shin.

Buckles, not laces. A lace must be tied and a buckle may be slammed shut, and the house has given the burning ones footwear that can be got onto a body in a hurry by somebody whose hands are shaking.

7.The Name(Title): Hartwin Stormgrave

The Lace-Sleeved Blouse

[CANON] Elaborate black gothic blouse, sheer puffed lace sleeves ending in ruffled cuffs, ruffled chest, buttons down the centre, corset-style lacing on the front panels.

Sheer from shoulder to wrist, in a house where the rain never stops. This is remarked upon by every new student and explained by none of them.

Solid cloth on an arm that works the Glacial Curse goes stiff. It freezes through, and then it cracks along every fold, and then it is sacking. Lace does not; there is more hole than thread in it, and the cold passes out through the holes and the garment survives the winter.

The frost still forms. It stands on the lacework in fine white filigree after a working and falls off in flakes as he walks, so that he leaves a short trail behind him indoors that melts within a few paces.

The Purple Ribbon

[CANON] A dark purple ribbon tied at the high collar, in a bow.

His marking piece: not a band, not a cord, not a strap. A ribbon.

He ties it himself, carefully, and he ties it so that it looks as though he has not. It takes him a considerable while to achieve that and he would rather be struck than have it mentioned.

It is the same purple as the stone at Armand Delacendre’s throat, and as the orb on the warden’s cane, and as both of the warden’s eyes. He has never once remarked on this in company. He has retied it, by one count, nine times in a single evening.

Gloves, Belt and Shorts

[CANON] Short black fingerless gloves. A textured dark leather belt with an ornate silver buckle. Fitted black shorts with draping silver chains and lace-up ties on the outer sides.

The buckle is the heaviest single piece of silver issued to any student, and the strap behind it has been replaced three times while the buckle has not.

Brute-Blood in the arms and a delicate pattern on the body is a poor arrangement, and the press-room has met it the only way it can: give him the fine things and give him them often. He goes through cuffs. He has split a sleeve by reaching for a door.

The Thigh-High Boots

[CANON] Tall, form-fitting black leather, over the knee.

Drawn up the whole length of the thigh, fitted close, with no fastening visible anywhere upon them.

He polishes them with the same cloth he uses for his teeth and has been told about this and does not care.

8.The Name(Title): Leofric Bleakwater

The Cold-Shoulder Blouse

[CANON] Fitted black gothic blouse with lace-trimmed cold-shoulder cutouts; high collar; metallic clasp closures down the front bodice; long sleeves gathering into layered ruffled cuffs.

Two crescents cut out of the shoulders, hemmed round with lace, so that the bare skin shows there and nowhere else on him.

It is not a style. Storm-Witching goes out of a body at the points of the shoulders — it comes up the spine and leaves by the high ground — and the cloth over those two places burned away in his first winter and in his second and in his third, and then the house stopped issuing it and started issuing the hole.

Which is to say: the press-room takes measurements of nobody and yet knows precisely where each of them will burn, and has the damage finished and hemmed before the student arrives to do it.

The Lace Cravat and Clasps

[CANON] A voluminous layered lace cravat at the high collar; metallic clasp closures down the front bodice.

The clasps are the only metal anywhere on him, and there are five, and they are set in a line down the breastbone.

They have been fused shut by his own gift and worked open again more than once, and the metal of each has a bloom on it now like the stain on a church window — the particular blue-black that iron goes when something has passed through it that iron was not meant to carry.

The cravat is folded high and full over his marking piece, in the manner of Dobrin Krasnovar’s, and for a different reason, and he has never said what it is.

Belt, Shorts and Hardware

[CANON] An ornate black belt with a large decorative silver buckle; high-waisted black shorts with draping silver chains at the hips, silver eyelets, laced side seams.

High-waisted, laced up both outer seams, with the eyelets set in silver and the lace drawn tight.

He draws the left side tighter than the right. He has done so since he was small and if ye ask him he will say he does not, and he will be telling the truth, because he has never once noticed.

Stockings and Ankle Boots

[CANON] Sheer black thigh-high stockings; plain black leather ankle boots secured by thin buckle straps.

Thin straps on a thin boot, and the plainest footwear in the cohort.

A student whose gift earths itself through the ground is issued nothing on the foot that will keep him from it, which has been described within the house as an oversight, and is not.

9.The Name(Title): Loytte Grayling

The Lace Blindfold

[CANON] An intricate, patterned black lace blindfold, entirely obscuring the eyes. A faint thin red scar runs down the left cheek from beneath it.

Lace, worked in a close repeating figure, bound round the head and knotted at the back, and never once removed in company.

It does not hold anything in and does not keep anything out. He can be led past a lamp with it on and will not know the lamp was there, and that is not the blindfold’s doing.

It was in the press-room before the Searing Epiphany ever went off. This is known because the lad who fetched it was sent for it that same evening and came back with it in a folded cloth, and the house does not make anything that quickly, and nobody in the whole of Sankt-Ebon has ever asked the obvious question out loud.

The Velvet Coat and Cloak

[CANON] Heavy, layered, black velvet-like coat and cloak, thick swirling silver embroidery along the trims, lapels and cuffs.

The heaviest garment issued to any student, and the warmest thing in the building that is not a fire.

A body that cannot walk cannot warm itself. A body that cannot walk sits still in a stone house in the rain and goes cold from the feet upward, and the house knows this, and the house has given him velvet and weight and a lining and a cloak over the top of it.

Which is a kindness. The press-room has no record of ever performing one, and this coat exists, and both of those remain true.

The Skull Clasps and Chest Chain

[CANON] Silver chains connecting two small metallic skull clasps across the chest.

Two clasps at the lapels and a chain run between them, slack, across the breast.

It is not a fastening; the coat has buttons. It is a place to take hold of a man who must be taken hold of — by whoever lifts him into the chair, out of the chair, onto a cot, off a cobbled floor. There is a chain across his chest because the house expects him to be carried, and it has expected it since the evening the blindfold came up out of the press-room.

Magot has never once used it. He goes under the knees and behind the back, every time, and says nothing about why.

The Hand Coverings

[CANON] Long sleeves extending into dark fingerless coverings over the hands.

Cut to leave the fingers out, like every glove in the house, and for a reason that is his alone.

He reads with them. Stone, wood, iron, the pile of a velvet cuff, the face of a person who has let him. The covering runs over the back of the hand and the palm and stops at the knuckle, and from the knuckle on he is looking at the world.

The Leg Braces

[CANON] Elaborate dark metal greaves or braces encasing the lower legs, silver filigree, prominent skull motifs at the knees. Four buckles each.

Shaped to the calf and the shin, filigreed, skulled at the knee, and heavier than they need to be for anything they do.

They do not support him; there is nothing in those legs to support. What they do is keep the bones in them from being broken by the rest of the world — by a cobble, by a stair, by a chair tipped over in a courtyard — since a leg that cannot feel a blow cannot be pulled out of the way of one.

They also mean that no one who looks at him can mistake those legs for a living man’s, and the house has never said whether that is a consequence or the point.

The Bare Feet

[CANON] His feet are completely bare, resting on the chair’s footplate.(In the Bath Chamber and in his chair alike.)

The press-room issues boots to every student in Sankt-Ebon Lyceum.

It has never issued him any, and nobody has ever brought him any, and nobody has ever remarked upon it in his hearing, and he has never asked.

He has been in this house since he was a child. There is a room downstairs full of boots.

9.1.The Name(Title): Loytte Grayling - Loincloth

The Loincloth

[CANON] A ragged, dark grey cloth draped across the lap and waist.

Undercloth, press-room issue, one to a student, given at intake and not replaced — the same as every other student’s, in a different grey, gone soft with age.

10.The Name(Title): Edrahm Ashenwake

The Dark Grey Brief

[CANON] A plain, simple, high-cut dark grey undergarment. The whole of what he wears.

No boot, no cloak, no ring, no cord, no mark of any house, and not a drop of water on it in a yard where the rain is falling sideways.It is the garment a man is left in when everything else has been taken off him for washing, or for burial, and it is the only garment he has been seen in since the embers cooled.He keeps lamps and he kept a hound and his house kept this hill, and he stands in the middle of a storm in his underclothes and is not wet.Nobody has asked him where the rest of it went.

The Hair

[CANON] Incredibly long, perfectly straight black hair parted down the middle, falling in thick sheets over both shoulders and down past the knees to the bare feet, and onto the ground where he sits.

It is not wet. It is never wet.When he sits on a tombstone with his legs crossed it pools on the stone and runs off the edge of it toward the grass. When he crouches it spreads around him on the flagstone like something spilled.It has not been cut since whatever happened to him happened, and that is the nearest thing to a clock that anyone in this book has been given.

The Bare Feet

[CANON] Barefoot. Long, white, entirely unmarked.

He walks on broken flags, on frozen puddles, on the breathing crust of the Swamp of Dread, and on the skin of a standing black pool, and none of them take his weight or give under it.The frozen puddles do not break.The last of his house went down to the water and was not taken up again, and here is a man of that house who does not sink, and he has been asked about it once and did not answer.