Vultures Are Holy Creatures.

Vultures are holy creatures.

Tending the dead.

Bowing low.

Bared head.

Whispers to cold flesh,

“Your old name is not your king.

I rename you ‘Everything.’”

I keep thinking about this guy I saw in Dallas.

Thinking about Ianthe's arm:

"He says it’s hideous and he’ll gild it for me—” (“Tacky,” you said.)"

Gold isn't something you can manipulate with necromantic ability. But here's Augustine casually offering to gild the bones of an entire skeleton arm, which sounds like it would be quite laborious manually.

But of course, what is the Mithraeum filled with?

Things like this:

"a skeletal arm wrapped in gold foil, amethysts studded like so many eyes between the knucklebones"

and this:

"gilded and bejewelled skeletons of Third and Seventh heroes dressed in gold and green robes of necromantic office, with amethysts and topazes and emeralds for eyes"

You have to assume that the Lyctors in general, or Augustine in particular, have been DIYing the bejeweled House hero relics for the last myriad, so adding some gold to an arm that's attached to someone isn't all that much of a stretch.

This is also riffing on an actual thing in Catholicism, so if you're trying to imagine the Mithraeum, I promise you that you are not visualising something as weird and tacky as reality...

Sometimes I forget that not everyone is lucky enough to see a magpie every day :(

Seeing a single magpie is a bad omen? Wrong! It's a good omen that you'll get to see a magpie today

What if we had three square roots of -1? Haha, ijk.