Harrow shudders a little at the touch, no less welcome even though she'd invited it this time. Her eyes close as he assesses her, and when his voice breaks the silence between them, she has to work to remain impassive. Even these few facts, plain and clinical, are evidence enough of the greater work she'd tried to keep hidden. A muscle ticks, just faintly, in her jaw.

"Irrational or not, it is what I required," she says, though to be called Nonagesimus unlocks something inside of her, a relief at being that and not Harrowhark the First even for the space of a moment. It's enough that she doesn't reject the rest of it wholesale, though her pinched features sharpen further as she looks his way. An ache ripples its way from temple to temple, but it passes. "But to repair it is to undo what I have...to lose..."

She cannot say it with Gideon in the room, with Gideon anywhere in earshot, but it seems she must. Harrow fists her hands in her robe, steeling herself. "Wherever this is, I have been brought to it both in spirit and in flesh. It stands that repairing the damage here will carry over when I return to the Mithraeum, and if that is so, that will represent a failure of work I consider inviolate. It will..."

She cannot do this. She makes herself. "It will destroy what I have left of the soul of Gideon Nav."