Nights on the Ninth are long. Though to what extent night can truly be said to exist in Drearburh is debatable, given the House's distance from Dominicus and the castle shaft's polar position. Everything exists in washed-out shades of grey and white, the passage of time marked only by the tolling of the bells that call the penitent to prayer and changing shifts of skeletons tending the snow leeks. Ellynhark knows about night mostly from her readings in the archives. Not the fiction, she doesn't have time for the fiction. But the letters of her ancestors are preserved in addition to the tomes of necromancy, and painful though it may be to admit it, she cannot focus on the latter indefinitely. History makes an adequate break.

She does a lot of reading, when she's not honing her necromancy. There's not much else to do on the Ninth. At least until her only agemate comes around looking for... whatever. Usually trouble, Ellyn thinks. If she really wanted to hide away, she'd go to her cell and lock the door. But there's only so much of that she can take, and Gideon... is not the worst. Not always. Most of the time. When her parents aren't around. So after prayers Ellyn sits herself in the corner of the archives with a stack of books on one side and a tacit invitation on the other.