Chapter 5 #3
Lyric bows his head.
“Go where Lyric likes, or stay. Lyric is protected by the Moon-Eater’s decree of friendship, but rumors of the star that fell already run rampant in the fortress and in the city beyond, so one should be careful.
” Eliri walks to the door, where Peace and Saff wait.
“Touch this”—she indicates a nearly invisible round tile—“and the door will open. This”—she taps below the tile with her claw—“will summon an attendant.”
“Thanks given,” Lyric murmurs. When Iriset wakes she’ll tear this whole room apart to study the layers of force and design. He doesn’t want to see it.
The three women leave. Lyric stares after, recalling there are more genders in Old Sarenpet dialects, easy to miss because of the lack of personal pronouns. He will have to ask, instead of assuming. Nobody has given a name with any indicators like mé or méra.
Lyric takes a deep breath and sits beside Iriset to carefully comb her hair.
He lets his mind wander to what-ifs and maybes: They’re here, so how do they return home?
Will Iriset have any answers? Does she know what she did?
Can she undo it? Can he go home? He needs to: He must. And he needs to know more precisely when they are, before he can choose what to say or do.
Suddenly, Lyric experiences an urge to blow something up, to change something, anything.
But now is not the time. It’s a funny thought when he’s pretty sure he’s traveled through time.
Not the time, what does that even mean? He wants to ask Garnet, who would be serious, and Amaranth, who would joke her way through defeating even the Moon-Eater himself, her own god.
He wants to ask his mother, who is dead and a murderer, who ruined his life. He wants to ask Iriset.
But for now he can only ask himself.
“It’s dark as a dungeon in here,” whispers a voice in mirané that cuts through Lyric’s dulled senses. He whips around, stumbling off the bed.
The numen.
It leans against the arched door, pink pupils glittering meanly. The room is dark; Lyric didn’t notice the change of light, caught in his slowly spiraling thoughts.
He stands, blocking the numen’s view of Iriset. He doesn’t know what to say to it, how to treat it. It wants him dead, and Lyric can’t blame it.
It wears a shape very like the one it wore Lyric’s whole life: masculine-forward, with long silvery hair—the same shade as Aharté’s moon, Lyric finally realizes.
The numen’s raw river-fish pink features are long and sharp, perhaps a little too long, a little too sharp.
It wears a silky fuchsia sleeveless robe over a black skirt and slippers.
Black pearls hang from its ears and black rings adorn its fingers.
There are delicate black combs in its hair, sweeping the silver-pink strands back from the temples and into loops.
The numen looks like a weird but pampered bride.
“What do you want?” Lyric asks in mirané. It’s a relief to let the rhythms and syllables come.
The numen scoffs. “I am here for Iriset mé Isidor.”
It moves, and Lyric intercepts, grabbing its arm in a twist, shoving it away from the bed.
Laughing, it spins back. “Want to fight, little Seal? I can’t promise not to eat you.”
“Stay away from Iriset,” he says, refusing to back down.
“You are the one who nearly killed her on that altar, not I. I showed her what she’s capable of.”
Lyric doesn’t protest that her death wasn’t his desire. It’s not the numen’s business. He says, “The Moon-Eater called you Never. Is that your name?”
“A name. You can call me numen, since you never bothered before now.”
The truth is only as harsh as Lyric already knew it to be, so he nods. “You didn’t bring us here?”
The numen grins, displaying rows of thin alliraptor teeth in its human-shaped mouth. “She did,” it hisses.
Lyric glances at Iriset at the same time the numen does. “How?”
Its black diamond-shard eyes glow in the dim bedroom, fixed upon Iriset.
Moving his body to block even the gaze, Lyric asks, “What is a sunderer?”
“Let us wait until your wife wakes, unless you are desperate to talk to me after all this time.” The numen stalks forward and Lyric holds his ground, lifting his chin to stare at those disquieting eyes. It is taller than him, and Lyric has no weapon.
The numen smiles, suddenly a middle-aged mirané auntie, orange silk cloth mask wrapped through wavy hair, palace-orange robes and slippers, harmless, familiar, gentle. “Better?”
Lyric shakes his head.
It rolls its eyes and puts fists on its round hips. “You can’t stop me.”
“Answer my questions.”
“Iriset mé Isidor is a sunderer, and she brought us here with a dart in her lung.”
Lyric guesses, “You don’t know how she did it, either.”
“She was dying,” the numen sneers. “It was instinct.” Then it waits, looking softer, its mirané auntie’s face pulled into simple worry.
With a quiet grunt Lyric steps out of the way, but hovers as the numen perches beside Iriset and brushes hair back from her temple. Silver-pink crawls up its fingertips like they’re dipped in paint wherever it touches her, then the color swallows away.
It looks at Lyric with disdainful mirané-brown eyes, exactly like Lyric’s own. Like his mother’s. “She is healed, but the sundering must have exhausted her. There are signs of fraying throughout her design.”
“Fraying?” Lyric doesn’t like the panicked rising force skipping up his spine.
The numen shakes its head. “Rest and the ambient forces in this palace will be enough. She knits and soothes herself back together. Quicker than I expected.”
“The marriage knot,” Lyric says without thinking.
The numen shoots him a sharp look that turns thoughtful. “Maybe.”
Lyric takes Iriset’s hand, rubbing his thumb along her knuckles.
“Her regard is the only reason you’re alive.” The numen pokes Lyric’s cheek and he flinches away, appalled.
“You can’t kill me. Your Shade wants me alive, to see how I’m made,” Lyric says, finding his footing. He is the Vertex Seal; he can be a bitch.
The numen wrinkles its mouth in distaste, then snaps, “He would forgive me if you did die.”
That is probably true. Lyric says nothing.
Then the numen blinks back into its weird new bride form and sweeps away.
“Wait,” Lyric calls. When it pauses, he says, “The Moon-Eater is really just—has always been—just a numen?”
“Just? Just a numen?” The numen laughs a series of sharp, sneering laughs. Inhuman. It vanishes.