Chapter 9
Rivermouth
There is a famous love story in the city of monsters.
A chimera child finally born healthy after many attempts to create her was raised by the commander-philosopher of the College of Dedicated Renovation to be the most skilled designer the college had ever seen.
She was called Eliri Crystal Smile because of her flawlessly designed quartz bones.
When she was sixteen the Rivermouth small king hired her to create a new gender aesthetic because the small king was spoiled, bored, and needed entertainment.
It was an assignment below the chimera’s skills, except the commander-philosopher instructed her to weave a crawling assassination into the redesign mesh.
This was a worthwhile challenge, and though the chimera was uncomfortable with assassination, what was she to do but obey her parent and commander?
Unfortunately for those plotting, but fortunately for romantics, instead of committing murder, Eliri fell in love.
Irsu Riverprince, the small king’s heir, was beautiful, clever, and entirely unlike ans lazy mother.
An likes to tell people an fell for the chimera the moment they met, but in truth the two teens danced warily around each other for weeks.
Eliri was shy, perhaps sheltered, but the attention of such a charming and strangely seductive person heated her up, distracted her, and she liked it.
She had never felt appreciated for her thoughts and curiosity instead of her crystal bones, or admired for her skills instead of coveted.
The first time Irsu kissed her, she finally understood how to be glad she’d been born at all.
“Leave your college,” Irsu urged. “Come to the Cult of Hopeful Design with me, and change the way design is used. Remake the world with me.”
When an said it, lips against her cheek, instead of a thrill she felt dread: You see, the reason her commander wanted the small king dead was because of her deep-pocket support of that very cult.
With this invitation, Eliri understood that her lover was the true money behind the cult, under ans mother’s nose.
Despite Irsu Riverprince’s youth, an was the troublemaker, the cultist.
The chimera fled. She returned home to panic and think. She couldn’t tell her commander-philosopher or they would insist upon assassinating Irsu instead. But if she did not, and the small king died, they would know anyway when the Rivermouth support of the cult did not come to an end.
The choice was taken from Eliri’s hands.
In her absence from the fortress, the small king grew even more bored and tried on the redesign mesh despite its incomplete state. And it was not so incomplete it could not kill her.
In the wake of ans mother’s demise, Irsu Riverprince became Irsu River, fully at the helm of the power and wealth of the water rights for the crater city.
The first thing Irsu River and his cult did was to storm the College of Dedicated Renovation to find ans chimera.
Although an took credit for ans mother’s death, the better to solidify a terrifying reputation, Irsu River knew who was truly behind it.
(Honestly, the college wasn’t so bad. They were merely traditionalists and disliked seeing any restrictions placed upon design—and restriction was the name of the cultists’ game.
You see, the cult had grown out of a scandal involving hundreds of dead babies, their bones and bodies distorted and strange from wild, unrestricted fetal design.
The cult screamed, Never again, don’t forget, there is a price for everything, and insisted human design should only be allowed to make people healthier.
They insisted structural design should never destroy the land.
Insisted micro-design and metallurgical design never be weaponized.
And nothing without consent! Talk about a scandal!)
The Cult of Hopeful Design did not raze Eliri’s college to the ground or kill absolutely everyone.
In the smoke and rubble, wearing a specially designed veil over ans face to protect an from poisonous force-nets and breathable shrapnel, Irsu River held out ans hand again to the chimera an loved.
“Come with me,” an said, and this time, she did.
Any other survivors fled to different precincts, and Rivermouth became a sanctuary for those who believed in hopeful design.
“Design should only make the world better” was the philosophy that convinced River, and went on to convince hundreds of others in the crater city.
Over the years Rivermouth power grew and grew.
Other design colleges banded together to insist the Moon-Eater intervene in the cult’s activities.
They claimed the cult had forgotten the red god doesn’t care about curtailing human architecture.
Design should be wild and free, the Moon-Eater has preached for hundreds of years.
But this time the Moon-Eater said, “Why are you bothering me with this? For two hundred years the Sarenpet line governed the city without bothering me.”
The only remaining Sarenpet in power was still in power because he knew what to fight head-on and what to fight with subtlety and grace.
He’d been a small king for decades already, knew a movement like Hopeful Design would tear through the city and run its course by the time its leadership died, or became parents, or turned upon one another.
But the colleges weren’t finished. They found a patron in the small kings of the Design and Fountain kingdoms, the former of whom wanted any excuse to end the cult, the latter of whom was more concerned with Rivermouth’s monopoly on water.
There was a war.
Rivermouth won.
(Irsu River would say nobody won when so many lost their lives, especially when the methods of fighting relied so heavily on the kinds of weapons and warfare the cult actively condemned. Every death proved the point of Hopeful Design.)
Rivermouth shuttered itself tightly behind ingenious force-shields developed by Eliri, then locked down the Lapis River.
Their enemies attempted incursions—cloud whales sacrificed to disrupting the shields, fire rain reinvented—but Rivermouth could not be held to siege without losing water for everyone else.
Irsu River did not mind being the villain willing to hold water itself hostage, not when the cult could rally behind the more charismatic face of ans longtime friend and mentor in design philosophy, Roc Aliel.
Roc lambasted their enemies, rallied allies, and moved freely with his own strike teams, eager to wreak violent havoc in the name of his cause.
Irsu River believed Rivermouth could hold out longer than the city could, and it was true that as they began dying of thirst, people turned against their small kings who’d started the war, and against those who weren’t putting an end to it.
Violent deaths rose exponentially as precincts were caught in the crossfire, and even Roc was not immune: He lost an arm to a crawling blood fog, thrusting his subordinate out of the path.
But the colleges refused to compromise their ideals, and their ideal outcome was the complete eradication of the Cult of Hopeful Design. The small kings of Design and Fountain just wanted Irsu River gone, or better yet, the dissolution of the Rivermouth small kingdom itself.
The war might have dragged on so long and killed so many that the Moon-Eater wouldn’t be able to avoid involvement, except Eliri Crystal Smile had an idea.
Together she and Irsu River snuck out of Rivermouth and made directly for the fortress of the strongest small king: Amado of Chimera fortress, whose fingers were in every pie.
And whose hive-like underground levels were ideal for hoarding water to distribute to his people, through which he’d avoided rebellion in his own backyard.
For Amado, Irsu and Eliri laid out a complex architectural schematic for the rebuilding of waterways and distribution to the entire crater, including something called blowback effect that should mitigate the remaining atmospheric anomalies that had been hanging over the crater since the last generational war.
It would mean finer control over water, more localized control to the small kings who came to agreements with Rivermouth.
It would also mean no more unpredictable airborne design disruptions and significantly fewer occurrences of random rain attacks.
This would all be accomplished with a newly invented design structure not unlike applying a human circulatory redesign aesthetic to the entire crater.
That’s revolutionary design, Amado Chimera said.
Hopeful design. And Irsu River smiled before answering, River’s spouse is a genius.
Amado liked the quiet little chimera, and was related to the River kings and several other neighboring kingdoms through his various marriages and also his grandmother. So Amado Chimera agreed to reconcile the two sides of the Renovation War, under one condition.
That it had all been his idea.
Naturally, it worked. The newly named Amado Reconciler made it work.
Once the armistice had been negotiated, all the leaders returned to their homes and families.
Alive. Irsu River chose to be wildly generous in the application of the circulatory waterways.
Eliri personally activated her designs in every kingdom, earning adoration from every corner with her elegant design, her pretty crystal smile, and her kind gray eyes.
Everywhere she went Roc Aliel preached that the circulatory design could never have been invented by people looking to turn design into war.
Design should heal. It should end thirst. And look how well this chimera was improved by her own fetal designers, looking to make her stronger, not to make her a monster. Look what she’d done for the city!
In the aftermath of the war, Rivermouth and Roc Aliel grew so popular, whispers grew that they might challenge the Moon-Eater himself.