11 The heart force
The heart force
In the morning Iriset wakes after restless dreams of shattered arrays and a cracked moon like a broken egg with thousands of baby spinners pouring out, leaving trails of silk behind.
It’s Lyric’s fault for talking about history and timelines and duties to the future and whatever. She groans, flops her arms out.
The bed is empty, and Iriset hates it. She hates even more that she wishes otherwise.
Shortly after Iriset has dragged herself to eat some of the breakfast brought by the duo of attendants, Eliri arrives. “Before heading to the workshop,” Iriset asks, “will Eliri show the way to the advent crater?”
Eliri studies her for a moment, and Iriset smiles her most businesslike but charming smile.
The crater is to the northeast of the fortress proper, in the center of a wide rock garden with obsidian flagstone paths and tall weird cacti with arms that curve and coil generally toward the sky but messily, without straight lines.
Iriset feels like there’s no straight lines in this whole place.
Certainly not the four forces. They’re tangled and bunched, cloudy, strange, unbalanced.
She wonders if the cacti in her Moonshadow City are so perpendicular because Holy Design makes them grow that way.
What a disgusting thought. That even the nature of trees could be so changed. Sweet Silence, what do roses look like here? Or snail shells? Iriset can’t wait to see Eliri’s workshop, or the hinted-at library the Moon-Eater keeps.
Iriset is distracted from her whirling thoughts by a gate of some kind at the edge of the small crater.
It’s built of white-painted wood, with two posts capped by an arched lintel, and within the frame float small glass balls, suspended like design graffiti on invisible threads of force.
They glow blue and lightning-white with tiny inner flames, captured and sustained without obvious fuel. They’re beautiful.
“Prayers,” Eliri says.
“Ugh,” Iriset mutters. She considers stepping through the gate shrine, batting at the balls, but that would be excessively rude. So she walks around it, then skids down the red rock ledge to the floor of the crater.
It radiates force.
Crouching, Iriset puts her hand over the center, wishing she had a stylus or her silk glove or a design mesh to reveal the structure of the forces gathered here.
Iriset senses all of them, strongly. She closes her eyes and licks her fingers and palm, vaguely hoping Eliri didn’t see, but not caring that much.
It makes her skin more sensitive. There’s a huge spike of falling force in the center, and Iriset thinks spike is the right word, because it feels driven deep into the rock.
Rising pulls the hairs on her forearm up, and she inadvertently takes a deep breath.
There are layers of flow and ecstatic spinning slowly around the spike, and maybe buttresses of flow and falling-rising weave… It’s not a flat array.
Iriset shakes out her hand and turns to look up at Eliri. She shades her eyes from the low morning sun. “Was there something here? Before the crash landing? An array of some kind?”
“Perhaps a gardening lock, or a part of the fortress security array, but nothing more specific as far as Eliri is aware.”
That’s what Iriset was afraid of.
As she hums in thought, she feels the array shiver. And under her thin sandals she might, possibly, maybe feel the ground of the crater shiver, too.
It feels like ecstatic force in a descending cycle urging the spike to expand in tiny bursts, in each direction.
Iriset needs more tools. She needs to keep an eye on this.
Because if she’s not mistaken, this is the location of the future Moon-Eater’s Temple, and whatever this thing is, it was caused when they popped out of the sky.
Iriset grumbles to herself, because she was unconscious.
Because Lyric’s hard-ass body-twin shot her.
Even if she has no interest in figuring out how to undo it, in going home, she wants to understand it.
If there’s one thing Iriset knows will piss her off more than anything, it’s doing something accidentally. Whether it’s tearing something apart, genius invention, or just causing trouble, Iriset much prefers to do it on purpose.
The upper stories of Eliri’s laboratory in the design tower are everything Iriset could have dreamed of, and Iriset loses herself in scale models of monstrous musculature and chimeric skeletons.
Eliri explains that while such things as human-eagle hybrids or megafauna can be created, the results tend to be difficult to maintain and certainly they cannot exist outside the constraints of design—not in ways that lead to reproductive survival.
Creatures that have made it such as, yes, cloud whales and unicorns and rep-cats and monkeycats and feathered dragons are successful because it is less complicated to take a creature and fundamentally change only one or two aspects.
Give a goat more lustrous fur and a spiraling marble horn, change the fur follicles of a cat until they grow scales instead, redirect the development of skeletal structure in a small primate until it looks like a cat but retains the cheeky intelligence of the monkey.
And when it comes to actual human design, feathered hair and scaled spines and such aesthetic redesign is easy.
Soft tissue changes for gender presentation are slightly more complex but only if reproduction is an issue and not simple appearance.
As for Eliri’s quartz bones, she said her mother focused on mineral modification in design school, and instead of a fetal mesh, her mother used a complicated array mesh upon ahzself that taught Eliri’s bones to grow this way in the first place.
Something about complex mineral structures that Eliri dismisses.
Iriset understands the subtext: Eliri is unique.
A one-of-a-kind chimera. It is unknown if she would pass her skeletal traits to a child, but is likely under various circumstances.
(She says so in a way that suggests pregnancy will never be sought, and the subject should be dropped.)
As for the cloud whales, Eliri can’t be sure.
They’ve been around for centuries, and when they die they pretty much dissolve right away, so there are no remains to study.
(Which begs the question of what bones were in the forbidden levels of the Vertex Seal library that were labeled cloud whale.) Because they drift high, they can only be observed from a distance, unless one obtains working wings, which is very, very difficult.
The mention of wings distracts both Iriset and Eliri because it turns out that when Eliri was young, she, too, obsessed over flight—over the wide variety of wings that developed in the natural world, and why they were so difficult to graft with human (or any primate) biology, and to her knowledge even the most extreme fetal mesh experimentations failed to produce a human chimera who could fly.
“Ornamental wings are useless,” Eliri says with the most wretched disdain Iriset has ever heard.
She likes it, and laughs. She likes Eliri, too, and remembers finding her name in the forbidden book.
Eliri Who Touched the Sun.
Iriset wonders when she’ll earn that epithet. She’d like to be there to witness. “What made you give flight up?” she asks.
“Too heavy,” Eliri answers, holding out her clawed hand to remind Iriset her bones are made of quartz crystal.
“But worth it,” Iriset argues impulsively. “The benefits of those claws alone would have saved me so much effort.”
Eliri turns her hands over to stare at the glinting tips of her claws. “Everything the claws can do can be done with a stylus or a design gauntlet.”
Iriset drags her attention away from the very distracting idea of a design gauntlet. “But they’re beautiful. And your teeth…” she says, naturally considering what those teeth would feel like against her tongue.
“Beauty is fine,” Eliri says. Then she loses herself a moment, big eyes unfocused. She murmurs, “Once, these bones saved Eliri. Saved Irsu. Worth it for that.”
“Saved Irsu?” Iriset leans nearer.
“This chimera was kidnapped to be used against Irsu, but Eliri broke off a finger, stripped the flesh from the bones, and drew a blood array that created a reaction in the quartz to convert falling force into electricity. It was easy to disrupt the locking mechanisms and the armor several of the guards wore. Once the armor was ruined, claws were the only thing needed.”
“Eliri!” Iriset stares in horrified awe. Broke off her own finger!
“It was this one.” Eliri holds up her left hand, wiggling the smallest finger. “It was not difficult to graft a quartz matrix to the rest of the hand to regrow it, and flesh is easy. It’s stiff sometimes in rain. But this is a desert.”
Iriset laughs breathlessly. “Can you show me the array for converting falling force into electricity?”
The two designers lean over a strip of sketching vellum, Eliri watching as Iriset draws a third version of the electricity array.
This one is founded on the original Eliri used, but with a few changes Iriset suggested given a certain quality of balance already present in the object being electrified.
“Aren’t they sweet?” the Moon-Eater says, stepping into the room.
The numen says nothing, eyeing Iriset intensely. She smiles. “Eliri needs to stay for the sundering lessons,” she says immediately.
Eliri’s head snaps toward her in surprise. “Iriset Sunderer, that is not necessary.”
“Moon-Eater, Eliri’s just like me, Eliri can do it, too.”
The Moon-Eater frowns. “Is that how it works? Though Eliri is welcome to remain.”
The numen taps its finger against Iriset’s forehead. In sharp mirané, it says, “Sundering is a gift, not a talent. It is who you are, not what you learn.”