Chapter 17 #2
“I like it.” She knocks their shoulders together again.
“It really makes me wonder how time works, you know? Like, can we change anything? Or, if we change anything, will we change? Or is there another path to take and another us, another me and you and Amaranth and Sidoné and the Little Cat and—and Singix? Maybe we make a world where everything we want is real. The people we love alive, the way we want. But how can we know? Is it a circle or a spiral? Is it spiraling toward entropy or implosion?” Iriset laughs, shakes her head.
“I really don’t know how we got here, Lyric. ”
“If you tried, you could discover it,” he says with very simple devotion.
“Ugh,” she groans. “You’re so earnest sometimes! This is a theory session! At a midnight festival of monsters. Be less serious.”
Lyric struggles for a moment, then sticks his tongue out at her.
Iriset tsks, then sighs. “At the very core, what is Silence to you, Lyric Aharté? What is it, if it’s only a philosophy? A political guideline? Not about a goddess who may or may not exist? What truly matters?”
Lyric lets his mind drift through her questions as they walk up a flight of stairs away from the little river with its weeping trees.
Just before they join another open street, he tugs her to a stop, cups her face, and kisses her.
This, he thinks, this is what matters, and that’s so far away from philosophy and history and the complete upheaval of a city—a world.
Iriset leans back enough to look between his eyes. “Why do you keep doing that? Kissing me like it’s the answer to every question?”
This time Lyric does it on purpose, and Iriset laughs against his lips.
They end up drinking beer at a patio café, chosen for the massive bonfire in the middle of the square before them.
In a little bit, when the moon is highest, they’ll join the crowd throwing in unwanted, sacrificial design.
Lyric’s sipping at his beer, and Iriset has downed half of hers and a shot of something she says tastes like herbs dropped in a vat of vinegar.
He asks how she’s not drunk, and Iriset taps her beer to his and says in addition to spitting a lot out, she’s practicing sundering inside her own body.
“I think it’s working a little bit! I’m definitely not much worse than tipsy,” she says, and she doesn’t sound worse.
Lyric is probably less sober than Iriset, given his low tolerance due to lack of practice.
He doesn’t mind tonight. The sway of his thoughts mellows the chaos and harsh firelight of the crater city, brings the fireworks to background noise.
At Lyric’s prodding, Iriset goes into more detail about sundering, talking in metaphor and examples he half understands. It soothes him to listen to her, despite every word dripping with apostasy. It is who she is, and Aharté made her this way.
If Aharté made anything at all.
Lyric will have to reckon with that. With everything.
What he wants to build here, what he wants to break, and who he asks to help him.
He knows he needs to find Maimeri, if the man exists yet, and he knows he needs to find other cults of Aharté, threads of Silence.
It’s a step in the balanced direction, though it could take years.
If Maimeri is only a child, or unborn, it could be decades before Lyric achieves anything.
He feels more urgency than that. Like there’s a limit, only a few quads, maybe not for the Moon-Eater or Iriset, but for him. His fingertips tingle.
Maybe it’s the alcohol, or the empty place under his heart where the marriage knot used to be, but Lyric is certain that he himself doesn’t have that kind of time.
The moon is high enough, Lyric thinks, tilting his face up. Under his foot, he feels a tremor. Like the earth itself shivers. Lyric looks around, but nobody else noticed. He must have imagined it.
“Nice little rabbit mask!” Iriset calls in Old Sarenpet, and he follows her gaze to a group of youths with very pretty white masks: a rabbit, yes, with long ears curled over their head, and an illusion design that makes it seem to blink its dark eyes.
There’s a cat with gilded whiskers and a shifting grin, and a mouse, Lyric thinks, with a lifelike twitching pink nose.
When she finishes waving her compliments, Iriset says to Lyric in mirané again, “Little rabbit. I never realized.” Her expression opens into amusement. “What a funny name for a famous man.”
It takes Lyric a moment to understand why she’s amused.
Little rabbit. In Old Sarenpet it’s mai meri.
“The Moon-Eater’s child,” he whispers.
“What?”
Lyric grabs her wrist. His pulse throbs in his temples. “The Moon-Eater had a child. Has a child. Named Rabbit—but in mirané. The mirané word for rabbit, not Maimeri, so of course nobody recognized it.”
“Really?” Iriset’s eyebrows are so high, she clearly finds it difficult to believe.
“Shade told me himself. And that Rabbit left the city because it was too loud for ahz. Because that’s how it is for me, and the Moon-Eater said—”
“Lyric.” Iriset touches his cheek. “Calm down.”
Shutting his eyes, Lyric breathes. His fingertips are tingling again.
A roar ripples through the crowd. Iriset stands, nudging his shoulder until he joins her.
She takes his hand and pulls him into the press of people all moving toward the bonfire.
It smells like smoke and sweat, a sweetness he can’t identify, and Lyric squeezes her hand tightly so they aren’t separated as too many laughing and cheering people press close.
What forms can’t quite be called a line, more like layers of concentric circles that shift into a spiral of sorts, with some people darting through to toss in their sacrifices.
Most of them are masks, some heavy and made of material that flies well, arcing just right to cut through the flames and send up sparks where they land in the wood.
The heat tightens his lips, and Lyric reaches for his mask, but Iriset gets there first. She pries it off, then nods her chin at him until Lyric grabs the base of one of the long teeth biting up out of her cheeks and rips it all off.
They move nearer and nearer through the tightening, crushing spiral, and as one, when they’re so close the flames are louder than the crowd, they throw each other’s masks into the bonfire. He doesn’t see where they land, but he yells wordlessly, and Iriset’s voice echoes in his ears.
“Come back with me,” Iriset murmurs with her mouth touching his ear.
“Come back with me and let me fuck you again, Lyric, let me eat you up, and it will be the best argument we’ve ever had, and we can be naked all night, please, please, come back with me.
” She digs one hand into his waist, and the other presses against his cock, which is not unaffected.
“We have so much more to fight about, let’s do it right now, right now. ”
He wants that, he aches for it, to let go of himself and let her remake him, because he’s not an idiot: That’s what she wants. A tamed Vertex Seal to mold and reform and re-form. He’s not anybody here, so why not be anybody? That’s her song, her seduction.
Heedless of the crowd around them, Iriset sucks on his neck, just below the bend of his jaw, pushing her body against him, arms around him, and her desire permeates his skin.
But Lyric carefully moves her teeth away from his throat. “I have to go to the Rivermouth fortress.”
Her flushed cheeks and hot eyes bend in irritation, but then she seems to remember something. “Because of Setka?”
Cold fear douses his lust, and Lyric grabs her shoulders. “You know?”
Her frown is so thick he wants to bite it. “I do, but—”
“Did you tell the Moon-Eater?”
Iriset jerks away. “What?”
“Did you?”
“Of course not! I’m glad you’re saving her.”
“And going against him, your red god.” Lyric feels so clearheaded suddenly, intensely aware of a very fine but solid line between them again.
Iriset pushes his hands off her shoulders. “I don’t serve any god, of Silence or apostasy.”
Lyric opens his mouth to say he’s sorry, but this time, the tremor under the street is noticeable. He frowns, looking down.
Then he hears a distant sound that some combat-trained instinct knows is not a firework. He turns so he’s in between Iriset and the sound—the sensation—and he taps the defense necklace she’s wearing just before everything explodes around them.