Chapter 27
A god walks
Though the Moon-Eater’s child has been gone from the crater city for several years, it is not difficult to track ahz.
Half the time, the people Lyric and Setka meet bring ahz up by themselves, because Lyric looks like the Moon-Eater, and the Moon-Eater looks like his child. No one else in the world looks like them. (Yet.)
“Ah,” people in the villages say, eyes wide. “Ah, the blood of the crater is in this stranger’s eye, staining the skin, just like the red god, just like that young one seven years ago! That shy child with soft words and sharp teeth!”
The child of the Moon-Eater made quite the impression. Az traveled south toward the sea, along the main road that winds mostly parallel to the Lapis River. So that’s the way Lyric walks.
In the traditions of generations of Vertex Seals, each has designed their own memorial that then their heir builds for them upon death.
Lyric’s design is a simple labyrinth in the Silent style.
Amaranth had called it plain and boring, and made him at least promise to incorporate precious stones or the like into the plans.
Those who understood him—Garnet, his wife—understood that the memorial was in devotion.
Lyric’s labyrinth is not intended to be admired with awe or longing or fear, no: To miss Lyric after his time, one must walk.
For all that he loves the rhythm and peace of a walking meditation, Lyric has never ventured beyond the walls of the crater.
Not in his own time, and certainly not in this one.
Now the world is his labyrinth. He walks with deliberation, watching, listening, appreciating the flavors of dust and animal and gently sweet winter cactus.
He appreciates the slow build of exhaustion that’s different from the tiredness he’s used to.
The rhythm of it feeds him step after step across the changing landscapes.
It hardly bothers him at all when he can’t feel his fingertips or he can’t eat due to nausea, because his inner design is mutating, twisting his body with it, and someday soon one of his organs will sputter or he’ll pass out, or both.
He left Rivermouth against the physician’s recommendation, but her treatment would be deeply invasive and recovery would take a long time.
And the cancer would only return. Lyric knows what he’s dealing with: He was created to exist inside Holy Design, and without it, his body struggles to make sense of the tangle of wild forces.
But the necklace of anchors he wears under his robe helps. He can breathe easier and reorient himself, and the soft weight of the quartz chips settles him. Lyric has never been afraid of death.
(He is, though, afraid of Iriset knowing. He’s afraid she would drop everything to cure him the way she cured her mother. He’s afraid she would not.)
At his side Setka walks with her tail dragging, though sometimes she lifts it for a quarter mile or so, the strain apparent in the paling of the dry skin around her mouth.
Eliri the Adept Hand re-formed the crooked tip of Setka’s tail, where the pain localized, but short of a complete redesign, there’s nothing but aesthetics Eliri could help with.
Setka said she was content: She is who she is, and doesn’t know how to be not herself.
Besides, she’s joining Lyric Aharté in Silence, and an alliraptor like her is already part of the story!
She belongs. So despite the occasional discomfort with the dust of the road and cooling nights, Setka furrows her scaled brow and keeps going.
The sound of the tail’s drag soothes Lyric most of the time, a soft whispering countermelody to the rhythm of footsteps from both them and fellow travelers.
There are farmers with market wares, immigrants, the occasional merchant train, families visiting relatives or moving in or out of the city.
There are carts and elaborate carriages drawn by pearl-horned bulls and massive beetles and spotted chimera beasts of burden with eyes as sweet and dull as a cow’s.
Their fellow travelers jostle for position either as near or as far as possible from Lyric, depending on their feelings about the Moon-Eater and taboos and Lyric’s soft countenance.
He might have missed that he’s called the Fallen Star, or sometimes just Lyric Aharté, but Setka excitedly babbles to him when she hears whispers at roadside inns or rest stops where they share watery tea and all manner of handheld pies bought with Rivermouth money.
When Lyric is asked, he talks about Silence, about falling from the sky, about Holy Design and in return asks after Aharté.
Sometimes she is vaguely known, sometimes tossed off as merely an old Sarian god, sometimes Lyric’s audience is ignorant and eager.
He tells them about the earthquakes and yes, his glass-gold eye is a gift from his wife who works at the Moon-Eater’s side in order to remake the world.
Frequently, Lyric is not quite believed. But they listen anyway.
Winter plows beside them as they go through the low desert, with its floodplain and marshland along the banks of the Lapis River, as they move into rolling fields and sweeping mixed forests of arid evergreens and taller, spreading trees with leaves that scatter in cold winds and shorter days.
The leaves gild in ways Lyric has only seen in paintings.
He stops to stare at the shifting colors: He’s never thought brown could hold so much nuance. Gold-brown, silver-brown, brown-edged red, brown as rich as his skin but veined darker, sweeping layers of dying autumn leaves that hiss and shiver in the freezing wind.
Setka laughs a little at him, though she stares at this jewel-toned autumn, too.
It’s a day like that, when the nights are not quite chilled enough to frost, when they pass a cluster of people singing as they plant seeds in hard chunks of earth.
They move in rows with hoes and spiked boots they slam down in time with their song.
Next comes a line of people with poles they stab into the mangled dirt, twisting and grunting and laughing with insinuating jokes.
Then more people with large bulbs and tinier black seeds follow.
They bury the bulbs and scatter the seeds, and behind them are children with buckets of fertilizer and bales of winter grass, the former to feed and the latter to comfort.
Lyric watches, fascinated. He’s read so much about growing things but never had the chance to do anything but send Garnet for offal from the menagerie and dead palm leaves to tear into strips for overwintering the herbs on his balcony.
In Moonshadow City it frosts sometimes but never snows, and ice never lasts past midmorning even in the worst storm.
So despite that his stomach feels lined in syrupy nausea and he’s eaten only a handful of nuts, Lyric walks into the field and asks to help.
They balk at the idea of a stranger in their midst, naturally suspicious, but a man with the beginnings of silver-wire curls puffing out from his brown ponytail says, “That is a child of the Moon-Eater,” and Lyric hasn’t the heart to disagree. It might even be a little bit true.
Setka steps to his side and several of the folk tense in concern, but Setka only flexes her claws. She offers, “Better than those boots, probably,” and one of the women with the metal spikes roped to her feet laughs. She beckons Setka to join her.
They spend the afternoon planting bulbs and seeds for the spring, and when the early darkness of winter falls, the farmers invite them to stay in their village that night—it’s a great extended family who’ve tended this field and the surrounding several for generations.
They share a village with twelve other families, all of whom plant at various times in various fields.
They don’t bother much with design magic, they say, though they have irrigation anchors for pulling water where it needs to go.
Half of them ignore Setka; the other half are fascinated.
Lyric pays close attention to the chimera’s needs, to her comfort level, but Setka doesn’t seem to mind questions and touching, when it’s only curiosity.
Two children ask her if she is the forest god they sometimes send offerings, when the elders think it will be a drought season, and Setka is so surprised she says Lyric is the only god among them.
Lyric wonders if the people in the village would be so friendly in a year of drought, or a war that stretched this far south.
He knows that political systems reach long, and the ramifications ripple for miles and generations.
He also thinks maybe it doesn’t matter right this moment, because it is a good year and they are friendly, and this is when he’s here.
If it were otherwise, he could choose differently.
It’s healthy for him to focus on the microcosm of people’s needs instead of the constant layers of philosophy and economics and political maneuvering he was trained to. He tells himself no matter what happens he’ll remember this night of sharing labor and food.
At the end of the evening Lyric scratches Setka’s scales over her ear the way she likes and invites anyone to join him outside to balance with Silence.
Setka and two villagers who like the way he looks follow him, and another who is nervous of Setka and feels better watching her, and finally a fourth and fifth who shrug and join from sheer curiosity.
Lyric leads them through an eight-count breathing exercise, then talks softly about the four forces, about what Silence is and why it makes him feel both grounded and as free as the wind.
Though they are looking for the Moon-Eater’s child, in a small city in a forest clearing the day after the winter solstice, Lyric and Setka find a cult of Aharté instead.