Chapter 31 #3
“Good.” She looks at ahz, allowing ahz hand to smooth down her scaly cheek. Her thin lip pulls back in a grimace. “This chimera does not know all the”—she waves a hand at ahz and back at the house as if to indicate ahz and Lyric—“things between two… adults.”
“But Setka worries.”
She nods decisively.
Rabbit lets ahzself smile very slightly. It feels like a wide-open admission to ahz. “Good. Maimeri is glad Lyric has friends.”
Setka answers with a very satisfied expression.
It makes her look older, and Rabbit feels slightly manipulated.
Az huffs, adding, “Setka is welcome to remain in the valley instead of returning to the crater city, if that is pleasing. Maimeri knows the fate of many chimeras in the Moon-Eater’s city. ”
“Thank you,” she says, obviously delighted. Some of her scales on her neck seem to shift as if she can ruffle them like a preening bird.
“Turo would enjoy the company,” Rabbit adds, knowing it to be true. The old unicorn spends quite a bit of time plodding after Setka.
“Setka will stay with brother.” She says it tentatively while staring very pointedly out at the center of the lake.
Rabbit nods, thinking Lyric would allow the familiarity. Then Setka says even more quietly, “Brothers?”
Shocked, az whips ahz head down to stare at her. Those scales are still perked up, and Rabbit wishes az had some physical way of imitating it, because ahz skin feels like it’s trying to peel off ahz body. Not quite in discomfort but something much more slippery.
“Ready?” calls Lyric as he crunches down into the last crust of snow near the house porch.
Setka catches Rabbit’s gaze and az nods to her, and she nods back, so they’re nodding together like it’s an answer to Lyric and not each other.
“It isn’t about the equinox,” Lyric says cheerfully as they trek around to their respective quarter markers.
They already left Setka in the east, ready at her rising marker.
She’s sitting on it, perched like a tiny dragon.
If Rabbit glances back az can see her, like a deposit of dark green granite on top of the gray stone.
Lyric had gone over her job with her twice, and she’d repeated it twice back to make a solid four, Lyric’s favorite number.
Then he’d kissed her head and promised it would feel very clear and balanced when they finished.
She said, “Thanks given to brother,” and while Rabbit still trembled a bit internally at the epithet, Lyric huffed a laugh and smiled at her, agreeing.
“It isn’t a coincidence,” Rabbit answers, because Lyric insisted on waiting for today, though they’d been ready for a handful.
“Symbolically it is relevant, though the forces shouldn’t be affected in any noticeable way for it.
” Lyric frowns thoughtfully as he climbs over a muddy bluff of dead grasses.
“There are theories, philosophies really, about the motion of the sun and moon and stars making a difference for large-scale arrays especially, and even maybe how forces work over water, but they’re just unproven theories. Apostasy, even,” he adds softly.
“Against Aharté’s Silence?”
He nods absently. “It’s impossible to say, at least for me. The moon… Well, it moves, and so even if true Holy Silence requires… It doesn’t matter. And today, it can’t matter. I just wanted to see where the sun rose this morning, to confirm our best calculations.”
They reach the northern marker, directly across the lake from the flow marker where Turo already waits with head down, either sleeping or snorting at the little grasses and slips of water at the edge of the lake.
The unicorn is a distant glow of icy sunrise.
Some of his mane seems to waft up despite the low breeze today.
It looks more like wavering light swimming in an invisible rising current.
“You can find your way?” Lyric teases, flattening his hand to the ecstatic marker.
Rabbit nods, but instead of walking on, az presses closer to Lyric and kisses him, bending him back over the marker. Lyric grasps at ahz arms to stay upright, and their teeth click together, but Lyric doesn’t push away.
So Rabbit kisses him with the sloppy intention az’s learned will send Lyric into a state of surrender, eliciting a soft moan from him.
Rabbit wants to wrap Lyric’s legs around ahz and fuck right here, delay the ignition of the balancing design, just have each other under the equinox sun even if the unicorn and their little monster sister are watching.
Az grabs Lyric’s waist and Lyric snaps right beside Rabbit’s ear.
The tingle of ecstatic force shocks ahz and Rabbit startles back, slipping a little in the shallow mud.
Lyric’s kiss-red lips curl into a knowing smile and he snaps again. “This isn’t rising and flow, this is ecstatic. Get to your marker, Little Rabbit,” he commands.
Rabbit bites at his mouth but goes, arousal warming ahz up.
Az is to summon the falling force, which Lyric says for someone with no dominant design should feel like centering everything az feels, knows, wants, believes into the bowl of ahz hips—and Rabbit said, “That’s just sex, Lyric,” but Lyric said, “It’s rain and it’s the sun arcing across the sky with you, your heart, as the singular point of transition.
It’s making yourself the heaviest knot in the tapestry of the world. ”
“Heavy enough to pull at you?” az asked.
“You know what you mean to me,” Lyric said.
As az walks away, Rabbit thinks az hears Lyric coughing, but when az glances back, Lyric is smiling at ahz from his position leaned against the ecstatic marker.
It’s a simple thing to ignite the balancing design.
They’d done the more complicated parts first: finding the marks at the lake, at the farthest points of the valley, and two layers in between so that there are sixteen markers total—sixteen steeples, Lyric says.
They’ve set the forces into the most distant together over the past two quads.
All the markers hum with rising, flow, falling, and in the case of ecstatic, they snap and pop, and what remains is to ignite the central steeples at the heart lake.
The design should lift, drag, fall, and crack into place, evening out the forces of the entire valley.
Making a small pocket of perfect balance. A little world of Holy Design.
This is the simplest form of Aharté. Lyric has said it so many times. It’s easy, basic, like asking everything to be exactly what it is.
The moment they ignite the heart steeples, Rabbit looks across at Setka, who waves. Rabbit feels ahzself smile as az glances north, to where Lyric Aharté stands like a steeple himself. Grounded, and sparkling.
They push their hands to the markers, they sing, slamming force to wake it up.
Rabbit feels very little. To ahz it is motions, it is belief, it is the normal course of power that shimmers under ahz skin.
Then the marker flares to life: falling, drawing, sucking, pulling, and churning like a, like a—
The world whites out.
Rabbit feels ahz internal organs expand. Az feels the design of ahz flesh unroll.
Falling force holds ahz together, holds ahz in a long line of falling, threads twisting together from marker to marker, an arrow of power from marker through chest to marker to marker to peak.
Silence rings after all, not a noise but a sensation.
Az comes to ahzself, panting huge wide-open breaths, giddy and lighthearted. The ice glares, the water gleams, individual waves and tiny individual blades of grass, too: They’re all shining uniquely themselves.
Rabbit feels incredible. Clear, strong, better than az has felt in all ahz memory.
But someone is screaming.