Chapter 32
What’s been done
She’s still dying when Lyric falls to his knees in a mess of blood and tissue, cutting his hands on the sharp ruffled edge of scales.
Or she’s dead already and the squelch that sounds like breath from the flattened sac of lung matter is only a leftover gasp.
Lyric’s hands tremble as he reaches for her face, split in pieces where skin and scale and muscle tore from bone as her skull fell apart at the plate seams. The sunlight glints on her crowded teeth, and her tongue glistens as if she’s about to tease him, except all that’s left of her is guts and inside-out flesh and—
He barely bends away before fiery bile demands its way out of his body. Lyric chokes and spits it out, his head roaring with the perfect pitch of Holy Silence. It rings in his bones, a relief, a balm, he should be shining, but instead Setka, his little—his little—
Thanks given to brother, the last he heard her, and it is impossible to comprehend that the adorable, ugly, charming chimera who followed him miles away from home and perched eagerly on her steeple, waving and bouncing, is this pile of broken flesh.
Lyric feels the ground vibrating under him and he crawls his hands back to the edge of viscera, bending over her to protect her from whatever is coming. His eyes are on fire; the tears falling seem to evaporate before they touch her.
Someone grabs him, his shoulders, and Lyric jerks away.
Words hit at him, muffled by the screaming Silence.
Lyric tries to touch her jaw again, but it shifts sickeningly under his finger.
He reaches for claws, her hand, it was her hand, and it doesn’t loosen or melt so Lyric curls his fingers around her palm.
Her skin is dry, the soft scales warm from the sun, and there’s a splatter of blood up her wrist where her arm fell apart.
It is impossible to connect what he sees with what he knows, impossible that this is—this is—
“—Lyric! Lyric!”
Lyric shakes his head, attention locked on the gore. He can’t stop, he can’t look away.
Arms come around him, dragging him around. He’s held, and Lyric gags again, smelling blood, smelling his own stomach lining.
Then his face is pressed to a chest, his head embraced tight, and he’s rocking, being rocked, slowly.
“Breathe,” Maimeri begs. “Breathe, please, please, Lyric.”
Lyric feels nothing but burning, hears the scream, and then he opens his mouth and chokes in the harshest breath. Air itself is like poison, cutting at his lungs. He breathes in and coughs out, wet and painful.
There’s blood on his lips, he can taste it.
“There,” Maimeri says, wiping a thumb too roughly across Lyric’s bottom lip.
Lyric takes a better breath, and this one only tastes like tears.
“Little Rabbit,” he says, blinking open his eyes to look at the grass, at the undulation of individual blades waving together in the spring breeze.
The lake glints beside them, mud-smelling and rippled.
He hears the low-pitch ring of new steeples as the Holy Design settles happily in this pretty valley, this perfect valley of monsters, and behind Lyric is the destroyed body.
He can’t even pick her up, or pet her tail, or scratch her itchy dry scales where her ears should be.
The scuff of a unicorn hoof draws his attention to Turo, tapping a foreleg against the grass. “I did not think it would be so violent,” the unicorn says.
“What?” Lyric raises his head, then pushes against Maimeri until he can stand. “What did you say?”
The unicorn shakes his long head, wisp-cloud mane ruffling. “I thought, if it did not suit the little chimera, it would be gentler.”
“You thought?” Lyric rocks back, but Maimeri catches him with hands on his shoulder. Lyric’s stomach churns.
“Always possible, when unbalanced is balanced,” Turo says. “Probably more dead up the mountain.”
Maimeri hisses in displeasure, but Lyric feels numb.
“Change is violent,” the unicorn continues, turning to move gracefully away. Where his hooves touch the grass, some of it withers, some of it blooms to golden seed.
There are stories about the end of the Apostate Age, that when the Holy Syr created the miran, unraveled the Moon-Eater, and set the Holy Design into place, designers destroyed the chimeras who were too unwieldy, too apostatical to live under the laws of Aharté.
Lyric assumed it was intentional, and necessary for chimeras who could not sustain themselves.
He assumed it would be a choice to come when they remade Holy Design.
But he wonders, as he lies in the tepid bathwater later, if anything he thought he knew is true.
They gather what they can of Setka’s body onto a finely woven mat.
Lyric wanted to do it on his own, to release Maimeri to scour the mountain for other dead, but Maimeri said, “She said ‘brothers’ to me,” and Lyric lets ahz stay.
Tears fall one after another, stuffing Lyric’s nose, heating his cheeks and throat.
It is horrifying and gory work. There is nothing to clean, nothing to care for.
Not enough to unravel completely, in the traditional mirané way, even if Lyric knew the proper design foundation.
So they burn her remains the way the Sarians do, and their descendants in Hehet town, and in places in Lyric’s own Moonshadow City.
Funerary licenses have always been easy to obtain in Aharté’s empire.
Lyric thought once that it was a good thing, that people were allowed to mourn according to their will and customs. So long as they registered with the Silent Chapel and obeyed Aharté’s laws, they were not expected to lose all their history. Assimilation, not strangulation.
But if the only thing people who enter the empire are allowed to keep are the ways of death, that really doesn’t say much nice about the Holy Design.
After the fire, Maimeri makes Lyric get into a bath. Maimeri washes his hair, and Lyric murmurs, “You’re grieving, too. You don’t need to take care of me.”
But Maimeri only kisses Lyric’s temple and keeps scrubbing. “It’s what she would want.”
Fresh tears cloud his eyes and Lyric whispers, “That doesn’t matter. She’s not here to want anything, because of me. It’s my fault.”
“You did not know it would happen.”
“I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even think.
It’s Holy Silence.” Lyric’s voice gains volume.
“It’s supposed to be perfect balance, and good.
It’s supposed to be right. It’s—it’s the foundation of everything good in the world, the promise that the world gets better, that justice and hope are possible if you have faith in Aharté and her design.
The things my predecessors have done, the things I have done, are for something.
They’re supposed to be for something. But—” Lyric leans away from Maimeri where az kneels outside the tub.
Lyric grasps the edges so tightly his fingers tingle in time with his pulse.
“It killed her. Balancing the forces of the valley killed her. Brutally. She was only here because she trusted me, she—” A cough scrubs his throat and Lyric struggles not to let it.
He covers his mouth too tightly, cutting his inner lip on his own teeth. He shakes.
It isn’t just Setka, though that’s bad enough.
“They’re going to do that to the whole crater city,” Lyric says quietly when his lungs and throat no longer rebel. “Balance it with Holy Design. There probably aren’t very many chimeras like Setka living there, because of the Night of Chimeras. But what if it hurts more than it helps?”
“We can warn them.”
Lyric nods. The water laps at his chest, at his underarms, and he arches his neck down until his nose touches the surface, too.
He told Iriset he didn’t deserve to live here, to stay here and make mirané babies, be at peace.
He told her he needs to go home and fix what’s broken, but Lyric understands now what he didn’t before: that there is a fundamental flaw in the Holy Design itself.
If it were wholly good, it wouldn’t—couldn’t—kill a child like Setka, or anyone innocent.
Lyric knew it the moment he met her: Setka’s makers were at fault, were apostate, but not Setka.
She was herself and living, and by being alive she had to be part of Aharté’s design.
He was half wrong. Making her part of Aharté’s design killed her.
It’s ironic that Lyric himself is dying for being removed from the Holy Design, because the miran are made for it, of it.
Perfect, except nothing is perfect. The flaw in the Holy Design is a flaw in him.
A flaw in all miran, in the way the mirané princes govern, in the Vertex Seal and the entire empire.
Lyric sees it from all the way back here, he hears what Iriset tried to tell him, that the Holy Design is a prison not just for the Moon-Eater but for everyone within it.
Later, Lyric lies loose and listless on the swaying bed. Maimeri curls against him, ahz head pillowed on Lyric’s belly, an arm curled around his hips. The griffons are singing terrible, high-pitched songs of mourning, unlike anything Lyric has heard before.
“Lyric,” Maimeri whispers.
“Little Rabbit.”
“I like how it feels.”
The words are hushed, a shameful confession.
Lyric brings a hand down to Maimeri’s loose hair, tracing his fingers along the underlying streaks of dark red hidden among the mirané-black strands. The bedroom is dim but for moonlight.
“The balance,” Maimeri continues. Ahz arm tightens around Lyric’s hip. Ahz fingers dig into the meat of his lower back. “The way the valley is changed.”
Biting back what could only be a keen of pain, Lyric closes his eyes and stills his hand in Maimeri’s hair.
He feels it, too: the peace and Silence, the soft resonance of belonging.
Because his body is made for this. His body, despite the cancer and scars, revels in even this rustic Holy Design. “It’s proof, isn’t it?” he murmurs.
“Proof of what?”
“The thing we were made to be is no more natural than Holy Design.”
Lyric can feel Maimeri’s frown against his skin.
“That isn’t important. We are, we exist, just like Setka was, Setka existed.
I think you are letting your pain twist your words.
What is natural? My mother isn’t human, but he’s natural.
The flowers we had in the crater city don’t grow here on the mountain because the rain is different, not because there’s something unnatural with them. ”
“Most of the flowers in the Moon-Eater’s fortress only grow there because of design,” Lyric argues faintly.
Maimeri snorts and pokes Lyric’s ribs. Then az rubs the spot. “So? The flowers are still there.”