36 Sharp edge
Sharp edge
Blood sprays when Never removes its hand.
Iriset grabs at her throat, scrambling to press, to catch the blood that spurts through her fingers, coating her skin, soaking her collar.
Tiny bright sprays fleck her cheek and her hair.
She falls back, eyes too wide, breathing in panicked gasps.
Never catches her and says, “That is an arterial bleed, so you have a few moments before you die of blood loss. If you die, I will hunt Lyric méra Esmail to the end of the world and flay him alive. I will massacre the Cloud Kings so your father cannot be born.”
“Never,” Shade hisses, grasping at Never’s arm with such pinching, tight fingers it’s good Never doesn’t need blood in its extremities.
“I will enjoy killing the Vertex Seal, so let me,” Never says calmly, staring at Iriset, who stares back in panic, as if she can’t comprehend anything. “Shade, calm down. If she can’t sunder, she might as well die.”
“I like her,” Shade whispers sadly.
“You’ll get over it,” Never says.
Iriset closes her eyes. Her hands fall away from the bloody tear. It’s really only a small wound, the width of a quartz stylus. But it’s enough. Never is precise.
Disappointment pulls Never’s mouth into a frown, but not regret. It knows she can do this. She’s done it, she must want it, she must believe it. What did she call the fifth force? Heart force? Love? Love life, Iriset Sunderer, the numen thinks softly. I need you.
A shudder passes through her body. Her lips pull back from bloody and clenched teeth, and her just-as-bloody hands curl into fists. She slams them into the tiled floor.
Nothing.
“Never,” Shade whispers. Never digs a hand into Shade’s hair, grasping it hard, holding him in place like it would hold a wild animal by the nape. Shade’s thick roots of red hair tremble.
Then the air itself stills.
Iriset goes limp.
There is too much blood to see the wound, but Iriset’s chest rises and falls. Rises. Falls. Even breaths. Iriset opens her eyes: one vibrant green-blue opal, the other bloodshot and glass-brown as autumn leaves.
Never stretches its mouth into a sly smile.
The numen is smiling at Iriset, bright and charming, and she shoves away from it.
She’s shaking too hard as she tries to get to her feet and slips.
On blood. She catches herself hard on her hands, splashing, and Iriset chokes again.
There’s blood in her mouth, covering her skin, Iriset can hear it gumming up her throat again, hear herself dying.
“No,” she says voicelessly to the hands on her arms, lifting her up. She’s not dying. She’s alive, not bleeding. The Moon-Eater sets her on her feet, but she pushes him away, too, leaves smears of blood on his bare chest. She turns her back to him and breathes. She breathes, takes a step away.
“Let her go,” the numen says. “She did it.”
“Iriset,” Shade calls so softly Iriset almost can’t hear it over her gasping half-sobs. He sounds plaintive and sad, and fuck that.
Iriset walks one step at a time, one breath at a time.
She’s woozy and lightheaded, and the smell is awful.
Her hair sticks to her neck; she can feel blood drying on her lips, in the folds of skin under her jaw.
Down between her breasts, on her arms, plastering her shirt against her.
So much blood. She swallows. Again. The blood drains, but she can still taste it.
The spiral staircase is difficult, but she manages. Except for blood loss she’s fine, fine, fine. Blood squishes against her left heel inside her slipper with every step. She has to keep going, can’t stay here, won’t.
Her heart beats so fast, so hard, it’s like a rock in her chest, bashing against the inside of her sternum.
When she stumbles through the exit into the library, there’s a swallowed gasp from someone else, then several cries of shock and fear.
Iriset’s eyes are not focusing well—oh, no, that’s tears.
She can’t see through their blur, and she can’t stop crying, either, like stopping the arterial bleed required a balancing leak, ha ha.
Iriset doesn’t know how blood is generated inside the body, but she hopes hers can manage it fast.
“Iriset,” says Eliri, horror radiating off her. The chimera gets close but doesn’t touch, crystal-tipped hands held up, palms open, unthreatening.
Iriset’s breath is definitely more sobs than panting, but she manages to put voice into saying, “I’m not hurt, but I was.”
“The Moon-Eater—”
She shakes her head, sickened at the cooling weight of bloody hair sliding against her nape. “Can you take me away?”
“Yes,” Eliri says with the manner of a solemn vow.
Eliri takes her to Rivermouth, of course, and says to the staring gate attendant, “Don’t let the Moon-Eater in if he comes,” as if the whole population of Rivermouth fortress could keep the Moon-Eater out.
Iriset is taken to a bath, given warm tea and a thin white porridge she doesn’t taste.
It awakens her hunger, and they give her sweet bread and cheese, too, and eventually she’s clean, dry, warm, and can’t eat anymore.
She snuggles on a low, very soft sofa with Eliri, who somehow understands that Iriset needs to be touched right now.
“Can Iriset speak of what happened?” Irsu River asks, unmoved.
Iriset wrinkles her nose in a very slight grimace.
The best she can do. Eliri says nothing, only squeezes her hand again and again.
Iriset squeezes back, and sits a little, looking at River.
An lounges back on a chair, as if there’s no other way to sit, smoking a small red cigarette with very normal white smoke.
The room is Eliri’s, part of her private building, and it’s all warm brown wood and soft blue hangings that lack the sheen of silk.
They’re homey, welcoming, and give the impression of being inside a nest. Every part of the floor is covered in thick rugs.
Iriset currently is under two different throw blankets, one ridiculously soft, the other knotted in big patterns.
It’s easy to forget the cold shock of dying.
Yeah, right.
“The numen decided the Moon-Eater wasn’t helping Iriset learn to sunder fast enough,” she says, and her voice sounds almost normal, like River’s. Nonchalant. “So the numen stabbed me in the neck.”
River hisses through ans teeth, spilling thin streams of smoke.
Eliri’s arm spasms around her. “So much blood.”
“It worked,” Iriset says bitterly. Though honestly she’s not ready to think about that part, the fact that the numen stabbed her to teach her a lesson and it worked.
(But she does think about it, again and again in the back of her mind, the panic, the desperation, the terror.
Iriset has been afraid before, even consistently, but terror is something she has not tasted, not so sharp it skates over ecstatic fear and into something much, much more like Silence.
Iriset will eventually come to the conclusion that terror unraveled her for a tiny eternity, and she only survived because her being remembered what it was supposed to be.
And then she tore into the fifth force and sundered herself whole.)
Once Iriset sleeps, she sleeps nearly an entire day.
She wakes starving and lazy, so it takes a while to drag herself up from the warm pillows and blankets cocooning her.
Her bed is in a small guest chamber near Eliri’s suite.
Sunlight pours in from three round windows paned in colored glass, and Iriset stares for a while at the play of light.
The mess of forces isn’t so pointed here outside the Moon-Eater’s fortress—though it’s nowhere near balanced.
Iriset doesn’t like to admit it even to herself, but she misses the soothing stability of Holy Design.
Touching her fingers to her neck, she feels the soft, perfectly knit skin.
She presses to find her pulse and listens to the calm thump of blood and beyond it—her ecstatic inner design tingling exactly as it should.
Everything internal is correct. Iriset cannot detect any sign of yesterday’s—the day before yesterday’s?
—trauma. At least not physically. Mentally and emotionally, however…
She takes a settling breath and holds out her hand. Her knuckles are bony in the cool winter light. Her nails glossy, but they could be glossier. They could be harder, the material transformed into a different mineral. Quartz. It’s possible, of course, like Eliri’s. She can do it.
She changed her wounded flesh into whole flesh, without understanding the details, without knowing how many layers of skin, fat, tendon, muscle, vein, exactly.
She just did it. And when she put her eye in Lyric’s head, she just thought, Connect.
In a panic then, too. But she believed. It was instinct.
Fuck that numen who killed her, after she freed it twice and trusted it! But it was right.
Iriset drops both hands to her breast.
She can do this. It’s something she wants to believe she can do.
The first time she felt the edges of sundering, it felt like love.
That’s why she called it the heart force.
That’s why it feels so much like Amaranth’s morning communion, when she resets the whole massive array of the Holy Empire with an orgasm that is a scant echo of true rivation.
It works because that’s how the Holy Syr drafted the design.
That’s how Iriset would do it. Will do it. To keep the Holy Design from entropy.
A weird giggle spills out of her mouth, and hot tears pinch out of the corners of her eyes.
Sundering isn’t about understanding or knowing how it works. It isn’t design at all, that art and science Iriset excels at. It’s a feeling and instinct, and Iriset will make it so that instead of needing panic to draw her deep enough into her instincts, it’s just sex.