Chapter 39
Sex magic
Iriset insists on speaking with Lyric alone. He agrees, though she wasn’t actually giving him a choice.
They go to her guest room, and the moment the door closes, Lyric embraces her. It isn’t desperate the way she first hugged him this afternoon. No, it’s sweeter, his arms around her ribs, his nose in her hair breathing in and then sighing out with his whole body. “Iriset,” he murmurs. “Thank you.”
She stretches her arms around his shoulders, cards fingers through his short hair, says nothing. She has so much to say, to yell about, but the priority is to get him to relax so she can do… her thing.
“I couldn’t do this without you,” he continues, and Iriset leans back to frown at him.
“That’s what you expect me to do,” she says, “hiding how sick you are. Letting yourself die.”
“There’s time to finish, and besides.” Lyric shakes his head. His eyes are pinkish at the edges, both of them. His breathing seems shallower than it should be. Than it used to be.
Iriset studies him. He calmly gazes back, waiting, his hands loose on her waist. She used to think she knew him better than anyone, but she knew the Vertex Seal—what did she call him?
A brutal king of a boring world. This Lyric she brought with her to the Apostate Age is missing something.
Maybe it’s just fanaticism. Unfortunately, Iriset isn’t sure agnosticism suits him.
“You’ll be fine,” he says soothingly.
Her nostrils flare with anger and she clenches her jaw. Iriset feels her shoulders lift like she’s ruffling furious feathers. “Get on the bed.”
His little frown is cute, but he obediently sits on the edge of her bed.
Iriset starts stripping, dropping her transparent silk jacket like it’s trash, dragging the robe off her shoulders in jerky movements, and kicking off her slippers like they offended her.
“Iriset?”
She unties her trousers. “I’ve always worked better with skin contact with the forces,” she says, which is true but not what’s happening.
“Worked?” The bed creaks quietly as he stands.
Whirling around, she points. “Back on the bed. Feel free to take off your clothes, too.”
“Iriset, I don’t feel good. I don’t—”
“I’m the one who has to feel good for this to work.”
“For what to work?”
“Healing you.”
“The treatment—”
“I’m not curing you with apostasy,” she snaps. “I didn’t do this with my mother.”
He falls quiet. Something apologetic in his sad frown.
Iriset abruptly realizes she’s not angry at all.
She’s terrified. She rips her shirt off and throws it as hard as she can toward the wall, but it lands soft, ruffling like a plucked yellow flower.
Iriset stares at it, a hand drifting up to her throat.
Warm air flutters against her exposed skin, pebbling up her spine and forearms.
Hands find her elbow, and Lyric gently turns her. “Iriset, you don’t have to do anything.”
“You want me to let you die?” Her voice is thick and she hates it.
“I want you to focus on being the Holy Syr. Not saving me.”
Tilting her chin arrogantly, she scoffs. “You think I can’t do it all?”
“Can you?” He’s so serious. And being so gentle, like she’s the delicate one right now.
He takes her hand in his. “Can you unravel the Moon-Eater and catch the moon, and is it going to send us home? Will it create the miran somehow, since I can’t stay here and make babies after all?
Will you save the chimeras in the crater city?
The ones who can be saved? End the earthquakes?
They’re talking about them outside the crater, and about you.
Talking about the One with the Eye. Do you know the word for eye in Sarian? ”
“Syr,” Iriset whispers, nearly naked and trying not to think about history. “It’s in their oldest name for themselves, too. Syr Sarian.”
Lyric shakes his head, squeezes her fingers. “That’s their oldest name for their gods, the gods who watched out for them.”
“You read too much.”
“You can do it all, Iriset. I need you to. We all need you to.”
“Well, I need you alive!” She tears her hand free of his.
“Since when?”
“Fuck you!”
Lyric smiles and it is gutting how much love is cupped in the curve of those lips.
So she kisses him about it. He lets her, soft and welcoming, but he barely kisses back.
Iriset flattens her hands to his cheeks and leans in, brushing her breasts to his chest. The cloth covering him is plain and smooth, but not silky, not fine like what he used to wear.
It catches pleasingly on her nipples, and she does it again, lifting on her toes to lick at his mouth.
Opening up, Lyric finally kisses back. He holds her, hands fitting where they’ve always fit, one splayed over her spine, the other sliding low to her hip and ass.
Nodding, Iriset nudges at him to walk back to the bed.
“Just be open,” she instructs as he sits down, and she begins taking off his robe.
He’s wearing three layers and loose skirts.
Like he’s still cold despite the lateness of the spring.
He catches her hands. “Iriset,” he says, but stops like he’s unsure what to ask.
“I don’t know what it will feel like, but just let me try, Lyric,” she says, clamoring onto his lap. “Do you feel good enough to get it up?” She makes herself tease him, wiggling against his lap.
“Try—try curing me? How—you said it isn’t apostasy.” He sounds tense, but also like he’s controlling his breathing too carefully. Probably he doesn’t want to start coughing again, which is a very good point.
Iriset sits back on his legs. “It isn’t design. It’s… magic,” she says, trying to sound harmless and confident.
“Sex magic,” Lyric says very seriously.
Iriset’s mouth hangs open, and she feels heat flushing her cheeks, her chest. She clenches all the muscles along her pelvic floor against the surge of lust because he’s so serious, so committed to hearing her out.
“S-sundering,” she manages. She tucks her face against his, in order to hide and urgently whisper in his ear.
“I can just take it away. All the cancer. I can change it into harmless life stuff. It’s better if I don’t overthink it because it’s not science or arrays.
” Iriset pants for a moment, realizing she’s been moving against him in little ripples, tiny undulations of her hips, and her fingers squeezing like a kitten lapping at milk.
Lyric holds her easily, letting her, listening.
“Please,” she says.
Lyric turns his face to kiss just in front of her ear, then he draws his hands up to her shoulders and nudges her away. “I’ve been with others.”
“Others, or just the little bunny?” she asks knowingly.
Blushing doesn’t appear on mirané skin, but Iriset is familiar with the embarrassed flutter of his lashes.
She leans in and licks at the corner of his sandglass eye, kissing toward his hairline.
The scars are so tiny, but she feels the impressions against her lips. She says, “I fucked the Moon-Eater.”
Lyric’s body startles, and Iriset laughs, pressing closer. She wiggles to get her thighs where she wants them so she can prop herself up for better access. “Really, he fucked me. It was…” She trails off, starting on Lyric’s robes again and isn’t sure what her face does to make him stop her.
“Iriset?” He holds her hands, looking close.
Iriset meets his gaze. “I’m all right. I’ll tell you later, after, please?”
Nodding slowly, Lyric kisses her lips gently, then helps her undress him.
Naked, Lyric looks skinnier, absolutely no excess fat on him, giving him a gaunt, wiry look, and it makes even Iriset, a decidedly non-parental person, want to feed him and get more pillows.
She wonders if she could give him everything back in a long burst of the fifth force, not only scour him cancer-free but regrow layers of health over his stringy muscles.
She trails a hand along his pectoral, over a nipple, and down his navel, to press her finger against the jut of hip bone.
His cock is plumping up, at least, thank Silence.
“That bad?” he says, clearly going for a joke, but too uncertain.
“Yes!” she declares, smacking his hip.
Suddenly his hands are on her waist and he rolls onto his back, picking her up with him to set her on top exactly where she needs to be. Her breath woofs out of her and she steadies herself.
“Still strong,” he challenges. A frisky gleam in both eyes.
Iriset’s vision blurs with fucking tears and she leans back, flinging an arm over her eyes.
When they were married—when she was Singix—he could be so playful in bed, or on the floor, or in his office throne, especially in the bath.
Lyric strokes her sides, holds her breasts in both hands, and Iriset arches, grinding down to smear wetness along his groin.
His very ready cock rubs lightly against her ass.
Lyric touches the rousing array on her lower belly, tracing the spiral of it with his thumb.
It is so sexy to have him caressing it, Iriset’s hole aches and she presses her hands to her eyes—she has got to get it together.
Lyric seems to sense the design, tickling her belly along the array in exact time with the build of power in her inner design.
He slides his other thumb down between her labia, sinking into the folds, and lightly touches her clit.
Iriset jolts and looses the knot of arousal as it sparkles out to all her limbs.
She drops her arms and reaches back for his cock, but Lyric hums and picks her up again, flipping them.
He lays her gently on her back. “You concentrate,” he murmurs against her breast, kissing the nipple, sucking kisses down the mound to her ribs and down, down, crawling with his mouth and hands until he kisses the array.
He bites the north ecstatic node and sucks at it, and Iriset grunts with the pleasure, spreading her legs for him.
Iriset sprawls as Lyric kisses over her pubic bone and into her vulva, using his mouth and tongue to devour her.
It’s so easy to center the hot cycling of her inner design like this, it’s right there, she can do this, it is absolutely sex magic, she thinks wildly.
Iriset angles her hips up and Lyric licks into her, stroking long and hard with his tongue flat, and Iriset cries out.
She could come instantly, she’s so eager for this, but she tugs at his hair, not quite ready.
She needs him touching more of her; no, she needs to be touching more of him—and Lyric gets it, hears her, moving up to kiss her slowly and push his cock into her slowly, too.
Wrapping arms and legs around him, Iriset lets Lyric set the rhythm, lets him do the external work while she reaches for his inner design like she’s used to doing, as if they were still connected.
His breath suffuses through her hair, heats her ear, warms her neck, and he is hot inside her, his skin slicking with sweat.
Iriset knows his body—his perfect, healthy body. Mirané and balanced, part of the Holy Design. Inside and out. Perfect. Unbreakable.
She’s losing herself, but not the feeling of forces building, the thread of rising arousal and falling to her core. Flow between them in every pull and press, and ecstatic in every gasp and squeak she doesn’t hold back.
Iriset doesn’t even have to tug on his rising too much, or clench too many sparks of ecstatic into his back with her fingernails, for his orgasm to hit quickly.
Iriset tears herself open at the same time, the four forces so tightly unmade into one that they unravel, and there it is: sundering. Love.
It is hot in the little guest room when Iriset starts noticing things like her skin again.
She and Lyric remain wrapped together, sticking with sweat and come.
Lyric appears to be passed out, but there’s a glow to him.
Iriset decides to think of it as a healthy glow.
Her body is light, too, and already a little bit hungry.
They should take a bath and see if Eliri has a diagnostic net here to check Lyric’s internal organs so they don’t have to summon back the mean surgeon who will have too many questions anyway.
Then get real sleep, and in the morning ramp up the work on readying everything for the big day.
After this, she’s not going to be able to keep it to herself that she knows how to make the miran, how to mitigate the blowback.
This is different because she knows Lyric, and it’s almost incidental that he’s mirané.
She needs something additional to make the magical sympathy.
Iriset wonders about Maimeri, if the little rabbit is actually the first miran born, and it’s true that they come from a god.
Only instead of Aharté it’s the Moon-Eater.
Suppressing a groan, Iriset leans closer to Lyric. He opens his eyes slowly, one at a time. He licks his lips, then smiles very slightly at her. But it’s enough to fill his eyes and shift the whole musculature of his face.
So naturally the first thing out of Iriset’s mouth is absolutely deranged. “I’m going to need you to get me a sample of your lover’s semen.”
His mouth pops open with a shocked little noise.
Chagrined, Iriset continues, “To make the miran, Lyric. If Maimeri is mirané, the first miran, really, I can use ahz semen to create a sympathetic connection. For myself. To reproduce ahz design. That’s where babies come from!” she adds almost frantically when Lyric still doesn’t respond.
“Half,” he bursts out. “Half where babies come from.”
“Well, we only have miran with penises, unless I’m wrong about Maimeri’s design,” she says rather snottily.
They stare at each other, and then laugh at the exact same moment. Relieved, breathy, and soft laughter. Lyric presses his forehead to hers. He takes a huge, deep breath. Lets it out. Does it again. Iriset joins him, and at the end of four, Lyric says, “I can breathe so easily.”
Iriset hugs him, squishing as much of her body against his as she can.
“Do you really want to make the miran?” Lyric murmurs.
“No, but it’s a solution to part of the same problem. The metadesign. It all has to be in place, with purpose. This is the real Holy Design, Lyric Aharté.”
“And will it send us home?” he asks, pulling her against his chest, smoothing a hand down the length of her spine.
Iriset doesn’t answer except to spread her hand over his chest beside her cheek, her fingers pressed between her mouth and his heart.