Chapter 43
All you have to do
The night before the end of the world, nobody is sleeping except Iriset mé Isidor.
She’s exhausted from twelve consecutive days of laying intricate, detailed design into the earth of the Moon-Eater’s fortress and beyond into the crater city.
It was an exacting process, for each thread of force and each complex sigil had to be put down in order.
Though she was aided by local designers, there to check her work, to make certain the timing was correct, the angles and anchors flawless, each thread and knot was carved in, cut, imbued by Iriset’s own hand.
That, and she drilled her inner design through the center of every fourth anchor, linking them all together for herself, to be activated when she’s ready, as she begins the unraveling.
Tonight Iriset sleeps dreamlessly, flopped on her bed, breaths slow and deep. There is nobody here she needs to bid farewell. Not anymore.
Shade and Never explode across the moonless night sky, two streaks of light, making colorful explosions for the people below: flower-bursts and stars, arrays of vivid green in the shape of a tree, each attempting to outdo the other and laughing.
Never tries one last time to convince Shade this is a bad idea, while they float among the stars with their arms wrapped together.
It whispers of decades alone and lonely, it says Shade will lose himself, lose what makes him Shade and become a smear of energy trampled on by millions of ungrateful humans.
For four centuries—or maybe forever if the sunderer can’t get to her proper time, can’t find a way to free the Moon-Eater, free him and put him back together.
“You should put me back in your stomach,” Never says. “Take me with you.”
“Ah, Never, I let you go. You have to let me stay.”
“I will stay with you.”
“It would hurt you. If you would stay, stay near and devout and wait for me. Babysit the lines of generations as you promised, so your sunderer can manifest. Then bring me back.”
Never looks into Shade’s blood-red eyes and still doesn’t quite understand.
But by now, Never realizes that if it doesn’t understand, it can still accept.
Still trust. Shade chooses Shade’s roots, to be roots, and Never will be perennial.
Come back, always there, even when it falls.
Through seasons and centuries, choosing to return like the sun is a gift it can give to Shade.
Is it love? Never doesn’t know, but chooses it anyway.
A tower away, on a half-moon balcony, Lyric sits with his shoulder against Maimeri’s, explaining what he likes about growing herbs on his own balcony four hundred years from now.
They’re both wrapped in blankets, sharing a pot of soothing tea, bodies languid from sex but neither ready to close their eyes.
Lyric has already given Maimeri the letter for ahz children, to be passed down and down until the reign of Lyric méra Esmail, the last Vertex Seal.
They’ve discussed it all, the line of Vertex Seals, the order of conquest, the laws and philosophies of Silence, much of the history to come.
The numen agreed to stay in the city, to tend to the Moon-Eater’s descendants through Maimeri, who will be the first Vertex Seal.
The weight of history is for Never to carry in immortal hands, but Maimeri wanted to know what Lyric cares about most, what needs to be preserved more than anything.
The people, of course. Lyric tells every story he can think of about Garnet, talks about Amaranth and Sidoné, his mother whom he loved so well but didn’t see for who she really was.
He never got the chance to know Singix Es Sun, despite marrying her, and he thinks, out of everything, his biggest regret is that his letter to future generations says nothing about Singix’s death, or the deaths of his mother or warnings for Lyric himself not to kill Bittor méra Tesmose.
It is Singix he would save, though, if he could save one.
“Why?” Maimeri asks.
“Selfishness,” he answers. “Would she be able to love me? Would I deserve her love, as I thought I did?”
“You have Iriset’s,” Maimeri says, though it sounds like you have mine.
“It would be for Iriset, too.” Lyric leans against this strange half-fairy who wormed ahz way into Lyric’s family.
“It has been such an honor to have known you, Little Rabbit,” he says, watching the lights dance in the dark sky.
“I admired you, as Maimeri Sarenpet, the first of us, deeply when I was younger. For bringing the mirané people together, for leading, for strength and honor and justice and everything our histories said you stood for. Though you’re not so martially oriented as I expected, everything else is true.
I look forward to reading the stories again, having known you.
I want to rediscover you. I want you to live well. ”
Maimeri shivers, eyes closed. Lyric knows how romantic it sounds, how hurtful, too.
“I’m in love with you,” Maimeri says softly.
It cuts through Lyric, and he takes Maimeri’s hand, weaving their fingers together—the same-color knuckles, the same nail beds, but Lyric’s fingers are longer, Maimeri’s stronger and entirely free of scars or flaws.
Lyric squeezes hard, until it hurts, until there will be a bruise for him to take to the future with him, a bruise to leave with Maimeri. “I do love you.”
Maimeri’s expression darkens as az opens ahz eyes. “But.”
“No but,” Lyric says, kissing ahz cheek, moving to whisper against the corner of ahz mouth. “This winter was the best of my life. Doubtless for the rest of it, too. You probably can’t understand how much I longed for a life like that. And you gave it to me. So believe me.”
Maimeri kisses him the way Lyric loves to be kissed: open-mouthed and messy, pushing him down onto the balcony in the dark, eager to pretend Lyric isn’t leaving, this isn’t real, to ignore it for one last stretch toward dawn, until the world is remade and Lyric is gone forever.
Irsu River stands at the pinnacle of a highly arched bridge over the Lapis River.
The city is quiet around an, hushed despite the near-constant drone of earthquakes and energy-shock making even the air itself tense.
There is no moon to blur the stars; it is riding the sun, so close there will be an eclipse tomorrow at noon.
Only a few hours remain until it will all be over, until the crater city will be devastated and remade, pulled into an exacting balance of trip wires and nooses, traps for anything and anyone unwilling to be consumed.
In River’s hand is a small crystal finger bone.
An holds it over the quietly rushing river.
Both the quartz and the water pull starlight and city light toward them, dull silver edges, shifting and melted, and River cannot look away from the bone.
Eliri left it on River’s pillow the first time she tried to die.
Right after the kidnapping, she gave an this gift, and gave herself away.
An made her take it back, fuse it back into herself, and swear not to try again.
This urge to disappear, to be gone, was a part of Eliri that River could never quite reach. But even without touching her there, River tried to make a home for it. For her.
An hopes that on her better days, she felt safe. She felt loved and that she had such a home. River knows it isn’t ans fault that Eliri never got completely better, never quite stopped feeling like everything would be better without her. But it’s impossible not to blame anself anyway.
(Once, she told River, “It feels like Eliri was created to be something, not someone. A triumph of fetal design. And once Eliri was viable, what was the point of living?”
“River loves you,” River said, not knowing what else to say.
“That’s a good reason,” she murmured, leaning against an, and River hugged her tight, knowing she didn’t entirely think so, even if she wasn’t lying, either.)
An drops the crystal finger into the Lapis River.
“River, there you are.”
It’s Roc, cranky and tired for all the work he’s been doing lately, to become one of the miran, and taking up River’s slack, which the cult leader doesn’t mind but also, at moments like this, resents a little.
River ignores him, and Roc grasps River’s hand, pulling it away from the water. “Come back and get some rest.”
“River will rest when River is dead,” River says.
“That’s not fucking funny.”
“It wasn’t a joke.” River shrugs, touching ans lips with the tip of ans fingers as if there’s a cigarette to enjoy. It wasn’t a joke, it’s a promise.
River has always been clear with the world about exactly who an is.
Here is the way the moon is fixed in the velvet sky over Moonshadow City, here is the way the Moon-Eater dies, here is the way an empire is born:
Iriset and Lyric stand in the exact center of a command array, near the middle of the quarter-mile array, just beside the shrine of the Moon-Eater that one day will be a glorious temple.
Now it’s only four gates with holy arches at every cardinal corner of the small crater they made when they landed here nearly three seasons ago.
“Hold on to me,” Iriset tells Lyric. “That’s all you have to do. ”
She’s in a loincloth and thin robe loosely tied, bare-armed and barefoot, her hair knotted tightly out of her way, and she’s ready to feel the forces on her lips, the nape of her neck, her cheeks and palms, the soles of her feet.
And the bare skin over her sternum. In one hand she holds a stylus, in the other a marble made out of Maimeri’s semen because Iriset never really kids about that kind of thing, and a lucky charm is going to do her a lot of good today.
Lyric wraps his arms around her waist, holding her close. He kisses her temple. “I trust you,” he says.
Iriset takes a deep breath and taps the first node.