Chapter 2
The last Vertex Seal
Lyric’s first real memory is huddling in the lee of the Moon-Eater’s altar with a large fossil molar pressed to his stomach.
Outside the dark pocket of the temple, people yell his name.
They sound furious and Lyric curls around the tooth, making himself smaller.
He doesn’t remember why he slipped out of his bedroom before dawn, why this place drew him, why he hid and didn’t simply ask to come.
The attendants would have said yes, his mother would have said yes, his uncle the Moon-Eater’s Mistress would have said yes.
But he didn’t ask, and now they’re angry at him, and he’s afraid to crawl out from behind the altar even though nobody will hurt him.
The voices and chaos move away until he’s alone.
They don’t look in the Moon-Eater’s Temple.
When the sun rises, Lyric’s uncle sweeps in, snarling at his attendants that he’ll be fast. Lyric hears the rustle of cloth and a soft brush of skin on stone.
His uncle leans on the edge of the stone slab opposite Lyric, propped up with his left hand, his head fallen back to show his long throat to the starry midnight dome of the temple.
Lirdal méra Niyah, the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, is disheveled, his wavy dark hair unbound, his sleeveless robe mussed and pulling as if it’s not on quite right.
He closes his eyes and breathes shallowly, his right hand hidden by his body as he begins.
Lyric doesn’t want to bother him, and remains still, on his knees behind the altar. His uncle’s back and shoulders loom up, like a broad statue, and Lyric remembers he has one of the teeth—the Moon-Eater’s teeth!—and they belong on the altar.
Gently, Lyric lifts the rough tooth, fingers in the grinding furrows. He holds his breath as he places it beside the others with the tiniest scrape of stone to stone.
The Moon-Eater’s Mistress freezes. Lyric ducks down, huddled back into a ball.
A soft sigh reaches him, and then his uncle moves. Hands grasp him and he’s pulled up into a lap. “Lyric, you’ve scared everyone.”
Lyric shakes his head, again and again.
“I need to take you back.”
He darts out his hand to grip the hem of his uncle’s open robe, clenching his fingers tight.
“You want to stay.” There’s something Lyric doesn’t understand in his uncle’s voice. But Lyric leans into Lirdal’s chest. “Very well, little moon. But I must put you down.”
Lyric allows himself to be settled on the ground again, and spreads out to lie flat beside the base of the altar. His uncle brushes hair back from his forehead tenderly and murmurs, “Maybe you will feel him, too.”
Closing his eyes, Lyric listens to the soft sounds of skin and stone, matching his breath to his uncle’s even as it picks up, rhythmic and shallow, and when the Moon-Eater’s Mistress finishes, Lyric’s ears pop.
He isn’t afraid any longer, and takes his uncle’s hand to be led back to the Seal tower.
If he is punished for hiding in the temple, he doesn’t remember it.
Lyric is seven years old when his father brings him into the mirané hall for the first time and sets him on his feet in the seat of the throne. “Do you know what this is?” Esmail méra Niyah His Glory asks.
The Vertex Seal is tall and broad, mirané-brown skin painted in long white and blue stripes stretching from his hairline down over his eyes and cheeks.
The stripes skip his short beard to pick up again under his chin in those colors of ecstatic and rising forces.
As usual, he wears layered robes in all four force colors and his hair is pulled into a high tail, from which tumble black curls with the barest hint of auburn.
Standing like this on the throne, Lyric can look directly into his father’s crater-red eyes.
“This is the throne of the Vertex Seal,” Lyric says quietly. He always speaks quietly, because everyone else is loud. “The center of the empire.”
“Correct. My throne, and one day yours.” Esmail plants fists on his hips. “Do you know what it means to be the Vertex Seal?”
Lyric frowns and stiffens his fingers where they brush against his plain black skirt.
Its narrow pleats fall to brush the tops of his slippered feet, and this morning his mother tied him into a sleeveless vest embroidered with her favorite fat red flowers.
Lyric likes them, as well, because they look like his baby sister’s cheeks when she smiles.
And Ama is always smiling—unless she’s screaming.
She is the loudest person Lyric knows. “To lead,” he finally answers his father.
“It means you must be the best miran there is.”
Thinking about that, Lyric nods. It makes sense. He doesn’t realize for years that while to him the best meant he should be just and good and proud and compassionate, Esmail only meant for his son to be strong.
To Esmail, to most Vertex Seals before him, strength comes from conquest and domination, expanding the empire in Aharté’s name without needing to care about what’s destroyed in the process.
Want more, be greater, do better, get stronger.
That is what Esmail demands of Lyric. A single-minded perfection ignoring the quiet parts born in his son.
Esmail would say he hones Lyric’s natural inclinations into the sharp weapon a Vertex Seal needs to be, shaving back unnecessary thoughtfulness, polishing away curiosity, dulling wonder.
In Esmail’s image, Lyric would grow to be as unmemorable as his father.
A year later Lyric wakes before the sun again, clear-eyed and eight years old. It’s his birthday, but miran don’t celebrate such individual things, relying instead on the anniversary of the birth of all miran four hundred years ago to mark the passing of time.
Lyric had been dreaming, and the dream rests quietly in his mind, all sound and song, no imagery.
He knows what it means and turns his face to the boy sprawled beside him in bed, uncertain about waking the other or letting him sleep.
But in the end Lyric prefers to give everyone their own choices when possible, so he shakes Garnet gently and says, “I’m going to the Silent Chapel. ”
Garnet, also eight, nods and drips out of the bed to tiredly put on his slippers.
He doesn’t ask why. Lyric drifts like a ghost through the darkened corridors of the palace complex with Garnet trailing behind.
The young body-twin whispers to the Seal guards and sleepy attendants where they are going, and they gain a small entourage that Lyric ignores until they reach the gate of the chapel and he looks back at them, miran all but Garnet, their red-brown skin gleaming under the dim light of Aharté’s moon.
It’s a thick wane this time of night, steadily fading into half by the moment of true dawn.
“Stay,” Lyric tells everyone quietly, and pushes open the gate with a firm shove.
Garnet ignores him, but Lyric expected that.
Although most people assume they get along because of similar interests and seriousness, it’s because Garnet knows how to be just as quiet as Lyric—when he cares to.
It’s almost as if Garnet can read the other’s mind sometimes, sensing or guessing what the heir needs or wants without Lyric having to speak.
Everyone else in Lyric’s life demands noise of him, whether it’s answers to oral exams for his tutors, or reports on what he’s read for his father, or opinions on how beautiful his mother is and his favorite foods for her to arrange, or if he prefers to focus on breath work or footwork or strength training with his combat instructor, or some vocal acknowledgment to redirect Ama’s constant babbling.
Soon he’ll be required to speak up at meetings of the mirané princes.
His uncle has promised that once such meetings begin, Lirdal will make it his daily mission to tease a laugh out of the serious little boy.
Lyric is unsure how to explain to his uncle that he often feels joy, he simply doesn’t let it out.
An instinct deep inside him—a core knot in his inner design—tells him to pull his feelings thin, to weave a shell of them. Especially around his father.
Garnet understands all that. And so Lyric allows him to remain at his side even when drawn to the Silent Chapel by his dreams.
The priest who greets them is an old mirané woman with wiry white hair and more wrinkles on her mirané skin than there are stars in the sky.
Her sleeveless red priest robe is as plain as any, and she has nothing painted on her face, nor any mask.
It is the way of Aharté’s priests, for they give everything to Silence, including honesty and even their own names.
“A Lyric to Bridge the Silence,” she says softly. Of course she knows him.
And Lyric knows her: This is the Holy Peace herself, most revered and blessed priest of Silence in the empire. Yet she crouches down so her knobby knees stick out like any grandma, and takes his hands when Lyric tries to touch his eyelids in respect.
“Not to me, little Seal,” she says with a smile. “Not to anyone but your parents, and one day, your children. When you meet Aharté, do it with your full gaze.”
Garnet remains at the gate as the Holy Peace leads Lyric by the hand deeper into the chapel grounds.
Only the silver-pink moon lights their way, through circlets of flow and rising force-steeples that gather the pretty moonlight and reflect it bright enough to see clearly.
The Silent gardens are simple, filled with elegant columns climbing with vines and plinths spilling night-blooming eris flowers.
Tiny water features ripple quietly at the movement of frogs, and the fountains draw Lyric’s attention because their design is so exact that water arcs in perfect quiet. No splash. No ripple.
Lyric finds it so very easy to breathe here.
The Holy Peace takes him to the great labyrinth at the heart of the garden and sets him on its path.
He walks it for more than a day.