Chapter 8 #3
“Your fortress, your city presumably, is very loud and chaotic.”
“Compared to where you come from?” the Moon-Eater says slyly.
“Compared to where I come from,” Lyric agrees. Then says no more.
The Moon-Eater laughs. “Do you think your talented wife will tell me?”
Lyric pulls his lips in a thin line. Iriset probably will tell this red god anything he wants to know if he’ll let her explore the farthest horizons of apostasy. She’ll tell the Moon-Eater to run away so he can never be unraveled.
But the Moon-Eater bursts into delighted laughter, bending over in his mirth. “I’m joking! Joking! Ha ha!” he says, holding his belly. “Never already told me.” Then suddenly the Moon-Eater goes still. Inhumanly still. In a cold, quiet voice he adds, “Everything.”
The vague, unsettled anxiety under Lyric’s skin coalesces violently into fear.
The Moon-Eater’s eyes don’t even glisten; his face is as smooth as glass.
His hair moves in a million tiny directions, but nothing else hints at life.
This is a monster, Lyric feels it. He can’t escape.
He can only stand there trapped in the focus of this predator, and keep his breathing as smooth as a fountain.
Sweat tickles his spine, under his arms, as Lyric does nothing but struggle to stand and hold the Moon-Eater’s gaze.
Slowly, very slowly, life returns to those mirané-red eyes, like flecks of blood sparking one at a time, and his cheeks shift as if in preparation for a smile, and then the Moon-Eater relaxes his shoulders into the slouch of the indolent teen he’s portraying.
“My, my, what a gambling face you have,” he says, and clicks his tongue.
Lyric swallows. He does not lose his own tension.
“I don’t mind knowing, Lyric Aharté. It sounds interesting, in the future.
Knowing I’m defeated.” The Moon-Eater claps a hand on Lyric’s shoulder, and Lyric jumps.
The Moon-Eater laughs, light and merry. He’s shorter than Lyric in this adolescent form, arm stretched to reach.
“It’s true. I didn’t know I could be defeated, even if that’s really what happens.
Because to be honest, I don’t think Never actually knows.
Because he wasn’t here.” The latter is said snidely, too angry to be a pout.
“You didn’t already stop her?” Lyric whispers, unable to summon a real voice through his tight throat.
“Stop who? Oh, your wife? No! I could, obviously, it’s too easy to kill humans. But”—and here the Moon-Eater slides his hand down to grasp Lyric’s elbow—“I want to know more about sundering, this magic she can supposedly do.”
“She won’t want to hurt you anyway,” Lyric manages, allowing the Moon-Eater to escort him away from the water feature. “So you shouldn’t hurt her.”
“Cute,” the Moon-Eater says. “What about you?”
“I… It doesn’t matter what I want. I can’t do what Iriset can do.”
“Oh? And she wouldn’t hurt me for you?”
Lyric lowers his eyes. “No.”
The Moon-Eater draws them to a stop and touches Lyric’s chin, raising his face. “So pretty, so well made. Well, I think we should ask Iriset what she would and wouldn’t do for you. She’s waiting with Never for us to return, so we can all eat.”
“Do you eat?” Lyric asks tentatively. He is a little lightheaded again.
“Everything needs fuel,” the Moon-Eater answers mysteriously.
He hums a little while he walks, reaching up to knock his fingers against the bell-flowers, so they leave a wake of tinkling behind them.
In the next garden he holds out a hand and summons a butterfly seemingly built of golden thread to perch briefly upon a knuckle. The Moon-Eater coos.
The beauty is easy to appreciate, though it settles like a sharp rock in Lyric’s chest. Under the marriage knot. The Moon-Eater asks no more questions, so Lyric tries again. “How long have you known the numen who came with us?”
“We were born together,” the Moon-Eater answers idly. “Made together.”
“By Aharté?”
The Moon-Eater slides Lyric a look. “Like you? Why would she make something like you if she could make something like me first?”
“You called me perfectly designed. Does that mean you are, too?”
“Hmm.” The Moon-Eater tilts his head, swinging his hair over a shoulder like a thick horse-tail whip.
“My people,” Lyric says slowly, “are made by Aharté, in her Holy Design, in balance. I do not know if perfection exists in material reality, or only in concept.”
“Oh, perfection exists. Maybe not in humanity. And you feel human enough. Merely… pulled into exacting shape. Cooked to a specific, elaborate mold. Maybe you taste like a good cookie, too.” The Moon-Eater laughs at his own joke.
“Silence,” Lyric says suddenly. He can’t help taking this conversation seriously, though the Moon-Eater seems only to humor him.
“Are you shushing me?” the red god prompts.
“The moment of absolute Silence, Aharté’s Holy Design, is perfection.
I can experience it, but it’s difficult to hold on to, maybe impossible.
A moment, a thought, a breath.” Lyric remembers explaining this to Singix.
She understood so swiftly, so well. No wonder.
“Noise, forces, emotions, all states, everything stills in a crystal moment. Even in the most impossible storm, it’s Silence. ”
“And it’s something to strive for?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t stagnate?”
Lyric frowns, steps slowing, taking solace in philosophy. “It can’t. Maybe something like you, if you could hold in Silence, if your skills are such, your talents, maybe it would, but I can’t. We can’t. Forces move. Energy moves. Changes.”
He’s thinking of the silver-pink moon of Aharté that in his time does not move, and it holds the Moon-Eater in stasis, if Iriset is to be believed.
As they step under a glass arch into the same glass garden Lyric passed through earlier, the Moon-Eater shifts his form slowly enough that Lyric can see: He grows taller, older, but the person is the same.
A twentysomething version of the adolescent from before.
It’s impressive, the Moon-Eater’s control over his own design.
And disconcerting in a way that Lyric can barely tolerate.
“Do you—know Aharté?” Lyric asks breathlessly. “Is she like you?”
“Like me?”
“We… She is a god to us. Counter to you, the Moon-Eater, the red god. But you’re not a god, you’re a numen. Does that mean she is, too?”
The Moon-Eater shrugs. “What is a god? I can manipulate form and energy to suit my whims and pleasure. I’m worshipped as a god, so does that not make me one?”
Lyric thinks quietly as they enter an atrium, pass through another night-blooming courtyard.
People watch them go, but don’t approach or call out.
He thinks through everything the Moon-Eater has said to him, especially the first afternoon they met.
“But you can’t make someone like me,” Lyric finally says. “So you aren’t quite like Aharté.”
“Good guess!” The Moon-Eater takes Lyric’s hand again. “I tried. My child is… ah, I wish your sunderer wife had come when Rabbit was here.”
“Rabbit?” Lyric is amused by the name, but also endeared. He knows what it’s like to have a cute name.
“Az was twitchy and shy, but loved a cuddle. Az left for the reason you said: It’s too loud here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Most humans assume az died, or I killed ahz.” The humor melts away from the Moon-Eater’s words, leaving only ice behind. “I let them.”
Lyric’s fingers flutter in the Moon-Eater’s grip, but he doesn’t pull away. Hasn’t he done worse things himself?
“Well, Lyric Aharté.” The smile is back in the Moon-Eater’s voice. “I don’t know any Aharté, though I have known humans who believe in her. I suppose if part of this future Never hates is an empire-wide cult in her name, you’d better get started on converting the masses.”
Lyric pulls his hand away and brings his hands up to shade his eyes as he bows shallowly. Partly to hide his face and eyes. Despite the actual words, this does not quite feel like permission. “And you, Moon-Eater? Will you listen to what I have to say about Holy Design?”
“You can call me Shade, and I think that I will.”
Surprise has Lyric looking suddenly up.
The Moon-Eater—Shade—is mirané-brown again, his black hair waving down his back from the high tail just as Lyric’s would if he grew it past his shoulders.
But the Moon-Eater’s eyes are silver-pink and luminous.
Lyric does not know if he can bring himself to call so familiarly this old red god.
Except then Shade winks and adds, “Though I might find it rather silly. I want to know everything about this future of yours, because this city? This crater and all the people in it? They don’t belong to Aharté. They belong to me.”
But it’s mine, Lyric thinks, because it was—it is.
The red-rock crust of the earth, the potential, the balance.
The miran and the city and everything in it.
He was the Vertex Seal, and will be still in four hundred years, if everything doesn’t crash around him.
Lyric feels resistance swelling in his chest, the urge to disagree, to rebel.
He feels it like his rising force pulling him up and up, and for a moment Lyric stops hiding everything behind his well-kept shell.
He lets himself feel it, because defiance feels good.
But the Moon-Eater smiles again, turning away. “In the meantime, let’s eat.”