14 What a funny thing about humans
What a funny thing about humans
It’s nearly midnight and Iriset has tucked herself against a plinth holding a kinetic statue of a fruit tree of some kind.
It starts as a sapling, grows up and out, spreading asymmetrical branches that blossom tiny flowers.
Leaves bud, unfurl into heart shapes, the flowers fall, relinquishing space to clusters of berries, and the leaves drop drop drop before swirling up to perch again on the tiny twigs.
It shrinks into a sapling, and the cycle begins anew.
She feels wrung out in the way only Lyric can cause.
How dare he ask her to heal a chimera with apostasy?
Is it so easy for him to give up the laws he’s clung to, and if so, why couldn’t he do it for her?
Did it take a four-hundred-year devastation for him to realize Aharté’s design doesn’t matter except for how he chooses?
Iriset supposes falling back in time like this is a legitimate reason to change, but she’s been working for quads to break his faith and all it took was an alliraptor chimera in a fucking garden?
Drawing herself up, Iriset crosses her legs and closes her eyes.
She sinks into herself, seeking the tiny-tinier-tiniest elements of her own nature.
As she settles into her core, her attention wavers, curious as always.
Down she goes, past the blazing heart of herself, where she’s always imagined her strength and design are centered below her heart, between her lungs, settled like a spiking, black-oil sun in the soft, squishy cradle of her organs.
This afternoon Iriset found the disparate elements of water and opal; she can do the same thing here.
Iriset dives back into herself and finds the marriage knot. This, this, she can pull apart.
The knot pulses gently, a secondary heart pumping threads of force between herself and Lyric.
She feels out the edges; they aren’t raw with evaporation the way her inner design has been these past days.
It’s just a tight knot, ecstatic and rising mostly, twined over itself, through itself, around itself, until it’s greater than either seed alone.
But Iriset sees where to strip the threads. She doesn’t need a pill or a map to undo this. Just rivation.
Iriset clenches her hands into fists low against her belly and opens her eyes.
She jerks back.
The Moon-Eater is right there, crouched like a gremlin so close his shins nearly touch her knees and his blood-red eyes blur.
“Fuck,” she says. “What… Moon-Eater?” she double-checks.
He appears about fifteen, mirané-brown skin lustrous in the moonlight, hair straight and pulled into a cheerful high tail.
In a black sleeveless robe and trousers, an outfit uncomfortably like the raiment of the Silence priests.
“Iriset Sunderer, I can hear your angst from a hundred feet in the air.”
She purses her lips in distaste.
“And you’ve chosen one of my favorite statues,” he continues in a more jocular voice.
Glancing back up at the kinetic statue of the tree, she asks, “Why?”
“You tell me. You’re the one sitting here.”
“I mean,” she says with a semi-friendly eye roll, “why is it your favorite.”
The Moon-Eater shrugs one muscular shoulder, drawing attention to the glittering silver chain-link cuffs on his upper arms. Thin and shimmering as ghost writing.
Iriset shoves that away. The last thing she needs now is maudlin thoughts of Singix Es Sun. What will that lead to but reflections of all she’s lost? “Do you know the chimera Setka, who lives in your gardens?”
“I do.”
Nodding, rather disconsolate, Iriset still doesn’t know what else to say.
“Whatever is wrong, if it involves Setka, it won’t be wrong past tomorrow,” the Moon-Eater says.
“The Night of Chimeras,” Iriset murmurs.
“Do you know what we do on the festival night?” At Iriset’s negative gesture, he continues, “We destroy broken, unwanted, unclaimed chimeras. A great conflagration of unfulfilled design.”
Iriset’s mouth drops open. “You’ll just kill her?”
The Moon-Eater shrugs his other shoulder.
“But… she’s alive. She’s that functional, at least.”
“Setka the Chimera was abandoned by her maker and accepted the sanctuary of my gardens, a sanctuary that ends tomorrow.”
Iriset covers her eyes with her palms, digging her nails into her forehead.
The pain does not clarify anything. Why did she ask?
Now she’ll be the one to tell Lyric what’s to happen to his adopted monster.
No mercy. At least he’ll have to understand such a thing.
“Did you say a hundred feet in the air?” she asks, looking up past the Moon-Eater.
There’s no tower looming in the immediate vicinity, only elegant weeping evergreens and a long peristyle walkway, none of which is more than twenty feet tall. Beyond that, stars.
“Can you… fly?” she whispers. Of course he can. He’s a numen. But Iriset’s pulse picks up; she tries to tamp the sudden excitement away.
“Sure,” he says.
“What’s your favorite form for it? Bird, dragon? Do you prefer feathers or scales or taut skin?”
He stands, holding his hand down for her. “Eliri likes flight, too. What a funny thing about humans.”
Anticipation ruffles under her skin, ecstatic popping up her throat as a giggle. “Does it seem so strange?”
“I suppose not!” As the Moon-Eater says it, he tugs on her hand. She stumbles into his chest, and he wraps both arms around her before leaping off the grass.
Iriset shrieks laughter, eyes closing of their own accord against the drag of air. His arms engorge, his torso stretches, and she feels his whole body move once, again, again, and realizes it’s the beat of his wings.
Throwing her arms up to his neck, she finds skin, hair, and as she grips him the Moon-Eater changes his hold until he has an arm under her back and an arm under her thighs. The wind is harsh, but not too cold, and Iriset looks.
The gardens spread below them, gilded in pale light from stars and baubles of everflame tucked here and there beneath leaves and trellises.
Her stomach dips as the Moon-Eater drags them higher.
His wings are huge, elegant bat wings, the long bones arcing perfectly in mirané-brown, pulling toward the tips into pink and white.
Beautiful. She grins at him, tilting her chin up, and the Moon-Eater grins back.
“This isn’t my favorite,” he yells over the wind and the swoop of his wings.
“But it’s the strongest, and I wanted to be dramatic in sweeping you up into the sky. ”
“They’re gorgeous,” she cries back, feeling her eyes burn. “Turn me around?”
The Moon-Eater laughs and flips her fast enough that Iriset’s heart jumps to her mouth and she digs her fingers into his forearms where they’re wrapped around her ribs.
Her back presses to his chest, her legs dangle, and she holds on so tight.
She can barely think—and the Moon-Eater dives.
Iriset screams! It’s a scream of delight, a cry of wonder, and for once Iriset is too caught up in sensations to catalog her bodily reactions.
They rise again, swooping around the five-fingered silver towers of the Moon-Eater’s Pit.
Shadows dart away from them—birds or bats, Iriset has no idea, laughing again and squeaking when he cups his wings to let a gust of wind blow them back and up up up.
His wings snap, she claws at his forearms, and then when the Moon-Eater turns them away from the wind so that it thrusts them forward, Iriset lets go.
She spreads her arms, and he tightens his grip around her.
Iriset struggles to keep her eyes open, tears streaming along her temples into her hair, but like this—arms out, legs out, wind buffeting against her, filling her gasping mouth, tearing her hair, and the Moon-Eater solid against her back, the rhythm of his wings—she’s flying.
Thought strips away, worries and wonder, everything, until Iriset is sensation, she is wind and starlight, laughter.
The Moon-Eater settles them on a jut off amalgamated rock along the northern cliffs of the crater. Though her legs have done no work, they wobble and she collapses back, caught by a laughing Moon-Eater who cradles her in his lap.
That’s good, because the wind up here is cold.
The crater city unfurls beneath them like a bowl of jewels, boulevards and vast gardens and markets and floating islands and the gash of the Lapis River outlined in strings of lights.
Spiking towers sparkle, and energy fields flicker between spotlights piercing up into the sky.
Iriset’s city never glows quite like this.
She relaxes back into the Moon-Eater’s hold, vaguely disoriented because this is the old red god, Amaranth’s god, and he’s material and filled with mischief and laughter and probably malevolence, too.
But Iriset leans her head against his jaw, and he sighs, breath ruffling her hair.
“Thank you,” she says.
“I don’t know if when you master sundering you will be able to transform yourself, but it is fun to imagine the possibilities,” he answers.
“Do you know why Never wants me to be a sunderer?” Iriset asks. Before, in the future, she might have understood: The numen wanted her to free the Moon-Eater. But here, the Moon-Eater is doing very well.
The Moon-Eater grumbles. Then, rather softly, he says, “Never has always longed for something outside of this crater. Outside of me. Perhaps what it wants, it believes a sunderer can provide.”
They sit quietly for a while. Iriset tries to let her mind rest, observing patterns of light, the sensation of thrill and anxiety settling in her body, listening to the Moon-Eater breathe. She wonders, does he need to breathe, or is it affectation?
“Where is Never?” she asks eventually.
“Pouting.”
Iriset laughs once, softly.
“Never has learned more human emotions, or at least the pretense of them, since it’s been with you than it did with me,” the Moon-Eater says wistfully.
“Why is it sad?”
“You went to be with your husband. Never dislikes him because of what happens to it. Happened to it?”
Iriset stills. “It told you.”
The Moon-Eater hums.
“And you don’t mind us here? When we come from, you’ve been unraveled and imprisoned for centuries. Lyric is the end of a line of rulers who caused it, and imprisoned Never, too.”
“I’ve never been unraveled before,” he whispers teasingly into her ear. “It sounds interesting.”
“That’s so bizarre,” Iriset whispers.
“Ha! Well, I’m not human. Now tell me why you love Lyric Aharté.”
“Are you so sure I do?”
He doesn’t answer. Iriset sighs, very disgruntled. She was only just flying! Why bring up this? “I do love him, but it’s against my will!” she insists. “How can you ask me this without liquor?”
“Tell me!” the Moon-Eater whines like a child.
After a little sigh, Iriset tells the Moon-Eater the entire sordid story about how and why she met Lyric méra Esmail and came to be married to him and love him, and ultimately decide to destroy him.
She circles back to Singix again and again, aware she’s giving away more than she intends.
She loved Singix; she was loved as Singix.
“I was in love once,” the Moon-Eater murmurs. “It did not make me want to destroy anything but myself.”
Iriset sucks a gasp through clenched teeth. “Only once?” she says to be mean. Being mean balances her back out.
“Well, once that I know about.” The Moon-Eater nuzzles her hair.
“Is it possible to be in love and not know it?” It feels like the most genuine question Iriset has ever asked. She stares out at the jewel of the crater city so hard, unblinking, that her eyes burn.
“What is in love? What is love? Another force, a yearning, a loss?” The Moon-Eater stands, pulling Iriset with him.
“You mean loss makes love stronger?”
“Or is it only that we feel it most strongly when it’s gone? Maybe that is something numena and humans have in common.”
“I did not know how much I loved Singix until she was dead.”
“And it sounds like Lyric Aharté did not know how much he loved either of you until he realized neither of you existed!” The Moon-Eater says it with a laugh, like he’s solving a puzzle.
Iriset makes a disgusted sound. “Fly me home, Red God! Old Fairy! Moon-Eater! Fly me home!”
The Moon-Eater scrapes dull human teeth against her cheekbone, hugs her, and flings them off the cliff.
So tired and adrenaline-crashing she feels drunk, Iriset crawls into bed with her husband. He’s on his side, his back to her, breathing evenly. She curls up in a ball, fingers woven together, tucked under her jaw, and she says, “Lyric, are you awake?”
He says nothing, but she hears the rustle of blankets as he shifts, and his head moves until he’s almost glancing over at her. The moonlight shines on one broad cheek, finding a handful of freckles.
“Lyric,” she begins again. There are so many things she wants to say, needs to say, but first, first: “I loved her. I did.”
Lyric takes a long, shaking breath.
Iriset says, “She was so good, and kind, and sweet. Soft, but brave. She was so brave, Lyric. She taught me more about bravery than anybody else ever has. I’m scared now, because—because even though I’m usually really good at doing something without worrying that I can’t, this is so different.
The design here, the power, the numena and what they think I am, what they think I can do…
It’s terrifying, and I keep thinking about Singix.
She was named for the demon of beauty, but it was Tapp she prayed to.
That icon you kept for her, that was the god of courage, and…
anyway. I loved her. Everything that’s happened in the past quads, that I’ve done, we’ve done…
If I could go back to before she was dead, I would keep her alive.
No matter anything else. I wish Singix was still alive. ”
She closes her eyes and lets go of a slow sigh. It feels good to have confessed. It isn’t an apology, not to him, but in many ways it’s an apology for Singix.
Finally, he says, “When I thought Singix loved me, it made me feel like I deserved to be loved.”
Each word trickles like cold acid rain through Iriset, stripping her insides raw.
“Lyric,” she whispers.
But he turns away.