Chapter 16 #2
He excuses himself as he ducks through a tight crowd of drinkers, heading toward the Moon-Eater’s fortress, then darts down a stone staircase into a tunnel dripping with vivid iridescent blue stalactites and echoing with laughter and song.
He tracks after a couple of adolescents holding wands with sparkling fireworks on the end, and they lead him unknowingly through the underground neighborhood, past dark shops and candlelit cafés, past cozy-looking houses tucked in for the night, tucked under, under in the warm caves.
Iriset is here, right here, he feels it, the same sensation as when he tracked her through his city, looking for Singix.
Lyric stops, but she’s moving away, past him, and he spins around, grabs a woman in a slick bird mask whose eyes behind the scaled feathers are too dark, and lets her go. Iriset is moving away, and Lyric looks up at the blue glow of the cavern roof. She’s above, on the city streets.
By the time Lyric ascends, he has to double back more than a block.
He runs.
In the middle of a long rock garden where people sit on spread blankets to watch a trio of trees full of tiny glass birds perform, Lyric sees her.
He knows Iriset instantly: her stance, the long red-and-teal robes, her thick hair fallen from the buns he put them in, redone into her knots so the ends hang around her shoulders and back, reddish in the firelight.
Her mouth parted in nothing like a smile, but expectant.
There’s a horrifying mask on her upper face: Long, thin teeth grow out of her cheeks, arcing up toward her hairline to form a cage through which her sandglass eyes flash.
Iriset meets him halfway and they stop before each other close enough to touch.
It’s a relief as the marriage knot calms. He glances at her eyes through the cage as best he can, then takes in the whole mask: From this close it’s a truly compelling illusion of teeth piercing up out of her flesh, and the curved tips glint sharply.
“You’re wearing it,” she says, almost too soft for him to hear amid the festivities.
Lyric finds no reason to answer her obvious statement, unsure what she wants. His shoulders rise and fall with breath; her sparks of ecstatic force are so strong he can’t believe everyone in her radius doesn’t lean away. Finally, he says, “Iriset.”
“Lyric.” She steps in. Tilts her face to hold his gaze. It’s disconcerting, especially through the teeth. She places her hand on his chest, and his entire awareness focuses on that warmth, the touch, as if a tiny sun emerges from the palm of her hand.
Her gaze darts to his mouth; he realizes he made a sound. She leans up on her toes and kisses him.
Or she tries to—the cage of teeth she wears clicks against his skull siren mask, and Iriset laughs, pushing away. Lyric forgot he was wearing such a thing.
“Come with me,” Iriset says, grasping his hand.
She turns and pulls him away from the tiny glass birds and rock garden, past a bonfire and into a street lined with pink lanterns, under a bridge made of glass filled with living fish he cranes his neck to keep looking at.
Up two stories they go, past windows and a balcony, and Iriset climbs over onto a wide stone wall dividing the building from a broad, lively garden.
She skips along the wall fearlessly and Lyric goes after, remembering she’s a child of thieves.
Iriset takes him to a strange shelf rather like half of an oyster that juts out over the garden.
It’s broad enough for them to stretch out on their backs to look at the fireworks still sparkling and dripping light overhead.
They don’t, though. Iriset sits with her legs crossed and tugs him down.
She takes off her mask and he follows, touching the lines the skull siren mask impressed across his cheeks as if he’s never felt the shape of his own face.
“What do you want?” he asks because earlier she was so disgusted that he didn’t try harder to save Setka. He can’t be the one she wants to spend this festival with. She hates him a little bit, after all.
With a little hum, Iriset reaches into her robe and removes a small cloth pouch. She unties it and tips it into her palm. Two oblong pills, like large grains of grass. “One is for you.”
His mouth dries with understanding. The pulse of the marriage knot seems to twist painfully in his chest.
“I tried to do it myself, you know. By myself, the day I left.” Iriset nudges her hand closer.
“With resonance designed into a chunk of polished opal, and it was working. But not fast enough to stay away from you. It would have been better if you’d had one, too.
Taken them together, like we took the seeds together. ”
Lyric’s hand does not shake as he plucks one from her palm, though his stomach revolts at the idea of swallowing it. He opens his mouth to breathe through it, sucks in cold, clear air, exhales a tight line, tries again. After the third attempt to calm down, he looks back at Iriset.
“Don’t panic,” she says, eyes squished in concern. “Lyric, do you not—do you not want to… take it?” she ends in a whisper, face falling into something lost and confused.
Maybe that’s why he says, “No, I don’t,” but then stuffs the little pill into his mouth and swallows hard. He covers his lips with his hand, pressing in, swallows again.
Iriset’s jaw falls open and she stares in shock. So Lyric pushes her hand up to her mouth until she eats her pill, too.
They stare at each other. Nothing happens.
Lyric holds his gaze on Iriset but pays attention inside himself, waiting to feel it, feel something.
Unraveling, maybe the fraying edges of his love, or resonance.
A gong to ring in his chest, to vibrate through his bone marrow.
To be severed and alone again, the way he was never supposed to be after making those promises. Through, with, around, toward.
“It might take…” Iriset begins, but she looks away, out at the garden with its changing statues and milling people. “What next, then?” she murmurs.
Lyric puts his hands under her jaw and kisses her.
He kisses her slow and deep. She tastes like she always tastes when they’ve spent a day apart: not quite right, not quite like his own tongue, but she’s warm and soft, and Lyric closes his eyes more tightly because it’s the same—she’s the same, her teeth and tongue, her palate and the way she tilts her head and grabs his wrists for leverage to climb directly into his lap.
It is such a relief to kiss her and let himself be kissed.
His fingers drag back into her hair, knotted and thick.
He digs into her scalp and Iriset groans into his mouth.
She clutches his ears and then his hair.
Lyric’s scalp tingles, and the heat of desire slides down his spine and around the curve of his ass, flow and rising force twined together to cup his balls and grip his thighs, and the heat of Iriset in his lap makes him shake as he kisses.
She presses into him, wiggling to situate her hips where they fit best against him, grinding after his cock, which she always liked so well.
Lyric puts his hands to her knees and starts bunching up the skirts of her robes, shifting to pull the material out of the way.
She helps with his long dress but it’s trapped under her, so she tugs at the top where it wraps his shoulders and torso.
With little gasps Iriset kisses down his neck and pulls the robe off one shoulder, binding his arm.
“Iriset,” he whispers, and she makes a face like she’s in pain.
Once his arm is free he loosens his dress and gets it off down to his waist. Iriset spreads her hands on his chest, skimming her palms over his nipples as she finds the tight muscles of his stomach and digs under the belt with cold fingers.
Lyric finds ties to her robes and pulls them open over her bare chest and soft belly. He is burning up, his entire body vibrating in perfect clarity for the first time since that night when everything was ruined, and he needs her to be inside of him where he can keep her forever.
She pushes him down and Lyric allows it, though the shelf is cold on his back.
The defense necklace falls against his throat, and while he’s removing it Iriset gets between his legs.
Suddenly her mouth is on his cock, tongue gliding heavy and wet up the underside.
He arches in surprise, the warmth so good, and his body pops with ecstatic eagerness.
But Iriset curls one hand around his cock and with the other lightly scratches his inner thigh, making him gasp, only to soften her touch on the delicate skin under his balls.
She kisses the naked head with all the intention of someone about to take their time doing whatever they wish.
“No,” Lyric says with more might than he intended, and Iriset plants another, wetter kiss to his cock.
He reaches down and grabs her hair, dragging her up.
By the time her whimper of surprise is finished, he’s kissing her again, holding her face against his until she gets the idea and kisses back with all that same focus of intention.
He sucks on her tongue, trying to hold it inside as she climbs up to straddle him again, reaching back behind herself, and Lyric helps with the hand that isn’t tangled in her hair.
He finds her hole unerringly, dips his middle finger in, and she moans into his mouth, then wiggles away.
As Lyric squeezes her ass, she gets his cock where she wants it and her body swallows the tip easily.
She leans up to seat herself on him with a long sigh, and her head falls back.
It’s dark up here, but enough firelight and fireworks and sparkling banners coat the night in chaotic flashes that he can see her open mouth, her eyes, the knots of her hair falling all around, and her breasts, her heaving belly.
Lyric touches her jaw, nudges up his hips where he’s so encased, and it’s weird to think about the way his cock just disappears inside her, her inner walls squeezing hot and his hand on her ass.
He slides fingers farther, feels the slick edge of her hole, and that’s when she moves: He feels his cock like it’s swelling in strange shapes to fit the spaces inside her, but against the side of his finger it’s the same as it always is when it’s hard and wet with her. Iriset laughs breathily.
Her hands prop her up on his chest, and Lyric lets go of everything to touch them, choosing one to tug up to his mouth until he can suck three of her fingers in.
“Oh,” she murmurs passionately, riding him slow and steady, her fingers pressed to his tongue.
That’s better, he thinks, body alight but in a falling way, like everything in the world is gathering in one place, pooling slowly around him, around this circuit of flowing, falling, rising, ecstasy.
His orgasm builds and builds without stopping, and Lyric reaches down, finding her thigh with its strength and tension, then the wet come she’s spreading low on his belly.
He touches her, offering fingers for her to press against, but Iriset shakes her head.
“Hold on,” she says, and smiles at him, the brightest smile he’s ever seen on Iriset’s face.
Then he feels it, ecstatic force ripping from his extremities and sparkling in the air itself, swarming down his arms, legs, chest, to their center, to her clitoris, Lyric is sure.
And rising, his dominant force, tugs at him from his spine, squeezing his balls and zipping up his cock, and his mouth is open in shock around her fingers as the forces move inside them.
Iriset curls her fingers against his tongue, and he remembers himself, sucks and licks, giving over to the feeling of her control.
It’s dangerous and sharp and it feels so, so good, like every particle of his body is focused on coming.
Lyric almost doesn’t realize it’s happening until he’s bending up like a great hand is folding him in half, and he nearly chokes on Iriset’s fingers as he comes. She throws her arms around him, squeezes with her thighs and hole, and shudders in his lap.
The day they arrived here, when he carried her into the Moon-Eater’s garden and the numen and the Moon-Eater embraced, he thought he saw their cheeks smeared into each other, merging and parting, merging and parting, and now he knows maybe it was true, because the numena aren’t human. He doesn’t even know if Iriset is.
This was apostasy, what Iriset did between them now. Pulling on their inner forces with nothing but her will. Changing them, making them come together.
He’s uncertain whether it matters that he knows or cares. In blissful apathy Lyric drifts, holding Iriset against him on the shelf balcony, stars and fireworks popping overhead, and the bonfires eager to feast.