Chapter 19 #2
Many times in the past Shade loved, obsessed, made friends, but this was the first time he realized he was in love while it occurred.
Something had happened to his emotions, his consciousness.
The emotion changed him, reworking his inner design on such a fundamental level he couldn’t describe it. He wanted to die.
The miracle is that Pip was in love with Shade, too. Every day the sun rose and Shade wished he could die, wished he could be a leaf that fell at the end of the summer and never grew back, because Pip wouldn’t.
(Shade knew death: He knew the transformation of death, though he could not trace the exact pattern and path the inner design of a living being took from consciousness to static, from pulse and spark to lack.
The kinetic impulses of muscles and mind, gone, laughter, gone, ecstatic flow falling rising gone gone gone.
When asked, over his long life, Shade will give different answers, but he does not believe the same life exists once it is gone.
The way leaves fall and return in the spring, but not the same leaves. Not the same. When Shade leaned too hard into such imaginings, he realized he would never know Never again and cursed himself for giving the one who’d been a leaf such a name.)
But mostly, with Pip, he was happy.
When eventually, inevitably, she was dying, Shade made himself as tiny as possible, all of his energy and consciousness pulled into a seed, and she didn’t realize this is what he was doing, but she swallowed it.
It didn’t work the way he wanted.
He did feel the change in her body as what human complex of consciousness she had faded, the warmth and fuel and struggle vanished in increments, going nowhere he could sense. Her death heated the air around her skin briefly before everything grew cold.
And Shade held inside her as she broke down, became nothing but a carcass, and he tried to spread into her, thin himself into filaments tiny enough to be a web holding her together.
But the complexity of her that made her laugh at him was gone.
When the Moon-Eater woke up from his long nap, he retook his castle and killed an appropriate number of people, promoted another handful, dismissed a few, and turned himself into a dragon as huge as he could manage.
He spoke in a voice that rocked the crater city, commanding that anyone who wished to know the secrets of life should come.
It was definitely a cult, and the Moon-Eater was excellent at leading it. He taught them design, showed them how to manipulate the four forces and play, told them, Imagine! Go wild! Do not hold back! And they listened.
Because occasionally the Moon-Eater ate people—literally and metaphorically, which is mostly about sex—he earned a reputation for being very hungry and always wanting more.
What he truly hungered for was incarnation.
He offered prizes to anyone who could design him a body, not to inhabit—he had tried possession and he had to focus on that just as constantly as he had to focus on orgasm but for significantly less payoff.
No, the body he wanted was his own. He needed someone to take his complex of consciousness and change it.
Humanity did not succeed in transforming the Moon-Eater, but they sure did make a lot of weapons and monsters.
The Moon-Eater made plenty of his own.
What else is important to know? Oh, there are more names Shade earned, for more obvious reasons, and don’t worry about the Screamer—Iriset will learn firsthand about that one.
And she’ll learn more about that time the Moon-Eater carried a child in a careful womb and the child took after him but not quite enough.
How about Aharté? To the Moon-Eater she was a god like any other: useless.
Aharté was a Sarian god, but the Sarians had several gods, and so occasionally Pip had mentioned her, but Pip and Liisia and their Syr Sarian people had fallen hard for architectural design and combat-design, and only Liisia occasionally prayed.
Not while she was Shade’s captive, but afterward, when Shade hid in her household and accidentally seduced her son-turned-daughter, that’s when Liisia strove for balance as a way to alleviate the scars of suffering Shade had carved into her.
Shade, if he was nostalgic for anything, was nostalgic for the wordplay he’d shared with Never, when they’d invented their own words, before either of them interacted with another of their own kind, before they knew so many other human languages.
And so Aharté’s name pleased Shade, because it sounded like their mirané word for the organ of the soul, the heart, a heart, even though it meant the breath between words, and that is where the Syr Sarians look for love and emotions: in the breath and lungs.
Maybe all of that is why, when he met Lyric, there was just enough nostalgia for the name Aharté to put Shade in a forgiving mood.
“Look at what you’ve done,” Never says, the first time they’re alone again.
It floats just a bit off the polished flagstone of a private water garden behind the Moon-Eater’s tower.
But Shade is too busy staring at Never, wondering if he can just meld himself completely with his old—his old…
friend. It’s been centuries. They embraced, they spoke, but it was in front of humans, with the sick one and the perfectly designed one who Shade thinks maybe is the key to making a body just for Shade, but Eliri is taking care of them for now and Shade’s full attention should be on Never, because Never is the one who leaves.
“What have I done?” Shade murmurs, slinking closer, feeling predatory.
He shifts to the side, circling Never, and Never only floats there in one form: pink and white and black, hair wavering like sun on water, eyes brighter than rubies, teeth jagged.
There are no flowers in its hair, no streaks of chlorophyl or dogwood colors, no resin smell, and certainly its balls won’t be shiny brown acorns.
Shade laughs at himself, because it’s both funny and true, and also the humans of his city went through a flora chimera phase two generations ago and it was amazing. Shade wishes more of them survived. He wonders if he’d made Rabbit in an acorn, the child would have stayed.
Never tilts its head, and its eyes seem to grow larger. “All of this. The city, the worshippers, the court. You’re a god.”
“Gods can do anything,” Shade dismisses.
“What can you not do that you want to do?”
“Make anyone stay.”
Never scoffs.
“Where have you been?” Shade asks.
“Around the world, as round as a moon,” Never says.
Suddenly Shade doesn’t want to hear any details. So of course he says, “Tell me everything. I’ll take us to a café that serves ecstatic wine brewed from the berries of a dogwood tree.”
Never levels a glance at Shade. “I came back to the crater city to find you gone. The rulers in place were terrible. They told stories about you, though, about an old red god of chaos and apostasy, and a woman who came at the side of the goddess of that pink moon up there, and destroyed you. Unraveled you, spread you into something else, and I couldn’t get to you.
The people in your place looked like you, but were not you. ”
“A legacy, hmm?” Shade hums, both confused and understanding exactly what Never says. Where—when—Never has been. Never is always leaving, after all, so of course it would leave him behind in time, too. “Tell me more.”
“No, Shade, it’s bad, it won’t happen to you this time.”
“It probably wouldn’t have happened the first time if you’d stayed,” Shade says, letting anger snap his teeth into points.
Never leans in, eyes pink vortexes. “I am here now. It will never happen again.”
“Never say never, Never,” the Moon-Eater cackles gleefully, meanly, with all the love in his consciousness. “Tell me.”
The spider mines explode just after midnight while Shade stands inside a bonfire in his fortress.
He’s focused on letting his flesh be real, his nerves real, makes himself a man and the pain is excruciating.
It locks his jaw, cracks his teeth. He stops breathing on instinct, only to take deep choking hot breaths of acrid smoke, coughing blood.
He feels so much so terribly, screams so loud, that what he doesn’t feel is the earth tremble, or the echoing string of explosions deep in the city.
A runner comes with a ribbon alarm and shows Eliri the Adept Hand and Amado the Reconciler, and Eliri throws tiny pebbles into the flames for Shade’s attention.
When he exits the sacrificial fire he’s good as new.
Eliri tells him something set off one of the missing spider mine triggers left over from the Renovation War, and the mines exploded in a string across the northeastern fortress precincts, arcing just into Rivermouth. She has to go help Irsu with triage.
And Never appears from somewhere, hissing Iriset is out there with her terrible husband.
Shade wants to snarl Who cares about them, care about me, stay with me!
but Shade actually needs Iriset Sunderer and Lyric Aharté—or at least wants them.
Wants what they can do, what they promise by existing.
So he goes with Never to scour the fiery streets, bypassing rubble and bodies.
Three hundred years ago, fifty even, Shade might have stopped to help people bleeding out, to lift a beam away from a dying whatever, to put out a fire, to summon wind, but he’s over it by now.