Chapter 23 #2
The library of the Moon-Eater is truly filled with art.
At least three stories are hollowed out, creating a tall column of light emphasized by mirrors, glass walkways, everflames, and delicate, spooling staircases and rolling ladders made of the finest wrought iron and crystal.
There are shelves of books open to illustrated pages: islands and breaking waves, deep sea gardens that must be pure imagination, surely, so bright are their colors and so strange the creatures inhabiting them.
There are towers of potted plants, the pottery itself works of art, burned black ceramics and cloisonné, wood worked into statues of monsters and fairies with vines falling from their chests and flowers in their hands.
And the silk, oh, Iriset touches the silk hangings.
Some are decorated with dripping ink mountains and finely painted runes.
Others are dyed into rainbows of coral and sunset horizons.
The floor is mosaicked so finely it seems like a painting, too, and Iriset steps over individual blades of grass and wildflowers so delicate they might be blowing in a real wind.
She imagines she can smell the sun-warmed wheat and fluttering petals.
Instead of finding the Moon-Eater, Iriset only sees a handful of small blue birds darting around the domed ceiling.
“Oh,” says Eliri.
The birds suddenly stop flying to hover, and then three drop to perch on a long bench, while two flit to the open window. The remaining four merge together into a slightly larger blue bird that flies toward Iriset, and when she startles back, it lands in her hair anyway.
All the birds laugh. They sound like him.
More so than when he was a giant sea snake, almost more than when he flew her across the crater, this impresses Iriset.
“Moon-Eater,” she says breathlessly as he laughs. She shakes her head, but his little bird claws prick at her scalp. “I’m still healing,” she chides with absolute dishonesty. He flaps long primary feathers over her face until she smiles.
All the birds leap back into the air, slamming together in a scuffle of feathers and chirping until they’re a long-limbed human standing before her with eyes as blue as the sky.
He bows playfully, as if sensing Iriset’s awe.
She doesn’t mind: It is awesome. To divide himself into many tiny, separate minds, as the birds move on their own, not in a susurration.
“It’s different,” he says, rolling his shoulders as a long feather-lined cape falls down his back to the floor.
“Being birds instead of bird, but I was thinking about your eyes, the plans Eliri shared, and how the design of the eye requires delivering different information to your singular brain, and the way you’re having to relearn to process it. ”
“So you gave yourself twenty eyes.”
“It’s different,” he repeats. “Next time I’ll do my preferred form, and a bird or two for my shoulders. Maybe one day I’ll be able to be myself and a bird-me simultaneously, and send that bird-me across the city to spy.”
“Play with yourself,” she teases lightly, because to be honest Iriset is fairly overwhelmed by the fact that he not only imagines such a thing but certainly will achieve it.
He still grows even after centuries of power.
He burst into nine little blue birds and rearranged himself back again, and it’s so impossible to think about.
She was Singix and Iriset at the same time, but only in the same momentary existence, and even theorized that, in fact, what she became was a third new thing, neither Singix nor Iriset.
“Iriset is impressed,” she says, switching back to Old Sarenpet for Eliri’s sake. “What artist made this place for the Moon-Eater?”
The Moon-Eater touches his own chest with a falsely demure flutter of lashes.
“You made this?” Iriset taps her toes to the mosaic.
“This red god has been around for a long time,” he murmurs. “Now, show an old fairy that eye.”
She does, in a spot of sunlight on the second level, harnessed by a series of mirrors arranged like a spiral chandelier.
They can be manipulated to point natural light in any direction, and the Moon-Eater gifts the space to Iriset, agreeing that his library of art is a good place to practice sundering, with so many various kinds of material objects at her disposal.
The Moon-Eater coos at the milky rainbow beauty of her eye, and she can almost make sense of the play of shadows around him when she closes her flesh eye.
“Why not an eye like the original?” the Moon-Eater asks as they nibble snacks outside on a balcony overlooking the broad silver expanse of the court.
“Because when this eye is fully functional, it will be so much better,” she says, like it’s obvious. Because it is.
“But Iriset will always stand out, in any place, any time. That eye is unmistakable for human.”
Iriset frowns. She hadn’t thought of such an impediment.
An eye like this would have negated her ability to become Singix when Amaranth demanded it.
An eye like this would have marked her as apostate instantly to the soldiers of the Vertex Seal.
Lyric might never have looked at her, with an eye like this.
That’s all irrelevant now, isn’t it? She says, “Iriset does not mind standing out.”
The Moon-Eater laughs. But Eliri glances down at her hands, loosely folded in her lap. Iriset thinks of the story Eliri told her, of her kidnapping and escape. The torture she underwent because of her quartz bones. Standing out hurt Eliri.
But it’s a risk Iriset is willing to take.