33 The wood has a memory of being aflame #2
For days at a time Iriset is fine. She’s also very good at being fine.
She fixes the gaps in her double-dome cradle interface and starts jotting down ideas for a set of interchangeable prosthetics or just caps, maybe, knowing knowing knowing she should sunder it into exactly what she wants.
That will be her graduation to mastery, she jokes to herself, out loud, wishing there was anybody to hear.
One day in a fit of frustrated boredom, she gives up on her sundering and asks for a cage of songbirds.
She makes them ugly little craftmasks with such deep falling weight and infinitesimal ecstatic triggers that when their feathers and skin peel back and their skulls emerge, it’s such a potent change that their offspring carry it with them.
They’ll keep evolving until they always live near live force-weaves and active arrays, and sing with them to create a resonance that makes their skull issue less irritating, probably.
Somebody had to do it, anyway, and Iriset figures it might as well be her. She always liked skull sirens.
The day Eliri brings her a letter, Iriset is bent over a containment array with a small chunk of cold, burned firewood in the center.
Iriset has hypothesized that perhaps she can set the wood to blaze with her sundering, and it might be easier for something that has already been on fire.
The way she could force the transition between ice and water and vapor.
(The wood has a memory of being aflame, she imagines writing, if these were the days she wrote her Silk pamphlets.
The sunderer asks the wood to remember.)
She touches the charcoal, eyes closed, and imagines it flaring to heat. She visualizes the blackened wood, the surface ashy, and beyond into the layers of burned material, smaller layers and smaller, until she imagines the tiny particles of mass that make wood, and she sparks them.
Ecstatic force explodes out from her finger, and the wood bursts into a puff of ash.
Iriset scowls. As soon as she felt the ecstatic force she knew it was wrong.
At the sundering level, the forces don’t feel like themselves, because they aren’t.
They’re the same on this fundamental level, only put together differently.
Sundering is the creation of the fifth force, not using the other forces.
Supposedly. It’s all theory from two beings who can’t actually do it themselves!
Iriset wishes there was someone she could fuck about this.
Holy red moon, it’s been longer since she’s had sex with another person than it has ever been since she first did it!
It would ground her, at least; she always feels better and smarter when she’s getting laid.
But the only person in her vicinity she’d consider is Eliri, and she’s positive Eliri would turn her down.
In a different circumstance she’d proposition the Moon-Eater, out of sheer curiosity, but as long as she isn’t sure what happened to the numen, Iriset wouldn’t be able to relax.
At least the containment array kept the ashes in a tight starburst.
“Still impressive,” Eliri says.
Iriset startles. The chimera is so quiet, going everywhere barefoot like a ghost. “Eliri. This is not what I intended.”
“What wanted?” Eliri says in careful mirané.
“What did you want,” Iriset corrects, standing. She shakes out her wrists. “To set it on fire,” she says first in Old Sarenpet and again in mirané.
“Fire,” Eliri murmurs in mirané.
Iriset decides to try again. She needs to visualize less, maybe, and just do it.
Just do it. The way she directed her eye to connect to Lyric’s body.
Pure brute will. “I wonder if I need to be desperate,” she says quietly, mostly to herself.
“Or if I should…” She trails off. Use my own body, she would have said, except Eliri has thrust a narrow tube at her.
It’s leather, rusty brown and scuffed. Iriset takes it.
“This arrived at Rivermouth for Iriset,” Eliri says.
“A letter?” Iriset flips the tube to open it, dumping the rolled paper into her hand. It’s Lyric’s writing, she realizes with an absolutely untenable ecstatic spark of glee that she squashes like a mosquito. But she huffs a laugh as she sees the salutation.
Holy Syr, it says in mirané. There is no beginning for me, not for this conversation. The state of Silence is absolute.
It’s the fucking Word of Aharté!
Laughing, she scans the whole thing. That’s what this is.
Her fool former husband didn’t write her a travelogue or love letter.
He wrote the opening pages of his most holy book.
As far as she remembers it’s not exactly accurate, though Iriset never had it memorized and she supposes Lyric could recite the whole tract in his sleep.
Unless he’s shifting things on purpose to suit his agenda—the miran, the establishment of the Holy Empire, and maybe… Well, is it an invitation?
Iriset vaguely recalls from the spare catechism she managed to learn as a child that there have been debates regarding the purpose of the dual treatises Word of Aharté and Writings of the Holy Syr, though there was no debate that they were written by Aharté herself and her wife, the Holy Syr.
But were they writing because they were separated due to the Holy Syr’s determination to end the reign of the Moon-Eater, or did they spend time regularly apart?
Was the Holy Syr a god, too, or merely a momentary love of Aharté’s?
Now Iriset knows.
“There is no location for sending a reply,” Eliri says.
Iriset looks up at her with a grin she hasn’t felt on her own face in ages. “That’s fine. The answer is for posterity.”
Eliri frowns, her big gray eyes looking sadder than usual.
But Iriset waves her concern away. “This is exactly what was needed, Eliri.” Iriset has the urge to squeeze the other woman’s arm, but holds back.
She keeps up her smile, though. “Can’t exactly explain, except this is to do with the future. ”
It’s Eliri who reaches out, touching the tip of one crystal claw to Iriset’s cheek. “You looked very pale, when I came,” she says in mingled Sarenpet and mirané. “But color now.”
Iriset opens her mouth to deny it, but why?
She feels bolstered. Lyric invited her to an argument—the grandest, most famous argument in the Holy Empire, where Aharté lays out the tenets of Silence, and the Holy Syr dissects them, encourages them, responds more personally.
Iriset can’t upend the whole philosophy, she can’t argue for human architecture, but maybe she can soften the blows. And Lyric wants to let her.
That’s the only way she’s interested in interpreting this letter.
Instead of writing back immediately, Iriset asks, “Eliri, where can I get a really good sex toy in this city?”
Eliri tilts her head so her blunt bangs sway in a long line. “Sex toy?”
Iriset nods eagerly. “Something to masturbate with.”
“Why not take a lover?”
“Sometimes it’s just better to do things myself,” Iriset says, unsure what expression she makes, but it feels tightly pressed over her cheeks.
“For a good one, Eliri will ask.”
That makes Iriset laugh. “But Eliri knows where to find a bad one?”
The chimera shrugs and it’s one of the most casual gestures Iriset has ever seen her make. “More immediate ideas occur if quality is not assured.”
Iriset leans closer. “I would consider taking a lover if Eliri were interested,” she says.
Eliri’s gray eyes widen, but very quickly she inclines her head in refusal. “But Eliri can ask about that, too,” she says. “This chimera is aware that Roc Aliel has a positive reputation for lovemaking and has never taken a spouse.”
“Ah, no, I don’t want any elaborate flirtations or anything to complicate…
anything. I just need to release tension,” Iriset assures, though it’s not entirely true.
If Roc Aliel, who looks capable and has a very interesting, blocky face, walked in here and pressed her onto the wall, Iriset would gladly participate in getting fucked.
But thoughtful Eliri studies Iriset’s face for a moment, then says, “Eliri can help. Have late dinner with Eliri tonight.”
Taken aback, Iriset nods. Then she spends the rest of the afternoon and evening thinking about claws and crystal teeth, and wondering what an orgasm would do to the resonance of quartz bones and if Iriset would be able to echo it back through her own system.
Eliri arrives with two lacquered boxes, one quite heavy with an elaborate bowed handle.
She offers the smaller to Iriset and says, “This way,” proceeding to lead Iriset to a different tower, up into a rooftop garden with intricately carved crenelations and a lot of night-blooming eris flowers trailing their vines around the bright white stone.
They sit and unpack the snacks and drinks in the smaller of the two boxes. It’s finger food and some light wine and infused water. Out of the heavier box Eliri removes a water pipe. “Eliri brought drugs,” Iriset murmurs.
The chimera pours one of the infused waters into the glass basin of the squat pipe.
“Irsu is a connoisseur,” she says. “Eliri sometimes partakes, especially when consumed by a frustration or problem, or when Eliri… I… need to let go of something.” As she continues to speak, she sets up the various accoutrements: charcoal and matches, the leafy drug itself, a smoothly articulated pipe decorated like a snake, with a mouthpiece of bright copper.
As Eliri deftly sets up the pipe, Iriset pinches the leaves. They’re a mix of various things, some more like shredded fibrous roots, the rest actual leaves. The combination smells floral and rich.