34 Appealing
Appealing
By the time the spring equinox rolls around, Iriset has grown used to the tension between fearing what the Moon-Eater has done to the numen and might do to her, and pretending it’s normal to work alongside him in the art library.
When he’s quiet, when he places a tract of interesting theory onto her desk—or more often a pretty sketch of something outside: clouds, trees, birds, and once a portrait of Iriset herself—it’s easy to mistake him for any design disciple or scholar.
He’s skilled after centuries of practice time, and Iriset loves to draw.
She can fall into a quick, intense conversation with him about artistic techniques or a particular brushstroke or color medium, then fall back out as they return to their respective works.
He can be so unassuming with his power, wielding it subtly or sometimes not at all, and occasionally his art is so silly that it’s too easy to think of him as human.
Outside of the library she’s avoided his presence unless he’s pretending to be the numen—for how could she excuse avoiding Never?
Iriset has done her best to sometimes wander the fortress grounds listening for gossip and rumors about the numen, about the Moon-Eater.
She built a small silk tool that fits over her first two fingers just to the first knuckle, held in place by a ring of copper wire.
In the fingertips are chips of salt hardened with miniature arrays, and when she touches anything—trees, flowers, benches, statues, walls—she can sense if there is hidden design under the design.
She’s looking for another prison. For signs of the numen, locked away or unraveled.
Wisps of it. There must be evidence. So when Iriset is frustrated with her lack of progress in sundering, or she needs to move her feet to unlock ideas about the more complicated issues with the untethered array that fall under her responsibilities—like the fucking design blowback that will make the whole project too self-sacrificing—she walks.
She wanders. She listens and touches. She attempts to flirt her way around the fortress, but most people don’t want to get too close.
They either blame her for causing the earthquakes (fair) or treat her like she’s single-handedly saving them all (embarrassing).
A bit less than a quad after the equinox, which they don’t celebrate in the crater city at all—especially when everything is so locked down as the tremors hit more frequently and with greater intensity—the Moon-Eater shows up with a completely new and fascinating and appalling idea for distracting Iriset from hitting her head against sundering.
“Iriset,” he says with a grin.
Iriset is focused so deeply on finding the exact moment between water and vapor, to chart the feeling and slow it down in her mind’s eye, she doesn’t notice Shade.
But at his voice, several clouds of vapor crystallize and fall to the worktable with tiny little tink-tink-tinks.
“Ah fuck,” she mutters, sweeping the ice crystals up.
“I’m busy,” she says, wiping her palm on her hip.
If she doesn’t learn to sunder skillfully in order to unravel the Moon-Eater and transform his forces into the foundational fuel of Holy Design, this entire project will be moot.
All the preparations and arguments will be wasted, and the city will crumble under the power of the untethered array, possibly rip a fissure in time itself or the whole planet or both!
(What she really needs to believe in is herself.)
Shade sighs like a flighty mirané prince.
He’s in one of his human forms, twenty, mirané-brown skin, a topknot spilling waves of black hair down his back, with a loose vibrant orange robe tied at his waist and darker orange pleated skirt.
All of it glitters with embroidered flowers—a tree flower of some kind, cherry or plum, Iriset isn’t an expert.
Matching gold earrings cling up his lobes and there are strings of gold in his hair.
And bells, maybe? Something tiny and tinkling when he moves.
His eyes are full red, shards of garnet and blood resin.
He says, “Rattle yourself out of this mood and go with me. I need you.”
Iriset makes a sour expression.
Shade laughs, grabs her hand, and drags her to a hidden door behind a display of weapons carved with tiny figures either in battle or in orgy.
Iriset schools her face as he pulls her up a tight spiral of iron stairs and they burst into a room shaped like a pyramid.
Four sides sweep straight up to a single point, and at the tip there are skylights of creamy green glass Iriset suspects lead to a funnel of light, not the actual outside.
There are no pyramid-shaped anythings anywhere in the fortress that she’s noticed. And she’s been looking.
Eliri is present, sitting demurely on a low sofa.
There’s a curtain-draped bed against one wall, a table and the sofa at another, a diagnostic chair like the one in Eliri’s workroom, and against the fourth wall a contraption that looks like a human-sized square of reinforced wood with chains and shackles attached.
On the table before Eliri is an assemblage of knives, rods, hooks, wires, and an obvious stylus.
Eliri has a sheaf of thick paper on her knee. Notes, it looks like.
“What do you want?” Iriset asks, the whole picture giving her some ideas she’s fairly concerned about.
“I want you to hurt me,” the Moon-Eater answers smoothly. He walks to the table and chooses a small curved knife. “This is used for castration by the Pirs.”
“Cows?” Iriset snaps, breaking into a cold sweat.
He looks over his shoulder at her, both amused and taking her to task. The bells in his hair sound like tiny waterfalls.
Iriset swallows. She looks at Eliri, not bothering to hide the accusation she’s feeling. Their conversation when high led Iriset to believe that Eliri has been tortured! How can she—!
Eliri simply says, “Shade wants to let go.”
Tapping the hooked knife against his cheek thoughtfully, Shade says, “Eliri and I have tried various arrays and static designs to hold my body embodied, but the fact is if I want to feel pain I must make the pain exist to myself. I want you to help.” He stalks back to her, and Iriset sucks in a breath, holding her ground as he gets way too close.
She can feel the heat radiating from her cheeks.
She hears the slight scrape of the blade against his skin as he drags it down without cutting.
The Moon-Eater smells like nothing when he speaks, and perhaps that’s part of the problem.
“You’re a sunderer, aren’t you? That’s what I’ve been promised, and you can do it.
It occurred to me that a different kind of impetus might help you achieve your goals. Won’t stabbing me be exciting?”
Iriset’s mouth drops open. She has no idea what to say.
“Come on, Iriset. Eliri likes this part of our work together.”
That makes Iriset cut a hard look at Eliri, who displays zero reaction.
Iriset narrows her eyes. She looks at Eliri’s left hand where there is absolutely no hint of wound or scar on her smallest finger.
Like one would expect from a master designer.
Iriset’s mind whirs and she says, “That’s because Eliri finds this to be a game of extreme consent. ”
Eliri blinks, and the Moon-Eater says, “Ah?” totally confused.
It takes a lot of willpower for Iriset to tamp down how smug she feels.
She smiles her worst smile at Shade. “You make yourself feel pain? Eliri can stab you and it’s your choice to feel it.
You choose the consequences of her actions.
She can shove a knife right into your heart and get away with it because you choose, Shade.
” Iriset laughs and does her best to make it mean.
“Eliri hasn’t solved this problem because Eliri doesn’t want you to be able to feel anything without choice. ”
The Moon-Eater spins to Eliri. “Eliri?”
The chimera looks at the floor, but there’s a flush to her desert-peach cheeks. Her blunt haircut shifts forward, but none of it is long enough to hide anything. “This chimera obeys the Moon-Eater,” she murmurs in Old Sarenpet.
And the Moon-Eater actually pouts. He crosses his arms and sticks his bottom lip out.
Iriset throws her hands in the air. “I’ll do it. Let Eliri go.”
“Can you hold me embodied and stab me at the same time? It might be a three-person job,” the Moon-Eater says.
“It’s better if everyone present wants it to work,” Iriset says flatly.
Eliri falls to her knees. “Forgive this chimera, Moon-Eater,” she whispers, hands clutched together, thumbs pressed hard to her forehead.
Shade—to his credit, Iriset supposes—kneels, too, and pulls Eliri’s hands from her face. “No need, my little chimera. Tell me next time.”
She turns watery gray eyes to him, and Shade kisses her forehead where there’s a reddening mark. “Go home for a few days.”
Eliri gets to her feet with his help and goes quickly, back straight. When she’s gone through the stairway, Shade cocks his head so his ponytail rings harshly. “I thought you and Eliri were friends.”
“Maybe that’s why I got her away from you,” Iriset says. Her pulse is uneven, too much ecstatic making her reckless.
The Moon-Eater hums again, and between blinks he’s before her, grasping her elbows with long fingers. “Do you think you can hold me in my body?”
“If you aren’t trying to break out, maybe. Probably. Is that all it takes to feel pain?”
He stares at her, stunned. “What?”