35 The thing about the numen #2
Never doesn’t understand, but at the same time understands.
This human man says the insides of everything are the same, that he can manipulate the fundamentals because the fundamentals aren’t that complicated, merely very flexible.
And just like all the beings and nonbeings in the world (and probably beyond) share universal fundamental parts, there is a universal language for communicating beingness itself.
The language is pristine, simultaneously both simple and complex, and the human considers all conscious beings and maybe less self-aware consciousnesses, even, to be born with basic knowledge of it!
(It’s math.)
What this human wants to understand about bees is their instincts.
How bees communicate knowledge from queen and worker to larva.
Their behaviors are so complex they surely cannot be communicated in the observable-by-people types of communication they share: dancing and smell.
So where is the information processed? The old man can change it, can change what bees are by changing their invisible information, but he can’t read it. He can’t parse it.
Never thinks Shade would be delighted to try to become a bee for a few generations, and practice dancing like this. “And,” the old man says, “and is an individual bee the sum of its behavior, of its self, or must you look at the entire hive to understand what bees are?”
To be honest, philosophy is not Never’s interest, either. But he stays for many long years because if this human can change one thing into another, then can’t he become a god, too, like the mother? Can’t he find her? Know her? Explain why she did what she did?
“It’s because I understand the fifth force,” the old man tells Never, “that I don’t use it very often.”
A hundred years later Never meets several numena all in the same place! It’s a chain of islands in the warm oceans far, far south of the crater of its birth. They know what these humans with the power of the fifth force are: sunderers.
It’s rare, but some humans are born with an instinct for the slippery fifth force, the force of creation that creates all other forces. It’s natural, they say, but not for humans with their limited instincts to tap into.
“Why can’t we?” Never asks.
Family says, “We aren’t made of the same stuff.”
“I thought everything was made of everything.”
“We aren’t organized in the same way, Family means,” says Courage.
“Why would we want to be,” sneers Obedience.
Never agrees. “Do you remember, or did you ever know, a sunderer who fell from the sky and made a crater in the desert on the continent north of here?”
“Silence!” cries Beauty. “You mean Silence?”
Strength says, “That was a sunderer, not one of us?”
Never frowns. “She was human, until she was not. She changed herself like a sunderer changes material, and it was her fifth force that birthed me and my brother.”
The numena of the Ceres islands hum in thought. But they don’t have answers, either.
Because it is near, and because it has been centuries, Never chooses to return home to the crater, to Shade. Though Never is disinclined to let Shade hear it call the crater home.
It arrives to find a thriving city, an expansive empire, dedicated to the same sunderer Never has sought for so many hundreds of years.
They’ve given Silence a human name, and Never can’t make itself care much if it’s the name of a god that existed before or was her own human name before she was a shimmer of light.
The energy of the crater is balanced and familiar.
At first Never wanders the precincts touching elaborate architectural designs, impressed and intrigued.
It can’t shake the strange feeling that everything is too familiar, and it listens for word of a loudmouth wild god, but only hears of a king, a brutal people with red-brown skin like the rock of the crater (like the bark of an ancient old tree), Aharté of Silence, and the Moon-Eater.
Oh, Never is very, very upset.
The energy permeating the city is familiar because it all feels like Shade. The thinnest, most underlying sense of his roots, rooting this entire fucking empire in place!
It slips into the palace and finds the core of its other self, the spark that bursts every day, once a day, very much like a tiny explosion of the fifth force.
But it is no sunderer sparking the seed of Shade’s existence.
It is just a human, a human using her internal design to keep alive a cycle, a rhythm, a spell.
They call it communing with a god, but it is design. Practically sundering.
Well, Never doesn’t make the best choices when it’s emotionally compromised, just like anyone else. It tries to tear apart Shade’s prison, even if that means tearing apart the woman waking her internal design to ecstasy in order to draw Shade close to consciousness every day.
Every day! Trapped in this half-waking nightmare!
Never is caught because Never allows itself to be caught. It needs time to understand this cage and how to free Shade.
Being very old doesn’t always make a being very patient, but in Never’s case, it was born that way. It waits, it studies, and to be honest it grows less and less enamored with humans—and it barely liked them to begin with.
It’s easy to let them think they contain it, that they can cut off its head or strangle it or make it bleed, or that a null collar makes a difference to it.
For several decades Never amuses itself pretending the humans are cute, watching them as if they’re its pets, like an ant farm, or maybe a beehive just like the old man in the city on a city on a city studied.
But it rests surrounded by the vibrant pulse of Shade’s life.
The humans believe their savior—the wife of Aharté, the mother of Shade!
Ridiculous!—unraveled the Moon-Eater, their apostate, wild god.
And yes, Never can imagine Shade liking such a reputation, but how dare they view such a thing as an ending, when instead it is a prison Shade has been trapped inside for four hundred years!
Never has rarely felt the urge to destroy, and always fleetingly. But while it waits, it steeps in killing intention. It hates. It grows into disdain.
But a human gives it a drink one night, and when Never touches her skin, and her flesh feeds it the same way Silence drew sustenance from the air itself, it knows. Finally, finally! This one can free Shade, can remake this crater back into the home it is supposed to be.
Sunderer, it whispers to her.
Never never predicted the sunderer could change not only material but time.
It wonders, vaguely, as it drifts inside the form of its brother, if the old man three hundred years ago suspected such a thing, or if Silence knew, if she remains nearby in some way, a shimmer of light on water, or every shimmer of light on water all around the world simultaneously.
The shimmers now, the shimmers before, the shimmers in the future that is also Never’s now.
It accepts seemingly contradictory notions a lot more readily, after everything.
Shade does not keep it from listening through the layers of Shade’s existence, though Shade does hold tight so that Never can’t separate itself without doing damage.
It almost relaxes. Almost sinks away into Shade, into itself like they are the same, like it was always right. Ha! It could let go completely, stop yearning, stop leaving, be consumed and subsumed.
But! It can’t quite manage to be anything but leaves.
It wonders what it would be like for leaves to be unraveled the way roots want to be, want to be threaded into the fabric of an empire, a massive array supporting millions of little human lives.
Like mycelium and sleeping cicadas and worms wound into and part of a root system.
For a split breath it understands Shade.
When the sunderer drags it apart from Shade, everything is sticky and stringy, and Shade groans while Never’s skin tears away from his skin.
“Numen,” the sunderer says, gathering it up in her arms. She’s touching it all over, and Never suspects she pulled it out in this shape because she imagined it, not because of any preference of its.
They’re sitting on the floor in a pyramid room.
Never’s shoulders are half collapsed as it bends over itself, unused to form, unused to being so separate.
The sunderer… Iriset… is flushed and on her knees, holding it.
Nearby Shade scowls at them from his youth form, the boy with a topknot and red eyes glittering with tears.
“What the fuck,” Iriset says, and Shade bares his teeth at her, but Never… laughs. It’s dry and rasping, but laughter.
They both look at it like it’s lost itself, Iriset surprised and Shade’s scowl falling into a massive pout, like he’s been bullied horribly. Never laughs more.
Laughter is the only sound in the room for a while. Iriset releases Never, and Shade hugs his knees against his chest. Never slowly reaches for Shade, taking his wrist. It tugs until Shade loosens up and scoots closer. “You’re teaching her wrong,” Never says.
“What?”
“The sunderer can’t learn the way she learned design. It isn’t design. It isn’t diagrams and threads of force knotting and snapping. It’s not what she does, it’s who she is.”
“I said instinct!” Shade cries. “I said that, I told her. It’s like how butterflies find their way here to the sea every year. Or how bees know how to dance and spiders how to fly!”
Iriset says, “It’s difficult to make something happen that I don’t exactly understand.” She sets her jaw and takes a long breath through the nose. “I am trying.”
“You don’t have to understand it to do it,” Never says. “I don’t understand how I change form, but I do it.”
Shade nods. “That’s true, you don’t understand how your body makes food into energy and shit, but you do it. You said you mitigated alcohol inside your body.”
Iriset scoffs. “Maybe I did. There’s no measure to know.”
“You sundered when you gave Lyric Aharté your eye.”
“You brought us back here,” Never says.
“By accident! I thought I was freeing the Moon-Eater! I only broke open an array.”
Her flushed cheeks are getting worse, and Never can feel the urgency of her ecstatic pulse, the tumult of forces in her inner design.
Shade leans closer. “You know what it feels like. Focus on that.”
“No,” Never says. “It can’t be taught, only willed.”
“That’s useless,” Iriset says ferociously.
“Yes,” Never agrees. It makes its finger into a blade and stabs her through the neck.