36 Sharp edge #3
For a long moment Iriset studies him. It’s strange that he’s not human, when every detail about his form says otherwise. Iriset doesn’t think if she were a numen she’d ever bother pretending to be human. What’s the point? “Do you even know what you want?”
“To be happy, of course.”
She rolls her eyes.
“I want to be the foundation of a whole empire,” he says intently. He grabs her knees, leaning in. “I want to know what that is like. I want to feed the pulse of such a massive, elaborate power. It sounds like a dream.”
“The numen thinks it’s a prison.”
The Moon-Eater’s blissful expression falls away.
“Never has no roots. That’s how I began this life, you know.
Roots. And when I was born into this being, I lost part of that.
The simplicity of roots, of nutrients and twisting mushroom electricity and tickling earthworms. What you and Never have described, it feels like going home.
Remembering home. And it won’t be forever, right? ”
Iriset nods. She can’t say she doesn’t understand a little, even though it’s such an alien way to think about existing.
“Because Never wanted to rescue me,” Shade says with deep self-satisfaction.
“I could kill it, too, if I can kill you.”
The Moon-Eater sucks in a harsh breath. “You could,” he whispers.
“Do you want me to?”
“No! I…” He shakes his head slowly, eyes huge. He puts a hand over his chest. “But you could. Oh my, that… hurts, too.”
Iriset sighs. She covers his hand with hers. “Congratulations on finding the sharp edge of love.”
The Moon-Eater’s mouth ticks sideways with bitterness. “Oh, I know that edge well, Iriset Sunderer. Only, it has never applied to my Never.”
“Why did you lock it away? I knew almost immediately. You aren’t so good at being it,” Iriset says just to be mean.
Shade sulks. “Never didn’t want me to let you do any of this. I thought it would leave again.”
“So you put it inside you,” Iriset murmurs, and that she totally understands.
The urge to have something beloved inside, not just for a moment, for sex, but forever.
Safe, consumed, whole. Like the marriage seed.
“Shade, do you know why Never is so invested in my sundering? It’s the first word it said to me.
Sunderer. Back then, I guess it thought I could free you.
Is that all? If you’re unraveled, only a sunderer can free you again, remake you again? ”
“Ah, I never understand Never,” Shade jokes.
Iriset waits.
With a sigh, Shade shifts nearer to Iriset on the bench. “Never has always been looking for something. Perhaps a sunderer is it, or perhaps a sunderer is a step toward this thing Never longs for. That is my best guess.”
“I’m not sure I could possibly give Never what it wants,” Iriset warns. “I don’t want to see it. Forget I exist for a while, all right?”
Shade kisses her with pouting lips. She lets him, lets him open her mouth and lick into her, and she arches her back and enjoys his sucking at her neck—extremely aware it’s the exact spot where the wound was, the gushing death wound—and welcomes the arousal, considers letting him keep going, fuck her in the shape of a human, not a monster of hands and fleshy tendrils.
But Iriset shoves him back with a halfhearted tsk and the Moon-Eater chuckles, and before he goes he catches her hand. He kisses the fingers and… pauses.
She does her best not to grimace as he notices her crystal fingernails. He says nothing, just gives her a knowing look. It’s intense, and Iriset pushes him away again.
He goes.
Iriset holds on to the feeling of arousal. She gathers it up, the heat and power of it, and she cups her hands as if she can cup the power outside her body.
Iriset blows gently, her inner design so hot her breath becomes vapor in the spring air. She plucks it with both hands, with crystal fingernails, pulling at it like two curving boundaries of a spider’s web. She stretches it out, and suddenly in her hands there is a big array of water droplets.
Mesmerized, Iriset releases them into rain.
Iriset doesn’t ask much of Eliri and the Rivermouth king, just some space, time, and in return she helps their fortress designers rework the precinct into balance.
The rest of the time she divides between scrawling plans again and again in slightly different configurations to mitigate the blowback and practicing sundering.
Blowback happens when a force-knot unwinds unexpectedly or too fast, or when an extreme event makes one force change into another force.
If an array breaks because it was improperly balanced.
There are plenty of reasons force-blowback occurs.
In this case, Iriset expects it on such a huge scale because unraveling the Moon-Eater is like trying to unravel forces themselves.
The power unleashed, the strength of the fifth force, which will streak out along the lines of the metadesign to bind the Holy Design into place, which will latch on to the moon, assuming they catch it, which will feed the force-loop holding the Moon-Eater’s transformed self to the Holy Design to the moon—all that power must be balanced, too.
Balanced, or directed somehow. Somewhere.
Eliri suggests it’s the blowback that can slingshot somebody back and forth in time.
But Iriset is pretty sure, and this is only a hunch, that the time loop is already in motion and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it except let the untethered array completely break apart and take the crater city with it.
As time passes, Iriset grows better at little sunderings.
She exists in a state of pre-arousal most of the time, which isn’t as inconvenient as it sounds for someone like her.
It’s fairly typical. She writes up Writings of the Holy Syr.
She meets with Helica Silkhair and the expanding group of city planners.
She ignores the echoing tremble of the earthquakes that come again and again, that the mitigation dome takes care of less and less well.
(At least the tremors keep the city in line and eager to assist in solutions.) She turns her nails into amethyst and back.
Eliri adapts one of the iris caps she developed for Irsu River’s cascading irises by grafting it with a pagoda diagram intended to illuminate the threads of force in a confined location.
It’s delightful, and Iriset uses it to transform her double-dome eye socket into a permeable net and can see anything she wants with only the tap of a stylus to the special iris cap, and perfectly sunders it to her opal eye.
Because at her core she’s a designer, she sketches out an array to activate her inner design toward arousal and acquires Eliri’s help fusing it onto her body.
It’s not a tattoo, exactly, nor inlaid quartz, but Iriset and Eliri make a mixture of ink that includes silicate dust and pure quartz particles.
Iriset lies back and bares her belly for Eliri to draw the design diagram just under her navel using a thin brush.
The thick ink is dark gray and glitters in the even everflame light.
When it is in place, Iriset melds it with her flesh. Sunders it part of her.
She can now snap ecstatic to the north node of the design, beginning a declining pattern that moves into falling, then flow, then rising and back to heat up her belly.
It’s faster than rousing herself in the usual way.
Iriset remembers all the times she considered putting her intellectual weight behind an old-fashioned sex toy, and can’t believe she finally did it in service of something so ephemeral and unpredictable as magic.