Chapter 42 #2
He shakes back into his body when the Moon-Eater calls Iriset’s name, and Lyric realizes how far behind he’s fallen.
He hurries past lascivious looks and a few beckoning hands (and tails).
The Moon-Eater is in a fairly gender-ambiguous form, wearing a long vest entirely wet and plastered to his body, and oh, yes, he’s got four arms and hands.
Iriset marches to him and leans up onto her toes to speak into his ear. Lyric stops at the edge of the fountain, vaguely concerned for the rainbows of fish trying to dodge all the stomping and twirling feet.
“Ah,” the Moon-Eater says. Much of the revelry dims as more and more people notice the interruption. Shade wraps his lower pair of arms around Iriset’s hips and pulls her flush against him, his upper hands cup her face.
The rain is only mist against Lyric’s cheeks as he watches. The Moon-Eater says, “She finally found a way. Are you all right?”
Iriset shakes her head no, and the Moon-Eater sighs. “Very well,” he says, moving back into Old Sarenpet. “This farewell-to-the-Moon-Eater revel is now a funeral for the beloved Eliri the Adept Hand!”
Iriset grabs his face and tugs him closer and says something fast, to which the Moon-Eater makes an expression of sorrow.
But he yells and his voice echoes: “Go, friends! Go and return with wings, design wings or costume wings, anything so themed! Tonight will be the greatest, the last, the most magnificent revel to honor the great, beloved Eliri Who Touched the Sun!”
“Will there be winners?” someone calls out, and it’s followed by cheers, and the Moon-Eater laughs, making promises to award excellent prizes, while Iriset makes her way back to Lyric and tugs him out of the party again.
Instead of heading for her rooms, Iriset drags him to her workshop and falls into a design fever, heedless of Lyric’s attempts to draw her out of it. Finally he resigns himself and sends for Maimeri to bring them food.
Iriset doesn’t protest as he and Maimeri take turns shoving food against her lips until she bites, as long as they also take turns modeling for her.
She’s creating different wings out of various materials found in the workshop: feathered, skinned, and scaled.
The sun sets and fireworks already burst every few moments when the designs are ready.
Iriset straps delicate harnesses around them and activates the wings with ecstatic charges, then taps into flow, and Lyric feels the design lock into his own inner rising.
From the corner of Lyric’s eye he can see dark green and gray feathers ruffling, and when he breathes the wings expand and contract along with his lungs.
Maimeri’s wings are delicate, colorful moth wings made of tiny scales.
They flutter differently than Lyric’s but also tie to ahz breathing.
Lyric can’t help but smile. The wings are pink, with black tips and black eyes, and long tails from the lower lobes.
They coordinate gorgeously with Maimeri’s mirané skin.
Maimeri’s pleasure shows in the subtle dimpling at the corners of ahz mouth.
Iriset struggles briefly with her own wings, and Lyric helps attach the harness. She can do her own inner design links, and when her wings unfurl it’s like being stabbed in the chest:
The wings she crafted for herself are tattered, the long strips of godgrass boning obvious, the paper torn and streaked with old ink.
But they move, and it’s almost more impressive, more magical, than realistic wings.
These are scraps that she designed into life, and Iriset isn’t hiding it. “Iriset,” he says sadly.
She takes a deep breath to expand the wings.
They even creak gently, like branches in winter wind.
Lyric can’t help but hurt to watch her, to see the manifestation of her grief and what he fears is self-hatred, all of which she’s turned into a haunting beauty.
Even this, in his empire, would have been punishable by death.
At the revel, Iriset murmurs, “Eliri would hate this,” then flits away from him, from Maimeri, slipping through everyone with wild laughter, a spark in her eyes, flirtation in every thread of her body.
Lyric watches while he can, but there is too much: clashing music, the cries of dancers, splashing water, the ground itself shaking because the earthquakes are so frequent now.
In the sky a vivid white-and-silver dragon soars, long bodied with dozens of wings that must be the Moon-Eater, and another one pink and black that he guesses is the numen.
They fly together, coiling around each other, peeling apart, and just look like they’re having fun.
Lyric haunts the edges of the celebration, feeling odd and disembodied, unable to stop thinking about River, what River is going through, how River might be spending the night. Maimeri wants him to dance, but Lyric cannot, scanning the crowd for Iriset. He needs her.
When he finds her again, Iriset is drinking something out of a cup in another person’s hand, then is turned by her shoulders into open-mouthed kisses with someone else.
The wine spills between their mouths and they laugh, sucking at each other’s lips, and it should be a vision of easy debauchery, pleasure shared, but even as Iriset is pressed between two bodies, both of them worshipping her with kisses and grins, hands under clothing and caressing the long lines of Iriset’s tattered wings, the look on her face is not ecstasy: It is shattered.
The flinch between her brows, the bend of her lips, the pained squeeze of her eyelids are all things a stranger might read as joy and arousal so sharp it loses itself, but all Lyric can see is pain.
He breaks in, pushing her lovers away, and flicks her forehead so she opens her eyes. The opal eye shines blue-green, vivid and pearlescent, while her desert-glass eye is glazed. Her mouth shapes his name, and Lyric puts an arm around her to draw her away from the noise, away from the chaos.
Iriset stumbles with him, pliant and humming. “Lyric,” she says, his name too thick and milky for comfort. She’s drunk.
“I’m taking you to bed,” he says.
“Oh, good, where’s your bunny, is az coming?” Iriset giggles.
“Here,” Maimeri says, “and no.”
Lyric glances at Maimeri with ahz beautiful moth wings.
Az is ethereal in the fire- and moonlight, with so many strange bodies shifting and undulating around them.
This is the first time since they’ve known each other that Maimeri has voluntarily left Lyric alone with anybody.
He reaches out and digs his fingers into the soft tuck behind Maimeri’s jaw, grasping ahz like he’ll never let go, because he doesn’t deserve someone loving him like this, someone he isn’t going to choose, can’t choose, can’t stay with.
“Thank you,” he says with all the devotion he can muster.
“Now kiss!” Iriset commands, throwing her hands in the air.
Maimeri nuzzles ahz face into Lyric’s palm and slides a glare at Iriset before slipping away into the dancers.
“Let’s go,” Lyric says, tugging at Iriset.
“Do you know what?” She leans toward his ear but is very loud.
“I have never been truly drunk before! I can feel all my fingers and toes more than usual, and my body is—my body is full, almost too full, but I know where everything is. But also, also! I’m moving very slowly, aren’t I?
My head is foggy and my opal eye keeps crackling, which doesn’t make any sense unless somebody spilled wine on it—do you think there’s wine in my eye? ”
Iriset pulls to a sloppy stop and shoves her very widened opal eye too close to Lyric’s: He couldn’t see if he wanted to. So he kisses the tip of her nose and she wrinkles it. “You should be drunk, too.”
“Why?” Lyric asks, maneuvering her into their old tower. “Is it fun?”
“Not really, you know, not really. Huh.” She frowns down at her feet, staring at them as she stomps up the stairs. Her wing tips trail against the walls, scraping lightly, and Lyric’s shed feathers as they go.
“It’s not fun,” she mutters, and her pout is so cute.
“Are you going to throw up?” Lyric asks.
The one time he was drunk, with Garnet at age sixteen, they both threw up.
His father threatened to cut Garnet off and find Lyric a new body-twin, and Lyric distinctly remembers deciding there would be no consequences to saying, “No you won’t,” and puking on his father’s shoes. Surprisingly, he’d been right.
Iriset tilts her head as if checking in with herself, before sneering “No” and continuing her slow progress up the stairs.
Lyric watches her bend down so that she’s helping herself with her hands, and chooses to let her have this, unless she asks for help. “I’m here,” he says, though, so she knows she’s not alone.
Eventually they arrive at the bathing chamber and Lyric shucks his wings off quickly in order to help Iriset with hers.
Then he climbs with her down into the wide tub and leaves her with her head propped on the rim to turn on the faucets.
Water bursts out, immediately churning as it fills the tub, and Lyric gets back out.
“Lyric,” Iriset murmurs, head rolling back and forth, “don’t leave me here alone or I’ll drown.”
“Hold out for two minutes,” he instructs gently, and goes outside to find Saff, the older of the attendants assigned to him since the very beginning.
He asks for simple food, crackers or soup or something for absolute drunkards, and stomach-soothing tea.
Back in the bathing room he drags over a hamper just in case Iriset does decide to throw up.
Horrifyingly, there are tear streaks on her temples.
Lyric strips down and gets in with her, murmuring nothings as he approaches so she isn’t startled. He pulls her in and holds her against his chest. “Just breathe,” he says. “I have you. There will be tea soon, and some crackers.”
“It won’t help,” she says.