With a sighing little pout, he says, “I want to be the friend of Her Glory’s friend, of course.”
“The Moon-Eater’s Mistress and I aren’t friends,” she snaps, exasperated. Glancing at the throne. Why can’t anyone feel that bizarre hum she’s feeling?
In the sudden silence Iriset looks back at Hehet. He wears an unbelievably satisfied smile.
“Excuse me,” she says, without excuse, and ducks away. She pushes past several people, hoping she remembers to ask Sidoné about this annoying person later.
She approaches the throne itself, cutting behind it to avoid the Vertex Seal where he stands chatting with Ambassador Erxan. Iriset wants to stare at him: Her brief glance told her he isn’t wearing paint at all, and a small white mask lies discarded around his neck. He took her thoughts to heart.
But behind the throne is where the tug of threads has its core.
Crouched barefoot on the shallow steps of the dais, leaning its rear against the moon rock forming the throne’s base is a man—or a man-shaped thing. Worn gray trousers tie at its ankles and about its whip-thin waist, and a dark sleeveless robe hangs open over its chest. The thing’s skin is a washed pink, drained of true color, as if once it had been a glorious, oiled miran, but centuries of shadows have withered its rich skin from that red-brown of the Moon-Eater’s moon into this sickly salamander pink. Even its long, lank hair is the same shade, its lips, its fingernails, and what should have been the whites of its eyes. Around a vivid pink pupil its iris is faceted black. Like shards of black diamonds drawn together and glimmering sharp.
A thick steel collar rings its neck. A chain is attached to the collar, its other end bolted to a ring at the base of the Vertex Seal throne. No one else in the room pays it any attention.
Iriset can barely breathe.
She slips nearer, unable to resist, and offers her warm cup of beer.
The creature takes it in both pink hands, and its long fingers brush the back of Iriset’s knuckles. She shivers, and the creature’s skin flushes silvery for the briefest moment, then falls to its dreary pink again.
Iriset stares. It drinks the beer in one long pour, its diamond-black eyes on Iriset the entire time.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers as she accepts the empty cup again. “I’ll bring you more if I can.”
She does not know why she makes the promise, except that her inner design thrums with power at its nearness. Its lips part and sharp pink-ivory teeth show: a line of tiny fangs. It says a word she doesn’t know, in a rasping voice like tearing bark off a tree.
Shaking her head, Iriset backs away. Suddenly she’s terrified. Her eyes widen. Being noticed by such a thing cannot suit her role, her scheme. She can’t sympathize with this prisoner when rescuing another prisoner is her goal.
As she leaves, her blood slows to its regular paces, and ecstatic force pops in her ears; rising a tingle at the back of her neck; falling a churn in her gut; and flow flow flow like nausea. She hadn’t felt any forces when she was near it, but had somehow thought she felt more! What a mystery, but too dangerous of one.
“Poor fairy,” says a voice, catching her. Diaa of Moonshadow, Amaranth and Lyric’s mother. Iriset covers her eyes with her fingers and says nothing.
“It’s been here longer than I’ve been alive,” Diaa continues softly, putting her arm around Iriset to murmur. “For a hundred years and more, captured trying to murder the Moon-Eater’s Mistress during the reign of Ladalir mé Idris Her Glory. There is nothing you can do, hiha, but I always approve of the new courtiers who are affected by its presence.”
With that, Diaa squeezes her and floats away to a new encounter.
Iriset doesn’t know if she should be impressed or horrified that the mother of the Vertex Seal considers such monstrosity no more than a gauge with which to judge the personality of her children’s friends.
The numen
Actually the creature chained behind the throne of the Vertex Seal had not come to kill the Moon-Eater’s Mistress a hundred years ago. It came for the Moon-Eater.
The creature, a numen, has been called many things—fairy, angel, ghost, she, he, es, xe, ah and an, alushad, they—but among a people like the miran who name the skyitand a mountainitand the moonit, so it wished to be known, too. Its own people have no such words. They hardly have words at all anymore, because words confirm and conform, they create meanings and enforce the patterns of the universe instead of dancing between.
A word enslaves, much like the collar snapped around its neck, binding the numen into a single pattern, an exclusive form.
But no matter: It can hunt from any cage.
Stories of numena pop up around the world, though they’re out of fashion in most places with rigid structures of religion or magic. Places children are encouraged to stop believing in fairy tales, societies above all that nonsense of interconnectivity and free spirits and fun. The only reason anybody believes innumena in Moonshadow City these days is because, well, they have one.
It doesn’t speak to anybody, though sometimes laughs in a scratchy voice as worn as wind-scoured bones in the high desert. It eats what amuses it to eat: sometimes dust gathered slowly over a week in its underground prison, sometimes flower petals provided by miran who think they know what it is, sometimes meat but only raw because it’s funnier that way for how the miran dislike it. Sometimes it doesn’t eat for years. Then there are those rare occasions when a guard gets a tad too near and it manages to touch, to soak in those forces that make it.
This numen is patient.
Others, not so much. One had its favorite hat stolen in Ur-Syel and waited no time at all to follow the culprit home, where it slaughtered him through three generations in every direction, teaching the Urs that one should never pick up unclaimed clothing left lying around. In the Bow they’re called trick men and tend to untie canopy bindings and spoil milk, unless one can be tricked back into a bargain, in which case they give unending blessings for defeating enemies. Across the prairies and leading into the ancient empire of Res, they were the fickle, strong wind, summoned by snapping pennants and worshipped with every breath. It’s unclear whether they ever really lived in Res. Numena are tiny as bumblebees or towering as gods, depending on the convenience to the story. They’re excellent lovers unless they decide they’re hungry, they carry the souls of the dead to whatever heaven the souls of the dead go, they talk to birds, they soak up sun like flowers, they travel by stepping through shadows and curse through dreams. They’ve never existed in the Ceres Remnants, though their people have plenty of stories about demons of humanity’s own making.
The Vertex Seal Tor méra Ladalir tried for thirteen years to kill the imprisoned numen. He attempted cutting off its head, a reliable method if there ever was one, to no avail. The numen’s head fell, unraveled, vanished to nothing, then reappeared on its body. The person serving as the Architect of the Seal at the time suggested that the null collar stopped working on the head the moment the head was detached, and therefore those forces of the numen’s body were able to rejoin the Holy Design. The architects attempted a null net, and a system of nulled accoutrement like bracelets and necklace, waist-chains and a cap, but the results were the same. When they put the null cap on its head, the creature laughed.
