The light
Four hundred years ago, a light appears in the sky.
Bright enough to challenge the sun, its blaze is not warm and golden like that very sun, nor tinged pink like the light of the pink-silver moon. No, it is an eerie, even white light that draws the viewer in to look more closely, to wonder, if they squint or stare or perhaps just tilt their head, can they see behind—or through—to a rainbow prism or another world?
Everyone for miles looks up, shading their eyes. From the commander-philosopher of the College of Intrinsic Foundation to the students studying in the Cult of Hopeful Design near the mouth of the Lapis River, everyone inside flees to windows. In the streets, merchants and artists, small kings and revolutionaries stop to stare, mouths parted, while combat-designers activate force-shields and design mercenaries drag their wards to shelter. The sudden surge of forces causes bridges to tremble and the force-eddies mingling over the city to knot, blowing hard winds that rip razor petals and translucent leaves from the garden canopies. Feather foxes hunker low in their alleys while rep-cats and copper apes leap as high as they can into trees and trellises and balconies. Avian creatures of every kindburst into flight, heading away. Away from what? The light’s point of origin, of course, over the center of the crater.
Even the Moon-Eater frowns in his palace in the heart of the monster city, distracted by the weird gleam directly above. He says, “Eliri, find out who is doing that and bring them to me,” and is obeyed.
The Moon-Eater is always obeyed.
As the light fades, a star remains. It glimmers, hangs against the plain blue sky.
And the star begins to fall.
Lyric is falling.
He can’t see, eyes burning with white-cold light; his ears ring, but beyond that is a terrible roar of wind. There is a body in his arms, and he huddles around it, blood in his nose, trembling unstoppably. He makes himself a ball, wrapping around her body like he is a nest and she is a fragile egg.
He falls and falls, even as forces pull and pull. Lyric is the heart of something, a great disk of design, an array the width of his city spinning and spinning with him at the axis. The spinning array pushes outward with tight centrifugal power, dragging at his dominant inner rising design. The array and his rising force slow them down in their fall, turn him from an axis point into a shooting arrow. A focus. An anchor.
The anchor hits the ground before Lyric does, piercing sharp and hard deep into the crust of the world. Its shock wave slides back up the lines of force and catches him like a massive hand.
Lyric touches down almost gently against red rock and thin crystal sand.
His ears still ring, but the wind is gone. It’s only his pulsehammering in his skull, his body alive with popping ecstatic force. His skin tingles and his head aches.
Lyric sucks in a huge breath and sits up.
A whimper chokes off, and through painfully wincing eyes Lyric looks at what he’s cradling.
She’s curled against him, hands fisted in his robe, blood across her jaw and mouth.
Iriset, he tries to say, but nothing comes out.
Her lips move, too, and bloody teeth glint. Her body convulses once, a wretched whine tearing free.
The altar—Lyric remembers the altar in the Moon-Eater’s Temple and the numen and Iriset standing bold and awful with her arms outstretched arguing to break the Holy Design—
And a dart slammed into her.
It jabs out of her ribs just under her left breast, blood darkening the orange shift she’s wearing. Lyric makes a noise that still isn’t words as he presses his hand around the wound. She gasps, face contorted, and coughs up blood.
Ecstatic force blinds him for a panicked moment and Lyric seethes his breath slowly through his teeth, controlling himself. He lays her carefully across his lap, her head on his folded knee, and rips at the thin shift where the dart tore through. Cloth comes away, making a shredded gap for him to see.
Blood pools and spills around the shaft. Iriset trembles and her breathy gasps are too shallow. Coughing blood could mean the dart is in her stomach or her lung, and Lyric can’t save her.
The last Vertex Seal
Lyric’s first real memory is huddling in the lee of the Moon-Eater’s altar with a large fossil molar pressed to his stomach. Outside the dark pocket of the temple, people yell his name. They sound furious and Lyric curls around the tooth, making himself smaller. He doesn’t remember why he slipped out of his bedroom before dawn, why this place drew him, why he hid and didn’t simply ask to come. The attendants would have said yes, his mother would have said yes, his uncle the Moon-Eater’s Mistress would have said yes.
But he didn’t ask, and now they’re angry at him, and he’s afraid to crawl out from behind the altar even though nobody will hurt him.
The voices and chaos move away until he’s alone. They don’t look in the Moon-Eater’s Temple. When the sun rises, Lyric’s uncle sweeps in, snarling at his attendants that he’ll be fast. Lyric hears the rustle of cloth and a soft brush of skin on stone. His uncle leans on the edge of the stone slab opposite Lyric, propped up with his left hand, his head fallen back to show his long throat to the starry midnight dome of the temple. Lirdal méra Niyah, the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, is disheveled, his wavy dark hair unbound, his sleeveless robe mussedand pulling as if it’s not on quite right. He closes his eyes and breathes shallowly, his right hand hidden by his body as he begins.
Lyric doesn’t want to bother him, and remains still, on his knees behind the altar. His uncle’s back and shoulders loom up, like a broad statue, and Lyric remembers he has one of the teeth—the Moon-Eater’s teeth!—and they belong on the altar.
Gently, Lyric lifts the rough tooth, fingers in the grinding furrows. He holds his breath as he places it beside the others with the tiniest scrape of stone to stone.
