Iriset is not having a good winter.
She’s no stranger to the loneliness of work, but in the Moon-Eater’s fortress, Iriset is alone in a way she never has been before. Iriset’s self-isolation doesn’t stem from an obsession with a singular problem, or an invention, no. In between her responsibilities regarding the untethered anchor and the exhaustive meetings about it, Iriset is attempting to learn a whole new methodology of design. One that nobody else can do. There’s no study partner or mentor or rule book, and her only guide is the Moon-Eater, who barely pretends to know anything about sundering or rivation.
Once her cradle design for her opal eye is functioning properly (thanks to Eliri, who Shade pointedly reminded her was anexpert in human redesign aesthetic), Iriset tries working outwardly from sundering, the way she did with silk, creating magnifying arrays to better understand the tiniest levels of creation. But Iriset realizes quickly that such work is the project of a lifetime, not a few quads. Sundering is more whimsy than utility. She needs to feel it, senseit,becomea spider andinstinctuallysunder, the way they build their webs overnight.
The numen tells her this, one morning when Iriset throws a shallow mirror across the library in frustration because it isn’t magnifying enough. “Silk is Silk because she was born to it,” the numen drawls quietly, silver-pink hair sliding along Iriset’s worktable as it walks around to gather the mirror shards. “Sundering is part of what you are, and it won’t be learned from looking outside.”
Iriset shudders and says with more than a little snarl, “Go away. I will do this myself, if it is all inside me.”
Because of course, it is not the numen but the Moon-Eater pretending. The Moon-Eater hasdone somethingto the numen, and lies about it, and Iriset is afraid.
Fear is isolating, too.
Iriset never sees the numen and the Moon-Eater at the same time, only one or the other. (Though even if she did, who is to say the Moon-Eater could not be both at once? Iriset remembers that flock of birds the Moon-Eater became.) Eliri does not seem to notice anything amiss, but then Eliri has worked hand in hand with the Moon-Eater for years and might not even care. So Iriset can’t quite trust her, either. There’s nobody in the fortress she can trust or even wants to trust, andthat—Iriset has never been in such a position.
Before, she could leave her workroom and find her father. Before, she could draw Bittor into her designs and into her body. Before, she could walk to her grandparents’ house with a bouquet of night eris and listen to the clang of her grandmother’s forge. When she was in the palace of the Vertex Seal, she still trusted Bittor. She found Shahd and Singix, Nielle, and Ambassador Erxan. Even Amaranth and Sidoné might have plotted against her, but Iriset knew what they wanted and could trust in that, at least.
Here, all she knows is that the Moon-Eater could kill her in aninstant, for absolutely any reason. And he might. And Lyric left. He left her alone in this place because he thinks she doesn’t need him, he thinks she’ll be fine among the apostates, and that she can—and will—master sundering for unraveling the Moon-Eater and design the massive array to re-create the Holy Design and coincidentally save everyone. Iriset just wants to talk to him. Yell at him. Hold on. She should have begged him to stay. She should have gone with him, except the Moon-Eater would never let her. She’s sure of that, now that she knows he’s been lying about the numen for Silence knows how long. The last time she’s fairly sure it was the actual numen is when her face was broken open and it said with such disgust that she gives Lyric too much. Is it even alive? Is the Moon-Eater lying about wanting this unraveling, too? He could be lying about anything. It could all be a trap.
When Iriset’s mind spirals in this direction, she panics. Her breathing speeds up, she’s dizzy, and she has to lie on the floor. The first time she feels one of the earthquakes rattle up through the tower, when she’s already having a bad day, she ends up sprawled in the hallway outside her room, half naked and sweating despite her fingers and toes being too cold to feel. She can’t quite remember how her father taught her to calm down, because he’s dead, he’s so dead and unraveled and she lost the echo coin with his falling force on the Night of Chimeras. Why didn’t she keep it safer?
Someone comes running and Iriset wishes it was Lyric or Shahd or Singix, even the false Singix in her mind, the Singix that was mostly Iriset herself.
But it’s Peace, the younger of Lyric’s attendants—hers now for quads. Peace brings Iriset a cup of water but doesn’t make her sit up to drink it. Peace pets her hair and drips cool water against her forehead, quietly reminding Iriset she isn’t alone. Iriset gulps the too-dry air, slowly regulates her breathing as she focuses on the drops ofwater, the rhythmic touch. She realizes she was crying. Fuck. Tears gum up the double-dome interface holding her opal eye in place.
All at once, Iriset sits up. “Thanks given. Now go,” she says without looking at Peace. She won’t let anyone in.
Peace stands, leaving the cup next to Iriset. Iriset waits, breathing eight-count, returning her inner design to order. Ignores the tangible attention of the attendant. If Iriset speaks again, she’ll say something terrible.
“Is Lyric Aharté coming back?” Peace asks.
Iriset laughs. It is not a pretty sound.
Every two weeks, which is fourteen days, two shy of a quad, Iriset attends another meeting of all the metadesign conspirators. During the deepest winter Iriset spent days re-creating a map of the Holy Design according to her memory, which is excellent, with the locations of key steeples, and the way the Silent Chapel and the Moon-Eater’s Temple figure in. She explains the basics again and again, including the purpose of the Moon-Eater’s Mistress and the ritual that resets everything on the Day of the Crowning Sun. She teaches them all to balance their inner designs, which most of the designers find comes naturally. Iriset says it’s their problem to figure out how to integrate Holy Design into what already exists, and her problem to actually trigger it with the Moon-Eater’s sundering.
But there are more problems than that. The fucking moon, for starters. The scope of the project is incredible, and not only designers need to be involved, precincts surveyed for current design tangles and flaws, for potential balance, but artists must be hired to carve steeples of several sizes, including the four Great Steeples that honestly should be made from towers already in existence given their timeline. Smallkings need to be convinced to cooperate, and the deadline for that is the spring equinox, or Shade claims he’ll just commit a few massacres and replace any recalcitrant subjects with others more amenable to their solutions. The small kings already working with them (Chimera and Rivermouth, of course, but Sharp-Shin, Design, and Flower, too, all of whom were convinced by the earthquakes and pointed discussions with Amado the Reconciler) disagree on the extremes to take to bring everyone else in line. Amado has already figured out that the Holy Design will completely reconfigure the makeup of not just the crater city’s design apparatus, but its neighborhoods as well. He sees the potential power grab and is working hard to consolidate as much for himself as possible. Iriset wishes him luck, honestly.
The pushback is expected, from several quarters—including that Design small king who hates her, despite being tentatively on their list of allies, and the small king of Rising Smoke who apparently goes against anything Rivermouth does onprinciple, and the Fountain small king, as well as a group of commander-philosophers and their college boards. Iriset ignores most of the reasons people are against this whole scheme. It’s not surprising because it’s a lot of work, and people don’t like to work even for their own good.
What does surprise Iriset is how many people, according to the reports from Sipipia the artist and the city planners, readily fall into line with this cityscape-altering insanity simply because the Moon-Eater asks them to.
She forgot that here he is the living red god, he’s the god of apostasy. And there are so many of his believers ready to witness and enact whatever miracle he’s planning. They’re having sit-ins and meditation parties already in the lead-up to every predicted tremor, humming chaotically as if they can mitigate the wild forces the untethered array—which these fanatics are calling the anomaly star—unleashes better than Helica Silkhair’s defense dome. They’ll probably be the first to turn to Aharté.
When the cardinal of the College of Lightning Revelation offers his initial sketches for how catching and holding the moon in place might be accomplished, Iriset looks at them and thinks,This is impossible. The blowback will vaporize us. Me especially.Every iteration is the same. But she doesn’t say anything. Part of her thinks they all deserve to die if they do this, anyway.
For days at a time Iriset is fine. She’s also very good at being fine. She fixes the gaps in her double-dome cradle interface and starts jotting down ideas for a set of interchangeable prosthetics or just caps, maybe, knowing knowing knowing she should sunder it into exactly what she wants. That will be her graduation to mastery, she jokes to herself, out loud, wishing there was anybody to hear. One day in a fit of frustrated boredom, she gives up on her sundering and asks for a cage of songbirds. She makes them ugly little craftmasks with such deep falling weight and infinitesimal ecstatic triggers that when their feathers and skin peel back and their skulls emerge, it’s such a potent change that their offspring carry it with them. They’ll keep evolving until they always live near live force-weaves and active arrays, and sing with them to create a resonance that makes their skull issue less irritating, probably.
Somebody had to do it, anyway, and Iriset figures it might as well be her. She always liked skull sirens.
The day Eliri brings her a letter, Iriset is bent over a containment array with a small chunk of cold, burned firewood in the center. Iriset has hypothesized that perhaps she can set the wood to blaze with her sundering, and it might be easier for something that has already been on fire. The way she could force the transition between ice and water and vapor. (The wood has a memory of being aflame, sheimagines writing, if these were the days she wrote her Silk pamphlets.The sunderer asks the wood to remember.)
She touches the charcoal, eyes closed, and imagines it flaring to heat. She visualizes the blackened wood, the surface ashy, and beyond into the layers of burned material, smaller layers and smaller, until she imagines the tiny particles of mass that make wood, and she sparks them.
Ecstatic force explodes out from her finger, and the wood bursts into a puff of ash.
Iriset scowls. As soon as she felt the ecstatic force she knew it was wrong. At the sundering level, the forces don’t feel like themselves, because they aren’t. They’re the same on this fundamental level, only put together differently. Sundering is the creation of the fifth force, not using the other forces. Supposedly. It’s all theory from two beings who can’t actually do it themselves! Iriset wishes there was someone she could fuck about this. Holy red moon, it’s been longer since she’s had sex with another person than it has ever been since she first did it! It would ground her, at least; she always feels better and smarter when she’s getting laid. But the only person in her vicinity she’d consider is Eliri, and she’s positive Eliri would turn her down. In a different circumstance she’d proposition the Moon-Eater, out of sheer curiosity, but as long as she isn’t sure what happened to the numen, Iriset wouldn’t be able to relax.
At least the containment array kept the ashes in a tight starburst.
