“Can Iriset speak of what happened?” Irsu River asks, unmoved.
Iriset wrinkles her nose in a very slight grimace. The best she can do. Eliri says nothing, only squeezes her hand again and again. Iriset squeezes back, and sits a little, looking at River. An lounges back on a chair, as if there’s no other way to sit, smoking a small red cigarette with very normal white smoke. The room is Eliri’s, part of her private building, and it’s all warm brown wood and soft blue hangings that lack the sheen of silk. They’re homey, welcoming, and give the impression of being inside a nest. Every part of the floor is covered in thick rugs. Iriset currently is under two different throw blankets, one ridiculously soft, the other knotted in big patterns. It’s easy to forget the cold shock of dying.
Yeah, right.
“The numen decided the Moon-Eater wasn’t helping Iriset learn to sunder fast enough,” she says, and her voice sounds almost normal, like River’s. Nonchalant. “So the numen stabbed me in the neck.”
River hisses through ans teeth, spilling thin streams of smoke.
Eliri’s arm spasms around her. “So much blood.”
“It worked,” Iriset says bitterly. Though honestly she’s not ready to think about that part, the fact that the numen stabbed her to teach her a lesson and itworked.
(But she does think about it, again and again in the back of her mind, the panic, the desperation, the terror. Iriset has been afraid before, even consistently, but terror is something she has not tasted,not so sharp it skates over ecstatic fear and into something much, much more like Silence. Iriset will eventually come to the conclusion that terror unraveled her for a tiny eternity, and she only survived because her being remembered what it was supposed to be. Andthenshe tore into the fifth force and sundered herself whole.)
Once Iriset sleeps, she sleeps nearly an entire day.
She wakes starving and lazy, so it takes a while to drag herself up from the warm pillows and blankets cocooning her. Her bed is in a small guest chamber near Eliri’s suite. Sunlight pours in from three round windows paned in colored glass, and Iriset stares for a while at the play of light. The mess of forces isn’t so pointed here outside the Moon-Eater’s fortress—though it’s nowhere near balanced. Iriset doesn’t like to admit it even to herself, but she misses the soothing stability of Holy Design.
Touching her fingers to her neck, she feels the soft, perfectly knit skin. She presses to find her pulse and listens to the calm thump of blood and beyond it—her ecstatic inner design tingling exactly as it should. Everything internal is correct. Iriset cannot detect any sign of yesterday’s—the day before yesterday’s?—trauma. At least not physically. Mentally and emotionally, however…
She takes a settling breath and holds out her hand. Her knuckles are bony in the cool winter light. Her nails glossy, but they could be glossier. They could be harder, the material transformed into a different mineral. Quartz. It’s possible, of course, like Eliri’s. She can do it.
She changed her wounded flesh into whole flesh, without understanding the details, without knowing how many layers of skin, fat, tendon, muscle, vein, exactly. She just did it. And when she put her eye in Lyric’s head, she just thought,Connect.In a panic then, too.But she believed. It was instinct. Fuck that numen who killed her, after she freed it twice and trusted it! But it was right.
Iriset drops both hands to her breast.
She can do this. It’s something shewantsto believe she can do.
The first time she felt the edges of sundering, it felt like love. That’s why she called it the heart force. That’s why it feels so much like Amaranth’s morning communion, when she resets the whole massive array of the Holy Empire with an orgasm that is a scant echo of true rivation. It works because that’s how the Holy Syr drafted the design. That’s how Iriset would do it. Will do it. To keep the Holy Design from entropy.
A weird giggle spills out of her mouth, and hot tears pinch out of the corners of her eyes.
Sundering isn’t about understanding or knowing how it works. It isn’t design at all, that art and science Iriset excels at. It’s a feeling and instinct, and Iriset will make it so that instead of needing panic to draw her deep enough into her instincts, it’s just sex.
Iriset slows her breathing, exhales with a gentle moan. She concentrates on the texture of cloth against her hips and breasts, the thin sleeping robe they gave her. And the weight of blankets. She tugs on rising force inside her, pinches a nipple to ping ecstatic and does what she does best: She manipulates her inner design with breath for flow, moans to invoke rising, pinching ecstatic, and rubs her other hand against her ribs again and again, friction for falling. Iriset knows how to arouse her own desire.
Heat grows in her belly, and she dips a hand past the band of the loose trousers she slept in. She caresses her soft pubic hair, slips her middle finger between her labia. She’s hot and already a little wet, and she rolls her hips.
Ecstatic sparks down her spine, and Iriset draws an invisible array against her navel, turning ecstatic pops into a flow-rising sequence. It stirs her skin to pebbles, and she opens her mouth to taste the chaotic forces of the air on her tongue.
With a hand pressed to her vulva, pressure on her clit, two fingers gently circling her hole, Iriset focuses on drawing all the forces toward her core, the way she did with Lyric on that rooftop, pulling at his desire and hers, letting their orgasms shake the marriage seeds apart as easy as swallowing.
But thinking of Lyric makes it easier, and she imagines him here, watching, not touching yet: His hands feel very different from hers—but Singix had small fingers, too, softer than Iriset’s, though, and Iriset never felt them like this. She’s thinking of Singix’s thighs now, and the little gasps she made as Iriset licked into her. Singix had gripped the bathtub and hugged Iriset’s face with her thighs. She’d been so soft, so giving, Iriset wanted to keep taking but in a way she’d never felt before, where taking and giving were the same, an infinite circle of pleasure and care.
Iriset lets go of herself, digging her fingers into the blankets. She doesn’t need touch and pressure for this, she can do it from the inside, willpower only, imagination only. Instinct, only.
She pants and lets the rhythm of panting ripple down her chest, her arched spine, her ass pressed down, her knees up, heels down. It’s a continual wave, and Iriset uses her breath in a special cycle she came up with years ago: spiky gasps and long moans, a singsong falling, bringing it around and around, and yes, this is it, the rivation building in her pelvic wall—a coming apart—and Iriset thrusts one hand up, opening her eyes to stare at her splayed fingers, the glint of light on nail.
The orgasm spills over, and Iriset catches herself in a weird noise as she makes herself listen to the threads of her body, and yes, this is it, she feels the moment of expansion, unraveling the threads of rising, falling, flow, and ecstatic. She doesn’t understand how an orgasm works, exactly. Between every little part of her muscle contractions and brain, she couldn’t draft a schematic, but sheknowsit.
She draws it out, welcomes the slow, languid afterburn of the newly created fifth force, and watches as her fingernails crystallize like they’re freezing from the nail bed to the curved edge. She sees the quartz formation—sees the transformation.
And Iriset relaxes back into the bed, barely aware of the shivers of coming down, just in awe at the quartz tipping her fingers.
Iriset holds out her other hand beside the first. They look exactly the same, except for the quality of shine. She didn’t give herself claws, only changed the composition of her right fingernails. Very likely nobody else will even notice. And actually it might not be quartz; how can she know for sure?
But she did it. She changed her fingernails from one material to another.
