As they step under a glass arch into the same glass garden Lyric passed through earlier, the Moon-Eater shifts his form slowly enough that Lyric can see: He grows taller, older, but the person is the same. A twentysomething version of the adolescent from before. It’s impressive, the Moon-Eater’s control over his own design. And disconcerting in a way that Lyric can barely tolerate. “Do you—know Aharté?” Lyric asks breathlessly. “Is she like you?”
“Like me?”
“We… She is a god to us. Counter to you, the Moon-Eater, the red god. But you’re not a god, you’re a numen. Does that mean she is, too?”
The Moon-Eater shrugs. “What is a god? I can manipulate form and energy to suit my whims and pleasure. I’m worshipped as a god, so does that not make me one?”
Lyric thinks quietly as they enter an atrium, pass through another night-blooming courtyard. People watch them go, but don’t approach or call out. He thinks through everything the Moon-Eater has said to him, especially the first afternoon they met. “But you can’t make someone like me,” Lyric finally says. “So you aren’t quite like Aharté.”
“Good guess!” The Moon-Eater takes Lyric’s hand again. “I tried. My child is… ah, I wish your sunderer wife had come when Rabbit was here.”
“Rabbit?” Lyric is amused by the name, but also endeared. He knows what it’s like to have a cute name.
“Az was twitchy and shy, but loved a cuddle. Az left for the reason you said: It’s too loud here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Most humans assume az died, or I killed ahz.” The humor melts away from the Moon-Eater’s words, leaving only ice behind. “I let them.”
Lyric’s fingers flutter in the Moon-Eater’s grip, but he doesn’t pull away. Hasn’t he done worse things himself?
“Well, Lyric Aharté.” The smile is back in the Moon-Eater’s voice. “I don’t know any Aharté, though I have known humans who believe in her. I suppose if part of this future Never hates is an empire-wide cult in her name, you’d better get started on converting the masses.”
Lyric pulls his hand away and brings his hands up to shade his eyes as he bows shallowly. Partly to hide his face and eyes. Despite the actual words, this does not quite feel like permission. “Andyou, Moon-Eater? Will you listen to what I have to say about Holy Design?”
“You can call me Shade, and I think that I will.”
Surprise has Lyric looking suddenly up.
The Moon-Eater—Shade—is mirané-brown again, his black hair waving down his back from the high tail just as Lyric’s would if he grew it past his shoulders. But the Moon-Eater’s eyes are silver-pink and luminous. Lyric does not know if he can bring himself to call so familiarly this old red god. Except then Shade winks and adds, “Though I might find it rather silly. I want to know everything about this future of yours, because this city? This crater and all the people in it? They don’t belong to Aharté. They belong to me.”
But it’s mine, Lyric thinks, because it was—it is. The red-rock crust of the earth, the potential, the balance. The miran and the city and everything in it. He was the Vertex Seal, and will be still in four hundred years, if everything doesn’t crash around him. Lyric feels resistance swelling in his chest, the urge to disagree, to rebel. He feels it like his rising force pulling him up and up, and for a moment Lyric stops hiding everything behind his well-kept shell. He lets himself feel it, because defiance feels good.
But the Moon-Eater smiles again, turning away. “In the meantime, let’s eat.”
Rivermouth
There is a famous love story in the city of monsters.
A chimera child finally born healthy after many attempts to create her was raised by the commander-philosopher of the College of Dedicated Renovation to be the most skilled designer the college had ever seen. She was called Eliri Crystal Smile because of her flawlessly designed quartz bones. When she was sixteen the Rivermouth small king hired her to create a new gender aesthetic because the small king was spoiled, bored, and needed entertainment. It was an assignment below the chimera’s skills, except the commander-philosopher instructed her to weave a crawling assassination into the redesign mesh.
This was a worthwhile challenge, and though the chimera was uncomfortable with assassination, what was she to do but obey her parent and commander?
Unfortunately for those plotting, but fortunately for romantics, instead of committing murder, Eliri fell in love.
Irsu Riverprince, the small king’s heir, was beautiful, clever, and entirely unlike ans lazy mother. An likes to tell people an fell for the chimera the moment they met, but in truth the two teens dancedwarily around each other for weeks. Eliri was shy, perhaps sheltered, but the attention of such a charming and strangely seductive person heated her up, distracted her, and she liked it. She had never felt appreciated for her thoughts and curiosity instead of her crystal bones, or admired for her skills instead of coveted. The first time Irsu kissed her, she finally understood how to be glad she’d been born at all.
“Leave your college,” Irsu urged. “Come to the Cult of Hopeful Design with me, and change the way design is used. Remake the world with me.”
When an said it, lips against her cheek, instead of a thrill she felt dread: You see, the reason her commander wanted the small king dead was because of her deep-pocket support of that very cult. With this invitation, Eliri understood that her lover was the true money behind the cult, under ans mother’s nose. Despite Irsu Riverprince’s youth, an was the troublemaker, the cultist.
The chimera fled. She returned home to panic and think. She couldn’t tell her commander-philosopher or they would insist upon assassinating Irsu instead. But if she did not, and the small king died, they would know anyway when the Rivermouth support of the cult did not come to an end.
The choice was taken from Eliri’s hands.
In her absence from the fortress, the small king grew even more bored and tried on the redesign mesh despite its incomplete state. And it was not so incomplete it could not kill her.
In the wake of ans mother’s demise, Irsu Riverprince became Irsu River, fully at the helm of the power and wealth of the water rights for the crater city. The first thing Irsu River and his cult did was to storm the College of Dedicated Renovation to find ans chimera. Although an took credit for ans mother’s death, the better to solidify a terrifying reputation, Irsu River knew who was truly behind it.
