“I didn’t interrogate her, Iriset,” Lyric says, feeling sharp and cranky. “That is the impression I got. But it isn’t only the pain. She is ostracized. Avoided. Feared. Here in the heart of the Moon-Eater’s city. That is intolerable. Is it because she’s not beautiful? Because she’s a—a flawed chimera, is that what you said? If designers here are going to make these choices, they should care for them and accept the consequences at least.”
“I agree. I’ll go with you to meet her, Lyric, of course I will.” Iriset sighs, slumping over. “It’s just, I don’t know what I’ll be able to do. Human design is hard.” She grimaces. “I can speak with her, get a look at her, but I’m… nothing compared to Eliri, for example. I don’t know their technology here. I’m not truly a human architect.”
“But—” He makes a rather distorted gesture at her face.
Iriset offers him a self-deprecating smile. “What I did, with Singix, of course it was the most amazing, incredible, skilled thing a designer has done in Moonshadow City in centuries. It was hard, but I did it, and nobody saw through me. I was untouchable, really, a ‘mere strand of silk to bring down an empire,’” she misquotes fromWritings of the Holy Syr. “But compared to this place, the Moon-Eater’s city, I was only scraping paint off a canvas and slapping my own handprints all over it, and calling it a masterpiece.”
“If that was true, the numen wouldn’t have been so impressed. Or the Moon-Eater.”
She winces. Then sets her wine on the table without drinking it. He can tell she’s contemplating something. Lyric waits, but in the end Iriset gets up. “I think I’ll… I’ll go find it. The numen.”
It hurts slightly, that she doesn’t want to stay. But Lyric can hardly blame her.
What a funny thing about humans
It’s nearly midnight and Iriset has tucked herself against a plinth holding a kinetic statue of a fruit tree of some kind. It starts as a sapling, grows up and out, spreading asymmetrical branches that blossom tiny flowers. Leaves bud, unfurl into heart shapes, the flowers fall, relinquishing space to clusters of berries, and the leaves drop drop drop before swirling up to perch again on the tiny twigs. It shrinks into a sapling, and the cycle begins anew.
She feels wrung out in the way only Lyric can cause. How dare he ask her to heal a chimera with apostasy? Is it so easy for him to give up the laws he’s clung to, and if so, why couldn’t he do it for her? Did it take a four-hundred-year devastation for him to realize Aharté’s design doesn’t matter except for how he chooses? Iriset supposes falling back in time like this is a legitimate reason to change, but she’s been working for quads to break his faith and all it took was an alliraptor chimera in a fucking garden?
Drawing herself up, Iriset crosses her legs and closes her eyes. She sinks into herself, seeking the tiny-tinier-tiniest elements of her ownnature. As she settles into her core, her attention wavers, curious as always. Down she goes, past the blazing heart of herself, where she’s always imagined her strength and design are centered below her heart, between her lungs, settled like a spiking, black-oil sun in the soft, squishy cradle of her organs. This afternoon Iriset found the disparate elements of water and opal; she can do the same thing here.
Iriset dives back into herself and finds the marriage knot. This,this, she can pull apart.
The knot pulses gently, a secondary heart pumping threads of force between herself and Lyric. She feels out the edges; they aren’t raw with evaporation the way her inner design has been these past days. It’s just a tight knot, ecstatic and rising mostly, twined over itself, through itself, around itself, until it’s greater than either seed alone.
But Iriset sees where to strip the threads. She doesn’t need a pill or a map to undo this. Just rivation.
Iriset clenches her hands into fists low against her belly and opens her eyes.
She jerks back.
The Moon-Eater isright there, crouched like a gremlin so close his shins nearly touch her knees and his blood-red eyes blur.
“Fuck,” she says. “What… Moon-Eater?” she double-checks.
He appears about fifteen, mirané-brown skin lustrous in the moonlight, hair straight and pulled into a cheerful high tail. In a black sleeveless robe and trousers, an outfit uncomfortably like the raiment of the Silence priests. “Iriset Sunderer, I can hear your angst from a hundred feet in the air.”
She purses her lips in distaste.
“And you’ve chosen one of my favorite statues,” he continues in a more jocular voice.
Glancing back up at the kinetic statue of the tree, she asks, “Why?”
“You tell me. You’re the one sitting here.”
“I mean,” she says with a semi-friendly eye roll, “why is it your favorite.”
The Moon-Eater shrugs one muscular shoulder, drawing attention to the glittering silver chain-link cuffs on his upper arms. Thin and shimmering as ghost writing.
Iriset shoves that away. The last thing she needs now is maudlin thoughts of Singix Es Sun. What will that lead to but reflections of all she’s lost? “Do you know the chimera Setka, who lives in your gardens?”
“I do.”
Nodding, rather disconsolate, Iriset still doesn’t know what else to say.
“Whatever is wrong, if it involves Setka, it won’t be wrong past tomorrow,” the Moon-Eater says.
“The Night of Chimeras,” Iriset murmurs.
