“Do you know what we do on the festival night?” At Iriset’s negative gesture, he continues, “We destroy broken, unwanted, unclaimed chimeras. A great conflagration of unfulfilled design.”
Iriset’s mouth drops open. “You’ll just kill her?”
The Moon-Eater shrugs his other shoulder.
“But… she’s alive. She’s that functional, at least.”
“Setka the Chimera was abandoned by her maker and accepted the sanctuary of my gardens, a sanctuary that ends tomorrow.”
Iriset covers her eyes with her palms, digging her nails into her forehead. The pain does not clarify anything. Why did she ask? Now she’ll be the one to tell Lyric what’s to happen to his adopted monster. No mercy. At least he’ll have to understand such a thing. “Did you say a hundred feet in the air?” she asks, looking up past the Moon-Eater. There’s no tower looming in the immediate vicinity, only elegant weeping evergreens and a long peristyle walkway, none of which is more than twenty feet tall. Beyond that, stars.
“Can you… fly?” she whispers. Of course he can. He’s a numen. But Iriset’s pulse picks up; she tries to tamp the sudden excitement away.
“Sure,” he says.
“What’s your favorite form for it? Bird, dragon? Do you prefer feathers or scales or taut skin?”
He stands, holding his hand down for her. “Eliri likes flight, too. What a funny thing about humans.”
Anticipation ruffles under her skin, ecstatic popping up her throat as a giggle. “Does it seem so strange?”
“I suppose not!” As the Moon-Eater says it, he tugs on her hand. She stumbles into his chest, and he wraps both arms around her before leaping off the grass.
Iriset shrieks laughter, eyes closing of their own accord against the drag of air. His arms engorge, his torso stretches, and she feels his whole body move once, again, again, and realizes it’s the beat of his wings.
Throwing her arms up to his neck, she finds skin, hair, and as she grips him the Moon-Eater changes his hold until he has an arm under her back and an arm under her thighs. The wind is harsh, but not too cold, and Iriset looks.
The gardens spread below them, gilded in pale light from stars and baubles of everflame tucked here and there beneath leaves and trellises.
Her stomach dips as the Moon-Eater drags them higher. His wings are huge, elegant bat wings, the long bones arcing perfectly in mirané-brown, pulling toward the tips into pink and white. Beautiful. She grins at him, tilting her chin up, and the Moon-Eater grins back. “This isn’t my favorite,” he yells over the wind and the swoop of his wings. “But it’s the strongest, and I wanted to be dramatic in sweeping you up into the sky.”
“They’re gorgeous,” she cries back, feeling her eyes burn. “Turn me around?”
The Moon-Eater laughs and flips her fast enough that Iriset’s heart jumps to her mouth and she digs her fingers into his forearms where they’re wrapped around her ribs. Her back presses to his chest, her legs dangle, and she holds on so tight. She can barely think—and the Moon-Eater dives. Iriset screams! It’s a scream of delight, a cry of wonder, and for once Iriset is too caught up in sensations to catalog her bodily reactions.
They rise again, swooping around the five-fingered silver towers of the Moon-Eater’s Pit. Shadows dart away from them—birds or bats, Iriset has no idea, laughing again and squeaking when he cups his wings to let a gust of wind blow them back and up up up. His wings snap, she claws at his forearms, and then when the Moon-Eater turns them away from the wind so that it thrusts them forward, Iriset lets go.
She spreads her arms, and he tightens his grip around her. Iriset struggles to keep her eyes open, tears streaming along her temples into her hair, but like this—arms out, legs out, wind buffeting against her, filling her gasping mouth, tearing her hair, and the Moon-Eater solid against her back, the rhythm of his wings—she’s flying.
Thought strips away, worries and wonder, everything, until Iriset is sensation, she is wind and starlight, laughter.
The Moon-Eater settles them on a jut off amalgamated rock along the northern cliffs of the crater. Though her legs have done no work, they wobble and she collapses back, caught by a laughing Moon-Eater who cradles her in his lap.
That’s good, because the wind up here is cold.
The crater city unfurls beneath them like a bowl of jewels, boulevards and vast gardens and markets and floating islands and thegash of the Lapis River outlined in strings of lights. Spiking towers sparkle, and energy fields flicker between spotlights piercing up into the sky. Iriset’s city never glows quite like this. She relaxes back into the Moon-Eater’s hold, vaguely disoriented because this is the old red god, Amaranth’s god, and he’s material and filled with mischief and laughter and probably malevolence, too. But Iriset leans her head against his jaw, and he sighs, breath ruffling her hair.
“Thank you,” she says.
“I don’t know if when you master sundering you will be able to transform yourself, but it is fun to imagine the possibilities,” he answers.
“Do you know why Never wants me to be a sunderer?” Iriset asks. Before, in the future, she might have understood: The numen wanted her to free the Moon-Eater. But here, the Moon-Eater is doing very well.
The Moon-Eater grumbles. Then, rather softly, he says, “Never has always longed for something outside of this crater. Outside of me. Perhaps what it wants, it believes a sunderer can provide.”
They sit quietly for a while. Iriset tries to let her mind rest, observing patterns of light, the sensation of thrill and anxiety settling in her body, listening to the Moon-Eater breathe. She wonders, does he need to breathe, or is it affectation?
“Where is Never?” she asks eventually.
