It’s standing several feet away, too tall and salamander white, with hair moving in every direction like tentacles. Not a drop of blood or a scrape, no dirt. The drifting ashes float past it in eddies without touching. “Numen?” she murmurs. “How did you find me?”
“We’ve been looking for hours. The attack was just past midnight. It’s nearly dawn.”
That explains why there’s no screaming anymore, why the fires are dim—oh, and Iriset can see spotlights now, lanterns moving as people assess damage and hunt up survivors. “Attack?”
“Something triggered old spider mines,” says the Moon-Eater, pushing past the numen to kneel before Iriset. “My Lyric Aharté,” he says, sounding gutted. The Moon-Eater is mirané brown and bland tonight, except for thick, long, black hair in that same high tail falling past his waist.
“He’s alive,” she whispers.
The numen kneels beside the Moon-Eater but grabs Iriset’s chin, lifting it. It pokes at the edges of her wound and she winces. “It’s disgusting what you do for him,” the numen says.
“Ah, Never,” murmurs the Moon-Eater, hands hovering over Lyric’s face and chest. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
The numen sneers. “This is a mess. Did you dig it out with your fingers?”
“Wire forceps and this broken clay,” she says, knowing she should be offended, but instead she’s drifting. She feels like her whole beingis merely a tiny spot in her chest. A singular core, like a candle flame, housing all that she is, while the rest of her cavernous body is just an empty room. Iriset giggles.
“You aremad,” the Moon-Eater says, voice hushed with awe. Then he bursts into laughter.
The numen’s body shifts, slithering under and around her, picking her up effortlessly. The Moon-Eater lifts Lyric. “You should hold together to your own things,” the numen grumbles. “Your eye!”
“His now. Ours?” she murmurs.
Distantly, she can tell the Moon-Eater is still laughing, but softly, fondly. It’s strange to think of him as being fond of anything. She remembers feeling him in the Moon-Eater’s Temple with Amaranth, the first time she witnessed the Mistress’s ritual and felt the expansion of forces, the splitting, the wave of power. She feels it now, and her whole body is shaking with fine tremors, and maybe she’ll just shake apart, turn into resonance and forces, spread and spread until she’s nothing but whispering flow-falling-rising-ecstatic pops.
“Iriset!” the numen snaps. “Hold yourself together. We’ll get you settled again.”
“Rivermouth,” she manages, falling away. “Lyric wants to go to Rivermouth.”
The thing about the Moon-Eater
Here’s the thing about the Moon-Eater: He’s been desperately lonely for centuries.
A long time ago, at least five hundred years but not more than seven hundred, the being that would become the Moon-Eater was born in a cradle of devastation. That’s how numen come to exist: dramatic rivation. An event takes place that is destructive and transformative enough to create an incident of the fifth force (the one Iriset calls love). In whatever location the event occurs, a spark of life pulls apart, and when it comes together again it becomes a complex of consciousness capable of constantly re-creating itself—or in this case, two complexes.
A small red moon falling out of the sky and slamming into the planet would absolutely be a dramatic enough occurrence to cause such a state, but that isn’t what happened, because if it were, thenthe little tree from which their sparks came would not have suffered rivation so much as demolition. These little numena know not what created them, whether accident or intentionality. When they were young enough to remember, they had no words, no conversation. Once they could communicate, they did not recall. (Unless one of them is keeping it a secret.)
Sensation, thought, sharing—those were all they had the first time they become aware of being two, the first time one understood the difference of roots and leaves without knowing any words for roots and leaves.
The one who was roots did not mind that the one who was leaves leaves again and again because leaves return, leaves returned, leaves will return, always. The sun, the moon, the snow, and the leaves return while the roots are what never leave. The leaves are always leaving, and the roots are always missing leaving.
In order to argue, they needed words.
Together they designed a language meant to bring them closer, through conversational communion, but in effect words drew more and more lines between their thoughts and their ability to share those thoughts.
When the one who was leaves left again, the time before it returned grew longer and longer.
(The truth is that both were all forms and parts of what might have once been a tree, only when they became two complexes of consciousness, one wanted to stay and one wanted to go. One grew through the rocks and bones, turned his face to the sun and the moon and liked it; the other drifted in the wind, let go let go let go, always falling, always moving and liked it.)
The last time Never left Shade, it dragged him all the way to the ocean and pointed across the deep blue waves toward the horizon.
“But there are no places to root in the open water,” Shade pouted.
“There might be!” Never said. It flung out its arms. “Come with me and find out.”
“I cannot leave.”
“You can.”
