“I will not.”
“And I cannot stay.”
“You will not stay.”
(See?)
Shade put his hand around Never’s throat and Never leaned in, neck sinuous and sleek. “Iamnot stay,” Never tried. They stared at each other. Both of them knew what Never meant, but it sounded absurd.
They laughed and kissed, which they had learned from humans and rather liked, especially because their bodies were not exactly bodies so they could have as many mouths and as much spit and the longest tongue or the fattest tongue or teeth or no teeth or both, weirdly, and when they slipped inside each other they felt echoes of what it must have been before the rivation, before complexity and yearning and staying and going. Then Never left but Shade knew it would return.
Shade gathered more words for himself than he knew what to do with, all while he waited for Never. He liked being children, when he was anything, because that usually meant people expected him to leave instead of leaving him. Shade grew most of the crater city in the guise of a child. In that way, the first leaders were usually decent people, because they wouldn’t abandon or abuse a child, and as he pretended to grow and age and mature, they followed him. Discovering that line for himself was entirely an accident, but when Shade realized he’d inadvertently designed the foundations of a home on the safety of children, he almost intentionally fucked it up because he had been young but he’d never been a child.
And even the best parents left him eventually. Everything (except the Moon-Eater) dies.
Sometimes he’d take a vacation as a baby animal, though he only made the mistake of incarnating as a puppy once. After that when he needed a break he chose wild cats and ravens and learned he could not be a fish. Flying was all right, because everything that flies lands again, but swimming—oof. Water is terrible. He’d been right about that all those years ago. He tried being a river grass, and it was all right, too, but if he was going to spend time as a plant he might as well be a tree. One with flowers. He started growing flowers in his hair or fur or scales even when he wasn’t being a tree, and so he was called a fairy by the people from the Ur-Syel lands.
A handful of humans caught him and put him into a cage they were sure would hold him, and Shade pretended for a while that it worked just to see what they wanted. It was power, of course, and when Shade said they could have just asked, the humans called him a demon, and so he killed them all since he knew what that name means.
He learned murder easily enough, and sex, as well as pouting and begging and gardening and architecture, and mostly he wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood welcoming people to his crater, until it was a city in actuality and people called him a god because he could be anything and do anything.
(Untrue, but who was he to argue.)
The Moon-Eater could think thoughts and feel feelings, but the thing about being a complex of consciousness is that he could not feel sensations like pain or pleasure unless he focused on it—unless he imagined it, and that was a constant source of frustration, because yes, yearning was great and laughter was great and respect and love and philosophy were great, but getting punched could change a human’s entire personality and a kiss definitely fucked with their brains and Shade didn’t want to fake it. He didn’t want to imagine the pain of aknife under the fingernail, he wanted to know it. He didn’t want to copy the ecstatic rising pleasure of orgasm until he could achieve it in his sleep, he wanted it to happen to him.
Predictably, and in the way of many stories, the first time he fell in love was the first time he learned to hate.
But the thing he hated was himself.
It started with a woman of Syr Saria, with metal scraps sewn into her collar and cuffs and the hem of her robe to keep ghosts away, and it turned out that if a complex of consciousness could be considered a ghost, then shiny scraps of metal attracted them, actually.
At that time Shade lived in a castle in the center of the crater, as he does now, but it was built of trees dragged from far away and mud mortar, with too many water features because Shade has been obsessed with water since he learned he couldn’t exist in it.
That’s how he grew obsessed with Liisia, too. She was married to a soldier who led one of the factions arguing for dominance in the early crater city, and it took Shade too long to realize that Liisia was the true leader. By the time he did, he’d already stolen her on behalf of one of the soldier’s rivals because they asked nicely. (In his youth, Shade did plenty of terrible things simply because a human asked nicely.) He kept her to himself despite her insisting she be returned, and Shade couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to stay. He could be anything she liked, including her husband, only a better version, he could give her anything, share any kind of pleasure, et cetera, but she wasted away for longing and sorrow—and pain. Don’t pretend Shade wasn’t hurting her, too, in his quest to prove himself, taking what he wanted.
He did understand what he was doing. Owning her.
When Liisia asked him to kill her instead of keep her, he threw her back to her husband and lashed out at the faction who asked him to take her in the first place. The crater city burned for days.
And the Moon-Eater went to sleep.
Not really, but that’s the way the story goes. Really he turned himself into a child again, pretending to be an orphan whose family was killed by the terrible red god’s rage. Liisia’s household took him in, along with a handful of others, and Shade worked for his keep and studied the lore and languages, the combat and math taught in their compound, and he was very careful to grow exactly like a human child.
Liisia’s son-turned-daughter (a translation of a Sarian word for a particular gender) liked Shade, and Shade liked her. He saved scraps of metal for her to weave into her long black hair the way her mother taught her, and he was very good in the gardens (ha ha) and saved the best parts of the best flowers and fruits for her, even though sometimes that was a thorn or leaf or a crosscut sour apple with perfect four-star pips.
Let’s call her Pip, which was not her name, but Shade is jealous of anyone who learns it, as it’s the only part of her that exists anymore.
Pip fell in love with the funny little boy who brought her twists of copper wire and the roots of flowers instead of their petals. He was kind, attentive, and made her laugh. He was cautious about touch, and hid his startling temper behind silent scowls instead of lashing out. Pip lashed out for him, for she took after her soldier father, destined for war and domination. Shade liked it. He liked her.
Many times in the past Shade loved, obsessed, made friends, but this was the first time he realized he wasinlove while it occurred. Something had happened to his emotions, his consciousness. The emotion changed him, reworking his inner design on such a fundamental level he couldn’t describe it. He wanted to die.
The miracle is that Pip was in love with Shade, too. Every day the sun rose and Shade wished he could die, wished he could be a leaf that fell at the end of the summer and never grew back, because Pip wouldn’t.
(Shade knew death: He knew the transformation of death, though he could not trace the exact pattern and path the inner design of a living being took from consciousness to static, from pulse and sparkto lack. The kinetic impulses of muscles and mind, gone, laughter, gone, ecstatic flow falling rising gone gone gone. When asked, over his long life, Shade will give different answers, but he does not believe the same life exists once it is gone.
The way leaves fall and return in the spring, but not the same leaves. Not the same. When Shade leaned too hard into such imaginings, he realized he would never know Never again and cursed himself for giving the one who’d been a leaf such a name.)
But mostly, with Pip, he was happy.
