When eventually, inevitably, she was dying, Shade made himself as tiny as possible, all of his energy and consciousness pulled into a seed, and she didn’t realize this is what he was doing, but she swallowed it.
It didn’t work the way he wanted.
He did feel the change in her body as what human complex of consciousness she had faded, the warmth and fuel and struggle vanished in increments, going nowhere he could sense. Her death heated the air around her skin briefly before everything grew cold.
And Shade held inside her as she broke down, became nothing but a carcass, and he tried to spread into her, thin himself into filaments tiny enough to be a web holding her together.
But the complexity of her that made her laugh at him was gone.
When the Moon-Eater woke up from his long nap, he retook his castle and killed an appropriate number of people, promoted another handful, dismissed a few, and turned himself into a dragon as huge as he could manage. He spoke in a voice that rocked the crater city, commanding that anyone who wished to know the secrets of life should come.
It was definitely a cult, and the Moon-Eater was excellent at leading it. He taught them design, showed them how to manipulate thefour forces and play, told them,Imagine! Go wild! Do not hold back!And they listened.
Because occasionally the Moon-Eater ate people—literally and metaphorically, which is mostly about sex—he earned a reputation for being very hungry and always wanting more. What he truly hungered for was incarnation. He offered prizes to anyone who could design him a body, not to inhabit—he had tried possession and he had to focus on that just as constantly as he had to focus on orgasm but for significantly less payoff. No, the body he wanted was his own. He needed someone to take his complex of consciousness and change it.
Humanity did not succeed in transforming the Moon-Eater, but they sure did make a lot of weapons and monsters.
The Moon-Eater made plenty of his own.
What else is important to know? Oh, there are more names Shade earned, for more obvious reasons, and don’t worry about the Screamer—Iriset will learn firsthand about that one. And she’ll learn more about that time the Moon-Eater carried a child in a careful womb and the child took after him but not quite enough.
How about Aharté? To the Moon-Eater she was a god like any other: useless. Aharté was a Sarian god, but the Sarians had several gods, and so occasionally Pip had mentioned her, but Pip and Liisia and their Syr Sarian people had fallen hard for architectural design and combat-design, and only Liisia occasionally prayed. Not while she was Shade’s captive, but afterward, when Shade hid in her household and accidentally seduced her son-turned-daughter, that’s when Liisia strove for balance as a way to alleviate the scars of suffering Shade had carved into her.
Shade, if he was nostalgic for anything, was nostalgic for the wordplay he’d shared with Never, when they’d invented their own words, before either of them interacted with another of their own kind, before they knew so many other human languages. And soAharté’s name pleased Shade, because it sounded like their mirané word for the organ of the soul, the heart, a heart, even though it meant the breath between words, and that is where the Syr Sarians look for love and emotions: in the breath and lungs.
Maybe all of that is why, when he met Lyric, there was just enough nostalgia for the name Aharté to put Shade in a forgiving mood.
“Look at what you’ve done,” Never says, the first time they’re alone again. It floats just a bit off the polished flagstone of a private water garden behind the Moon-Eater’s tower. But Shade is too busy staring at Never, wondering if he can just meld himself completely with his old—his old… friend. It’s been centuries. They embraced, they spoke, but it was in front of humans, with the sick one and the perfectly designed one who Shade thinks maybe is the key to making a body just for Shade, but Eliri is taking care of them for now and Shade’s full attention should be on Never, because Never is the one who leaves.
“What have I done?” Shade murmurs, slinking closer, feeling predatory. He shifts to the side, circling Never, and Never only floats there in one form: pink and white and black, hair wavering like sun on water, eyes brighter than rubies, teeth jagged. There are no flowers in its hair, no streaks of chlorophyl or dogwood colors, no resin smell, and certainly its balls won’t be shiny brown acorns.
Shade laughs at himself, because it’s both funny and true, and also the humans of his city went through a flora chimera phase two generations ago and it was amazing. Shade wishes more of them survived. He wonders if he’d made Rabbit in an acorn, the child would have stayed.
Never tilts its head, and its eyes seem to grow larger. “All of this. The city, the worshippers, the court. You’re a god.”
“Gods can do anything,” Shade dismisses.
“What can you not do that you want to do?”
“Make anyone stay.”
Never scoffs.
“Where have you been?” Shade asks.
“Around the world, as round as a moon,” Never says.
Suddenly Shade doesn’t want to hear any details. So of course he says, “Tell me everything. I’ll take us to a café that serves ecstatic wine brewed from the berries of a dogwood tree.”
Never levels a glance at Shade. “I came back to the crater city to find you gone. The rulers in place were terrible. They told stories about you, though, about an old red god of chaos and apostasy, and a woman who came at the side of the goddess of that pink moon up there, and destroyed you. Unraveled you, spread you into something else, and I couldn’t get to you. The people in your place looked like you, but were not you.”
“A legacy, hmm?” Shade hums, both confused and understanding exactly what Never says. Where—when—Never has been. Never is always leaving, after all, so of course it would leave him behind in time, too. “Tell me more.”
“No, Shade, it’s bad, it won’t happen to you this time.”
“It probably wouldn’t have happened the first time if you’d stayed,” Shade says, letting anger snap his teeth into points.
Never leans in, eyes pink vortexes. “I am here now. It will never happen again.”
