Iriset grimaces. “Maybe. If I tried, maybe.”
“It isn’t only an aesthetic,” the numen says, then wrinkles its nose. “Shade says Lyric Aharté is perfectly designed.”
Turning away, Iriset hangs her feet off the bed. “The miran are designed in accordance with the Holy Design. They are only perfect if the Holy Design is perfect. Where it exists, their design is fundamentally ideal. Where it doesn’t, they aren’t. Maybe they’re still balanced. This place feels like chaos to Lyric. He’s making anchors to hold balanced space for himself.”
“So you could make them, you could redesign someone in accordance with Holy Design.”
“Ugh, yes. Especially if I could study someone—like Lyric. Without him here, I can pretend I don’t know how.” Why is Never of allbeings interrogating her about this?
“And you don’t want the miran to exist.”
“Of course not. I certainly don’t want to be responsible forcreatingthem. They aren’t necessary for completing the anchor, and you know what they’re like! But Lyric will fight for them—he already is. I’m worried time and that untethered array are already on his side. Not knowing how is the only guarantee that will keep me from doing it.”
Cool arms come around her, and the numen says, “Iriset, you’ve never done anything you didn’t want to do.”
“I didn’t want to take Singix’s life!” She jerks, trying to free herself, but the numen holds tight. It hums soothingly.
“You did. Once it was too late for her to live, you wanted it. To prove you could. I know you.”
Iriset slumps into its embrace. “Yes,” she whispers. “That’s why I don’t want to know how to make the miran, because what if I figure it out and just have to see it through? It would be the most ambitious project I’ve ever conceived of,” she tries to joke.
The numen holds her, and Iriset lets her mind fall into it, into its complexity, the jagged, chaotic design of forces at play along its boundaries.
“And if you’re nothing else, you’re ambitious to a fault,” it murmurs, almost sounding amused.
And that’s true, but also exactly how she phrased it when she told the Moon-Eater the entire saga of how she came to be Singix and marry Lyric and meet the numen.
Iriset keeps leaning, keeps breathing, but nudges further through the numen’s boundaries, into fireworks and power, and she holds on to its forearms where they wrap around her. It feels exactly like the Moon-Eater, and maybe that’s normal, maybe numena all feel the same, but that’s so difficult to believe when one has played at godhood for centuries and the other is from the future, four hundred years older.
Sheknows.
This is the Moon-Eater, pretending to be the numen.
Chilled to the core, she wonders, when was the last time she saw the real numen?
Lyric just warned her to be careful, and here she is, heart pulsing, terror zinging through her with an excess of ecstatic, impossible that the Moon-Eater won’t feel it, and she has to laugh to hide. She laughs, breathless with it, and holds the Moon-Eater closer.
NOBODY TO ACCOMPANY
The Garnet That Blooms in the Broken Heart méra Bež has rarely felt aligned to his melodramatic name, but for the past few days it’s suited him. He hasn’t slept more than a fitful few minutes since Lyric disappeared, and he doesn’t expect to anytime soon.
It’s early morning and he needs to tend to his duties, but instead Garnet sits in the griffon enclosure at the heart of the royal menagerie.
Beneath the tallest vault of the many-domed glass building, an adobe platform rises from the lush gardens rather like a small peaked mountain, with shelves, caves, clinging junipers, and spiral succulents. Griffons lounge about: Several sprawl at the edge of a shelf, stretching their wings; a young female grips the rough stone at the very top of the peak with her claws; another snuggles in a pile at the mouth of a cave.
The griffons are thin and elegant, with lanky legs and wide paws. Their sleek brown fur is patterned with white spots and sweeping stripes that curve around their huge slit-pupil eyes like kohl. Long tails curl over their backs, or swipe in avid interest as the griffons notice morning gardeners, or stalk a micro-vulture soaring around their platform, eager for castoffs. The griffon wings are featheredwhite or black or brown, or in the case of the oldest, largest queen, all three.
It’s said that the queens of the sky were designed by the Moon-Eater himself, from a leopard, a prairie eagle, and his own moon-red flesh. Garnet doesn’t particularly care.
The griffon reclined against Garnet’s leg on the sandy ground butts his wide head into Garnet’s hand to remind him to scratch. Cinnamon is a young male with his white-and-red wings folded tightly along his spine. The griffon opens his mouth in a silent meow. His eyes are black, with shards of mirané brown at the edges, and despite their strangeness, it’s easy for Garnet to read the wiles in his mind, the concern.
“I know,” Garnet mutters, scratching harder. Cinnamon is only six years old, not yet a father, though Garnet’s mother thinks soon he’ll be in competition for the honor with the females. Lyric had wanted to invite Singix Es Sun to name the next litter, and he’d been asking Garnet to ask his mother when it would be.
Garnet’s fingers still as he tamps down on the ache in his chest, refusing to press his hand against his own pain. His whole body feels wound too tight, and every move he makes hurts. He doesn’t know if Lyric is even alive.
Suddenly Cinnamon darts to his feet, wings out and forelegs bent as if he curtsies.
A shadow flicks over Garnet’s face, and the queen Beti lands gracefully, her huge, multicolored wingspan at least sixteen feet. She uses those wings to balance, wafting musty breeze, and stands on her hind legs so that her forelegs hang, claws displayed and curling wickedly. Her hips are narrow, but her furry, bright mirané-brown torso expands into heavy shoulders that support those huge wings. Her teats show dark brown. She had two kits at the start of the summer, and has been spending most of her time in the private, cool birthinglair. If she’s emerged, it must mean Garnet’s mother is on her way out here, too.
