Page 112 of The Shape of Monsters
For a moment nothing happens. There is no noise creeping in through the door, through the pyramid walls. No sound but the slight hollow echo of breath in her nose. Then the Moon-Eater is kissing her.
Surprised, Iriset gasps in a full taste of him, of his breath andtongue, which taste like barely anything. His arms are around her waist, lifting her up, and Iriset grabs his shoulders even as her mouth is assaulted by soft, sweet texture. Her fingers dig into real-feeling muscle, her toes brush the floor, her whole body is pressed to his. “Moon—ah, Moon-Eater,” she whispers jaggedly as he bites her jaw, then sucks under it, dropping a line of desire directly down to her navel and lower into her hole. Her entire body lights up, pressing into him. Wetness springs to life and she moans, and then, then! The Moon-Eater is all hands and lips, arms wrapped around her like ribs: a cage of arms, grasping her arms, her waist, her hips, her thighs, her calves, pulling her up and around him, and there are two mouths, one for each side of her throat. Then there is a hand, tiny, like a tendril of a plant, slipping up her leg against the skin. There is another at her throat, wrapped around her. It squeezes and slips down in a dozen branches under her robe, under her shirt, against her spine, and they find her shoulder blades, they find her armpits, lifting her tighter against the Moon-Eater’s malleable body.
Little fluttering touches find her forehead, her cheeks, like bouquets of hydrangeas kissing her, petals nipping and sucking somehow, and Iriset arches with a cry as fingers find her nipples simultaneously, and Iriset realizes in her core that there’s no good reason to fight this.
She goes limp. She relaxes. Nothing hurts; it’s a lot, yes, but there are fingers all over her, cool and warm in waves. A hundred hands touch her at once, a hundred mouths and tongues, and one pulls aside her loincloth, cupping her vulva, and Iriset has nothing to brace against but she tries to press into it. She whimpers, then opens her mouth, and there is a tongue inside her, licking along hers, teasing the ticklish roof of her mouth. Another tongue, or two or three or four, lick at her labia, at her clitoris, circling it, pinching it, and Iriset bucks.
A tendril punches into her hole and it is so, so good, and onceinside, it grows. It’s filling her up literally, finding the angles of her cervix and the sides of the space, rubbing, undulating. It hurts but it’s an ache she’s never felt before and she loves it, loves how bizarre and overwhelming it is. She can feel the edges of her mind blurring away, under too much, too much sensation. The tongue in her mouth retracts and somehow melts around her throat until she’s held in place, a soft, warm, welcoming embrace around her head and neck. Tiny tendrils stroke her earlobes, her scalp, kiss her lips again and again, and the one inside her undulates in hot waves. A tongue presses against her clit, fingers dig into her ribs. Wet flower petals lave her nipples. The hands and fingers pull at her inner thighs, wrap her legs, and massage her feet, she can’t pay attention to all of it. One warm slim finger finds her asshole and slips in with almost no resistance. Iriset is penetrated and filled in every way. She wants it, wants more. Her ears and nostrils, nipples navel urethra every single pore like she’s coming apart at the foundations. It is madness!
When she comes, it barely even feels like an orgasm. It is too much, it is not enough, it is an eternity-long roll of sensation and Iriset feels her entire body coated in tendrils of life, baby-soft roots of a tree mummifying her forever. And she’s all right with that.
Honestly, drifting, she’s not even sure she came at all. Maybe it was a fever dream, an unraveling.
Oh.
That.
Iriset slowly realizes she’s sprawled alone on the floor of the pyramid room, all her clothes on but twisted in places, and some of them between her legs are very damp. Her mouth is dry from panting, and she can barely open her eyes. Her skin feels like it’s floating just above her actual flesh.
“I want to feel that,” the Moon-Eater whispers against her ear.
Iriset shudders hard, overstimulated. And kind of angry, in thatway where she has time to decide if it’s worth it to nurse. Probably not. She swallows thickly. “Shade, you just fucked me,” she says, or thinks she says.
“I want you to do it to me. Make me feel it, make me let go.”
Lolling her head to the side, she sees him. He’s curled beside her, red-bark skin and white-pink tree-blossom eyes. He looks alien and young. Is this why he wants to be unraveled for the Holy Design? He thinks he’ll feel like this, pulled apart, into threads of self, and played every day into a soft, building, empire-powering orgasm? A piece of everything? Iriset can get that, she can understand why, if this is what he’s struggled with for ages, why this idea of being the point of connection for an entire empire is appealing.
But because Iriset is orgasm-syrupy and dazed, she says, “What did you do with the numen?”
Shade’s cherry-blossom eyes widen, and she can see her reflection in the pink sheen. “It’s safe,” he says, one hand drifting to settle over his navel.
Iriset understands in a terrible flash.
She rolls onto him, kisses his dry lips, thinks of sundering and the fifth force, and then plunges her hand into his guts.
The thing about the numen
The thing to know about the numen Never is that unlike Shade, it does remember their mother.
She does not give birth to them in the usual way, but it is her actions that directly cause their little tree to transform from a magically aware if low-power local spirit into a numen duality, that complex of consciousness with all the strength of design in them. The leaves remember because it witnesses the whole thing. The part of the tree that is roots is too entertained by the antics of worms and sleeping cicadas and listening to the music of information passing through strands of mycelium under the dirt. The roots simply aren’t paying attention when the human woman roams nearby.
The leaves notice, though, because the beloved wind brings sensations of the woman’s design, and the leaves turn its attention toward her. She walks upright, calmly, under the sun without fear. When she reaches the tree, she stops. It’s part of a grove of very old flower trees surrounding a little pool of water fed by a tiny finger of the great river that flows through the desert canyons enough miles away that the tree spirit has no idea it exists. To it, water simply is water, wind wind, and the sun delicious. Its roots reach for water and it reaches for food.
The woman speaks, but the tree does not understand. She seems melancholy, though, a feeling trees know well. She puts a hand to its bark. Her melancholy falls away and she smiles before reaching with her inner design to make a tiny pop cascade throughout the tree. The tree begins to change—or rather, to prepare for change. That gets the roots’ attention, but by the time the roots drag up through the channels of the tree to find out what is happening, the human has already wandered away. The roots tingle with the cascading change, like a million bugs dancing inside its rings, and it sinks into the sensation.
She doesn’t go far.
Just at the edge of the tree’s awareness, she stops again, casts her attention wide, and uses her inner design to change her body until she can float up and up and up into the air. She floats so high that to the tree she vanishes. The leaves sway in the wind, feeling like it has indigestion, while the roots are hungry for more than water.
The sun darkens, though it is not night.
The air does something strange then, the tree might have thoughtcoldorflatif it knew words yet, and suddenly a massive weight is falling from the dome of the sky.
(If the tree had eyes, it would see the tiny woman falling, merely a speck of life, curled up around herself in a ball. She looks like a human woman but has changed her entire being, the makeup of her physical presence, so that her extended mass is immense.)
The sunlight returns, and the huge thing falling from the sky hits the desert with the power of a tiny moon.
The earth ripples with the forces, and blazingly hot wind burns down all the living things in its perfectly circular path. But when the forces of the blast hit the edges of the desert, they ignite design anchors, and massive energy walls rise into the air. The walls curl inward to make a dome, capturing force, capturing dust, capturingscraps of material from the recently scoured life exploded and burned to crisps in the wake of her fall.
