Page 6 of The Shape of Monsters
Eliri starts up a broad flight of obsidian stairs leading toward a yawning atrium. Iriset groans softly in his arms and Lyric clenches his jaw. He is so angry with her, but right now she’s everything he has. (Lyric and Iriset share a skill for compartmentalization. And dramatics.)
Pausing, Lyric settles his feet against the ground, breathes in a calm eight-count and he can feel the echo of it in the marriage knot, alive and throbbing inside Iriset.
Then, as Lyric has done countless times in his life, he looks up at the vertex of the sky to find peace in Aharté’s steady moon always looking right back down.
But the sky is empty, a swath of blue and painfully white sunlight, cavernous, infinite.
There is no moon.
The song and the breath of a song
Impossible.
The word rings in Lyric’s mind. This is allimpossible. Pieces of information stick to him: the Moon-Eater and Old Sarenpet and human architecture, the monster—thechimera—the empty, empty, empty sky, no mirané people, the red rock of his crater but there is no palace or temple or architecture he knows. The forces tingle and swirl and he can’t quite feel his fingers, but it’s wrong the way everything settles against his skin—no balance. No Silence.
No moon.
Impossible.
Lyric takes one step, a foot on the stairs, and another, carrying Iriset with him.
But how many things were impossible before he knew Iriset mé Isidor? Before he married an apostate who changed her face and upended the Silence of the Vertex Seal’s palace, infiltrated the hallowed balance of—of everything? Killed his mother, started a rebellion, freed the numen, tried to destroy Holy Design. The marriageknot churns in his chest, biting, eager, reminding him.
Nothing is impossible when she is involved.
Eliri leads him across a foyer of polished black glass. It shimmers like liquid, and Lyric nearly trips. The tiles are solid, but they seem to shift like water. Flickers of color dart here and there like tiny fish, disorienting. The foyer is lined with pillars encircled by deep green tendrils, long leaves waving gently. It’s like being underwater.
Beyond, a great archway opens up into a massive bright courtyard. They descend shallow black glass stairs that give way to paler glass, or clarified quartz, or something that ripples like sunlight on water. Five of those metallic towers rise all around, as if the courtyard is a disk held in the palm of a giant’s silver hand. The towers are woven of filaments of silver and crystal and seemingly grown together with exquisite design. Lyric has seen nothing like them. Elegant glass-like bridges connect the towers at various levels with balconies and glass bubble windows here and there. At the pointed tips, hundreds of paces up, sea-green pennants drift long and languid in the wind. The sky remains an empty, impossible blue.
Lyric looks abruptly down at the clear glass floor again, shaking off disorientation.
“Shade,” the invisible voice hisses, and something darts past him—it’s thenumen, its silver hair streaming pink and black as it moves in leaps and starts toward the daybed at the very center of the glass courtyard.
Someone reclines upon it. A mirané man, Lyric thinks, as the figure gets to his feet.
He’s an extremely masculine-forward person, broad and muscled, more defined than a chiseled statue and wearing only a long unbound vest and pleated black skirt. What is more outstanding, though, is that he is mirané brown, but more: Not only is his skin crater-rock red, the man’s hair and eyes—even the sclera, the palms of his hands,and nail beds that on a miran tend to be paler—are as crater red as everything else. This is a man carved not of marble but of polished red moon rock, and Lyric knows what he is looking at although hecannotname it yet. It’s impossible.
“Shade,” the numen says again, a mirané word for a slash of darkness across daylight grass, the shadow of a tree cast by the sun. And the impossible man’s body changes, slipping itself into a mirané-skinned youth, fifteen or sixteen only, lanky and almost cute except for his hair going silvery and his eyes pink-black. And a vicious baring of fangs that cannot be called a smile.
The Moon-Eater says, “Never?”
It’s a mirané word, too. A negative absolute.
“Yes,” the numen answers with a laugh, and it is a youth just like the Moon-Eater, lithe and eager, and as pink-silver as Aharté’s moon.
The two creatures embrace, arms wrapped tightly around each other. They kiss again and again, rubbing their cheeks like cats. Only, where their cheeks touch they smear, faces merging together and pulling back like raw dough. Lyric barely registers how disgusting it is.
He sinks to his knees, sitting back to cradle Iriset in his lap. He stares. Awed, shocked, his pulse seeming to spark in little stars outside his body. He can’t. The Moon-Eater, the moonless sky, Old Sarenpet, human architecture, chimeras.
The Apostate Age. This is at least four hundred years before Lyric was born.
“You came back to me, Never,” the Moon-Eater says. He smiles again; even his teeth are red.
The numen cups the Moon-Eater’s face. “Leaving does not mean no returning.”
For a moment the Moon-Eater’s expression slips into an undefinable passion, but it’s gone too quick, and Lyric too exhausted.
“Why now?” the Moon-Eater asks, removing the numen’s hands from his face but holding on to them.
