Page 110 of The Shape of Monsters
Eliri hums. She holds her left hand up against the sky. In the low tower light, Iriset can just make out a scar along the bottom of Eliri’s littlest finger. The one she cut off to escape her captors. Except it’s fresh. Not a scar so much as a wound. Days old, not years. Iriset’s tongue seems to curl unpleasantly at the back of her throat, almost like she’ll throw up. Before she can ask, Eliri says, “Eliri Who Touched the Sun is a good way to be remembered in your future.”
The wistfulness in the chimera’s voice leads Iriset to decide to ask instead, “Why do you believe that we’re time travelers?”
“The math makes sense,” Eliri answers immediately. “No—the missing math. The dark space, the parts that can’t be observed. The missing math makes sense if what’s missing isn’t space or weight or force, but time.”
“Yeah,” Iriset whispers her agreement.The memory of the sun, she thinks, from that hot afternoon in the garden with Singix.Here courage is a daily practice, between the sun and the memory of the sun.And Eliri who can touch it.
“But I want to believe you,” Eliri says very quietly. “I want it to be true, the future Iriset speaks of. Sometimes all that matters for belief is wanting to have it.”
Iriset wrinkles her whole face, and it feels funny, so she does it harder. She must make a noise, as Eliri twists to look at her. “Iriset doesn’t want to make this array, doesn’t want to put the Holy Design in place, but is, to save lives here.”
“It will destroy them down the line, so that’s a wash when it comes to goodness,” Iriset argues listlessly.
“Reductive, too.”
Iriset snorts. Points to Eliri.
“Then why do it?” the chimera wonders.
“It’s hard to care more about the abstract someday people who establishing the Holy Design will kill than the people living right now who will die if I don’t and the array remains untethered.” Iriset takes a deep breath. That’s only partly true. “I’m still trying to figure out my obligation to the future. The moon is stuck above the holy city then, so does that mean I must make it happen? The Holy Design exists, and I understand how it works, so must I enact it? Ugh.” Iriset takes her hand back and presses both heels of her palms into her eyes. It hurts the left eye more. “Are the people the empirewill kill already dead because I lived through it, lived after it? Or are they alive again because they haven’t been born? Is changing anything even possible, or have I already changed everything? Is it murder to prevent the miran from appearing? They don’t exist yet, but if I actively try to keep them from being born, is that genocide? They will commit various forms of genocide in the next four hundred years, so is erasing them stopping genocide?”
“Eliri sees,” Eliri says, taking Iriset’s wrists and pulling them off her face. Iriset’s vision is blurry, and not only from pressure. “Sees Iriset welcome too much weight onto Iriset’s shoulders.”
“Eliri is the one who claims to be too heavy,” Iriset says.
Eliri lets go of Iriset. In the starlight, Eliri’s gray eyes are more washed than usual, her black hair tarnished rusty-red. The tips of her quartz teeth show when she smiles sadly. “Eliri would gladly put down this weight, if there were a way.”
There’s something so heavy, indeed, in Eliri’s voice that Iriset angles her gaze back to the sky. The night breeze is not as cold as it was a few days ago. Maybe spring is coming. The gauzy clouds keep crawling nearer to Aharté’s moon.
And then Iriset wonders if she’s ever evenwantedto believe in anything at all.
Appealing
By the time the spring equinox rolls around, Iriset has grown used to the tension between fearing what the Moon-Eater has done to the numen and might do to her, and pretending it’s normal to work alongside him in the art library. When he’s quiet, when he places a tract of interesting theory onto her desk—or more often a pretty sketch of something outside: clouds, trees, birds, and once a portrait of Iriset herself—it’s easy to mistake him for any design disciple or scholar. He’s skilled after centuries of practice time, and Iriset loves to draw. She can fall into a quick, intense conversation with him about artistic techniques or a particular brushstroke or color medium, then fall back out as they return to their respective works. He can be so unassuming with his power, wielding it subtly or sometimes not at all, and occasionally his art is so silly that it’s too easy to think of him as human.
Outside of the library she’s avoided his presence unless he’s pretending to be the numen—for how could she excuse avoiding Never? Iriset has done her best to sometimes wander the fortress grounds listening for gossip and rumors about the numen, about the Moon-Eater. She built a small silk tool that fits over her first two fingersjust to the first knuckle, held in place by a ring of copper wire. In the fingertips are chips of salt hardened with miniature arrays, and when she touches anything—trees, flowers, benches, statues, walls—she can sense if there is hidden design under the design.
She’s looking for another prison. For signs of the numen, locked away or unraveled. Wisps of it. There must be evidence. So when Iriset is frustrated with her lack of progress in sundering, or she needs to move her feet to unlock ideas about the more complicated issues with the untethered array that fall under her responsibilities—like the fucking design blowback that will make the whole project too self-sacrificing—she walks. She wanders. She listens and touches. She attempts to flirt her way around the fortress, but most people don’t want to get too close. They either blame her for causing the earthquakes (fair) or treat her like she’s single-handedly saving them all (embarrassing).
A bit less than a quad after the equinox, which they don’t celebrate in the crater city at all—especially when everything is so locked down as the tremors hit more frequently and with greater intensity—the Moon-Eater shows up with a completely new and fascinating and appalling idea for distracting Iriset from hitting her head against sundering.
“Iriset,” he says with a grin.
Iriset is focused so deeply on finding the exact moment between water and vapor, to chart the feeling and slow it down in her mind’s eye, she doesn’t notice Shade. But at his voice, several clouds of vapor crystallize and fall to the worktable with tiny little tink-tink-tinks. “Ah fuck,” she mutters, sweeping the ice crystals up. “I’m busy,” she says, wiping her palm on her hip. If she doesn’t learn to sunderskillfully in order to unravel the Moon-Eater and transform his forces into the foundational fuel of Holy Design, this entire project will be moot. All the preparations and arguments will be wasted, and the city will crumble under the power of the untethered array, possibly rip a fissure in time itself or the whole planet or both! (What she really needs to believe in is herself.)
Shade sighs like a flighty mirané prince. He’s in one of his human forms, twenty, mirané-brown skin, a topknot spilling waves of black hair down his back, with a loose vibrant orange robe tied at his waist and darker orange pleated skirt. All of it glitters with embroidered flowers—a tree flower of some kind, cherry or plum, Iriset isn’t an expert. Matching gold earrings cling up his lobes and there are strings of gold in his hair. And bells, maybe? Something tiny and tinkling when he moves. His eyes are full red, shards of garnet and blood resin. He says, “Rattle yourself out of this mood and go with me. I need you.”
Iriset makes a sour expression.
Shade laughs, grabs her hand, and drags her to a hidden door behind a display of weapons carved with tiny figures either in battle or in orgy. Iriset schools her face as he pulls her up a tight spiral of iron stairs and they burst into a room shaped like a pyramid. Four sides sweep straight up to a single point, and at the tip there are skylights of creamy green glass Iriset suspects lead to a funnel of light, not the actual outside. There are no pyramid-shaped anythings anywhere in the fortress that she’s noticed. And she’s been looking.
Eliri is present, sitting demurely on a low sofa. There’s a curtain-draped bed against one wall, a table and the sofa at another, a diagnostic chair like the one in Eliri’s workroom, and against the fourth wall a contraption that looks like a human-sized square of reinforced wood with chains and shackles attached. On the table before Eliri is an assemblage of knives, rods, hooks, wires, and an obvious stylus. Eliri has a sheaf of thick paper on her knee. Notes, it looks like.
“What do you want?” Iriset asks, the whole picture giving her some ideas she’s fairly concerned about.
“I want you to hurt me,” the Moon-Eater answers smoothly. He walks to the table and chooses a small curved knife. “This is used for castration by the Pirs.”
“Cows?” Iriset snaps, breaking into a cold sweat.
