Page 118 of The Shape of Monsters
Laughing in delight, Iriset rolls over, clutching her hands to her chest. She laughs into her pillows until she’s crying again.
Eliri comes in shortly after Iriset gets herself into the bath, bringing food and news that it’s a day later, almost nighttime again. Iriset doesn’t show off her fingernails. She needs to practice more. She needs to get to the point where she doesn’t have to build up an orgasm every time she wants to sunder something. Not that she minds masturbation, it’s just inconvenient. And Iriset needs to think about this more, because if she can transform bone, can she transform the energy of the design blowback from capturing the moon into a different kind of energy? Give everybody in the vicinity of the crater city a nice orgasm during the ritual?
Laughing at herself, Iriset grins at Eliri, who is offering fresh clothes.
“Iriset feels… well?” Eliri asks, brow furrowed.
“Yesterday is forgotten,” Iriset says too lightly for it to be true. But she’s going to move past it.
“While Iriset slept, the Moon-Eater waited outside the gates. Politely.”
Iriset scoffs.
“The Moon-Eater hovered in the air, bright and ostentatious,” Eliri corrected. “But polite.”
“Fine.” Iriset gets out, drying off fast. “Tell the Moon-Eater I will meet with him and him alone.”
“Iriset is not required to see the Moon-Eater,” Eliri says firmly. “River agrees.”
Iriset lowers her hands. She looks at Eliri, the lovely but too-thin, too-pale chimera, who has always looked to Iriset like someone getting over a yearslong wasting disease. There’s still an ethereal quality to her beauty, a resilience. Now that Iriset has a better idea of what the chimera went through, it’s even more obvious. Iriset appreciates the offer of protection. But the Moon-Eater isn’t the one who murdered her.
“Tell the Moon-Eater,” Iriset says.
The Moon-Eater is allowed past the first gate and into the secondary courtyard. Iriset waits among softly trickling water features. The entire garden is pleasantly balanced, and Eliri mentions that Rivermouth has begun balancing what they can in preparation for the strict Holy Design. It should make the transition smoother when the time comes, and it’s good practice for their designers. The water features are connected by eight small streams, with two highly arched bridges leading to an island in the middle of an ornamental lake.
The Moon-Eater walks in, and Eliri squeezes Iriset’s hand beforeleaving. Iriset leads him across one of the bridges to the pavilion on the island.
They sit on a wooden bench, and the Moon-Eater keeps space between them. He looks like a mortal mirané man, plainly human and not even especially handsome. The spring air is warm, and lily pads on the surface of the lake are beginning to unfurl.
Instead of saying anything, Iriset turns to straddle the bench and takes the Moon-Eater’s wrist. He blinks half-moon eyes at her and allows the touch.
Iriset doesn’t close her eyes. She doesn’t think too hard. She thinks,He is enfleshed, he is real, a man, a mirané man who can be hurt.
The Moon-Eater watches her expectantly, but with patience.
Iriset slides her hand down to the Moon-Eater’s hand, focused on the sensations against her own skin, on the sensuality tingling throughout her. It’s masculine-forward, soft and dry.It will hurt, she thinks, staring at the shape and form of his first finger.Wantingit to hurt. Nail, nail bed, cuticle, first knuckle, sparse wrinkles, second knuckle, third knuckle attached to the square of his hand. She imagines that finger on her, in her, against her tongue so every swallow pulls on her arousal. Relishing the process, in as great of detail as she can manage, Iriset imagines jerking his finger back as hard as she can, snapping tendons. And then she does it.
“Ah!” Shade cries out, jerking his hand free. His expression flashes petulance almost too quickly to see, then opens wide into delight. “That hurt!” He laughs.
Iriset clenches her teeth, refusing to share triumph, despite the relief draining her energy.
“Iriset, you did it, you held me in form! It hurt. I didn’t make it hurt.” He’s on his feet but bends over to grasp her shoulders.
Iriset shies away. “I’m not going back with you.”
“Ah, Iriset, but you did it.”
“I can give you an array to enforce the same effect,” she says as snippily as she likes.
The Moon-Eater frowns. “Really?”
“Yes, it’s not sundering.” It’s actually more like a null wire, but Iriset doesn’t tell him that.
He doesn’t seem to believe her, which he shouldn’t, because while Iriset told the truth about being able to create an array for the same effect, she’s fairly sure most designers couldn’t do it without any design at all. She willed it, without a buildup of connective inner design the way she could draw Lyric’s inner design toward coming together when they had sex.
Slowly the Moon-Eater sits back down, perching almost shyly beside her. Considering how thoroughly he fucked her, it’s a little ridiculous for him to act shy.
Iriset says, “Why do you really want to be split apart? Why are you so willing to be unraveled and made into the foundations of a design that will so fundamentally change your city. Change you?”
