Page 32 of The Shape of Monsters
“But Eliri is a prodigy, too, and have you heard about what she’s done?” Iriset says it quickly, passionately, also in mirané.
“Have you?” the Moon-Eater asks slyly, glancing over at Eliri.
“Old Sarenpet,” Iriset says, “so Eliri can follow. Eliri,heris for women-gendered others. Is that how you would describe that, Shade?”
The Moon-Eater shrugs. “Sure. Now prove Iriset can sunder.”
The numen snarls.
Iriset touches its long-fingered hand. “First explain what exactly sundering is, and why I can do it but you cannot. You can do things I never could.”
“Never has said what sundering is, Iriset mé Isidor,” the numen says through its sharp teeth.
“Say it again,” she insists on Eliri’s behalf.
It seethes but says, “Sundering creates a force different from the four known forces—a fifth force, a force of creative power.”
“Power means the same as force in this tongue,” Eliri says, and Iriset laughs.
“Theforceforce,” she says, sharing her laughter with Eliri—though the Adept Hand only smiles slightly.
The numen shoves everything off the desk between Iriset and Eliri, eliciting exclamations. It says, “Be serious. Iriset knows the fifth force, Iriset saw in the temple, and felt it.”
She sobers. “I did. It was immense but somehow incredibly small. All the power I’ve ever felt contained in the palm of a hand.” Iriset bites her lip, thinking of the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, and the first time Iriset felt hints of sundering. When Amaranth brings herself to pleasure and it opens and shuts something in the Moon-Eater’s Temple. At the time, Iriset did not have a clue what it was other than sex magic and the remnants of an old red god. She thought of it as love. Now she knows it was a prison.
“Call it the heart force,” she says quietly.
“Oh,” says the Moon-Eater. “I like it.”
The numen purses its lips.
Eliri says, “Unscientific.”
“So sundering creates the heart force,” Iriset says, blowing past the commentary. “But what makes me able to do it? I’m not like a numen. I can’t shape-shift. I require tools and arrays.”
The Moon-Eater wanders to Eliri’s shelf of cubbies to skim his mirané-brown fingers against sheaves of papers. “Never says sunderers cannot be bound by the known rules of design, but can be true gods, because the potential power is limitless.”
“Iriset is not a god,” Iriset says carefully.
“Not yet,” the numen whispers. It stares at her with pink-shard eyes, seeing through her skin. “There is no answer to satisfy Iriset.Greater minds have tried, written and argued in languages Iriset has never heard of. Never has searched. Never has learned. There is no one in the world that knows what makes a sunderer. Only that sunderers exist, that others have existed. Whatisknown is that numena are born in sundering, of sundering. We are made of the fifth force and can change ourselves. We are always in motion. Iriset is made of four forces but can access the fifth. Bring it to life, make numena. Make anything. You, Iriset Sunderer—if you master sundering, you can change everything.”
In the Moon-Eater’s Temple four hundred years in the future, the numen and Iriset made a sixteen-point diamond to highlight the threads of force at work binding the Moon-Eater to the center of the empire’s Holy Design in order for Iriset to see and understand them. So here they do the same, and settle a simple chunk of polished opal in the center. To see if Iriset can find the means within herself to see its inner design, to see the ways to pull it apart. Iriset sits cross-legged at the ecstatic anchor and puts both hands to the array.
She’s stripped down to loincloth, wet lips and breath and her own inner design.
The design diamond immediately causes Iriset to relax, though she hadn’t realized how tense she’d held herself against the chaotic force patterns in this place. She’s too used to the consistent balance of Aharté’s Holy Design.
“Not seeing,” the numen says, “but knowing. Understanding. Use eyes and ears and, yes, that skin, but don’t rely on such flawed flesh.”
Recalling what it felt like when the numen triggered this rivation in her, she tips forward, a little bit physically but a lot sensorily. The highlighter array lets her trace the complex forces in her mind untilthe opal’s design expands in her awareness, the mineral-flow structure, the hardened flow-force dominance of its chemistry, and Iriset laughs breathily as she realizes with the right tools she could prick here, pull there, and transform it into salt. Or, with an infusion of some base elements, obsidian.
She opens her eyes to excitedly explain, and the numen says, “A sunderer doesn’t need tools other than will and understanding. A sunderer can pluck those missing elements from theheartforce, make them yourself, and then there should be a chunk of obsidian there. That is when I will be impressed.”
“Oh.” Iriset thinks fast and hard, wondering how to start the rivation process. Before, the numen triggered it in her. But she can’t rely on it, it has been very clear. Can she begin the process within herself, a snap of ecstatic, and transfer it to the opal? And if she wants to make opal into obsidian, doesn’t she need toseethe inner design of obsidian, too? Turning to Eliri, she asks.
“There will be obsidian here by tomorrow,” Eliri agrees.
The Moon-Eater says, “Learn something else,” assuming it to be so easy, and Iriset likes that.
