Page 101 of The Shape of Monsters
They reach the northern marker, directly across the lake from the flow marker where Turo already waits with head down, either sleeping or snorting at the little grasses and slips of water at the edge of the lake. The unicorn is a distant glow of icy sunrise. Some of his mane seems to waft up despite the low breeze today. It looks more like wavering light swimming in an invisible rising current.
“You can find your way?” Lyric teases, flattening his hand to the ecstatic marker.
Rabbit nods, but instead of walking on, az presses closer to Lyric and kisses him, bending him back over the marker. Lyric grasps at ahz arms to stay upright, and their teeth click together, but Lyric doesn’t push away.
So Rabbit kisses him with the sloppy intention az’s learned will send Lyric into a state of surrender, eliciting a soft moan from him. Rabbit wants to wrap Lyric’s legs around ahz and fuck right here, delay the ignition of the balancing design, just have each other under the equinox sun even if the unicorn and their little monster sister are watching. Az grabs Lyric’s waist and Lyric snaps right beside Rabbit’s ear.
The tingle of ecstatic force shocks ahz and Rabbit startles back, slipping a little in the shallow mud.
Lyric’s kiss-red lips curl into a knowing smile and he snaps again. “This isn’t rising and flow, this is ecstatic. Get to your marker, Little Rabbit,” he commands.
Rabbit bites at his mouth but goes, arousal warming ahz up. Az is to summon the falling force, which Lyric says for someone with no dominant design should feel like centering everything az feels, knows, wants, believes into the bowl of ahz hips—and Rabbit said, “That’s just sex, Lyric,” but Lyric said, “It’s rain and it’s the sun arcing across the sky with you, your heart, as the singular point of transition. It’s making yourself the heaviest knot in the tapestry of the world.”
“Heavy enough to pull at you?” az asked.
“You know what you mean to me,” Lyric said.
As az walks away, Rabbit thinks az hears Lyric coughing, but when az glances back, Lyric is smiling at ahz from his position leaned against the ecstatic marker.
It’s a simple thing to ignite the balancing design. They’d done the more complicated parts first: finding the marks at the lake, at the farthest points of the valley, and two layers in between so that there are sixteen markers total—sixteen steeples, Lyric says. They’ve set the forces into the most distant together over the past two quads. All the markers hum with rising, flow, falling, and in the case of ecstatic, they snap and pop, and what remains is to ignite the central steeples at the heart lake. The design should lift, drag, fall, and crack into place, evening out the forces of the entire valley. Making a small pocket of perfect balance. A little world of Holy Design.
This is the simplest form of Aharté. Lyric has said it so many times. It’s easy, basic, like asking everything to be exactly what it is.
The moment they ignite the heart steeples, Rabbit looks across at Setka, who waves. Rabbit feels ahzself smile as az glances north, to where Lyric Aharté stands like a steeple himself. Grounded, and sparkling.
They push their hands to the markers, they sing, slamming force to wake it up.
Rabbit feels very little. To ahz it is motions, it is belief, it is the normal course of power that shimmers under ahz skin.
Then the marker flares to life: falling, drawing, sucking, pulling, and churning like a, like a—
The world whites out.
Rabbit feels ahz internal organs expand. Az feels the design of ahz flesh unroll.
Falling force holds ahz together, holds ahz in a long line of falling, threads twisting together from marker to marker, an arrow of power from marker through chest to marker to marker to peak.
Silence rings after all, not a noise but a sensation.
Az comes to ahzself, panting huge wide-open breaths, giddy and lighthearted. The ice glares, the water gleams, individual waves and tiny individual blades of grass, too: They’re all shining uniquely themselves.
Rabbit feels incredible. Clear, strong, better than az has felt in all ahz memory.
But someone is screaming.
What’s been done
She’s still dying when Lyric falls to his knees in a mess of blood and tissue, cutting his hands on the sharp ruffled edge of scales.
Or she’s dead already and the squelch that sounds like breath from the flattened sac of lung matter is only a leftover gasp.
Lyric’s hands tremble as he reaches for her face, split in pieces where skin and scale and muscle tore from bone as her skull fell apart at the plate seams. The sunlight glints on her crowded teeth, and her tongue glistens as if she’s about to tease him, except all that’s left of her is guts and inside-out flesh and—
He barely bends away before fiery bile demands its way out of his body. Lyric chokes and spits it out, his head roaring with the perfect pitch of Holy Silence. It rings inhisbones, a relief, a balm, he should be shining, but instead Setka, his little—his little—
Thanks given to brother, the last he heard her, and it is impossible to comprehend that the adorable, ugly, charming chimera who followed him miles away from home and perched eagerly on her steeple, waving and bouncing, is this pile of broken flesh.
Lyric feels the ground vibrating under him and he crawls his hands back to the edge of viscera, bending over her to protect herfrom whatever is coming. His eyes are on fire; the tears falling seem to evaporate before they touch her.
