Page 120 of The Shape of Monsters
Mesmerized, Iriset releases them into rain.
Iriset doesn’t ask much of Eliri and the Rivermouth king, just some space, time, and in return she helps their fortress designers rework the precinct into balance. The rest of the time she divides between scrawling plans again and again in slightly different configurations to mitigate the blowback and practicing sundering.
Blowback happens when a force-knot unwinds unexpectedly or too fast, or when an extreme event makes one force change into another force. If an array breaks because it was improperly balanced. There are plenty of reasons force-blowback occurs. In this case, Iriset expects it on such a huge scale because unraveling the Moon-Eater is like trying to unravel forces themselves. The power unleashed, the strength of the fifth force, which will streak out along the lines of the metadesign to bind the Holy Design into place, which will latch on to the moon, assuming they catch it, which will feed the force-loop holding the Moon-Eater’s transformed self to the Holy Design to the moon—all that power must be balanced, too.
Balanced, or directed somehow. Somewhere.
Eliri suggests it’s the blowback that can slingshot somebody back and forth in time. But Iriset is pretty sure, and this is only a hunch, that the time loop is already in motion and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it except let the untethered array completely break apart and take the crater city with it.
As time passes, Iriset grows better at little sunderings. She exists in a state of pre-arousal most of the time, which isn’t as inconvenient as it sounds for someone like her. It’s fairly typical. She writes upWritings of the Holy Syr. She meets with Helica Silkhair and the expanding group of city planners. She ignores the echoing tremble of the earthquakes that come again and again, that the mitigation dome takes care of less and less well. (At least the tremors keep the city in line and eager to assist in solutions.) She turns her nails into amethyst and back. Eliri adapts one of the iris caps she developed for Irsu River’s cascading irises by grafting it with a pagoda diagram intended to illuminate the threads of force in a confined location. It’s delightful, and Iriset uses it to transform her double-dome eye socket into a permeable net and can see anything she wants with only the tap of a stylus to the special iris cap, and perfectly sunders it to her opal eye.
Because at her core she’s a designer, she sketches out an array to activate her inner design toward arousal and acquires Eliri’s help fusing it onto her body. It’s not a tattoo, exactly, nor inlaid quartz, but Iriset and Eliri make a mixture of ink that includes silicate dust and pure quartz particles. Iriset lies back and bares her belly for Eliri to draw the design diagram just under her navel using a thin brush. The thick ink is dark gray and glitters in the even everflame light. When it is in place, Iriset melds it with her flesh. Sunders it part of her.
She can now snap ecstatic to the north node of the design, beginning a declining pattern that moves into falling, then flow, then rising and back to heat up her belly. It’s faster than rousing herself in the usual way. Iriset remembers all the times she considered putting her intellectual weight behind an old-fashioned sex toy, and can’t believe she finally did it in service of something so ephemeral and unpredictable asmagic.
Eight times eight
One night two quads past the equinox, Iriset dreams of Singix, of being Singix and being herself sitting beside Singix, all at the same time, in the way of dreams. And in the way of Iriset mé Isidor, it is a sex dream, all peach-blossom flushes and arched necks, perfect lines of jaw and chin, soft cries, so tiny and sweet and desperate.
Iriset wakes up as she comes, her legs pressed tight together, wretchedly alone, but so very warm as the orgasm ripples throughout her body. Even her cheeks are on fire.
She drifts back to sleep, wiping tears from her eyes because she misses Singix; she’d do anything to have saved her.
In the morning Iriset washes perfunctorily and heads for the communal dining hall. She feels languid, lost in thoughts about redirecting blowback.
“Ah, what a beauty! How could this one not know such a beauty?” someone says. Iriset continues on, skirting around a boulder marking the edge of one courtyard to the next.
“Lovely thing is a Rivermouth refugee?”
It’s Roc Aliel, sounding suspicious. Iriset looks over to see what the commotion is.
The leader of the Cult of Hopeful Design is a boulder-like man in his early fifties, with a not unattractively craggy facial structure (though of course Iriset’s bar for attraction is low) and Sarian coloring, with a light silvering of his hair and deep laugh lines at his bright black eyes. He has no human architecture as far as Iriset can discern.
And right now his attention is directly onher.
The thing is, Iriset and Roc have met several times. They’ve engaged in lively debates about the hope potentials in the Holy Design, and whether Roc should join Aharté’s priesthood when it appears. (“It seems like the Silent Chapel are the ones deciding what people are allowed to hope for,” he’d mused, to which Iriset said, “Don’t make that sound like a good thing.”)
“Roc?” Iriset says.
Roc frowns dramatically. “This man is known to the lady?”
Iriset actually looks behind her. There’s no one else. She glances back at him, and his intelligent eyes are taking in all the details about her, and something about the set of his mouth and shoulders puts Iriset’s hackles up. “Roc Aliel, what is happening?” she demands.
Something odd ripples his expression, and he cocks his head. “That eye… is the opal eye of Iriset Sunderer.”
“Because that’s who I am!” she cries.
Roc stares at her, not quite comprehending her mirané words. But he looks her up and down, and Iriset feels offended and, yes, fine, turned on. She had a lot of sexy dreams last night!
The cultist grabs her elbow in a big hand and pulls her with him, wearing a scowl. She hurries along as Roc takes her to the nearest bathing chamber.
He thrusts her before a mirror, and Iriset almost chokes on a gasp.
She’s looking at Singix.
She flings her hands up to her cheeks; the reflection does the same. She touches her eyebrow—Singix’s eyebrow!—and her wide, smooth cheek, the corner of her perfect soft mouth. Tiny chin, big eyes flat on the bottom, rounded over the top with thick but short lashes. Perfect white skin, smooth and pearly. One eye is deep brown, the other is glaring green-blue opal.Singix.
Iriset blinks, and tears fall in perfect straight lines down the center of her cheeks.
