Page 136 of The Shape of Monsters
Rounding a standing bookcase, he finds Iriset seated on a bench, staring at a spread of design manuals on the desk. Untied outer robe and messy topknot make her seem wild despite how quietly she’sreading, both eyes darting back and forth too fast. Her arms fold over each other, one hand tapping staccato misery against the opposite elbow.
Instead of speaking, Lyric walks around the desk and leans down to take her in his arms from behind. She sucks in a breath and her head drops. She grasps his forearms and squeezes for a moment, then shakes her head and pushes at him. “I can’t,” she says.
Lyric lets go, but moves to straddle the bench next to her. “Iriset.”
“She didn’t tell me. She knew, she… she knew,” Iriset murmurs. “I can’t believe how many people I’ve killed.”
“Talk to me,” he says, thinking of her lover Bittor, the rebel he killed last year at the end of summer. The only time he’s killed with his own hands. But there is also Setka now, whose death is his responsibility, and countless apostates and rebels and very likely innocents who were only guilty by association, perhaps the justification farthest from justice.
Lyric brushes stray hairs from her face as she stares at him. He’ll wait her out with touch, burying his own anxieties, his need for answers. He runs his fingers along the shell of her ear again and again.
Iriset tilts her head like a cat. Her eyes drift closed. “Eliri knew. Her heart and lungs and muscles were meant for quartz bones. She was designed that way, in the womb. She couldn’t live with regular human bones, Lyric, not without her organs changing, too. I could have changed it all, but she told me not to. She said just the bones. Just the bones.” Iriset blinks several times, her eyelashes picking up the flecks of tears and clumping together so no actual tears fall.
“It isn’t your fault, then, Iriset,” Lyric says. He’s thinking about human architecture, and how this doesn’t happen when it’s forbidden, and how he’s supporting a huge redesign initiative and probably, certainly, the whole mirané people were made with apostasy, not by She Who Loves Silence, the goddess who is silent, if she exists. AndIriset isn’t a god, even when she acts like one. And that’s why he can still love her. “She used you,” he adds.
Iriset stands up, disrupting his caresses. “Look at this,” she says, pulling out an open book. “I saw this book in your forbidden library,” she mutters, flipping the pages until she comes to a fold-out double set of pages with long diagrams of wings and Old Sarenpet notations. Iriset points to some of the notes. “This is Eliri. She wrote,not compatible with quartz, and I didn’t know what that meant back then, but she’s talking about herself, her bones. And this”—Iriset flips two pages—“this says,too heavy, calculations impossible, try air pockets, hollow bones? Too heavywere basically her last words!”
Lyric catches Iriset’s hands. “She knew what she was doing.”
Iriset grimaces with all her teeth. “But why? Why not tell me? Why—why leave River? An is going to follow her, as soon as an can justify it. You’ve heard their story, haven’t you?”
“Yes. And I don’t know.” He squeezes her hands, feeling like his lungs squeeze, too.
“So much for consent,” Iriset says darkly.
“If she thought…” Lyric pauses, throat closing around words he hates to think much less say. “If she thought there was no place for her in Holy Design, maybe it was the only way she could imagine remaining, here, alive, at all. Maybe it wasn’t a death sentence but a risk. A risk worth taking to her.”
“You mean maybe it was brave?” Iriset’s mouth twists. “Maybe she wanted to believe it was possible? Then she should have told me everything. Let me want to believe it, too.” Iriset breaks free and reaches for a long pen, dipping it in ink before writing directly into the margin of the book,Eliri Who Touched the Sun.
“It was me,” she whispers. “I’m the one who names her that.”
They return to the Moon-Eater’s fortress and find the old fairy himself by following the sounds of celebration. Iriset shoves her way past people cavorting in various fountains and water features, which seems redundant given the light rain. Lyric tries to follow closely behind, but he’s not so good at ignoring the fact that many if not all the people are naked. It certainly makes the variations of human architecture more obvious than usual. Lyric sees skin striped like a cat, feathers on not only the head but the pubis, gemstones embedded along a sternum, and an actual prehensile tail. Not to mention at least three ridiculously enlarged penises and one that’s in some kind of armored sheath that matches the scaled armor down the man’s back—Lyric stops in utter shock, unable to look away.
He shakes back into his body when the Moon-Eater calls Iriset’s name, and Lyric realizes how far behind he’s fallen. He hurries past lascivious looks and a few beckoning hands (and tails). The Moon-Eater is in a fairly gender-ambiguous form, wearing a long vest entirely wet and plastered to his body, and oh, yes, he’s got four arms and hands.
Iriset marches to him and leans up onto her toes to speak into his ear. Lyric stops at the edge of the fountain, vaguely concerned for the rainbows of fish trying to dodge all the stomping and twirling feet.
“Ah,” the Moon-Eater says. Much of the revelry dims as more and more people notice the interruption. Shade wraps his lower pair of arms around Iriset’s hips and pulls her flush against him, his upper hands cup her face.
The rain is only mist against Lyric’s cheeks as he watches. The Moon-Eater says, “She finally found a way. Are you all right?”
Iriset shakes her head no, and the Moon-Eater sighs. “Very well,” he says, moving back into Old Sarenpet. “This farewell-to-the-Moon-Eater revel is now a funeral for the beloved Eliri the Adept Hand!”
Iriset grabs his face and tugs him closer and says something fast,to which the Moon-Eater makes an expression of sorrow. But he yells and his voice echoes: “Go, friends! Go and return with wings, design wings or costume wings, anything so themed! Tonight will be the greatest, the last, the most magnificent revel to honor the great, beloved Eliri Who Touched the Sun!”
“Will there be winners?” someone calls out, and it’s followed by cheers, and the Moon-Eater laughs, making promises to award excellent prizes, while Iriset makes her way back to Lyric and tugs him out of the party again.
Instead of heading for her rooms, Iriset drags him to her workshop and falls into a design fever, heedless of Lyric’s attempts to draw her out of it. Finally he resigns himself and sends for Maimeri to bring them food.
Iriset doesn’t protest as he and Maimeri take turns shoving food against her lips until she bites, as long as they also take turns modeling for her. She’s creating different wings out of various materials found in the workshop: feathered, skinned, and scaled. The sun sets and fireworks already burst every few moments when the designs are ready. Iriset straps delicate harnesses around them and activates the wings with ecstatic charges, then taps into flow, and Lyric feels the design lock into his own inner rising. From the corner of Lyric’s eye he can see dark green and gray feathers ruffling, and when he breathes the wings expand and contract along with his lungs.
Maimeri’s wings are delicate, colorful moth wings made of tiny scales. They flutter differently than Lyric’s but also tie to ahz breathing. Lyric can’t help but smile. The wings are pink, with black tips and black eyes, and long tails from the lower lobes. They coordinate gorgeously with Maimeri’s mirané skin. Maimeri’s pleasure shows in the subtle dimpling at the corners of ahz mouth.
Iriset struggles briefly with her own wings, and Lyric helps attach the harness. She can do her own inner design links, and when her wings unfurl it’s like being stabbed in the chest:
The wings she crafted for herself are tattered, the long strips of godgrass boning obvious, the paper torn and streaked with old ink. But they move, and it’s almost more impressive, more magical, than realistic wings. These are scraps that she designed into life, and Iriset isn’t hiding it. “Iriset,” he says sadly.
She takes a deep breath to expand the wings. They even creak gently, like branches in winter wind. Lyric can’t help but hurt to watch her, to see the manifestation of her grief and what he fears is self-hatred, all of which she’s turned into a haunting beauty. Even this, in his empire, would have been punishable by death.
