Page 142 of The Shape of Monsters
So many children reborn today! Iriset feels like she’s crackling with lightning, and the thunder is about to boom. She touches a toeto one of the nodes in the command array at her feet and feels the zip of ecstatic and drag of falling, the ache of rising force and inexorable flow. The forces light up around the Moon-Eater, and Iriset makes a fist with her hand, gathering everything he is, every thread of force, ready to let it all go, to unravel him in a burst of fifth force.
“The moon!” cries one of the designers.
She looks at the moon first, which is doing its work of darkening the world. It is blinding, and she winces away but studies the forces. They’re loose, so small and high—too far away. One of the columns of force-light flickers.
“River,” Lyric gasps. A huge gust of forces blows down on them from above, tearing at hair and clothes. Loose sand stings her face.
Wincing, Iriset sees what the problem is: Across the crater is Irsu River with a bloody knife, ans arm wrapped around the flailing cardinal. Blood spurts from the slash to his jugular.
“We’re losing the helix!” one of the Lightning Revelation acolytes cries, while the others strain to hold, styli clutched in shaking hands as they keep impossible forces barely contained.
Lyric shifts, beginning to let go of Iriset, but she tells him, “No, this is our only chance.”
River lets the cardinal fall and walks quickly around the crater, around the straining Moon-Eater, toward Iriset. “Let it fall apart, sunderer,” River commands. “Don’t die, too.”
“Lyric won’t allow that,” Lyric says, arm tight around Iriset before releasing her.
Fear shoots through her. “You have to stay with me,” she says through clenched teeth. In her opal eye the forces drift and snap, whipping about like there’s a storm. She hears cries of panic, and under her feet the earth trembles.
Lyric says, “Do your work,” and darts around her. He runs in great leaps at River, who dodges, but Lyric is fast and ducks aroundto grab the wrist holding the knife. Iriset’s pulse screams in her head, the helix is shattering, and she—
“Sunderer.” The numen appears before her, translucent pink eyes, hair whipping in every direction. “I can do it,” it says.
“But—”
“I will go up and send the falling force back down.”
Wind tears at her hair, wind and ecstatic force, rising force trying to drive east toward the faraway Great Steeple. Iriset yells, “If you’re in the path, you might be caught in the helix. I can’t adjust anything this fast.”
“I know.”
Behind it, the Moon-Eater screams, his voice wavering as he unravels with aching slowness, not the right way, just like any dead body pulling into four elements, four forces. They’ll lose him if Iriset doesn’t grab his essence now!
River falls to ans knees before Lyric. Blood drips from the knife in Lyric’s hand.
“Do it, Iriset,” the numen yells over the sounds of the crater breaking. It spins away and shoots up into the sky, like a reversed bolt of pink lightning.
“Lyric,” she cries, seeing him kneel with River, holding the other up by the shoulders. River’s lips move, and ans hand grasps at Lyric’s neck, to keep him there.
Iriset closes her eyes so she can’t see, can’t see if Lyric—she focuses on the feeling of the Moon-Eater, the feeling of rivation in the Moon-Eater’s Temple, and the charm in her hand. She needs the blowback. She needs the power of the helix, of trapping the moon, to explode downward toward her so she can channel it, press it into sixty-four nodes, through sixty-four bodies. Change them, drive the Moon-Eater’s life essence through them, power it all, and lock the Holy Design into place. That’sall.
Distantly, she hears exclamations from the designers and peeks with her opal eye to see falling force streaming down like rain. The designers are dragging at it, planting it in place, and Iriset screams as she tears the Moon-Eater apart. He is nothing but crackling energy before exploding into a shock wave of raw power.
Iriset catches it, her body vibrating apart, and she wills it through her, absorbing into every fiber of herself and commanding it where to go. It blasts through her, out of her, and into the metadesign in four directions, aiming for the Great Steeples, reaching reaching reaching hard enough to encircle the globe if nothing catches them.
Then the blowback crashes into her like a moon plummeting from the sky.
That hits her and she tastes blood, her body is coming apart, too, skin nothing but vapor. She can’t close her eyes; she’s rigid and so alive.
All she can see are vibrant, starlit threads of force, and Iriset blows out a slow breath as she attempts to remake the world.
Everything flashes white-hot. The last thing Iriset feels is hands cupping her face; the last thing she hopes is that the calculations were exact, before she becomes nothing but light.
The most important question
Two hundred and fifty-seven days after Lyric méra Esmail, the last Vertex Seal, was revealed to be an imposter by a rebellious faction of mirané princes led by Hehet méra Davith, a star appears in the morning sky.
Lyric is falling again. Wind whips at his robe and skirts; tears suck out of his eyes even as they appear. He was holding Iriset’s face, but the intensity of the wind drags them apart. Lyric grabs for her arm, her waist, slipping against her sweaty bare skin.
