Page 3 of The Shape of Monsters
Hunger focuses him in his body, and the gradual ache of his feet, until everything else falls away and Lyric hears only his own peaceful thoughts. Then even those thoughts quiet, pulling thinner and thinner, and he feels it: Silence.
The very moment Silence arrives, it dissipates, but Lyric notices.
Though the Vertex Seal is apathetic to his son’s devotion, Lyric’s mother Diaa is pleased, and reminds her husband that Silence is the strength of the empire. Lyric will be the Vertex Seal Esmail molds him into; let Lyric be Silent for himself.
She pulls her son to sit on her lap though he is too gangly to fit. She reads to himWord of AhartéandWritings of the Holy Syr, and inquires after a tutor from the Silent Chapel to instruct him once aquad. By the time Lyric is eleven, every word ofWordlives perfectly in his mind, and then followsWritings.
Lyric is fourteen the first time he feels jealousy. He’s tending the young garden on his balcony, which he keeps to remind him of the herb garden in the Silent Chapel.
He breathes carefully as he touches the soil at the base of the blue sage to assure himself of its lingering dampness, and is about to move on to pinching lemony basil leaves because the plant grows furiously and every day he harvests a basket for his mother’s rose ice tea. The desert gentians aren’t blooming, but they prefer the drier parts of the summer.
A shriek resounds from inside the suite he shares with his sister Amaranth and their body-twins.
“Lyric! Listen!” Ama shoves the lattice screen away, bursting onto the balcony with her inner trousers bunched over her heart, holding her loosely tied breast-binding in place. Her hair is a shocking mass of black curls and her eyes alight. “I was expecting it soon because I’m hairy now, and sweatier? And, well.” She drops her arms away to reveal still-small breasts under the thin binding cloth. “But it’s finally happened!”
Lyric raises his eyebrows in question.
“Menstruation!” Ama cries loudly enough everyone in the complex below their petal probably hears the future Moon-Eater’s Mistress’s news. “I was hot all night, but then forgot and was just standing there getting dressed, and this sensation started gathering in my guts, but not really my guts, in the cup of my hips, and it felt strange, not really unpleasant. It drew all my attention.”
“Ama.” Sidoné appears beyond Ama’s shoulder. The skinnymirané body-twin has been wearing her hair in a puffy halo recently, and it makes her seem taller than she is. “Must you subject everyone to these details?”
Lyric winces slightly, predicting the reminder will only make Amaranth more visceral in those very details. He puts a stop to it by saying, “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Amaranth says laughingly, spinning in place, her trousers once again held to her breast.
The delight suffusing his sister’s entire being brings an answering smile to Lyric’s lips. “Have you sent anyone to inform Uncle Lirdal?”
Amaranth freezes, and as she stares at Lyric, her mouth drops open and her eyes grow watery and wide with luminosity. “Oh,” she breathes. “The Moon-Eater!”
That is the moment the jealousy curls through Lyric, like saw-creeper vines around his lungs.
He wants that. To belong to a god. To be able to wake one morning and find his body has prepared him to serve that god. Lyric has to work so hard just to brush against Aharté. His devotion is real but difficult to touch when he is so busy with becoming a great Vertex Seal, inundated with noise. He longs for the ease of giving body and sex and release to the Moon-Eater. Instead Lyric can only work and work and work to barely understand Aharté’s Holy Design.
He watches his sister and vows to himself that he will succeed. He will understand Silence and make himself part of it, until there is no difference between himself, the Vertex Seal, and the Holy Design of Aharté’s empire.
Lirdal turns the work of the Moon-Eater over to his niece when she is fifteen and Lyric sixteen. Their uncle leaves Moonshadow for the cityof Ilistrum in the north, to enjoy the snowy winters, he says. Really he’s there to whip the mirané governor into shape and excise festering corruption. He only visits his family again four years later when Esmail dies and Lyric is invested as the Vertex Seal. He says to Lyric, “May you live to step down one day. I’ll teach you snow sculpting.”
But Lyric is brimming with the pressure of an entire empire dropped suddenly and solely on his heart, as well as grief, and he speaks with brutal honesty, “I cannot imagine voluntarily subjecting my child to this.”
Lyric does not mean to implicate his uncle, but that is how Lirdal takes the words, and once he returns to his new husband and home in Ilistrum, he never comes back.
Lyric has been the Vertex Seal for less than two years when a skull siren drops onto his balcony, its wing battered, a leg broken, and a tiny fracture lining the blunt curve of its skull between gaping eye sockets.
He crouches, priest-red robes pooling on the glazed white tiles, and his hand hovers over the trembling little body.
“There, little one,” Lyric murmurs. It wails a sorrowful song, and Lyric starts to call for Garnet, working in the study.
He stops. The skull siren will die. It’s suffering.
Just four days ago Lyric commanded the army to put down riots by the most efficient means in a town three ribbon hours away. Next quad he will choose the names to receive relief during the Days of Mercy. He has learned well how to kill via command, and walks the labyrinth of the Silent Chapel again and again, struggling to know how to think of himself, when he can be responsible for such violence by proxy, or such mercy by his own word. What is the Holy Design of this?
Lyric picks up the bird and it flails, slicing his palm with its delicate talons. He holds on, murmuring lines from a Silent prayer. He can do this. He can snap its neck. If he can kill seven people at such a distance, he should be able to kill a small bird in his hand.
Its body flutters, one little talon hooks under his skin and stays there. The song spilling from its bony beak is woeful and weak.
Do it, Lyric thinks.You can. It’s suffering.
His hand doesn’t move.
