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The numen

A ctually the creature chained behind the throne of the Vertex Seal had not come to kill the Moon-Eater’s Mistress a hundred years ago. It came for the Moon-Eater.

The creature, a numen, has been called many things—fairy, angel, ghost, she, he, es, xe, ah and an, alushad, they—but among a people like the miran who name the sky it and a mountain it and the moon it , so it wished to be known, too.

Its own people have no such words. They hardly have words at all anymore, because words confirm and conform, they create meanings and enforce the patterns of the universe instead of dancing between.

A word enslaves, much like the collar snapped around its neck, binding the numen into a single pattern, an exclusive form.

But no matter: It can hunt from any cage.

Stories of numena pop up around the world, though they’re out of fashion in most places with rigid structures of religion or magic.

Places children are encouraged to stop believing in fairy tales, societies above all that nonsense of interconnectivity and free spirits and fun.

The only reason anybody believes in numena in Moonshadow City these days is because, well, they have one.

It doesn’t speak to anybody, though sometimes laughs in a scratchy voice as worn as wind-scoured bones in the high desert.

It eats what amuses it to eat: sometimes dust gathered slowly over a week in its underground prison, sometimes flower petals provided by miran who think they know what it is, sometimes meat but only raw because it’s funnier that way for how the miran dislike it.

Sometimes it doesn’t eat for years. Then there are those rare occasions when a guard gets a tad too near and it manages to touch, to soak in those forces that make it.

This numen is patient.

Others, not so much. One had its favorite hat stolen in Ur-Syel and waited no time at all to follow the culprit home, where it slaughtered him through three generations in every direction, teaching the Urs that one should never pick up unclaimed clothing left lying around.

In the Bow they’re called trick men and tend to untie canopy bindings and spoil milk, unless one can be tricked back into a bargain, in which case they give unending blessings for defeating enemies.

Across the prairies and leading into the ancient empire of Res, they were the fickle, strong wind, summoned by snapping pennants and worshipped with every breath.

It’s unclear whether they ever really lived in Res.

Numena are tiny as bumblebees or towering as gods, depending on the convenience to the story.

They’re excellent lovers unless they decide they’re hungry, they carry the souls of the dead to whatever heaven the souls of the dead go, they talk to birds, they soak up sun like flowers, they travel by stepping through shadows and curse through dreams. They’ve never existed in the Ceres Remnants, though their people have plenty of stories about demons of humanity’s own making.

The Vertex Seal Tor méra Ladalir tried for thirteen years to kill the imprisoned numen.

He attempted cutting off its head, a reliable method if there ever was one, to no avail.

The numen’s head fell, unraveled, vanished to nothing, then reappeared on its body.

The person serving as the Architect of the Seal at the time suggested that the null collar stopped working on the head the moment the head was detached, and therefore those forces of the numen’s body were able to rejoin the Holy Design.

The architects attempted a null net, and a system of nulled accoutrement like bracelets and necklace, waist-chains and a cap, but the results were the same.

When they put the null cap on its head, the creature laughed.

Tor méra Ladalir tried to have the numen bled, starved, hanged, and even suggested the Vertex Seal’s historically preferred method of execution: unraveling.

His brother, the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, argued that unraveling would free the numen, not kill it, and since the Mistress was the one in the most danger from the creature who (they believed) had come here to kill the Mistress, the Vertex Seal and his mirané council gave extra weight to the man’s opinion.

(There is only one way to kill a numen.)

Since they certainly couldn’t set it free and had no clue how to destroy it, they spent quite a bit of effort paid in money and hours to secure it in a prison that should last a thousand years.

It was Lyric and Amaranth’s grandfather who decided to flaunt the numen sometimes, situating it behind the throne, chained to the red foundation rock broken from the fallen red moon itself.

Initially it caused a stir, both curiosity and outcry, but the Seal guards didn’t allow anyone too near, and the numen itself reacted to nothing at all—not offers of ecstatic wine in delicate flutes or beer thrown in its face.

Eventually it lost its luster, and the miran ignored it, teased one another about it, pointed and told stories to comfort themselves, and drifted away.

When Lyric was fifteen, he came across it already chained to his father’s throne, hours before the start of the party that would fill the Hall of Princes. Startled, on his way between the Silent Chapel and the high arch leading to the office of the Vertex Seal, he stopped.

They were alone in the echoing chamber.

He’d seen it before, of course. Lank hair, falling in pieces over pale gray-pink shoulders bared by the long vest it wore.

Naked feet with toes splayed inhumanly against the tiles.

It crouched so that its legs seemed too long, knees too knobby.

And it stared at him with black diamond-shard eyes.

Lyric breathed deeply, in a slow four-count as he’d been taught in the temple.

There was nothing he could do, and if he unlocked the null collar and chains, what if it slipped away to murder his uncle? By the time Lyric inherited and could make such a decision to let it go, it would be his sister in danger.

But Lyric always felt it when it was in the mirané hall.

Not the hum of forces felt by certain others, no—for Lyric it was the weight of his own expectations and the weight of choice and privilege.

Imprisoning it did not fit into his understanding of Silence, of Aharté’s Holy Design.

It had been captured attempting murder, but hadn’t actually hurt anyone.

It was a mystery, yes, and dangerous, certainly.

It should have received swift and just punishment.

Death or a term of sentence, whatever his forebears decided.

Not this slow, sick, unending apathy. It was wrong.

Torturous. Unbalanced. He wanted his reign to be marked by justice, by the balance and peace of Aharté’s Silence. The promise of it.

Then again, the next time Lyric méra Esmail the Vertex Seal was alone with the numen chained to the throne—which, thanks to the death of his father, was suddenly his—he had already commanded every sixteenth person in the Rising Two refugee camp executed, whether child, adult, elderly, infirm, guilty, or innocent.

A handful of refugees coming in from the northwest in the wake of a bad plague—on top of civil war in the great Lakesea—had broken into the army warehouses of animal feed and stolen the grains for rough bread.

They’d been protected by the people in the Rising Two camp, of course, because they fed those people.

Instead of hunting the specific perpetrators, the army rounded up the whole camp and committed the Vertex Seal’s deterrent.

You are welcome here , the Vertex Seal said, so long as you obey the Holy Design. Harbor criminals or apostates, and this is what you face.

The number of refugees in the camp was seven hundred and sixty-eight. A perfect number divisible by Aharté’s best number. Proof, was it not, that the decimation was part of her Holy Design? Forty-eight died. Also a holy number. Maybe some of the thieves were among them. Maybe not.

After having done such a thing, Lyric looked at the numen as it wasted away behind his throne. He saw the injustice. He saw the slow cruelty of it. But in the face of everything else he had to consider now, the balance of violence and compassion, the numen was nothing.