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So Amaranth can’t identify the strange feeling gathering in her belly as she stares at the needle obelisk. It’s probably just stress unraveling in a sick little spiral right where her center of force rests, high in the bowl of her hips.

But when a commotion at the eastern garden gate draws her attention and her brother bursts into her presence for the second time that day, scattering Seal guards around him, and with Garnet alert at his heels, Amaranth suddenly knows something is wrong in the Moon-Eater’s Temple.

“Thank Aharté,” Lyric says, coming to her and taking her elbows. “You’re all right.”

Sidoné says, “What happened?”

Garnet answers, “The numen is free, and we feared—”

“Because it tried to kill the Moon-Eater’s Mistress when it was captured before,” Lyric says, softer, panting now as his adrenaline pops and cools.

But Amaranth’s eyes widen. “It’s in the temple,” she says, and pushes free to lead the way.

Sweat slicks down Iriset’s spine as she holds the final thread of their design diamond down with the broken stylus and places the fourth chunk of transformed crystal.

The weight draws the threads, and she holds her breath, lips parted, as she moves the stylus to jab its tip atop the crystal, pulling the threads up through the center to knot them there.

The entire diamond flares to life, glowing pure silver.

Iriset laughs and looks up at the numen. It no longer wears Garnet’s face, but its own vibrant silver-gray skin and hair and diamond-shard eyes.

“Now what?” she asks.

It points at the altar. “Look.”

Iriset, in only her split linen shirt and loincloth, having discarded robe, trousers, and boots to revert back to her prodigal barbarian Silk self, carefully picks her way on her toes to the altar, avoiding the many silver threads of force. At the altar, she simply… climbs atop.

She lies down, spreading her arms with her palms flat to either side of her face, cheek pressed to the warm, polished granite.

The numen hops into the air and hovers there, slipping along currents of force to float over her. It mirrors her pose from an arm’s length above. Its hair spills down around its face like a pretty fountain. The strands tickle Iriset’s shoulders.

(Imagine the spectacle that soon will greet Lyric, Amaranth, and their body-twins upon entry a few moments later: Iriset spread upon the altar instead of the teeth, half naked and sweating. And the numen hovering over her like a pale salamander god!)

(But first!)

The numen says, “You can look now, without your eyes.”

Iriset draws a long breath and looks with her skin and ears, listening to the flow of her blood, the spark of her pulse, the hope heating her cheeks, and the core of her forces pulling everything to a center.

She feels her inner design and pushes that awareness through her palms into the altar, through her cheek into the altar, through her thighs and knees and toes and belly, every part of her body that presses to the granite.

Like listening to something in the corner of the room, directing attention; that’s the only trick of it.

Threads of force wrap the altar, thrumming against the design diamond she and the numen drew, linked, and weighted with crystal.

Their diamond highlights the forces already present, and the complex design that binds the altar, the temple itself, and all the empire. Iriset chases the design, deeper and deeper, realizing how massive the design is: It spreads throughout the empire.

Iriset falls—not physically, but outwardly, through herself and into nothing but a realm of interplaying forces.

She’s nothing but forces: She senses the spread of the empire’s Design.

Every obelisk and steeple that lines out from this center pins the threads in place, balancing perfectly east and west, north and south.

This is why the empire requires equal frontiers: anything more or less in any direction and this Holy Design in the center will falter, unbalanced.

Because the empire is a prison. Built and maintained for one reason: to bind the Moon-Eater.

The whole of it is too complicated to parse or understand, it’s only to be glanced at by a mind like hers, human and fettered to flesh. Each layer interconnects, and the design is multidimensional, vivid, and breathing. Through space… and time.

The empire is a being, like Iriset is a being. Not merely design, but alive.

The pulse she’s heard throughout the palace complex is the breath of a great being bound in the very center of the crater, somehow powering the balanced architecture of the entire empire.

It is said that the Holy Syr unraveled the Moon-Eater, but the truth is that the Moon-Eater was pulled thin enough to be woven into a new design. The design of the empire itself.

The numen reaches down and places its hand flat against her back, between shoulder blades, and gives her a nudge.

As Iriset spins through the threads of force, she meets what fuels it: a give-and-take between the core of forces directly beneath that altar and that high hanging moon.

It’s a cycle of rising and falling forces, urged on by never-ending flow, and snapped to life constantly, again and again.

By the Moon-Eater’s Mistress. Amaranth puts her ecstatic spark into this massive machine every day, to rebind and fuel prison—Iriset even called Amaranth an architect once!

—and Lyric holds the throne, balancing her efforts with his solid presence against the red moon rock, his blood to bind it.

one claimed with blood and paired with hunger, always binding

There always are two, there have to be: Vertex Seal to bind, and the Moon-Eater’s Mistress to energize. Both. (But where are the third and the fourth? There must be, must be, but where? When? )

The empire is prison and imprisoned.

Iriset senses the tension holding the Moon-Eater down, and he aches to be free.

Iriset opens her eyes. They’re teary and hot. The lashes of her right eye brush the surface of the altar, her left stares through a veil of the numen’s silvery hair toward the blue-tiled wall. “He is so angry,” she murmurs, awed and angry herself. Growing angrier with every breath.

She came to the palace of the Vertex Seal to free someone. Her father rejected the effort and the numen toyed with it, but this, the Moon-Eater? He wants it.

Maybe this is the real reason she was here all along. To unleash herself and unleash this old red god, too.

He is the god of apostasy, after all.

Just then, the sanctuary doors slide violently open and Lyric méra Esmail runs in, empty-handed. Behind him come Amaranth, Sidoné, Garnet, and Raia mér Omorose. Seal guards pour inside, too, forming an offensive grid around the edge of the sanctuary.

“Stop!” Lyric cries.

Iriset pushes up and swings around in a fluid motion, dizzy, while the numen disperses into light, bursting like a rainbow, and coalesces again outside the design diamond. When it re-forms, it’s shaped like itself, bright white-silver-pink, and grinning at the Vertex Seal.

But he has no eyes for it. Lyric stares at Iriset instead. “What are you doing here?”

The airy panic in his voice draws her to her feet. Oh, she’s so angry with all the world.

“A Lyric to Bridge the Silence,” says the numen, invoking Lyric’s ridiculous full given name.

“Iriset,” says Raia mér Omorose, trembling. An wraps ans arms around anself.

Her eyes dart to the architect. “Hello, Raia,” she says dangerously.

Amaranth steps onto the first force-thread, and the diamond wavers. Her eyes are on the altar. “This is mine. You should not have come here without me.”

“What is going on?” demands Sidoné.

Iriset moves fast, jumping back onto the altar. “Listen,” she says, arms flung out and fingers splayed. “I have seen the Moon-Eater—Amaranth, he is alive! He is the furious, pulsing heart of the empire.”

“Aharté is the—” begins Lyric, but he stops, staring at his wife, at the frenzy in her sandglass eyes. Their hearts beat desperately together, still—always—connected. He feels her wrath, she feels his dread.

Then the numen is mirané, its hair turned black and waved, its skin the rust-red of the fallen moon.

It wears a priest’s robe, but silver-pink like Aharté’s moon.

“This is the Holy Design at work, if you like to think of the world that way—and I know you do,” it says.

“Here before me is a rising-dominant, a falling-dominant, a flow-dominant, an ecstatic-dominant, and my sunderer! Everything I could need. We are meant to do this, together.”

“Do what?” Garnet and Amaranth ask with the same breath.

“Free the Moon-Eater!”

“No.” Lyric makes his word a command.

Iriset meets his eyes. “Your Glory, the Moon-Eater is imprisoned here, he is trapped and suffering to keep the empire whole. That is the purpose of Amaranth’s ritual, that is the balance between blood and hunger—the binding! It’s the answer to the cruel riddle of your throne.”

Amaranth sets her fists on her hips. “Imprisoned? You cannot just appear here, with wild theories.” Her voice wavers, though, curious and concerned.

“You’ve felt him, Your Glory,” Iriset says seductively. “I know you have, and you have felt him respond to you. Alive.”

“Aharté set this throne,” Lyric says. “She Who Loves Silence and the Holy Syr created the empire in its glorious form. If what you say has even a shred of truth, it is as Aharté wills. We are hers.”

“At what cost?” Iriset snaps.

Garnet shifts his weight and glances at one of the Seal guards who holds a force-dart bow.

“Cost?” asks Lyric. “You know better than any how much I count cost. What would the cost of your choice be?”

Iriset stops. She knows. She’s sensed the entirety of the design, and if the design burns, the destruction will ripple throughout everything.

Roads, ribbons, buildings, bridges, shaken and shattered, security and glass domes, force-fans and waterways.

Everything that relies upon architecture will be vulnerable and might simply break.

What a change that would be. Even her father and Bittor might feel the reverberations backward through time.

“A sundering,” says the numen. “Righteous and necessary.”

“Brutal,” Iriset cries. She can destroy the empire. She can . More than rage blossoms in her chest, more than grief: It is her very unholy pride. Because she can, she must . Then she says the ancient word the numen taught her. “ Sunderer. ”

With the flick of his finger, Garnet signals the Seal guard, and it loosens the force-dart at her.

Iriset shudders at the impact just below her heart, blinking in surprise.

Lyric cries out.

Blood seeps around the flickering dart and Iriset feels an ache, a weight, more than she feels pain.

She brings her hands under the dart’s tail, cupping it almost gently.

She can’t breathe; ecstatic force explodes in her skull, sparkling in her vision.

Inside her, that thing from before trembles: She is coming apart, the prison is coming apart but remains the same. It is warm, vibrant, glowing.

The numen stills. It has waited a long, long time to free the Moon-Eater. “Do it, sunderer,” the numen hisses.

Lyric dashes for Iriset, reaching, while Iriset reaches inside herself, through herself, for that vibrant power—the one that feels like love.

She falls to her knees, and Lyric catches her. The numen puts its arms around them both for the moment of rivation.

The air pops, hollowing out the ears of every human present, and a brilliant explosion of forces pushes everyone back.

The forces shove out and out (and back and through), cracking the dome of the temple. Dark blue tiles fall like heavy rain, and in the silence after, the altar is empty.

The numen, the apostate, and the last Vertex Seal are gone.