The Moon's Shadow · Fracture of the Divine
The Architects
Kael
Unmaker
Selene
Maker
Selene. Kael. Paired before the Sacred Laws had been tested.
Kael
Unmaker. Architect. First to go still.
Kael is an Unmaker, which the Celestial vocabulary defines as a being whose function is to dissolve, reduce, return what is shaped to what was unshaped. The hierarchy treats this as a solitary calling. Kael has spent his entire existence understanding that it is not.
He was paired with Selene before the Sacred Laws had been tested against the full violence of what existence requires. They built the Seventh Realm together, and the Realm survived for as long as their balance held, and the Realm fell when their balance was severed.
He has been alone in the Scar Cathedral for forty-three years. He has not crossed the corridors between his territory and hers. The discipline of not crossing them has cost him almost everything except the discipline itself.
His hands are very still. They begin to move sometimes, toward a wall she leaned on once, toward a doorway she walked through that morning. Tendons lock. The hands return to his sides. He has been doing this for a long time.
Selene
Maker. Architect. First to hear the Cathedral respond.
Selene is a Maker, the Celestial counterpart to the Unmaker function, the being whose work is to generate, to restore, to hold. The hierarchy treats this as the gentler of the two callings. Selene has been finding out, slowly, that the description was incomplete.
She is the only living Architect who can read the Glyph Language, the substrate of the Sacred Laws, the original syntax that predates everything the hierarchy calls divine. Reading the language is not the same as believing what was written in it. She has not yet decided what to do with the discrepancy.
She has been carrying a warmth that has no shape, low and lateral, behind ribs whose architecture has not adjusted to the absence on the other side of the Cathedral. She has been not naming it for a long time.
The morning the Cathedral begins to respond again, she is the first one who hears it.
The geometry between them
They did not choose each other. They were paired, before the Sundering, by a hierarchy that had not yet imagined what they would become. The Sacred Laws prohibit Forged Love. The Laws were written. Written things can be unwritten. The novel is the cost of finding out.
Indifference requires nothing. The distance between them is not indifference.
The opening is here.
Read the opening