39. Astraea
39
A straea
Eltanin had made something of a home tucked in my hood. We were both craving the extra warmth against the bitter winter air as he was surprisingly very warm.
“Best hope he doesn’t get the impression he can keep using you when he gets bigger next month,” Nyte mused.
“He’ll be able to keep himself warmer then. More feathers.” At least I hoped he would.
The temple we stood outside of was more like a small castle. I couldn’t stop staring at the magnificent structure that was so tall I had to crane my neck back to see even though we stood at the opposite end of the massive circular courtyard before the entrance.
Nyte kept close to me, but we hadn’t spoken of the memory he’d given me last night. I spent the morning reflecting, tracing his gold markings and feeling myself being pulled impossibly closer with each new glimpse of the past, made even more precious in his own thoughts and feelings. That night we’d learned of our clashing existence that should have sunk me in despair, given me enough reason to push Nyte to arm’s length with all that was repeating in the present. Yet all I felt was defiance to change our fate.
“Do people use it?” Zathrian asked from behind me.
I wondered if their distance was because Rose held a stare like knives on Nyte which kept Zath and me on edge with what she might do or provoke out of him. Nyte didn’t help when it was often like his receptive stares back were goading her.
It was Rose who answered. “It’s said to be haunted by spirits and curses anyone who tries to enter with ill intent. But people still worship around it for the Winter Solstice.”
I twisted around to her in surprise. “How do you know this?”
“There’s one in Pyxtia too. People make paper dragon figures and burn them in bonfires for Winter Solstice as they believe the age of the dragon will come back with her—you,” Rose corrected, shifting on her feet like acknowledging the legends she grew up with were about me made her nervous to remember. “I guess they were right.”
“I love Star-Maiden Day!” Davina said excitedly.
“Me too,” Lilith gushed. “The fae cast coins into wells like wishing upon stars. Then of course we get drunk and dance the night away outdoors.”
The concept seemed wonderful, but I was cringing inside because of the name. “My birthday,” I said.
Nyte’s hand hovered on the small of my back. “Yes. This side of the veil it’s known as the Winter Solstice. I imagine the celestials still celebrate it as Star-Maiden Day.”
I remembered Auster’s disappointment when he learned Nyte hadn’t told me about it already. I didn’t understand why when Nyte spoke of it now with ease.
“Hardly something for anyone else to celebrate,” I muttered.
“I worship it every day, but once a year, the world recognizes your brilliance too,” Nyte said, low and personal away from the others nearby. “Many have never forgotten, and never given up hope you’d return.”
I was building up the courage to tell Nyte about Auster. This time when I went back to Althenia I didn’t want it to be behind his back. After this visit to the guardians, I decided I would tell him.
My eyes trailed back to the building, then they fell down, and I was awash with dread, blinking at the golden circle I stood within.
“Strange,” Rose muttered, examining the ground with me. “Pyxtia’s temple has the same woven circle outside, but ours has a magnificent painting of a white dragon within it.”
This one had nothing.
“Uhh, should we be concerned about them?” We all turned to Zath’s carful alert.
Long past the gold-painted circle, guarding the entrance now, stood three cloaked figures with pointed hoods.
“They’re keepers of the temple,” Davina said. “They should be harmless unless you try to bypass them to get inside.”
“I need inside,” I said.
“They have to find you worthy,” Davina said.
Should be easy enough as the star-maiden , I thought.
“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered under my breath. A crawling unease was beginning to prick my skin.
Even as we got closer to the keepers, I still couldn’t see any flicker of skin from their tilted-down hoods. I walked ahead with Nyte, and stopped when they finally looked up.
They weren’t creatures of flesh, only bone. Ice crept through my blood at the depthless skull eyes that seemed to lure me in.
“Why have you come, maiden?” A low, echoing vibration sounded those words and silenced the wind around us.
“I need to know why I fell here,” I said.
“You have abandoned your duty since.”
“I hardly had a choice.”
Nyte’s hand slipped into mine, and with the touch my rising temper cooled within. I thought the faceless keeper before me might have shifted his head a fraction as if observing our hands.
“Even now, you are not ready to dedicate yourself to being what the world needs.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
“They mean because of me,” Nyte said calmly.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
His hard eyes turned soft on me. “You know it does.”
We didn’t have time to navigate more obstacles. I was running out of patience.
I slipped the key free; flipping it, I caught it in its full staff form it had transformed to.
“You either let me pass, or I do so by force. But what I won’t do is turn away from answers I need for my duty. ”
A tendril of pride fluttered in my chest like a gentle passing of Nyte’s emotions within me.
“Very well, maiden. But you must go alone.”
Nyte pulled me to him, cupping my cheek.
“You know I’ll be waiting right here for you,” he said quietly, trying for privacy.
“I know.”
Then he added to my mind, “You always know how to call for me. And you know there’s nothing that can stand in my way to you the moment you do.”
Nyte let me go and I rallied the courage to go ahead without him in my next breath.
The keepers parted and I ascended the long temple steps as the doors groaned inward by some invisible force.
Inside, I’d never felt so small and intimidated by a single space before. There was nothing ordinary about the colossal columns that circled the perimeter toward a lower center hexagonal platform. I came to one of five descending staircases.
My chest tightened with anticipation as I tried to gauge all I could but there was so much to take in. Light flooded the space from a domed roof and greenery climbed the aged cream walls and pillars. Down on the platform there were six statues. I kept my senses on high alert and the key warmed my palm as I headed down. It was so eerily quiet with only intermittent sounds of water dripping somewhere and the faint scuff of my boots.
I reached the platform and surveyed the statues. They stood in three pairs. The second thing I noticed was that each pairing had a different animal painted in front of them. A serpent, a panther, and a raven. The third thing I noticed was the diversity around me. A male nightcrawler from his taloned bat-like wings next to a human woman I deduced from her rounded ears. A celestial male from his feathered wings next to a vampire female, but I couldn’t tell if she was a soulless or shadowless. Then finally a fae male with dark, curled horns next to another vampire female.
Nerves bubbled inside me, but they were overpowered by something tighter in my chest. Excitement. The kind that sped my pulse with eagerness, but it was wrapped in threads of sadness and uncertainty.
These were my guardians. The people who raised me in this world. I blinked away the prickling in my eyes, hoping my memory of them would come back.
I hadn’t had two parents. I’d had six. And I couldn’t remember all they’d done for me.
My sight weighed to the ground in sorrow. At the center point of the gray cracked stone, there was a six-point star in the middle. I gravitated to it, puzzling like it was a riddle before me. The hole wasn’t a perfect shape, near circular but more like a rock had plummeted down to create the crevice.
It only took trailing my eyes to the stone at the top of the key staff in finding two puzzle pieces that would fit together.
Hope bloomed in my chest.
“Here goes nothing,” I said to myself.
Flipping the staff, I gripped it tight, my adrenaline threatening my composure as I considered what I could unlock by doing this. I had to try.
Holding my breath, I lifted with both my hands until the rock slammed into the slot. A perfect fit that erupted the world around me in a flare of light my eyes winced shut at. Energy slammed into me, then left me feeling weightless.
When I dared to open my eyes, I gasped.
I was still in the temple, but it was like the walls and roof had dissipated away and became an open ground of endless sky and mountains and life. So much life radiated here, but not like in my world. This place had a peaceful but almost sad aura.
“Astraea,” a soft feminine voice said behind me.
I whirled around in fright, and my heart slammed against my chest finding the six figures, the statues given flesh, before me. At least in appearance when they could be spirits with hollow forms.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“The land of guardians. Where those of us who have fulfilled our sacred duty get to pass in peace,” the woman said.
She was the human, I assumed. Her hair was long and raven black and she had dark eyes to match. Beside her stood a male, with dark brown short hair and bright hazel irises, who wore an equally warm but saddened expression as he held eyes on me. I couldn’t reciprocate when the towering, leathery wings behind him made me balk.
“She should know this,” another feminine voice said bitterly.
The red-haired beauty stood cross-armed, pinning me with a frown of disappointment but I didn’t think it was aimed toward me. Somehow, I knew to look down to discover her missing shadow. A blood vampire. The male at her side wore a similar steely intimidation in his green eyes and had silvery hair like mine. I was awestruck to discover his celestial feathered wings were black when I’d only seen those on Nyte before.
The two pairings were so unfathomable in the world I knew with all species at war.
“You’re my… guardians?” I asked the red-haired shadowless. Her lips firmed like the question angered her.
“They make us spend nearly a century raising her only to take that all away?” A new voice snapped, talking to the others about me as if I couldn’t hear. He was the tallest and I found him so beautiful with dark reddish disheveled hair, curving horns, and green eyes. Though my speculation about him being fae from the statue above was wrong. He was the other vampire. Soulless. From his missing reflection in the lake surrounding the hexagonal platform.
A female with short black hair with silver tresses framing her face curled an arm around his bicep. She had both a shadow and a reflection. Fae.
One from each species stood before me—I had been raised by them all to be fair and unbiased.
“It’s not her fault,” the soulless female said.
“I’m trying to find my memories,” I whispered. That snapped all their eyes to me.
I hadn’t known what the concept of my guardians would mean when I confronted it. If they would be just as parentally unattached as the gods who created me. Only seeing me as a duty. Yet as I looked over them all I couldn’t explain the waves of emotion at being in their presence that were overcoming me. I didn’t have the pictures… but I missed them. I mourned for them.
“Oh, our little star,” the human said, stepping away from the others to approach me.
The nightcrawler followed and she stopped in front of me, hesitating to raise her hands. She touched me carefully like she didn’t know if a touch could be physical here.
It was, and the moment she held me I couldn’t help but break a sob, pulled into the arms of someone who felt trusting and warm, like a mother I never had.
“I don’t know how to remember,” I cried.
“Shhh,” she soothed, smoothing a hand down my hair. “We’re here now.”
“Can you help me get my memories back?”
“I don’t know. But I do think there is something you could find here.”
She held my arms to pull me back and gave me a saddened smile.
“I’m so lost,” I confessed. I’d been trying to be brave and strong and convince those around me I could be what they wanted but those walls came tumbling down here. “I don’t know if I can be what they need.”
“You are everything they need,” the red-haired shadowless said, approaching too. “We didn’t raise you to be anything less.”
Her reception wasn’t as warm as the human’s; her affection was a little sharper, but I appreciated the balance.
“It has to start with believing in yourself,” said the celestial male.
“I’m trying,” I said.
I was relaxed in their company; unexplainably I knew I could be my most vulnerable here and it would be safe and secret with them.
“You’re holding onto your past. Both in this life and the one before,” the nightcrawler said. “It’s always been your greatest flaw—you’ve always been the hardest on yourself and your capabilities.”
The guardians weren’t old in appearance—immortality had preserved their youth—but I felt like a child among them. Their child. It was unconventional, but I understood now this was what I was missing most in my short life since returning. To know if I’d had parental love and I never could have imagined it was in the form of not blood but guardianship. It was whole and promising all the same.
“None of you had children of your own?” I asked, keen to know more of the history of the guardians before I came along. How they met their partners, and why they’d been chosen to raise me by the Gods of Dusk and Dawn.
“A story for another time,” the woman said with a smile. “Unless you remember first. But this is about you right now. You’re as much of a daughter to all of us as any of blood could be.”
“Can you come back with me?” I said, a child’s plea, but I yearned for them to come back and guide me again.
My glance over their dropping expressions sank that small dose of hope.
“Our time has passed in your world now,” the soulless male said.
“It doesn’t feel like mine,” I admitted quietly.
The woman cupped my face, planting a kiss on my forehead, and I bit my lip to keep it from wobbling when it felt like goodbye.
“It will,” she assured me.
“What about Nyte? Is there really no other way than for him to leave?”
Her expression saddened. “All of us have faced improbable odds. At our time it was like your world now—our species didn’t get along. We fell in love, then were guided by your creators to the temple in Vesitire where we were granted the sacred duty of raising you when you would arrive to bring a Golden Age to help us all see peace. You did well, Astraea. You ushered in that time and led triumphantly. It is Rainyte who stepped into a world that was not his and along with a meddling god’s gift it made him too powerful of a contender for your magic and the age of peace began to collapse. His father rose a vampire rebellion and your clashing existence shook the balance of magick—the celestials wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
“Why are we all dancing around telling her the truth?” the shadowless female snapped.
Her companions shot her warning looks but they didn’t discourage her. When she looked at me, I braced for the impact impending in her green eyes.
“You have to kill him, Astraea. Before, by his hand or not, he kills you.”
I shook my head. “There has to be another way.”
“Astraea,” the fae female said. “You have to kill Nightsdeath. ”
“I can’t,” I shouted. The world we stood in trembled at my cry of defiance. My eyes prickled and I swallowed down the marble in my throat. “The world might have crafted us as weapons against each other. But we refuse to be used as such.”
Why bond two people destined to create such catastrophe together? There had to be a reason our souls called to each other. A reason that while a bond could be denied our hearts claimed each other first.
The human cupped my cheek. Her expression warred with what she wanted to say, pinched like she shouldn’t speak.
But she did.
“There is a prophesy that speaks of a Godkiller—”
The ground quaked, so suddenly and violently that we clutched each other tightly.
“Stop, you’ll condemn yourself,” the nightcrawler male said, slipping a hand around her, and the concern he bore down on her rattled me.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Death shouldn’t always be feared. No one is born evil because of their shadow, or reflection, or wings. And no one is wholly righteous because of their blood either,” she continued. “Trust yourself, always. Don’t fear the darkest path for it will always lead to the brightest light.”
The warning rattled harder under our feet.
“You said each of you defied great odds to be together,” I backtracked, but it was a fragile grasp of desperation when my heart was shattering where I stood.
“We weren’t facing catastrophic imbalance,” the shadowless female countered. “Merely enemy outrage.”
“Merely,” the celestial male repeated with a playful huff. Meeting the snap of her scowling stare at him with twinkling adoration as his hand slipped absentmindedly around her.
I wanted to know their stories. Each of them. When their love for each other was so absolute it pulled at a yearning in my chest…
For Nyte.
“The hardest battles make the strongest soldiers, and if conquered together, it creates something transcendent and immortal,” the human said.
“Our time is up,” the fae female informed me.
“I still have so many questions,” I rushed out, panicked.
“I know you do,” the human said, embracing me again.
The nightcrawler laid a hand on my shoulder. “I have every belief in you. That stubborn, defiant, and kind mind of yours can’t lock those memories away forever. When you come back here, you’ll remember us.”
I clenched my teeth tightly to keep the tears from surfacing to waver my vision. I looked over them all again, filling with more motivation to get back my past to know all they’d done for me.
The celestial male took the hand of the shadowless female and turned to walk away.
The soulless male curved an arm around the fae female, exchanging a loving smile before they followed.
Then the nightcrawler male interlocked fingers with the woman.
“Cassia was right,” the woman said somberly. “If there’s one thing you’re not allowed to give up on, it’s love. After all you face, it’s the peace you deserve when not everyone can brave the dark to find it.”
My brow pinched with that and I was slammed with relief I didn’t know I needed.
“What about the world?” I asked desperately at their fading forms.
“You’ll find a way; you always do,” the nightcrawler said. The final echo before they were gone.
A single, silent tear slipped down my cheek when I stood alone.
I almost fell to my knees for a moment to gather my thoughts, but the ground trembled beneath me, and I shifted my stance to brace.
It only got worse, but there was nowhere I could run to. Water surrounded me and it was only then I realized that while the guardians had walked over it I wasn’t confident I could do the same.
The platform began to crumble and I gripped the key, yanking it out of the ground with a cry. It sucked me back into the mundane and comparatively cold surroundings of the temple in my world. The guardian sculptures didn’t move, but the ground beneath my feet still trembled.
Before I could take one step to race up the stairs, I was falling.
The ground gave way beneath me and darkness swallowed me whole. No stones touched me. It was like I was falling through oblivion. A space of lost time and endless wonder.
Down and down.
All I could do was close my eyes and embrace the confidence I’d gained in coming here. The defiance to follow my path of destiny, not one the world was trying to pave and condemn me to that separated me from everything my soul cried for.
My name is Astraea Lightborne.
I embraced the fall, curving my body in a dive and locking my shoulders that broke with tingles over my skin.
I am the star-maiden. The Daughter of Dusk and Dawn.
I breathed clearly, giving myself over to the flare of magick that wanted to expel. I fell like a shooting star. But this time, I would rise.
I am not weak. I am not alone. I am not afraid of myself.
Wings expanded from my back.
Then a voice broke through my tunneling focus. My name—but it was the shallow, fearful plea of it that snapped my eyes open and tightened an urge in my chest.
Nyte called for me.
Then his pain… it lanced through me, and my body twisted, stopping my endless fall with powerful pulses that strained my shoulders. I cried out with the effort, but I needed to get out of here.
If there was one thing I would not give up on… it was him.