Nyxiana
The door takes us both at once. There’s no dark, no distance.
One step out of a Colorado morning and the next one lands somewhere else entirely, the only thing I carry across is his hand in mine.
Then I’m standing, and I stop breathing for a second, because I’ve walked into four realms since this started and none of them looked like this.
The chamber is enormous. I can’t find a wall in any direction.
Light comes down in long columns. Gold, green, a blue I have no name for.
Where the columns cross, the color runs together and pours out across the floor in sheets.
There are shapes overhead. I can’t tell whether somebody built them or whether they’re simply more of the light.
Whatever holds this place up, it isn’t stone.
The air is warm. It’s not the weather, it’s the temperature of a bath, and my body wants to let go of everything it’s holding. This is the most beautiful room I have ever stood in.
There’s no scent in it. Every other realm I’ve walked into, I smelled it before I saw anything.
Wet rock and old blood in the quarter. Cut grass and charge in Doria.
Here there’s nothing. In a room this beautiful, that’s the first thing wrong with it.
There’s no sound either. It’s not that it’s quiet, there’s just nothing.
I can hear my blood moving, nothing else.
Something goes over me while I stand there.
It works down my body the way a border ward checks a stranger at a gate, takes its time about it.
Then it leaves me alone. The star on my wrist is the only reason it does.
I turn to check Valen. He’s standing straight, hasn’t moved since we came through.
He didn’t reach out a hand for balance, isn’t squinting into the light the way I am.
He belongs here. This place checked me at the door and decided whether to let me stand.
It hasn’t come near him at all. It doesn’t need to.
Whatever this realm is made out of, he’s made out of it too.
His eyes move over it, gray and unhurried, going left across the chamber and back again, the same way they move over any place he walks into for the first time.
Far out across it the light starts to gather.
It’s not travelling, it’s thickening. One part of it turns solid white and keeps getting brighter.
I set my feet and bring flame up at my fingertips, just enough to work with.
I’m getting ready to fight whatever is coming out of that light.
Valen is watching the same place with his head tilted, open, curious about it.
“Valen,” it comes out sharper than I intended.
“It isn’t a threat,” he says.
“You can’t know that.”
“No.” His eyes stay on it. “I know it anyway.”
“How?”
“Same as I knew which stone to put my hand on in Drakoria.” He leans toward it instead of away. “It’s the only answer I’ve got.”
I keep the flame where it is but stop bracing.
Five figures come out of the gathered light, each one roughly the size of a man.
Behind each something enormous is folded in close.
Wings, probably. I can’t hold any of it long enough to be sure because every time my eyes settle on one the brightness pushes them off sideways.
One comes forward and the light around him eases enough so that I can look.
Dark skin, dreadlocks all the way down his back, wings that open wide enough to take up the room, white the whole way through, held out instead of folded.
He isn’t a giant. He’s the size of a large man and no more than that.
It’s the way he stands that fills the room.
I want to take a step back from him and I couldn’t tell you why.
Bancroft. My mother described him to me when I was a girl.
She said he was the law itself, that he had never apologized for what the law does to people.
She didn’t tell me how it feels to be in a room with him.
I don’t think she had the words. The one beside him is easier to look at.
Golden hair that drifts and settles as though there’s water in this room.
Gold eyes, warm, and a great deal older than the warmth makes them look.
White wings held closer to his back than the first ones.
Samuel. My grandfather. He held me the day I was born.
He came to my mother’s house every year of my childhood, never came empty-handed.
Out of everyone I’m related to, he’s the one who has never wanted a single thing from me.
He’s standing forty feet away and looks glad to see me.
The other three stay back. Bowen. Rainer.
Gavin. My great-uncles, the five of them brothers, and the last time anybody said those four names out loud in front of me it was four women on a porch in Colorado arguing about which one of them was the most romantic.
“You carry the Star.” Bancroft’s voice arrives without any air moving. “All four points of it, and the fourth on your own arm. Say why you have brought it here.”
I open my mouth. Then the light in the chamber changes, every one of the five turns their head at once, I know why before I look.
Faelan is standing thirty feet from the Council.
He doesn’t arrive. He’s just there. No door, no light, no step out of anything.
The realm that went over me at the gate and decided whether I was allowed doesn’t touch him at all, because he’s already been in here long enough to be part of the room.
I haven’t laid eyes on him since a balcony in Doria.
The gray has spread along his jaw, down the backs of both hands, he’s stopped putting any effort into covering it.
“It’s finished,” he says to the Council. “Two thousand years and it’s run its course.”
Bancroft’s wings shift once. “You will stand down.”
“No.” Faelan’s voice doesn’t rise. “I’ll give you something better than standing down. Tell them yourselves. All of it, every realm, in your own words, before I do it for you. It will go easier for you coming out of your mouths than out of mine, and I’d rather have it that way.”
Not one of the five moves. The air gets heavier until I can feel it pressing on my skin. Then he turns his head and looks at me.
“I asked you to stand aside.” The chamber does nothing. No air moves. His voice goes out and stops.
“You put your hand on my throat and told me I was right about the crime, wrong about what to do with it.” He says it the way another man would remind you of the time. “You never said no to me. You’ve had days to notice that. I don’t believe you have.”
He doesn’t give me room to answer. He turns his back on the Council, the first thing he’s done in here that looks like violence, and takes hold of the light.
The realm’s own light, the thing that decides what has a right to stand in here.
He gathers it the same way I gather flame, turns it, and it comes at the two of us.
I step in front of Valen. Part of it catches me, goes across the top of my shoulder, through the cloth, into the skin under it.
White-hot. My arm goes dead from the joint down for as long as it takes me to get my feet back under me.
The cloth is gone. What’s under it is open, already trying to close.
Bancroft’s wings snap wide. The whole chamber goes bright behind him, I’m certain the Council is about to put Faelan down where he stands.
They hold. The wings come back down. Not one of the five moves out of the formation they arrived in.
Samuel’s face is turned toward me. What’s on it comes as close to an apology as anything I’m going to get.
Then I work out why they’re standing there, and it’s worse than them being cowards.
Their power is the seal. It isn’t something they use.
It’s something they are. Every one of them is holding a piece of this realm together by standing in it, and the second Bancroft throws any of that at Faelan, the piece he’s holding lets go.
Faelan has known that longer than I have been alive.
It’s why he came here to do it in front of them.
Nobody is coming for us either. Ash Hollow is a realm away with its own perimeter to hold, and the door we came through is behind me and closed.
So it’s this. We fall back, and he goes on tearing at the seal until there’s nothing left standing between him and the three women at Ash Hollow with his marks in their skin.
Or we take him now, here, with my shoulder open, neither one of us has ever having fought anything like him.
I move first. I put myself square between Faelan and Valen with flame coming up both hands.
Faelan’s attention settles on me and stays.
His face changes. It isn’t anger, isn’t satisfaction.
It’s the look of a man who suspected something and has just had it confirmed.
What he’s confirmed is that I will put my body in front of Valen every time, whatever it takes out of me.
He keeps it. He lets me see him keep it.
Then Valen moves. He comes past my shoulder and puts himself in front of me instead.
Light comes out of him. Out of his arms, his back, the ends of his fingers, all at once.
It’s white and has no sound, every column of color in this room bends toward him while it’s happening.
Then it stops. He’s standing there the same as he was a second ago.
In all the months I’ve known this man he’s never done one thing that wasn’t ordinary.
He can’t shift, doesn’t carry magic. I’ve read him a hundred times and gotten his nature and nothing else.
I don’t know what I just watched come out of him but Faelan has stopped moving.
Everything he’s done since he walked into this chamber has been unhurried.
He arrived without arriving. He put the realm’s own light through my shoulder without changing his expression.
He’s looking at Valen now, and he’s gone entirely still doing it.