Guardian of Exile (Nyx Fortuna #7)

Chapter 1

Nyx followed the spiraling path within her to the landscape of A-Queltr, to that place where the shores of death lapped at her feet.

As she did, she searched for any signs of change.

She had made the journey here daily for the last four weeks, both because she needed the practice, and because she kept hoping for some subtle sign that her path had altered. That she had altered.

Jevryn had told her that the path to A-Queltr was unique to every Salyrian.

That it was a reflection of the person, and it could remain the same or change over time.

Both Nyx’s path and her destination were simple.

A plain black stone staircase in an enclosed tower that led to a barren snow-covered mountainside, next to which the ocean of A-Queltr slumbered lazily.

When Jevryn had first taught her how to come here, the emptiness had been a relief.

She’d found serenity in the nothingness, an odd sense of achievement in enduring the harshness—in embracing it.

A kind of comfort in knowing that if it all grew to be too much, she could tip over the ledge and let the waters of A-Queltr swallow her.

It wasn’t until she’d left the equally static environment of Jevryn’s home—until she’d been dragged unwillingly back into the waking world and realized she had to try and find her place in it again—that she’d wondered what her path would have looked like if she’d known how to find it before Seth died.

What kind of person would it have reflected back to her then?

In the end, she was glad she didn’t know, so she didn’t have to have yet another concrete reminder of how much her life had changed.

She didn’t think she could have handled knowing she’d had a forest before, and it had dissolved into this nothingness.

And it was still nothing. Still utterly quiet, except for when the winds chose to howl, still empty and unending.

In the physical world, where her body sat cross-legged on the rug in her Station bedroom, she squeezed her eyes closed.

She was getting better at being in the two places at once—at finding A-Queltr without losing the sense of her body—but all she could manage while holding both was basic physical movement.

Walking, talking, sitting. Fighting while holding A-Queltr, as her father could, was out of the question for her.

As was holding Kaliaris’s senses. Attempting to experience three selves at once was too much for her mind, but she was getting better at holding two, and she hoped that her growing control over being in both places at once was a sign.

And because she hoped that, she kept looking for even the slightest indication that her path was changing, that the fact she found the barrenness stifling rather than comforting meant she was getting better.

Getting back to the normal she was trying to imitate.

Was it too much to ask for the snow to melt or the grass to grow?

For a single evergreen tree to break the harsh white that surrounded her for miles? For a damn bird to fly by?

She blew out a hard, irritated breath and tromped through the snow with none of the care she would have taken if it were actual snow in the real world.

She didn’t have to care how it clung to her jeans, waiting to melt and soak into the fabric the moment she was warm and indoors, because nothing here would follow her back.

The tower appeared almost immediately, and she only had to climb up one turn of the spiral staircase for her exit door to appear, a true indication of how eager she was to escape the proof that while she might be trying to live again, she wasn’t yet doing a very good job.

She spun fully back into her body, spared everything but the briefest tingling of pins and needles in her feet since she’d managed to be mostly both here and there at the same time, and found the first rays of morning sun slipping in through the windows.

It was a sight she’d rarely been awake to see before this point in her life.

She’d never been a morning person, preferring to rise whenever her body decided it was good and ready to wake up.

When she’d stayed with Jevryn, she’d slept more than ever.

Now, she found herself constantly restless.

Unable to sleep well, but simultaneously unmotivated to do much of anything else.

She made herself run through a series of stretches, but insomnia or not, she wasn’t inspired to actually work out this early in the morning.

Her gaze kept going to the companion journal on her nightstand.

She hadn’t seen or heard from her biological father since the movie night he’d attended at the Station.

He’d left soon after the film ended, saying there were things he needed to take care of before they went in search of Tristen Veld.

Which was, coincidentally, how she’d found out he intended to be a part of the search for the exiled Shaman.

On the one hand, she’d been relieved—the idea of not having to plan and be responsible for every second of this search, of being able to follow along as she let someone with lifetimes more experience than her take the lead, held no small amount of appeal.

Especially since her brain seemed to run into a wall every time she asked it to perform higher level executive functioning these days.

On the other hand, the idea of Jevryn A-Morridahn gallivanting about in Dead Earth was one that didn’t fully mesh in her mind.

He didn’t fit in Dead Earth. She highly doubted he would condescend to put on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt for the excursion, but maybe she could talk him into a suit?

His normal attire might not stick out like a sore thumb in New York City, where a variety of clothing choices were presumably less noticeable—though really, she’d never been, so she had no idea how much of what she’d heard about the city was reality and how much was stereotype—but even if he would attract little attention there, he certainly would not on the trip across the country.

Picturing Councilor Jevryn A-Morridahn attempting to eat dinner in a small-town midwestern bar didn’t compute.

He was too much glower and arrogance and flowing black robes to not look out of place tucked away in a vinyl booth next to wood paneling and taxidermied deer heads.

Not to mention she didn’t think he was capable of being “tucked away” anywhere.

But then, the bigoted-small-midwestern-town stereotype was likely as unreliable as the accepting-big-city stereotype.

She figured wherever you went there would be people who welcomed you for who you were, and people who feared and hated anything that was different.

Maybe it skewed more heavily in one direction or the other in certain places, and that was where the stereotypes were born, but the only thing she was really certain of at this point in her life was that no place or group of people was a monolith.

She finished stretching and finally allowed herself to check the companion journal. Blank, except for the three lines she’d written him on different days over the last four weeks.

A week after he’d left, she’d asked: When do you plan for us to leave?

A week after that: Do you need help? Should I send Kaden to you? And, yes, that one had been an entirely self-serving offer.

When he hadn’t responded to either of those, she’d tried to be patient—he’d said he had something to take care of, after all, and since she had no idea what the nature of the task was, there was every chance he wasn’t at home to answer—but three days ago she’d finally broken down and written: Is everything okay?

She’d been starting to get a bad feeling, and she wasn’t ready to have any more bad feelings at this point in her life.

The last question remaining unanswered made the feeling intensify.

What could possibly be more important to Jevryn than finding Tristen Veld?

Her father had been looking for centuries for a way to free Griff from the Station.

She was surprised he hadn’t dragged her and Kaden to New York City the moment they’d gotten the location from the Congregation.

Sighing at the lack of response, she closed the book. Just as the pages were falling shut, a slash of black caught her eye. She hastily flipped the journal back open and found words scrawling across the page.

Something has arisen that requires my attention. Proceed after Veld without me. I will join you as soon as I am able.

She wrote back hurriedly. Is something wrong? When do you think you’ll be here?

No answer came, and the lack made a frustrated noise crawl up the back of her throat.

She left the book open and distracted herself by making the bed, dressing for the day, and doing the minimum required hygiene tasks of brushing her hair and her teeth and applying deodorant.

She could only drag that out for fifteen minutes, so she took the journal downstairs and laid it open on the cafe counter while she made coffee, feeling like something of a walking cliche for having lost her taste for lattes in favor of Americanos, no room for cream needed.

There was something about sustained brooding that lent itself to black coffee, and she’d accepted the reality of the fact.

She’d hardly blown across the top of the cup and taken her first sip when Griff came in.

The hallways and rooms of the Station had permanently widened to accommodate the larger griffin form he maintained these days, and while there had been something undeniably adorable about a house-cat-sized griffin, Nyx was glad he no longer felt the need to make himself smaller.

For her, or anyone else. He still wore his glasses and carried his pocket-watch though, and any time he reached for the latter, or pushed the former up his beak, she could see the man from the picture he’d once shown her of him and Jevryn.