Chapter 4 #2
I hate to break this to you, Nyx said icily, but you not approving of me doesn’t mean that I’m not still Salyrian.
Half Salyrian, Alihana rebutted.
What?
Half, they repeated. The other half of you belongs to that woman.
Half. It was something about the way they said it, as if she was less than. But then, that was what half meant, wasn’t it? Less than a whole?
She suddenly thought of all the times she’d thought of Morgen as being half Siren.
She couldn’t remember if she’d ever said it that way out loud—had certainly never meant he was less than anything by framing it that way—but she did remember him saying once, ruefully, I’m only half Siren.
As if he felt lacking in some way. As if he’d been taught at some point to feel lacking.
As if someone had once said he was half Siren with the same disdain with which Alihana was now saying Nyx was only half Salyrian.
Language was such a slippery thing, and how a person used it—how they intoned or implied—could be as cutting as any knife.
People were biologically programmed to care what others thought of them.
It was a necessity, born from evolving from a time when survival depended on being accepted by—or at least allowed to remain with—a societal group in order to have access to food and shelter.
Modernity might allow a person more leeway to exist in solitude, but it didn’t change the sting that came from rejection.
She didn’t answer Alihana’s statement. She didn’t know if they were needling her on purpose, trying only to see what her reaction would be, or if they really believed what they were saying to her.
Either way, she didn’t care to engage with it further.
She didn’t have to. She took the portal magic they’d given her and summoned the map she’d grown so familiar with, glowing dots representing all the planets she could travel to.
The problem was, she didn’t need that map.
That map showed the universe—all the places she could go, all the possibilities surrounding her.
But she needed something closer. Something she wasn’t surprised she’d never found before, because she’d never opened the portal map with any intention of portaling elsewhere on Earth. She needed to scale down.
She might have had more practice at this had any of the time during her six months of living with Jevryn been spent on portal navigation, but he’d been too afraid to let her near portal magic, for fear she would go and do exactly what she’d gone and done.
He’d told her that she saw a map when she used her magic because she was accustomed to navigating by maps—which really made her wonder what she would see if she’d grown up more accustomed to letting an automated system guide her everywhere—and that meant she was looking at the larger scale map, so to speak.
Her instinct was to stop looking at the map and focus on her feet—where they met the ground—and pull the energy of the portal magic toward it.
The response was sluggish. The universe map didn’t want to fade away, because that map was endless possibility, and the purpose of portal magic was to explore that possibility.
Earth felt known, as if there was nothing new here to be discovered.
She gently coaxed the magic, whispering to it that while Earth might be known, that didn’t mean there weren’t things to discover.
Didn’t mean that one of the most important discoveries of all couldn’t be here—the freedom of the Stations, of Griff.
And if the Stations were no more, then the magic of portaling would become more important.
There would need to be a resurrection of the ability, of the training for it to be used as it was always intended.
The magic grew more pliant at the picture she painted for it, until suddenly it rushed down, flattening at her feet into a rectangle, a new map spreading out on the ground before her.
Hundreds of dots glowed at her from that map.
She hadn’t expected so many. As vast as the universe was, her exposure to it had made her forget that a planet itself was vast also.
Eight billion people was nothing to scoff at, and neither was the sheer breadth of landmass that defined Earth.
So many people, from so many walks of life, and cultures.
So many places for pockets of belief to remain.
The nearest dot called to her softly, an aching pull filled with both familiarity and sorrow.
She did not reach for it, did not think she ever would again.
The only thing she had loved from that place was gone, and the idea of returning to her childhood home in the wake of Seth’s loss was too painful to contemplate.
If that pocket of Between had been located a stone’s throw from New York City, she still didn’t think she could have gone there.
But located where it was, there was no real benefit to going there anyway.
Driving from Montana rather than Arizona didn’t shave off enough hours to make the emotional damage worth it to her.
She turned her attention further to the right, trying to mentally underlay a world map beneath the dots.
Her knowledge of Earth’s geography was limited because she’d never anticipated actually seeing much of the planet.
The plan had always been to leave for the reaches of the wider universe and that was what she’d done, if not in the way her younger self had ever imagined she would.
The point being, she knew the general shape of the United States and Canada, and that the European continent lay on the other side of their eastern shore, but when she looked at the pockets of Between, there didn’t seem to be enough of a gap to indicate an ocean.
Which either meant oceans were magical places—and if she wasn’t careful, she could end up underwater in an ocean on Earth just as easily as she’d ended up beneath one on a foreign planet—or the “map”, such as it was, poorly represented Earth’s geography simply because Nyx poorly remembered Earth’s geography.
She could potentially solve the issue by stepping back across the Station boundary and getting a map, but since she had unlimited portal magic at her fingertips, it didn’t really seem necessary.
Grabbing for the nearest likely looking dot, Nyx opened a doorway.
On the other side lay a forested valley rimmed by a rocky ridge, and she couldn’t see anything to indicate if civilization was nearby.
“Be right back,” she stepped over the portal threshold.
The air on the other side was crisp and clean, cold with a harsh bite that tore at her as the wind blew through.
To her right, somewhere just out of sight, she heard the crash of waves.
Directly to her left, in a place that had been hidden from view when she’d looked through the portal doorway, a low wooden structure with a steep A-frame roof that extended nearly down to the ground.
The building looked as if it had entrenched itself into the earth, grass growing over the sides of the roof, as if the structure and the land had been slowly merging for centuries.
An old woman sat before a loom on the front porch.
She was hunched over, her long hair pulled back, but Nyx guessed that standing upright she would be pushing six feet tall.
Her hands, engaged with the loom, worked independently of her attention, her eyes fixed on where Nyx had emerged from nowhere.
She did not look surprised at a woman appearing out of thin air—certainly nowhere near as surprised as Nyx felt at finding someone living in a pocket of the Between.
Someone who had clearly been living here a long, long time.
The woman looked both ancient and young, as if she had always been and always would be.
This pocket of Between was not a nexus. It did not grant extended life the way the Station did.
But Nyx knew there were other magics in the world, even here, on Earth.
Perhaps especially here, because to remain magical in a world so dry that the rest of the universe called it Dead Earth, must take a belief—and a power—that could not be easily extinguished.
“You look lost, child.” The woman’s voice was impossible to describe.
As impossible to pin down as everything else about her.
It sounded both old and young, male and female, strong and soft.
The only thing Nyx was certain of was that it came from someone who knew exactly who they were, even if the world did not.
Nyx opened her mouth to answer that she was, indeed, lost. But some instinct kept her from speaking, some certainty that lost things did not always find their way home if something else found them interesting enough to keep.
Some certainty that this being who existed all alone in this forgotten space should not be casually trusted.
“I’m just passing through,” she said instead.
“On your way to where?”
Nyx could not think of the person as either female or male, and she did not know if that was because they were neither or both, or if it was her own doubt that made the old woman’s appearance flicker, revealing a young man, eyes full of mischief, for the briefest moment before the visage of the old woman snapped back into place.
She answered evasively. “To where I need to be.”
They chuckled. “And where do you need to be, Nyx Fortuna?”
Nyx’s heart thumped in her chest with unsettling determination. At what must have been a textbook wide-eyed expression, Nyx received a smile that made every fear response in her body jolt to life.
“All names are written in the stars, child. Yours in so many different iterations. Nyx Mira Fortuna. Nyx Ilera A-Morridahn. Nyx Zephira Thesrani. So many parents you have collected, so many lineages you may lay claim to.”