Chapter 22
If asked, Nyx would have said that having a councilor nearly suck the life out of her and then managing to kill them anyway should have earned her at least a solid day’s sleep before she had to look at the world again. Unfortunately, no one asked.
Something was dragging her back to consciousness, and she had the sense of too much fuss around her.
Loclyn’s body was no longer atop her, for which she was grateful, and someone’s hand was curled around her wrist. Tristen’s, she guessed, by the feel of the magic crashing through her, insisting she wake up.
She did not want to wake up. Against her will, her eyes opened.
“There,” Tristen said, “she’s awake. But she really shouldn’t be.”
“She must be,” Jevryn said. “Nyx?”
She managed to tilt her head in the direct of Jevryn’s voice and found him next to her.
“You must come back,” he said.
Come back from where? She was right here. And here was tired. So very, very tired, and her eyes were so very, very heavy.
Another wave of Tristen’s magic pushed into her. A small ache in her shoulder she hadn’t really realized she had disappeared, but her eyelids were still too heavy to open.
“Keep her awake,” Jevryn snapped.
“Tiredness isn’t an abnormal state,” Tristen snapped back. “It’s part of the natural cycle. I can’t force her to stay conscious, there’s nothing to heal.”
A hand cracked across her cheek. Her eyes flew open. Jevryn’s hands—one of which had just slapped her—curled around the back of her skull, lifting her head from the floor. “Listen to me, Na’tria. You must come back.”
She remembered, then, tumbling off death’s ledge. Felt the soft sigh of the air in A-Queltr and how Jevryn was perched on the ledge with her, holding her up. He’d jumped into her private oasis of A-Queltr and caught her before she could fall into that abyss.
Why were they still here? Why hadn’t he simply pulled her back into her body?
He’d done it enough times, when he’d first taught her how to find this place.
He could do it again. She was too tired.
Her eyelids closed again, her metaphysical body growing limp.
He stumbled in A-Queltr, holding her up.
She had the passing thought that it was odd.
Jevryn didn’t stumble. He was like a rock against which the universe could crash but never manage to crack.
She didn’t think he could break. He was A-Morridahn in a way she never would be.
“Na’tria.” He shook her violently and she groaned, opening her eyes in the physical world again. “You have locked us both in there, and I am not for consciousness much longer than you are. Come back, or we are both dead.”
“Just pull me out.” She was too tired to care that it would hurt.
“I cannot. You must lead us out.”
A jolt of adrenaline shot through her. In A-Queltr, she managed to rise. Jevryn still held her there, steadying her on the knife’s edge. She looked, but all she saw was abyss. No snowy cliffside to leap onto.
“The path’s gone.” Her words were slurred. Despite the sharp bite of adrenaline, she was still barely functional.
“Find it.”
She tried, peering into the darkness. But no barren cliffside greeted her. She strained harder, wondering how she could have lost it. It had never disappeared before. Then again, she had never collapsed into unconsciousness while in A-Queltr before.
The more she looked for the familiar landscape, the more she realized that what she was looking for didn’t feel right.
It didn’t feel like her anymore. That previous landscape was emptiness and hopelessness and she…
she wasn’t empty or hopeless anymore. Somewhere between finding Tristen and visiting Morgen’s home, she’d found part of herself again.
She stopped looking for the path and listened instead. At first, it was only to the breeze blowing softly around her. Then it was to the wind whistling through the limbs of distant trees. Then to the loud, determined caw of a raven.
She looked again and saw a forest of evergreens, boughs heavy with snow.
The raven loosed another caw, his black form stark against the green and white of a nearby tree.
The raven’s feather earring she wore in her left ear fluttered against her skin.
“I see you, Trickster,” she whispered. She took Jevryn’s hand and jumped from death’s ledge to the safety of the forest floor.
She had the sense that if she dropped her connection to Jevryn, he would be lost in this place.
That she could trap him forever. She had the sense no small number of Salyrians had died in just such a manner.
Her grip on him tightened in a way that would have been painful were these their corporeal bodies.
She walked quickly and with purpose, through the forest, until she found a wooden bridge spanning a wide river. She crossed it, each step leading her away from A-Queltr and back into herself. Her feet touched the riverbank on the other side, and she was home.
“Thank you, na’tria.” In the physical world, Jevryn collapsed beside her a second before she too sank into blissful unconsciousness.