Chapter 9 Nyssa
Nyssa
The rain plasters my hair to my skull as I march through the winding streets of Blackfen Edge. Three gods. Dreven, Dastian, and some bloke named Voren who talks to ghosts and has a questionable taste in coats. It sounds like the setup for a terrible joke. My life has become a terrible joke.
For a fleeting, tempting moment, I consider keeping everything to myself and handling it my way.
But that’s not how the Order works. It’s not how I work.
I’m a part of a chain of command, a cog in a machine that has kept the world from falling into darkness for generations.
Loyalty is drilled into us from birth. I report the facts, no matter how insane they sound.
I reach the unassuming facade of O’Malley’s Antiquarian Books, its green paint peeling and its windows filled with dusty, leather-bound tomes.
Pushing open the heavy oak door, the tinkle of a small brass bell announces my arrival.
The familiar scent of old paper, beeswax, and dried herbs wraps around me like a blanket.
It’s the scent of order, of history, of everything I’m supposed to trust. Taking a deep breath, I head for the back room and open the secret door that leads into an underground chamber, ready to face the inquisition.
The stone steps spiral down into the cool, still air of the chamber.
Three figures are seated at the long, dark-wood table that dominates the room.
Cormac, Taye, and Finnian. The Triumvirate.
The Guardians of the Veil. Cormac, with his severe face and beard like iron filings, gestures to the empty chair opposite them.
I don’t sit. I prefer to stand when delivering a report. It feels less like a confession.
“Nyssa,” Cormac begins, his voice as dry as old parchment. “Your report is late.”
“Rough night,” I mutter.
“Oh?” Taye asks, her ghostly pale hair, twining up into knots above her head before they fall again around her shoulders.
“Demon, vampire and…” I trail off, suddenly not sure I want to say the next part.
“And?” Finnian asks.
“And that’s it,” I state flatly.
Cormac’s eyes bore into my skull. “How does that constitute a rough night? Did something else happen?”
Tell them! My conscience screams at me that this lie I’ve told, this great big lie, the first of none, is going to have severe consequences.
My stomach knots, but something deep in my brain is fighting against telling them anything about the madman or the summoning or the gods or the fissure or my blade.
“Nope.” The lie goes against everything I believe in. “Just got wet and banged my elbow on a gravestone. Couldn’t sleep after that.”
“Your patrol logs are usually meticulous,” Finnian adds, his tone softer than Cormac’s but no less pointed. “This is… vague.”
“There’s nothing more to report,” I say, forcing a finality into my tone I don’t feel. “It was a slow night business-wise.”
Cormac leans back, steepling his fingers. The look he gives me is one of profound disappointment. “Very well. If that is all, you’re dismissed.”
“The old docks!” Taye suddenly says, her hand clutching her head. “Go!”
I don’t hesitate. Taye’s visions are few and far between, but when she gets one, I move.
They are never wrong. I’m lucky she didn’t have one of last night’s shitshow.
Not to say she never will, but I assume that if she had prior to the fissure opening, she would’ve said.
Her visions are of the future, not the past, so I’m safe in that respect.
No pesky video replay in her second sight of me stabbing a goddess in the face and then lying about it.
The command gives me a perfect out. I spin on my heel and take the steps two at a time, not looking back.
The weight of their gazes follows me, heavy with suspicion, but Taye’s word is law when it comes to her visions.
The lie sits like a stone in my gut. I’ve never withheld information before. Not once. But Dastian got in my head.
Damn him.
I burst out of the bookshop, the bell jangling frantically behind me.
The rain is relentless, a grey sheet that turns the world into a watercolour blur.
I pull up my hood and run, my trainers slapping against the wet pavement.
The docks are on the far side of town, a place of decay and forgotten industry even on a good day.
Today, it will be a special kind of miserable.
As I get closer, the air changes. The familiar scent of brine and rotting wood is there, but it’s overlaid with something else.
A cold, static nothingness. It’s the opposite of a demonic presence.
Where a demon feels like a spike of malevolent energy, this feels like a hole.
A vacuum that sucks the very life out of the air.
I slow my pace, pulling my blade from its sheath.
The runes stay dark. No shadowy gods about then.
My breath mists in front of my face as I step onto the first rotting planks of the main pier.
The only sounds are the creak of wood, the drumming rain, and the slap of choppy water against the pilings.
There are no gulls crying, no distant foghorns.
Just silence. A dead, hollow silence that is more terrifying than any monster’s roar.
Whatever Taye saw, it’s here. It’s waiting.
But where? What is it?
I creep forward, each step deliberate, testing the warped boards beneath my feet.
The pier groans like it’s in pain. My knuckles are white around the hilt of my blade, and I force myself to loosen my grip just enough to maintain flexibility.
Tense muscles make for slow reactions, and slow reactions get you killed.
A shape moves in my peripheral vision. I spin, blade up, but it’s just a tattered tarp flapping in the wind, caught on the skeletal remains of an old crane. My heart hammers against my ribs. Get it together, Nyssa. This is what you do. You find the monster, you kill the monster, you go home.
A ripple disturbs the grey water below, too large to be a fish, too deliberate to be the current. I freeze, my blade held ready.
The water bulges upward, a dome of oily black liquid that defies gravity. Then it collapses, and something rises from the depths.
It’s not a creature. Not in any sense I understand. It’s a shape, a writhing mass of darkness that seems to absorb the rain before it can touch its surface. No eyes, no mouth, no discernible features. Just a hungry, gnawing void in the shape of something that might once have been alive.
“Okay,” I mutter, backing up a step. “You are a bit ugly, aren’t you?”
The thing doesn’t respond to my quip, which is fair enough.
It probably doesn’t have ears. Or a sense of humour.
It just undulates there, hovering above the water like oil floating on the surface of a puddle.
The cold intensifies, biting through my sodden coat and making my teeth chatter.
My breath comes out in thick clouds now, and frost starts to creep across the wooden planks beneath my trainers.
It’s the kind of monster that doesn’t play by normal rules.
I take another step back, assessing. My blade is good against physical threats.
The demons, vampires, and the occasional pissed-off werewolf and a goddess, I got the jump on.
But this? This is something else entirely.
It’s not solid. It’s not even really there, in a way I can define.
It’s an absence. A hole in reality that happens to be hungry.
The mass shifts, elongating towards me like a tendril of smoke. I dart to the side, and the tendril follows, slow but inexorable. Where it passes over the pier, the wood blackens and crumbles to ash. The sound it makes is like a sigh, a long exhalation of nothing.
“Fuck,” I hiss, breaking into a run back towards the shore, needing to get this thing out of the water.
The pier shakes under my feet, the ancient wood protesting my sudden movement.
Behind me, I hear the wet slap of the thing hitting the planks, and the creak and groan as they disintegrate under its touch.
I need distance. I need to think. I need a plan that doesn’t involve getting erased from existence by a sentient water monster.
I hit solid ground at the end of the pier just as another tendril lashes out. I throw myself into a roll. The watery mass passes inches over my head. The air feels stripped, empty, like all the oxygen has been sucked out. I gasp, trying to breathe in air that isn’t there.
The mass looms over me, a watery wave that is about to swallow me whole, and I can’t stop it.
A dark shadow appears between me, and it and I’ve never been more relieved to see that brooding, handsome face.
“Stay down,” Dreven commands.
“Wasn’t planning on getting up,” I retort.
“Not you,” he hisses, staring at the mass like he expects it to obey him.
To my utter shock, it does.
The mass recoils, pulling back with that same wet, sighing sound. Dreven’s jaw is tight, his silver eyes fixed on the creature with an intensity that makes the air crackle.
My gaze flicks from it to Dreven and back again as the mass crashes in a wave back to the shore and disappears from sight under the sea’s surface.
“Uhm,” I mutter, getting to my feet. I clear my throat. “So that was—”
“A Tidewraith,” Dreven interrupts, his gaze still fixed on the water where the thing vanished. “An ancient predator from the deep. It shouldn’t be awake.”
“Well, it is now.” I sheathe my blade, though my hands are shaking. The adrenaline crash is hitting hard, and I’m suddenly aware of how cold I am, how utterly soaked through. “And it was about to erase me from existence, so thanks. I think.”
He finally looks at me, and there’s something in those silver eyes that makes my breath catch. Not quite anger, but close. “You shouldn’t have come alone.”
“I didn’t know I’d be facing a sentient puddle of doom,” I snap back, defensive, but something ugly lurks in my gut. Taye sent me here. Alone. Did she know what it was? Did she know I wouldn’t survive it?
The fact that I’m questioning her makes me feel ill. I push the thought away. It’s absurd. “How did you make it leave?”
Dreven’s expression darkens. “I didn’t. I merely reminded it that there are things in this world more dangerous than itself.”
“So, it will try again?”
“Undoubtedly,” he says, and there’s an edge to his voice that makes me look up sharply. “You’re inexperienced with creatures like this. Your generation has never had to face them.”
“Or gods,” I point out.
Dreven moves closer, and suddenly his coat is around my shoulders. It’s warm, impossibly so, and smells of sandalwood and shadows. I should shrug it off, tell him I don’t need his help, but I’m too fucking cold and too fucking rattled to care about pride right now.
“The Tidewraith is a symptom, not the disease,” he says quietly. “The veil between worlds was damaged when that fissure opened. Even sealed, the echo of it has disturbed things that should remain sleeping.”
“Like you?” I challenge.
He smiles, that cold, sharp, sinister smile that shouldn’t be hot but practically scorches my eyebrows off.
“Not quite,” he murmurs. “We were locked away for a reason, but we were never sleeping. We were waiting.”
“Waiting for what? A madman to tear open reality?”
“Waiting for the seal to weaken enough that it could be broken.” His gaze drifts back to the water. “Aethel was the catalyst. She found a way to whisper through the cracks, to plant seeds in fractured minds. The madman was her tool, nothing more.”
I pull his coat tighter around myself, my mind racing. “So, she orchestrated her own release. And yours.”
“And her own death, it would seem.” There’s something almost like admiration in his voice. “She always was ambitious. I doubt she anticipated a slayer would be waiting on the other side with a blade built to end her.”
I stare into his eyes. “Built to end her. What about you? Does it end you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He vanishes after the cryptic comment, taking his coat with him, leaving me shivering and pissed off. I turn on my heel and march back to the HQ, practically kicking the door open to the shop.
Taye is upstairs now, tending to her herbs, and she looks up as I storm inside.
“Did you know?” I spit out. “Did you know that thing could’ve killed me?”
She smiles. “All of the things can kill you, Nyssa.”
“None have come that close.”
“And yet here you are.”
“No thanks to you.”
Her smile grows more mysterious as she takes a step back, fading into the book stacks to a place I can’t follow.
I sigh sharply, but I’m not convinced by her motives. She knows more than she is letting on, but then, so am I. I can’t really bitch about it when I’m doing the same. I turn on my heel and push my way back out into the rain, pissed off, but I only have myself to blame.