4 The Smell of Home
Antal slept that night holding Fionamara like he might never touch her again. Like he could steady the world with each rise and fall of her slumbering breaths. His arms wrapped her ribs, tail curled around her ankle.
The next day, he settled what business he could in Thomaskweld. Made sure all would be well in his absence. Three days, they’d agreed. No more.
That evening, they packed for the journey.
Antal delved into the ornate section of his wardrobe, fashion more typical for a Lord Daeyari. He chose a jacket black as the Void, close-tailored and high at the collar. Inlays of iridescent vesper fabric decorated fractal designs up the sleeves.
He opened his box of antler adornments. His claws drifted over silver chains, bells…
“No, no.” Fionamara clicked her tongue. “These ones.”
She selected silver caps to accent his antler points, without detracting from the carvings along their length. An excellent choice.
He ought to braid his hair. Daeyari typically wove their topmost hair in some form of plait, antlers clearly displayed, but he’d intentionally kept his hair too short to braid for decades.
A petty rebellion, letting messy strands obscure the midnight dahlias carved at his antler bases, the sigils of his family. For now, no braid would have to do.
“May I?” Fionamara said.
Antal sat as she fastened the caps into place.
A simple gesture. To her. He didn’t tell her why his posture tensed as she worked, his tail a flustered sway. To adorn a daeyari’s antlers was an intimate act. A ritual reserved for the patient hands of his mother, when he’d been a child.
Or for Void-bonded partners.
The thought stoked restless heat in Antal’s chest. Over a century had passed since he’d considered pledging his heart to another, unsure if he’d ever feel that way again.
Then Fionamara had charged into his life, vicious and beautiful and fit to destroy him.
She wouldn’t live as long as him—all the more reason to covet the decades they would have, to make her his.
Though, for a proper bonding ceremony, he’d need…
Antal shouldn’t be thinking about this now.
It was enough to wake up beside her. To share her mischievous smiles. Antal had to protect her from his family, not drag her closer to their claws. They only had to survive this trip.
They gathered in the sitting room, two bags packed, ready to leave.
“I’ll tell them you’re my Arbiter,” Antal said.
Fionamara, dressed in her black jacket with crimson-stone cuffs, scowled but nodded.
He continued. “It would be… customary for you to carry my bag.”
Her lips thinned. Antal expected to hear about this later.
“The route to the Twilit Plane is a close-guarded secret,” he said. “You must tell no one.”
Fionamara’s brow lifted. “You don’t want humans crashing your party?”
Far worse than that. The daeyari had spread their territories across hundreds of worlds, had explored hundreds more—to their peril.
Fionamara would never have met the beasts who claimed the far reaches of the Shattered Planes, would never have even heard of them in this pocket of safety closest to the Twilit Plane.
Antal pressed his forehead to hers, seeking steadiness in her warm ember scent. “Avoid speaking. Avoid attention. Tell no one you can Voidwalk. Use it to escape if you need to.”
He kissed her softly. One last moment to savor sweet lips. One last comfort in the way her hand twined behind his neck, leaning into him with an eviscerating amount of trust, given where he was taking her.
He took her hand. Then visualized where he wanted to be.
Veshri was the first to weave an immortal body, the first to master teleportation, gifts he’d taught his brethren millennia ago.
That generation of daeyari had woven themselves into immortality, following Veshri’s path.
Their descendants, like Antal, were born immortal, the art of weaving lost ages ago, bodies changed by the Void forever.
Antal, born of ether, carried that instinct to slip off the Plane into the dark of the Void—though not a full plunge. Not Voidwalking. Teleportation was a flicker, a brief skip off reality then back at his destination, Fionamara pulled in tandem as long as she held on to him.
They arrived on a mountain ridge, on the far side of the Winter Plane.
Daeyari couldn’t teleport between Planes.
Farther travel required Shards to bridge the distance, and Curtains to cross from one reality to the next—that translucent doorway visible to immortal eyes, and to Void-touched mortals.
Antal led Fionamara through the Curtain, onto the first Shard, a fragment of reality with rocky ground and a sky of black Void.
Another teleport. Another Curtain. Another Shard. Again. Again. A dozen times.
Shards littered the Void like stepping stones, more numerous than Planes by an unfathomable number, disorienting as a labyrinth. But Antal knew this route like it was carved upon his bones. Upon the bones of his ancestors.
One final Curtain.
They emerged to dusk light, peach on the horizon and a lavender sky, stars barely visible overhead.
Around them, a field of midnight blue flowers shifted in the breeze.
It hit Antal like a reverie, crisp air laced with the sweetness of day turning to night, the richer perfume of dahlia petals, so familiar that it shuddered up his spine.
After fifty years, it was exactly how he’d remembered.
The smell of home.