Chapter 4 Astraea
Astraea
If I had to guess, I’d say at least two hours had passed since I left Nadir’s home. It wasn’t without tethers of guilt making every step away difficult. Or it could just be the thick snow that made walking feel like climbing a mountain.
I would have flown but the sky was clear tonight, and with no cloud cover, I couldn’t risk being seen.
My plan was … well, I wouldn’t even call it such.
I knew I could be stealthy enough to infiltrate the city alone. Once within the walls, however, events could unfold a number of ways—my capture, having to wear more blood of my kin—but I hoped to free Eltanin without ensuing chaos while Auster was distracted by his address to the city.
Wishful thinking, most likely.
The only part I wasn’t confident of was my restraint not to let my emotions act out recklessly when I saw Auster within reach. When I would have to watch him claim my throne, twisting the minds of my people, and remember how he had harmed my friends with no consequence.
Yet.
Wrath was coming for him. Wrath was me.
I wondered if the patrolled borders between kingdoms no longer existed, as the measure had been implemented for control during his Libertatem game by Nyte’s father.
Auster would have no reason for it. Perhaps he used the abolishment of the borders to appear even more heroic.
He was the High Celestial who saved the continent first from a tyrannical king, then from its dark-hearted maiden and her villainous bond.
A breathy laugh escaped me at the thought. I found it both a humorous and delightful concept. It’s exactly what Nyte and I were, except we would aim all our villainy toward Auster Nova and Nyte’s father.
I kept aware and silent, watching the path ahead but focusing mostly on my hearing. After a stretch of time, I started to get a sense I was being followed. I hadn’t heard any sure footfall or crack of branches, but weariness unsettled in my gut and my skin pricked with awareness.
If I was being followed through this woodland, my stalker was being very careful.
I flexed my gloved fingers and slipped one off.
My magick was far stronger without the leather barrier.
With a snap of my fingers a light sparked between them, a small violet pulse.
The warmth was glorious, but I wanted whoever the pursuant was to think twice at the sight of my unpredictable magick.
They gave themselves up with a step too fast through the crisp snow, or perhaps they wanted me aware now.
I cast my hand out, fingers pointed, in their direction, but they were agile, and my magick splintered the side of the tree they ducked behind.
“You’ve lost your touch,” he called.
My battle stance slackened and my magick cooled.
“Drystan?” I called out, mildly irritated.
“Don’t stop,” he said, appearing from his cover with a sword in hand. He twisted his wrist, advancing with it braced.
“What are you doing?” I bit out.
He shrugged, then attacked with no warning.
I gasped at the vertical swipe of his sword I twisted to avoid, then clumsily pulled my own weapon free. Our blades clashed, not giving me pause to calculate as he seized the advantage of my outrage.
“If you wanted to kill me you could have taken a dagger with Nyte’s blood to my chest already,” I said through gritted teeth.
My returning memories weren’t so clear. On the contrary, they often confused and frustrated me wildly when they were like dreams: flashes of people and things and events that didn’t fully feel real.
I recalled Drystan was no fighter in the past, however, and that had severely changed over the centuries I was gone.
“Consider this a reprimand for your stupidity,” he snapped back, continuing his unrelenting advance.
“You picked up some skills over the years.”
“You’ve certainly lost some.”
I was panting already. I really needed to train harder, and that’s where my frustration came from: knowing how adept at combat I’d been in the past, and yet in this life I was barely pushing past novice against someone with real fighting skill.
I’d used magick for efficiency against most people I’d fought so far, or I’d faced common folk and rogue vampires, whose skills in weaponry were hardly a challenge.
My coordination faltered when my ankle caught on a branch hidden by the snow. Falling onto my back, I hissed at the tip of Drystan’s blade over my chest.
He smirked down at me. The amusement grated on my rising temper.
“Wanted to prove you could best me?” I grunted.
“I wanted to gauge how long you might last in your reckless endeavor,” he said, removing the threat and popping the sword between his hands against the ground. “I’d give you less than a day beyond the city wall before you got yourself captured.”
“Your faith in me is charming.” I pushed up before the cold could seep through my leathers.
“Did you really think you could take on the task of retrieving Eltanin alone?” His ire creased deeply on his brow.
“It’ll be easier for one person to get inside the wall and remain hidden. I planned to be back in a few days.”
Drystan mocked me with a scoff.
“I can’t decide if your arrogance is delusional or faintly admirable.” His expression turned harsh. “There’s no second chance for you this time. If you die, this world dies with you, either by Auster’s corruption or Nyte’s vengeance.”
“I am Lightsdeath now; it was your plan to make me that, and I’ve stopped underestimating myself, so I don’t need you to start.”
We matched disagreeing stares while our breaths frosted the air between us.
“I know you, Astraea. You would have gone into that city and lost focus of everything the moment you had Auster in your sights.”
“I know what I need to do, and you’re only slowing me down.”
I tried to brush past him, but I detected the shift of his arm in time to raise my sword to meet his. The heat of our glares through crossed blades was enough to dull the sharp chill of the night.
We were moving again and I led the attack this time. I honed in on him like I would with an enemy, seeing him as nothing but a barrier stopping me from getting to Eltanin and having Nyte back. If he wouldn’t back down, neither would I.
My steps became a dance awakening from a distant place in my mind.
It was then I realized that despite my vicious efforts, forcing his faltering offense through the trees, I would never harm him.
There was a tear in my soul for what was broken between us, and as Drystan stepped around a tree, my next horizontal swipe lodged my blade into the timber.
I let go of the hilt, leaving it suspended there while I gathered my breath.
“So a world upended by war showed you can’t fight with your books?” I said, reflecting on the man I knew from long ago, who always had a fascination for knowledge and arts but never with fighting.
Drystan huffed, a bitter sound. “A hundred books can sharpen a mind to be far deadlier than any steel. But what I learned was that books were often an escape from the rage and pain; fighting was the only way to keep those emotions from killing me by giving the pain back to the world.”
That unexpected, deep truth was a slice far worse than what he could have inflicted on my flesh. I snapped my eyes to him, but he’d already dismissed the vulnerable words by sheathing his sword.
“We should go before the others notice and come after you too,” he said with an icy distance now.
Then it dawned on me. “You didn’t follow me to haul me back?”
His smirk lacked humor. “Of course not. We might have a way to wake Nyte up, and I’m not leaving it solely in your reckless hands.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but Drystan suddenly straightened, casting a look through the depthless forest and holding a hand up to silence me. I turned rigid, then scrambled into a defensive position when I heard steps racing toward us.
“Shit,” Drystan swore, raising his sword. “Nightcrawlers. Maybe a soulless or shadowless too.”
“You all but called them to us with your unnecessary violence,” I hissed.
He didn’t get to retort when one of the vampires reached him. Watching Drystan in combat while it wasn’t aimed at me just showed how much had changed. He was good. Great, in fact. He moved with as much elegance and form as I could hope to regain.
My sights fell to my sword, still suspended in the tree, and when I heard the snarls of more vampires approaching I cast my hand out toward it.
A flare of violet light engulfed the blade, and I shifted my leg back for balance, crying out with the force it took to cut clean through the trunk with my magick-infused sword.
The tree toppled and several vampires faltered in their approach, trying to scramble from the path of the thick trunk instead.
My hand wrapped around the hilt of the sword that flew toward me, my arm drawing back with the force.
I barely got the chance to tighten my grip before my blade slashed across the first nightcrawler that narrowly missed being crushed by the tree.
A loud boom resounded through the forest from it.
“Was that really necessary?” Drystan called, not faltering in his combat.
“It took out five of them at once!” I shouted back. “You’re welcome.”
“And likely summoned a hundred more.”
Well, he maybe had a point there. Though I hoped we’d finish off the last of those here and be long out of range before any more heard the commotion and came.
All I thought about was killing. There was a certain dark exhilaration to it.
I felt the slick tear of flesh and heard their wails as victory.
I didn’t see my satisfaction as wrong when it was either kill or be killed.
I’d spent most of my short life back, almost six years now, being manipulated by Goldfell—the man who’d found me staggering lost through the woods when I first returned to this land and taken me in.
He made me believe I was no better than flesh to keep him warm and a pretty prize to collect.
Now I was a reckoning to all who stood against me.