Chapter 7 Astraea
Astraea
The ground beneath my body was as firm as I’d expected, gritty and warm as my fingers flexed. The thick air confused my stirring consciousness when I drew a long breath, inhaling thick dust and coughing violently.
I opened my eyes but I wasn’t greeted by the red night of my world. My cheek lay against dry, cracked land. Flattening my palms to push myself up, I knew I should be in pain even if only from my position lying on solid ground.
I felt nothing. In fact, my body didn’t quite feel … wholly here.
I stood and surveyed my surroundings. A sweep of panic choked in my throat when I didn’t recognize the neutral toned wasteland with a hazy overcast. The trees in the distance were stripped of all that could bring color and joy, scattered in the field like dark skeletal bodies with crooked fingers reaching to reap the creatures that passed, though only ravens flew, silently, landing on the branches confidently.
The wind whistled by me, wailing as though lost souls cried, captured in the drafts.
Hugging myself to fight the prickling sensation that crept over my skin, I turned around and found another person a few paces away with their back to me. Before I could decide whether to let fear or relief dominate after discovering I wasn’t alone, both were quelled by a wash of shock. Disbelief.
This couldn’t be real.
“Nyte,” I whispered.
I would know him from any angle. His tall stature and broad shoulders. The few locks of dark hair long enough to catch in the wind.
I’d been trying to stop the meteor from destroying the central city of Vesitire, but I remembered the final piece that hadn’t dissolved in my magick in time and instead pummeled into me.
I hadn’t fallen unconscious. What pulled me under after that immediate impact had felt so icily cold and blindingly bright before submersing me in complete darkness. I was sure that impact had killed me.
Nyte turned to my call, but it wasn’t him who greeted me.
It was Nightsdeath. The black vines crawled his skin and his complexion was paler here.
His irises glowed like they trapped the sun.
Darkness rolled off him as though he were part flesh, part shadow.
Despite his frightening appearance and deathly stare, I inched closer when he didn’t move again or speak.
“Astraea.”
When I got close enough to reach a hand up to his hauntingly beautiful face, he immediately lashed out. I clawed at his fingers, tight and unforgiving, around my throat.
“You’re going to wish you’d never been created, Lightsdeath,” he hissed, throwing me to the ground, and I spluttered, my vision peppering.
Could he kill me here? That true fear of possibility, when I didn’t think I would awaken in my realm again if he succeeded in ending me in this void between life and death, had me crawling on my elbows while I tried to scramble my thoughts back together.
I couldn’t leave him here. There had to be a way to reach Nyte through his dark, dominating power, just like I could in my own realm.
Nightsdeath grabbed my ankle, and I grappled for purchase against being dragged back. My fingers only bled, tearing over the dry, serrated slashes of the ground, and I yelped when I was flipped onto my back.
He crouched down, looking over my face and hooking a strand of my silver hair.
Even when mirroring Nyte’s habits, Nightsdeath held nothing but disgust in his stare.
“You made the greatest mistake in thinking you could become something to contend with me, Maiden,” he said, his voice a haunting lullaby.
“Where’s Nyte?” I breathed, trying to swallow the terror threatening to keep me down.
A wicked smile curved his mouth and his eyes, blazing like twin suns, locked on mine.
“I’m right here. Only now I’m free from the weak, cowardly parts that I’ve been plagued with for eternity.”
I shuffled back a fraction as it started to make sense. This was Nightsdeath. Only Nightsdeath. A creation that started as a death-given power that fed on pain and suffering. My eyes stung realizing everything Nyte had endured over his life was what made this side of him so strong.
What stood before me was a raw representation of Nyte’s tortured soul given form.
All his pain and suffering had become a creature that wanted to shroud everything in his path. His misery fed his cruelty. To inflict pain on others was the only way to claw out some of the agony festering in himself.
“How are you here if Nyte’s body … his right mind … is not.”
“Who are you to say I am not his right mind? I think far clearer without the wrong side that tries to conform to your ways in a world that is long overdue to be purged of its sins.”
It was puzzling, confusing to my heart and mind, to understand that this was Nyte in a way.
What stood before me was Nyte with his humanity detached.
The part of him I would reach for to pull his humanity back to the surface was gone, but I hoped it lingered somewhere safe.
Waiting for me to wake him from his curse.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“The rift between life and death. I was hoping you would make it here sooner or later before you woke me in your realm.”
I shuddered, realizing Nightsdeath had been here all along. Waiting for me.
“Why?” I dared to ask.
“Because when you do find a way to break the curse, I want full control of our mortal body. I want the part of me you call Rainyte to be buried so deeply it can never see the light.”
“No,” I breathed. I would never let that happen.
I had to get out of here.
As I threw out a gale of my violet power, Nightsdeath hissed, conjuring a cloud of pure darkness to engulf it. Unlike when Nyte used shadow magick, this was devoid of stars, another distinguishing feature that separated Nightsdeath from Rainyte.
I scrambled to my feet, racing though I didn’t know where I could make it out, only that there was a beast on my heels and I couldn’t let him keep me here.
Was this where Nyte went every time he died? The thought of him wandering alone through the lost, barren land ached in my soul.
Had there been a time, perhaps several, he hadn’t wished to come back to life?
I’ve died many times. I’m pretty good at it.
Of course he was. He was masterful at harboring more pain than any person should have to endure. He had every reason to let Nightsdeath take it all out on the world that hurt him so reprehensibly, yet he fought that part of himself every day.
For him, for his humanity, I would never stop fighting to remind him there was good in him, and he deserved far better than the cruel hand life had dealt him so far.
My magick built steps, which I climbed frantically. Shadows crept around my ankles in a soft caress. I couldn’t find a direction on land, and so I chased the sky, the only course toward a break of light in the thick, sad clouds.
A whimper fell from my lips when I didn’t think I would make it to the bright window of escape that could be a figment of my desperate imagination. I raced the shadows that began to wrap around me, the slow embrace of Nightsdeath like a cold lover’s touch.
Then I leaped off my next step right as his hold began to tighten, and I let myself fall to freedom or doom.