Page 64 of Sunsplitter

“Don’t keep it all in, Fi. I know we haven’t always been… close. But I’m here.”

“Thanks, Kashvi.” She held up her glass.

Kashvi departed. Fi finished her drink slowly, watching the snow fall.

She left Aisinay to enjoy her evening in the river. The Void horse would find her way back to the capitol stables once she’d finished snatching trout from the current.

Alone, Fi walked Thomaskweld’s main avenue, listening to the din of afternoon shifting to evening, hands deep in the pockets of her black and red coat. Cold wind off the river tussled rainbow hair across her eyes. A clash with her ensemble. She ought to consider a new hue.

She mulled Kashvi’s advice. It was good advice. Level-headed advice. To solve her current dilemma, all Fi had to do was figure out how to support Antal. Easy.

Except it wasn’t fucking easy, was it?

Fi couldn’t send him off to some daeyari book club. This washis entire world. His entire species. And he seemed to want to keep her away from every part of it.

She could bare her teeth, but she couldn’t grow fangs.

She could hang a marriage pendant around his neck like Kashvi and Iliha, a glass capsule of silver mixed with red. But they wouldn’t be “bonded in the Void” the way daeyari did.

Fi arrived at the capitol complex. Fists clenched, she looked to the cliffs above the city. Near the highest point, a smudge of black marked the opening to Antal’s home. Simple, for a daeyari to teleport there. Fi would have to navigate through two Curtains, climb down the icy ledge without slipping and breaking her neck. Either that, or wait in the capitol building for Antal to collect her like a child at daycare.

Or she could Voidwalk up there.

The thought hit her like a bucket of ice water, some cold slurry of paralyzing fear and Plane-shattering anger.

Despite being able to see Curtains since she was eight, Fi had only accomplishedrealVoidwalking twice. The first time, a mistake, when she’d been fleeing Verne and had recklessly cut a Curtain with no Shard on the other side. The second time, she’d done it to reach Antal before Verne could tear him apart.

While both these feats had been unquestionably badass, the fact that she could only pull it off in life-or-death circumstances really put a dampener on her bragging rights. Fi hadn’t worked up the courage to practice again, daunted by that teeny tiny fear of getting trapped in liminal space and dying a slow cold agonizing death.

She snorted, rage-hot air billowing steam.

Was she really a Voidwalker, if she couldn’t do it whenever she wanted? Whyshouldn’tshe use one of the coolest skills in the Planeverse for something as petty as walking home?

It wasn’t a well-ordered thought, the way Fi yanked a handfrom her pocket. All fluster and bravado, as she gathered energy to her fingers. She couldn’t give Antal claws or a tail, couldn’t even give him the right kind of coffee, apparently.

Shecouldslash her hand through the air, parting the fabric of reality.

A ripple. A tear. The shimmer of a new Curtain. Exhilaration surged through her, simultaneous with the thought of,oh no, this is actually a stupid, reckless ideas, isn’t it?—

Fi stepped through the Curtain, off the Winter Plane.

For ten years as a Void smuggler, she’d mapped Shard locations, fragments of reality to safely cross the abyss. It was a disorienting, nauseating feeling, to find no Shard on the other side of the Curtain. No ground beneath her boots.

Just floating in endless black.

The Void was as silent as she remembered.

Then there was the lack of air. That oddly tight feeling in her lungs as they seemed to, for the moment, not need any air. Fi floated in stasis, limbs weightless, cold aching her joints. For most mortals, this would be a death sentence, lost to the abyss with no scrap of reality in sight, no visible path to claw back out.

Oh, good, there came the paralyzing fear again. A helpless feeling as she drifted…

Fi forced herself to calm.

She embraced the drift, not trying to move. Smothered in the quiet.

For most of Fi’s life, she’d considered herself a coward. All her bravado, just a defensive facade. But that wasn’t true. She’d held her ground against immortals. She’d reclaimed her home from Verne. She’d won Antal’s heart, had taught herself to Voidwalk.

That last one, with some help. Once, Fi had met a wraithof a daeyari here in the Void, eyes like glowing carnelian and a calming voice inside her head. She’d never seen him again. Whether it truly had been Veshri, the wandering immortal, she might never know.