Page 11 of Guardian of Exile

The magic grew more pliant at the picture she painted for it, until suddenly it rushed down, flattening at her feet into a rectangle, a new map spreading out on the ground before her. Hundreds of dots glowed at her from that map. She hadn’t expected so many. As vast as the universe was, her exposure to it had made her forget that a planet itself was vast also. Eight billion people was nothing to scoff at, and neither was the sheer breadth of landmass that defined Earth. So many people, from so many walks of life, and cultures. So many places for pockets of belief to remain.

The nearest dot called to her softly, an aching pull filled with both familiarity and sorrow. She did not reach for it, did not think she ever would again. The only thing she had loved from that place was gone, and the idea of returning to her childhood home in the wake of Seth’s loss was too painful to contemplate. If that pocket of Between had been located a stone’s throw from New York City, she still didn’t think she could have gone there. But located where it was, there was no real benefit to going there anyway. Driving from Montana rather than Arizona didn’t shave off enough hours to make the emotional damage worth it to her.

She turned her attention further to the right, trying to mentally underlay a world map beneath the dots. Her knowledge of Earth’s geography was limited because she’d never anticipated actually seeing much of the planet. The plan had always been to leave for the reaches of the wider universe and that was what she’d done, if not in the way her younger self had ever imagined she would. The point being, she knew the general shape of the United States and Canada, and that the European continent lay on the other side of their eastern shore, but when she looked at the pockets of Between, there didn’t seem to be enough of a gap to indicate an ocean.

Which either meant oceans were magical places—and if she wasn’t careful, she could end up underwater in an ocean on Earth just as easily as she’d ended up beneath one on a foreign planet—or the “map”, such as it was, poorly represented Earth’s geography simply because Nyx poorly remembered Earth’s geography. She could potentially solve the issue by stepping back across the Station boundary and getting a map, but since she had unlimited portal magic at her fingertips, it didn’t really seem necessary. Grabbing for the nearest likely looking dot, Nyx opened a doorway. On the other side lay a forested valley rimmed by a rocky ridge, and she couldn’t see anything to indicate if civilization was nearby.

“Be right back,” she stepped over the portal threshold. The air on the other side was crisp and clean, cold with a harsh bite that tore at her as the wind blew through. To her right, somewhere just out of sight, she heard the crash of waves. Directly to her left, in a place that had been hidden from view when she’d looked through the portal doorway, a low wooden structure with a steep A-frame roof that extended nearly down to the ground. The building looked as if it had entrenched itself into the earth, grass growing over the sides of the roof, as if the structure and the land had been slowly merging for centuries.

An old woman sat before a loom on the front porch. She was hunched over, her long hair pulled back, but Nyx guessed that standing upright she would be pushing six feet tall. Her hands, engaged with the loom, worked independently of her attention, her eyes fixed on where Nyx had emerged from nowhere. She did not look surprised at a woman appearing out of thin air—certainly nowhere near as surprised as Nyx felt at finding someone living in a pocket of the Between. Someone who had clearly been living here a long, long time. The woman looked both ancient and young, as if she had always been and always would be.

This pocket of Between was not a nexus. It did not grant extended life the way the Station did. But Nyx knew there were other magics in the world, even here, on Earth. Perhaps especially here, because to remain magical in a world so dry that the rest of the universe called it Dead Earth, must take a belief—and a power—that could not be easily extinguished.

“You look lost, child.” The woman’s voice was impossible to describe. As impossible to pin down as everything else about her. It sounded both old and young, male and female, strong and soft. The only thing Nyx was certain of was that it came from someone who knew exactly who they were, even if the world did not.

Nyx opened her mouth to answer that she was, indeed, lost. But some instinct kept her from speaking, some certainty that lost things did not always find their way home if something else found them interesting enough to keep. Some certainty that this being who existed all alone in this forgotten space should not be casually trusted.

“I’m just passing through,” she said instead.

“On your way to where?”

Nyx could not think of the person as either female or male, and she did not know if that was because they were neither or both, or if it was her own doubt that made the old woman’s appearance flicker, revealing a young man, eyes full of mischief, for the briefest moment before the visage of the old woman snapped back into place.

She answered evasively. “To where I need to be.”

They chuckled. “And where do you need to be, Nyx Fortuna?”

Nyx’s heart thumped in her chest with unsettling determination. At what must have been a textbook wide-eyed expression, Nyx received a smile that made every fear response in her body jolt to life.

“All names are written in the stars, child. Yours in so many different iterations. Nyx Mira Fortuna. Nyx Ilera A-Morridahn. Nyx Zephira Thesrani. So many parents you have collected, so many lineages you may lay claim to.”

Their hands paused on the loom. “Lineages are such troublesome things. Perhaps best forgotten all together, for family will betray you.” Their appearance flickered again. Nyx caught a glimpse of a trio of rocks, of a naked body and marred face. “But we all choose our own path, in the end. Do you wish to know what path you will choose? What names you will bear in the future? What they will call you, when that name is once again rewritten in the stars?

“I could tell you. For a price.” Their gaze dipped to Nyx’s arm. She thought at first they were fixated on Constance, formed into a bracer around her forearm. But when she realized that gaze was a touch lower, where Gleipnir lay wound around her wrist, she stepped hurriedly back, only to realize the portal behind her had closed. That she had let it close, only she didn’t remember doing so.

She fumbled for Alihana’s hilt, for the portal magic that flooded to her hand.

A laugh split the air. “I will give you one at no cost, in case it should entice you to change your mind in the future,” they said as Nyx reached for her anchor by the Station and the portal opened sluggishly behind her as if an opposing force fought her.

“Pathbreaker,” the stranger said. “When it comes to haunt you, come visit me again.” They smiled, and they looked as if they bore a thousand different faces at once.

Nyx sank magic recklessly into the portal, until it opened just enough for her to jump backwards through it. Laughter, birdlike and cackling, followed her through. And as Nyx cut the flow of magic, watching the doorway shrink to nothingness, like a drop of water evaporating on a sun-baked sidewalk, the word Pathbreaker echoed in her mind.

She sucked air in quick, shallow breaths. Her friends were staring at her, and after a moment she realized they were also asking questions about what had happened. Her brain finally calmed enough to make sense of words, to hear Griff’s concerned “Are you alright?”

She wasn’t sure. She felt the wideness of her eyes but couldn’t make them narrow, her hands shaky with adrenaline. Wiping sweating palms on her jeans, she asked, “Griff, was your mother’s name Zephira?”

For the first time she’d ever seen, he looked truly startled. “Yes.” A pause. “Did Jevryn tell you that?”

“No.” She swallowed. “Someone else just did.” Someone who could see things in the stars. Things like the naming conventions of Hidden families, like the fact that, in every way that mattered, Griff was as much Nyx’s father as Jevryn. More so, even. Someone who had somehow known the name of Griff’s mother, who had had died over nine-hundred years ago.

Someone who had called Nyx Pathbreaker, a title Nyx did not remotely like, even as she recognized that pathbreaking was, in essence, exactly what she was trying to do—to break the bonds that held the universe together.

“Who?” Evra demanded.

“I don’t know,” Nyx lied. Mythology had been one of her strongest interests in childhood. She had seen enough clues to know precisely who she thought that had been, but she couldn’t quite get herself to believe it.

“Then why did you close the portal before we could come with you?”