Page 59 of Guardian of Exile

Nyx thought about it. Thought about how badly the thorns had affected her emotions, until Vorex had told her what they were doing, and she’d learned to control the effects. Thought about how they never bothered her inside the Station, where it was almost as if they calmed Kaliaris.

“How did they end up in your face?” Tristen asked.

“It’s a long story.”

“Indulge me.”

Nyx didn’t much feel like it, which Morgen must have picked up on, because he stepped in. “Did you ever travel the ley lines before coming here?”

“No.”

“But you know what they are?”

“Well, apparently now I know they’re souls that have been poorly grafted together and somehow let people travel interdimensionally.”

“Ah. Well, there are these things on the ley lines called chaos pockets. Pulsing pockets of color that dot the edges of the ley lines, and you aren’t supposed to touch them.” Morgen pointed at Nyx’s face. “She had a teensy tiny brush with a chaos pocket her first trip out.”

“Huh.” Tristen knocked back the rest of his coffee and proceeded to fill the mug half full of straight whiskey.

Nyx’s head, liver, and stomach all internally revolted in remembrance of her own recent consumption of ill-advised quantities of alcohol. Okay, no, she couldn’t actually feel her liver, but she imagined it was wailing in protest.

Tristen was still staring at her face. “Huh,” he said again. Then he shrugged. “Okay. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I agree to help you. You want me to pull apart everything the previous Shaman did—cut all the seams, so to speak?”

Hope sank desperate claws into Nyx’s chest. “If it can be done without killing any of the joined individuals, yes.”

“And you want me to do this to the entire universe? To every Station?”

She really wished he hadn’t said it like that. “Yes. None of these souls chose this for themselves. I can’t speak for all of the Station Avatars, but I know mine didn’t either.”

Tristen’s eyes narrowed. “Yours?”

“I’m the Guardian of Earth’s Station.”

He blew out a breath. “Of course you fucking are.” He knocked back another slug of whiskey. “You do understand what you’re asking, right? This is like if you blew up every airport and plane on Earth and there was no way to make any more of them.”

“I know.”

“Anything people currently trade between planets won’t have any way to get between them. Do you know how much shit in the US alone we’re dependent on other countries to manufacture? While we wouldn’t all starve overnight, quality of life would go down. Hospitals wouldn’t be able to replace medical devices. You can’t build manufacturing plants overnight, or replace talent you haven’t trained your workforce to have. It would take years—possibly decades—to recover from it. People would die.”

At the combined stares this speech got him, he said, “I have a masters in economics. Once you’ve established longterm trade between multiple places, you will cause immense harm if you permanently sever it.”

Nyx thought of the being she’d encountered in the pocket of Earth Between. Pathbreaker. It wasn’t a title that sat well with her. But there was no good way forward out of this mess. She’d already come to understand that long before now. “Immense harm has already been done. These are souls that have been enslaved for over nine centuries. Do you want to know where those souls came from? Because as you said, souls don’t simply wait around to be stitched into something new.

“Someone destroyed those planets. Over one-hundred of them. That is billions of lives, hundreds of genocides committed to create a fucking transportation system.”

Tristen looked a little sick. “And I don’t agree with that. But it has already been done. And you’re going to kill thousands of people if you do this.”

“Not necessarily.”

He leaned back in his chair, propping his arm on the back of the barstool. “I’m listening.”

“If you destroyed all air traffic on Earth, you would still have ships to cross the oceans, and cars and trains to cross the continents.”

“You have ships?”

“I have the equivalent of ships.” She didn’t mention that they weren’t, strictly speaking, her ships, and that they weren’t exactly seaworthy yet. She didn’t, in fact, know if she could get them at all. But she thought she could. She’d seen the look in Bryn Morrigan’s eyes when she’d realized portal magic could do more. And while Bryn’s methods might be questionable, her driving desire was to make the world a more equitable place. If Nyx told Bryn the ley lines were going to vanish overnight—provided she could convince the Keeper of that fact—she believed Bryn and her portal witches would fill the transportation gap.

There was significant training and trial-and-error to go through if witches who couldn’t currently portal outside of using portal stones were going to be able to manage that gap, but Nyx had been talking magic theory with Morgen and Griff the last few weeks and they thought there were workarounds. Nyx wasn’t going to explore those workarounds—or give up whatever she was no doubt going to have to give up in bargaining with Bryn—unless she knew she had Tristen’s help first.