Page 67 of Guardian of Exile

“Though I of course understand the loving sentiment underlying your seemingly hostile words, Mother won’t, so maybe don’t mention that to her.”

“Murder you,” she repeated, before stalking across the Station boundary.

“I love you too!” Morgen called after her.

Tristen shook his head. “You two have an odd relationship.”

Morgen grinned. “I know. I’m going to marry her.”

“She agreed to that?” Tristen asked skeptically.

“Oh, stars no, but I do ask frequently. Some day she’ll say yes just to be contrary.”

“Nyx, are you coming?” Evra yelled.

“Yep!” Nyx called back. To the others, she said, “No one disappear while I’m gone.” She broke into a jog and ran after Evra. Kaliaris’s senses washed over her, a kaleidoscope of sensations that all felt like one thing: coming home. A wave of sorrow washed over her, sharp and poignant. She was going to lose this. This place that had become her haven, her home, was going to be gone. Her connection to Kaliaris, the certainty of them and Griff always being here.

Griff would remain, but Kaliaris would be gone. Once they were separated from her, once they were reabsorbed by the Harvester, she would never again be able to talk to them. It was yet another thing that hadn’t felt real until she’d found Tristen. Until she’d left him standing outside her Station.

She shoved the sense of pending loss down deep and entered the Station building, catching up to Evra as Griff rounded the corner ahead. Having just taken an Arrival, he was wearing a bottle illusion and looked like Nyx.

Evra stopped short on seeing him and shook her head. “That never fails to deeply disturb me.” She focused on him intently, and the lines of his body wavered. He typically only took a small dose to last an hour or so, and when Nyx joined Evra in trying to see through the illusion, they hastened the magical use rate until it shattered, leaving Griff standing as himself.

Nyx hugged him. “I missed you.”

His wings folded around her. “I missed you too.”

She released him. “The others are outside,” she said at his questioning look. “I’ll explain in a minute, but we have a lot to talk about, so maybe we could see Evra off first?”

“Of course. The passage is already booked, and I took the liberty of pre-filling out the Departure paperwork.”

“Thanks,” Nyx said. As they walked to the portal room, Nyx searched the Station with Kaliaris’s senses, then pulled an item out of storage—nothing special, just a glass figurine of a chimera, small enough to fit in Evra’s pocket—and worked a Hiding over it. She didn’t need it to be Hidden from any one person specifically, she only needed her magic to be attached to it so it would become an anchor for her portal magic. The two easiest Hidings to make were either blanket Hidings—ones that Hid an object from everyone—or single person Hidings, which Hid an object from a specific person only. In between those were Hidings with various numbers of exceptions worked in, which gained complexity depending on the number of exceptions required.

Normally she made her anchors from blanket hidings, but normally she put them places no one was likely to run into them and cause a drain to her magic when it had to work triple-time to convince a person they weren’t seeing or feeling what they were. In this case, the anchor was going to need to be in a specific room, and she needed the person that room belonged to to know what it looked like and not throw it out. For that reason, she went with a single person Hiding, and she chose someone from Earth Between at random—the baker from Cain’s Confections—to Hide it from, because the unlikelihood of them ever coming into contact with the object meant it cost her almost no magical resources to create and maintain.

Finished, she handed the figurine to Evra, who dutifully tucked it into her pocket. “I still cannot believe it has come to this,” the Amazon said, with the kind of gravitas one usually reserved for profound but unpleasant realizations about the nature of existence.

“Congrats on being the only member of our friend group who can legally travel?” Nyx offered. The problem with portaling to Morgen and Kaden’s homeworld was that Nyx didn’t know where it was. Yes, she had a planet name, but that didn’t tell her how to get there. The planetary map her portal magic brought up couldn’t tell her a planet’s name or where it was located in the galaxy—it was just a sea of glowing dots her magic was pointing to as possibilities.

Jevryn could likely show her the location, and Griff had written to him days ago at Nyx’s request, asking just that, but he hadn’t responded. It was yet another bit of worry gnawing at her. What the hell was her father doing that could possibly be more important than ensuring Griff’s freedom? He viewed nothing as more important than Griff’s freedom, so the lack of response could only mean that he wasn’t able to read his correspondence.

She didn’t know where he was, and it ate at her. It was also inconvenient, since without him as a resource they had only two options for getting to Raveras: use a portal stone from the Shadow Market, or get one of Nyx’s anchors onto the planet. Nyx had fully expected that Morgen would have a portal stone home. As it turned out, he did not, because Bryn Morrigan, Keeper of Shadows and sole purveyor of black market portal stones, was a tad on the vindictive side and had apparently refused to sell any portal stones to her ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend.

While it was possible she would sell one to Nyx, Kaden, or Evra, it wasn’t a guarantee. Nyx didn’t want to see Bryn because she still owed her a portal magic lesson for the magic she’d taken from the Keeper’s well, and she had neither the time to give it nor the patience to deal with the bad mood the Keeper was likely in from having been left an IOU in place of that lesson. Not to mention she didn’t want to divulge enough information about the various uses of portal magic to explain why she would need one. Not yet.

Kaden wasn’t a great option either, because Bryn knew he was connected to Nyx, and she would probably fuck with him just to fuck with Nyx. Evra was the one most likely to be able to get what they wanted, but the Amazon’s interactions with the Keeper were always fraught with the potential for disaster. Then there was the problem that Evra’s sister, Tamrin, was living at the Shadow Keep. Evra didn’t want to jeopardize the tentative peace they’d come to by barging in unannounced—and with the intention of leaving again as quickly as possible—and so had come to the conclusion that she would rather carry out Plan B.

Plan B was sending someone through the ley lines to Raveras with an anchor Nyx could use to open a portal and pull them all through. Nyx, as a Station Guardian, couldn’t travel the lines. Though her leaving wouldn’t kill the Station anymore, she didn’t have any identity papers to give the Guardian on the other end, and if she did, it would only alert the Council that she was doing what was supposed to be impossible for Guardians.

Kaden was still a wanted fugitive, and Morgen still couldn’t ride the ley lines legally. Tristen had no papers with which to travel. Getting them restored would involve a long legal process that would in all likelihood out his Shamanic status, and would definitely involve alerting his mother to his continued existence, neither of which Tristen wanted. The only person left who could legally travel anywhere without raising suspicion was Evra. And while she could toss an anchor somewhere out of the way for Nyx to bring the rest of them through, that wasn’t going to get her out of meeting Morgen’s mother. Without him.

The reason Evra was threatening to murder him? He’d written to his mother about Evra. On numerous occasions. In his words, his praise “maybe have been effusive” and his stated intentions “of a matrimonial sort”. According to Morgen, his mother might have then told everyone he was engaged, and by everyone he meant everyone. His exact words had been “You won’t make it two steps inside the Station without being bombarded, the Guardian’s a friend.”

In response to Nyx’s comment about Evra being the only one legally allowed to travel, the Amazon bestowed upon her a glare of epic proportions. “This is the end of my relationship we are discussing, the least you could do is not be flippant about it.”

“It’s not the end of your relationship.”

“You fail to understand how vehemently mothers dislike me. My first girlfriend ended our relationship within hours of introducing me.”