Page 94 of Guardian of Exile

Loclyn shrugged. “Later children are like the loves that come after your first. Each one means a little less, until eventually you hardly notice it when they pass.”

She licked her lips, stalling. “Aren’t you worried I might prove to be my father’s daughter in more ways than one?”

Loclyn gave her a pitying smile, as if he were a professor letting a poor student down gently. “If you were, everyone in this room who is not me would already be dead.”

She thought back to being in this very room before they’d left to find Tristen, of Morgen telling her she was too soft to kill a plant without reason. “You’re right,” she told Loclyn. Not because she didn’t have her father’s magic, but because she wouldn’t use it with the same abandon he would.

He relaxed, almost imperceptibly. He thought she was both confirming that she didn’t have Jevryn’s death magic, and accepting her fate. “I will make it quick,” he promised her. “It isn’t you I wish to hurt.”

His magic gathered and she couldn’t wait any longer for Tristen to figure out what he was doing and cut Loclyn’s thread. She opened the floor, dropping Loclyn and all his people into the basement room she’d once created to drop Seth into so he wouldn’t antagonize Jevryn. Or she tried to. Loclyn’s Devoted dropped through, but he still had his connection to the Station and he fought her, dropping slower than the others, feet then knees then hips sinking into the floor.

If it came down to a mere contest of wills in their control of the Station, she would win. But it wasn’t. His magic clamped her and drank. It was nothing like when Maruca had siphoned from her in the Shadow Market. That had been a small thing, possible to mistake for simple tiredness. This was agony. As if he’d drained her vitality in a single gulp. The pain jolted her so fully into her body she couldn’t hold her connection to the Station.

Loclyn rose out of the floor. His magic arced through her like an electric current, disrupting her system. Her Hidden workings, as second nature to to her as breathing, became difficult to hold. She fought to maintain them, but every time Loclyn’s magic pulsed through her, she lost one. Her chaos thorns appeared. Her portal magic bracelets became visible.

One by one, her portal anchors lost the magic that made them anchors, becoming lost to her. The one outside her Station. The one in Bryn's throne room. In Jevryn’s home. In Tristen's.

Her legs gave out and she dropped to the floor, falling onto her side, but she stubbornly clung to the works she could not afford to lose. Her anchor in Serenity's room, the only way she had of reaching her sister. The Hiding on Alihana. The Hiding on the Harvester. The ones on Kaden and Morgen and Tristen.

But her grasp was tenuous. Hidings that had been nothing but background noises for so long she barely noticed them, as light to carry as a feather, became too heavy and slippery to hold. She lost Serenity first, the working so far from her, on the other side of the universe. A new kind of pain tore through her as it faded—her little sister would never understand why Nyx vanished from her life.

Then she lost Alihana. Then Kaden and Morgen and Tristen, the first two of whom had started running at Loclyn the moment Nyx screamed.

If she'd managed to keep those Hidings a little longer, maybe it could have all been over. Maybe Kaden could have separated Loclyn’s head from his body with a single stroke of his sword, and she could have watched Loclyn die like any other man. But Kaden and Morgen become visible to Loclyn before either could land a blow, and his attention diverted from her long enough to grasp them. She knew exactly what her own screams had sounded like because theirs would haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life.

Morgen's sword dropped from his fingers. Kaden kept his but his knees buckled, hitting the floor. Loclyn's magic still clamped Nyx. She couldn't move, but he hadn't actively drawn from her again, his focus on draining Kaden and Morgen. Nyx took her tenuous reprieve, fought against the growing lassitude enveloping her, and clawed her way back into Kaliaris’s senses. Seizing control of the Station again, she dropped Kaden, Morgen, and Tristen through the floor, but instead of putting them in the basement with Loclyn's people—who were nearly up the long staircase and to the door that led back to the cafe—she shunted them sideways and down, into Morgen's laboratory.

It didn't break Loclyn's hold on them. They were one floor and multiple rooms away and she could still feel his magic stretching through Kaliaris, killing them. Desperate, she grasped her Hidden magic and flung it out, trying to Hide the points where Loclyn's magic latched onto them, as she'd once done in the Shadow Market when Maruca's had latched onto her. It had worked, then. But Maruca Moor had not been an energy mage for nine centuries. And Maruca, while irritated, had not been trying to kill Nyx. Her connection had been a mere thread of magic. Loclyn's was all-encompassing, tentacles clamped around her and the others.

She would have to Hide them entirely. She strained, her magic flexing, weaving layer after layer between Loclyn's magic and her friends. Every stitch was a fire in her mind, every reserve of her magic pushing against Loclyn's knowledge of their presence. Pushing against his magic's knowledge that it grasped them. She shoved with everything she had and felt Kaden and Morgen flicker out of Loclyn’s sight. The tentacles of his magic flexed, seeking. Nyx hurt, arcs of pain screeching through her as she refused to let go of her magic.

She couldn't hold it much longer. A second. Maybe two. She had to move Kaden, Morgen, and Tristen before she gave out and Loclyn found them again.

When she reached for the Station, it felt like her mind splintered. Her vision grayed as she shoved her people through the wall, out onto the Station grounds. Her magic—and Kaliaris—slipped from her grip once more. She heard a door slam open behind Loclyn, knew his Devoted had returned when he snapped, “Take care of the other three. This one is mine.”

They didn’t argue. She only hoped Kaden and Morgen could handle the others. Or that they had been smart enough to run. But she knew them. They wouldn’t run.

Loclyn’s magic drank from her again. A slow sip, this time, as if tasting her rather than seeking to drain her immediately. Footsteps drew nearer and his shadow fell over her.

“What are you?” Loclyn's voice held the kind of curiosity that came when a person hadn’t found anything truly interesting in years, and had finally discovered something new and wondrous. “What have you become?”

Loclyn brushed the hair from her face, his fingertips tracing the spiral pattern of the chaos thorns in her cheek. She tried to brush him off, her hand jerking a few inches off the ground before a fresh draw from his magic stole her strength and her muscles gave out.

“No, no,” Loclyn murmured, stroking her cheek. His voice was almost tender, now. “Don't rise.” His fingers trailed down her neck, stopping when they hit the chain of her necklace. The chain that was no longer Hidden. The chain that held the Harvester.

Use me, it called to her. She could feel its promise to devour him. But she couldn't use it. Not now. She didn't know if she was dying, but she knew she was holding onto consciousness by a thread. She had barely restrained the Harvester in Mary’s shop, when she had been at full strength. If she let it loose now, she could not contain it. It would take Loclyn, yes. But then it would take everything she loved.

More of her energy siphoned away as Loclyn tugged the necklace from beneath her shirt. In her mind, someone was screaming at her. An ancient voice and a furious one, demanding that she find A-Queltr. What a ridiculous notion. A-Queltr was peace. She could not find peace in all this pain.

Loclyn inhaled sharply as the Harvester fell into his palm. “Here, all this time.”

Finding peace in pain is what A-Morridahns do, Alihana bellowed in her mind. Or are you not one after all?

She would have laughed, if she'd had the strength. All this time, Alihana kept telling her she was only half Salyrian, and now that it mattered to them, they expected her to be whole. She swallowed and felt the rock resting against the hollow of her throat bob with the movement.

Seth. Seth was peace.

A doorway to a tower opened in her mind. She walked through it. Down the tower stairs, out the door onto frozen slopes, across to where the ledge of A-Queltr waited. Outside A-Queltr, in the physical world, Loclyn ripped the Harvester from her neck, the chain biting into her skin as it tore free.