Page 24 of The Heart of Nym (The Twisted Roots Duology #1)

It meant that Nymiria wasn't just a Mystic, nor fae. It meant that everything written inside of his mother's journals were true. Nymiria wasn't just the princess he saved all those years ago—not just a courtesan. She was the last Godling of Greia.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" She snapped, striding closer to him.

Despite the intent to stand his ground, he took a step back, lips parting.

"What is it? Is there something in my hair?

" The moment she started combing her fingers through the golden locks around her shoulders, her glamour slipped away, revealing the creature that lurked underneath false skin.

Her facial features were the same, still unnaturally beautiful, but in her raw and natural form…

He didn't know how he couldn't have seen it before. The signs were all there—the glow of her skin, the gleam of the universe trapped within her eyes.

Aziel let out a low growl, his heart thrumming so quickly and loudly that he could hardly hear what she was saying. Or yelling. "You don't belong here." He whispered.

Nymiria was still talking, still thrashing her hands around in a fit of rage until she turned and grabbed a handful of her dead flowers and shoved them into his chest. "Just admit that you did this.

Admit it. You don't like me touching your mother's grave, I understand that.

But why would you kill these flowers? I made this place beautiful—I cared for it!

So why do you hate me?" She shoved at his shoulders.

Aziel didn't have the strength to stiffen his body or lock in his footing. He stumbled back, bracing himself against the iron gate. He shook his head again, letting the dead flowers he didn't realize he was still holding fall to his feet. "You don't belong here." He repeated.

"What?" She snapped.

His eyes flickered up to hers, anger swelling low in his stomach as he looked her over. "You. Don't. Belong. Here."

Nymiria opened her mouth to speak, but closed it again almost immediately and folded her arms over her chest. Just like a child clutching at a security blanket, Nymiria glamoured herself again, her eyes turning down at the corners.

He'd definitely struck a nerve, found the tenderest wound she had and prodded it.

And though she turned from him as quickly as she possibly could, he could still see the swell of tears in her eyes, the pain that etched itself across her face.

Aziel turned away from her, leaving her crumpled form in the garden as he charged for the palace.

The world seemed to move too slow, his feet too heavy, his palms sweating as he climbed the stairs.

Barreling past the shadows and the figure that lurked inside of them, he ascended up to the west wing tower, his hands shaking by the time he finally reached his rooms. Trio watched from the corner, silent and observant as Aziel began digging through the trunk of his mother's belongings.

When he pulled the leather-bound book from underneath the other meaningless trinkets, it tumbled from his fingers.

Trio was at his side immediately, catching the book before it hit the ground.

"What's going on?" Trio asked.

Blue eyes flickered up to meet black, Trio's shadows looming over them, creating a barrier between them and the outside world.

Aziel only stared at his friend, leather pressing into leather as he squeezed the spine of the journal.

"Nymiria is not just a princess. She's not just Seelie. She's the Anam."

Trio's hand fell away from the journal, tightening into a fist mid-air before he raised to full height once again. "She is Life?"

His shock was fitting for the situation.

Aziel felt it, too. Knowing that the next Goddess of Life was outside tending to a fucking garden was absolutely laughable.

As many times as he'd read over his mother's writings, it never said much about who the next Anam would be, only that she was everything that was good and pure in the world, that she would sense the Mortem inside of her son.

It was said that they would call to one another.

In the time of the old gods, it was said that the gods would eventually die.

But before their deaths, they would choose from their children and their followers, finding people that exhibited powers and hearts similar to their own, to fill the roles that they would leave behind.

Without the beating hearts of these godlings, the powers that the gods bore would dissipate into the earth, leaving them unregulated—uncontrolled.

Gods were vessels for these blessings, forever keeping the balance.

Greia, the Goddess of Life and Fertility, was the most-worshiped goddess in Seelie culture.

She was the most coveted. The one that people fell to their knees and prayed to at the end of a very long day—the one that they screamed for when life was coming to an end.

People rarely prayed for death. And when they did, the circumstances were far more dire and depressing than Aziel once assumed.

The prayers usually made in his name were curses and screamed with hatred.

For the last ten years, Aziel had scoured the world in search of the next one, following his intuition, following any fae being that exhibited Greia's powers.

He'd discovered fae that could make flowers bloom with the snap of their fingers, he'd found some that sprouted flowers from their very skin, resembling a walking garden.

He'd seen them all. But he'd never seen them digging through the dirt and planting seeds with their bare hands the way Nymiria did.

It couldn't be true.

"Thorn has to know about this. There is absolutely no way that he would not have known." Aziel said it more to himself than to Trio, trying to find some excuse that would make all of this impossible. This couldn't be happening.

"We always knew Anam was out there somewhere, Aziel.

" Trio moved in beside him, watching as Aziel opened his mother's journals and began thumbing through the pages.

"Doesn't this make things easier for you?

Instead of having to retrieve the princess and a goddess, you found them both at the same time.

Two birds, one stone." Trio leaned back against the stone wall, pushing his bleached locks away from his face.

"Reading it for the thousandth time isn't going to change anything, Aziel.

It is what it is." Aziel let out a sharp noise of distaste, tossing the journal across the room as if distance from the proof could change reality. "Why are you so upset about this?"

"Neither of us are ready for what this entails." Aziel sighed, finally able to look at his friend again. "She is like them."

"How do you know that?" Trio asked. "Have you had an actual conversation with her?"

"No. And I don't think that's happening in the foreseeable future"

"Have you been nice to her?"

"Fuck." Aziel growled, the force at which his head recline into the wall behind them was nearly strong enough to crack the stone. He closed his eyes. "Some days I wish I'd never been born."

Trio chuckled. "Some days, I agree. My life would have been far simpler if you weren't here. But you are. And I have devoted my life to helping you. So, that being said, we need a course of action. We need a plan. Either you charm her, enchant her, curse her, or… something. Fuck her, if you—"

"Watch it." Aziel warned. One blue eye snapped open, glaring in Trio's direction. "I may not want this, but that is still a goddess you are talking about."

The shadow wielder shrugged, his smirk grating against a nerve that always seemed perfectly reserved for Trio and his inability to keep his mouth shut when the moment called for it. "Rather protective there, Haze. One would assume that you actually care for her."

Aziel laughed at this, rolling his eyes and pulling himself off of the wall just enough to grab the decanter of whiskey off of the table to his right.

He looked down at the amber liquid and swirled it.

It wasn't necessarily him being protective, but more so him being…

him. Nymiria was once a beacon of hope for the Mystics he was saving and he'd devoted the greater part of his adult life insuring that she would return to her kingdom.

That was all that this was believed to be in the beginning.

When Thorn approached him about the missing princess, Aziel believed that this would be an easy job.

He believed that she would still be the same wild little princess he'd seen ten years ago and would immediately gravitate towards him, given their likeness.

But it didn't happen that way. Every chance he had of talking to her, he'd scared her off.

"But," Trio sighed. "I suppose one would actually have to have a heart to feel anything. And you and I both know that you are horribly lacking in that department."

Aziel grumbled something under his breath and raised the decanter to his lips, swallowing down the amber fire and letting it warm his frozen center.

He shuddered in approval, letting out a soft groan as the alcohol hit his stomach.

"I might be lacking in that department, but there are other departments where I am perfectly well-endowed. "

"It certainly is not the department of modesty, either."

He cut his eyes at Trio, making a sound that resembled a laugh around the lip of the decanter. With a roll of his eyes, Aziel tipped the bottle up once again.

They sat in silence for a while, passing the whiskey between themselves until Aziel's intense emotions were dulled just enough to head towards his next job. One of the taxmen in Yaar was causing problems with Dorid's shipments and Aziel was summoned to dispatch him.