Page 27 of The Night Is Defying (Nytefall Trilogy #2)

27

N yte— P ast

The summers were becoming shorter each year, and this winter was beginning to feel endless.

Nyte stifled a shiver from the cold whistling through the cracks of the long neglected library they’d ventured to in a corner of Arania. He plucked a book from the old shelf, squinting with little interest at the small script. Astraea’s light laughter drew his eyes to her as she sat unbothered by the dust of the old seating she reclined on next to Drystan, their noses stuck in books likely far afield from what they’d come to this hopeless abandoned library for.

Over their time spent trying to scour the land for any knowledge and following any leads to seers, mages, and tricksters… he’d watched the pair become concerningly close. Only for the mischief that was tangible between them. If his father knew they’d been meeting with the star-maiden for so long, Nyte didn’t think his rage would spare their lives for this.

Nyte kept to himself as much as he could, but as the months turned to years and the years passed suddenly too fast, he found the days, or weeks, she wasn’t around became hollow. Astraea also kept their meets secret, and both their travels were passed off as a truth wrapped in a lie: that they were hunting each other.

“I don’t know what you could find about the realm’s history that could be humorous,” Nyte muttered.

When Astraea flashed those silver-blue eyes at him, twinkling with mischief, her attention on him fluttered in his chest.

It did so often and he tried to ignore it, but the small truth that he allowed his dark mind to hold was that he enjoyed it.

“You know, I’ve often wondered if you’re capable of a smile,” she replied.

Drystan didn’t look up from his book as he said, “So have I.”

Astraea was leaning into him, turning the pages of the book in his palms when he didn’t do it fast enough and giggling over whatever they were looking at. Nyte couldn’t understand his feelings at the sight. He’d never had such light occupy his mind without the itch to expel it.

The star-maiden was unbiased to what Drystan was—a blood vampire. She was raised to be neutral about all species even though both the soulless and shadowless had begun siding with his father to overthrow her in masses growing larger each day.

“This is the last library we know of,” Nyte said, approaching them.

Astraea’s face fell with this news. She knew already that they were running out of options to discover the origin of the quakes and how to stop them.

“There’s one temple left,” he hedged.

They’d been to all of them. Yet he wondered why Astraea had often diverted from the one he thought they should have tried, or at least she could have, a long time ago.

Her feet swept off the table she’d perched them on, and she ran a hand down her face. Nyte stilled with the urge to do something for the distress rising in her. He could feel them, the shifts in her that had grown stronger in their time spent together.

He was becoming so acutely in tune with her it was frightening. He’d never feared anything in his life.

Nyte asked carefully, “Why won’t you reach out to your parents?”

Astraea huffed a laugh. A mocking sound.

“They’ve never been parents. They are gods, nothing more.”

He’d never expected to find himself on common ground with his enemy.

“You are the Daughter of Dusk and Dawn. They might help.”

“I am a duty, not a daughter. Created, not born. Raised by six guardians, not parents.”

“Nyte is created too,” Drystan said casually with half attention as he kept flipping through his book. “Technically.”

Nyte’s jaw locked, wishing he wasn’t here right now.

“Hardly the same,” he grumbled.

“What do you mean?” Astraea asked. The interest she harbored wasn’t simply for knowledge about him… but rather it was like she exposed a side of herself that was longing to find a relation to something. When those who surrounded her in Vesitire and Althenia could never understand what she was.

“Nightsdeath,” Drystan answered her.

“Maybe you should take a walk, little brother,” Nyte said tightly.

Drystan looked about to protest, until he looked up and saw it was an instruction, not a request. He groaned under his breath, thumping his book shut and kicking his feet off the table.

“If something terrible is lurking in dark corners to devour me—”

“I’ll make sure you’re commemorated bravely.”

Drystan sauntered off with a huff. The silence between Nyte and Astraea grew uncomfortable.

“He shouldn’t have said anything,” Nyte said, wanting to strangle his brother.

Astraea was still their enemy, and he wasn’t foolish enough to think she wouldn’t turn on them as easily as Nyte could her. Once they found the answer they were looking for, he was prepared for the battle to rise between them.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said, dropping her sight to brush over pages aimlessly.

Her disappointment tugged a thread within him, clamping his fists by his sides. Would it matter if she knew things about him? When it came time, he supposed it wouldn’t. It would be his power against hers and knowing the origins of him couldn’t grant her an upper hand.

Nyte sighed, gravitating toward the old leather seat. He sat beside her, sinking down and not anticipating the small size that had them nearly touching. He’d thought being near her would keep the tension locked in his body. But instead, he eased.

“My full name is Rainyte,” he began, picking a book from the stack for a distraction. “But it didn’t feel right to keep when it belonged to a child named by his mother he was torn away from. But nothing is chance, and that child was bestowed a gift that would become a curse. Made into what would become the realm’s nightmare by the name of Nightsdeath.”

He stole a glance, finding her delicate face thoughtful.

“So you see, we’re not so different after all,” he said quietly. “Only you are made of light, and me of dark.”

“Some might call that balance. That you were created for something good after all.”

“Or destruction. Created to bring nothing but terror.”

“Not everyone is afraid of the dark.”

Nyte mapped every inch of her face, resisting the urge to reach for a strand of glittering silver hair that hung loose from her braids.

“No one fears the dark. They fear what can lurk within it.”

“Hey, look what I found!” Drystan’s voice echoed from down a bookcase.

He came into view waving a parchment.

Nyte hooked an unimpressed brow. “A map?”

Drystan smiled, mischievous. He set it down, saying, “Kateran Keep.”

They watched the paper, and to his surprise, the ink started shifting. When it finished, the full keep came into clarity. He’d never seen such an enchanted item before.

Nyte swiped it up faster than his brother’s protest could stop him.

“Vesitire,” he said to it.

Nothing moved.

When Drystan huffed a laugh in satisfaction, Nyte almost tore the damn parchment.

“It doesn’t like you, give it here,” Drystan said.

Astraea plucked it from his fingers first. “Vesitire,” she repeated for him.

It didn’t answer her either.

Drystan’s grin was insufferable.

Astraea said, “It must only answer to one person at once. Perhaps it would switch if Drystan gave up ownership as it seems to have attached itself to him.”

“This place is centuries abandoned,” Drystan thought out loud. “It’s past owner could be dead, and it was just waiting for the next.”

“It’s an item of the Wanderers Trove,” Nyte realized.

“Like the compass that doesn’t work? Is there anything else?” Astraea asked.

Nyte drew a long breath, leaning back to try to recall the story he’d learned from an old man in a tavern once. He’d thought it was just a drunken tale for entertainment that engrossed the room at the time.

“I think there’s a monocular telescope. They say it can reveal lost islands or doors or items. It uncloaks anything hidden by magick. These three trove items make someone a master traveler and treasurer.”

“We need to find that,” Drystan said with a giddy edge.

“Not what we need right now,” Nyte said.

Drystan rolled his eyes as he folded and pocketed the map. “You’re not very fun.”

Nyte ignored him, halfway to lifting a book from the table when a loud sound, like a roar mixed with a wail, shot him and Astraea to their feet in alarm.

“What the hell was that?” Drystan said.

“What else did you touch?” Nyte demanded.

“Nothing!”

It sounded again and Astraea’s key glowed to life in the appearance of her legendary staff.

“We should get out of here,” Nyte said.

Contrary to his warning, Astraea headed through the bookcases.

Toward the creature’s sound.

She was impossible. Yet Nyte followed after her. Perhaps some action would help to ease his boredom that had been growing over the last few months of travel and no findings. Nothing at all except suffering close company far too often with Astraea and Drystan, who’d bloomed something of a near intolerable friendship.

“This is not a good idea,” he warned, but he knew there was no dissuading her.

The bookcases in front of them exploded and Nyte’s power struck out on instinct. Waves of his darkness surged toward the threat but it was repelled by a huge white feathered wing. Nyte wasn’t thinking when his arm hooked around Astraea, pulling her to him to avoid the counterattack from the beast that came with just as much force.

Pressed to the nearest bookcase, he watched the power blast by, trying to decipher what it was when it looked like what he could conjure—smoky darkness littered with stars.

“It’s a celestial dragon,” Astraea said with wonder, barely audible over the commotion.

The creature wailed again.

“Run!” he barked at Drystan.

His younger brother took off but Astraea pushed off him to face the creature.

“Are you planning to talk to it?” Nyte said sarcastically, charging his dark energy.

“It’s wounded,” Astraea said, so entranced by the giant threatening creature Nyte was ready to kill.

He examined the huge beast that had wrecked dozens of bookcases around it. Its mighty wings hung lazily. Someone, or likely it would have taken several people, had sawn away at its shoulders and they were shorn of many feathers. Some were bare like long fish bones. Nyte pitied the mighty creature that had been overpowered by mere mortals, who took away its ability to fly.

“Someone clipped them?” Nyte concluded.

“It’s barbaric,” Astraea seethed.

The dragon cried out again and they winced at the sound.

“We’re either getting the fuck out of here or I’m killing it,” Nyte warned.

“Don’t you dare.” Astraea pinned him with a lethal look of warning.

Nyte internally groaned. Of course this wasn’t going to be an easy out.

“A dare is a musical challenge to me, Starlight.”

Astraea appeared ready to fight him, but the dragon’s chest expanded and its neck straightened, ready to blast another round of what he assumed to be some kind of shadowfire at them.

This time, Nyte circled Astraea’s waist and traveled through the void to evade the attack. They stood behind the dragon as it finished breathing fire. It must have felt them as it immediately swung around and they had no choice but to dive out of the way as its lame wing came close to projecting them across the room. More bookcases were torn through, but before Nyte could cast out his power to avoid the rain of sharp wood stakes and books, a gale of light encompassed them as a shield from Astraea.

“Thanks,” he said through a breath.

“Don’t mention it.” They fumbled up to stand over the wreckage around them. “I mean it, don’t.”

With the next roar, he wondered if it was his own adrenaline that thought the beast was getting more pissed off. Nyte didn’t think when he took Astraea’s hand and they raced through the library.

“Over here!”

Nyte swore at the sound of Drystan’s voice echoing from somewhere lower and distant. He hoped his brother was safely outside but a part of him knew he wouldn’t be that fucking compliant.

They winced at the loud tumbling of stone as the dragon tore through walls to follow hot on their trail. Nyte’s intuition of the darkness felt the prickling of its approach across his nape just in time to duck into the next alcove and pull Astraea into him. He held her tightly to his front and they panted hard to catch their breath.

“Remind me why we’re not just killing it?” Nyte snapped.

“Celestial dragons have been believed extinct; we can’t just kill it!” she hissed back. “It’s only attacking because it thinks we’re a threat. You can’t really blame it for the treatment it’s endured by mortal hands.”

“Right, and you want to become smoke and ash for what?”

She pushed off him, and Nyte cursed all the hells as she ran and he after her.

“Just let me handle this. Don’t get in my way.”

He had a lot to say about that, but he kept it to himself. It wasn’t that he thought her incapable; what he despised was the acknowledgment that he was incapable of leaving her in danger.

They skidded into a smaller hall that had been torn down. In the center was a giant nest like the dragon had made themselves a home here. Nyte could kill his brother right now, standing in the middle of the dragon’s den, a dead end with no door on the other side. But what he stared down at…

“Stars above,” Astraea breathed in awe.

It was a celestial dragon egg. A stunning stark black with silver etchings.

“You decided to come to the one place that’ll piss it off more for our trespassing?” Nyte snarled.

The crashing amplified and if they didn’t get the hell out of here now they were going to—

Nyte’s magick expelled from him out of instinct. Darkness struck the creature behind them and its roar turned to a cry of pain.

“Stop!” Astraea said, advancing forward, and Nyte jerked, almost following her.

He studied her and the beast with a laser focus, ready to disregard her request to strike it again if it so much as showed a flicker of attack. Right now it huddled into itself and the viciousness it found them with fell, revealing a frightened, beaten animal.

Nyte watched Astraea raise a hand and when the beast snarled Nyte’s shadows swirled his fingers.

She wasn’t afraid. Astraea’s metallic tattoos glowed brighter the closer she got, like her magick was recognizing the dragon as kin. Then she spoke. Words not of our language or any he’d heard before. The soothing speech was as delicate as it was fierce. Like an enchanting song that, even though it was for the dragon, Nyte felt hypnotized by, resisting the urge to kneel to her. It calmed the beast, who laid down its head as if it bowed to her.

“She’s in pain,” Astraea whispered, her voice choked with emotion, and Nyte turned stiff.

He was in pain. With the star-maiden’s distress and he didn’t know how to be rid of it. This ache inside him for her.

“We have to leave it,” Nyte said, approaching her and the tired dragon.

“We can’t.” When she turned her head to him and her silver eyes glistened with tears, he was slammed with the pressure to stop them from falling.

Nyte was utterly compelled by her, reaching without conscious effort to touch her wet cheeks. He didn’t know what this was, only that he couldn’t stand this sight and needed to eradicate anything that could invoke this sadness in her.

“What do you need me to do?” he asked, and it was like he gave her all the power over him with that token.

Astraea’s sight weighed to the ground with sorrow before casting back to the dragon. She reached out a hand and Nyte’s whole body tensed when she made contact with the beast. It gave a huff like a dozen horses at once, then a soft whine. Such a contrast to what had chased them moments before.

It was then that he understood the creature. When agony turned peaceful things sharp. It broke out claws and teeth and all it took was one vicious reaction from the pain to be condemned to that reputation.

“We can’t leave her here like this.” Astraea sniffed, wiping her tears on her sleeve, and looked to where Drystan still stood by the egg. “She’s only held on this long to guard it.”

Nyte understood what she was asking. What needed to be done, but Astraea didn’t have it in her to kill the beast even to end its suffering.

“Take it. I’ll meet you outside,” Nyte said.

Astraea’s eyes held him with gratitude he didn’t deserve. He was only doing what he was known for, after all. Death.

“Can you make it painless?”

He gave her a nod, and it was in that moment he realized the trust she gave him was genuine and without doubt. As he watched her say her silent farewell, calming the beast more so that it settled down like it understood it was all over, Nyte didn’t expect the feelings that lingered when she left with Drystan carrying the egg.

She trusted him.

Why did that feel more terrifying to him than the thought of her as the enemy?

He didn’t know when it had happened, but that term— enemy— seemed fitting only in politics and duty now. For somewhere along their quest, he’d been silently, unwittingly, ensnared by the beautiful poison of her that tasted precious and valuable but it turned a steel guard to fragile glass.

He cared for her.

No—that felt too little for what he was willing to become for her. When he knew he’d be a shield if danger was near. Or a sword if a threat advanced. Shit, he would even take her in his arms if it would stop those tears from falling.

He’d felt the racing in his chest before. It was like the adrenaline of war and that’s what she’d become. His war. Something he had to fight against because it was not their destiny to be anything else on mortal opposite sides of everything.

Dark and light.

Vampires and celestials.

Him and her… it was a twisted, dark mockery that taunted the bond between two who could never be.

Nyte grew bitterly resentful and turned his focus to the dragon. He had to admit, a part of him despaired at the end of such a magnificent creature’s life, and more so because it had spent its last centuries in lonely misery. Nyte came to the sinking thoughts he could relate to in its torment.

Approaching, the beast tracked him with large purple eyes with slit pupils. He reached out a hand and was hit with so much pain and suffering his teeth clenched tightly. While he distracted the creature’s mind, his shadow magick crept around the dragon. While it could cause immeasurable agony and terrifying hallucinations, his darkness could also be peaceful and gentle. The beast’s eyes grew tired and shut. Its loud heartbeat slowed.

Just before the silence of death fell, Nyte’s mind was battered with impossible images.

He saw Astraea, but she appeared different somehow. So lost and fragile.

Then he looked up at a tall barrier of rippling starlight that felt like his magick but he didn’t know what it was dividing.

He was shown Drystan, but his brother’s usually bright hazel eyes were so disturbingly cold and loathing.

Then he heard the roar of a different dragon, seeing one with membranous wings and red tipped talons and horns.

Finally, Nyte saw himself… kneeling in a small crater around deserted ash-clogged land, but it was his cry, a sound of the most absolute agony, he didn’t know could tear him apart for what— who— he cradled…

Nyte ripped his hand back, but it was too late to demand what it all meant.

The echoing terror of that final vision drummed hard in his chest.

Nyte didn’t know what to think. How to feel. He wandered out of that library feeling vacant until the freezing air hit his face. Glancing up, Astraea and Drystan huddled close on the snow covered steps. She held the dragon egg, examining it as his brother was studying a book, and they chatted quietly.

“It’s done,” he said, words that were almost lost in the whistling wind, but Astraea heard him.

She stood, hugging the egg to her body, and Nyte didn’t care about anything anymore. Not the dragons, nor the quest to find the quakes.

He couldn’t explain why he never wanted to let Astraea out of his sight again and resisted a strong pull of gravity to her right now.

“We found something else,” Drystan said, coming up beside Astraea.

Nyte barely registered his brother. He couldn’t take his eyes off the star-maiden.

“Are you okay?” Astraea asked carefully. Her face pinched in concern, as if it was killing the dragon that disturbed him.

Astraea unexpectedly stepped toward him, and his whole body turned taut at the arm she circled around him, only one while she still cradled the egg but her warmth seeped into him. He didn’t know what to do.

“You’re a terrible hugger,” she mumbled.

“Tell me about it,” Drystan said.

Nyte glanced down to see her small smile to that, and he relaxed, thinking of nothing but right now.

She was safe.

Right here.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

Nyte held her. Slipping an arm around her shoulders and his other hand cupped her head on his chest. He’d never felt this before. Every muscle in his body eased and he didn’t want to let go. He wanted to draw her tighter when it suddenly didn’t feel like enough.

He wanted her alone—like that time in the cabin she’d been wrapped around him. Nyte didn’t know what love was, but he thought, just for a few vulnerable seconds, that he could come to find the answer in her.

An answer he couldn’t want.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“What else did you find?” Nyte asked. His throat tight.

Astraea took that as her sign to let him go, and the coldness of her absence was like a lash of punishment for craving her warmth when it could drift away at any moment.

“A diary, I think, but the text is in a language neither of us have seen before. It’s old, ” Drystan said, squinting at the pages. “This was also inside.”

He held up a transparent piece of paper the likes of which Nyte had never seen before. It had an intricate drawing of a dragon on it but Nyte thought there was a constellation through it.

“What does it do?” Nyte asked.

Drystan shrugged. “We’ve been puzzling over it.”

It seemed the least of their concerns right now. “What do we do with that? ” Nyte pointed to the black and silver egg.

Astraea held it protectively, marveling over the silver swirls that reminded him of her metallic tattoos.

“I think it could be alive,” she said. “I just don’t know what it takes to hatch it. No one knows a lot about the dragons, even the celestials. It’s been over a thousand years. For now, I’m going to place it with a guardian I know will keep it safe.”

Her brow crumpled and Nyte knew she was reflecting on how long the beast inside had been suffering. Even he felt sorrow, but it was sleeping peacefully now.

Astraea slipped her sight to him, and her small smiles felt so precious all of a sudden—like he had to capture each one and store it away for safekeeping because they could be numbered. This world wouldn’t survive if that was true.

It had been Nyte’s primary order to eliminate the star-maiden. Now he feared she might be the only thing that could save the world…

From him.