Page 54 of The Night Is Defying (Nytefall Trilogy #2)

54

A straea

I sat on the edge of a small, humble bed, and for a while, it was like no time had passed at all. Like I’d never left.

Looking out the dainty balcony window, I couldn’t see the outdoors. I was underground, and if I could have stood from my numb state I would have seen the expanse of a deep, colossal shaft.

Before getting my memories back, I had struggled to believe there was over a century missing in my mind. My time had paused while the world kept pressing forward for three more. Now time was racing with all I had to catch up on in the centuries I was gone.

Nyte had waited.

I’d known this, and yet it was a whole new ache in my soul to have the trickling images and emotions of the past bringing such clarity as to why. What I felt for him was as certain as time, as promising as life, and as inevitable as death. Above all that was coming back to me, Nyte was the only sure thing that kept me grounded.

I knew where I was. Only I couldn’t fathom how big and busy this stronghold had become in my absence. It was overwhelming, and why I couldn’t bring myself to step onto that small balcony and see it in full clarity for myself.

They’d left me in this room after I’d awoken, near frantic, terror-stricken, and unable to get my mind to stop. They had made me drink a tonic and I was glad, for it calmed my storm.

A presence crept in behind me, and I knew the time for dwelling was over. I couldn’t stay idle anymore.

The gods that created me had wanted a perfect idol, but the god that made me Lightsdeath had broken those chains of obedience.

The Golden Age would come again—my way. It would take knocking down the pillars of superiority one by one.

“How are you feeling?”

I turned then, finding Zephyr standing patiently, hands clasped behind his back.

How was I feeling?

The were no words in my mind anymore, only pure rage-filled actions I wanted to take. I didn’t want Auster to know in words, I wanted him to feel it when the sky fell down upon him.

“Like I want to tear the world apart,” I said.

“I was rather hoping you would say that.” Zephyr smiled. “Welcome back, Astraea.”

At first the sight of him when I awoke had struck me with dread as much as it might have to see Auster standing over me. Until my memory of Zephyr filtered back.

He was my friend and I trusted him. I knew that now. All the plans we made, the suspicions we confided in each other long ago…

“None of them will forgive you,” I said, giving him one last chance to back away. But this was something we’d started long ago, and like Nyte, he’d been waiting too.

“Then I hope you remain as confident as before that we’ll emerge triumphant.”

“I failed before. I could again.”

“You didn’t fail,” he said, coming carefully closer. “You became everything you needed to be to take your rightful place once and for all.”

I nodded, choosing to be grateful for the loyalty I didn’t deserve.

Just then a head of blonde hair curved around the door, and I relaxed in relief seeing Katerina. Her exile had been a ruse Zephyr had no choice but to partake in to keep her safe and not risk a conflict with his brothers, and I was so glad.

Auster was a harsh and powerful dictator. His views were absolute to create a world where the weaker people would always be lesser. His other two brothers followed his iron fist, but not Zephyr… his heart was too kind to shun his own people. Even half-bloods.

This sanctuary was another rebellion. For the Nephilim and celestials who had lost their wings and had been exiled by order of the High Celestials.

What most didn’t know was that corruption was a poison in the roots of even the fairest beings, and goodness was a light even among the most wickedly portrayed.

So this place had been created as a refuge on the Forgotten Isles, east of Althenia. For their safety, and one day an uprising for equality.

One Zephyr and I had only just begun before I was killed.

“You and Nyte… you’re the bridge to our peace once and for all,” Katerina said.

My eyes stung as I pushed up from the bed, turning away from them. For the first time we were regarded as something of hope not tragedy. I clung to that notion, because nothing felt more absolute, more inevitable, than him and I.

“Nyte isn’t the savior you pray for. But he’s the one you hope will answer anyway,” I said, looking over the wide expanse of the stone perimeter with an aching heart.

“None of us would have seen that without you,” Zephyr said. “Auster and the others have always tried to make you believe it was a crime against your people to accept there was good in Rainyte, but it’s those who are quickest to condemn a monster that are harboring something more vicious of their own.”

For Auster, Notus, and Aquilo, it was the beast of superiority. I couldn’t believe how many exiled celestials, Nephilim, and even fae resided here after three hundred years. When last I saw this place… it had been empty. A mere dream. Yet as glad as I was to see we’d offered a home and safety for them, it was abhorrent to see these columns so full.

Thousands of outcasts.

I hovered toward the dainty balcony doors and pushed down on the handles.

“Are you sure you’re ready?” Zephyr said worriedly.

“I have to be.”

The sound of people was only a distant murmur from inside the room; as soon as I stepped out into the hollow column it became an overwhelming racket. There was anguish and rage and terror fighting through the crowd and when I peered over the stone rail I realized why with my own dousing horror.

“You captured Aquilo?” I said in shock, twisting back to Zephyr.

He stayed in the frame of the door. “I tried to tell them not to when we passed him unconscious, but the others with us didn’t listen. We have to let him go; keeping him or killing him is an act against the gods. It wouldn’t be Auster and Notus we’d fear most, though their vengeance would come down in force.”

Aquilo was strung up below by his wrists between two pillars. Ironic really, when he’d laughed at me in such a helpless position and now a dark part of me looked down again and was pleased by the sorry sight of him. A few men and women acted as a firm barricade to him against a crowd that wanted to spill his blood.

I climbed onto the rail and a few looked up. The pit began to quieten but I couldn’t pay them any attention. I rolled my shoulders back and thought that I probably shouldn’t release my wings right now with the healing ache of my muscles. When I caught a flicker of the black feathers behind me I was reminded of who I was now. Death-touched.

The pit hushed all at once to the dark angel staring down at them.

“Astraea, what are you doing?” Zephyr asked, growing increasingly concerned.

“Exacting justice.”

I stepped off, letting gravity take me down sharply before my wings splayed, catching the draft that softened my landing.

The people let me pass and my resentment grew with every step closer to Aquilo I got. Those guarding him looked up behind me but Zephyr didn’t follow. He kept hidden. An inside spy for them into the High Celestial houses all this time.

The guards let me pass.

Aquilo kept his head hung but he was conscious, eyes fixed on the ground, jaw tight.

“You won’t even look at me?” I said, not recognizing the ice in my tone.

“You’re the devil’s maiden now,” he spat.

My smile felt vicious.

“I quite like that, actually.”

Kneeling, I gripped a fistful of his dark hair, yanking his head back. Aquilo’s brown eyes seethed at me.

“Doesn’t feel so good, does it? To be bound and powerless.”

Shouts started out from the onlookers.

“Kill him!”

“He made outcasts of us all!”

“Death to the High Celestials!”

“You’ll risk the wrath of the gods if you kill him,” Katerina warned behind me.

I looked over Aquilo’s head into the shadows. I couldn’t be sure if my visions of Death were just that as I could have sworn he watched me now. In a mundane size this time, still no face, only a depthless hood. Scythe in hand. Waiting.

“I am wrath,” I said. “And I am a god.”

Aquilo screamed. My touch began to inflict his torture, invisible to everyone. I wouldn’t kill him this time; I had a message to deliver. To give a taste of the High Celestial’s own iron fist.

His wings were glamoured but that didn’t stop me reaching them. I would have liked it to have been a spectacle for all those here who had been shunned for losing theirs, but I didn’t have the patience right now to get him to break and reveal them.

The people knew what was happening soon enough. Down his back two slanted lines scorched his flesh he bled through his jacket. I drowned out his screams of agony. Maybe I should have been repulsed by what I was doing, but right now all I felt was rage toward Auster for what he’d done to me—taken three hundred years of my life away. I was furious over the ruling of Althenia that had continued in my absence when I could have helped stop it sooner so this place wasn’t so full. And I was livid at the gods who gave me life, only to control what that meant—make a puppet out of me abiding by their supreme ideals.

Not anymore.

When I was finished removing Aquilo’s wings I let him go. He hung there limply, barely maintaining consciousness now.

I stood with no remorse. No feeling at all. Then I turned to Zephyr, cloaked in shadow at the entrance of a passage on this level now.

“You can take him back now,” I said to no one in particular. “Let Auster and Notus know we won’t be silent. We won’t be compliant. We’re fighting back.”

Zephyr looked at me like he didn’t know who he saw anymore. When I next looked in a mirror, I wasn’t sure I would either.

The crowd broke into applause and vengeful cheers. I didn’t bask in any of it. They praised me for what I’d done, but there was no glory to be had in this first act of war.

I walked away, glamouring my wings again to maneuver while there was little space here. The tight mob of people was beginning to suffocate me and my anger cooled again to remember more pressing things to me right now.

I had to make sure my friends and Nyte were okay. I missed him. So much that I rubbed my chest with the ache swelling in me as we wound through tight stone passages in this underground maze. I’d only just got my memories back and while I was still recalling things and threading fragments of the past together, it felt like I’d only just found him again before we were ripped apart.

He had let them tear his wings out for me…

“How long has passed since you saved me?” I asked Zephyr, who was following me.

“A few hours. It’s sunset.”

Sunset.

That knowledge was like a punch when I recalled what the God of Death had said:

When this dawn ends, eternal night will fall.

“Nyte,” I breathed.

Then I was running.

Zephyr called my name but it was drowned under the drum of my pulse.

I knew how to get out of here. I’d designed the layout through the underground caves before I died. Hurtling up the spiral stairs my lungs began to burn from the exertion, but I couldn’t travel through the void under here; it was enchanted for protection.

When I breached the surface the icy air speared my throat. I closed my eyes, trying desperately to feel for Nyte to channel through the void to him. The world felt too cold and vacant. I couldn’t feel him.

Panic riddled my mind, my chest, my soul. I paced, trying again. When I still couldn’t reach him I tried Zath, Rose, Davina… anyone.

Had something terrible happened to them?

Zephyr said he’d seen Drystan helping them all to safety on his dragon before he left with me.

I stepped through the void to Vesitire. The pedestrian traffic around me bustled past. So mundane. Oblivious. Their world was whole and normal while the ground crumbled beneath my feet and I scrambled like the streets were ablaze.

“Where are you?” I tried to call to Nyte through our bond but something was making it too distant and blurry.

I could still feel the essence of him entwined with me. It was the only thing that kept me from sinking to my knees in utter despair.

“I’m coming for you,” I said, hoping in some way he would hear that, even if not in words.

Commotion sounded down the wide street and I dipped into a shadowed alley, watching the lines marching up.

Celestials.

Auster was wasting no time in staking his claim on Solanis. An acidic bitterness rose in me as I pressed my back to a wall for them to pass. Some stopped, hammering things intermittently on the walls of buildings.

When the celestial soldiers wearing Auster’s color and seal passed, I slipped back out.

Curious, I gravitated toward what they were hanging. To my outrage and horror, it was posters of dangerous wanted persons.

The prices for each, dead or alive, climbed as I walked, examining the five variants they’d hung.

Davina and Lilith.

Zath and Rose.

Nadia and Drystan.

Nyte.

And me.

The reward money for capturing Nyte and myself alive was obscene. Enough to turn friend to foe to capture us. To make a criminal out of any saint.

“It’s the star-maiden,” someone whispered behind me.

“Are you sure?”

I spun, and the elderly human couple who’d spoken stared at me wide-eyed, but we’d attracted the interest of many others who were all examining the new posters plastered all the way down the street.

The elderly woman said, “Run, child.”

I did.

As other people started to pique their interest, some advancing for me, I turned and raced down the alleys.

Voices grew at my back as though the city was coming alive fast and viciously for the chance to capture me, and I realized the gravity of what Auster had done.

Turned the whole city against us. Soon, the whole continent would see us at the enemy.

My eyes burned.

I had to find Nyte. We’d figure out what to do together.

Stepping into the void, I choked one sob in the silence of the bell tower.

I sank to my knees, not knowing where else to go.

The sun was setting too fast and if what the God of Death said was true; if this was the final glimpse of the day in consequence for what I’d become…

Nyte didn’t have weeks or days or hours. He had minutes. My pulse had never raced so hopelessly as it did as I watched the fleeting rays.

“Please. I need you.” I begged with everything I had through our bond.

Voices echoed behind me, and my heart leaped up my throat.

No. They couldn’t know about this place.

How had they found me here?

I braced to stand and fight for our secret home above the world.

The soldiers didn’t climb the tower.

I yelped, ducking at the loud boom that shook through the stone and into my bones.

Oh gods.

They were tearing it down.

Racing to the dresser, I snatched up the snow globe Nyte had gifted me, about to leave when the structure was blasted off balance.

I fell into the wall as everything in our once safe and sacred space was thrown and broken with me. The bed slammed into the stone, turning to wreckage. Everything was upturned and I watched as our home crumbled. Tears blurred the destruction around me. If I didn’t get out I would be buried like our precious memories in here.

I stayed as long as I could in my desperate attachment.

Then I left through the void.

My knees sank into the snow with my cries as soon as I met the ground again. I clutched the snow globe as all I had left and I wished for him.

More than anything in the world all I wanted was to feel Nyte. He’d been through an unfathomable trauma, he’d done it for me, and I wasn’t with him.

A pull within me silenced my cries. It could have been sheer desperation, but if there was a chance it was real…

Pushing to my feet, I scrambled through the darkening woodland, tripping over the unseen obstacles of branches under the snow. My palms were cut against the harsh bark I gripped to catch me several times and the few woodland claws that succeeded in pulling me to its ground but I didn’t stop. I protected the globe with my body, not feeling pain right now anyway. Adrenaline pushed me on, keeping my skin numb, because time was too precious and I had to make it.

Breaking out of the tree line I came to a cliff’s edge, then all it took was a sideways look to shatter me with delusional relief.

I cursed the snow for slowing my run, pushing with all I had toward Nyte, but he could hardly walk to meet me. The void wouldn’t open here and my teeth gritted. Don’t. Stop. I broke at the sight of the black cane he leaned on, as he clutched his abdomen and barely shuffled his steps.

“Nyte!” I called when he hadn’t looked up yet.

When he did, the tired misery in his eyes cleaved my world in two.

Then he looked over the mountainside, as if he knew…

I sprinted with all my might through the thick snow, racing to beat the sunset.

He was right there.

Just a few more steps…

I never battled such an uncompromising force as time. Everything in me was screaming to make it stop. To let us defy just for a few more delicate minutes.

But as the last amber streak winked out across his face, the world rumbled with a violent quake, and Nyte’s hold slipped on the cane. My knees plummeted into the snow, arms opening to catch him.

I cried out, taking the impact that sprawled us both from the weight of him. Pushing with everything I had, I managed to maneuver, hooking my arms under his and pulling myself up enough to hold his upper body in my lap.

The silence had never rung so loud. The darkness had never felt so haunting.

“Nyte.” My hand slipped over his chest. His heartbeat was there but it was so terribly slow and shallow. I couldn’t accept that Dusk and Dawn had won in inflicting their curse on him. “I need you.”

He was so beautiful. So peaceful. Our bond turned distant but I wrapped my entire being around the eternal tie between us.

“I can’t do this without you,” I whispered.

I kissed him, smoothing away the sweat-slicked dark hair on his forehead. Despite his suffering, against what must have been strict orders to rest, he’d still come.

Somehow, he’d known this was his final dawn. And still he’d come for me.

The mountainside echoed with my pain and heartache. I held Nyte as I stared over the city of Vesitire, then beyond to Althenia. My tears fell but each forged my anguish, my determination, and my will.

The daylight might not rise again, but the brightest star thrives in the darkest night.

I was no longer the Daughter of Dusk and Dawn.

I was the Daughter of Death.

And this world would either bow, or watch the stars rain down upon it.

“I’ll meet you in the darkness,” I whispered, holding his head to my chest and keeping his body warm from the snow with the glow of my magick. “Now, then, and always.”