Page 14 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

Being this obnoxious is a talent, actually

Fi jerked awake in a cold sweat, heart hammering. The world was all dark outlines, groggy thoughts as sleep kept its claws in her.

Void alive, she’d had an awful nightmare.

Her head flickered with memories of falling buildings. Paralyzed limbs. Forest shrines and shadows shifting in the trees, the kind of bone-deep dread that kept a hold long after waking. Fi squinted her eyes shut and burrowed into the furs of her bed, eager to escape into more sleep.

But this bed… felt strange.

It smelled strange, sharp like ozone.

Still groggy, Fi poked at the pelt draped over her.

At home, she’d assembled a blanket of snowshoe hare from her traps, plus a skin of aurorabeast fur she’d bartered off Boden for a cask of Autumn Plane hard cider.

The blanket wrapping her now consisted of silver fox.

Beneath her, soft mink lined the mattress. Not her bed. Then where…

Adrenaline dragged her fully awake, pieces clicking together, breath shallowing in slow-dawning horror. Fi’s flight through the forest was no nightmare.

And she was in a daeyari’s bed.

An angry daeyari, last she recalled.

She clamped her mouth shut on a curse, not wanting to reveal she’d woken. No sign of the beast—for now. Just an empty room where she lay swaddled in blankets. Void save her from whatever twisted power play this was.

After checking to make sure all her limbs were intact, Fi scanned for escape routes. The bed sat upon a rock slab. The entire room appeared chiseled out of stone. Stone floor. Stone walls with recessed shelves, stuffed with books and odd pieces of scrap metal.

Dim light drifted through a doorway.

Fi lowered a foot to the floor. Warmth bloomed beneath her, a spark of red around her boot that made her recoil.

When no calamity followed, she tried again.

Crimson energy glowed around her foot, emitting heat.

She kept a furnace at home, powered by an energy capsule that required daily charging.

She’d never seen such thread-thin conduits glinting against stone, heat diffusing through the ground.

Wasteful. Of course, an immortal could afford as much.

Fi’s head throbbed when she stood, still sore where she’d struck the wall, less foggy after some rest. She crept toward the door, red splaying beneath each footfall.

This place, wherever it was, must have an exit.

A front door, a window to dive out of. She’d run home and hide in her cottage for a month.

Move to a new territory, if she had to. Anything to get away from scheming attendants and vengeful immortals.

Speaking of which… Fi paused, listening. A rumble sounded down the hall.

Wind. She could hear the wind. That meant an exit.

The next room was larger, brighter, also cut out of stone. No exit doors. Or windows— technically . Fi’s heart sank at the sight of the far wall, completely open to the wind. No rail guarded the edge. Cautious, she stepped closer.

Under better circumstances, the view would have been magnificent.

Beyond the ledge, the world fell away, this chamber carved into the highest cliff overlooking Thomaskweld.

The valley lay beneath a lavender sky—dusk, not morning, to her horror.

The river snaked silver through dark conifers and the lights of the city, energy conduits like golden fractures from the factories.

But the cold . Upon the ledge, the floor heating faded, and cold bit into Fi like teeth, wind lashing her Void-and-rainbow hair. She still wore a borrowed tunic of thin gray cotton. No coat.

This wasn’t a window she could leap out of. One glance at the dizzying fall sent her empty stomach flipping.

Ok, different plan. Fi spotted no Curtains on the cliffside, but a full night’s sleep had replenished some magic. She unfocused her gaze and Shaped energy out of a tired bicep, into her fingertips, intent on cutting her escape—

“Don’t try it,” warned a voice behind her.

Fi spun, arms raised like a shield.

What good would that do against claws?

The daeyari loomed at the back of the room like a shadow slipped off the wall.

She hadn’t spotted him a moment ago, hadn’t heard him enter.

Even now, he could have been a figment of the dark, betrayed only by the crimson glow of his eyes and the swaying tail.

The old stories couldn’t capture that deathly stillness.

That twist in Fi’s stomach like the instincts of a prey animal, urging her to run .

Maybe that was what he waited for. Fleeing quarry must make for better entertainment.

“Wherever you can step on Plane or Shard, so can I.” He glanced to the open wall, the slice of wind and purple dusk. “Don’t linger in the wind. Your people don’t do well in cold.”

The beast spoke low and measured, his seasonspeak heavy with a Winter accent, though too sharp on several syllables. When he touched the wall, two metal lanterns embedded in stone lit the room in soft twilight blue.

The daeyari approached Fi with prowling strides.

Closer.

Too close.

She flinched as he passed, his long tail brushing her calf. A crass intimidation tactic. Fi scowled fierce enough to curdle icicles, baffled as to why he hadn’t butchered her yet.

The wind was cold. Giving her host a wide berth, Fi retreated across a rug depicting a moonlit forest in black and silver, into a sheltered sitting area.

Blue floor cushions circled a low table.

A cabinet sat against the wall, topped by the shine of a…

gramophone? Far be it from Fi to wonder what a monster did in his free time.

The daeyari stepped to the “window,” perched light upon the lip of rock, like a hawk in his eyrie.

He was dressed simpler than before: no silver tips to his antlers, no embroidered jacket, just trousers and a dark shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow despite the cold.

Wind tousled the longer hair between his antlers into shards of blue-black.

“What’s your name?” he asked without looking at her.

Oh no. Fi didn’t like this one bit. She searched the room for any exits she’d missed. As far as she could see, she was blocked by rock on three sides and a daeyari on the fourth.

When she didn’t answer, he turned on her with a skin-peeling glare.

“Is this what you want to fight me on, human?”

Fi didn’t want to fight. She wanted to be a hundred miles away, never having to think of daeyari again. As that option didn’t currently sit on the table…

“Fionamara.”

His mouth quirked, as if tasting the name. “Do you know what they did, Fionamara ?”

Another pressuring tactic. She’d already told him what she knew. “They blew up the capitol building.” She considered. “ Your capitol building.”

“Not just in Thomaskweld.” He lowered to a growl. “Runeyska. Calvariz. Sunip. Every major city in my territory. Offices destroyed, administrators killed, energy conduits severed.”

No. Fi hadn’t known any of that.

When she was young, her father put her and Boden to sleep with old folktales.

In the stories, daeyari were phantom beasts waiting to snatch mortals from the shadows, deviously difficult to fight.

Skin like steel. Fast as a blink. Impossible to kill by mortal means, and any human foolish enough to try typically ended up skinned alive.

As Fi grew, school taught more practical lessons: the boons of energy conduits and cross-Plane trade, facilitated by working with the predators, rather than against them. Centuries without warfare, their immortal overseers settling disputes amongst themselves before tensions escalated.

And quieter: histories of once-a-century rebellions by restless territories, crushed swiftly by their ruling Lord Daeyari, a feast for the creature they sought to unseat.

But aside from those rare, heavy-handed reminders of authority, most daeyari kept distant from their subjects.

So long as they were fed, so long as their edicts were followed, they left their human governments to run the territories.

If this creature spoke the truth, he’d just lost most of the people loyal to him.

Not many ways to misinterpret that.

“Who would try to overthrow a daeyari?” Fi asked.

“That,” he said, “is what you’re going to help me determine.”

“You want me to help you?”

Fi’s retort came too fast—too sharp , speaking to a carnivorous beast. But brazen was the only shield she knew when her heart beat this fast, her cloak of bristles keeping her upright whenever her gut screamed to run and hide like a useless rabbit.

The carnivorous beast in question narrowed his eyes, two smoldering motes of red framed in Void black. His rolled sleeves displayed the lean lines of his forearms, the black claws at his fingertips.

“Are you arguing with me, Fionamara?”

“I…” Fi swallowed, a lump like stone in her throat. What use was she to him? That felt like a question guaranteed to get her neck ripped open.

“You owe me a debt,” the daeyari said, low as the wind rumbling the cliffs. “And I have need of mortal help.”

“Get your Arbiter, then.” Anyone but Fi.

“I have none.”

“Surely, you have someone better than—”

“There is no one else,” he snarled, baring a glint of fang. “Everyone I had has either betrayed me, or is dead beneath the rubble of the building you blew up. So you’ll have to do.”

Fi’s scowl deepened. No, she didn’t want any part of this, but no need to be rude—

“Void and Veshri know, I could hope for better than… this .” He swept a clawed hand over her haggard hunch in the corner of his living room— more rude.

“But you know what happened in the capitol. You say you weren’t part of my attendants’ scheme.

Help me determine who was , if you’re so adamant to prove your innocence. ”

The bite in his words gave Fi pause. For years, she’d assumed this daeyari’s leniency came from apathy. Incompetence, even.