52Nyte
“Nyte…”I heard a beautiful angel call my name, but it was a pained distant echo in my mind.“Did we win?”
I gasped, or coughed—both.I spluttered with blood choking my throat, but I forced myself to find consciousness and search for my Starlight.
She wasn’t far. A few steps away, but I could hardly bring myself to stand.
The world around us was furious. The ground was splitting and the stars were plummeting. Without Dusk and Dawn, the imbalance was catastrophic.
We didn’t have much time before it would all be destroyed.
I crawled to her. Through blood and sweat and agony, I crawled to her.
Both of us were drawing numbered breaths, having each other’s blood struck as a weapon through us. It was so fucking tragic and deplorable.
“Astraea,” I croaked. As I scanned her chest, the shallow rise and fall was a small dose of relief. “Hang on for me.”
Eltanin’s cry of distress rattled through the chaos as he landed on the courtyard.
Cradling Astraea to my body, I pulled us through the void, and the moment we were upon Eltanin’s saddle, the dragon knew where I needed him to go.
It took everything I had to hold her tight and keep a conscious purchase on the saddle when Eltanin’s flight was more unstable than usual, with the meteors he had to dive and swerve around to avoid. The sky was burning.
He landed in North Star in Althenia, and it took the last dreg of magick I had left in me to use the void to reach outside the temple.
Though I had no arrows left in me, every moment was like ten molten-hot rods were being twisted into my body. Sweat slicked my skin, but one glance at Astraea’s too-pale face had me barking in agony to lift her more securely in my weakening hold. Clenching my teeth, I carried her through the doors.
The giant shard of mirror still stood against the quaking lands. I got soclose before my knees buckled right before it from the shooting pain in my chest. Breathing felt like the air was clogged with ash and fire. If these were to be our last moments as mortals…
I brushed the tangled silver hair from her slick forehead and cheeks. Astraea’s eyes fluttered open, so tired. Still the most beautiful set of eyes in all of existence.
Her fingertips barely brushed my jaw, and her sight flicked sideward to the dire reflection of us.
“Where are we?” she whispered.
“Do you remember what I said? As the night and the stars, as the dark and the light, as the dusk and the dawn,” I said, running out of breaths, but they were all hers anyway.
“Yes.”
“We are inevitable, Astraea. Will you be infinite with me?”
Her glistening eyes filled with puzzlement; then she understood.
“As the dusk and the dawn…” she recited.
“After your battle with Auster, when he condemned you with that blade of my blood before you killed him, I was beside myself. I couldn’t sleep or eat; I had to know there was a way to save you, but Drystan had nothing. I visited every mage or seer I knew of in a single night and only one gave me a riddle I think I figured out. They mentioned the dusk and the dawn. I think we can take their place, and though it takes us from this realm and our friends, we’ll be together, and their land will be restored to its balance.”
“Our friends,” she repeated, cupping her hand more firmly onto my face. It was a touch of bliss against the misery.
Her tears spilled as she came to terms with everything. It wasn’t a favored fate—to become gods that would watch over this realm and others as every dawn and every dusk in existence—but it was still an end, or in some ways a beginning, that kept our promise to stay together.
“But how will we…?” Astraea was split between heartbreak and hope.
“When I figured it out, I only needed one thing. The blood of Dusk and Dawn. It wasn’t easy to get, but tracking them down was. They didn’t even know I was there as I influenced two others to draw their blood for me.” I dipped into my pocket and produced the two vials of blood, pressing Dawn’s into her palm for after we stepped through the mirror.
She was stunned speechless, staring down at the sample in her hand. When she looked back at me, she was about to speak before her back arched and her breath caught in her throat.
“Nyte,” she said through labored breaths.
