Nyx Shadowthorn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

For three nights Nyx Shadowthorn hunted a beast she had never seen. She wanted it for her familiar, the way other dark fairies kept toads or ravens. But this one left no tracks. It stalked the bogs of Sphagnum, and every hunter who chased it came back empty or never came back at all. She crouched at the edge of a black pool, her cloak of layered shadows pulled tight. The cloak drank the moonlight. In it she became another patch of dark bog, invisible even to the thing she sought. That was the problem. She could hide from the beast, but she could not find it. Mud sucked at her boots. Reeds hissed in the wind. Nyx listened for breath, for a splash, for anything. Nothing. The bog shifted under her, swallowing footprints as fast as they formed. No trail could survive here. She had wasted three nights on empty water. Her bat cat pressed against her leg. He was a cat with leathery wings, sleek and gray, and he hunted by night when she could not. His ears swiveled. He stared at a stretch of reeds she could not read. "You hear it," she whispered. "I don't." The cat's eyes glowed, but he gave her nothing she could follow. Hearing was not seeing. She needed to look where no eye reached. Then she remembered the orb. Nyx drew it from her pack, a polished crystal ball on a gold stand. She had taken it from a drowned seer's hut weeks ago and never dared use it. Now she set it in the mud and pressed both palms to the cold glass. "Show me the beast," she said. The crystal clouded. Light stirred deep inside it. Slowly an image formed: tall reeds, a sunken log, and a shape coiled in the shadow beneath. Huge. Patient. Eyes like two cold coins. The orb could not track a trail, but it could show her the creature where it lay, right now, hidden in plain water. Nyx turned her head. The sunken log was real. It sat forty paces off, past the black pool, exactly where the cat had been staring. The beast had been beside her the whole time. Her heart slammed. She had her answer. She knew where it slept. But knowing was not the same as safety. The orb showed the thing was far larger than any familiar she had imagined. It filled the whole glass. Nyx lifted the orb and crept toward the log. The bat cat followed close, wings tight to his back. The water went still. Something beneath the surface shifted to face her. For the first time, Nyx had seen the shadow-beast. Now it had seen her too.