Nyxi's Arc

Chapter 3 of 8

Nyxi stepped through the tear and the stone behind her sealed shut. The new realm was white and wrong. Ice ridges rose where a sky should be. Frozen blood ran in long red veins through the ground. The priestess's body shivered in the borrowed skin. The mortal had come this way. She felt the faint warm thread of her mark still pulling, thin as a hair, vanishing fast. Umi slipped through the tear behind her, barefoot on the ice, untroubled. "He has a head start," Umi said. "Guilt is very bad for the complexion. So is hesitation." Lyr stepped through next, the sky above her shoulders crackling pale and cold. "This realm answers to no one I know," Lyr said. "That will change." Then the ice moved. A tall shape unfolded from a ridge, made of frost and rotted meat, jaws hung open and dripping red. It turned its black eye on the priestess's body and came. Its long arm swept down. Nyxi did not lift a hand. The creature's claws raked the borrowed skin and tore a strip from her shoulder. The thread to the mortal snapped under the blow. She felt it go. Lyr moved once. A single white bolt cracked from her palm and split the creature down its chest. It folded in halves on the red ice and steamed. Lyr lowered her hand. "It will not be the last," she said. Umi looked at the dead thing with mild interest, then at Nyxi. "You let it hit you." "I lost him," Nyxi said. The priestess's blood ran warm down the cold arm. She turned slowly in the white waste. No thread. No pull. Only ice and the long red veins going on forever. Olryme would find the mortal first now. Olryme always did. The hunger in her chest went very quiet, which was worse than loud. "Then we hunt the realm itself," Nyxi said. She pressed a hand to the torn shoulder and started walking into the cold. The tear behind her was already gone. There was no way back, and no clear way forward — only the slow certainty that whatever lived here would come for her again, and again, until something here learned her name.