Page 84 of Storm Front
He doubted he would. Ranger wasn’t the sort of man who needed a person like Glaive. He was more suited for… for Azaiah, perhaps. For someone who was gentle, who buried thieves and murderers and wept when they thought no one was looking. He needed someone to keep him kind.
Some flames were too bright to be put out. Maybe it was too late for Glaive, but he hoped that Ranger’s light would prove stronger than his own.
ChapterSeventeen
The island of Lukos was inhospitable, dangerous, and covered months out of the year in snow. Azaiah had no reason to go there in the early days, because there were no humans, only animals. But, over the years, two thriving communities grew there, though only one was aware of the other, and it was on this small island in the winter sea that Azaiah’s chosen successor lived.
His name was Aleks, and he was a typical Lukoi boy of fourteen, drowsing in a tree house while the deer he should be hunting grazed harmlessly below. He was a good-tempered young man, and Azaiah’s interest had been piqued when he’d cried after killing a deer. That wasn’t unheard of for young people when they first learned to hunt, but Aleks had both compassion and brightness of soul, along with the stubbornness that would suit him well when he wore the cowl.
And he loved already, a girl with a fire of her own—and one who Azaiah recognized immediately when he beheld her. She had familiar light-blue eyes and dark hair, and he’d last seen a face like hers smiling at Nyx and calling him “Uncle.” How he wished he could tell him! But it had been years since he’d last seen Glaive, as the man named Taliesin had long since gone his own way and Glaive was once again solitary, a quiet hunter in the dark. There was very little left of the Nyx Azaiah had known, and it was time to make his peace with it. He was not quite ready to give up, but the threat of his darkotherwas too much to ignore. The pieces must be put in place, as Azaiah would go across the river alone before he let his dark mirror drown the world. He was, likely, putting off the inevitable… but he couldn’t stop the flashes of hope that maybe he would find some remnant of the man he’d loved.
It had been Arwyn who told him, bluntly, to find another lover or a successor orsomething,and Azaiah knew he was right. So he waited for the moment when he could at least draft Aleks into his service as a ferryman. It came when Aleks watched in horror as his best friend tumbled from a tree branch and broke her spine in a fall that should have killed her.
Azaiah appeared to the distraught Aleks as a hare, and Aleks—compassionate, kind Aleks—grabbed the knife he used to slice fruit and whittle sticks into fantastical creatures and plunged it into the creature’s neck, over and over.
It was exquisite. When Aleks stared down in horror at a man instead of the bloody carcass of a black hare, Azaiah smiled at him and reached up to take his chin in his hand. “Oh, look at you. Only one other has succeeded as you have. What would you ask of me?”
Trembling with anger and fear, Aleks asked not for power or riches, immortality or vengeance, but simply for the spirit of the girl standing near Azaiah’s river to be returned to her body. He loved her enough to ask for nothing but her safe return.
Azaiah took a moment to study him and then nodded. He would be an excellent ferryman, this bighearted boy, and his soul was bright enough that Azaiah did not see it dimming anytime soon. But he would not ask for Aleks’s vow to take up the scythe and cowl, not yet. First, he should live a bit. Fall in love. Not go to the sacrificial altar—proverbial though it might be—without knowing life.
Perhaps there was a reason Azaiah’s predecessor had chosen him, and innocence was, in her experience, better than worldly understanding. Maybe when it came time for Aleks to choose a successor, he would do the same as she had. Maybe Mora herself had been chosen by one who was as innocent as Azaiah was, centuries ago, when he’d bared his throat for the knife. Maybe that was some sort of balance to keep theotherat bay. The corruption Azaiah felt like a rot in his veins.
There was none of that in this young man. He was distraught and worried, agreeing to be Azaiah’s to save the soul of the girl he—ah, yes—loved, but the strength in him was evident, the core that Azaiah knew was steadfast.
Azaiah told his ferryman to help those who needed him, that he must not turn them aside. “This one,” he said, gesturing to the girl on the ground, “is the only one you can withhold from me. But not for long. Not forever.”
The boy looked up at him, eyes blazing, his soul a bright, warm beacon that eased the perpetual chill of Azaiah’s flesh. “You won’t get her.”
Ah, but he was lovely, wasn’t he? As fierce as Nyx had been on the field of battle, fighting under a banner no one now remembered. “Kind soul,” Azaiah murmured. He pulled Aleks down and pressed a kiss to his forehead, his blessing as the Gentle Boatman, the Death who smiled and reached out a caring hand to the souls who needed him. Perhaps Aleks would not fall victim to the bitterness that had taken Nyx from Azaiah, leaving in his place a dead-eyed mercenary who couldn’t remember the creatures that once ran wild in his homeland. “You will need it, now that you are mine.”
He left Aleks there, cradling his best friend in his arms, and wondered how the rest of them were doing, the exiles who’d been meant to die. They had a story about how they’d come here, etched onto the walls of a cave, and Azaiah took a moment to go and see it. He looked at the crude figures of all those who had fallen to Emperor Lamont’s purge: The witches whose magic did not give Lamont the son he wanted. The political prisoners, former soldiers who grumbled about revolutions and coups, how the general should be the emperor and how they’d gladly fight beside him if he tried to take the throne. The imperial guards, who did not understand they were being sent to die as well.
The Lukoi thought the emperor had sent everyone away because he grieved the death of his son, but Azaiah knew that didn’t mean Andor, who had smiled at him and looked so fondly on his weeping mother when Azaiah took him to the river. It was the one Lamont had wanted to groom in his own image, the son of his mistress… but even then, Azaiah knew it was Nyx that Lamont wanted, and always had.
Of Nadia and the girl Kelta, there was no trace. Perhaps they did not want to etch their truths into the cave walls, afraid that someone would carry the knowledge back to the emperor and report them alive when they were supposed to be drowned in the cold winter sea. But their line lived on, here in the little village, together with their legacy: mates were sacred, children were cherished, and no one ruled unless they were strong enough to prove they deserved it.
Azaiah left Lukos and found himself in the far north of Staria, where you could see ice floating in the sea if you stood on the highest hill on a clear day. At night, the ribbon lights wound themselves around the stars like the dragons in Arktos that ate fire, those little creatures a witch once called into being. The world was trembling on the precipice of some great change, though Azaiah could not tell what it was. He thought of the boy Aleks and the girl he’d so easily given his vow to protect. And the boy on the river, who came from the same place where Elena’s ancestors once ruled in a kingdom long forgotten.
That one, Evander Akti, was alsotied to the ruined kingdom. His ancestor, Atreus, the beloved of Azaiah’s sibling War, had once been a small boy who couldn’t breathe without pain, who had loved his sister and his uncle and his mother, who had given War a stone from a river and smiled at them as if they were kind. Atreus Akti did not know of the empire buried beneath the sands of his home. Ares did not care about the past, only the present, the future, and the distant drums of war.
Azaiah walked through the forests of northern Staria, and there he found the tree.
The altar on which he’d been sacrificed was gone, only a few moss-covered stones from the base remaining… and even those were perhaps not as old as the altar; it was impossible to tell. But the tree had endured.
A single red blossom remained on the highest branch, the only one bearing a few green leaves. Azaiah understood the tree was him, and the corruption in his soul was spreading. His death as a mortal had caused the tree to flower, but as Death took over more of the man he’d once been, the tree was dying once again.
“I will pass along my scythe to Aleks of the Lukoi when the last leaf falls,” Azaiah said to the tree. He felt the wind stir his hair, felt the restlessotherinside him, ever churning, a perpetual storm. After that, this tree would be nothing but dead wood, fit for the axe, perhaps, to be burned to ash. His heart ached at the thought, because he knew it would mean that Nyx was lost to him, his own fire finally snuffed out. “I swear that I will not let Death drown the world. I will cross the river when the time comes.”
He was not sure to whom he was speaking. Only that it seemed fitting to make a vow to end his service here, where it had begun so long ago. He placed his hand on the tree and felt the life force beneath the bark, faint and growing fainter as he stood there. The sun began to fade, drowned by the clouds that followed Azaiah always, now, when he walked in the realm of mortals. Even if he didn’t mean to take any to the river, the storm came with him. The storm wanted him, and he supposed that was all right. Whatever waited beyond the river, he only hoped that he might one day see him again. Nyx.
Glaive only knew Death, now, and Death only knew Glaive. But they were so much more than the dark mirrors of themselves. Azaiah wondered whether, when Glaive’s end came, he would already be gone into whatever waited for gods who surrendered their divinity. Whether he would even know. Whether they would end up in the same place. He did not think Glaive’s soul would do much but drift into pieces, but perhaps Glaive would welcome that. Maybe it was the only relief left for a man who used to care so much about everyone else.
Azaiah reached up and touched his face, which was wet, though the storm was only a rumble of distant thunder. He was crying. For Nyx, his beautiful, bright soul dimmed by betrayal and an impulsive human desire for vengeance. For Glaive, a man who could strip a person to bone and gristle without such much as a flicker of feeling. For himself, a smiling young man who went eagerly into death without knowing what it meant to live. For the future they might have had, him and Nyx, if things had been different.
You still have me,Death whispered.Come to me. Forget this pain, let me take it from you. My rain washes it all clean, Azaiah. Your grief, the disappointment. Why should you suffer, my avatar, when all you have ever done is try to ease the suffering of others?
“Because I must,” Azaiah whispered, pressing his forehead to the tree as if his tears could water it, bring the leaves back to the branches. “Your rain would take not only my suffering, but everyone. Everything. I cannot let it happen.”
