Nyx turned to look at the house where Kataida was still sitting with her family. She was a strange girl, quiet and intense, and it struck him that her intensity was familiar. Andor had been much the same. Thoughtful. Clever.
“But she isn’t Andor,” Nyx said. “Just as Elena isn’t Kelta, for all that she has her eyes. I prefer it that way, I think. They aren’t held down by the past.” He looked at the beads wrapped around his wrist, the mark of a Misthotos, and sighed. “Thank you for this. But there’s one last piece of the past I have to lay to rest, Azaiah. If you don’t mind a long walk, of course.”
Azaiah kissed Nyx under the familiar stars of Arktos, his cloak stirring the dust. “I never mind, beloved. Let us walk together, and you can show me.”
* * *
Azaiah didn’t remember ever being so happy.
It was a strange feeling, walking with Nyx as he’d dreamt of for so long, and as they took a long, leisurely journey from Aleks’s home in Arktos to Nyx’s mysterious errand in Thalassa, it occurred to him that they had quite a lot to catch up on. While he ached at the pain in Nyx’s voice when he spoke of those early years after the fall of the empire, he wanted to know everything. All that Nyx had done, had seen, in the time when they could not be together.
He told Nyx about his siblings, too, and promised to introduce him to those whom he hadn’t met—which was everyone, of course, except for Ares. Before they left Arktos, Nyx asked if he wanted to go and speak to his sibling, since Azaiah knew where Ares slept.
He’d been tempted, as he missed Ares, but he shook his head after a moment. “It is not, I think, time for them to be up and about in the world. They were devastated when Atreus Akti died without making the companion bond, but that wasn’t why they wanted to sleep, I don’t think. I think perhaps they knew their time would come again and are content to rest until then.”
“Do they know,” Nyx asked, “that Kataida is Atreus reborn?” He made a face. “Or… that’s not right, is it? She’s no more Atreus than she is Andor. How does that… work, exactly?”
“I’m not sure. We aren’t given that knowledge. But a soul is like, hmm.” Azaiah thought about how to best describe it. “It is like how a seed becomes cotton, cotton becomes fiber, and fiber becomes a tunic. Andor was the seed. Kataida may be the tunic.”
“What about me?” Nyx asked. “Who was I, do you know?”
“I think, like me, you were a new soul,” Azaiah said, smiling, taking Nyx’s hand just because he could. “The man who was your apprentice, he was the same.”
Nyx startled. “Ranger?”
“Yes. I could sense his family line—I shall tell you sometime about how I met his ancestor, once, on a beach—but his soul was new.”
“I thought, maybe,” Nyx said slowly, “Tyr…”
Ah. Azaiah brought his hand up and kissed the knuckles gently. “I haven’t seen him, your Tyr, but I am sure he came back. Most do.”
“Will you? Will I?”
“I don’t know,” Azaiah admitted. “But there is something to be said for that, isn’t there? A mystery.”
“I thought you were the final mystery,” Nyx murmured, but he smiled.
Azaiah laughed. “If I am, it’s safe to say that you solved me, my companion.” He stopped, catching sight of something in the distance. “Look, there, do you see that field shimmering like glass in the sun?”
Nyx squinted, then nodded. “Yes. They call it the Heart of Arktos. It looks like glass because that’s what it is, although no one knows why it’s red. They say Atreus Akti died there.”
“He did,” Azaiah said. “I came for him, and Ares wept tears of bloody flame as their love died in their arms. Those tears turned the sand to glass, and that’s why it’s red.”
“He was a good man,” Nyx said. “Atreus. I marched with his Arkoudai for a time. He didn’t mind mercenaries, despite what you hear about how insular the Arkoudai were, and he treated his soldiers fairly.” For a man like Nyx, that would of course make him a general worthy of respect. “Did he not love Ares, then? I would think a man bound to war might, but then again… I was, and maybe I’d fallen for Death, but your sibling is another thing altogether.”
“It takes a rare soul to love one such as Ares,” Azaiah agreed. “For if someone loves conflict and battletoomuch, it turns the heart dark. Ares is war personified, but they are not evil, any more than the storms that sink ships are evil, or the windstorms in the Starian plains that turn into great funnels and tear apart whole villages in seconds. To love my sibling would require temperanceanda love of battle, and that combination is hard to find. Atreus was one such person, but his heart was given to another long before he met Ares.”
“Is Kataida such a person?” Nyx asked.
“I don’t know,” Azaiah said. “I can’t see bonds, since the potential doesn’t only exist with one person, but it would seem as if that may be the case. I suppose we shall have to wait and see if Ares wakes and she goes to them.”
“She had the look of a soldier,” Nyx said. “But all of them do, don’t they? The Arkoudai. You’d think Ares would want to be up and about, walking among them.”
“I think they are content to let their love come to them, when it is time. Kataida is not only Atreus Akti reborn, she is also of his line. Maybe that is what Ares waited for. I do not know.”
“And here we think gods know everything,” Nyx murmured.
“We know what we know, Nyx. Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
