Novel Full Chapter 1078: Seen Seraphiel: All-Seeing Nyxire!
Chapter 1078: Seen Seraphiel: All-Seeing Nyxire!
Slipping through the veil after the abomination was nothing like Seraphiel had feared.
All it had taken was a thought. A choice really... decision to commit to her mission and stop second-guessing whether commitment was the correct posture.
Doubt had been her only obstacle, and the moment she'd set the doubt aside the gate had become a suggestion she could politely ignore. Good that she'd asked her foolish questions in the Hall and returned to this sphere and seen, with her own misread eyes, the reason her orders were correct.
Her hesitation had cost her nothing and given her the most useful resolve of her long existence.
There were other forces in this game, though. Old ones whose Essence she'd brushed against on the island earlier and the taste was still on the back of her tongue.
She couldn't rush or afford to be—what was the mortal saying?—a chicken without feet?
No. Headless, which made even less sense, because the body was the part that did the moving, and a chicken with its body intact would run for quite a distance after losing its head, which technically meant the phrase flattered the chicken and insulted the person being compared to it, and mortal idioms truly were—
'Fools rush in.'
Yes, that was the one. She approved of that one.
She would not be a fool.
She became invisible again and wet after ARIA who descended toward Earth and rode it the rest of the way down.
ARIA arrived at the empty lot under the oak tree like certain storms arrived.
The goddess hung ten feet above the grass with her white hair down around her shoulders, one bare foot, one foot somehow still sandal'd, smile already in place. The moonlight, which had been doing a perfectly adequate job of lighting the lot a moment before, suddenly had competition it hadn't asked for.
Ashley made a small helpless sound against Eros's coat.
ARIA lowered the rest of the way without ceremony—toes pointed, weightless until she decided not to be—and stepped onto the grass.
There was no point hiding that she was the same girl Ashley had just met a few breathes ago in the restaurant.
"Hi, we meet again..." ARIA said warmly.
"Hi," Ashley managed, her words were against her.
"You must be surprised, Ashley."
"…Yes."
"He has spoken of you," ARIA said, taking Ashley's hand. "Constantly. It's a problem. We've had to institute a conversational tariff.... that is why I came to meet you firsthand."
Ashley tipped her face up at Eros, eyes wide. "You talk about me?"
"Sparingly."
"He does not," ARIA said cheerfully.
"Sparingly."
"He does not."
"ARIA, you are making a bad first impression."
"I am making an excellent second impression," ARIA said, "which you will come to appreciate."
Ashley laughed despite herself—bright, disoriented-happy, her hand still in ARIA's and her other still curled into the front of Eros's coat.
The three of them made a small bright knot of warmth on the grass in the shadow of the oak, and Ashley did her best to hold her whole heart in her chest without letting it visibly rearrange itself from the shock of the Aria who she'd met and the real ARIA she actually was.
Nobody noticed the small cold weight that slipped into the grass behind Ashley's heels.
Well.
Almost nobody.
Nyxire had been standing patient at the edge of the clearing—reins loose, head lowered, giving the human girl, her Master and the goddess the professional space a mare of her lineage gave any interaction clearly above her pay grade.
The moment ARIA had appeared, Nyxire had lifted her great white head by an inch and lowered it again.
Horse for oh, you. ARIA didn't interest Nyxire particularly. ARIA had never once produced an apple in Nyxire's presence, which was, by Nyxire's metric, the only meaningful category of divinity.
What interested her tonight was the other thing.
She saw it move.
A shiver of something in the air behind Ashley—thin, compressed tight as a closed fist. It had come riding inside ARIA's wake, tucked flush against the goddess's trailing heat so cleanly that a less perceptive creature would have read the two of them as a single arrival.
Nyxire wasn't a less perceptive creature.
Nyxire was born of a line older than anyone in this clearing tonight suspected, raised on a realm where things hidden inside other things was a game the children of her bloodline were taught to see before they were weaned.
The cold thing peeled itself out of ARIA's wake the instant the goddess's bare feet touched grass.
It hesitated for one heartbeat.
Then darted—fast, careful, humiliated at its own caution—into the nearest shadow it could find.
Which was Ashley's.
Nyxire watched it settle. Watched. Waited.
It didn't stay.
Ashley, little mortal human was too small and too soft and too new to hold the weight of a seraph in her shadow—felt something wrong somewhere in her body without knowing what, and shivered involuntarily in Eros's arm.
The presence in her shadow registered the wrongness of its own fit, recoiled, slipped sideways with a speed only Nyxire caught—
—and slid into Eros's shadow instead.
Where it settled.
Not because Eros had invited it. Because a body of the young demigod could hold the weight of a Warden of Purity a good deal better than a body of an ordinary nineteen-year-old girl who was, at this exact moment, dizzy from a horse ride and a first kiss and a literal goddess landing in her empty suburban lot.
Nyxire snorted.
She turned her great white head fully toward Eros's new shadow and looked at the thing inside it.
The thing, being a thing of ancient celestial dignity, did not return the look—a cloaked seraph did not acknowledge the attention of a horse—but Nyxire wasn't asking it to.
She was informing it that it had been seen.
She flicked one ear. Scoffed once through her nose. And with the serene unhurried contempt of a creature who'd seen many interlopers come into her master's orbit over many lifetimes and buried all of them, she looked away.
'Go on, then,' her look said, in the language a horse's look could speak if you knew how to listen. 'Go on. Try. See how far you get. See how long you'd last in my realm.'
She glanced sideways at ARIA. At Eros. At the little human girl they were both fussing over in the centre of the clearing.
Then she looked back at the thing in her master's shadow.
'You thought entry was the hard part?'
She scoffed again. Softer this time. Almost amused.
'Oh, little flame.'
The thing had pressed too long on her attention. Nyxire didn't, as a general rule, waste her attention on interlopers once she'd categorised them, so she turned away from the shadow and pressed her great white head against Eros's shoulder instead, inviting.
He obliged at once. Both his hands went to her face—one cupping along the broad plane of her cheek, the other scratching behind her ear where the mane thinned—and he murmured something low and warm that was meant only for her.
Nyxire closed her eyes and leaned her whole considerable weight into him.
She made a soft purring throaty sound deep in her chest at being told, in private, that she was the most intelligent and most beautiful creature in the universe.
Ashley laughed at them. ARIA laughed at them too.
The thing in the shadow didn't move.
And inside Eros's shadow, curled tight against a geometry that wasn't her natural fit, cloaked to the edge of her ability and then past it, Seraphiel—who'd reminded herself only minutes ago that she would not be the fool rushing in—felt something she hadn't felt since her making.
A shiver.
Down the long golden line of a spine she didn't, in her present compressed form, technically possess.
Cold.
Fear.
She didn't know why.
She couldn't see Nyxire's eyes on her. Couldn't feel them on her. Nothing in her cosmology had ever told her that a mount, a beast of the mortal sphere, could register the presence of a cloaked seraph of the First Morning.
She hadn't even considered the horse. The horse hadn't been in any threat matrix she'd built coming into this engagement.
The horse was decoration.
And yet.
Somewhere in the oldest part of her awareness—the part that had been burning long before the oldest prophet wrote the oldest prayer and had outlasted the falling of the first stars she'd ever watched fall—a small still voice spoke the thing she didn't have a name for, in a register she could not argue with.
Something in this clearing has seen you.
Something in this clearing is not afraid of you.
Run.
She didn't run.
But she pressed herself further into the shadow she'd chosen, and she went silent in a way she'd never had reason to go silent before, and she allowed herself the single private admission—unspoken, unheard, folded so deep inside herself that even the Source could not have pulled it out of her—that she had, perhaps, underestimated something about the house she'd just entered.
Above her, her target tilted his head at his horse and laughed quietly and said, in a voice only his mare was meant to hear: "Good girl."
Nyxire flicked her tail once.
The shadow at Eros's feet lay very, very still.