Chapter 325

Zweryn was perfectly well, which was weird because he wasn’t just a minute ago and it felt like something was seriously wrong with him.

He took a look at himself in the mirror. He still looked okay. His eyes were the same color they had always been.

The idea of the fade illness catching up to him after so long was not something he believed in, but right now he was thinking of it being a possibility.

He opened his mouth and checked his tongue, feeling ridiculous the entire time, since it was the same checklist that everyone in the Queendom knew by heart, and that was normal too.

His hands had stopped trembling. He held them out in front of him anyway and watched them for a full minute, as though they might change their minds.

Nothing about him had changed, and that was what made it so hard to settle.

A person who had been struck by something could at least point to the place where it had hit, and all he had to point to was a hallway, a sound, and a stretch of time in which his own body had stopped listening to him.

Finally leaving the bathroom, he did not go back to bed.

That was partly caution and partly fear. Caution said that if the tone came again while he was asleep, he would rather be awake for it.

The system had nothing more to say when he asked, so after a while he stopped asking.

Warmth against his face drew Zaeryn out of sleep, and he reached for the slate he remembered leaving on his stomach.

His hand met a folded blanket instead.

For a few seconds, he remained where he was, trying to reconcile the sunlight behind his eyelids with the position of the windows in his suite. Then he heard water flowing nearby and opened his eyes.

He was lying on a cushioned bench beneath a flowering tree.

Branches extended above him, their white blossoms moving in a breeze that carried the smell of damp soil and something faintly sweet. Beyond them rose the upper stories of a pale stone residence, its tall windows open behind curtains that stirred in the same breeze.

Zaeryn pushed himself upright and looked around.

The bench stood on a broad terrace overlooking gardens that descended toward a lake. Water ran through a shallow channel beside his feet and disappeared beneath the balustrade, joining a series of pools on the lower terraces. Across the lake, wooded hills rose toward mountains whose snowy slopes caught the sunlight.

It might have been somewhere on the outskirts of the Capital, except that two moons hung above the mountains, and a broad field of stars remained clearly visible across one half of the blue sky.

He slowly lowered the blanket from his lap.

"You can leave that on the bench," a woman said from behind him.

Zaeryn turned toward her voice, already beginning to recognize the presence he had been too distracted to notice.

Astraea stood near an open doorway with a letter in her hands. Her silver hair fell loose over a pale blue gown, catching the morning light like spun glass, and the sun revealed the fine embroidery along its sleeves.

For a second, Zaeryn simply stared. When they had met in the void between worlds, she had looked like something carved from starlight and winter, distant, blinding, and untouchable. Here, stripped of that astral veil, she looked unmistakably like a woman, though the difference did nothing to make her easier to look at. Every woman in his new life possessed the kind of beauty that would have stopped traffic back on Earth, from royal princesses to the Warladies of the Citadel. Yet looking at Astraea made even the most breathtaking women he knew feel like painted imitations of an original they had never seen. Her skin had the warm, flawless clarity of sunlit marble, and her crystalline eyes held a quiet depth that made him feel as though she were seeing the architecture of his soul rather than just his face.

She looked far more at ease here than he remembered, although there was nothing diminished about the impression she made upon him. He had stood before women whose authority was enough to make him reconsider every word before he spoke. What he felt from Astraea was different enough that placing her somewhere above them wouldn’t have been a useful comparison.

"You look surprised," she observed. The way she said it was so casual that Zaeryn almost felt unreasonable for reacting at all.

"I fell asleep on a sofa," Zaeryn replied, glancing down at the bench. "I think surprise is a fair reaction."

Astraea finished reading the last lines of the letter, the parchment faintly iridescent where her fingers rested against it, before folding it and slipping it into her sleeve.

"Your body is still there, and no one at the residence has reason to think you have gone anywhere."

"So you pulled me out of my reality again?" Zaeryn asked.

"I did, although I waited until you were asleep this time." She stepped out onto the terrace, her gaze lingering on him with a quiet, unhurried fascination, the look of a collector examining something rare that had somehow wandered into her gallery on its own. "And I brought you somewhere more comfortable than an empty stretch of sky."

Zaeryn looked out over the gardens once more. The air felt cool against the skin beneath his sleeves, and the stone under his bare feet had already warmed in the sun.

"This looks different from where we met before."

"That was a threshold where we could speak without interference," Astraea said. "This is where I live. How do you like it?"

Zaeryn looked around before answering her. The place looked straight out of a period drama from his old life, the kind filmed on some preserved country estate where every hedge was trimmed and every window framed a view. Compared to the sleek towers and holo-displays of the Queendom, it looked almost archaic. Did a goddess really live like this?

He gave a small shrug. "It’s alright. I wasn’t expecting you to live somewhere like this."

Astraea descended the steps beside the terrace, then glanced back over her shoulder when he remained beside the bench. The sunlight caught the silver fall of her hair and the sharp, devastating line of her profile.

"Come with me. We have things to discuss."

He considered asking whether that was an invitation or an instruction, but she was already continuing down the path, entirely confident that he would follow.

He left the blanket where it was and went after her.

The steps led between flowering shrubs to a path wide enough for them to walk beside each other. Up close, she carried a faint scent like cold mountain air and night-blooming flowers. Small pale birds moved among the branches overhead, and somewhere beyond a stone wall he could hear someone working, accompanied by the occasional ring of metal against stone.

He had not expected that last sound.

"Other people live here?"

"Some do," Astraea replied. "Others come and go."

"Other goddesses?"

"Goddesses, and gods as well, although you won’t be meeting any of them this morning."

He looked at her, wondering how many questions she intended to answer quite so narrowly. He had imagined the realm of the gods as an endless expanse of stars, populated by beings who had no need for anything ordinary.

Yet Astraea had a house, a garden, and letters to read. Somehow, that domesticity made this more intriguing to him than the cosmic void had.

They passed beneath an arch covered in climbing flowers, and the path continued into an orchard where fruit trees had been trained against low stone walls. Astraea slowed beside one of them and lifted a blossoming branch out of her way. Zaeryn followed her through the narrow gap, close enough that her sleeve brushed his arm, and noticed she didn’t pull away from the contact. Instead, she glanced sidelong at him, her crystalline eyes studying him with that same unsettling intensity.

"Do you spend most of your time here?" he asked.

"Whenever I can," Astraea said, looking toward the residence through the trees. "We deities get bored too, so we established a few places like this one, where we can live the way mortals do for a while. I like having a home, and I like the garden best when I have the time to walk through it."

He supposed there was no reason she shouldn’t, although it was still strange to think of someone like her having preferences as ordinary as his own.

"And the rest of the time you’re watching over our world?"

"That is Marea’s duty," Astraea replied. "I have other matters that need my attention."

"Am I one of them?"

Astraea stopped walking and turned to face him properly. Standing this close on the narrow garden path, her beauty was almost disorienting, but it was the attention in her eyes that made him reconsider how lightly he had asked the question.

"Lately, more than most," she said. "Do you remember when I gave you the Eros Engine?"

"It’s not something I’d forget."

"Then tell me how you like it."

Zaeryn considered the question. The last time she asked, he had tried to look unbothered, and he doubted that had fooled anyone in the void. The short answer was that it made him stronger through exactly the activities a man would choose if he were given the choice, and he was not sure that was something to say to a goddess in her own garden.

"It’s been educational," he said. "I’ve been applying myself to the coursework."

"So I’ve seen," Astraea said. "The charge has been climbing quickly."

He decided not to ask how closely she had been watching it.

"That was the intention," she went on. "Most powers demand years of tedious grinding before they give anything back. I saw no reason yours should ask for the tedious kind, so I made it fun for you."

Zaeryn was fairly sure she remembered what he had thought about that word the last time, and equally sure she had chosen it on purpose.

"I haven’t found a flaw in it yet," he said, with all the composure he could manage. "I’m still testing it thoroughly."

"I would expect nothing less." Her amusement stayed with her for a few more steps along the path, and then it faded, as the conversation moved on to the subject she had brought him there to discuss.

"What else did I say that night?" she asked.

"You said I could accept it without agreeing to fight Pyralis."

"And I haven’t told you otherwise," Astraea said. "But it matters very little whether you want to fight him, because he still sees you as a threat and he will come for you. You may not have a choice."

Zaeryn had realized that long ago, and he no longer wanted to avoid the inevitable. He was going to grow stronger, and he was going to defeat Pyralis. He studied her for another moment before looking back toward the path.

"I have been training," he said. "I think I’m much stronger now."

"I can see that," Astraea said. "So can Pyralis, and he has not taken it well. Tonight he tried to force a connection with your consciousness."