Page 12 of Nyx
“We do not compare our evils. It is all bad, no matter how small. But what they did to you… it was not small. I do not think you are a coward. A warrior. Ahero. What you and August did was brave. Saving them… saving so many people from becoming…this.” I gesture at myself, and he watches me closely. “You speak of being broken, but you are strong.”
“You’re strong, too, Nyx. Stronger than you realize.” We’ve reverted to the common language of the other side, and words come easier this way. The sound of Elas speaking it brings a rush of nostalgia so potent, tears flood my eyes.
“I don’t remember home,” I whisper, blinking away the moisture. “My parents, or siblings… the smell of the air. The sky or the trees. It’s gone.”
“It’s been a long time,” he insists, but I shake my head.
“Time isn’t the thief here. They are. I can…” I hesitate, unused to being this open with people, but the sadness in his eyes has shifted. The razored edge of it has become gentler, and I realize as much as it hurts to talk about it, my sadness is shifting, too. “They caged me, too. They didn’t know what to do with me. The humans found me, and they weren’t cruel, not at the beginning. They were curious, and deep down, I understood their curiosity. I was as different to them as they were to me.”
My hands draw mindless patterns over the moss, enjoying the soft fuzz beneath my fingertips. “Over time, they became indifferent. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying. Basic words—yesandno,food,sleep.Years passed, and I was a novelty. A trophy. A strange thing in a cage they’d show their important visitors. They believed capturing me was a feat to boast about, but I was only a child when they took me.”
“What changed?” he asks, and I close my eyes, replaying the fuzzy memories from the buried depths of my mind.
“Our people came. Familiar skin tones andwords…words I could understand after so much silence. Gods, I was foolish enough to hope. Despite the years of isolation, I dared to think I had been rescued… freed. And maybe I would’ve been, if that damned mark wasn’t there.”
He grunts, obviously curious as he glances at my arm, but I’m not ready to talk about that part of my past. “It was the first time my heart was truly broken,” I continue, “when I realized they were only there to put me in a different cage. The first time I understood what it meantto be hopeless. To feel unfixable. How little I knew then, thinking I was lucky enough to be broken so easily.”
“We’re stronger than we realize,” he says again.
“I wish we weren’t.” The awful truth slips from my lips before I can stop it, but his face holds no judgment. “I wish my mind had shattered in those first years, so I didn’t have to watch them chip away at the pieces that remained.”
“You remember it all?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “Memories of faces, of people and family I loved, slipped away. One morning I woke up and couldn’t picture my mother’s face. I couldn’t remember what her smile looked like, or the sound of her voice. But I could tell you every detail of that base being built. How they arranged the crates of building materials. The sounds of the tools running constantly, day and night, with their sawdust and metal sparks. I watched it all from my cage.”
Elas hums to let me know he’s listening, but now that the words are flowing, they don’t want to stop. “When they brought me inside, they gave me the very first cell like it was a prize. It was shiny and new and clean, but it was still a cage. Some of my time there is hazy. Entire years are barely more than sounds and smells rather than memories. They stole my life before that place. Left me with nothing but pain and sadness, and trying to figure out how to live without hope because they took it. They tookeverythingfrom me.” My lips seal shut, my chest raw and split wide open with the honesty of my confession.
Elas releases a quiet whine in the back of his throat. “We weren’t meant to be caged,” he whispers, and I shake my head as fresh tears build in my eyes.
“I don’t know how to not be caged anymore. Even here, they hold me.”
Elas nods, leaning his head against the trunk and closing his eyes against the growing light from the rising sun. “They caged me when I was a young soldier as punishment for disobeying. It was a way for them to control me. I’ve always hated the dark and had nightmares, but lately…” He takes a few breaths, and I give him time to collect his thoughts. “Since we’ve been back, whenever I close my eyes, I’m in that cage, with those bars slowly crushing me. Every time I sleep, I wake up terrified I’m still in that place.”
“So you try not to sleep.” It isn’t a question, and he pulls in a shuttering inhale as he nods.
“So I try not to sleep.”
Quiet stretches between us as the birds grow louder. The heat rises with the sun, and eventually, I calm myself enough to continue. “For a long time, I believed I had done something to deserve it,” I say quietly, and his attention bores into me. “I thought I must’ve angered the gods and just forgotten… because if not? How could they let such a thing happen without reason?”
“You think there was a reason behind any of this?”
My fingers drift over the moss as I force myself to meet his eyes, and I give him a solemn nod. “If I’d never been captured, that camp wouldn’t have been there when Ronan and Cameron passed by. They would’ve made it to this village without learning of Ljómur. Maybe I had to sacrifice those years so the truth could come out… so the others could find their freedom.”
Elas is quiet again as he nods thoughtfully. “It gives it purpose.”
“There has to be a purpose in this pain, Elas.”
“And what was the purpose in my pain? What good did it do to spend those days in the darkness?”
The last few stars are suspended in the sky as I tilt my face upward. They’re barely visible as the sun shines over their glow. “You saved those people. Set them free. Because of you, they do not have to live their lives in these same cages we do.”
“Fuck,” he mutters, swiping at his eyes before thunking the back of his head against the tree trunk a few times. “And this is our reward? Am I supposed to never sleep again?”
Such desperation clouds his voice that I lean forward and gently wrap my fingers around his wrist. He stares at my deep green skin against his dusty blue for a long time, like he understands what this takes from me. Like he knows how hard it is for me to touch another.
But Elas is safe, and for once, I can help.
“Come find me,” I say as I squeeze him and pull away. “When you cannot free yourself from that cage, you find me. We will try to open it together.”
