Elva Rackthorn and the Tears of Azrael

Travel Blues, Part 1

Elva didn't mean to cry for long, and she knew that if she wanted any proper sleep, she'd have to cross the hall to her room. But her limbs felt weak and sickly, her face sticky and feverish, and nowhere in her did she have the energy to get off the floor.

"I want to trust you."

Nyx's voice was like the predawn light beginning to seep through the windows: soft and kind and utterly unwelcome. Elva looked up anyway.

"You want... to trust me?" Her mind felt sticky too, and she couldn't quite get the words to make sense.

"I want to believe you. I do believe you." He kneeled down, several feet away from Elva. His wings, half-furled, were like a shelter he huddled in. "But I don't think I should."

Staring at Nyx, Elva could catalogue the furrowing between his brows, the tapping of his sharp nails on the floor, the gradation of his fur, the way it was lighter on his face like a barn owl's heart and almost midnight-y on his wings. But she still couldn't make sense of his words.

"You want to trust me. Right. You don't have any reason to, with the evidence available to you." Elva gestured at the life line sigilry. "I mean, the evidence is there, but you don't have the tools to read it. So." Her mind stalled, its gears still swollen from crying. "So."

Nyx's finger tapping grew faster, wilder. "The thing, is I believe you. Everything you say sounds true. It tastes true." His face scrunched up. "But I think that's just because I'm bound to you. My will, subjugated to yours."

Elva shook her head, but her tongue felt to heavy to speak. She had bound another sapient being to her soul, and though her intent had never been to steal him away from his life and trap him in hers, the result was still the same.

"You're right. That is..." Elva closed her eyes, scrunched up her face. "You shouldn't trust me. I wouldn't, in your shoes. You're not... I won't make you do anything you don't want to. But I already have, I guess." She laid back on the floor. There had been a time, not so long ago, when people thought necromancy the most monstrous form of sigilry, its practitioners ghoulish and cruel. That's how Elva felt, just now.

"But... I know you." Nyx's wings twitched. "I mean, we just met, but I can feel the pulse of your thoughts, the beat of your heart, the rush of your emotions. Not clearly, but like... but like sitting by an autumn river rushing by. The sound is always there. So I think everything you've said is true. It feels true— and painful and acrid and sharp. It's not..." the boy closed his eyes and concentrated, his furry ears crinkling a bit. "Discordant. I think if you were lying, it would sound discordant to me."

Elva pushed herself into a sloppy seated position. "So you'd be able to feel if I was lying?"

A moment, then a sharp nod from Nyx. "I think so, yes."

"Okay. Right. That's something we can test." Elva was pretty certain of that, and certain in general that testable hypotheses were the best way to gather knowledge. But pushing her mind further than that felt impossible. She stared, bleary-eyed, at the demon.

Nyx tapped his talons on the floor. "Just give me a few statements. Say a few things about yourself that I don't know, and make one of them a lie. And if I can tell which one it is, that means... well, it might mean that I can believe you. Or, feel safer about believing you."

"Umm, right. Okay." Elva sat up a little straighter. She could do this. "I slaughter my own pigs to use their blood in necromancy, I wanted a tangle of wyrms for my familiar, and I was planning to poison my brother as a diversion yesterday."

"No, the point is they have to sound equally plausible." A pause. "Wait, that first one was the lie." His eyes widened. "You were planning to WHAT?"

"Just a light poisoning! Nothing too dangerous. Just enough for Father to bring him into town for the doctor."

"Sun and slaughter," Nyx said, sounding dazed. "I'm bound to a maniac."

"I didn't do it!" Elva protested, though certainly she would have. And that certainly wasn't great of her, was it? A cavalierly possessive attitude towards other people's flesh. Maybe she was irredeemably ghoulish deep down. "I wouldn't, now, anyway."

Nyx looked at her, the black marks on his face pulsing. "I trust you."

Outside, a bird cooed a mournful three note call. It was late enough that it was early, and Elva still hadn't slept. She tried to push herself to her feet, but kept stumbling. Eventually, Nyx helped her up, his wings flared out as counterbalance.

"So what now?" Nyx asked, as they trudged across the hall to Elva's room.

"Turn around."

"What?"

"I'm putting on a nightgown, so turn around." Elva shucked off her Night World travel outfit— her older brother's trousers, a long tunic, all heavy duty clothing now torn and covered in blood and dust and chalk. "What now? I'm going to bed. I'm going to sleep for like, hopefully, two years. Father and Henri will be back in the morning, so you'll need to be back in my shadow. A familiar would usually only stay shadowbound for a few days, maybe a week." Elva made a weary gesture with her hands, forgetting Nyx couldn't see her. "For us it will be longer. Until I can figure out how to set you free."

"Can you?"

Elva's hands trembled as she did up the buttons of her gown. Her body and nerves were worn down, like a copper wire frayed to a hair by friction. "I am very clever. That's just a fact. I'm well positioned to figure this out."

"That wasn't a yes."

"I will do everything I can. I can't... we can't tell people. They would try the same thing we just did, and the punishment for having a familiar like you..."

"You'd get in trouble, even though you saved me?"

"In trouble?" Elva laughed, a thin gasping sound. "That would be the least of it, yes."

She turned around, reached out towards Nyx, stopped, then rested her hand lightly between his shoulder blades, since his wings blocked his shoulders. The demon turned to face her. In the odd pre-dawn light, he looked almost like a doll, a toy. They were roughly the same height, but suddenly Elva felt so small, like she and Nyx were just puppets tucked away in toy house, forever standing facing each other, eyes listless, limbs limp.

Elva shuddered and tried to gesture at her shadow. She wanted to go to bed, but first...

"Right. Shadow entering. Hmm." Nyx looked at Elva, then down at their feet and dim floorboards between them. An inky sort of darkness radiated out from his ankles, advancing down the ground and then spreading to Elva's feet quickly, like watercolor paint soaked up by thirsty parchment. Then the rest of Nyx's legs darkened, coated by the inky shadows, and next that viscous, gleaming darkness claimed his torso, his arms, his closed-eyed face. Then his dark-coated form surged suddenly downwards, like the smash of a wave against a cliff falling back to the sea, and he was gone.

Elva stood there for a few moments, swaying like a mast among breakers, and then wobbled into her bed.

It was odd, having Nyx in her shadow. She could feel him somewhere in the back of her mind, or in the depths of it. It was not so much that he was in her thoughts, but that he had a space of his own and the orbit of his own thoughts sometimes brushed against hers. But more than that queer sensation, she could feel the real pinprick pain of her body buzzing, like her flesh was hive-paper and her blood bees. When she closed her eyes, nightmarish shapes from the gardens bloomed to life: the arm stretching out towards them, twisting and morphing, the flesh almost bubbling into different shapes; the smear of Nyx's blood against the wall where he was thrown; her own fingers, nails caked with dirt and blood, frantic as she fumbled with the asperbell, the pentacle, the pin...

Elva stared out at the fading night through fogged window glass, kept her eyes open until they burned, so that when they slowly slipped shut in a heavy blink, she was out of consciousness without the intervening swarm of memories.