Chương 44: I Went to Nyx's Room

POV: The Dark Lord, Milo Miles I didn't know what had come over Nyx, but she had just done me an enormous favor. Blunt as she had been about it, she wasn't wrong about a single word. This wasn't the time for Evelisse to sit here agonizing over moral codes and her sense of justice. She had saved the Dark Lord, and the current Hero had watched her do it. I had no idea where Ywain was right now, but he tried to kill us both, and there was no chance he would stay quiet about what he had seen.

He would tell the Church, and soon enough, Evelisse would have hunters on her. I found myself thinking about Lunessa. Her sister, probably the only close family she had left, had just had her entire life torn apart, and it was because of me. Then my thought drifted to Mel, the mage girl, if I had the name right. She'd be gutted. Her closest friend had abandoned everything she believed in and risked her life to save her worst enemy.

I hoped it wouldn't destroy the friendship, but I doubted it would come through clean. Something in it would break. Evelisse hadn't spoken since Nyx left. She sat with her gaze down on her own hands, folded in her lap, her brow drawn faintly together, turning something over and finding no comfortable place to set it down. The only friendly face in the room was the chibi sticker on Nyx's door, grinning at me with that smug little expression, as if to say you made this mess, so clean it up properly.

"Um, Evelisse." She looked up. There was no anger in her face. Just a kind of tired steadiness, and underneath it something braced, as though she'd already decided to hear whatever came next and hold still through it.

"I'm sorry. I know how hard this is for you, and it's all because of me. If you hadn't come out here—""Milo." She cut me off.

"I know you're sorry. You did things I don't think were right, and like I told you, I still can't fully forgive you for them." I opened my mouth and found nothing worth putting in it, so I shut it again.

"But I need you to understand something." She met my eyes.

"I did this of my own volition. I was confused. I was unsure of nearly everything in life. But in the moment I made the choice, I was certain. I did what I wanted, exactly what you and sis have both been telling me to do." Lunessa told her that?

"I did it because of you, yes, but I made the choice myself. You didn't force it out of me." Her jaw tightened.

"I've spent my whole life being told what to do, and honestly, I never got a say in any of it, not in what I should do, and not in what I should feel." That last part went through me like a blade. Because I had tried to do exactly that to her. I had looked at a person who had never once been allowed to want anything for herself, and I had reached for a charm to make her want me. An instrument for my own survival.

I had flogged myself over it many times, yet the guilt kept surfacing anyway, refusing to stay buried no matter how many times I pushed it down.

"And this," Evelisse went on, gesturing at the empty air between us, "whatever this is, as reckless as it might be, it's the one thing in my life I've chosen for myself." I didn't know what to say to that.

"So don't apologize to me." Her voice stayed level.

"If you apologize, it's the same as saying what I decided was wrong. That it wasn't really mine, and I only did it because you put me here." She shook her head slowly.

"I'd like to believe you didn't manipulate me into that choice."

"I—" My throat closed for a second.

"No. I didn't."

"Then I trust you." She let out a breath.

"I…just need some time. To think about how to move forward."

"Okay. Sure. Yeah." I got to my feet, too fast.

"I'll just—I'm going to go talk to Nyx. In her room. About something." I heard myself and kept going anyway.

"Something important. Not anything weird." Evelisse blinked at me.

"... Um. All right." Why had I felt the need to clarify that? It was so much weirder now. I walked briskly to Nyx's door and tried the handle. Locked. Damn it. I knocked. A few seconds passed before it swung open, Nyx filling the gap with an expression that suggested I had approximately one sentence before she shut it again.

"We need to talk. Please?" She held me there for a moment, unimpressed. Then her eyes slid past my shoulder to Evelisse, still sitting at the table, and something in her face shifted, flattened, went unreadable. She let out a long breath through her nose.

"Whatever," she said. She turned and walked back inside, leaving the door standing open behind her. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. I took that as permission, so I headed in and gently closed the door. The room was much as I remembered, except for the two unconscious bodies slumped against the wall in the corner, the shield guy and the red-haired mage.

"... Did you kill them?"

"No." Nyx didn't look up.

"Do you want me to?"" No! No, no. I just figured you'd have…done things your way. And I only knocked them out because I had to think fast, and killing them would've meant thinking about it longer, so I—" She sighed.

"I know. I know. Whatever, you pig-brained pacifist." She glanced at the bodies.

"I suppose they're worth more breathing anyway, somehow." Then, she turned back to me.

"So. what?"

"What what?"

"What did you come in here to say, you walking concussion."

"Oh, right. Yes. Sorry." Honestly, I had mostly come in here to give Evelisse room to think. Sitting across from her while she worked through the wreckage of her entire life would have just made it worse. Though, now that I considered it, why had I come to Nyx's room? I could have gone outside, said I needed air, to check on Luke. Anything. Nyx was watching me with her usual flat, faintly irritated look, one eyebrow up, waiting for me to produce a point. And she looked... fine. Completely fine.

No burns, no cuts, nothing. Every mark gone, like the fight had never touched her. Greg's doing, I suppose. I owed him a thank-you next time I saw him. Which dragged the memory up before I could stop it. Nyx in the crater. The burns eating across her arms, the cuts, the blood in her hair, one wing bent at an angle wings don't bend at. A state I had never once imagined I would see her in. And, same as with Evelisse, I had been the cause. Because I wouldn't kill. Because I wasn't good enough.

So Nyx had gone and taken the worst thing on that field by herself, and it had nearly ended her.

"Sorry," I said.

"Are you a Pokémon or something?" She rolled her eyes.

"Should I start calling you Sorrymon?" That wasn't funny. And Pokémon don't even have the -mon suffix; that's Digimon. Obviously I didn't correct her.

"Sorry, I mean, no. Thank you … for taking Ywain on."

"Ahh, that." She crossed to the edge of her bed and sat, one leg folding over the other.

"I lost anyway."

"You lost because he was cheating. And either way, you saved my life." I stepped closer.

"Why didn't you link me? Tell me you were in trouble?"

"Because I wasn't. I had it managed, right up until he detonated that burst of holy light." She shrugged.

"Besides, if I couldn't handle him, what exactly were you going to do about it? Or have you forgotten that you lost, and the former Hero had to come pull you out of the dirt?"

"Okay, fair, but I tried. I nearly had him, actually. I would've had him if he hadn't been running an infinite-health cheat code."

"A loss is a loss." She examined a nail.

"And don't imagine I don't know you were about to cry when he was seconds away from killing you with that sword over you." What the– How could she possibly—"Did Greg tell you? Does he have, like, omniscient vision or something? Because if he does, then you also know I'm the one who came and—""I know." I stopped.

"... You do?"

"Greg told me." She still wasn't looking at me.

"He isn't omniscient, before you spiral about it. He sees fragments. Bits and pieces, and not many. But enough." A pause.

"So, yes. I know you came for me. That you got me out. That you put me on Luke and sent us home instead of leaving me in that crater and running." The silence stretched between us.

"... Thanks for that. I guess." She said it to the floorboards, her jaw set tight, arms crossing over herself like she was bracing against the words on the way out. There was color rising faintly along the edge of her ear. I didn't know what to do with any of that. I just stood there, thoroughly derailed, because in the whole time I had known her I don't think Nyx had ever said a sincere thing to me on purpose. She looked up, took in whatever idiotic expression I was wearing, and sighed.

"Right. If that's all, get out." She flapped a hand at me. Shoo. That snapped me back.

"W-wait — I wanted to ask you something."" What?"

"Back in the Afterport. That woman called you the demon princess." I hesitated.

"What was that about?" Something moved across Nyx's face; a flicker, gone almost before I caught it. I don't think it was anger. It was... something closer to the look of a person who recalled something but wasn't exactly willing to share it.

"That's..." And for a second, genuinely, it seemed like she was going to tell me.

"... none of your business." The words came out quiet. Not sharp. Just closed.

"Rescuing me once doesn't buy you a look inside my life."

"Okay, right." I raised both hands.

"I just—if you ever want to talk about it. To anyone. I'm here. I'm not going to say anything useful, I'll probably make it worse, but I can at least listen. I don't want you thinking that I—""Sure, whatever. Out."

"All right, all right!" I backed toward the door with my hands up, then turned and let myself out. On the way through, I glanced back. She was just sitting there, staring at the floor. Just... somewhere else entirely, chewing on something I couldn't see. There was nothing I could do except give her the space. Though it was strange that she'd chosen to keep two unconscious enemies in her own bedroom.

She was hiding a lot of things from me, but if she didn't want to say them, then there wasn't much I could do about that either. I shut the door behind me and looked across the room. Evelisse was still at the table, exactly where I had left her. Her hands had come apart in her lap; one of them was turning the empty waterskin over and over, slowly, without her seeming to notice she was doing it. Her eyes were somewhere past the fireplace, fixed on nothing. I didn't want to crowd her.

She'd asked for time, and it had been — what, less than five minutes? Ten? Then I noticed her looking at me.

"I'll, uh." I gestured vaguely toward the front door.

"I'm going to go check on Luke. Give you a bit more—""Milo." The waterskin stopped turning. She stood, and something in the way she did it was different from how she'd been sitting a minute ago. Straighter.

"I've decided," she said.

"What I'm going to do." I didn't move. She crossed the floor toward me and stopped a pace away, eyes on mine. She held them, steady, no hesitation in it at all.

"Can you…take me to Eremiah?" she said.

"Right now?"