He turned his head.

Nyx was standing beside the kitchen table.

She was barefoot on the linoleum. The hoodie was gone. The ash-grey dress had returned, somehow, mended and clean, and her hair was loose around her shoulders. Her crimson eyes were the only thing in the kitchen that did not look like memory.

"How did you—" His voice didn’t come out properly. He cleared his throat and tried again. "You shouldn’t be here."

"No," she agreed. "I should not. But you are very deep in, Bearer, and I have followed."

"You can see this."

"I can see all of it."

She glanced, briefly, down the hall toward the bathroom door.

She did not flinch.

She turned back to him, and she pulled out the chair beside his, and she sat. Her hands folded in her lap, the same careful way they always did. The kitchen sun caught in the dark of her hair and made it look, for a moment, almost warm.

"Nyx."

"Mm."

"I asked you not to look here."

"I know."

"Then why—"

"Because you were dying, Bearer." She said it simply, the way she said most things. "And the question I am about to ask you, you cannot be asked anywhere else."

He waited.

She did not say it isn’t your fault.

He had thought, somewhere in the bottom of him where the dream had not been able to reach, that if anyone ever followed him in here, that was what they would say. It isn’t your fault. You were a child. He would have killed her. She was already gone. Ellie didn’t mean it.

All of the soft, useless sentences he had heard from social workers and counsellors and one very kind warehouse foreman who had found him crying in the loading bay at three in the morning.

Nyx said none of them.

What she said was:

"And?"

He blinked.

"Will you die for them, then?" Her voice was very quiet. "Here, on this floor? For her, who would not stay? For him, who abused her? For the child who left? Is that what you intend, Bearer?"

He stared at her.

"Or," she said, and now there was something in her voice that had changed. "will you live in spite of them?"

The kitchen sun did not move.

"Nyx—"

"It is a fair question, Bearer." She tilted her head. "I will not answer it for you. I do not have the right. But I will tell you this, since you have asked nothing of me and I have a great deal to give."

She turned her hand over on the table, palm up, between them.

"I have been alone for a very long time. Longer than the seal lets me remember. The dark place I was in before you pulled me from it. I do not know how long I had been there. Years. Centuries, perhaps. I cannot say. But I know what it is to be in a room with no other people in it. I have a kitchen of my own, Bearer, and a chair, and a door I do not open."

He looked at her hand.

He didn’t take it. Not yet.

"And I am not in it any longer," she said. "Because you reached down. So now I am asking, in return. Reach up."

A long moment passed.

He looked at the bathroom door. He looked at the chair across from him, empty. He looked at the kitchen window, where the sun was a fraction too warm. He looked at his fourteen-year-old hands.

Then he looked at Nyx.

"You said you wouldn’t answer it for me."

"I will not."

"But you came in."

"I came in," she agreed, "because the answer cannot be asked of an empty room. There must be someone in it for the question to mean anything."

He swallowed.

"...Stay a minute."

"I will stay as long as you ask, Bearer."

He took her hand.

He looked at the bathroom door.

It was still there.

It was, he understood with a sudden, almost embarrassed clarity, always going to be there. There was no version of this kitchen where the door was not at the end of the hall. He had spent six years trying to negotiate with it, and the door had not negotiated back, because the door was not a thing that negotiated.

But he did not have to open it today.

He did not have to open it on this floor, in this hallway, on a flagstone where a man with frost-coloured eyes was waiting to finish the cut.

He took a breath. It went in cleaner than he’d expected.

"I’ll live," he said.

The kitchen did not answer.

But Nyx’s hand tightened around his.

"Then come back, Bearer," she said. "I am not done with you yet."

She bit her wrist.

He saw the blood well up, and she pressed the wound to his mouth and her free hand cradled the back of his head, and she said, against his hair, "Drink... and awaken."

He did.

[BOND LEVEL UP.]

[Bond: Nyx Sanguina — Level 2.]

[Shared Experience: ACTIVE.]

[NEW SKILL UNLOCKED!.]

[Resonance Lv. 1 (Active) — The Covenant Bearer may channel a portion of the bonded entity’s nature into his own body for a limited time. Duration scales with bond level. Drains MP and HP over duration. Cost: 50 MP + 1% HP/sec. Side effects vary by entity. Cooldown: 30 minutes.]

The bathroom tile under his knees lit, very faintly, the color of her eyes.

☼☼☼

He opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was the inside of her hood, drawn over both of them like a tent. The second was her face, very close, streaked with tears she had not bothered to wipe away, her crimson eyes wide and red-rimmed and fixed on his with an expression that was somewhere between fury and relief and several other things he did not have time to name.

She drew in a breath to say something.

He moved first.

He didn’t know, afterwards, how he had moved. His body had been a dead weight on her lap a heartbeat ago. Now it answered him, all of it, with a kind of clean immediacy that he had never felt from his own muscles before.

It was as though the wiring between his thoughts and his limbs had been swapped out for something better while he was away.

He sat up. The motion did not hurt. The torn flesh across his chest pulled and itched, and he could feel it knitting in real time, the heat of it a low, pleasant ache rather than agony.

His mouth tasted of her. Copper and something underneath it that he now understood was her, specifically, the part of her that hummed.

Out in the chamber, very close now, the Knight Of Vow’s footsteps stopped.

The Shadow Veil tore.

It didn’t drop. It tore, as though something on the other side had simply put a finger through it. The grey of muffled space peeled back, and the blue light of the sconces flooded in, and the Knight Of Vow was standing six feet away with his pale blade already in motion.

It came down at Nyx.

Finn caught it.

He caught it with his hand.

The black blade hit his palm and stopped, and the impact rang up his arm in a way that should have shattered every bone in his wrist, and his wrist held. The edge bit. Blood welled. The wound began to close before the blood had finished welling.

The Knight of Vow’s glowing eyes flicked, for the first time, to Finn’s face.

Whatever he saw there caused him, fractionally, to pause.