Chapter Text
Nyx remembers life before the invasion as memories that are more sensate in essence than actual memories, clear scenarios.
He remembers the hot, humid summers, moreso than he remembers the stately, wired trees of the endless Galahd forests. If he does his best to recall them he knows that they grew ancient and twisted, so narrow that the canopy appeared braided and nearly impenetrable overhead. But that’s real, lucid memory; that’s when he’s awake. Not the dreams.
In the dreams, he recalls the winters as wet. Wet and still. Winter in Galahd had been rainy, and he knows that—but portrayed within a litany of dreams it’s just wet. He remembers that, not so much the specifics. Not how the snaking of the upstream river would overflow, how the riverbank would become unmoored, its clear lines erased. How the stepping stones of the left bank would become submerged, obscured by a fury of water that was so angry, so volatile, and wouldn’t recede till early spring.
What else he remembers: he remembers the steady stream of people. Them coming, them going. An arrhythmical pattern of footsteps from everywhere and nowhere in the village: the faraway echo of feet staking a path, whether unknown or one already discovered, on the icy insides of the Nostrus Grotto. In the dreams he hears the sloshing of them viscerally: particularly those that remain bare, sloshing in the sink sand of the upper western upper bank following a bout of rain. The thumping of someone running on the hard, staked out pathway between residences. The refugees coming from distant regions, more and more of them annexed, with time, by the empire. Their steps tired. Hesitant.
He remembers Ma as a ghostly touch and a deck of tarot cards. The pad of her index finger tracing his palm as she read his future in small slopes and steep inclines. The stillness in her wrists as she plaited the first of two braids around the curve of his ear. The reverence in her tone, as she’d stroked his cheek, and said, “There’s the old ways in you, Nyx. Don’t you ever shun them.”
And then, viscerally, like branded agony, there’s Selena—his brave, elder sister. There is bloating smoke coiling from the fire. Acres of wet forest, somehow, set ablaze: the heavy cadence of soldiers marching up the steep, winding paths that lead into the village. The dull raps of ceaseless gunfire. His sister rounding a corner, shielding the Lyrion twins—
“Selena!” he screams, the push and shove of his voice coming out strangled and desperate.
He’s woken by the roil of a heavy-set vehicle. It’s beneath him, above him, just everywhere. There’s a dull ache in his upper body that reverberates with each turn they make. At his side, something smells strong; like the gum trees that grow upstream from the main village, like they’re wet with sweet water and autumn.
“Nyx? You with us?”
Pelna’s voice is rough, but altogether steady. A comfort, in spite of everything.
“Yeah,” murmurs Nyx. He’s here, he’s present, but also—
Pelna’s back is curved into a pair of sand bags. To their left sits a slew of others: Hesperus is leaned into a tall rifle. Nyx doesn’t recognize it; most likely, it’s Niff-manufactured. Rena is, whenever they straighten out on the road, sharpening a pair of curved blades against a whetting stone. Libertus’s face is dark. He’s leaned the solid bulk of his forearms to steady on his knees. Curled half into his side is Crowe. The bridge of her nose is sooty. A thin gash stretches across her left collarbone.
“We’re heading upstream,” says Pelna, “The Niffs don’t know the land. Luring them out onto the marshes and below the largest trees, and we might just have a chance of getting to them.”
“Are there—“ begins Nyx, and then swallows the remainder of his words. He tries again, “Any others made it out?”
“Yeah,” says Pelna. “A few from the east bank got started on the evacuation. It’s not just us — they came at all the villages, all at once.”
“Coordinated slaughter,” mutters Crowe. She swipes at her eyes, but Nyx can’t see where they’re wet.
A growl escapes Libertus, but he says nothing. Pelna glances his way, but doesn’t comment. Nyx eases his way up to sitting. There’s a torn wrap of someone’s shirt tied around his upper left arm. That’s where the ache originates from.
There is a feeling, needling, scraping, in his gut, that says that there is something so wrong—the thought comes, and then it goes. He’s not sure he can think it.
“What happened,” he says, and then stops. He pulls a deep, deep breath. Someone’s—Pelna’s—warm, damp palm, lands on his shoulder. He knots his hands into fists, digs his nails into the vulnerable skin in his palms.
He tries to work past the knot in his throat, “What happened to all the families?” and carefully does not ask about—specifics.
“Niffs rounded everyone up they could get to like cattle,” says Rena. She meets Nyx’s gaze, fierce, angry. “They didn’t do anything, far as we know, to those who didn’t resist.”
And those who did—Rena won’t have to tell him. Nyx has enough trouble keeping the bile down, sour and heavy, as it is. He tugs a little on the makeshift bandage wrapping around his bicep. The pain flashes up bright for a second, then dulls again. It grounds him. Makes for a ledge that he can grip onto and haul himself halfway over. If he doesn’t have to think—then he won’t.
He looks up at Libertus, who won’t meet his gaze. At Rena, who has reverted her attention to her blades. The fashioned steel makes cold embers spark when she hits the whetting stone a little imprecisely. At her back, Hesperus has procured a filthy cloth. With it, he polishes down the length of his stolen rifle.
Nyx turns. Pelna watches him with an open expression. The only one who will. It’s opened up raw. Too vulnerable. It didn’t used to matter, Nyx thinks, but things change.
“We go to war,” he says.
Pelna nods. Just once, perfunctory, but it is weighty and says all it needs to, all the same.
“We go to war.”
They arrive at the perch of the upstream village, originally part of theirs, only forced to relocate after the flood of 698 cornered the settlement further downriver. It’s now situated just atop a rock plateau that teaches the young to never meander close to the tear of the riverbank alone, the drop of a waterfall chillingly close and real.
The things they expect: ruin, and chaos. Screaming, from children, and from fathers, and mothers. From nieces and from uncles. Gunfire. Endless, ceaseless gunfire. Fear has burrowed its sharp claws into Nyx’s throat. It makes it difficult to talk, to breathe.
The things they do not expect: when they round the bend in the road that leads up to the village, the first thing that comes into view is a ground platoon of Niffs establishing a perimeter blockade around the village. There is an entire slew of them just standing riverside, erect and motionless the way humans could never do. This is charged; robotic. It’s alien.
Tredd makes a sharp left, shifting the car into a low thrumming first gear to avoid detection. There’s a rock plateau a few feet removed, into the tree line. He eases the car into stop just beneath it, where they’re mostly concealed from view, unless someone comes down the hill to actively search them out.
They cover the Humvee with brambles and banana leaves elongating from broken stems. Rena and Crowe secure their perimeter. Tredd and Hesperus are hauling the sand bags out of the back of the car. Luche leans over Libertus’s shoulder, motioning for them to gather ‘round.
“This can’t be an ambush,” he says, once everyone has gathered tightly, arms woven between them. “The one thing the Niffs don’t have on us is the geography. You all know the lay of these lands,” he looks each of them over, “So use it to your advantage.”
Nyx feels Crowe’s hair brush his left elbow, scored with blood and singed. On his other side, Pelna leans heavily into his upper arm. It puts pressure on the wound across his bicep, but Pelna is warm, and it dulls the throbbing somewhat, leeching through the cloth.
“No matter what happens, we don’t stop till justice has been dealt.”
Libertus looks up at Nyx from across the circle. His eyes are red rimmed, his face streaked with smoke and mud. Nyx nods at him.
Libertus returns it. When he talks, his voice comes out scratchy and raw, “We go to war.”
Nyx quells a shiver. The bile in his throat, omnipresent, is receding. Slowly it’s becoming replaced by anger. By something that rears, on hind legs, desperate to be unleashed. He looks around, from Tredd’s closed off expression, to Crowe’s shoulders, barely still, to the sharp twist of Pelna’s mouth.
“We go to war,” they echo, simultaneously. A promise of deliverance, of fire for fire.