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Arete leapt past him, tearing the throat out of the MT Nyx had been about to take out. He swore and swerved around her, slamming his kukri into the gut of the one beside it. She had been strangely reluctant to fight for some reason, and he knew she was grumpy that he'd forced her into it, but did she have to steal his kill? He could have hurt her!
Thankfully the squad of five had been easy enough to handle between the two of them, even if they weren't working like the team they normally were. He'd taken out two of them, and Arete had gotten the other two—one with teeth and the others with her whiskers, just as deadly as a real coeurl's. They were children of Galahad, after all. It was their job to keep everyone in Galahd safe, and the battlefield was where they did it best.
Nyx kicked at one of the empty bodies and shuddered as it sort of skittered away from his foot, the joints bending oddly. Dark Dust swirled from the circuitry, and Nyx leaned back instinctively to avoid it. It was so pretty, though, even if it was wrong.
It was wrong, right?
Arete stumbled back into view, and Nyx let her distract him from whatever that thought was. There was something strange about the way she was moving, though, some of her normal grace missing. She wasn't supposed to stumble like that, or hunch over. Something was wrong with her.
It was wrong, right?
She lifted her great muzzle and starlight gleamed off her eyes. Her jaws, where she'd taken out the MT, were dripping with some dark ichor and suddenly it felt like there were miles between them. Was she— were they infected?
Nyx had a flash of them running through the dorms, infecting all of their cohort as they slept, bite after bite, each shallow slice of his blade dripping more of the miasma into their bodies, their souls. (Did miasma drip?) In one night they could steal away the future of the whole province, and who could stop them from there? They could take the fight back to the continent and soon all of Lucis—
No. They couldn't let that happen. They couldn't be the cause of that. Mama and Selena would cry but Nyx couldn't run that risk. If they were infected...
He should be crying. Why wasn't he crying? This was the worst thing that could possibly happen. This was—
Nyx opened his eyes, and had to jerk back from Arete's face hovering right over his. He sucked in shallow breaths, clutching the bed beneath him.
It had all just been a dream.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Arete whispered, rubbing her head against his cheek. Nyx leaned into the touch and wrapped an arm around her, grabbing hold of the loose skin around her shoulders instead of the bed and shook his head. She was fine. She wasn't being corrupted by the scourge. They were whole, not whatever nightmare of a rabid sleeper agent that had been.
Everything was going to be fine. They had a second chance.
No, it had never been real. They had their real life to live.
It had just been a dream. A nightmare, whatever.
Nyx finally collected himself enough to remember that he wasn't alone in the room, and glanced around him at the other beds. The three beds to his right that he could see around Arete's bulk seemed undisturbed, coeurl daemons and humans alike both asleep in their usual positions. He could only see one bed on his left, but it looked normal as well, Romeo and Bissa snoring away like logs. Thank the Hunter and whatever stars watched over people who wanted to be left alone.
Relaxing his grip on Arete, Nyx stared up at the ceiling, opening his eyes as wide as they would go to make sure he didn't fall asleep too quickly. He didn't need a reprise of that scene, thank you. Unfortunately, the comforting weight of his traitorously purring daemon did not help with that, but Nyx was stronger than that. He was.
"Tea?" Lucia whispered, and Nyx nearly jerked upright, stopped only by Arete's bulk. "It's got honey in it. I made too much," she lied, blank-faced. Lucia did precisely what she intended to do, always, and she always had a plausible explanation for it. The faster she offered it, the less likely it was to be true, or at least her actual reason for acting.
On the other hand, tea would be very nice.
"Sure," he said, shifting Arete off him. She went without even pretending to grumble, which was a little rude, but it's not like you were supposed to have any pride when it came to your cohort, even a late-forming one like this. And obviously Lucia already knew he'd had a nightmare.
For once, Lucia kept quiet, probably out of deference to the rest of the dorm room. Once he was sitting up, she handed over the tea in his favorite cup—he knew she'd been lying—and perched on the end of his bed, their daemons sandwiched between them. Usually her attempts at being a big sister to the group were annoying, but this was surprisingly low key for once.
Nyx sipped his mug in silence, letting the sound of breathing that filled the dorm—even Romeo's snoring—reassure him that everything was normal. Nothing had gone wrong.
Everyone was fine.
Nothing was fine.
The sirens were ringing out, as if everyone didn't already know the Niffs were here. Nyx ran and ran and ran, trying to get back to the bunker where he'd left everyone like an idiot.
Why did everything he tried to do go wrong?
Lightning flashed from the hillside, and Nyx ran faster, even if it felt like he was swimming against the current, wading through mud. There were fighters there with him somewhere, but even as slowly as it felt like he was moving, he knew he had outpaced them all, even Libertus.
He kept scanning the skies for Hypnos, hoping he was flying to bring them news that the bunker was safe, or at least where everyone had gone. Something, anything to give him concrete information to work on, not just the shadows of dropships and the feeling of dread.
He arrived just in time to see the MTs cut down Selena, silhouetted at the edge of the forest. A the cloud of golden dust rose in the air as Hypnos vanished.
Nyx screamed, running toward the clearing, finally able to move even if it was too late now—
It was too late for Selena and Hypnos, but he could at least avenge them.
Nyx pushed his body past all the aches, moving like the wind itself as he wove between the MTs. They seemed endless, dropships flying off and new ones replacing them, and people and daemons were flitting around the crowd helping him to thin them out but it was endless. Nyx's eyes darted from MT to MT, and he jerked from target to target, no method in it just death and death and death that barely missed him.
Death had caught up to Selena before her time. When would it finally catch up to him?
The battlefield was still, stacked with the bodies of MT so deep he had to wade through them, his footing precarious whenever he looked down at the tangle of metal limbs. There were other bodies there, too, just bodies and arms and legs, not people any longer. The fine mist of golden dust lingered in the air around them, and Nyx didn't want to know the final death counts. He didn't want to know the names of who he'd lost and never see again, he didn't want to see the numbers that spelled out his failure. He was supposed to give his life to his people and all he'd done was feed them to the enemy.
And when would he stop failing? When would be his final breath so everyone could find someone better?
Nyx tripped over a body, landing almost on top of an MT. He struggled to his feet, not wanting to be near the accursed thing, not wanting to breathe in its damned smoke, but he accidentally tugged the machine with him as he rose. The thought of touching the thing made him nauseous, but as he pushed it away he realized that instead of cold metal it felt like he was touching cloth.
Moving as if it was the only thing to do, Nyx turned over the trooper, seeing metal but still feeling cloth. The faceplate was cracked and gaped oddly, and Nyx brushed it away with a thought.
Selena's face was beneath it.
Nyx stumbled back in horror, but everywhere he looked Selena was lying there, dead. He didn't have to see the faceplates removed, he knew her from the way she slumped there, her favorite dress wrapped over cold metal that would never move again, again and again and again and again.
A hand grabbed his foot – definitely metal this time – and he looked down to see Selena's face again underneath the gray helmet, her eyes shining red and a cloud of dark dust around her. She yanked and he was falling—
Nyx hit the floor with a thump. He should get up, get back to bed—PT was going to start at 4:30 this morning, he needed the sleep—but he couldn't bring himself to do anything just yet, with the memory of Selena's face with those awful eyes and the feel of the gauntlet around his ankle feeling more real than the barracks at the moment.
It had only been a dream. Just another blasted nightmare.
At this point, Nyx wouldn't blame the other rookies if they kicked him out to sleep in the hallway with how often he was having them now. Thankfully they didn't seem to notice very often, or at least didn't say anything to show they had. Maybe he'd have to actually thank Trainer Eliana for working everyone too harshly to leave anyone light sleepers. Just the thought of her cackle at that gave him enough energy to finally push himself off the floor.
Arete was curled up on the end of the bed in a tight ball that made her seem almost reasonably sized, even if Nyx's legs knew otherwise. Being the heir of the ruler of Galahd who had volunteered for the Kingsglaive in order to be an example and liaison for his people didn't win him any privileges here in Insomnia, not even a bed extension or shelf for his huge daemon, and Nyx was getting tired of squishing himself to the side or top of the bed.
He was just tired.
The standard-issue sheets felt like the cloth from his dream, which probably shouldn't be surprising but did mean that Nyx didn't want any of it touching him. Arete finally stirred herself and he shoved her the rest of the way over so he could grab the quilt he had been allowed to bring with him and wrap it around his shoulders and curl up in a ball next to his bunk.
It wasn't fair. He'd dealt with the grief, with the failure of what happened at the bunker. Lucia had told him he was being sent to Insomnia because he was the best among them for the Kingsglaive, not as a punishment and had even given him permission to stay if he wanted to. Even if it felt like exile, he'd technically volunteered. Lucia hadn't been crowned Prince yet when he'd left, so it had been an offer, not an order.
He'd missed her coronation.
It had been hard at first, sure. That had been expected. He was living in a new place, with new rules, in a new position. He'd missed his family and his village but at least he had Libertus and Petra, and Luche and Lamprotes. And he'd worked hard to learn the king's magic, how to work with yet another new group, and he'd done it. He'd even been in combat already and gotten through it just fine.
It wasn't fair that the nightmares had come back now, after he'd already dealt with everything.
Arete curled up beside him, not under the blanket but with her head on his lap, a silent presence with no answers. Nyx let his head loll back on the bed to check his alarm clock and how much time he had to actually sleep before he needed to get moving again.
The dim display – of red light, why had he gotten one that was red? - unrepentantly let him know it was 3:12, and he probably wasn't going to be able to get any good sleep at all at this point. With equal mercilessness, it also informed him of the date, which he had been trying to ignore.
Well, if he wasn't going to get any sleep, he might as well be useful.
Nyx moved quietly to grab Selena's headband out of his nightstand, twisting so as to not knock Arete off his lap. Carefully he ran the disks through his hand, remembering who gave them and when, and what Selena had looked like each time they'd surprised her with another one. Most women didn't have this many disks until long after they had settled, but they'd loved to spoil her, and the abalone they'd chosen for her material could be caught and polished themselves whenever they could get someone to sneak away when they visited Asfalei.
Watching the links slide through his fingers, Nyx mouthed the words to his name song and hers, and Mamē's, and Da's and Papa's and Libertus' and every one he could remember, just like they should be sung on her birthday, if by more voices than his, and actually out loud.
And actually with Selena there.
Morning couldn't come soon enough.
This night was never going to end.
They had been ambushed just after dusk, all the lights blown at once and the shades flooding into the camp. If the camp had only been Kingsglaive that would have been bad enough, but they had been escorting an entire village of refugees, evacuated after a Niff raid on what was left after a landslide at the end of monsoon season. Even on the relatively flat plains of Duscae, the power of Titan and Ramuh combined was terrifying, as relentless and merciless as the Niffs.
In the darkness, the Captain was nowhere to be found, but they'd done their best. Libertus's group focused on punching through a path, while the mages caused as much chaos as possible and the Flames held back the shades. The Chains tried to gather up the supplies and their assorted personnel but Nyx didn't give them much of a chance at all. He and the rest of the Wings had flitted around from group to group, offering support and protection wherever they could.
It wasn't enough.
The MTs just kept coming, the skies as dark with dropships as with clouds. The camp was overrun quickly, the mud acting like snares around the glaives, most of whom couldn't warp much at all.
But Nyx could.
At least when he wasn't tied up fighting an Iron Giant.
"Arete! Go! Help Luche!" He could hear Luche's cries for backup over the comm, voice trying for calm and missing it by a mile for anyone who knew him. But every time Nyx tried to warp away, somehow the shade's club found him or his dagger, and he ended up pulling himself out of the sucking mud one more time. But he was always good at being distracting, right? He could at least get Arete to Luche and she would save him.
Nyx aimed at the Giant's shoulder, planning to be very distracting indeed, but before he could throw his kukri the club came out of nowhere again, right above him. Nyx barely shifted his gathered magic to the cold shell of a shield, which predictably crumbled quickly but kept enough of the force off of him that Nyx still had ribs to crack instead of becoming instant Nyx paste.
He sucked in a breath and scrambled in the mud next to him for his fallen kukri. He had to be ready to move when the club was lifted back up if he wanted to get to Luche. But he couldn't find it, where was it, where--
Nyx hardly noticed the club lifting, so consumed was he in the search for his kukri – wasn't this why he had a backup? He must have lost it earlier – but even he couldn't miss the shock of lightning crashing down almost at his feet.
"No!" he howled, scrambling to his feet, ignoring the fall of the Iron Giant behind him. "You were supposed to go to Luche!"
"I couldn't let you die!" Arete screamed back.
Better me than anyone else, he wanted to say, but they didn't have time for this, Luche didn't have time for this--
Nyx flung his kukri toward the center of camp and prayed.
He came out of the warp in the middle of chaos. Grenades were roving around the camp and going off at irregular intervals, flinging equipment, glaives, and the last of the refugees with force that Nyx knew in his bones was not survivable. The screams were almost louder than the explosions somehow, and Nyx stumbled his landing as he tried to focus. Luche's light hair should have been easy to see, but between the fire and the shades --
There he was. Luche looked up from the glaive he was hunched over and made eye contact with Nyx, then shifted his gaze to something beside Nyx as he opened his mouth to --
A sword sprouted from Luche's chest and he was lifted into the air in an arc of gold dust by an MT that was just there one moment where there had been no one. Nyx didn't even have time to scream before he was bowled over and jolted with static as another sword swooshed past him.
"You aren't allowed to die, too, Nyx! There are still--"
Right. There were still people that needed their help.
Arete's bulk was lifted off of him and Nyx could move again. The rest of the glaives were scrambling with what they had salvaged toward the rest of the group, half fleeing and half trying to form a rearguard. Nyx followed them with only one last glance toward where Luche's body was, or had been, but all he could see was flames.
"Incoming!" Crowe's voice crackled in his ears, and Nyx changed course without thinking. He glanced at the sky to see Dog, her goose, circling above where the mages must have moved to and warped there as fast as he could.
Nyx crested the top of the hill, and shields flared brilliantly in the night as a Cryonade swept through the mages' formation. The shields held strong as it passed – of course they did, Nyx shouldn't have doubted – then flickered as the mages switched to offense, hurling fireballs at the daemon as it returned, even larger than before. Nyx watched as if in slow motion as the mages' fire turned back on themselves as the shade exploded right in their midst, and then the screams returned as the ice flashed over to gas in an instant and boiled the mages alive in their own victory.
Crowe somehow locked eyes with Nyx, half her hair burned off, before the steam engulfed her, too.
Arete tried to stop him again, but Nyx raced forward as soon as he could see where to put his feet, the air still superheated around him as he waded into Ifrit's Cage itself. He wasn't going to leave Crowe behind, not if he could still help her. He wasn't losing another friend tonight, not if he could help it.
But he couldn't help it. When he finally found Crowe's scalded body, flushed red and almost indistinguishable from the others, all he could do was try to flip her over so she wasn't staring at the sky.
He was too late.
Cries for help filled his ears, from his earpiece and from the people fighting and dying everywhere he looked. Nyx tried to help – he tried so hard, but everywhere he went he was too late.
Too late for his rookies, who fell out of the sky in stasis and were easy pickings for the swarming MTs.
Too late for Pelna, who came back to secure the route and was crushed by another Iron Giant.
Too late for Helen, who fell behind, tangled with an MT, and didn't get clear before it exploded.
Too late for Libertus, crushed beneath a landslide.
Too late for anyone, and Nyx was left, kneeling in the mud, as the MTs closed in inexorably on the only thing still alive – Nyx, and Arete.
He had just been too late.
Like always.
When Nyx opened his eyes his whole world seemed to spin as his mind reoriented toward the land of the living.
Well, the land of the awake, at least.
Arete raised a bleary head over the edge of the bed, so Nyx made sure to roll out of the opposite side where he had half a chance of catching himself before he traded being flat on a bed – it wasn't his bed, and it wasn't a cot in the field or the barracks either, but that was all he could tell in the darkness – for being flat on the ground. He used the wall to help stand up the rest of the way, and then to brace himself when Arete made her way around the bed to very firmly headbutt him.
That had certainly been a dark pit of a nightmare.
He buried both of his hands in the thick fur around Arete's shoulders and ran through a quick check of his body. He was stiff and a little groggy, and if his hands were shaking he couldn't feel it against his daemon's warmth, so overall he was fine. At least the headache was gone.
Right. The headache. The one that got him banished from Luche's birthday prep into Crowe's closet of a bedroom. Nyx was abruptly grateful he hadn't tried to go stumbling for the door on his own, because Crowe's wrath for anything he might have knocked over was something to be feared worse than the headache.
And she was alive to deliver it, for Dog to nip at Arete's ankles like his namesake. They were just fine.
Nyx oriented himself and then edged carefully around the bed to the door, threading his usual line between prudence and expediency to get back to where he could check on the party. He could hear some sort of noise of people on the other side of the door but had he missed—
Luche jumped and stared at Nyx as he emerged into the main room of Libertus and Crowe's apartment, where the party was apparently still going on in full swing for as much attention as he could spare for it, most of his attention focused on the guest of honor as Luche's narrowing eyes slowly replaced his death stare in Nyx's mind. Lamprotes dropped from where she had been clinging to Luche's shoulder to circle around Arete, who half-heartedly mimed stepping on her as was tradition. Once the little orange monkey was clear, Nyx swept his cousin up in a hug, tapping their temples together as Luche shuffled around so his hastily-evacuated plate was clear enough to return the hug with one hand.
"Nyx?"
Nyx hummed but otherwise ignored the question, enjoying the solid weight of the living body in his arms, warm and here and not forever out of reach. Luche squirmed out of the hug before Nyx was quite ready to let go, but he didn't dodge the kiss that Nyx landed right above his ear so Nyx still counted it as a win. Luche had become somehow even more prickly after they'd gotten to Insomnia, and if Nyx didn't retain a few privileges from being his favorite cousin then he'd never have been allowed even that much.
Luche shoved Nyx down onto Libertus's well-worn couch with perhaps more force than was wise, given the wobble that followed, then wedged himself next to him on Nyx's left. Crowe threw herself down on his other side with another disconcerting wobble, but also a plate of snacks and cake that she shoved into Nyx's lap that earned her forgiveness.
"Feeling better?" she asked, raising an eyebrow at him. Nyx shrugged, careful not to dislodge either of them, so Crowe jostled the arm holding his plate with hers and started glaring around the room. She apparently found whatever she was looking for, judging by the series of exaggerated expressions she made, and so Nyx elected to ignore her and instead focus on ripping off a piece of the naan at the bottom of the pile on his plate, grateful when his stomach seemed to accept the offering.
Pelna appeared with a beer that Nyx shuffled to get a hand free to accept before Luche did it for him, taking a sip as tax then wedging it between their legs. Nyx just rolled his eyes and settled back further between Luche and Crowe – carefully, so that the couch didn't wobble again. He knew its secrets.
There were a few squawks in the other room before the daemon walk Libertus had insisted on installing filled with an entire host of the beasts, with Dog hissing at their heels. The gang settled on Libertus' bed in a pile around Arete, and only Libertus using Nyx's knee to lower himself to the ground clued Nyx in that he'd also been surrounded while he'd been distracted by their chaos.
Nyx should protest the coddling on what should have been Luche's evening – even though a voice that sounded a weird blend of Arete's and his mother's reminded him that Luche hated being the center of attention and probably appreciated the distraction – but it was chasing away the chill of the dream and Nyx wasn't actually a masochist. He let the warmth and the life around him, the cool beer and the extra-spicy dip slowly coax him back to reality, back to all the people he still hadn't failed yet. Even if he hadn't done a thing to earn it, he had been blessed with a third family somehow, and he was going to appreciate them for as long as he had them.
Even if he still drew the line at letting them pull him into karaoke.