Even when something has been taken beyond your sight.
Nyx comes alone, which means this isn’t a judgment. She sits across from me in the dark with her shadows curled around her, and she looks at me for a long time before she speaks, “Come home,” she says.
I don’t answer.
“You’re untethered,” she continues, and there’s nothing cruel in it, nothing sharp. Nyx reserves her edges for those who deserve them. This is just an observation. This is her being a sister. “Valeria is gone. You have no scion, no court, no anchor. Come back to the Coven. Come back where you belong.”
I look at my hands.
At the space where Valeria used to stand.
“No,” I say.
Nyx is quiet for a moment. In the centuries I have known her, I have learned to read her silences. This one is not offended, it is not impatient, it is genuinely, carefully curious.
“Why?”
And I open my mouth to give her the easy answer—I need time, I need space, I am not ready—but something stops me. Because none of those things are true, not quite, and Nyx has always been able to tell the difference between what I say and what I mean.
So I tell her the truth instead. “I’m looking for something.”
Her eyes don’t change, but her shadows stir. “What?”
“I don’t know.” The admission costs me something I don’t have a name for. “But this, what we are, what we have built, what we do, it isn’t enough. The Coven is everything it was made to be, and I am not questioning that. But it is...” I search for the word and land somewhere close, “… insular. We are six. We have always been six. We move through the world, we take from it, we govern it, we leave nothing behind except fear and the shape of our absence.” I pause. “I need more than that. I don’t know what more looks like. I don’t know if it exists. But I know I can’t find it inside what we already are.”
Nyx studies me for a long moment.
Her shadows stretch toward me and then pull back, the way they do when she is feeling something she has decided not to act on.
“You’ll come back,” she says finally. Not a threat, not even a prediction, it’s something softer than both.
“Maybe,” I say.
She stands, and the darkness moves with her. At the door, she pauses without turning around. “Whatever it is you’re looking for, Draven.” Her voice carries that precise, careful weight she gives to things that matter. “I hope you find it before the looking hollows you out.”
Then she is gone.
And I am alone with the silence and the question I cannot answer.
What are you looking for?
I don’t know.
But this isn’t it.
***
Varro appears at my door three nights after Nyx leaves, that same gray-templed stillness about him, and he doesn’t explain himself or ask permission. He simply takes up a position at my side like he has already decided and is waiting for me to catch up.
“I don’t need a wolf,” I tell him.
“No,” he agrees. “But you’ll have one anyway.”
I don’t argue.
I’m not surewhyI don’t argue.
Maybe because he is the first living thing in centuries that has looked at me and seen something worth the trouble, or maybe because the space where Valeria stood is still too fresh and too quiet, and having something warm and breathing nearby is easier than I want to admit.
