Page 54 of The Demon Tide

Always, in the center of everything, Love.

As I read, something clicked in me. Something that resonates with this age-old religion, bone-deep. Something that helps me to mourn without becoming lost to it.

It was painful, when almost all the Noi’khin left Vo’s temple. Excruciatingly painful to be rejected in this lifeline that’s been thrown to me. But Wyn Juun welcomed me, and it was enough to dampen the storm inside me and enable me to sit down and take the prayer beads Wyn Juun gave to me in hand. To begin committing to memory the prayers associated with each manifestation of Vo.

These unfamiliar, beautiful prayers awaken something in my heart, even as a storm wreaks havoc inside me. I can feel Vo in this room, feeding strength into me, calming the storm.

Feeding love into me.

I dive into the scripture of the Eastern Realm like I’m a starving man whose soul is finally being nourished. Because there’s nothing in this faith but a door flung open. And there’s nothing in it that casts me out.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

NOI’KHINGARDNER

Vothendrile Xanthile

The Wyvernguard

North Wyvernguard Island, Noilaan

Eastern Realm

Sixth Month

Trystan is changing.

He gets up before dawn to meditate with Minyl and Ru Sol. And then, after the dawn service, he spends time speaking privately with Wyn Juun, the old priest embracing Trystan paternally before he leaves and gifting him with new books on the Vo faith. Books that I groaned over having to recite as a child. Fidgeting through meditation. Eager for the service to be over to get to the gathering afterward and its profusion of food.

It fills me with an inexplicable yearning, how Trystan is finding, in my own religion, something that grounds him so powerfully. Because I feel like I’m coming unmoored.

The dreams won’t go away.

Every night, I see the child, crying over her dead mother. And in the dreams, Vo’s Ahxhil birds are everywhere, perched on the edges of the boat and filled with a mourning I feel straight through my heart. They look up as one and set their eyes on me.

I wake up crackling with fitful lightning and wondering how many more dead mothers there are to come. How many more motherless children.

“I’m to meet with Ung Li,” Trystan informs me a few days later, his expression remote.

It’s a nightmare, I want to confide in him.What’s happening just outside our borders...it shouldn’t be happening. We need to help the people fleeing here. My family is wrong to want to shut them out.

I was wrong.

Trystan, I was wrong, and I’m lost in confusion. Minyl was right. We can’t wall ourselves off from the Western Realm and pretend it’s not there.

But I say none of it, because I can sense that he needs to keep himself tethered firmly away from me.

So, instead, I let the lightning inside me spit and churn and consume me.

“I’m lifting your guard after Xishlon,” Ung Li states succinctly from behind her Wyvernguard tower chamber’s desk.

Both Trystan’s power and mine ignite with surprise, my lightning aura crackling outward all over my skin.

It takes Trystan a moment to find his voice. “Does that mean...”

“I’ll be granting you the same privileges as other apprentices,” she says. “Privileges with the same restrictions, of course. And I’m granting you more extensive use of your wand.”

Tears sting my eyes as I realize what this will mean for Trystan. I turn and take in his stunned expression.

---