Page 213 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

“How are you getting around the castle grounds?”

“It’s nice in here,” she said while pulling Snow’s jewellery off of her. “Warm. The food is good, better than what Eren used to cook for us. Nia also brought me some Olympian snacks to keep in my room.”

“Snow struggled in the beginning,” I explained. “Knowing who she was surrounded with.”

Her fingers halted on Snow’s hair piece. “I…I didn’t see much that night, not as much as she might have. The hall was set on fire before I saw any Adriatian soldier. And then Aryan showed up. I guess my evil is not everyone’s evil. Your people don't bother me.” After we tucked Snow in bed, she sat on the ground, watching her sister sleep. “She never slept like this. So peaceful.”

“She is tired, having to deal with so much in Olympia with Silas and the Fogling all over the cities and here, too.” We’d been called four nights in a row at Highwall, and we’d spent the rest of those nights waiting and ensuring whatever disturbing scent the Canes had picked up were not Silas’s beasts. Silas was lurking nearby, and Snow swore she could hear his…rattle nearby. And I never doubted her.

“And I think,” Thora said, fully sitting on the floor and running a hand through her sister’s hair. “That she feels safe. I’ve seen her tired plenty of times, exhaust kept her even more awake.”

Safe. Had Snow truly ever felt safe in her nights here?

She stood and blew off a candle and then another before I stopped her. “She doesn’t like the dark, Thora.”

The little sister blinked at me, brows pulling to a frown of realisation. “Will you always love her like this?” she whispered, blinking the glaze of her eyes back. “Even when it is time for her to come after you?”

“Always.”

Snow had woken a couple hours later and had sat along with Atlas, Thora and I in my private library, studying Eamon’s Book of Dreams. She had reached the last quarter of it and was struggling to keep her nerves grounded and not cross the Otherworld to chase the man and squeeze the life out of him over and over again.

“Love,” I said, putting a hand over the page she was reading. “Leave it. We don’t need to find out about Aurora anymore.”

She took my hand and put it on her thigh, lacing my fingers with hers. “I want to know what her flaw was. What stayed with her in that tower. What we found in Olympia was useless. How could my ancestors have defeated her, a guardian, without knowing how to fight her? There has to be something.”

Her curiosity was a beast that fed on her anxiousness. The more she knew, the more uneasy it made her.

Thora raised her head from one of the colourful pages of a Demon Grimoire illustrated with all of the beasts of Golgotha that an ancient Adriatian scholar had observed in his studies on the Dissiri creatures. I was convinced Silas’s beast was not of Caligo and the only way to prove it was by cancelling out other dark creatures. And the young Skygard had a brain that worked at the speed of light. She’d compared half of it already to the sketches Magnus and Moriko had provided for us. “You said the piece reacted to you when you touched it.”

“No,” I said, cutting whatever the young one was suggesting.

“Finish, Rora,” Snow said, smacking Eamon’s diary shut.

The younger sister glanced between her and I. “Perhaps not.”

“Wise girl,” I said, going back to my research on the Ater beasts that the 97th Grand Maiden had created using humans and Caligo beast blood. Any attempt to find any loophole on Obitus Law had failed so now I was back to studying any form of mutation in Numen that could have mimicked the beasts with a little bit of craft manipulation. Though the 97th Grand Maiden had been a psychopath, she’d created a revolution within the community of Potioners. More dared experiment with dangerous and unknown substances. But Melanthe was a Summoner so that complicated my research. “What are the chances that Melanthe’s sister might have created a potion to create her sister a beast?”

“Slim,” Visha said, strutting in along with Oryn. “Aradia can fix you a nice little potion for your headache, but that's it. And besides, I’ve been keeping an eye on her for years after Melanthe died.”

Oryn glanced over the journal I was reading. “If a Potioner had made the beast, its essence would be of dark magic not made from dark magic. No Crafter is that good, my king.”

“Visha,” Snow said, trailing a finger over the table. “Could we establish a tether between the sceptre and I?”

“Love,” I warned, and the woman turned, blinking her lashes all innocence. “Not only is it too dangerous, but we could trigger the guardian.”

“Actually,” Visha said, and I sent a scathing look to her. “Never mind.”

From the look on Snow’s face, she was not going to let this go.

“This…thing,” Thora said carefully, running her fingers over the sketch. “There is something strange with it.”

Snow leaned over to steal a glance. “It’s the eyes, isn't it?” Of course she had doubted something. Nothing missed her sharp eye. Nothing. The more details something had, the better she remembered.

Thora nodded and pulled a much smaller book from under the Book of Demons and pointed to a few creatures we often had seen in history books from the Ater battles. “The Ater battle monsters’ eyes, the Caligo beasts drawn from the Crafters, Eudemons and even few of Dyurin’s creations, they all had unusual eyes. Uncle Lys used to often say that our eyes were what made us most recognisable from other creatures, they were a gate—a gate to the human soul, and much could be read from eyes alone. Gods made sure no human could be able to conceal such a gate, so no magic, earthly, divine or dark could change them. But Demir’s eyes in his beast form are human, too human even.”

“Would defeat all of our theories that he belongs from Caligo or Dissiri,” Oryn said. “Well thought, Princess.”

“At least then we had some sort of answer,” Snow said, slouching in her chair and narrowing her eyes on a wall. “Don’t you all think that this beast and the sceptre are fitting a little two perfectly with one another, like a key to lock. Melanthe is using his blood on the trace crafts, she's drinking his blood, too, Demir is also on its own collecting these pieces like he knows how. In Hanai, it was clear it was the first attempt at retrieving it as it was in Solarya. It took two of us, an Elding and an Obscur, to go through it. We were lucky I could call my magic inside the veils and that Kilian can turn air to ash.”