Skies and Ashes - A Grishaverse/Red Queen Crossover

The Library

A/N: I didn't mention this in the note to chapter one, but they language they speak is Ravkan (the Nortan tongue is a derivative of the Shu-Han proto language). Maven is actually quite skilled with languages, and while Nikolai knows how to communicate in many tongues, I think Maven would be the more elaborate speaker of the foreign language.

Nikolai POV

My guards already knew what to do – to keep their distance while they did their job, so I could feel almost private. Fortunately, no one else was in the library of Norta's capital at this hour in the early evening. I walked along the shelves made of dark, lacquered wood, their tops showing off elaborate carvings. The setting sun cast its reddish light on the rich hall, falling on the wood and walls painted with warm ochre stripes.

I relished more the cool temperature in here than the architecture and the hosted books protected by the Grisha craft maintaining the coolness. The climate in Norta was generally humid and warm, especially now since the rain season had started, and the weather didn't need long to make me uncomfortable. Extreme climates ached me, only that "extreme" was becoming a more and more loose term. The heaviness of my bones, the cramping muscles, the itching skin – they all came at me so often there was hardly a point in avoiding its triggers. Nor did I want to, if it meant giving up the skies and seas and my way of handling politics. Even when they pained me, I needed them, because they reminded me of who I was. So I'd decided to try my best to live with the aches.

But after a few minutes, even the controlled climate lost its soothing effect and suddenly, I began to feel too cool, and a harmless shiver became the harbinger of the more severe and familiar symptoms crawling beneath my skin.

I moaned. Not now, even though now was better than another time. I pulled off the gloves and let my fingers glide over shelves and the leather- and paper-spines of the tomes as I searched for a place to recline in. A glance behind me and I saw one of my guards approaching, sensing the change in my demeanour.

So awfully competent, aren't you?

I passed seat after seat, table after table. I didn't want to give in so early, but I also disliked most of the chairs in the colours of flames which were made of ostentatiously stuffed and embroidered velvet, itching and hard. They'd only give me more sensory issues.

Down the corridors, I could see a set of chairs in a different colouring, offering me slight hopes. And indeed – there were two soft and brown and cozy leather armchairs, next to a table decorated with an inlaid chessboard and engraved flames, over which stacks of books and papers were piled.

I sunk into the armchair and sighed. I knew how much this rest, just a few minutes of it, would help. I still felt the itches and shivers on and under my skin, but I had to accept that. The weariness, the strangeness, were what really terrified me. I thought my own specific ailments were the reason I usually preferred Genya to accompany me on journeys, even over skies and seas. She knew how to treat my kind of wounds and scars, enduring some of them herself. It was easy to trust her with them, despite her previous machinations.

But it wasn't the same. As severe as her scars were, in the end, there remained on the surface. She couldn't relate to being a stranger in your own body, down to your blood and bones, to wake up and wonder who you'd see on the mirror, and if your voice was still there or if you could only scream in your own head.

Which was probably a cruel way to think of it, as if a woman with a maimed face didn't have moments of doubt s about the person in the mirror.

I leaned back further and closed my eyes, having given up any interest in the books on the table. It was deceptively relaxing, but the nightmares and scars wouldn't go away, and likely, I'd still feel weary when I got up. Reprieve never lasted, even when a warm beam of sunlight fell on my cheek. I couldn't not think of Alina, and how the war against the Darkling had left us, her without her Grisha powers, me scarred and sickly, both of us haunted my memories of what we lost and couldn't have been.