As I got back to my flat late in the night, verging towards early in the morning it was to the usual papers and things tapped to it covered in hateful speech towards people of the middle east, claims of my involvement with Islamic hate groups along with all sorts of various other things: I keep a recycle can right past my front door that I can easily throw all of those into when I stepped into my flat, same with the shoe rack on the other side of the hallway. I sighed as I leaned my back against the door after I flicked the locks closed as I looked up towards the ceiling, the wear and tear of working retail making my back already softly ache form sporadic heavy lifting between spending the majority of the time hunched over doing paperwork.

I got myself a cup of tea going as I flicked my finger causing the thick curtains to open as it was so late that the sunlight didn’t bother me, I just have never been too keen to extensive sunlight exposure. Dad is a deity whose realm is underground, so…I’m accustomed to that almost subterranean way of living. I softly wrung my hands as I paced around my room, my thoughts going a mile a second because of how I was pacing and how my trains of thought were going so out of line they were not only derailing, but derailing off the edge of a cliff. I just…couldn’t focus on anything, even when I had my hands folded around a mug of steaming tea of mint and other calming herbs and spices, my feet wouldn’t stop bouncing and my hands wouldn’t stop trembling my thoughts were so…plaguing my mind. As I rifled through my pocket to put a cigarette to my lips and lit it the familiar sound of my neighbor filled my ears.

“Stay away from that door!” the familiar voice of my neighbor was able to be heard through my door and from across the hall before I heard a slam of either a hand on the wall or a table top, “I told you that the person in there is a disgusting --!“ they shouted as they referred to me with a very, very intense slur for a middle eastern person that combines another name for a massive pile of sand and the shortened version of the word racoon which is also used as a slur for people of African descent. I rolled my eyes as I heard that phrase echo across the hall. “He is a terrorist pig who wants to harm everything there is about being American: he is not white or Christian…you cannot get within five feet of that door!” they added.

“Poor kids” I said quietly as I looked down towards my tea, I had contemplated calling CPS or the police because of them, I have before, but they immediately started pounding away at my door about how they knew I had called and said that if I even thought about calling again that I could expect the police at my doorstep.

The feather glimmering against my chest in the low light seemed to shift and change color as the lights outside were caught in the snowy colored stone, almost as if the stone itself was trying to tell me something, though I don’t know what: Dad refuses to make contact with any other pantheon like the others should also follow, but alas…all of them as intermingled into one giant divine clusterfuck. As a Egyptian demigod I should only stick to my pantheon, but…Cian is not a being of the Egyptian pantheon, nor is the problem revolving around him, that lies solely in the hands of the Judeo-Christian pantheon.

I flipped back open that compendium of demons as I sat on the couch, my tea a bit off to the side to avoid spilling it onto the pages, done that more times than I would care to admit, also ruined a few rugs like that too. The pages about Kálmán were the same as when I read them prior, but there was something else I hadn’t noticed, along one of the pages was a bar of text not in the browning ink as the rest of the tome, but a deep, glimmering purple, sideways along the margin of the page where that King of Sleet and Snow was first mentioned, it was…simply a page number. It was far in the back of the book where a good third of the book had been blank, but as I turned to that page, newer looking text glimmered into view across the page, shifting in gold before mottling purples then black as they set themselves into their places forming the text, magic seemed to shift and churn across the opposite page forming a different looking lithographic picture: depicting a man in these massive flowing robes, caught in a maelstrom storm around him: icicles the size of people floating around him in rings, snowflakes the size of dinnerplates, holly and pine needles making a crown around his head, eyes depicted glowing, though without color like the rest, his skin nearly looked blackened with frost bite in areas and others nearly looked to be encased in ice as black as midnight. He was stood on what appeared to be a very, very finely pointed mountain peak, his robes flowing in such a swirl of fabric around him that his bare legs and feet could be seen bedecked in jewels, this storm cloud of hair floating behind him in these pencil thin kinky curls of the blackest black ink to ever exist. Freeform shapes of that same bottomless black seemed to collect in the corners of the photo like darkness itself was bent to his will, everywhere around him was this flurry of razor shape shards of ice, sleet and snow, behind him raged the blizzard of a century with lightning cracking over both shoulders looking like broken skeletal wings, only a thin sliver of sky past visible showing only a crescent moon against the pitch black sky, covering the mountain at his feet were…bodies; too many to count there were piled up so thickly, some however only appeared to be asleep by their posture and lack of ice growth across them, whereas others were full ice mummification like you see on Everest. The biggest confusion about the picture was however…this long pendant hanging off his throat, the robes hung low off his shoulders and arms nearly leaving him bare-chested as well, but a thin chain hung down his chest adorned with a…nautilus shell.

“Who…is he?” I asked myself before glancing over at the page as the last text swirled to form the title across the page’s top…Nyx.