The Songbird & the Heart of Stone (Crowns of Nyaxia, #3)

by Carissa Broadbent

For every lost soul who just needs someone to listen

i cry now

This is the tale of how a chosen one falls.

No one loves you more than someone who has no one else.

Or perhaps gods, like mortals, are simply mesmerized by their own damnation.

The magic came to her so easily. As if it burned straight from her heart itself.

This is the tale of how a chosen one falls. She does it screaming, clawing for her old life with broken fingernails. She does it slowly, over the course of decades. And in the end, she takes the whole forsaken world with her.

Shadowborn magic, I realized. The magic of minds and compulsion, illusion and shadow.

But the Shadowborn were like ghosts. They manipulated reality itself. They drank up the darkness like wine and relished the notes of fear within it.

It was the kind of beauty that made you certain that surely, someone had to have suffered for it.

One day, the whispers would make legends of Raihn and Oraya, too, and I looked forward to hearing them.

But I never ran away. Not even when I should.

Asar Voldari. The Wraith Warden.

I knew better than to be intimidated by myth. They were just distortions of the truth, and we were all more similar than we’d like to admit beneath.

I could imagine someone being very intimidated by him. Not me, I told myself. But other people. Other reasonable people.

Asar stood in the frame, blocking my view of the inside. He—unsurprisingly, from what I knew of him so far—looked irritated.

wasn’t looking at you in a lecherous way, I was looking at you in a curiosity-in-a-museum way. Which was worse?

“Are you horrified or excited?” he said drily. “I can’t tell.” Shamefully, I couldn’t quite tell, either.

“Not very holy of you.” “Can’t bring the light unless I know what the darkness looks like, Warden.”

I didn’t like how he looked at me. Like he could see it all.

Nothing was more deadly than a hurting person pushed to a breaking point.

“The dead crave the living. Let’s not rush the inevitable.”

Saescha was the wisest person I’d ever known. Maybe she saw a hint of what I’d become that day.

Men. They were the same everywhere.

pouring one out for you sister

She looked at him like he was a question answered. He looked at her like she was the only one worth asking.

Two souls saved didn’t make up for the ones I had damned.

“A connection, no matter how biological, is only worth the attention one gives it,”

“Ah.” Her lips brushed the crest of my ear. “He likes you. Even if he doesn’t know it yet.

“She is very interesting. I see why you enjoy her. Another attractive curiosity. But she only knows how to love things she can fix, and there is no fixing you, is there?”

“Or perhaps that’s why you would be so perfect for each other. A girl who can only love broken things, and a boy so broken he can only love what he cannot have. A perfect match.”

But above all, I felt her loneliness. And as it so often did, that won in the end.

I smell fate upon you, its voice echoed. But I also smell hunger.

“We all have ghosts in our pasts, Iliae. We can’t give them the power to define our futures, too.”

“Not all the dead are so easily put to rest.”

“It doesn’t make the love worth less,” I said quietly, “just because you can’t help her the way you wish you could.”

“Why are you looking at me like that, Dawndrinker?” It even surprised myself that the real answer was, I missed fixing things with you.

He likes you. Even if he doesn’t know it yet. But he will ruin you all the same.

He had said that Psyche would try to draw us in. It would offer us bait. Bait. We were each other’s bait.

In this moment, the boy made a vow: They could beat him, they could break him, they could hurl fists and ugly words at him, and he would endure it. But they would never take another precious thing away from this world ever again.

But through it all, his eyes met mine over his shoulder, just for a split second, and he looked at me as if the sight of me alive was a prayer answered.

And there was nothing more dangerous than a sin that felt right. Nothing.

Nothing felt safe about the way he looked at me just then.

“I would never deny you a mortal pleasure, Iliae.”

🫣

“In the name of the Mother, girl, he could not stand up after he saw you in that nightgown. Friends, she says.”

this had me laughing out loud

“My cold soul cares for little in this life or the next, but it cares deeply for Asar. And perhaps I could tell you that you should be careful about how much of yourself you sacrifice to your sun god, because once that man decides that he cares for you, he will never stop. Not ever. Your sacrifice will become his, and I fear that fractured stone heart of his cannot bear another blow.”

“You wrote this?” “Wrote is a strong word. I just…” I was too close to him to see him, but I felt his muscles shift as he shrugged. And then he said, after a moment, “I just played the notes that sounded like you.”

😭😭😭

I murmured, “It’s beautiful.” And he whispered, “Yes.”

Because this was what I was taught that love was—something you hurt for, something you bled for.

I had been hurting for so long that I had forgotten what it was like for something to feel good.

“I won’t let you die here because you’re too ashamed to live, Mische,”

“I’ll tell you what you’ll have if you lose the sun, Mische. You’ll have a soul gentler than any vampire’s I’ve ever known. You’ll have an incredible magic and the skill to wield it better than the bastard who gave it to you. You’ll have a soft heart and a sharp wit and the wisdom to know when to use one or the other. You’ll have countless inane questions and horrible taste in food and a penchant for making lost souls love you.”

my wee little heart