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

by Carissa Broadbent

It always begins like this. In times of great darkness, humans crawl to light like flies to the gleaming silver of a spider’s silk. These are the souls that gods feast upon. No one loves you more than someone who has no one else.

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.

Our binding ceremony was more about faith than love, the night after it more of a physical offering than a lovemaking session.

WHAT

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

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

Stay in this moment, before he opens you up and takes you like another meaningless offering, before he leaves you alone in a room of gold, staring at the dress he ripped off you and discarded. Stay in this moment, before you have that little crack of doubt. Because the doubt would lead to the desperation, and the desperation would lead to the mistakes, and the mistakes would lead to my downfall.

“If anyone can melt a stone heart.”

“I don’t comment on décolletage unless invited,” he said coolly. “Men today!” Esme sighed,

And then he said, after a moment, “I just played the notes that sounded like you.”

“It is an injustice, Mische, that this is what you got when you asked for love,” he murmured. “This isn’t what love should feel like.”

I’d drunk his blood and he’d drunk mine.

Okay, but like this wouldn't work though?

Pushed them open, as he lowered himself to kneel at the altar.

WOOHOO

Two sinners on the edge of something we both knew would change everything, here upon an altar of all that had destroyed us.

I started to scream for Asar, but she lowered her mouth to mine, plunging back into my past.

Homoerotic

And I drove the arrow into Atroxus’s throat.

HUZZAH

If I were the god of the sun, I would have given her endless dawns and warm hearths. If I were the god of the sea, I would have given her cool rains on hot nights and currents that always brought her home. If I were the god of vitality, I would have given her sweet fruit and spring flowers. I would have given her anything, everything, because that was what she deserved—every single thing she had loved, fully and completely, about mortality.