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

by Carissa Broadbent

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.

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

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. When little human children in a country half a world away told scary stories at night, the vampires of the House of Shadow were the monsters that came to them in their nightmares. Sure, the Nightborn were intimidating, with the wings and the swords and all that battle prowess. The Bloodborn were frightening the way rabid wolves were, vicious and unpredictable. 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.

As a human, I’d loved the stories because I loved fantasies. And that’s what they had been to me: fantasies. Myths and legends.

Asar Voldari. The Wraith Warden. The stories seemed more befitting a myth than a man, even by the gruesome standards of vampire lore. They all ran together in my memory, grim tales of torture and spycraft, bloody tasks accomplished by bloodier means. Every king has someone to do their dirty work.

A cold, floral scent wafted over me, naggingly familiar but gone before I could place it.

He might have been handsome once—or perhaps beautiful would be a better word. His features had a powerful artistry to them. A finely angled jaw. Strong brows over intense near-black eyes. A chiseled nose with nostrils that flared slightly in interest as his gaze locked to mine. His hair, thick and dark, fell in waves over his forehead, a once-refined cut that had been long neglected. He was very tall, and broad-shouldered, the top button of his shirt undone to reveal muscles leading down to his chest. All of it free of wrinkles or marks of age, doused in that almost sickening vampire perfection. But that was where the perfection ended. In a lifetime of traveling, I’d never seen scars like these. They crawled over the left side of his face like thorny vines. They dug deep into his flesh, black and luminescent blue, as if whatever had made them had clawed past muscle and bone all the way down to his soul. They ran from beneath his collar, twining up the muscles of his throat, over his jaw, his cheekbone, his ear. And his left eye⁠— No pupil. No iris. A sea of silvery clouds that rolled in constant movement, emanating tendrils of smoky light.

Dawndrinker.

“Very well,” he said. “Take her. The underworld will be punishment enough.”

Morthryn. A prison created by the gods themselves, long before Obitraes was Obitraes, long before vampires existed at all. Each of the three vampire Houses guarded a site of great divine power. The House of Night held the Moon Palace and the Kejari tournament hosted within it, held every one hundred years in Nyaxia’s honor. The House of Blood had the barren fields where the god of death, Alarus, had been murdered and dismembered. And the House of Shadow had Morthryn. A place said to be cursed, even by vampire standards.

Follow, the dog insisted. And with a firm push from its bony snout, I stumbled through the arch—straight into the halls of Morthryn. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I stood in a long, winding hallway. The floor was mirrored, like the smooth surface of a still pond. If there was a ceiling, it was so high above us that it disappeared into ghostly mist. Balls of light hovered above us like little moons, casting silver and gold across ivory walls and golden columns, which curved and arched in a shape that was eerily reminiscent of ribs. Intricate carvings crawled up each one, quivering under the flickering light. Thorny vines cradling blood-tipped leaves encircled the columns, increasingly overgrown as they climbed and eventually disappeared into the mist. The walls were lined with arches like the one I’d just come through, though each was bricked over with stone. The door I’d just stepped through was now the same, framing a flat wall. I took a few amazed steps, taking it all in. The black ink floor rippled beneath each one, though my feet remained dry.

The roses were more plentiful here, trampling each other as they coiled up bookcases that stretched so high they disappeared into the silver fog above. A neglected fire languished near death in a grand fireplace to the left. Before it, a massive desk sat in foreboding watch, a faded, black velvet chair askew behind it. Open books and papers covered the mahogany surface, wet ink still gleaming on one sheet, as if someone had just stepped away mid-thought. Yet, even so, it was all meticulously neat—every piece of parchment aligned to the edge of the desk, every little trinket artfully arranged. But the shelves—gods, the artifacts⁠— I just kept turning and turning. Every time I considered stopping, I found something more to see. I’d spent decades in libraries across the human nations and beyond. But two minutes in here and I knew that this had to be one of the most impressive collections of magical relics that existed in the world. The shelves were divided into sections. Here, bones—a small horse skull with a twisted silver horn protruding from its forehead, a carefully reassembled skeletal hand with claws longer than its fingers, a lower jaw with jagged teeth that extended several razored inches. There, a series of glass flasks holding what I recognized as various types of blood arranged by color. The red of human, the black of vampire—then several types I didn’t recognize: gold, indigo, a strange silver that gave off waves of light. Then, weapons. A broken sword pinned to t...

The Wraith Warden. A title given to someone who had built their reputation on a mountain of dirty tasks.

“Alarus,” I choked out. “It’s Alarus. You’re going to resurrect the god of death.” Nyaxia’s deceased husband, who had been murdered by the White Pantheon—an execution led by Atroxus himself.

“We’ll need to travel through the five Sanctums of the Descent,” Asar told us while we walked. He was not out of breath, and I hated him for it. “Body, Breath, Psyche, Secrets, and Soul. To resurrect anyone else, it’s enough to merely bring together representations of each of the five elements of a mortal being. But we aren’t talking about a mortal.”

The membrane that separated the world of the living from the journey toward death. It was said to be lorded over by three guardians—the viper, the songbird, and the lioness.

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

“I began to hear things that no one else did,” he said quietly. “Cries that needed answering. The world is built atop the invisible, abandoned souls. They needed someone.” They needed someone. There was no mystical Turned connection that could make me feel Asar’s soul more deeply than I did in this moment.

“Death is not the same as failure,” Asar said.

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

“It’s a powerful gift,” he said softly. “To right a wrong.”

But it’s a strange cocktail, suffering and faith. A dangerous one that makes you think you can survive anything.

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

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

My breath hitched as his fingertips traced my clavicle, my shoulder, the swells and dips of my bicep. And gods, that touch—it was like his hands over the piano keys. His scars against mine. Mistakes against mistakes.

“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.”

It isn’t? I almost said. Because this was what I was taught that love was—something you hurt for, something you bled for. You give your god your life, your blood, your virgin body. You give your charges your devotion and never accept theirs. You give and give and give until you have stripped your soul bare. I should have told him, That’s faith. Don’t you understand?

“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.” I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. He leaned closer until his forehead touched mine. “And if you’ll take it, Mische Iliae, you will have me, too.”

He looked at me exactly as Malach had when I’d driven my sword through his chest. Like I had truly shocked him by existing beyond the bounds of what he thought I was. Sometimes they only see you for the first time when you force them to.

“Welcome to the underworld,” Vincent, dead King of the Nightborn, said to me. “I hear we have some work to do.”