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August 6 - August 12, 2025
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.
They said he could pick thoughts from your head like grapes from the vine and crush them just as easily. They said that he could enslave you without a single chain.
She was dangerous. The little razor blade no one saw coming because they were too busy looking at her husband’s sword.
“There is no light without darkness. There is no life without suffering.”
She looked at him like he was a question answered. He looked at her like she was the only one worth asking.
His brown eye seemed darker than ever here, endless black, like the oldest vampire blood. His scarred one shone like a stone freshly polished, galaxies of silver and green and gold in its depths. Every time I’d looked at Asar, that eye had always held a tempest. Now, it was the mists on a winter dawn. Quiet.
Above, there was no more sky, only endless layers of red rivers that layered over each other to a sea of ominous dark crimson. Smooth stone walls of bright white towered around us. Dots of red and black beaded on the porous surface. The blood pooled into countless ancient carvings that looked as organic as the veins in leaves.
“And then I realized, this is what it feels like to be Turned. You’re stuck between layers as the entire world changes. And you’re in the middle of it all, watching it happen, and yet none of it can touch you.”
A girl who can only love broken things, and a boy so broken he can only love what he cannot have. A perfect match.”
Be wary, mortals, of such deadly cravings,
I smell fate upon you, its voice echoed. But I also smell hunger.
“We are now closer to death than life.”
But it was too late. Asar shut the door against the tender parts of his grief and opened the door to his violent fury. He had made a vow once, a long time ago, and he would fulfill it.
This is what magic should be, a voice whispered. Easy. Like breathing.
He leaned down and tore the fabric with his teeth. I was so disoriented that I almost didn’t feel it when his lips brushed my skin with the movement. Almost.
“If anyone can melt a stone heart.”
“You seem like the type who likes… books.
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.”
“Because I know what it looks like to be so desperate for redemption, you would sacrifice anything.”
“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 was so sick of wanting. This isn’t what love should feel like. “Show me what it should feel like,” I whispered. The blade fell. My sentence was written. We crashed together into beautiful damnation.
“I’d burn with you till the end of it all, Dawndrinker.”
Sometimes they only see you for the first time when you force them to.
