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.

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.

“Can’t bring the light unless I know what the darkness looks like, Warden.”

facts

“In the battles in the House of Night, Nyaxia has now witnessed her own husband’s remains defiled and used as weapons among her own followers. At the culmination of that same battle, she, too, witnessed a goddess of the White Pantheon act against her. She is staking her claim among human nations. She is hungry for power.” His lip curled in disgust. “Nyaxia’s madness has been growing since the moment she left the White Pantheon. Alas, now, she shatters. Just as I could not kill Alarus myself, she cannot resurrect him herself, either. So instead, she turns to her children to do this work for her. An irrational decision, but who can say why Nyaxia acts as she does?”

Nyaxia had always struck me as the most human, the most fallible, of the gods. Her story was one of all those imperfect mortal emotions—love, lust, grief, rage. She had been a young lesser goddess confined to a life of servitude. She’d broken out and found her freedom—found love—only to have it ripped away from her as punishment.

Still, that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. Nothing was more deadly than a hurting person pushed to a breaking point.

“One cannot kill what is not alive. Alarus’s resurrection provides a path to his true death. Indeed, it may be the only opportunity the White Pantheon will ever get to kill him permanently.”

“Nyaxia’s necromancer will need to travel through the five Sanctums of the Descent between the mortal world and the underworld. He will need to recover a relic from each, placed there by Alarus before his death. I could not tamper with my brother’s magics, but I did what I could to lock them away in anticipation of these very events. The necromancer will need the magic of the sun to claim them.”

ohhhhh shittttt

“Don’t you know what this place is, child?” Chandra said softly. More than a prison. Morthryn was a relic from another time, when this land was still the territory of Alarus, before vampires existed at all. Of course it was more than a place to let criminals rot, and of course its true nature would be kept from the other vampire Houses.

Even the oldest scriptures didn’t talk about Alarus much. He’d been dead for two thousand years, and after his death, Nyaxia had turned his territories into the vampire kingdoms. Every other god had acolytes to spread the word of their scriptures and practice their magic. But no one had worshipped Alarus for a long time, and that meant most of his mythos had been lost to time.

“You say that because hellfire didn’t rain down from the skies. But there are many ways to wage a war, Iliae. I know that better than most. I suspect the vampires your kind dismembered for their holy offerings knew it, too.”

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.

Asar, I now understood, was like me. Not because he was related to my maker, or because he wielded a magic that spoke so innately to mine. But because he, too, was a healer. He had devoted himself to fixing the broken things that no one else saw.

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

“That’s the trick, Asar. You’ve been my project from the start.”

stop why are these two so cute?

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.”

brb im crying

I had been hurting for so long that I had forgotten what it was like for something to feel good. And gods, it felt so good that it hurt. It reached past my scars, past my wounds, to the neglected version of myself that I’d long ago abandoned.

“Psyche primarily holds memories. Secrets holds emotions.”

“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.”

“I’m patient,” he murmured. “A man can’t rush worship.”

“I’d burn with you till the end of it all, Dawndrinker.”

“Can’t think of anyone better suited to master both the sun and the stars, Iliae.”

Was it her faith, so bright it blinded her? Was it her desperation, pushing her ever closer to the cliff? Was it his magic, drenching her in that honeyed haze? Or perhaps the truth is simpler. Perhaps mortals, like gods, are mesmerized by their own damnation. She took his hand.