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

by Carissa Broadbent

This is the tale of how a chosen one falls.

There was nothing special about the girl when the sun god chose her. He had his pick.

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.

She trailed behind her sister, eyes bigger, hair wilder, staring up at the sky no matter how many times the priests hissed at her to lower her lashes in supplication. She listened to her sister’s tearful offerings and watched the priests’ disapproving stares, and though she was only eight years old, she understood what would happen after this. She had nothing to offer. And what would a god want from her, anyway?

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

I see you, little one. Reach out your hand. 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.

Vampires were never quite prepared for it—the sun. They definitely never expected it to come from me, a vampire girl with big eyes and a bigger smile. I could always get so far on that.

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

What they really, really love, more than anything else, are souls. They’ll eat your soul in one big gulp. And they especially love the souls of little six-year-old girls with curly hair!”

I moaned and thrashed, instinct more than anything, because I knew what my bare arms would reveal—years’ worth of burn scars, the natural punishment of a vampire wielding the magic of the sun. The marks of my failure.

“Father,” the Shadowborn princess said, voice smooth and yet booming through the massive room. “My gift for you on the auspicious night of your birth. I present to you, the murderer of your son.” The King of the House of Shadow leveled his gaze at me, a thousand-year-lifetime’s worth of hatred in their depths.

Vincent, Oraya’s father and former King of the Nightborn, had been the drawn blade, a killer cold as the night itself. Dante, King of the Bloodborn, had been the beast larger than life, more teeth and claws than man. One day, the whispers would make legends of Raihn and Oraya, too, and I looked forward to hearing them.

Raoul, King of the House of Shadow, might have dwarfed them all. He was the oldest of the vampire kings, and the one who had managed to cling to power the longest. Like most vampire rulers, he’d plucked his crown off the severed head of his predecessor, his mother, before even bothering to wipe his blade.

I was a ploy to gain her father’s favor. Something that, I guessed, she’d probably never been able to attain. Gods take me. I’d die a pawn in someone else’s family drama.

Raoul was not well. And he was so ancient, so powerful, that losing control of his faculties meant losing control of his magic. That wasn’t just an embarrassment to the House of Shadow. It was deadly. The King of the House of Shadow was a massive liability.

Behind me, Egrette laughed. “Avenging our brother, a waste?” Our brother? I searched my mind for what I knew of the House of Shadow’s royal family. Raoul had two legitimate children—or he did, at least, before I’d killed one of them. But I’d heard stories of a third one, too. Old stories, centuries past. A bastard son who had once led Raoul’s fleets of spies, before he…

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.

If this was my savior, maybe death was the real mercy.

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 this last year, now that Atroxus denied me my magic altogether, had been worst of all. The scars now ran all the way from my wrist to above my elbow. Some still wept pus and black blood, fresh from my attempts at calling the flame in my cell. No skin was untouched.

“This is a symbol of the Order of the Destined Dawn,”

The Dark Mother? Nyaxia? Nyaxia was the goddess of vampires. What mission could Nyaxia possibly have given him? What mission could she possibly have given him that required the magic of Atroxus? It couldn’t be anything good.

My light, I prayed. I know I have failed you. I know I do not deserve you. But I call upon you now, one last time. Please. Silence. Of course, silence. Silence like I’d heard every endless night for the last year. My eyes burned. My palm was empty. But then, the voice. It sounded exactly as it had that day on the Citadel steps.

I see you, a’mara. Open your hand.

I was that little girl all over again, saved by her god.

So foolish, she crooned. You could have had a clean death. Instead, you’ve volunteered yourself for something far worse.

The Wraith Warden. I’d met my fair share of legends. I was a chosen one of the sun god himself, after all. 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 think we’re going to Morthryn.” The name sat heavy on my tongue. 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.

Not yet, a’mara. This is not the time. Wait for me.

Raihn had often teased me for taking mythology so seriously. To him, the Moon Palace was a fancy house. Morthryn was a fancy prison. The Kejari was a tournament full of magic tricks. A prophecy was just a nice poem that seemed reasonable in hindsight. The gods were angry and fickle, and we couldn’t attribute their actions to more than whim. I understood why he felt that way. But I also knew he was wrong.

Gods, I’d missed dogs. There weren’t many domestic animals in Obitraes. Vampires didn’t usually like to keep pets, unless they could provide some useful function like tearing the faces off their enemies. Maybe it was a sign of dog-starved desperation that I thought this one still looked a bit cute, skull face and all.

I was glad he cut me off because what was I going to say? I wasn’t looking at you in a lecherous way, I was looking at you in a curiosity-in-a-museum way. Which was worse?

“I have been the warden of Morthryn for more than a century. I’ve dealt with better liars, more charming manipulators, and more beautiful women than you. So don’t bother.” “More beautiful women?” I repeated. I wasn’t sure if that was an insult or a backward kind of compliment.

“Those are all that remain of one of the oldest Shadowborn bloodlines after some Dawndrinker missionaries were done showing them the path of the light.”

For a strange, disorienting moment, an innate connection bonded us—I could feel his emotions, just as tangled and nonsensical as mine, curiosity and anger and determination and fear.

“It was you. The night before your father’s party. You helped me.”

All this to say, necromancy was forbidden. Very, very forbidden. A rare point of agreement between both humans and vampires. But a tiny part of myself was also fascinated by it.

“This hardly counts,” Asar said, exasperated. “She’s been dead for a few hours. If you die out there, I can’t help you.” Out there. The underworld.

“Alarus,” I choked out. “It’s Alarus. You’re going to resurrect the god of death.”

“No, Dawndrinker,” he said. “We are going to resurrect the god of death.”

A’mara. The tongue of the gods, for my bride of the sun. My title as one of Atroxus’s rare chosen ones. A word I hadn’t heard in so long.

A silent satisfaction settled over him, as if those marks—proof I was willing to bleed for my faith—were enough to satisfy him.

“No. He is far from alive. But my siblings and I could not snuff out his soul forever, either.

She had built a kingdom on top of her loss, but that didn’t do a thing to heal the wound.

A resurrection could rip apart the world.

“You came to me with this because—because you want me to sabotage it,” I said. “You need me to make sure his mission fails.” But Atroxus shook his head. “No. You must ensure he succeeds.” My brows leapt. “Succeeds?” “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.”

I will kill a god.

“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 had promised myself to him that morning. I’d promised him my body, my love, my loyalty. I had promised him both my life and my death. And I had promised him that I would devote my eternal soul to bringing the light to the edges of the horizon, no matter what it took.