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

by Carissa Broadbent

For every lost soul who just needs someone to listen

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.

No one in the world was better at hugs than Raihn.

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

“Do. Not. Touch. Her.”

“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.”

“Do you think that I don’t know what darkness is?” I said. “Why? Because I smile too much? Because I talk too much? It’s my choice to be the way that I am. A choice that I make even when it’s hard. That doesn’t make me weak, Asar.”

“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.”

“You asked me what love should feel like,” he murmured. I tensed as his lips brushed my inner thigh. “It should make you think of nothing else.”

Did I look like he did? So shattered? Like all his defenses had broken apart, leaving the tender vulnerability of our want exposed and raw.

“Do you think that was really intended for her? The arrow?” Even as I asked it, I knew the answer. I just wanted to rail against it. Nyaxia had always struck me as so lonely. I didn’t want to think that her one love had been tainted by this hidden betrayal. “Some believe that the gods’ power is communal,” Asar said. “Perhaps they were afraid that the addition of a thirteenth major god would dilute their strength. Or maybe they were just threatened by her because she wouldn’t do what she was told. She was a runaway, after all.”

“People hurt the ones they love all the time. It might be the one thing we have in common with the gods.”

No, I would never regret Asar. But I knew that one day, he would regret me.

“Sometimes someone else just needs to feel it with you. Like when you’re a child with a scraped knee.

A horrible truth settled over me—that this was always intended to be the end. Salvation paid for with the blood of the unsalvageable souls. A dawn drenched in sin.

I remembered the sunlight feeling like hope. But this just felt like damnation.

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.

I was going to die, and it would be by the hand of the god I had sworn my soul to. “I made you,” he snarled. “You end with me.” “Then let me burn,” I said. And I yanked that arrow from his throat, and this time, I plunged it straight into his chest.

She leaned down and picked up the arrow, still intact. I sensed her pain as she observed it. Her betrayal. It had been her husband’s weapon, after all, originally intended for her heart. And it was a dangerous thing to offer a broken heart blood instead of love. Nyaxia’s tears fell, blood-red, to her enemy’s ashes. She cradled the arrow to her chest. Then she looked up at the blackened sky, endless ink from which endless possibilities could be written.

And I saw it, the moment that Nyaxia decided to discard love in favor of power. The moment she decided that if she could not have her husband, she would have an empire.

Asar’s voice was warm against my ear. “Do not be afraid of death, Dawndrinker. Make death afraid of you.” I watched the bird burn, and I let myself rise.

Footsteps approached. Someone knelt next to me. I turned my head to see a man peering down, brow furrowed. He swept moon-silver eyes over me and pushed a strand of blond hair from his face. “Get up,” he said. He didn’t bother to introduce himself. But maybe he knew he didn’t have to. I recognized him. I took his hand, and he helped me stand. “Welcome to the underworld,” Vincent, dead King of the Nightborn, said to me. “I hear we have some work to do.”

Oh. My.God.

Because while I don’t remember their betrayal of Alarus, I do remember what they looked like standing over Mische’s broken body.