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.

One day, the whispers would make legends of Raihn and Oraya, too, and I looked forward to hearing them.

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.

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

I didn’t care about my redemption. But gods, I would give anything for theirs. To make it all worth something in the end. To finish the holy mission that I’d started with them.

“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.

“Or perhaps that’s why you would be so perfect for each other. A girl who can only love broken things, and a boy so broken he can only love what he cannot have. A perfect match.”

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

She had given her life to spreading the light. She had reached out to countless broken souls. She’d seen time and time again that no matter how dark a person’s past, a little flicker of light still shone in every single heart.

Stay in this moment, before you have that little crack of doubt. Because the doubt would lead to the desperation, and the desperation would lead to the mistakes, and the mistakes would lead to my downfall.

How exciting, she said. The songbird has talons. But what a price she will pay for them.

“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 knew what it felt like for your past to mark your flesh, a wound that would never heal, a wrong that you could never right.

And he was smiling in a way that made the entire world stop, a smile that reminded me of the way the sun looked when it crested the horizon the first time I saw it at the Citadel, and I had thought, I am home. I am home.

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.”

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’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.”

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.

“You’re challenging my self-control, Dawndrinker,” he growled. My lips curled beneath his kiss. “Good. You’re too restrained.” Let him unravel. Let me see what he looked like in the ruins of all that self-control. Let him drown my grief and my sadness beneath the exquisite sin of his touch.

“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.” Higher, where the skin was so sensitive that I jolted when he dragged his teeth over it. “It should make you see stars.”

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

“Fall with me,” I whispered. Because I was oddly terrified to lose control—terrified to do it alone. He exhaled against me, our pace rising to a desperate crescendo. “I’d burn with you till the end of it all, Dawndrinker.”

I would always be with him, I knew in this moment. I would never be able to leave.

“Exhausted with pleasure,” he murmured. “I keep my promises.”

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

“No. Not always. Sometimes people just love each other and do right by each other and always make up for it when they make mistakes. Sometimes people are just happy together for the rest of their lives. Sometimes—sometimes it all works.”

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

“I thought you liked adventures. This is the greatest one you’ll ever take. Besides.” He brushed a stray hair behind my ear. “Can’t think of anyone better suited to master both the sun and the stars, Iliae.”

Her recklessness was not borne of foolishness or stupidity. Always, it was borne of love.

I lifted my chin to that rising orb of light as it drenched me. The destined dawn. 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.

Sometimes they only see you for the first time when you force them to.

The death of one woman, one woman who was better than all of them, who had given everything until she had nothing left, was worth more than all of it.

But I am not the god of any of those things. I have only one gift to lay at her feet. And so, I wait.