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August 19 - September 10, 2025
ASAR THE GOD OF DEATH
oh
The god stared one more time down at it. At the woman who reached for him. But such were the concerns of mortals, and he was not one of those anymore. He turned away.
But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking about the love of my life, and that heart I had so treasured falling into the sea.
“The underworld is not the territory of the gods,” he said. “It is the kingdom of the dead. And the dead have chosen you.”
“I won’t pretend that I believed much of it, in life. All this talk of fate. But even I know that there is power in this place. The kingdom that Alarus built. It does not forget. And it has chosen you.”
He lowered his gaze to the castle, and there, he saw a winged couple standing, watching Nyaxia. The woman turned her gaze to him. Her brow furrowed. He understood that she was confused. Perhaps in another life he’d known her. But he didn’t now.
“That intimidates you, cousin. Good. Fear me. The dead outnumber the living. The only army that grows with every loss.”
I wasn’t sure anymore what I was—human, vampire, wraith, living or dead. Did it matter? I was Mische, I decided. That was all I could be.
The dead sang me a tune I now knew so well, and I followed it over plains and mountains and rivers and forests, all dead and withered.
She was more dead now than she had been when I found her body. So much further from the woman I’d loved.
Sometimes, it was easier to look away from the most painful parts of our past. But I pushed the flap aside and stepped inside.
Even in his greatest sanctuary, he could not escape his greatest prison.
“If I leave,” the boy said carefully, “I will make many mistakes.” “Probably,” I agreed. “But you can still do a lot of good. Don’t you think?”
“You will make mistakes,” I murmured. “And I will love you anyway.”
“Then we’ll try again. Together.” I held out my hand. “I will never promise you, Asar, that it won’t hurt, because it will. I will never promise you that we won’t fail, because we could. And that terrifies me, too. But it’s in that fear that we hold our greatest strength. We need yours, now.”
I wasn’t ready. But I stepped into the darkness, anyway.
The heart was angriest of all. It said nothing, just throbbed against his rib cage. Only the wound beneath it was pleased. Hopeful.
He inhaled the fleeting scent of burnt spice. A fierce hunger pang ripped through him. A longing for something that had never existed, like the pain of a phantom limb.
A million memories of a stranger surged through him, then abandoned him once again, like a wave crashing and dragging away from the shore. They felt like both death and life, divinity and mortality, humanity and vampirism.
Their song played on, mournful, painting the ghost of a life they could not have.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, Asar Voldari, Warden of Morthryn, king of the underworld, heir of Alarus. I love you, and in this life or the next, worlds mortal or divine, I will never let you go.”
Light poured from her eyes, her freckles, the tips of her fingers. The skull—her crown—glowed bright. The flower in her hair burned. She was a goddess. Every bit a goddess.
I had walked the path to divinity; I had walked the path to death. And yet, here, in her presence, I was overwhelmed. Here, in her presence, I knew worship.
We did not speak. We did not have to. Morthryn played the final notes of our song to the rhythm of our shared heartbeat.
And I knew: this was true ascension. My queen. My light. My darkness. My future. The answer to every question. The ending to every sentence.
And the piece of the one that still gave him Alarus’s power. The piece of the heart that also sat inside me.
SCREAMINGGG
“The dead do not fight for you,” he said. “The dead belong to the kingdom of the underworld. The kingdom of Vathysia, the House of Death.”
“You will not touch her,” Asar said. He did not raise his voice. But the command shook the fabric between worlds. “Now you see who the army of the dead answers to.”
And the last thing I saw was the night opening as the White Pantheon stepped through the sky.
The blades on her back—only five, one missing—glowed with divine fury.
The 6 is Misches' :')
“No,” Nyaxia agreed. “It will not be. Let the games begin, my cousins. What fun ones they shall be.”
“You are weak,” she observed. “Such is the price of walking the path to divinity and back.”
“In some, your endings are pleasant. In others, painful. But how curious, that in every one, you change the world together.”
“I was watching her in battle,” he said. “She was incredible, wasn’t she? Greater than a queen. A demigoddess.”
He somewhat hurriedly pressed the parchment into my hands, then turned away. In elegant script, a name was written on the envelope: Little Serpent.
sobbing brb
“I don’t know.” He shot me a sly, sidelong glance. “What does a missionary do once their mission is complete, acolyte?” Sun fucking take me. To think I had been the lost soul this whole time.
“Surely you cannot expect me to call you ‘Highness.’ ” “The rumor is that I’m the queen of the dead. And you are dead. Therefore . . .”
“A lonely afterlife sounds quite dull,” he said. “Especially when there are such interesting times ahead. Should you ever need to lead an army of the dead, Deathborn Queen, I may be willing to volunteer my expertise. I was quite a formidable force in my time.”
“Be ruthless, Highness,” he said. And the winds of the underworld, at last, swept him away.
“How many times will we find each other wandering these halls?” he said.
“ ‘If you are interested.’ ” Sun take me, he actually looked nervous. “If you aren’t—” “I am, you idiot. I am interested. It’s just the most Asar marriage proposal I’ve ever heard.” The corner of his mouth quirked. “ ‘I am, you idiot,’ ” he repeated. “The most Mische proposal acceptance I’ve ever heard.”
And when it was all done, Asar would take me back to our room. He would play one final song for me—a song that sounded like me, and like him, and the future we once had thought would only belong to the ghosts.
In the darkness, I found solace. In the underworld, I found hope. And here, in this twin soul, in this love we built together, I finally found it: Home.
It was just a few steps away from being trusted, and being trusted was just a few steps away from one’s throat.
A decade of carefully maneuvered problems. A decade of sweet, pathetic loyalty. A decade of making himself so very indispensable.
Somewhere here, in the shit pile that remained of the human nations, was an answer. A sword gifted by a goddess of justice, and a wielder who perhaps might be desperate enough to let him aim the strike.
So maybe its NOT mische's sword?
