More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 22 - September 20, 2025
How easily our bodies aligned around each other. Like the sun and moon meeting in an eclipse.
“Sometimes, magic is dancing to a tune that mortal ears can’t hear.”
Quote !!
“If you don’t have the protection of a god, might as well make your own, right?”
“You and me, right?” he murmured. “Two fucked-up people getting through the worst of our Mother-damned lives together. We were just trying to survive. And I wouldn’t have done it without you. That’s just the truth of it.”
think the key to survival will be a little more complicated now than just you and me learning how to enable each other’s madness.”
Lol
“We’re all just trying to do what we can to save who we can, all while the gods play games with us. But as long as we have to go up against them, I’ll be damned lucky to do it with someone as fierce as you by my side.”
“Grief has a way of sanding down all the complicated parts of a person in the eyes of the living. It freezes them to a single moment.”
“But the truth is that the dead are just as complicated and broken as the living,” I said. “Maybe even more so, sometimes. Vincent’s death was not going to make him the father he should have been for you in life. It just makes it easier to dream it could.”
The ballroom had collapsed. The cracks, which still pulsed with dark purple shadow, ran all the way out the castle doors—out into the gardens, and then the city beyond. I cursed at that sight.
This is giving fold lol
“We can’t change what we’ve done in the past,” I said. “But there’s still a whole damned future out there waiting. You and me. We’re in this together. I need you to believe in this with me. You can do a lot of good in this world, Asar Voldari. Don’t you dare give up on it now, when it needs you most.”
Quote
My painting of the future, bringing life to our shared dreams.
He looked mortal. And I felt alive.
I no longer craved blood. But I was still desperately hungry.
I no longer cared to find Alarus’s heart. I cared only to find my own.
Faith could be such a beautiful thing. It had saved me, once. Perhaps it had saved Kyrene once, too. I hated that right now, I pitied her for it.
“I thought it was just another pretty gift passed from husband to wife,” she said. “But the blade was no trinket. It was the key to cut out his heart. The key to my own divinity.”
“Why do you think that the children I created with his power feast upon the blood of mortals? We were all born in suffering. What makes us powerful is to thrive upon the taste of it. You understand this. I have always seen it in you.”
{Only an end can create a beginning,}
Nyaxia set out to make a world that was only hers, born in the blood of her grief. It would die in the blood of it, too.
I was a man who was in love with a woman, and I understood that love would never be beyond fear.
“A heart for a heart.”
It was over. As a missionary, I had believed that there was always hope, even in the darkest places. But my actions had torn the sun from the sky and the heart from my lover’s chest. I could no longer remember what hope felt like at all.
We had created a god, just as we had intended to. And though it had saved us, it had also damned us.
“Her daughter, our daughter, is up there still, at the mercy of this game of gods. I will not allow her to suffer the consequences of it. And I do not care if the goddess-damned underworld collapses around me, but I will not allow it to take her with it. I didn’t protect either of them in life. Not the way I should have. But I will be damned if I don’t protect them now. So get up.”
“The underworld is not the territory of the gods,” he said. “It is the kingdom of the dead. And the dead have chosen you.”
sword. Asar’s sword—no, my sword. I had lost it when I fell into Srana’s forge. Yet, it looked different now. The broken blade glistened as if freshly polished, illuminated with a sunless glow. The leaves on the intricate hand guard quivered as if they were alive. And the hilt . . . the hilt had changed. Now it bore poppy petals, and outstretched wings that looked as if they were aflame. A phoenix.
“A queen must make difficult choices,” he said. “But no one can carve this path but you. You are the one with the power of Alarus. Listen to what it tells you.”
Human and vampire. Alive and dead. Imperfect, just like the scarred hand that I held over
We can be imperfect together.
Good. Fear me. The dead outnumber the living. The only army that grows with every loss.”
Souls became Sentinels because of their desperate desire for justice, so powerful that nothing else existed anymore at all. Saescha had every reason to want hers. I had thought that she was seeking justice for her own death at my hands. For the death of Atroxus. For the death of the sun. But Saescha had been seeking justice for me.
had always been Saescha that I’d believed in. More than the sun. More than Atroxus. She had held my most unshakable faith, and because of that, I’d never seen her vulnerabilities. Now, they were all that remained.
“You are the sacrifice I will not make,” I murmured. “And I will do this for you, Saescha. I will build you a home to rest. Your whole, beautiful soul.”
sometimes, faith was all we had. And my faith in Saescha, even now, was absolute.
“It wasn’t enough to save you.” “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 have something that I’m supposed to give you.” He withdrew his hand from his jacket and held it out. There, throbbing faintly in his palm, was a heart.
Strange, that so often, the souls of the dead appeared in darkness. But around her, they were light, clinging to her like licks of flame to a candle.
“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.”
“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.”
“I will not, Dark Mother,” he said. “I will not collapse the underworld and damn the mortal world, with it. I will not force these lost souls from their rest to become weapons against their brethren.”
“I have had enough. This is my territory now. The king and queen of the House of Night have pledged themselves to me. And so now have the king and queen of Vathysia, the House of Death. You will make no move against them, or else face the wrath of me.”
“No,” Acaeja said, looking between Shiket and Nyaxia. “You fight for the eradication of each other. And I fight for the one path that will not end in the destruction of all.”
“She is the queen of the House of Death. You acknowledged it yourself. The dead have chosen her. You need the underworld, and the underworld needs her. You are the goddess of fate. Surely you see how important she is.” Acaeja gave me a long, indecipherable stare.
“In some, your endings are pleasant. In others, painful. But how curious, that in every one, you change the world together.”
Quote !!
“She was no one,” Acaeja said dismissively. “But perhaps that is what makes her remarkable. Such is the glory of fate. It is forged, not born.”
told you that strength is measured by the sacrifices we refused to make,” she said softly. “You were mine.”
Life was easier back when I believed that the love of a god could protect us. Now the gods’ favor was fickle and complicated—perhaps even more dangerous than it was helpful.
