The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

by Carissa Broadbent

But to claim that the woman who had literally changed the course of the divine world, who had saved countless lives and touched countless souls, would ever be forgotten . . .

Never. Mische Iliae would be remembered by the bones of time itself, and I knew it because I would write her story there with my blood if I had to.

It was pristine, flawless beauty. And yet, it was all so artificial.

As if the gods had seen some beauty in mortality but failed to realize that the imperfection of it was what made it remarkable.

It wasn’t even a choice. “Take me to her,” I said. Acaeja smiled as she straightened. Her wings went dark as fate shifted. “Billions of threads,” she murmured, “and not a single one where you say no.”

Vincent grabbed my chin and wrenched my face toward him. “You chose this battle. You chose it when you took your first steps into Morthryn, and you choose it again now. You set out to change the world. You set out to create a god. So do it. This is the time for conquering, Mische Iliae. Go.”

Vincent looked disappointed in me. The expression made me even more sympathetic to Oraya’s complexes. It really dug right into your chest.

“Stop thinking like an acolyte and start thinking like a vampire.”

And just as she began to bring it down, the room plunged into an eerie, static silence. The candles snuffed out. The room fell to slow, ominous darkness, shadows painting across my vision like bandages winding around and around and around us all. And a voice, quiet and booming at once, said, “Get your hands off my wife.”

“If I had just been a child, Raoul would have executed me without a second thought. Being a tool gave me the chance to live.” He said this so simply. I hated how deeply I understood it. Because from the moment Atroxus chose me at eight years old, I’d had a function to fulfill, too. And like Asar, without it, I would have been thrown away. It was hard to question what kept you alive, even if it did terrible things with the life it gave you.

{At long last,} a voice whispered, with piqued interest, {a new heir.}

I blinked away a fleeting memory of a woman with galaxies in her hair.

No. Freckles like cinnamon. Honey-brown eyes.

A rush of sound, of emotion, flooded around me. The wailing dead screamed in pain and joy, released into the land of the living.

She stared back at the shattered gate, roiling with the desperate dead. “We’ll fix it,” she whispered. “Right?” “We will fix it,” I vowed. Even though I was looking only at her.

I had my sword ready, but it seemed comically useless. At least I supposed I could grab onto one of Egrette’s soldiers and suck the life out of them with my wraith touch if I really had to. The thought struck me with an unpleasantly visceral delight that instantly made me feel dirty. The idea of touching skin, using that warmth to drag myself closer to the mortal world, felt more tempting than blood after starvation.

“No,” I said firmly. “You don’t use it. I’ve got—” I wiggled my fingers. Asar stared flatly at me. “What?” “Death touch! Magical death touch!” He looked unimpressed. “Forgive me if I’m not exactly eager to throw you out there to go tickle the Shadowborn military to death.”

An uncanny scent hung in the air, like the faintest trace of a campfire’s smoke, or the warm afterglow of a sun that had just set. It made the hair prickle on my arms even across the chasm of death. The strikes that had taken apart the soldiers were clean, but vicious. Someone had kept going long after these men were dead.

without thinking, I grabbed his face between my palms. The rush of euphoria that came with his cry of pain, even from a touch that lasted mere seconds, was intoxicating. It felt like the first swallow of blood after far too long.

An onslaught of sensations consumed me. The gold-streaked sky. The swaying leaves of trees. Feathers and blood. The scent of the ocean. Vostis. The Citadel. I felt more alive than I ever had been, and deader than I had since the night I was Turned.

But he was wounded, and I was dead. We couldn’t get out of this through brute force. Think, think, think⁠— I needed time. The dead wailed in my ears, begging, We need time. My gaze flicked to the Dusk Window, which still stood at the abandoned dais. Hands pressed to it, the dead pushing against a veil that was already tearing.

I leapt up and threw myself against the Window. The dead reached for me. You’re one of us, they begged. Let us out. We’re so hungry. We’re so thirsty. Through the morass of empty, desperate eyes, I saw a familiar face—Vincent. You’d better help me here, I told him, momentarily regretting that I was so rude in our last conversation.

It really was dumb fucking luck. To think that I could possibly conduct a spell that could be, supposedly, done only by the heirs of the House of Shadow. Apparently I was just that good. Or maybe I had just enough help from the other side. Or maybe it was simply easier to destroy things than to repair them.

When I looked to her, I knew I would remember that image for the rest of my life. Mische, standing in front of the Dusk Window, her torn dress billowing out behind her, black silk hood pinned around her face, hands outstretched like a mother’s waiting arms as the shadowy forms of the dead poured out around her. I thought, Damn masks and eyes and hearts and divine missions. This is what a true goddess looks like. A sight so stunning that it made the entire damned world stop mid-breath.

After all this time, it really never had occurred to me that Egrette had actually loved Elias. But here, on this night of mirrors, I saw another version of myself reflected in her grief—the villain in her story. The resentful bastard brother who had betrayed her, butchered his own mentor, slaughtered her lover, and sacrificed his own kingdom and hers.

Ahead, a man in a white suit smoked a cigarillo, the one little dot of ember-orange glowing like a lone north star.

Raihn followed my gaze. His voice lowered, the words intended only for me. “Please. Whatever is happening, we will work it out together, at home, where you’re safe. Let us help you.” And there it was. The gods-damned sad puppy face. He meant every word of it. I could tell him everything. He would understand. He would give us every resource. Right now, I could change everything. But what a cost he, Oraya, and their entire kingdom would pay for it.

Years passed, then decades. The boy grew. He became a prince, and he became a monster.

The implication that this could one day be something that drove him to become a greater weapon enraged him. The prince had spent a lifetime hauling strength from the worst of his memories, forging rage into destruction. And it was, always, always, destruction. The only thing he was capable of. The only purpose he could fulfill.

The prison, he knew, was not a prison at all, but a temple repurposed. It had once been a place of spiritual solace, but in the eyes of the Shadowborn king, it was fit only to be a place of pain. It occurred to the prince only now that it was so deeply misunderstood. He thought of all the times he had been told that his greatest purpose was to become more effective at inflicting suffering. He thought of all the times his mentor had told him that his life was only worth the blood he spilled upon it. The prince reached for the broken gate, and slowly, methodically, tenderly, patched each and every wound. When he was done, he stepped back and surveyed his handiwork. It was immaculate. For the first time in months, he smiled—satisfied in his defiance.

And I dreamed of a god I’d never met, bearing a mask of copper, watching me with skeptical interest. Tell me, he murmured, leaning close, who are you?

The carvings gave off a very slight glow, which seemed to subtly shift from white to silver to black to purple. It reminded me of something that I couldn’t place. Not until I looked at Asar and saw his scars gleaming with that exact same light. Then my gaze drifted down to his Mark, visible between the hem of his sleeve and the edge of his glove. The organic strokes of ink were a near-perfect sibling to the flowing lines of glyphs on the mask’s surface.

“A long time ago,” he said, “when I was a child, and then a young man, I had dreamed that maybe one day, it could have been. Instead, I left it worse than I found it. And that version of myself mourns what I have done. Even if I don’t regret it.” I understood this. It was the part of me that still mourned what died when I thrust that arrow into Atroxus’s throat. The belief, the faith, the dream. Not the god. Another loop. Almost done. He said, wryly, “Are you going to tell me it’s not my fault?” I shook my head. “No. I’ve learned over the years that people think they want absolution. But that’s not what they really need to hear.” “What do most people need to hear?” For some reason, I had to speak past a lump in my throat. “They need to hear, ‘Even if it is your fault, I will love you anyway.’ ”

“For whatever of your mistakes, Mische Iliae,” he said, quietly, firmly, “for whatever of your faults, for whatever unintended pains you may bring this world, I will love you anyway.”

And I felt a door opening for me—a door into his mind, coaxing me inside. I realized what he was doing: giving me an opportunity to reclaim the power that I’d used to destroy. Paint over the pain with pleasure. The gift I hadn’t even known I needed.

“You are an event, Mische Iliae,” he murmured. “God slayer. Dawndrinker. Shadowborn queen. And I would die to taste your skin.”

Mische sprawled out on the bed, snoring—and I loved that horrific, deafening sound, because it was so messily alive.

The House of Blood’s relationship with Nyaxia had always been fraught. That was the tricky thing about worshipping the one who had damned you.

Nyaxia had fought through every god of the White Pantheon in her rage after Alarus’s death. We came through the hole she’d torn between worlds when she escaped. And now we were seeing the path of enraged carnage she’d ripped through her fellow gods.

Every Obitraen knew this story well. Her victory over the White Pantheon was immortalized in every church. But this seemed so much more raw. More sad than victorious. Like her grief had seeped into the ground with the blood.

“Maybe he could only love it once he knew what it was like to have something to lose. He built the Descent on his story with Nyaxia. It was all a monument to her.” I considered this. She could be right. Perhaps the underworld, the Descent, Vathysia—all of it was just a game to Alarus before Nyaxia came along. Perhaps it only started to mean more to him once he realized he was building it for her. A legacy to protect them once he’d turned away from everything else he had. And he lost her in the end, anyway. What an uncomfortable thought. I didn’t want to look too hard at it.

“Maybe greatness should come not from the sacrifices you make, but the ones you refuse to.”

“The curse that the Dark Mother placed upon us takes much from us. We’re born knowing that we will die too young, and with little dignity. This is why the Bloodborn see no shame in death. The greatest gift we can offer is a life that serves those who come after us, and the greatest gift we can be given in return is a death with dignity. There is no sadness in that. I’ll give her a quick, painless end. As she deserves.”

I think of my wife. Her kiss goodbye still burns on my mouth. Somewhere far away, she holds my final gift to her. I grieve that I will never get to see what she will become, and the fact that she needs to become it at all.

Mische rose from the forge. She was doused in the white of the flames and the darkness of the shadows. At her heels, the dead climbed from the crack. Her hair flew out behind her. Her eyes were bright white, her skin glowing a bronze that rivaled the sun itself. The flames of the forge and the shadows of the dead whorled around her like a ball gown of divinity. She didn’t walk, she simply ascended.

But when my knees hit the ground now, it wasn’t for the eye. It was for her. I wanted to bury myself before her. I wanted to cut myself open for her, let her take whatever she wanted, and treasure the scars for the rest of my pathetic life.

“Do not touch her.”

I saw those clockwork eyes watching over the murder of a woman in the ashes of a dead god. Watching over the torture of a woman with galaxies in her hair. These two memories twisted, tangled. I didn’t care to separate them. Srana would suffer for either crime.

I needed to take her somewhere safe. Somewhere we could hide, if only for a little while. I had seconds to decide, and when I arrived at our only answer, I knew she would hate me for it. But at least if she hated me, she would be alive. I gathered her up in my arms, Luce at my side, and jumped.

In his journey to the underworld, the Dawndrinker had made him believe he could be capable of healing the hurts of the world. With every broken gate they mended, every lost soul they freed, every wound they stitched, he had let a little more of that hope shine through. It had happened so slowly he had not even realized how fiercely he had wanted to believe it, until now, when it shattered beneath the ugly truth. The prince did not grieve his own life. He grieved that dream.