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

by Carissa Broadbent

“What was my alternative, Mische? I needed to bring you somewhere safe. Somewhere to save your goddess-damned life. There is no sacrifice I wouldn’t make for that. Not mine, not theirs. And I have known these people for all of a few hours, and I can already tell that the thing they ‘can’t afford’ is to let you die because you were too prideful to let them help you.”

I stepped closer to the mirror, leaning over the basin, so I was staring right into his eyes. “This is Oraya’s home,” I said. “Oraya’s kingdom. I need to be able to trust you, because I can’t gamble with her life.” A pained wince flickered over Vincent’s face.

The truth was, no, I hadn’t known it would all work out. I had been ready to die to help Raihn become what I knew he could be. To force him to become what I knew he could be. Now, this seemed so unforgivably cruel.

Yes, I was speechless. Because what words existed to describe that? I said, at last, “He makes me want a happy ending.” When I finally forced myself to look at Raihn, he was giving me a quiet, serious stare. “Is that silly?” I said. He shook his head. “No. It’s not silly at all.”

When Mische and Raihn left, Oraya watched me like a cat watches a bird flitting in the rafters. Her silver eyes were sharp as the blades she carried—even here, in the bowels of her own castle. One of them sat on the table between us, the carvings along its length glowing red. Eventually, she spoke. “Raihn won’t say it, but it needs to be said, so I will.” She dug the tip of her blade into the table and leaned across it. “You’re welcome here as long as Mische says you should be. But let’s be clear. If you ever hurt her, in any sense, I will peel your skin off and make you eat it.” She said it like she was discussing the weather.

She was blunt, straightforward, and trusted the intelligence of her listener to keep up. All qualities I appreciated. I liked her immediately.

And in those notes, I saw it: mirrored floors, curved rafters of bone, crawling ivy dotted with blood-red flowers. My lips curled. “Morthryn,” I whispered. Even though the word that sat on my lips was, home. Here, enveloped in his body and his music, I was there all over again. Not Morthryn as I had known it, but a version that was what it had always been intended to be—a place of solace for the forgotten souls.

I wanted to cling to it—this urgent, desperate sense of life. I wanted to believe it would last forever. But I couldn’t help the sense that perhaps we were like two celestial bodies in the sky. Him arcing from mortality to divinity. Me, from death to life. The two of us colliding for only a few ephemeral moments, magnificent in their impermanence.

The Sentinel was diving for me. But their mask was cracked, now. It had split right along the scratch I had etched into it in our first meeting. And what was revealed . . . The horror made my steps falter. I barely managed to deflect their strike, sending them stumbling to the sand. The face that stared back at me, framed by jagged gold, was barely human—the features faded, like those of a statue sanded down by time. The marks of life and humanity had been erased. She was free of freckles or scars or hair. Her eyes were blank white. But it was her. The sister I had damned twice over now, come to seek her revenge. “Saescha,” I gasped.

Across all of it, across blood and steel and fire, I reached out for her. Her presence was warm against mine. I felt her pain and her grief. I felt her fury and her determination. And even now, above all, hope.

“When I retrieved this from what remained of him, I wanted to sleep with it beneath my pillow. I wanted to cradle it like the child we never had the chance to bear.” Her face hardened. “But I did not wish to use my husband’s final gift to grieve him. I would use it to become something more terrible than he ever was.”

“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.”

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.

She must be so lonely, Mische had told me once. And it was this loneliness that I saw shoot across her face with the blazing heat of a falling star, there and gone again in seconds.

“He says, Join her. Make them suffer. And make it slow. I could offer you that. Whatever is left of him. And we can walk a longer path together.” It was the only thing Nyaxia craved more than power. Love.

Over Saescha’s shoulder, I watched a firefinch hurl itself into the sky from the burning forest. Nightfire clung to its golden wings. Its wail of agony ripped through the night like a blade through a heart. And then I fell.

“Do you think I don’t know what this is like? To lose the—” His voice caught. “The greatest love you’ve ever known? I do know this. And it was the fault of my own mistakes. No one else’s. No, Mische Iliae. I’m not here to earn Nyaxia’s favor. I am here because someone I once loved very much believed in the power of fate. The power of even the most inconsequential person to change it. Her goddess sent me to you, not my own. And I know that there is nothing I can ever do to right the terrible ways I wronged her. Not in life, and certainly not in death. But.” He leaned closer, fury burning in the cold ice of his stare. “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.”

“I consider myself a practical man,” Vincent said. “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.”

A 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. The dead pressed the hilt into my outstretched hands. Then, wordlessly, they melted into the mist, swept away with the fading embers of the underworld. And my skin, where they had touched it, was now marked with streaks of red. Twisted, organic strokes like lightning, and an eye on the back of my hand. An Heir Mark. The twin to Asar’s.

He began to turn. Then stopped and looked back at me one last time. “She knows, I hope. How much I love her. I know that in life, it was not enough. And I know that it isn’t in death, either. But it is all I can⁠—”

My skin was faintly translucent, as if shimmering with the dusty coating of the underworld, but I still had my scars. I pressed my fingers to them, and the red ink that danced over them, intertwined. As if the marks of my shame and the marks of my power were inextricably linked, one and the same.

Yet the god still found himself drawn, more and more, to the ruins of the underworld. He was looking for something, even if he couldn’t explain what; he was answering a call, even if he could not hear what it was saying.

My hand trembled as the realization fell over me. 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.

Through several broken doorways, I glimpsed a copper bathtub, cracked and rusted, falling into the floor. My eyes burned. I grieved it the way I would grieve an old friend, or an old life. Just one life of many, the skull whispered. It could have another. You still see what it would be again, the flower said.

“Safer, maybe,” I said. “For a little while. But I don’t think that means it’s better.” His fingers threaded through the dog’s—Luce’s—fur, as if to hold her there. “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?” “I thought so. A long time ago.” I shifted a little closer. Luce’s lip twitched, like she thought about growling and decided not to. And gods, my heart hurt so deeply for this child. I saw myself in him. An eight-year-old version of myself, sitting upon an altar in Vostis. An eight-year-old version of myself who had been told the same lie that he had been. Give me your heart, and you will never hurt again. Give me your heart, and your soul will be pure. “You will make mistakes,” I murmured. “And I will love you anyway.” The boy flinched. Looked away. Again, that flicker of the man I’d known. “I never told you how much it meant to me,” he said. I smiled. “Yes, you did. Not with words. But with something even more valuable.”

“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.”

Asar said, “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. The mortality of it was unmistakable. It was smaller than I might have expected, twitching in slow, rhythmic beats. Red-black vampire blood pooled around it in his palm. A faint glow pulsed from the muscle with each contraction. It was nothing but flesh. No golden divinity. No blessed gift. And yet, the beauty of it nearly brought me to tears. This was Asar’s mortality. The thing he had discarded to descend, in the care of the truest version of himself. More precious, I decided, than any divinity. I held out my hands, and he slipped the heart into it. It was warm, and it felt like him. “It’s perfect,” I whispered. “I will treasure it forever.” He gave me a sad smile. “It always belonged to you,” he said.

Morthryn’s shadows wrapped me in an embrace. They writhed around the blade, the hilt, and then my hand that held it—painted with the tangled red ink of the Heir Mark. A responsibility that I had not inherited, but had been given by those who needed me most. Do not fear yourself, Morthryn whispered. You are a queen. Your kingdom stands behind you. I closed my eyes. A million invisible souls, Asar had said once, of the underworld. They needed someone.

At his summons, he felt the attention of the dead turn to him. But they did not obey. He paused, confused. The mask, the eye, and the heart trembled with indignation. {Who does challenge us?} the mask demanded. {I cannot see beyond the veil,} the eye mused. The heart was angriest of all. It said nothing, just throbbed against his rib cage. Only the wound beneath it was pleased. Hopeful.

Something was there that should not be. Someone was there who should not be. Nyaxia watched, her fury rising. Their attention shifted to the mortal world. Gods felt the draw of divine energy, and now, they sensed it gathering below—at the inflection point where the mortal and underworlds collided. Morthryn. Nyaxia’s mouth curled into a snarl. “What is that?” she demanded. At last, the heart spoke: {A challenger.}

And as it was now, so breathtakingly horrifying and breathtakingly beautiful. It had crumbled so much in the time since he had last been here. The mirrored floor was shattered with spiderweb cracks. The rafters had been broken, the bones now reaching up and ending in jagged blades. The glyphs that had etched the ancient power into these walls were faded, worn away as if by a sandstorm. And yet—now, they glowed. All of them, even the ones that no longer were visible beneath centuries of neglect. They beamed with searing light. It was not flame, he realized. It resembled it. But it wasn’t hot. It was cool and comforting, and strangely familiar, like a tune that lingered just beyond reach. It was closer to smoke than fire, or shadow summoned by the reinvigoration of the spells in the walls. Darkness met the light in equal measure, intertwining as it rose from the floors, the rafters, the walls, in a sad, graceful dance. Clusters of light and shadow moved about the room, almost taking on the appearance of silhouettes—faces visible within them for seconds at a time.

And then he felt it: A presence brighter than the weak souls of the dead, younger than the ancient halls of Morthryn. And yet . . . Powerful. A power that even mirrored his own. He whirled around to see a flash of smoke move from one door to another. The pull continued down the hall. He smiled. There you are. A voice taunted back, If you want me, then come get me. It was not Morthryn’s voice. Not the voice of the dead. Not the voice of the mask or the eye or the heart. 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.

“You won’t do it,” she said. He should. He understood, in a knowledge that went beyond logic, that this person was the one thing holding him back from the ultimate power of his divinity. A challenger, and a shackle. {Do it,} the eye said. {Do it,} the mask said. {Do it,} the heart said. No, the wound begged, scar tissue from another life. No. His hand did not move, and he was not sure why. The hesitation cost him. The dead rose up around them, surrounding his adversary. 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.

The voice did not belong to a god. Nor did the sudden desperation that jumped up against the inside of his ribs, screaming, Do it, do it right now. Take the power, take the heart. It was always meant for you. He had prayed she would understand. She had become everything he dreamed she would be. Had known she could be. He was so proud of her that he thought his heart, mortal or god, would burn with it. But Mische did not move. A tear rolled down her cheek.

Because this had always been the only option. The only happy ending he could offer her. The only good he could do in this world. Sacrificing himself to hand her the power to be greater than he ever could be. She already was. She always had been. But Mische leaned her forehead against his. Her gold eyes shone with the light of the underworld. 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.”

She stood over him, holding the heart—no, not all of it. Half still remained within him, giving him the power of divinity. But the power she took from him still was enough to set her ablaze. The dead caressed her like children embracing their mother, guiding the heart into her own chest. 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.

My queen. My light. My darkness. My future. The answer to every question. The ending to every sentence.

Her eyes fell to me, and the hurt within them was as deadly as the anger. Suddenly, I understood—that so much of her anger now was not because of an army or an ally, but because Asar would never be Alarus, no matter whose heart sat in his chest. Once again, she had attempted to reclaim him, and once again, she had been left alone.

The hurt and horror that spasmed across her face dug deep into my heart—or perhaps the part of Alarus’s heart that was in me. I felt the sudden, inexplicable urge to reach for her with the touch of a comforting lover. “No,” she whispered. And then, louder. “No. I will not allow it. I will cut it out of you.”

“Three times now, I have warned you, Nyaxia, of how this path ends,” she said. “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.” Nyaxia rasped a furious laugh. But her eyes shone as if with tears. “Vathysia? Vathysia no longer exists.” “That does not appear to be true. It appears that your husband has heirs once again.”

At last, Acaeja said, “Very rarely, there are souls that, no matter the thread, become the continuation of each other’s tales.

“In some, your endings are pleasant. In others, painful. But how curious, that in every one, you change the world together.”

At the mention of Oraya, his gaze slowly turned back to me—moon silver, even in death, just like hers. “I was watching her in battle,” he said. “She was incredible, wasn’t she? Greater than a queen. A demigoddess.” He said it the way parents in Vostis used to brag about their children’s performances. With such unrestrained pride.

“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.”

Septimus gave his goddess—the goddess who had cursed his kingdom, who had murdered his brother, who had been responsible for untold suffering of his people—a silken smile and pressed his forehead to the floor. “It will be my greatest honor, Dark Mother,” he said. It felt good to be needed. It was just a few steps away from being trusted, and being trusted was just a few steps away from one’s throat.