More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 6 - October 12, 2025
This is the tale of how a fallen one ascends. He does it in countless cascading decisions, over years, over centuries. He does it with the desperation of a starving soul willing to sacrifice anything, everything, for a single chance at redemption. But in the end, he loses her every time.
“I’m giving credit to its rightful owner. I did not kill Atroxus. Mische Iliae did, and she deserves to have her name painted in the stars for it.”
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.
As if the gods had seen some beauty in mortality but failed to realize that the imperfection of it was what made it remarkable.
This felt like false pleasures and a knife poised between your shoulder blades. Beautiful denial.
“Fate and luck are twin sides to the same coin.”
“Billions of threads,” she murmured, “and not a single one where you say no.”
In my world, every heartbeat pushed me to her. I only had to let it take me there.
“Mische Iliae, Dawndrinker or Shadowborn, living or dead, I will never let you go.”
My mouth found hers immediately, like a compass seeking north.
Goddess bless the daughters and the second sons. Imagine a kingdom built in our image. They always underestimate us, but they never understood. We are the ones who actually had to use our teeth.”
“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.”
I dreamed of skin, and want, and all the ways the two collided.
How easily our bodies aligned around each other. Like the sun and moon meeting in an eclipse.
She let out a trembling cry and pulled taut around me. Everything disappeared—gods and wraiths and death, war and betrayals, magic masks and cursed axes and all the fears I tried to tell myself I did not feel. Everything but her. I was whole, entwined in her skin and soul alike.
Empires rose and fell as we held each other through the aftershocks. And only three words cycled through me: It is her. It is her. It is her.
“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.”
“There,” he murmured. “Now we can both be imperfect together.”
We entangled ourselves in each other like roots through the earth, pulling away clothing layer by layer, relishing the sanctuary of each other’s skin.
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.
