Page 1 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)
T his is the tale of how a fallen one ascends.
Long ago, I told you a tale of a chosen girl who fell to the darkness. Now I will tell you the tale of a boy who was born within it.
His very existence was the product of generations of mistakes.
He was born on a desolate island off the coasts of the vampire kingdom he could one day come to rule.
The boy learned young how to survive on the blood of squirrels and fish, or the rare, ill-fated human travelers who would stumble by.
He was small, but he had a way with death.
He could have spent his whole life there, had it not been for the small fact that he was a prince.
The man came when the boy was eight years old. When he arrived at the shore, he had slipped his hands into the pockets of his fine but simple black suit and surveyed the scene before him—marshy forest, waterlogged soil, stone ruins covered in ivy.
The boy watched him from his hiding place in the reeds. Instantly, he knew this man was unlike anyone he had ever met, even if then he could not explain why. He crept closer, closer, careful to remain hidden.
But the man didn’t even move as a tendril of shadow wrapped about the boy’s leg, dragging him into the open.
The boy’s back hit the mud. The man casually stared down at him, spindly fingers of darkness winding around his shoulders, his arms, his hands.
The boy had played with magic before. He knew how to lure in the young fishermen who occasionally came to these shores, how to ease their fear just enough to coax them to his grip.
He knew how to whisper comforts to the foxes he tamed in the woods, the ones he treated much kinder than the humans.
He always knew when someone was watching him, and somehow, the shadows always seemed to end up exactly where he needed them.
But he had never seen magic like this before. Magic that tasted like power.
“Get up,” the man said.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
The boy was standing before he knew what was happening.
The man looked the boy up and down with icy fair eyes.
“The king has come for you,” he said.
The boy was silent, wary. His mother often spoke of crowns and kingdoms. You are a king, she would slur. And it is my blood that makes you so.
The man lowered himself, perching gracefully at the edge of a stone so that he was at eye level with the child. He heard the boy’s unspoken thoughts.
“Your father’s blood is nothing to scoff at, either,” the man said, amused. “And he has sent me to retrieve you.”
The boy had been warned countless times of the danger of his lineage.
His mother used to read him bedtime stories of slain princes, bastard-born royalty just like him who died for the crime of being too strong or too weak, too hungry for power or too avoidant of it.
You are a king, she would say. Survive long enough to take your crown.
He should run, he thought to himself. This was exactly what she had warned him of.
He stepped backward. He expected the man to move after him, but he did not.
“You can go,” the man said calmly. “I will wait.”
“You’ll kill me.”
The boy’s voice was small, weak with disuse. He did not speak often.
“I will not kill you.”
The boy didn’t believe him.
“I speak the truth,” the man said. “But you’re wise not to trust me.”
The boy didn’t know how to word his objections.
“You’re thinking that there are many worse things than death,” the man said, answering what remained unspoken.
“Very wise of you. Yes, boy. I am truthful when I say I won’t kill you.
But if you want the difficult truths alongside the easy one, I will give you those, too.
If you come with me willingly, I will evaluate you.
Your father believes that you could be a useful asset as a potential heir.
If you prove yourself to be so, you will never go hungry again.
You will sleep in a bed. You will drink the richest human blood.
You will wear fine clothes. And you will serve the crown until the day it no longer needs you. ”
The boy asked, “What happens when it no longer needs me?”
“Then we will take whatever parts of you are useful and discard the rest.”
This was no threat. Just straightforward fact. The boy appreciated that, even as fear prickled at the back of his neck.
“Is that what you’ll do now, if I run?” he asked.
“Not this night. Maybe another, if your father gives the order. But I don’t know these lands as well as you do.
Maybe you run far enough, fast enough, that I let you be.
Maybe your father loses interest and calls me back to go kill someone else before then.
” The man smiled. His eyes were very old, though his face was young. “But I know you will not run.”
He was right. The boy would not run.
The child said, “What makes you so certain?”
“Because you look at this the way a starving vampire looks at blood.”
The man opened his palm, shadow unfurling within it. The boy’s heart stuttered at the sight of it.
“I am not offering you an easy life,” the man said.
“It will be a life judged by the value of the blood you spill upon it. Your father told me to come here and tell you that you could be king one day. Perhaps you will be, but more likely your father will kill you if you get too powerful, or your siblings will if he decides not to. You will sacrifice beyond what your mind could ever conceive today, and there is only a chance of a chance of a chance that there will ever be a crown on your head in exchange. But I am offering you something far more valuable than a crown.”
The boy hesitated before he asked, “What?”
“When dawn comes, you hide behind the curtains and you peer out into the world when it’s drenched red under the sunrise,” he said.
“And sometimes you feel it, don’t you? All those secrets hiding in the haze between the light and the darkness.
The books are nothing, boy. Nothing. The things you will see if you learn to walk this path will devastate and delight you. ”
“Magic,” the boy said, and the man scoffed, sudden and violent.
“Magic,” he spat. “Any vampire can do magic . I am not talking about the common gifts. You smell like death, boy. Carve out your heart for it and it will give you the world in return. Do you know what it means to conquer every unknown? It means a life free from fear. Think of that. Freedom. ”
The boy was silent.
The man spoke to all his secret dreams. He knew that he could survive on this soggy patch of land forever. But for what? For the next fisherman’s carcass? The next swallow of rancid fish blood?
The boy did not want glory. He did not want a crown.
He wanted freedom.
The man’s eyes glinted like stars in the dusk.
“So tell me, young prince,” he said. “What is the next step in our dance?”
Some moments remain permanently engrained into one’s memory, even over the centuries of a vampire lifespan.
The boy would remember everything about this one.
And yet, oh, how the shadows shift upon the past depending on the light of the present.
For years, the boy—the man, the prince, the king—would look at this as the night he was saved.
Only centuries later would he understand the truth.
He had thought the sacrifice came in the form of blood and guts and the pleas that he would never be able to scrub from the inside of his skull. He had thought the sacrifice came in the form of the permanent marks on his body and the invisible ones on his soul.
He had been wrong.
He realized it many years later, when he felt the power of the gods course through his veins, and finally, finally, he received the very thing that his mentor had promised him that night—illumination into every dark corner of the world, power beyond anything he ever could have imagined.
And he cared about none of it, because he was losing the love of his life.
Carve out your heart for it.
In that moment, he would hear his instructor’s words. He would think of that little boy. Turn away, he’d beg his past self.
But the boy takes the man’s hand every time. Death, after all, is inevitable.
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.