Page 110 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

EPILOGUE

S eptimus stood before the goddess that had betrayed his kingdom and bowed like a good little dog.

“A travesty,” he said, voice dripping with indignant offense. “The House of Blood will never allow such disrespect against the Dark Mother to stand.”

“Nor the House of Shadow,” Queen Egrette added, from her own supplicant kneel.

But her voice was weak. Even her appearance was frazzled.

She had lost half her kingdom, and she had not yet recovered from the stress of attempting to keep her fractured, sexist noble class from cutting out her heart and throwing her into the sea as punishment for her loss.

Septimus almost pitied her. It really wasn’t her fault. No one could have expected that her brother would run around becoming a god, and fewer still could have expected he’d stab Nyaxia in the back when doing it.

Well. Almost no one.

But that wasn’t a fair comparison. Septimus made it his business to know things, and he was simply better at it than most.

Nyaxia’s rage split the sky. She was seething. The kind of seething that led one—mortal or god—to make irrational decisions.

“It is no matter,” she hissed. “Your traitorous kin will have their punishment in time. I have never needed them. And when we have our empire, children, they will beg for our forgiveness.”

Her eyes gleamed and churned with storm clouds. Whether she was on the verge of uproarious laughter or tears, Septimus could not tell.

Amazing, just how similar mortals and gods really were.

“Of course,” he purred, pressing his hand to his heart. “The House of Blood is yours. We are prepared to build the empire you have always deserved in your name.”

“As are we,” Egrette agreed, casting a quick, uneasy glance at Septimus. Perhaps she was calculating whether she would need to drive a stake into his heart to keep Nyaxia’s favor.

He wasn’t worried. Let her try.

Nyaxia barely seemed to notice they were before her. She whirled to the horizon, casting her hand across the sea—gesturing to the human nations beyond it.

“They know not what they do. But we do not give mercy to the ignorant.”

“What are your orders?” Egrette asked.

Nyaxia did not hesitate.

“Conquer,” she snarled. “Show my cousins our true might. Seize upon the gift of eternal night. Let no human kingdom be untouched. Let no village remain unburned. Let no throat remain unopened. Turn them. End them. Build me an empire. And then I shall use it to destroy all those who stand against us.”

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.

Ten Years Later

Septimus exhaled a lungful of smoke and curled his lip in disgust.

His breath unfurled into the air, immediately lost in the thick haze. The air was sticky with soot and rot. Flies hummed around discarded carcasses. Somewhere in the distance, survivors wailed fruitless pleas.

Septimus felt like shit, and this wasn’t exactly making things any better. He did not like coming to the human nations. Every visit, it just got more depressing.

Pain nagged at his chest, and he quickly covered it with another inhale, smothering it before it could set.

He strode through the streets, if they could be called that. It was something of a shame. Some human kingdoms had been quite lovely, in a quaint sort of way.

But now, it had been a decade of war beneath a sunless sky. Not many charming human idiosyncrasies had survived that.

Septimus’s stomach twisted with hunger. The pain shot through his chest again. He drew in another desperate inhale, though the smoke didn’t work the way it used to.

It had been a long, hard decade.

But he could feel that the end was coming. The slog was nearly over. A decade of carefully maneuvered problems. A decade of sweet, pathetic loyalty. A decade of making himself so very indispensable.

Somewhere here, in the shit pile that remained of the human nations, was an answer. A sword gifted by a goddess of justice, and a wielder who perhaps might be desperate enough to let him aim the strike.

Septimus very much liked to be the solution to a problem.

He flicked the cigarillo into a pile of burning corpses and slipped into the night.

END OF BOOK IV

The Crowns of Nyaxia series will continue in book V coming in 2026.