Page 12 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

MISCHE

M y heart hurt.

It was a strange pain, hard and tangible, unlike any I’d experienced in death. It felt like a more acute version of the anchor spell Asar had cast when we first embarked on our journey. It felt like a fragment of life .

I was lying in the dirt, stomach down. I sat up, then frowned down at myself, confused.

A line of bright red light speared straight through my chest. Confused, I tried to touch it, only to be rewarded by a shock and an onslaught of images—a gold reflection of a silhouetted face, a set of six wings, a goddess’s bloody smile.

What the ? —?

“Move, girl, move !” Vincent’s voice bellowed. I could barely see him through the cloudy mist as he rose unsteadily to his feet.

I opened my mouth to respond.

But then a blunt, metallic force hit me across the back of my head, sending me back to the dirt.

There was nothing pleasant about this pain. This felt like it had felt when Atroxus had set me on fire.

It took me a moment to realize the scream of agony was mine. I tried to scramble to my feet, but a harsh grip yanked me backward.

I struck the ground. Above me, the sky tore to ribbons.

A figure leaned over me. I saw my own terrified face distorted in gold.

And then nothing.

I dreamed of a dead firefinch, rot consuming its open chest.

“It’s dirty,” Saescha said.

I looked up at her. Blood covered her chest, too. She looked at me like I was cursed.

“Not worth saving,” she said.

I turned back to the bird. She was wrong. It was a phoenix. It still had so much to do. But the maggots squirmed and writhed in its chest, and even though I poked it, it didn’t move.

“See?” Saescha said. “What did I tell you?”

I was standing, my back to a wall, my arms splayed and wrists bound. Gods, they burned .

I opened my eyes, fighting heavy eyelids.

My chin was lowered, head sagging. The first thing I saw was my own body, translucent and ghostly.

It never got less unnerving to see it that way—but that wasn’t what made me jolt with shock.

No, that was the bright red thread going straight through my sternum, shimmering and not quite solid.

I’d thought that I had imagined it. But this was very real.

The only words my mind could conjure were, What the fuck?

I was chained up in ruins, atop a crooked stone tower, half collapsed.

Perhaps one of the crumbling buildings that I had seen in the distance as I’d traveled with Vincent.

A spiraling staircase of uneven stone rose up, up, up into the bloody mist, disappearing into the noxious smoke.

If I stared hard enough into it, I could see the veil above and the two massive forms lording over it—a serpent and a lioness, bearing golden skulls upon shadowy bodies, trying and failing to herd a glut of wayward souls.

I recognized this place, where the Descent met the mortal realm. I’d crossed this passage with Asar, Chandra, and Elias when we began our journey to the underworld. Even then, it had been clear that the veil was weak and the guardians overwhelmed.

Now?

It was heartbreaking. Half the lioness’s skull face was missing, creating the illusion of a mouth open in perpetual wail.

Their desperation was palpable as they attempted to herd the souls back to their rightful path, but they were overwhelmed.

Countless lost souls spilled through gaping tears in the veil, falling to the underworld like drops of rain.

The grief was overwhelming. Death should be a refuge. But there was no peace in this.

It made my heart ache to think of Asar, the man who had lorded over Morthryn and the Descent with such empathetic care, witnessing this. Together, we had tsk ed over broken gates and cracked stone. Flesh wounds, all while a cancer consumed what was beneath.

At this thought, the thread pulsed again.

“I wonder,” a voice said, “what it must feel like to be so important to someone.”

The sound had more in common with the tinny scrape of metal than it did with a voice—as if age and gender and melodic cadence had been all stripped away, leaving behind only the barest echoes of humanity.

I turned my head to see a figure silhouetted against the shifting light of the tears in the sky. Their back was turned, and their body obscured by long, white robes.

I tried to jerk forward, only to be rewarded by terrible burning where my restraints met my flesh.

“Godlight. Even in death, you are still a fallen one. There is no resisting it.” The figure lifted their hand—as if examining it. “The power of the White Pantheon is all-consuming,” they said, with a thoughtfulness that seemed strangely mortal.

“What happened? Up there?” I jerked my chin to the broken sky and the guardians fighting their fruitless battle in the distance. Something, I knew, was so deeply wrong.

The figure paused. Still, they didn’t turn. Their head cocked, too slowly and too smoothly. “You seem concerned.”

I choked a laugh. “Concerned? Look at that! Of course I’m?—”

Another spear of pain bolted through my chest, leaving me gasping. An onslaught of images, too quick to decipher, flashed by. But I didn’t need to see them to feel it. Hear it. Notes of a song that sounded like him. The next words of a sentence we hadn’t yet finished.

“Asar.” The name was a sudden exhale. I didn’t mean to say it out loud.

But at this, the figure swiftly turned.

“So this is what earns your compassion,” they hissed. “Alarus’s guardians of the dead. Wayward wraiths. Your fallen lover. Fitting. ”

With a flash of billowing robes and gleaming light, they were right in front of me. I found myself staring at my own reflection, face distorted in smooth curved gold.

I almost didn’t recognize myself. I looked like—like a wraith. But that shock faded quickly compared to the shock of what I was witnessing.

“You’re a—a Sentinel.”

My voice trembled slightly.

I’d never met one in person—most, of course, never did.

But like anyone else, I’d seen them rendered in paintings and tapestries and church carvings.

I had spent lots of time in temples of Shiket.

Shiket and Atroxus had strong overlap in their followers.

The Order of the Destined Dawn frequently dealt with nearby cults of Shiket in our missions spreading the light.

But I had never liked Shiket’s temples. They felt like monuments to violence, every wall painted with depictions of glorified battles and lined with stone visages of Sentinels, staring down in eternal judgment from beneath those smooth masks.

They paled in comparison to the real thing.

As I stared at this twisted version of myself in the warrior’s mask, I felt as if I were seeing every ugly mark upon my soul, burning my skin like the sun.

“You can’t be here,” I blurted out. “A Sentinel can’t be in the underworld.”

Sentinels were creations and servants of the White Pantheon. The underworld was territory of Alarus, and by extension, Nyaxia. Gods of the White Pantheon could barely see into this territory, let alone send their soldiers into it.

A low ting rang out beneath the Sentinel’s mask—a laugh that sounded like the toll of funeral bells. “What shall stop me?” They lifted a gauntlet-clad hand to the sky. “You hide behind rules that you yourself have so callously destroyed. Even now, your lover shreds the veil to reach you.”

Their head canted slightly, and somehow, I could sense their stare at my chest—at the thread of light, running straight through their body and continuing on the other side. It now rose into the sky, disappearing into the morass of lost souls.

He was coming for me.

That stupid, reckless, foolish man was coming for me.

But of course he was. Asar was a man of his word. And for a terrible, selfish moment, a giddy elation bubbled up in my heart.

Just as quickly, it shattered, as the reality of my situation hit me.

I was bait . That’s why I was here.

“Tell me, fallen one. What made you believe that you could outrun justice?” The Sentinel’s tone was genuine, like they wanted a real answer.

“You have murdered a god of the White Pantheon. You have shattered the sun in the sky, damning millions to the darkness.” They tipped my chin up, and I bit back a yelp of pain.

Their gold-clad fingertips were razor-sharp.

“Most disgusting of all, you swallowed the innocence of the human girl who had committed herself so fully to the god you one day murdered. And yet, you believed you would escape punishment.”

Their fingers tightened.

“This is the vilest thing about Nyaxia’s fallen children,” they said. “Your indulgent, lustful egos .”

Tightened.

The pain became excruciating.

My eyes fell over the Sentinel’s shoulder. To the pile of glowing chains on the cracked stone floor. Godlight blessed, clearly intended for Asar.

I had to get out of here. Now.

But I didn’t know where Vincent was. I had no weapon. And while I could hold my own well enough in a fight, I certainly wasn’t about to win in hand-to-hand combat against a blessed warrior of the divine—least of all when I wasn’t sure if my ghost body was even capable of hand-to-hand anything .

You are a Shadowborn, Iliae. You are surrounded by your greatest weapon. I could hear Asar’s voice in my ear, could practically feel his breath. Use it!

I had a lot of logical qualms with this advice.

But hell, how many times had I said that all we had was faith?

“Release me.”

I did my best impression of Asar’s voice of compulsion. It was comically low, distorted slightly by the Sentinel’s crushing grip on my cheeks, and I had to admit, not very intimidating.

The Sentinel stared at me.

“Release me,” I said again, in an attempt that was louder, more gravelly, and no more effective.

The Sentinel laughed.

“As I said, that ego is?—”

A streak of darkness collided with us.

My body went flying with the force of the impact. One of my restraints snapped. The other screamed against my skin as it took the whole of my weight.