Page 2 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

MISCHE

W hat does it feel like to die?

Everyone has asked that question, but perhaps acolytes more than any other.

Acolytes are obsessed with death—maybe because it is both the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate reward, the greatest thing we can offer our gods and the greatest thing they can offer us.

No acolyte was spoken of in greater admiration than those who left this life ablaze with their love for Atroxus. None wanted to die in their beds.

I did not die in mine.

I died at the doorstep to the underworld, a traitor’s weapon in my hand, drenched in the blood of the god who had given me everything. I died covered in the ashes of his remains and the burns of his punishment.

I died alone, listening to the screams of the love of my life.

What does it feel like to die?

Would I remember how to answer that question?

I’d comforted countless grieving souls in my time as a missionary. We were taught that death was a peaceful end to a grand fight.

When I died, I realized that we had been wrong.

What does it feel like to die?

When I died, it was with my god’s blood on my hands, my lover’s pleas in my ears, and the oblivion of eternal darkness—not eternal dawn—seared into my eyes.

When I died, it did not feel like the peaceful end to a grand fight.

It felt like the beginning of one.

I lay on the ground and stared at my hand, which I held in front of my face. Beyond it, colors danced in the eternity of the sky. My skin was smooth and brown and glistening with the faint translucent dust of death.

I just kept staring at that hand. It looked so alive, and so, so dead.

Blink. I closed my eyes and saw palm trees, a blue sky, white sand. Vostis, the place that had once been my home. The place I had once given my very soul to.

Open.

The underworld hung over me. Unmistakable.

“Get up,” the voice said.

I tore my eyes away from the sky, away from my hand, to the angular face of the man who leaned over me. He swept a strand of long, fair hair behind his ear and gave me an appraising stare.

We had never met—not directly. But of course I recognized him. I’d seen him in countless paintings. I’d seen his visage illuminated over the skyline of Sivrinaj, the capital of the House of Night. And I’d seen his likeness torn down by Rishan soldiers, after Raihn had killed him.

Vincent—dead vampire king of the House of Night—held out a hand to me.

“Get up,” he said. “I hear we have some work to do.”

I stared at him blankly. Beyond him, a split of lightning arced across the sky.

Except—no, not lightning. They just kept growing, splitting, bursting open to reveal waves of warring light and darkness—purple, black, blue, green, the essence of galaxies.

They reminded me viscerally of something so familiar, something that made my heart ache, but I couldn’t place it.

My lashes fluttered.

Once, as a child in Vostis, I had been caught in a riptide. I had fought and fought, but every time my head bobbed beneath the surface of the water, I was a little farther from shore. What had shocked me then was just how quiet it was. Almost peaceful.

That was what this felt like.

Deceptive, dangerous peace.

“Mische Iliae.” Vincent clutched my arm, yanking me from the riptide. “You cannot go. Not yet.”

I stared at him, confused. Behind him, the cracks shivered across the sky.

Cracks like the sun shattering, as I thrust an arrow into the throat of the god I had once loved.

Cracks like the beautiful scars across Asar’s face.

Asar.

The name flooded over me. With it came the memory of an agonized voice and the final words I had heard.

Stop! I need her!

It was this memory, more than Vincent’s grip, that jerked me awake. A harsh, disorienting reality struck me.

I had died.

Gods help me. I had died.

A powerful force shook the ground. In the sky, the streaks split open, gushing light like blood through torn stitches. Silhouetted, winged bodies slithered through them.

Souleaters, I thought dimly. They were souleaters.

But this realization snagged something sharp in my overwhelmed, blurry mind.

Souleaters shouldn’t be in the underworld.

A wave of darkness passed over me. I felt oblivion beckoning—true death, offering me a welcome embrace. The sun called to me. The scent of the sea. The peace of an easier past.

And oh, I was tired.

But Vincent pulled me closer. “If you go, I cannot find you again. Whatever you are feeling now, it is false. It is a lie. You have work to do.”

A memory of my sister flitted past.

My sister kneeling beside me in the church. Death is the ultimate offering. Death is the ultimate peace. The grand end to our destined battle.

My sister in the last memory I had of her—a wraith, kneeling before Atroxus, drowning in admiration as I killed him.

As I betrayed her.

As I listened to the man I loved being dragged away.

As I watched the sun shatter in the sky forever.

A burst of fury tore through me. The answer was suddenly clear.

What kind of a choice was it, anyway? I was already damned.

With a grunt of exertion, I grabbed Vincent’s other hand. A gushing current of light roared past me, but he held firm. I glimpsed his smirk of satisfaction.

“Correct choice,” he said.

He didn’t understand. It wasn’t a choice at all.

But I didn’t have time to say that as we both fell beneath the darkness.

My eyes opened. Above me, the souleaters wound through the sky. Slow cracks spread across the heavens.

My surroundings shifted and changed. Blink, and the scent of sulfur was replaced by that of the ocean, the lush, sweet aroma of the forest, the elegant whisper of jasmine incense.

I sat upright, the world twisting with the sharpness of the movement.

Before me was an altar adorned with a gilded depiction of the sun, rays spilling across the marble floor.

Atroxus rose over it, stone hands outstretched, empty eyes spearing me.

Somehow, they were every bit as enraged as they had been in his final moments.

This, somehow, managed to elicit a real reaction.

Panic.

I pressed my hand to my chest. I felt as if my heart should have been pounding against my ribs, my lungs gasping for air, but instead, all that panic manifested as?.?.?.?silence. As if nothing existed beneath my skin at all.

“Odd, isn’t it?” a low voice said.

I turned to see Vincent leaning against a pillar, arms crossed, gazing out to the soupy mists through the windows.

“The sensation fades quickly,” he said. “Soon you won’t remember what it felt like at all.”

“It?” I croaked.

“Living.”

Gods, I was going to throw up.

I wished I could throw up.

I tried to stand, and nearly toppled over. Not because my muscles offered resistance, but because they didn’t—the movement was too easy, too unburdened by flesh or gravity or the weight of my body.

Because I was dead.

I was dead.

This thought hit me, more surreal than ever, as I stared at the Citadel tapestries.

Vincent cast me a disinterested glance.

“The visions will fade. The things you see here change. More pleasant for some than others, I hear. Punishment or reward, depending on how your immortal soul was judged. Which is it for you?”

I dragged my gaze up to Atroxus’s face, exactly as I remembered it in life—powerful, all-seeing, absolute. It all felt so real, just as I had begged to see it for decades.

Yet the answer was so clear:

Punishment.

I pressed my hands to my eye sockets, hard—hard enough that it should have hurt, but didn’t—and when I removed them, the mists before me had cleared. I no longer was looking at the Citadel.

I stared, silent.

Vincent’s voice came from behind me. “We need to start moving. Best not to stay in one place too long here.”

His words faded off into the background like sand worn down by the sea.

Distant, ghostly silhouettes wandered across the landscape—a landscape that constantly changed, revealing glimpses of grand cities and desolate plains, of oceans and mountains and ravines, of blood-soaked battlefields and bustling metropolises.

A million fragments of a million different lives.

Maybe they might’ve been beautiful in a sad kind of way, had it not been all so terribly overshadowed by the destruction.

Cracks ran through the ground, the sky. No, cracks wasn’t the right word for them—they were more vicious than that, more organic.

Wounds, gushing black and red. Massive beasts lumbered across the horizon, their eyes perfectly round, gaping windows through their silhouetted forms. They plucked souls from the ground, shoving them fistful by fistful into their mouths in too-slow, too-smooth movements.

It was horrifying.

“Is this—am I?—”

I didn’t know how to ask the question. My voice sounded far away and hollow.

Again I pressed my palms to my eyes and rubbed, hard. But when I pulled them away, the scene before me was the same.

“What is this?” I demanded.

Vincent stared at me like I was stupid. “This is the underworld.”

“I know. I mean, what is that ?” I stabbed a finger out to the view. “All of that? Is that—some kind of vision? Or is that real ?”

For a moment I could hope—hope that maybe this was my own personal divine punishment, the mist and the monsters and the cracks and the lightning.

But the faintest ghost of a wince passed over Vincent’s face.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “it is real.”

No. This wasn’t right. The Descent had looked something like this, falling prey to the decay of two thousand years of neglect.

Sure, in the Descent there were souleaters and monsters and ravines that swallowed souls.

But the underworld was supposed to be safe.

The underworld was supposed to be shielded from all of that.

And this—gods, this wasn’t decay. This wasn’t neglect. This was?—

It was hell. No soul, not even the most deserving, would find peace in a place like this.

I shook my head dumbly. “You’re wrong. It’s not supposed to?—”