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

ASAR

I t is a myth that vampires can see in true darkness.

Like cats, vampires can see in nearly all real-world circumstances.

But we need just a little sliver of light—no matter how slight.

The reflection of the moon or the shimmer of the stars.

The near-invisible glow of the atmosphere over the horizon, indistinguishable to inferior human sight.

One little wisp is enough to illuminate an entire world.

True darkness was very rare. Most vampires had never and would never experience it.

I was not one of them.

My mentor, Gideon, had believed it was important to learn how to function without your senses.

One could find, he said, far more powerful skills without the lazy payoff of sight or sound or smell.

When I was a child, he would often lock me in a dark windowless box for days.

Funny that now, when I was less mortal than ever, I would feel so close to that fragile younger version of myself.

The cell where the gods imprisoned me was the first time in centuries that I had experienced that kind of unending darkness.

Gideon had taught me that every weakness could become a strength if you embraced it enough. That the most resourceful minds would find the tools to sharpen nothingness to a blade if offered nothing else.

He had been right. And here, between mortality and divinity, I reached into the darkness and honed myself against the whetstone of a single memory.

Mische’s death.

In life, her skin had smelled of cinnamon. But when I held her at the end, I breathed only the scent of ash. She had been nearly unrecognizable, her skin charred, her freckles hidden beneath the blood. Her eyes, though—her eyes had been the same, honey brown and gold and amber.

She had slain a god. The kind of act that would cement her in legends.

But the woman I’d held had not felt like a legend.

She felt mortal. Fragile and fading like a smothered flame.

In the darkness, I experienced that final embrace over and over again. And then after it, I felt the gods tear me away from her. I watched Shiket, the goddess of justice, drive her sword through Mische’s chest so thoughtlessly. Like she had been nothing more than a pest to be swatted away.

I wasn’t sure how long I had been here. Weeks, maybe, or months. I could feel the strange, unfamiliar stirring of divinity in my chest. Mische had pulled me out of the resurrection circle, in an infuriating act of selflessness that I had never deserved.

But she had pulled something else out with me, too. Some part of Alarus, the ancestor buried generations back in my bloodline. A seed of divinity, germinating in my soul.

None of it mattered as much as that memory of her body falling beneath Shiket’s blade. I lived it again, again, again.

My arms ached against my restraints. The chains around my wrists, ankles, and throat burned with every pulse of divine light. They shortened them every time I misbehaved, and now, I couldn’t move at all. A single strand of greasy hair dangled down against the tip of my nose, itching miserably.

My head lifted, muscles screaming in protest, as a door formed before me. The light was disorienting, and it made me unpleasantly aware of my physical form.

Two figures in long white robes stood before me. Sentinels.

The powerful build of their physiques was clear even beneath the obfuscation of their clothing, which hid whether they were male or female. Their hair was covered by hoods and their faces by masks of polished gold, free of features, decoration, or imperfection.

As they approached, I saw my distorted reflection in the gleaming surface of those masks—dirty, thin, limbs forced out against this slab of marble. I looked like a corpse at the center of one of my rituals. The thought almost made me laugh, even though I couldn’t quite figure out the joke.

They sent two this time. That was, I had to admit, a little satisfying.

In the beginning, I had been tended to by the winged creatures that acted as the gods’ footmen here in Ysria.

But they were servants, not warriors. I’d killed four of them by the time the gods decided I required more security.

That was when they started sending the Sentinels.

They were divine soldiers of Shiket. Once, they had been human.

But they had been chosen in their death to ascend to immortality and serve her as guardians of the just—or whatever Shiket deemed “justice” to be.

They were shells of their former selves, subject to greater decay than even the worst wraiths I had encountered in the Descent.

It was an honor Shiket offered to only a select few of the greatest warriors that followed her.

Supposedly. To me, it seemed like a terrible deal. Give up your soul in exchange for endless almost-but-not-quite life. Spend eternity doing the dirty work of the gods instead of finding peace in death. Sentinels may have looked more civilized than wraiths, but they were just as lost.

But then again, some people never did find peace in death. Some were not equipped to face the truth of themselves within it, and others still refused to believe that death was its own kind of eternal life. I had no pity left to spare for the ignorant. Especially not ones that served her .

The goddess who had skewered Mische and tossed her aside like garbage, and still had the gall to claim she represented justice.

I wasn’t angry. Anger was a fool’s emotion. It made you slow and stupid.

What I felt was hatred. Cold, sharp, precise.

The Sentinels began working at the restraints around my wrists.

They wore gold gauntlets, more refined than any that could have been crafted by mortals.

My shoulder wailed in protest as they released one of my chains, my hand dropping like dead weight.

It had been a long time since I’d supported my own body.

My other wrist followed, and before I could move, the Sentinels linked my shackles together in front of me.

One lifted its faceless head and touched the chains. Pain shot up my wrists as light doused my face. My teeth ground against a hiss of pain.

“Godlight,” the smaller of the two Sentinels said.

Their voice was sibilant, as if distilled from an echo of an echo, hiding all marks of who they had once been in life.

“Perhaps you hold a drop of a god’s essence in your lineage, but your flesh is still mostly that of an accursed.

Remember that you remain vulnerable to the light of the Just, vampire. ”

I didn’t much like being so condescended to. But I said nothing. They were afraid of me. I could smell it like sweat. We both knew I knew it, and we both knew it meant I’d already won.

I looked down at my hands, flesh bubbling beneath glowing metal.

The other times they had sent Sentinels after me, it was to interrogate me or to retrieve pieces of me for the gods’ experimentations—a lock of hair, a sliver of skin, a vial of blood. But this was the first time I’d been taken from my cell. Interesting.

“Taking me on a walk?” My voice was rough with disuse.

One of the Sentinels pushed me toward the door. “Perhaps they have at last decided to execute you, god slayer.”

“I’m not a god slayer.”

The taller of the two laughed. It was an unpleasant sound, a rasping death rattle. “Only a coward pleads his innocence to the executioner.”

I stopped walking abruptly.

“I am not pleading my innocence, ” I hissed. “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.”

The Sentinel scoffed. “The stars have already forgotten your whore, fallen one.”

Perhaps it was the fact that I was in the land of the gods, or perhaps it was whatever Mische did to me when she pulled me out of that ceremony. But my body felt different than it had before, like the layers of resistance between my mind and my muscles had been thinned.

I moved fast.

One moment, the Sentinels were leading me to the door of my cell, and the next, I was across the room, my fingers digging into one Sentinel’s shoulders, pushing them against a pillar.

A spiderweb of cracks surrounded their body.

The chains around my wrists and ankles flared searingly bright. But the pain was an afterthought.

“By the light of the Just,” the other Sentinel was bellowing, “the White Pantheon commands you to stand down!”

The Sentinel’s golden mask reflected my face back at me, distorted by the curve of metal. My eyes were hollow, my skin wan, my scars brutally stark. My left eye was ink black, shadows pouring from it.

I jammed one hand beneath the collar of the Sentinel’s armor, right around their throat. I felt no skin there, only metal. Their mortal past was so far away. They had done all they could to forcibly shed it.

“You have the nerve to claim you know what the stars remember?” I snarled. “ You? A creature that sold your soul to forget what you once were?”

“Get off me!” they snarled, as their partner yanked at my restraints. “You cannot kill a Sentinel of the White Pantheon!”

And yet, still, that spark of fear, so much brighter now.

No, a mortal could not kill a Sentinel. But was I mortal?

I didn’t know. And they didn’t, either. Beneath that metal mask, they were weighing their luck.

“Kill you,” I repeated, scoffing. “Ignorant, to think death is the worst I can offer you.”

The free Sentinel looped the glowing chain around my neck and pulled, and the surge of pain was too much even for me. I dropped the Sentinel and stepped back.

The Sentinel touched their throat as they steadied themselves against the pillar.

“It is so easy to provoke your kind. You fall prey to such simple taunts. Move. ”

They gave me an abrupt shove, and I resumed walking.

Whore, they had called her. It was such a dull, unsophisticated insult. They thought that was what had provoked me?

Whore was one thing. But to claim that the woman who had literally changed the course of the divine world, who had saved countless lives and touched countless souls, would ever be forgotten ?.?.?.

Never. 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.

She was not done with this world. Only the ignorant believed that death was an end. It certainly would not be for her.

But I shut my mouth and kept walking.