Page 43 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

INTERLUDE

Y ears passed, then decades. The boy grew. He became a prince, and he became a monster.

I will spare you the details of his rise and his fall.

It is, after all, a tale you have heard before.

Just know that both were extraordinary. In his mentor’s hand, the prince was honed into exactly the weapon that his father dreamed he could be.

He became more legend than man, and he thrived on it, because only a legend could cross into the unknowns he still longed to conquer.

And yet, his hunger for knowledge remained insatiable.

No matter how far he pushed himself, he still found that promise he had been offered all those years ago—a life beyond fear—evading him.

His downfall, fittingly, was a painful tumble from the height of his success. When he came home that night to find his lover’s body, he knew it was over. He knew it even before he sealed his fate himself.

His attempted resurrection of his lover—a Shadowborn noble—was forbidden.

He was, after all, a weapon, and weapons should not strike without the hand of their master on the hilt.

But the prince knew that his true crime was not conducting the necromancy, but failing at it.

What damned him were the fresh scars on his face, still seeping, and the fact that they would mark his failure forever.

The prince did not care. Not about this, or anything. He sat in his imprisonment, awaiting sentencing.

He thought his mentor would come to visit him, but he did not. Instead, one night, a guard delivered a single folded piece of parchment.

The prince almost refused it. A lifetime of abuse had stoked hatred in his heart. Yet, in this vicious world, hatred was independent of admiration, and the prince still, after all these years, admired his mentor deeply.

So, he took the letter and unfolded the parchment. It held only a single line written in familiar script:

Remember this feeling.

The prince stared at that sentence. Then, in a fit of rage so violent it sent the guards lurching away from the bars, he crushed the paper in his fist, decimating it with a burst of darkness.

Something within him snapped in two.

The implication that this could one day be something that drove him to become a greater weapon enraged him.

The prince had spent a lifetime hauling strength from the worst of his memories, forging rage into destruction.

And it was, always, always, destruction.

The only thing he was capable of. The only purpose he could fulfill.

Upon his sentencing, the prince was officially cast into exile.

He was sent to the prison to rot away with everything else the kingdom did not wish to look at.

For a long time, the prince resented this place.

It echoed his rage and pain back at him.

He saw himself in the prisoners, in the ghosts, in the bowing beams that moaned their death wails, and he hated them all.

Weeks passed, then months.

He had stopped counting the nights of his exile when the prince, at last, wandered the halls of his new home with fresh eyes.

He realized how deeply it was hurting. He noticed the stress fractures in the doors, windows, beams. He heard its voice, so quiet he had dismissed it before, begging for his help.

He paused at a gate in the prison’s lowest levels, close to the boundary to the veil. Jagged cracks fanned out through the bronze metal.

He looked down at his hand, and the scars that echoed those cracks so perfectly.

Help me, the prison moaned. Help me.

The prince touched the cracked metal and could have sworn he felt an exhale of relief.

The prison, he knew, was not a prison at all, but a temple repurposed. It had once been a place of spiritual solace, but in the eyes of the Shadowborn king, it was fit only to be a place of pain. It occurred to the prince only now that it was so deeply misunderstood.

He thought of all the times he had been told that his greatest purpose was to become more effective at inflicting suffering. He thought of all the times his mentor had told him that his life was only worth the blood he spilled upon it.

The prince reached for the broken gate, and slowly, methodically, tenderly, patched each and every wound.

When he was done, he stepped back and surveyed his handiwork. It was immaculate.

For the first time in months, he smiled—satisfied in his defiance.