Page 51 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

ASAR

W hat have you done to me?” the Keeper thundered.

His voice was the shifting of mountains, greater than that of any mortal.

He thrashed like a fish on a line, massive limbs flailing.

I shouted a warning as his tail nearly swept Sylina away, though she stepped into nothingness and reappeared safely afar seconds before it struck her—an impressive Arachessen skill.

Mische pushed herself up with Luce protectively at her side. She had been stunning in the throes of her ritual, her eyes glowing bright white, licks of darkness pouring from her hands. Now, the final ebbs of her magic faded.

I let out a breath of relief when she met my eyes and nodded a silent, I’m alright.

The Keeper clutched his torso—now whole again—as if feeling for his death wound.

He swung his head up, eyes glowing white, infuriated steam puffing from his nostrils.

He seized his sword—a weapon so massive it had taken two men to move it—and raised it over his head as if it were a child’s plaything.

I threw all my strength into calling the shadows, sending tendrils of them winding around his limbs, but I knew that there was no holding him.

Just as the Keeper prepared to fell his weapon, Atrius called out, “We challenge you, Keeper, for passage into the deadlands!”

Mid-strike, the Keeper froze. Recognition flickered through his rage.

“You,” he growled. “I remember you .”

Atrius lifted one hand, the other still firmly on his sword. “I thought perhaps you’d like a rematch.”

For a moment, the Keeper was still. “Challenge me,” he repeated. Then his rage returned, slow and inevitable and terrible, voice rising with every word. “Fools. Fools! You ask for passage? You know not what you seek. You are already merely ants on a carcass. As are we all.”

I sensed something different in him now—something stronger and yet more tender than anger. Beneath his rage, his words cracked as if he was on the verge of tears.

Pain. Grief.

Sylina’s brow furrowed. Her head cocked slightly. She felt it, too.

“We have given you a second life, Keeper,” I said. “It’s what you deserve, after your years of service.”

Asar, Mische said into my mind. He ? —

But apparently my words had been the wrong ones. “A second life?” the Keeper roared as he whirled toward me. The blade rose, glinting eerily against the light below. I tensed, ready for it to fall.

Mische let out a wordless shout and dove for me, even as I hissed, “Don’t.”

But when she collided with me, and the Keeper’s gaze fell to us, he stopped. His stare picked me apart, narrowed with interest.

“It has been many years,” he said bitterly, “since I have seen your kind here.”

He lowered himself, slowly, until he was nearly at eye level, his great claws digging into the stone.

“They killed all the others like you,” he said. “Just as they killed all the others like me. Now there is nothing left. For too long, I have been a naive fool.”

They. “You’re speaking of the gods,” I said.

“The gods that remain. The ones who live by sweeping away all else. And now they plan to do so again.” Smoke plumed from his nostrils.

“They swore to me once that it would never happen again. But they are liars. Go, if you know what is good for you. The gods prepare for war. I have already lived through such an atrocity. I will not live to witness it again.”

“If you let us pass,” Mische said softly, “we’ll stop it. That’s why we’ve come here. Why we’ve asked for your help. Please.”

Into my mind, she whispered, He didn’t fight, when he was killed. He just let it happen. I saw it.

Whatever he had witnessed in his final moments had made him choose death over the future ahead.

The Keeper regarded us in silence. Then, with his free hand, he reached down and scooped up a handful of snow. Cold flakes fell over my head and Mische’s. It occurred to me that they resembled ash.

Atrius and Sylina watched, tense, unblinking.

I thought Mische’s plea might actually work.

But then the Keeper lowered his head.

“They always claim they will be better,” he murmured. “And even now, I am a fool for dreaming it could be true.”

When he moved again, it was so swift we didn’t have time to react.

He let the snow fall, then raised his sword high. Fire flashed in his eyes.

“You wish to challenge me?” he roared. “Very well. Challenge me.”

Flames burst up the walls, dousing us in red light.

Atrius and Sylina lunged. I reached deep into the shadows. Luce snarled.

The Keeper brought the blade down?—

—and thrust it into his own gut.

Silver blood spattered over my face. Mische gasped and jerked backward, narrowly avoiding him as he sank onto his knees.

“Go,” the Keeper gurgled out. “The snow will offer you passage home. If you make it that far. Even the monsters have fled.”

He splayed out his hand against the closed gate.

“Do not ever bring me back,” he said.

And with a sickening, wet, agonizingly slow crunch, he dragged the blade up, up, up, splitting himself in a twin to the wound that had killed him.

The door burst open. A gust of wind sent us sprawling to the gaping frame, so strong it was as if the world had tipped sideways.

The horses snorted and pawed the ground, frantic at first, then fearless as they charged forward, the first to dive into the open arch.

I narrowly managed to grab onto Mische’s arm, her hand clutching a handful of snow.

Luce tumbled against us both, and we all went careening into Atrius and Sylina, sliding through the door, and then we were falling, falling, falling.

As I plunged into nothingness, I watched the Keeper slump over, his blood dripping over the edge of the stone, rapidly shrinking in the distance.

And then, nothing.

I opened my eyes.

An inverted version of the world stared back at me.

I knew, logically, that the land of the gods did not follow the physical rules of the mortal realm.

But to see it laid out in front of me was disorienting, even after the time that I spent in Ysria.

There was no sky, only upside-down terrain hanging overhead, like a shattered mirror in which each shard offered a glimpse of another world—white dunes, lush forests, majestic mountain ranges.

In one shard, I recognized a glimpse of the House of Shadow.

In another, a sliver of Vostis, Mische’s homeland.

The fractures between them glowed with ethereal gold, little bursts of light streaking back and forth like shooting stars.

For a moment, I couldn’t hear anything because I heard everything —the monotonous din of thousands or millions of voices whispering at once.

I sat up too fast. My head throbbed. The hum faded. Luce sniffed my face, concerned.

Beside me, Mische rubbed her eyes as she got her bearings. Atrius was already on his feet, leaning over Sylina, who was on all fours, her forehead pressed to the ground. The horses, shockingly, had not bolted after our unpleasant landing, though they stood in a tight circle, snorting in irritation.

I stood and took in the scene around us.

Mische whispered, “Holy fucking gods.” An ironic choice of words.

The deadlands were rarely depicted, or even mentioned, in religious or historical texts, save for their occasional reference as the place of Alarus’s dismemberment.

I hadn’t realized that I’d even had a mental image of what they looked like until now, when it was so clear that it certainly had not been this.

We were in the middle of a city so incredible it defied mortal comprehension.

Or what once had been one, long, long ago. Now, it was in ruin.

Great buildings that rivaled what I’d witnessed in Ysria towered over us—just as incredible, and just as utterly foreign.

A triangular tower stood beside us, countless stories high and slightly tilted, jutting up into misty clouds.

Hundreds more disappeared into the distance, shrouded in a haze of gray dust. The ground, beneath a thick layer of dust, was crafted of large marble tile.

The streets ran in perfect, endless blocks in all directions, interrupted by occasional crumbling ravines. Stairs circled up, up, up, to nowhere.

I turned to find myself staring into the monumental face of a fallen statue.

It was so large that I needed a moment to take in the entire thing.

I realized that she had swords on her back, jutting into the hazy sky—or once had.

Now, four were broken off, several small buildings crushed where they had fallen.

Shiket. Albeit an unfamiliar depiction of her—with different armor and her hair free in undulating stone waves.

Other statues lorded over the ruins, too.

I spotted Vitarus, with a building that might have once been a hanging garden dangling from his outstretched hand; Ix, dancing over a murky distant harbor, her long-chipped thorny arrow glinting in the sky; Zarux, toppled over in the distant sea, half his briny face peering over the horizon.

Acaeja stood upon a distant hill, wings outstretched and only slightly chipped, staring directly down at us.

I hadn’t believed it was scientifically or magically possible to build a city so grand. Any society that could do so had to be far more advanced than ours.

But this place also reeked of death. The stench seeped from every building, every ruin, like rot from fermented fruit.

“ This is the deadlands?” Mische whispered. She turned in a slow circle, around and around, eyes wide, like she couldn’t take it all in at once.

“What were you imagining?” Atrius said drily. “Desolate tundra, a few cursed mountains, maybe some divine beasts?”

She paused, then said, “Well. Yes.”

Atrius kept his thoughts guarded. Still, I sensed his tension. I suspected that his last visit here had not been pleasant. Beside him, Sylina had managed to stand. She now steadied herself against a wall, swaying slightly.

Atrius let out a humorless scoff. “That was what I had expected, too, once. But no. The deadlands were once a world much like ours.” He gazed wryly up at Shiket’s looming visage.

“The gods’ pleasure garden, before they turned their attention to our world.

Now it’s just another place they hide what they have discarded. ”

My gaze lowered to the streets ahead of us, long abandoned.

Despite the ruin, it was all shockingly well-preserved after what had to be thousands of years.

In one corner, a small, overturned cart sat, remaining wheel spinning lazily in the breeze.

It could have easily been any Obitraen child’s wagon.

The mundanity of it was jarring against the backdrop of the grand ruin.

And somehow, I knew what had happened here, as if from the hazy memory of a long-forgotten dream.

“They destroyed it,” I murmured.

{Bones upon which to build a stronger kingdom,} a voice whispered, so faint and brief I thought I’d imagined it.

“Seemingly so,” Atrius muttered. “I don’t know how or why. Maybe a war among themselves. Maybe they just got bored. The gods are cruel, and they care about nothing.”

He said it with the bitterness that could only come from one who knew it firsthand.

“It’s horrific,” Mische whispered.

There was no other word for it.

I’d never known of this, not even in the books I’d dragged out of Ryvenhaal’s deepest shelves.

The existence of such a tremendous past was staggering.

Illumination into all the dark corners of the world, Gideon had promised me, the first night I’d met him.

To think there were so many places even his promises couldn’t reach.

Mische looked up at the fractured sky, reflecting the glimpses of the mortal realm and the arcing light between them. “And what is that?”

“Perhaps the closest we’ll ever come to seeing the world as the gods do,” Atrius said. “They witness everything at once. And they travel through the cracks between them.”

The spira. It looked more impressive up in the sky than it had from within.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and turned, hand on my weapon, to see a little smear quickly ducking behind a crumbling building. A deep crack ran down that street, weaving through the ruins. It looked different—fresher—than the rest of the carnage. Silver smoke puffed from it.

Mische pointed into the distance, where slips of silver wound over the landscape. “Are those wraiths ?”

They were faint, and amorphous even by the standards of the Descent in its worst condition—barely identifiable as humanoid. Yet, they were unmistakable.

Impossible, my logical mind protested. They can’t be here.

The deadlands were a completely separate realm, farther from the underworld than even the mortal plane. It was terrible enough for the underworld to break through to the mortal realm, but if the damage was spreading so far that it seeped into the deadlands as well?.?.?.

It would mean that the condition of the Descent and the underworld was so bad that those trapped there were now clawing their way out any way they could.

Sylina still kept one hand on the wall. “The threads here are?.?.?.?twisted. Torn.”

“Were those here before?” Mische asked Atrius. “The cracks, and the wraiths?”

His brow was low over his eyes, wary. “No. And it was not this quiet.”

I realized he was right. It was completely silent.

Atrius had told us to expect countless dangers and beasts, but there were none. Only abandoned ruin.

“Even the monsters have fled,” Sylina murmured. Some of the Keeper’s final words.

Another gust of wind sent dust and debris rolling down the abandoned streets. Above, the gods’ pathways flashed across the sky, like the lightning of a distant, deadly storm.

“We should be going,” Atrius said at last. He shushed his horse, stroking its nose, then pulled himself up onto it. “At least we’ll move quicker without unwanted company.”

He jerked his chin to a hill in the distance—what looked to be another abandoned city rising up in a series of jagged spires. “The execution site is that way.”

Perhaps we were all wondering whether it was wise to go toward whatever had chased far worse beasts than us away.

But none of us said it.