Page 52 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

MISCHE

T he ruins were a museum of horrors. This had once been a civilization that dwarfed any I’d ever seen—when we left the city we’d arrived in, we traveled through sparser townships, then sprawling space that had perhaps once been farmland, now dry and shriveled.

Yet, even after all this time, all the discarded remnants of mundane lives still remained.

A tipped-over garden table. A dented cauldron rolling lazily down a hill.

A little piece of twisted metal crunched under my horse’s hooves that I realized, upon examination, had once been eyeglasses.

At one point, as we traveled through a narrow alleyway, I paused at a strange stain on the wall, the stone scorched in a shape that was oddly, terribly entrancing.

Sylina paused beside me, staring at it, too, with her blindfolded gaze. Then she reached out to touch the wall, before quickly withdrawing her hand.

Only then, at her reaction, did the shape suddenly make sense:

It was the shadow of two people, crouched down, clutching each other.

One leaned against the other, whose face was raised to the sky, now seared in silhouette against the stone.

The shape was too distorted to say whether it was a couple, a parent and a child, or perhaps two strangers who didn’t want to die alone.

None of these options seemed any better than the last.

I felt Sylina’s cold horror, too—just as sharp as mine.

“I spent a lifetime worshipping the White Pantheon,” she murmured. “I never imagined?.?.?.”

Her voice trailed off. But she didn’t need to finish. I understood her implicitly. It felt like the most shocking, gutting betrayal, even now.

The Arachessen worshipped Acaeja. But Sylina was now with Atrius, and the country she ruled had been claimed in Nyaxia’s name. Perhaps Sylina’s relationship to the White Pantheon was almost as complicated as mine.

I looked up into the distance, where a monumental gold statue of Atroxus peered through the mountains.

I thought of countless dawns and dusks on my knees before his visage, in stone or in flesh.

I thought of the countless times he or the priests or Saescha had told me that my faith was my greatest virtue.

That I was only worth whatever tiny sliver of Atroxus’s divine wonder that I could bring into the world.

Divine fucking wonder. From the being who had done this .

Did these people think that, too, when they built such incredible monuments to their gods? Did they think it when they were on their knees, begging for mercy?

“I was a missionary of Atroxus,” I said quietly. “I saw so many times how faith could help people who had nothing else. I believed it. I lived it. How do you reconcile that?” My throat clenched. I shook my head. “I didn’t think that it would still hurt to think of it all as a lie.”

Lies that I not only believed, but that I told .

“I was always taught to defend what is Right by Acaeja’s fate, not moral goodness,” Sylina said.

“I was taught that Rightness was simple, when morality was complicated. But I’ve learned there is no such thing as a single truth.

The threads are often contradictory.” She flattened her hand against the stone.

“Maybe multiple things can be true. Your saved souls found solace in your god, just as mine did. But even in the biggest lies, there is something real. I found a home with my sisters of the Arachessen. Not just with my goddess.”

It was a kind thought. I understood why Sylina wanted to believe it, because I wanted to, too. Faith wasn’t just about a church and a god. It was about your connection to those who shared that belief with you.

Yet the memory of Saescha in her final moments, her face raised in adoration for the sun she craved more than anything, twisted in my heart.

What if losing one, I wanted to say, still means losing the other?

But Sylina had already urged her horse on, pushing her emotions back into a controlled box in a way I sensed she’d likely done many times before.

“Come,” she said. “We have a long way to go.”

Before long, my horse was swaying beneath me. I was shivering near constantly, now, though during our brief rests Asar offered me sips of blood from his wrist. It barely helped. My hunger was agonizing. Asar saw it, even though I denied it.

Eventually, we came to a broken gate. The execution site loomed ahead.

Closer, it now somewhat resembled a colosseum, tall and circular with columns of stone and gold.

Leading up to it was a streak of ruin, cutting through buildings and towns and terrain.

Splashes of liquid gold glinted over the wreckage at seemingly random placement—a pile of collapsed stone here, a crushed building there, and other patches falling off into the distance.

It was a clear path, albeit a scattered one, as if something massive had barreled straight through the landscape. It didn’t seem like part of the original ruins, but it also was clearly much older than the fresh cracks leading to the underworld.

Asar pulled his horse to a stop beside me, staring up. I followed his gaze to a towering, twisted arch of metal, now broken. A gate, maybe? Clink, clink, clink, as a chain dangling from it swayed in the breeze. The chain gleamed faintly, and I found myself inching away from it.

“Is that godlight?” I asked.

Asar stared at that chain, unblinking.

“Nyaxia was here,” he said, his voice distant.

My brows rose. I looked to the path of destruction, stretching miles, with fresh eyes. The splashes of gold.

Nyaxia had fought through every god of the White Pantheon in her rage after Alarus’s death. We came through the hole she’d torn between worlds when she escaped. And now we were seeing the path of enraged carnage she’d ripped through her fellow gods.

“Observant of you,” Atrius said. “This is Nyaxia’s battleground. Leading right up to the execution site.”

His finger traced the line of wreckage into the distance, all the way to our destination.

Sun take me. I touched the twisted metal, and I could feel the past crashing over me, two thousand years later—Nyaxia’s grief, tender as mortal flesh, and her rage, stronger than that of greater gods.

Every Obitraen knew this story well. Her victory over the White Pantheon was immortalized in every church. But this seemed so much more raw. More sad than victorious. Like her grief had seeped into the ground with the blood.

How had she felt, when she fought through them? When she went back to the mortal world to create her own kingdom? The vampires spoke of their creation as a triumph. Here, it seemed more like a desperate attempt to fill the hole her loss had left.

“She must be so lonely,” I murmured.

Asar was still staring up at that chain, clink, clink, clink -ing against the gate.

“She must be so angry,” he said.