Page 58 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

MISCHE

E verything was suddenly simple.

A second stretched to an eternity. I could see it all at once, life and death and every rung in between, sprawling out before me like a spider’s web. Complex, chaotic, and yet so easy to understand.

{See how beautiful it is,} the eye murmured. I did not hear the words but felt them in my soul. Everything became distant. The challenges that had once felt insurmountable now were merely pieces moving across a game board.

Was this, I wondered, what it was like to witness the world as a god?

A shiver ran through the axe. {This is nothing, mortal. You cannot dream of such a thing.}

The flames of the forge were now white-hot, engulfing the walls, the floor, the stone. It was in my lungs, in my eyes, in my hair. But it didn’t hurt anymore. It flowed into me with the euphoria of blood.

A fresh crack now ran through the ground. Reaching hands and gaping mouths of the dead pushed through it, desperate for life.

{They attempt to escape a painful fate,} the eye observed. {But it will not work.}

And yes, I could see that now, as if another world was superimposed over this one—that the fissure in the underworld they’d come from was crushed and mangled, like the rusted jaws of a steel trap. Yet I noted this distantly, with no emotion, as if it was merely the color of the sky.

The Sentinel had staggered away from me, pressing themselves to the wall. A second, fresh gouge, now ran across their smooth helmet where they had barely evaded my swing. It created an X across their face.

They no longer seemed so frightening. They were a collection of scraps. A few threadbare remnants from a tattered lost soul and a blessed suit of metal. That was all.

I sensed a drop of satisfying hesitation.

“What have you done?” they breathed.

The wraiths broke free. I saw every single individual soul, even within the writhing, decayed morass. They grabbed the Sentinel, winding around their legs and arms.

I watched, unmoved, as the dead pulled the Sentinel back toward the crack.

But then, in this sea of soft, hazy indifference, I felt something hard:

Fear.

Raw, mortal fear.

The Sentinel’s hand flew out in a desperate lurch—reaching for a savior. Reaching for me. Their heart, or whatever remained of it, pounded with animal panic.

{Leave them,} the eye said. {They are inconsequential.}

But there was nothing, nothing, that could quite prepare you for the way someone looked when they were truly desperate not to meet death.

Let them go, all rationality commanded.

But I was moving before I was thinking.

I grabbed the Sentinel’s outstretched hand and pulled them back.

At that touch, I felt so much: my life flashing before my eyes again. But this time, I watched the moments pass by like leaves in the autumn wind. I was bigger than that now. More than the past events of the girl I had once been.

I stared at my face reflected in the Sentinel’s mask. My eyes were bright white, my body framed by ink black. Whorls of shadow poured from my eyes, my nostrils, my hands.

The Sentinel clutched my hand. Time slowed.

And then they did exactly what I knew they would.

They raised their sword.

I knew it was coming. They were a divine warrior. They had nothing but their single task.

But here and now, I was a fucking god.

I raised the axe to block their strike. Their blessed sword bounced off it with a harmless cling . I pushed the Sentinel away with a defiant thrust. The flames of Srana’s forge surrounded me in a welcome embrace.

It was nice, I thought, to feel warm again.

I looked up, to the opening of the forge. What had seemed so far away minutes ago now was laughably simple. The journey from death to life, like everything else, was merely a path to walk. You only had to know the steps.

Life and death surrounded me. It all seemed so damned easy now. A web to be scaled.

I raised the axe, and I started climbing.