Page 60 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

INTERLUDE

L et me tell you now about the night the prince learned he was a god.

It was not the first time he had met the goddess—he had seen her once before, the night she gave him the mission that brought him here, into the belly of the dead kingdom he did not yet know was his birthright.

He had traveled through the Sanctums of the Descent to the underworld alongside the acolyte that he had become so fond of.

And with every level, every Sanctum, every healed hurt, he fell deeper in love.

When the goddess came to him, he still had his lover’s blood on his lips and her scent on his skin. He fell asleep entwined in her naked body, and he woke up alone.

The goddess looked at him with disgust.

“So this is what you have been doing with the mission that I have given you,” she sneered. “You have been bedding sun-tainted harlots.”

The prince scrambled upright. The goddess threw clothing at his feet.

“You are foolish to trust her,” she said. “And more foolish still to love her.”

Perhaps this was true. His mentor had taught him to trust sparingly. Bed who you want, he had said, but always keep the knife beneath your pillow.

The prince had known that any vampire who continued to wield the power of the sun after Turning was a rare being.

He had known how deeply she had once loved the sun, and how deeply she mourned its loss.

If she had ever believed she had hidden this from him, she was mistaken.

And in the beginning he had indeed wondered: What might she be willing to do to reclaim it?

But the Dawndrinker had become a partner, and then a friend, and then a lover.

She had become a twin soul, burning alongside him on the path to death.

He did not doubt that she had told him lies.

But the truth in every wound they healed together was absolute.

A connection so intrinsic that it rendered all else meaningless.

He had not answered the goddess. But perhaps she saw his true feelings, and they enraged her.

“Mortals,” she seethed. “You are so ungratefully sentimental. You made an oath, and now you believe you will use it to seize the ending that was stolen from me. Do you think I chose you for this task because you are so great, so powerful? No. I chose you because your blood already carries my husband’s.

Because your soul already belongs to the underworld.

When you fulfill your oath to me, it will take it back. ”

The prince was silent.

Your soul.

It should have been a shock. If he had not already had his suspicions, he would not have even understood what she meant.

But he had been wondering. Sometimes magic knows even what a mind does not. Something within the prince that surpassed logic knew that his connection to the underworld ran too deep to be mere coincidence. That the dreams he had of the god of death were more akin to visions.

You are a king, his mother had said.

The prince understood, now, that he was not a divine champion. He was a sacrifice. A relic merely as valuable as the ones he had been collecting on his journey.

“It is in me,” he murmured. “My bloodline. The relic of soul.”

“Do not be too arrogant. You are no demigod. Merely the product of some mortal tryst, centuries before my birth, that survived through generations. Useful for nothing but a sacrifice.”

He stared down at his hand, marked with tattoo and scar and flesh. Mortal, with a single drop of a god.

Staring down upon his impending death, he was not angry. He was not frightened.

But he did grieve.

In his journey to the underworld, the Dawndrinker had made him believe he could be capable of healing the hurts of the world.

With every broken gate they mended, every lost soul they freed, every wound they stitched, he had let a little more of that hope shine through.

It had happened so slowly he had not even realized how fiercely he had wanted to believe it, until now, when it shattered beneath the ugly truth.

The prince did not grieve his own life. He grieved that dream.

Because the prince was not a healer. He had been crafted from a young age to destroy. Life was only worth the value of the blood one spilled upon it. And the blood would always, always spill. The only thing he could control now was whose.

There was always a sacrifice to be made.

The kindest thing he could do, the only good he could offer, would be to ensure that it was his.

He accepted this. A simple truth.

And then he turned to the goddess, and he crafted a deal.