Page 84 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

ASAR

I walked into the sea until it lapped at my knees. The water was warmer than I would’ve expected it to be. It was tinted dark red, human blood mingling with vampire. A severed hand, still reaching out for a god that would never reach back, bobbed by.

Nyaxia lowered to meet me.

{It is her,} the mask whispered.

{It is her,} the eye agreed.

But I couldn’t tell if they were speaking in fear or admiration, admonishment or affection. Perhaps all at once.

She smiled. A drop of ruby blood rolled down the elegant point of her chin. The stars and infinite shades of night in her hair twinkled with shifting fates, comets ricocheting across her infinite depths.

“We meet yet again,” she purred. “How you have risen to your new role.”

I didn’t feel like I was rising. I felt like I was falling.

Her smile soured. “It is not enough to take the second chance at life that should have been his. You must seek his divinity, too? How predictable. One cannot dangle over the edge of such power without succumbing to the desire to take the final leap. It has been many years since I have seen these. Thank you for returning them to me.”

She stroked my cheek. With that touch, the screams and battle shouts and explosions fell to the background, as if behind layers of ice.

Our surroundings grew hazy. I looked up into the sky and instead of the star-scattered night, I saw images dancing in the clouds—glimpses of every reach of the mortal realm.

The House of Night, barely staving off their attackers.

The House of Shadow, mobilizing still more soldiers.

Human nations across the world, crumbling beneath the unexpected, bloodthirsty strike of the vampires, or the horrors of the broken underworld.

“Tell me, Asar Voldari, bastard’s bastard’s bastard of my husband’s blood,” Nyaxia said, “how does it feel to stand upon the cusp of godhood? Once I was little more than you. A lesser goddess barely touched with divinity. And now, look what I have done.” She spread her hands.

“I have brought the White Pantheon to their knees.”

{If only he could see her now,} the eye sighed. {So much greater than she once was.}

I saw her as she had been two thousand years ago. The girl with galaxies in her hair and poppy petals on her lips, as Alarus had known her—as he had loved her.

Was this what he would have wanted her to become?

{He was no fool,} the mask said. {He knew what she was. Even then.}

I felt the echo of his pride, radiating through time and death and space, in whatever pieces of him I held. Alarus had loved Nyaxia because of her viciousness, not in spite of it. And I could see now, up close, just how much of herself she had sacrificed to become what she was now.

I could see where she had found that power.

It was so obvious. Stupid of me not to have realized it sooner.

“You have the heart,” I said. “Alarus’s heart.”

My ritual circle had obeyed my command to take me to Mische. But it had brought me to the heart, too, just as it had been instructed.

The auroras in Nyaxia’s eyes danced with delight.

“You are intelligent for a mortal,” she said.

She pressed her hands to her chest, and when she extended them, in her cupped palms sat a hunk of blackened flesh. The blood, thick, honeyed gold, dripped from the twitching morass of muscle, down into the sea.

It was smaller than I might have expected the heart of a god to be, and oddly misshapen.

Nyaxia stared down at it with reverence.

“He gave it to me, before he was taken,” she murmured. “I did not even know it then.”

Her memory unfolded around us. I saw the two of them, sitting in the underworld beneath the twisted ebony branches of an obsidian tree. Saw him passing something gold to her—a little dagger, a ribbon wrapped around its hilt. Saw him kiss her goodbye.

{She did not know what he was to do,} the mask said.

{She told him not to meet them,} the eye whispered sadly. {But he did not listen.}

“I thought it was just another pretty gift passed from husband to wife,” she said. “But the blade was no trinket. It was the key to cut out his heart. The key to my own divinity.”

Nyaxia’s lashes, black as ink, lowered in mournful half-moons over her pale cheeks. She cradled the heart close to her.

“When I retrieved this from what remained of him, I wanted to sleep with it beneath my pillow. I wanted to cradle it like the child we never had the chance to bear.” Her face hardened.

“But I did not wish to use my husband’s final gift to grieve him.

I would use it to become something more terrible than he ever was. ”

She lifted her eyes to me.

I saw the past in them. Nyaxia weeping over all she had left of her husband’s body. And then, how those tears froze, hardened, to blades of rage.

I watched her lift Alarus’s heart to her lips, and tear off a chunk of the flesh. Another, and another, each swallow bringing her closer to major divinity.

Now, Nyaxia smiled at me, a drop of red rolling across the curve of her lower lip.

“Why do you think that the children I created with his power feast upon the blood of mortals? We were all born in suffering. What makes us powerful is to thrive upon the taste of it. You understand this. I have always seen it in you.”

I looked out over the carnage around us, unfolding in slow motion, seconds stretching to minutes. There was such peace in how the gods watched civilizations fall.

{Is it not beautiful?} the eye said.

{Only an end can create a beginning,} the mask added.

She was right. I did understand. Vampires feasted on blood to ensure that they would always be separate, always be isolated. Nyaxia set out to make a world that was only hers, born in the blood of her grief. It would die in the blood of it, too.

And I did feel her stare on those dark parts of my soul. My desire for revenge in the wake of Mische’s death. My desire to bring her back in the most painful way possible for all who had wronged her. The sheer venomous hatred I had for an unfair world.

It would be so easy to let it happen.

But I said, “Take the mask and the eye, if you wish. I can’t stop you. But I can give you something more valuable.”

Nyaxia cocked her head, intrigued. Gods did love a deal.

“Moons ago, you tasked me with resurrecting your husband,” I went on.

“I failed in that task. But tonight, if you wish, I can offer you an ally. Your cousins band together against you. Yet you have been alone for thousands of years. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Not if you allow me to ascend beside you. ”

She must be so lonely, Mische had told me once. And it was this loneliness that I saw shoot across her face with the blazing heat of a falling star, there and gone again in seconds.

Nyaxia was not thinking now of war or powers or strategic decisions. She was thinking of her own grief.

She laughed softly. “You fail me, and now you ask me to make you a god. I am amused by your boldness.”

I looked over my shoulder at the carnage below, moving now in slow motion. I was so far away, as if staring down at it all from the back of a bird. And yet, my eyes found her immediately.

Mische, hand outstretched for me.

Mische, marked by the scars of the betrayal of so many people who she had loved. Mische, barely clinging to life, giving everything to protect those who had cast her out.

Shiket called herself the goddess of justice—but there was no justice here, not in Mische kneeling before the bed of a god as a child, not in her throat ripping beneath the teeth of a vampire prince who discarded her, not in the gods tossing her aside like she was nothing.

A world that accepted any of those things was not worthy of redemption.

“Ah, is that what you want?” Nyaxia murmured, following my gaze. “To become a god, and make them suffer for it? Perhaps. We could destroy it all, you and me.”

This idea piqued her interest. She showed me her vision—empires falling into dust. Shiket, cleaved apart slowly by the edge of her own blades. Srana, dismantled gear by gear. Ix, lured to her death just as she had lured Alarus millennia ago.

The mask and the eye purred their approval.

{A bed of ashes upon which to build a new kingdom,} the mask declared.

“She can even come with us, if you please,” Nyaxia went on. “Pluck her from all this. Let her watch as we remake the world. She can warm your bed in the land of the gods. No one will be able to take her from you again.”

The dream was so vivid, so painfully close.

I could give Mische an endless existence.

I could show her beauty mortal eyes had never witnessed.

I could give her the music of gods. I could lie in a bed of silks beside her, and though I would no longer sleep, I would watch her, content in her safety.

I would kiss the scars on her skin knowing that none would ever mark her again.

I felt like I was a child standing before Gideon all over again. A child being offered the greatest gift I could imagine: a life beyond fear.

But I was not a child. I was a man, covered in the marks of my mistakes, watching the world fall.

I was a man who was in love with a woman, and I understood that love would never be beyond fear.

When I had sat chained in my cell in Ysria, I had thought long and hard about the blood I would use to paint Mische’s story into the stars. I had thought that I had only death to offer her.

I had been wrong.

I could give her something greater.

I stared down at her. I was so far away, and yet felt so close.

I could taste the sweet softness of her lips.

The freckles on her cheeks like flecks of cinnamon.

Among the sound of the universe rearranging, I could have sworn I heard a song, the fading, imperfect notes of a dream floating to the stars, never to be recaptured.

And I loved her, I loved her, I loved her.

I turned back to Nyaxia. “I have another proposition.”

Surprise flickered across her face. Then hungry curiosity.

“What could you possibly want more than that?”

“Spare them,” I said. “Spare the humans here. Spare the House of Night.”

A hateful sneer. “The House of Night betrayed me.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “But the Nightborn are still your children. They might be useful one day.”

“I do not want their help.”

“Then as a mother. Don’t you love the creatures you created from your husband’s gift?”

Her face was hard. It was only now that I understood—that Nyaxia was genuinely hurt by the disloyalty of her followers.

“Perhaps,” she hissed. “But what argument could you possibly make for sparing the humans? I offer you the vengeance you crave, and you reject it?—”

“You misunderstand me, Goddess. If you destroy the human nations now, it will all be over too quickly. Perhaps Alarus is gone. But some of him still lives in the mask that was the crown to his kingdom. In the eye that saw the possibilities of the dead. Do you know what I hear them say?”

{Destroy it all,} the mask said. {Build a greater kingdom. Just as we did in the beginning.}

{See how it stretches from each horizon,} the eye purred. {Now it shall stretch into death itself.}

I answered, “He says, Join her. Make them suffer. And make it slow. I could offer you that. Whatever is left of him. And we can walk a longer path together.”

It was the only thing Nyaxia craved more than power.

Love.

All I needed was to ascend. I needed the power that would stop this imminent collapse. Just one moment. One burst of power.

And then I could open the door to something—someone—better.

Nyaxia said softly, “You are not him.”

“No. But I will be closer to it.”

The proximity of the heart was dizzying. My looming ancestor cast his shadow over every shred of my being. A little more of myself slipped away, like stone worn by the steady beat of the shore.

“You understand what sacrifice this will require you to make?” she said.

I lowered my chin. “A heart for a heart.”

“There is no telling what you will be when it is done.”

“No,” I said. “There isn’t.”

Her eyes searched my face. How close could I become, she was wondering, to the husband she had been trying for centuries to reclaim?

“Very well,” she said. “I accept.”

She opened her other hand, and within it sat a small golden blade. The blade she had been gifted two thousand years ago, beneath the branches of an obsidian tree.

“A heart for a heart.”

Beneath us, a crack split the sea in two, the bleeding mists of the underworld breaking free beneath foamy waterfalls. A thousand invisible souls called my name.

Yet I heard only one.

I looked over my shoulder one last time, at the dead woman reaching for me. I drank in her image, pressing it to my heart—deeper, to my soul.

Strange, that I could not remember her name.

I turned back to Nyaxia.

“I am ready,” I said.

She smiled, and then she plunged the blade into my chest.

Crack, as my bones parted. My flesh opened. Blood fell in waterfalls to the sea below.

A million memories dissolved into mist. A million inconsequential moments that created a mortal life, unraveling like fabric pulled by the edge of a thread, row by row by row.

In my final dregs of awareness, I threw every scrap of myself into the wounds of the underworld below, into every open crack, every tattered veil, every wounded guardian.

I threw every shred of my mortal power into it, praying that my divinity would flow into it, too.

Nyaxia cut out my heart. And I couldn’t help myself—I was the one to reach into my chest, to yank the chunk of bloody flesh free. It was so small, so fragile.

{It would never belong to a god,} the eye said.

Nyaxia smiled as blood ran down her chin.

“You will not miss it in the end,” she murmured.

She tipped my hand and let the chunk of flesh fall, fall, fall, into the crack below us, sinking all the way to the underworld.

And then she cradled Alarus’s heart close one final time, before thrusting it into my chest.