Page 90 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

MISCHE

I knew where to go. It was all so simple.

I wasn’t sure whether the crumbling of the underworld had created a shorter path through the Descent, or if, maybe, the underworld was simply guiding me through the most efficient route. But as I walked, my next steps just seemed to spread out before me.

Listen to the underworld, Vincent had told me.

The whispers of the dead directed me, and all I had to do was empty my mind and follow.

The underworld had decayed so terribly in the time I’d been gone.

The temples that I’d so admired when I’d first traveled with Asar down here now crumbled, stone falling into deep cracks in the earth.

Pathways were shattered; doorways were cleaved in two.

The rivers of blood, once mournfully beautiful, now churned in perpetual agitation.

Even the dead could no longer thrive here, swept away by the harsh winds.

The few that remained were so corrupted by the broken afterlife that they were barely souls at all.

I felt all these woes in my own body as I traveled. I listened as the underworld whispered its sad tales to me. And with every crack or wound I passed, I stopped to ease its hurts.

I had thought that I couldn’t do this without Asar.

But Vincent was right—I held a piece of Alarus’s power, too.

And when I pressed my hands to those wounds, I could feel in my own heart exactly where to pull them closed.

Just like healing human souls, or vampire souls, had once come so naturally to me.

And with every tear I closed, with every lost soul I helped back on their path, it was worth it to hear the underworld sigh, Thank you.

But there was still so much to do. I walked and walked. I wasn’t sure anymore what I was—human, vampire, wraith, living or dead. Did it matter? I was Mische, I decided. That was all I could be.

I didn’t get tired. I didn’t get hungry.

I didn’t need to sleep. In the rare moments I stopped to rest, I rolled up my sleeves and looked at my arms. My skin was faintly translucent, as if shimmering with the dusty coating of the underworld, but I still had my scars.

I pressed my fingers to them, and the red ink that danced over them, intertwined.

As if the marks of my shame and the marks of my power were inextricably linked, one and the same.

I’d hated my scars for so long, but now, I was grateful I had them. They connected me to the scarred surface of the underworld, too.

On my left arm, my old tattoo burned, also, with the fading light of divinity.

In my low moments, when I feared that Saescha could be waiting around any corner with the punishment I deserved, or when I thought of Asar’s empty, cruel face beneath that mask, I would press my fingers to it and close my eyes.

I would think of a dream I had once, of a broken firefinch in the dirt, rising up again to the sky.