Page 92 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

MISCHE

E ventually, I reached a field of poppies.

I stopped when I crested the hill and saw it spread out before me. A lump rose in my throat. My chest ached.

The arch at the center of the field was broken, just two silver sticks of metal rising up from the wilted grass. The flowers were withered and black. Everything was dead and colorless.

And yet, I could still so clearly imagine it as I’d seen it last, when Luce had chased butterflies and Asar had whispered in my ear, and I had thought I’d die under the weight of my affection for him and the certainty that I would destroy him.

“I won’t,” I whispered to myself.

You won’t, the underworld agreed.

I didn’t have to pass through such painful memories. But I did, anyway. I wound through the flowers as they tickled my knees.

I stopped in the center of the field. A single poppy stood there, bright red, unmistakably alive.

Take it, the underworld whispered. It is for you.

For you, for you, the field agreed.

I lowered to my knees. Gently, I cradled the flower. When I touched it, I drew in a sharp, shaky breath. I felt as I had when I’d experienced Asar’s touch for the first time. Like a new door had been opened.

I plucked the flower and twirled it carefully between my fingers.

When I lifted my gaze, it was as if I could see the underworld as it could be.

Not just the version of it I’d witnessed on my journey through the Descent, sadly beautiful but still only a shell of its true potential.

Now, I saw it as it once had been and what it could become in the future.

A place of solace and mercy, blood and bone and flowers, a comforting path ushering souls from life to death.

It was so beautiful that it hurt to look at. This was the kind of dream that seemed so big that it was dangerous to even acknowledge it—to open a tender heart up to something that seemed so impossible.

But I felt it, anyway.

I knew that Asar had, too.

I held the flower to my chest, right over my heart. I inhaled the scent of frostbitten ivy.

Then I tucked the flower behind my ear, where its stem wound into my hair like fingers folding around mine, and I kept walking.