Page 93 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

THE GOD OF DEATH

A s Nyaxia prepared for war, the god continued to return to his old kingdom.

He would wander for hours or days—he could not tell which.

Time was different for gods. This was why, even on the precipice of war, at the height of their bloodthirsty fury, the moments before their next move seemed to stretch into eternity.

Nyaxia schemed and seethed, talking constantly of all the ways she would make her cousins suffer. The god was content to listen. Most of the time, he felt her bloodlust, too. He was, after all, a god—he craved power just as all the rest.

{Imagine the entire universe for our kingdom,} the mask said.

{I see it already,} the eye answered. {A new world far grander than the old.}

All while the heart silently dreamed of its former host’s revenge.

But the god still found it difficult to fully commit himself to Nyaxia’s plans.

He would disappear for his long walks through the underworld, weaving through the ghostly ruins.

He knew that once this place had meant much to him.

Now, he found it hard to remember why. Still, it called him back night after night.

He wandered across rivers of frozen blood, the reaching hands of souls trapped within it.

Across stone palaces, long empty. Through abandoned forests of fallen mushrooms, exhaling puffs of spores with their death cries.

Souls crawled across eternal nothingness in the distance, chaotic as ants after the destruction of their nests.

It was in one of these fallen temples that he came across the rotted body of a guardian.

It was larger than the other such creatures he had seen—though none of them seemed whole anymore.

It had been a bird, once. Now, its body was just a faint suggestion of shadow.

It lay belly-up, its wings splayed and broken.

Its chest had been cut open. It still smelled mildly of smoke.

The only solid remaining part of it was its face—a golden skull. It was half broken, one eye socket incomplete. Its beak was chipped. Scratches marred its surface.

Yet, the sight of it made the god feel something he could not explain. He touched his own face. He felt only the cold metal of the mask, but had the uncomfortable feeling that he had been reaching for something else.

He knelt down and lowered his own forehead to the skull. The visceral pain—grief—of the underworld flowed through him. He felt the final cries of the fallen guardian in his own bones. He felt its commitment, even in its agonized death throes, to its task.

Then he rose, took the skull in his hands, and poured his power into it.

The metal glowed black, twisting and reforming beneath puffs of shadow. When it faded, the skull had changed. It was still a bird skull, still bright gold, but it was smaller, more delicate. Twisted metal whorls wound around the broken bone like ivy, spiking up as if to form the peaks of a crown.

Satisfied, the god placed his new creation upon the broken arch above the altar at the center of the room. With a sputter, fresh blood poured from the stone, filling the parched pool around it.

The god stepped back and observed his handiwork. This one repaired piece of a desolate, broken world.

{Why?} the eye asked. It was all-seeing. And yet, even it could not understand the point of this.

But the aching wound in his chest, the thing that sat beneath his new divine heart, was content, even if he could not explain why.

The god left it there, and continued on.