The Songbird and the Heart of Stone (Crowns of Nyaxia #3)

Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

I sat in my cell, staring into darkness.

I was in shock.

I knew I was in shock because I was actually at a loss for words after Asar confirmed my suspicions—a state so rare that most people who knew me had never witnessed it. I’d gaped at him, words bubbling up in my chest but never making it to my lips, as he turned me around, led me from the room, declared that he had work to do, and deposited me with Luce to be brought back to my cell. He said something about resting and waiting and drinking something for Mother’s sake and we leave soon, so be ready .

I didn’t quite remember.

The last few days had been a haze. Days—had it been days? I couldn’t tell if it felt like longer or shorter. How long ago was it that Itrudged through the forest on my way to gods knew where? How long ago was it that those Shadowborn soldiers had dragged me away?

It felt like minutes. It felt like years.

The gravity of everything that had happened left me shaken. But that was nothing, I was sure, compared to what was still to come.

For the first time since I’d heard Atroxus’s voice in that party, I was alone with my thoughts.

I pulled up my sleeve—still the dirty, bloodstained white dress Egrette had dressed me in—and looked at my arm. The new burn I’d gotten in exchange for the flame I’d given Asar seeped yellow pus a few inches shy of my wrist. Farther up, my phoenix tattoo stared back at me, its face warped and bright feathers dull beneath scar tissue.

I’d been so proud the day I’d gotten that mark. I could still remember just how lovely it had looked over smooth, untouched skin. When I’d prayed at sundown that day, Atroxus had come to me easily, and he’d smiled with such amusement when I’d shown him my new gift in his honor.

It was easy back then. Prayer.

Though Atroxus had allowed me to keep my magic for a while after I had Turned, he had immediately stopped appearing to me. Still, I sent him my hymns every day. I performed my rituals and made my offerings. But as the years passed, it grew harder and harder to hear his silence. And lately…

Lately…

I’d found myself avoiding it entirely.

Now, everything I had longed for for decades was in reach. He’d spoken to me. If I called out to him now, he would answer. I was certain of it. Yet, I hesitated, and I didn’t know why.

Was I afraid of what he would say to me? Was I afraid to see his face as he witnessed everything that I’d become?

I pulled my sleeve down, pushing away my insecurities. I extended my hands, one palm layered over the other to receive the gift of the sun. And just as I had countless times before, in my best and my worst moments, in my greatest joys and greatest devastations, I prayed. The syllables came easy as breath.

And the words were still on my tongue, seared there like scar tissue, when my eyes closed.

Hello, a’mara.

I’d lost track of how many times I’d startled awake to the sound of that voice, those words, only to find that they were just a figment of my desperate subconscious. But faith meant that you never stopped letting yourself hope, even if it hurt.

I opened my eyes.

Atroxus stood before me, so brilliant my eyes stung to look at him.

I scrambled to my feet only to fall to my knees, pressing my forehead to the mirrored glass floor.

“My light,” I choked out.

I was shaking. I wanted to weep; I wanted to laugh. There was so much I wanted to say to him. I had thanks and blessings and apologies built up over decades, painstakingly cultivated during sleepless days full of unanswered prayers. Now, all of them were lost to me.

I didn’t lift my head, but I felt the scalding heat of the sun bearing down upon me with each step he approached. I drew in a gasp as his fingers brushed my chin. His touch felt like relief at the end of an endless night.

And…?gods, it burned .

He tipped my head up, guiding me to meet his gaze.

He was the embodiment of perfection. Eyes as brilliant as dawn over the desert and tan skin dusted with embers. His crown, a glowing orb of the sun, hovered behind his head, framing cascading waves of gold that swayed in an invisible breeze, burning off into infinity like rays of dawn. He smelled of tomorrow and yesterday and eternity.

“Rise, a’mara.” His voice was the wind and the sky and the earth. It reverberated through my every muscle. Deeper still, into my soul.

A’mara.

The tongue of the gods, for my bride of the sun . My title as one of Atroxus’s rare chosen ones. A word I hadn’t heard in so long.

I obeyed, swaying slightly on my feet. I had imagined so many times what I would do, what I would say, in this moment. Yet, the swell of emotions still shocked me. I expected the joy, the relief, the amazement. What I didn’t quite expect was the little ball of complicated anger beneath all of it—the petulant child inside me crying out, Why weren’t you there when I needed you?

I couldn’t stop crying—I’d never been good at holding back tears. I hated that about myself right now. A long time ago, Atroxus had found all my silly mortal vices amusing. I found it hard to imagine he still thought so after all these years. Vices were only charming when you were young and innocent, and I wasn’t anymore.

“I never—I never?—”

I never doubted you, I was trying to say. And I told myself it was true—that even on my loneliest days, when I could only see the dawn through cracks in the curtains, when the hole in my heart that had once held the sun felt so empty that my chest ached for a stake, I knew he would come back.

I told myself it was true, even though I wasn’t sure if it was.

“I was always faithful, my light,” I managed. “Always.”

His warmth wavered, the distant caress of a cool breeze over my face. His gaze lowered, fingertips tracing my jaw and running down to my throat. Vampires didn’t scar the way humans did. The bite that had Turned me left no mark—not on my flesh, or even on my mind, the memories eaten away by the sickness that killed my human self and remade me vampire.

But at Atroxus’s caress, fragments of those lost moments flashed through my mind—full lips, cool as night, pressing against my flesh, and a soft, sensuous voice. I had the powerful urge to cover my throat, knowing that he was looking right at that fifty-year-old wound.

Instead, I touched the burns on my arms. Normally, I was ashamed of them because they were marks of everything I’d lost. Now, I wanted to bear them as badges of honor, physical marks of decades of commitment.

A silent satisfaction settled over him, as if those marks—proof I was willing to bleed for my faith—were enough to satisfy him.

He straightened, drawing himself up to his full majestic height.

“I come to you with a matter of great importance.”

I wiped my tears away with the back of my hand. I tore my gaze away from him long enough to take in my surroundings. I stood surrounded by hazy nothingness, which I recognized as the nebulous space between consciousness and unconsciousness. Atroxus’s presence had overwhelmed me, but I could see now that he appeared to me at just a fraction of his true greatness—his form faded, his light dimmed.

“I cannot venture into Nyaxia’s territory,” he said, as if hearing my unspoken realization. “At least, not without inconvenient consequences. Even here, my time is short, and we have much to discuss. We stand on the precipice of a great darkness.”

A great darkness.

The House of Shadow. Nyaxia’s mission. Necromancy.

Asar’s mission: to resurrect the god of death.

“They plan to—” I started.

“I am aware.” Atroxus’s voice grew grim. “I have heard whispers of it. I long suspected Nyaxia would make another attempt at rebellion. But I did not have confirmation of it, until I saw that truth through you.”

My tattoo pulsed, as if reacting to his voice. The realization dawned on me—that this was why he had finally answered my call. Not to save my life, but because I’d been acting as his spy without even knowing it.

I pushed away a brief stab of disappointment.

“But that can’t be possible,” I said. “To resurrect a god ?”

“It is an abomination.” He spat the word, the light around him flaring like a freshly fed flame. “But Nyaxia has no limit to her depravity. A major deity cannot kill another of our own. These are the rules set out upon our making an eternity ago, a bid to prevent us from falling into wars against ourselves.” A sneer flitted over his nose. “What little good such rules have done.”

The hairs prickled at the back of my neck. No, no divine rules had managed to keep the gods from their infighting. The twelve major deities of the White Pantheon had, at least, managed to stay unified for the most part, though they certainly still had their drama.

But what they had done to Alarus was far more than a petty argument. Alarus and Nyaxia had defied the White Pantheon with their marriage. Atroxus, joined by five other gods, had lured Alarus to a private meeting with promises of a pardon for Nyaxia.

Instead, they had killed him.

The betrayal had shaken the immortal and mortal worlds down to their bones.

“So does that mean that Alarus is…?alive?” I whispered.

“No. He is far from alive. But my siblings and I could not snuff out his soul forever, either. So, that night, we did what we could. We sliced open my brother’s heart. We cut his body into pieces and scattered him, believing that whatever small shards of his soul might remain somewhere could never be restored to him. It was all we could do to prevent a war that would consume the mortal worlds.”

Atroxus’s eyes darkened, clouds passing over the dawn, and for a moment I felt like I had been there—that night two thousand years ago, watching six gods hack apart Alarus’s body. And still, despite my commitment to the god that had chosen me, the brutality of it made my chest ache. Nyaxia had gone mad with grief when she was given Alarus’s head—a grief that had made her powerful enough to defeat the rest of the White Pantheon and stake out her own kingdom in her husband’s abandoned territory. A grief that had driven her to create a following of her own—vampires.

“The death we gave Alarus was the death of mortals,” Atroxus said. “It is not a true death. Necromancy, given the right tools, does not require an intact body.”

So if a mortal soul could be resurrected, Alarus’s could, too.

“But why now? Nyaxia has grieved her husband for two millennia. Why didn’t she try before?”

“In the battles in the House of Night, Nyaxia has now witnessed her own husband’s remains defiled and used as weapons among her own followers. At the culmination of that same battle, she, too, witnessed a goddess of the White Pantheon act against her. She is staking her claim among human nations. She is hungry for power.” His lip curled in disgust. “Nyaxia’s madness has been growing since the moment she left the White Pantheon. Alas, now, she shatters. Just as I could not kill Alarus myself, she cannot resurrect him herself, either. So instead, she turns to her children to do this work for her. An irrational decision, but who can say why Nyaxia acts as she does?”

Who can say? I resisted the impulse to laugh at him for that question—because for all that a god understood of the universe, how could something so painfully simple be beyond him?

Nyaxia had always struck me as the most human, the most fallible, of the gods. Her story was one of all those imperfect mortal emotions—love, lust, grief, rage. She had been a young lesser goddess confined to a life of servitude. She’d broken out and found her freedom—found love—only to have it ripped away from her as punishment.

She had built a kingdom on top of her loss, but that didn’t do a thing to heal the wound.

Still, that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. Nothing was more deadly than a hurting person pushed to a breaking point.

Atroxus leveled a piercing gaze to mine. “Whatever version of Alarus that Nyaxia succeeds in bringing back, whether she is successful or not, will be a source of great power. You understand this.”

Gods, I did. I had helped Raihn and Oraya fight for their rule of the House of Night, where fragments of Alarus’s teeth had been used to horrific ends. It was power that no mortal should wield. Power that very nearly toppled an empire. All from a few shards of bone.

A resurrection could rip apart the world.

“She will destroy,” Atroxus said. “Indiscriminately. She will wage war on the White Pantheon. She will scorch the human nations. She will never stop.”

With every word, he showed me a glimpse of that future—the Citadel of the Destined Dawn soaked in blood and scattered with broken bodies, the seas boiling, the skies alight. It was everything that had once haunted my nightmares before my time at the Citadel, but many times over. I knew what war did to innocents. And I knew that a war between gods would be unimaginable.

The visions drowned me. When I became aware of myself again, I was on my knees, retching against an empty stomach.

Atroxus stood before me, tilting my head up again, his touch so comforting that I didn’t even care about the burns on my cheeks.

“You came to me with this because—because you want me to sabotage it,” I said. “You need me to make sure his mission fails.”

But Atroxus shook his head. “No. You must ensure he succeeds.”

My brows leapt. “Succeeds?”

“One cannot kill what is not alive. Alarus’s resurrection provides a path to his true death. Indeed, it may be the only opportunity the White Pantheon will ever get to kill him permanently.”

“But—but how will you do that?”

Atroxus caressed my cheek, his touch the kiss of a thousand suns.

“I will not, a’mara,” he said. “You will.”