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

Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

“ I thought you said that it was dead!”

I barely managed to get the words out between panting breaths. No one had to tell us to run. We wove through the narrow gaps between the mushroom stalks, the guardian’s screams echoing behind us.

“It was dead.” Asar sounded frustrated by the very possibility that he’d been wrong about something. “It is dead.”

“It doesn’t look dead to me,” Elias huffed.

A screech raked down my spine. The mushroom I’d been squeezing through shifted, sending me tumbling backward into Asar’s chest.

Light blinded me. The guardian ripped the mushroom out of the ground and tossed it aside as if it were a twig. I found myself staring directly into its skull face. One eye socket was cracked open, giving the appearance of flaming tears as fire surged from within it.

Elias seized that moment to run at the bird with his sword drawn.

No one could say he didn’t have balls.

But, predictably, this didn’t go well. Another screech and a column of inferno burst from the skull’s beak. Elias narrowly dodged, protecting his face with his arm and diving behind a half-crumbled stone wall. Luce leapt at the guardian, too, hissing and growling, but the bird howled and flung itself back toward the ceiling.

I fell to my knees next to Elias. He let out a hiss of pain, cradling his arm. I didn’t need to look to know what I would see—I knew those wounds by smell alone at this point. No ordinary burn.

“This is Atroxus’s work,” Chandra said, echoing my thoughts.

The bird circled above us. Asar peered over the stone to the altar on the opposite side of the room.

“We certainly aren’t going to stab it to death,” he muttered. Then he turned to me and Chandra and stared at us expectantly.

I threw my hands up. “ Me? What do you expect me to do?”

“I don’t know, Dawndrinker. It’s your god, not mine.”

Again, I peered over the wall, up at the guardian circling above. Its wingspan covered the entire ceiling. It was just…?so, so big.

“I was only a priestess,” I whined.

“I have faith in your abilities,” Asar said, and unceremoniously pushed me out from behind the wall.

I stumbled out into the open. The bird’s empty, flame-filled gaze fell on me. Gods fucking above, what had I gotten myself into? For a moment, I genuinely considered turning around and running until I got back to the cave. At least if the dead got me, it would be less humiliating than succumbing to the magic of the god I was supposed to serve.

Instead, I turned to Chandra, who quaked beside me. “We do it together,” I said. “We’ll strike it at the same time. All right?”

She nodded.

Across the room, Asar and Elias had abandoned their hiding place, making a run to the altar—an attempt at distraction. When the bird dove for them, Chandra and I struck—me with what I could summon of the flame, her with the blinding light of the sunrise. Dragging the magic to the surface of my skin was slow and painful, and as I squinted against the fire, the agonizing reward of the fresh burns on my arms had tears collecting in my eyes.

The guardian screeched, lurching from one side of the room to the other. I hadn’t noticed this at first—I’d been too overwhelmed—but its movements were awkward and choppy, like it didn’t have full control of itself. It careened into walls and nicked its wings on mushroom stalks, veering out of the way a little too late.

Still, whatever was wrong with it had nothing to do with us. Our plan was comically ineffective. I was willing to keep trying, but eventually, Asar yanked me back behind a pile of ruins.

“Let’s not waste our time,” he grumbled.

“We’re being persistent,” I protested. But his gaze flicked pointedly down to my arms, where I could sense him staring through my sleeves, right down to the fresh burns that I was trying to pretend I didn’t feel.

“Asar.” Elias jerked his chin to the wall behind us. It took me a moment to realize what he was gesturing to. And then I saw it—the shadows beyond the glass.

Not rocks. Not mushrooms.

“Are those—” Chandra whispered.

Asar winced. “I told you they’d be up again. They sense the living in here.”

I tried not to think about exactly how many corpses were on the other side of that wall.

That glass wall.

Gods above. We were fucked.

I spun around, watching the guardian circle above us—watching those erratic movements.

Think, Mische.

“What did you mean when you said the guardian was dead?” I said to Asar.

He followed my gaze.

“It fell,” he said. “Long ago. Atroxus must have commandeered the body.”

“So the fire isn’t natural.”

He scoffed. “No. No, it is not.”

I stared hard at the bird. At its movements.

No, the more I watched, the more none of it looked natural. It seemed addled. Worse, in pain.

I touched my arm without thinking.

Of course it was in pain. It was a creature of the underworld, meant to be a vessel for Alarus’s magic. Instead, it had been forced to hold the flames of the sun. The light pooled in its chest, leaking out through every translucent quill of its feathers. If I looked closely, I could even see the darkness warring against it, a cloud of tangling shadow and light at the underside of the beast’s stomach.

It almost looked like?—

I sat upright and grabbed Asar’s arm in a burst of realization.

“The bird isn’t a guard. It’s a vessel. Look at its stomach. He put the relic inside of it.”

Asar didn’t seem convinced. But he also didn’t immediately contradict me, which counted for something.

“Do you feel anything coming off that altar?” I pressed. “Wouldn’t you sense something, if a piece of a god was in there?”

He blinked. A wrinkle flitted across the bridge of his nose, like he was annoyed he hadn’t made this observation himself.

I was right. I knew I was.

“Chandra and I can pull the fire out of it,” I said. “And you can retrieve the relic.”

“If we can get the damned thing down first,” Elias said. He had one eye on the wall still, where the silhouetted shadows of the dead beyond were growing concerningly close.

I could see the thoughts turning, turning, turning in Asar’s head. “How close do you need to get?” he said. “To pull the flame out?”

I stared up at the bird. “Closer than this.”

“You need it on the ground?”

I chewed my lip. There was just so much fire. “Almost.”

Asar stood. “You had better be right, Iliae.”

And then he lifted his hand and flung a spear of magic across the room—straight through the glass wall, unleashing a wave of dead into the temple.

Elias cursed. Chandra leapt back, eyes round. I swallowed the immediate impulse to shout, What the hell are you doing?

But Asar didn’t hesitate.

“Hold off the worst of them,” he said to Elias. “Let a few through.”

Then, to Chandra and me, “Come. Quick.”

His plan became clear right away. The guardian’s attention snapped to the trail of dead dragging themselves into the temple, as if the sight was a thread jerking it back to its former life. It swooped down, the beat of its wings dousing my face in scorching heat, ready to herd the wayward souls back into place.

My face broke into a smile.

Smart. I had to admit it.

Asar pressed his hands together, then drew them apart, threads stretching between them like thick ropes of black honey. He kept stretching and stretching them, more darkness seeping from the crevices of the room to thicken it. And then, with a grunt of exertion, he cast them toward the bird’s skull and pulled .

“Go!” he commanded.

The guardian let out a screech, veering off to the left, one wing flailing out and drawing a sweep of fire across the room that narrowly missed our heads. Chandra and I ran to the fallen bird. The light burned my cheeks, my eyes. I could barely look at it. There was so much flame—far more than I’d ever manipulated at once, even at the height of my prowess.

But no time to doubt ourselves. I pushed down my uncertainty and grabbed instead for the last dregs of my humanity, calling to Atroxus’s power.

I reached for the magic trapped inside the guardian’s body. I could feel the pressure of it pushing against the creature’s ribs in an endless attack against its host, warring with the cool dark within it—an unrelenting struggle waged for nearly two thousand torturous years. The guardian’s pain erupted through my skull as I established the connection between us, so unexpected that I nearly released my grip.

Chandra, though, saved me. Her jaw was set, eyes unblinking. She grabbed hold of the light alongside me and gave it the first powerful heave when I was too unsteady to do it.

I felt it shift.

The bird let out a scream, thrashing against Asar’s restraints as the fire began to slip. It swirled and lurched within its ribs as Chandra and I pulled at it, inch by inch. Sweat rolled down my temples. My breaths were ragged and shaky. My arms screamed in pain beneath a fresh set of scars.

“Better fucking hurry!” I barely heard Elias’s strained voice in the distance, just as I barely heard the rising groans of the corpses’ cries.

Snap, as one of Asar’s shadowy ropes disintegrated under the force of the bird’s thrashing?—

I let out an ugly roar of exertion as Chandra and I gave one final yank.

Atroxus’s magic snapped free. I opened my eyes just in time to see the wave of fire rolling toward us, at last unleashed from the guardian’s body.

I gasped and dove out of the way. Chandra simply let it roll over her, arms outstretched, like she was embracing the refreshing tide of the sea. A pang of hurt in my stomach reminded me that I could have done the same, once, but I didn’t have time to dwell on my own self-pity. Glass cracked as the wave of dead widened the hole in the wall. The flood was now far more than Elias could hold off on his own, pouring into the temple.

The guardian had collapsed to the floor, body now dim and flickering. It no longer screamed or fought. Up close, I could see that its body was comprised of countless delicate tendrils of silver, which shuddered with its final remnants of life.

Asar climbed on top of it. “Get up here,” he barked.

I obeyed, crawling over a twitching wing to join Asar on its back. When I knelt next to him, my palms pressing to the bird’s flesh, I jolted. The creature’s woe pulsed through me, wretched and furious.

I thought I heard a voice in my head whisper, It was not always this way.

Asar gave me an odd look—an unspoken, What? —but we didn’t have time to talk. He drove his blade through the bird’s back, cutting through spiderweb-fine feathers and silver ribs and flesh that seemed to be both solid and smoke at once.

The guardian let out a final wail that vibrated through my bones. But it wasn’t a cry of pain. It was a cry of grief for the past and relief for the present. It reached for the cool solace of the shadows. I splayed my hands against its back as Asar made another cut.

“It’s all right,” I whispered. “You did your job. You can rest.”

Asar forced the wound open, smoke erupting free, and the guardian at last went still.

“Asar!” Elias barked, frantically. Chandra was helping him now, but the dead were countless.

“I know!” Asar snapped. Then, to me, “Help me.”

The guardian’s body was so large that Asar and I needed to climb inside the wound, into a swirling mass of black and purple and blue and gray. It was delicate, like the foam that formed at the ocean’s edge.

“What are we looking for?” I asked. But the words had barely left my lips when I knew . My fingers brushed a solid object, and that one touch zapped through my entire body.

Asar halted—he felt it, too. We both reached down at the same time. My hand wrapped around something smooth and hard.

Suddenly, I was no longer here.

I stand at the edge of my territory, where the underworld begins to encroach on the mortal realm. A sensation that is almost pain radiates from the center of my chest. The goddess is coiled like a wolf ready to strike, and her teeth are bared like one, too. She has long dark hair that slides over her shoulders in a waterfall. It glints purple and black, every shade of night, stars twinkling within it. The only sign of divinity on such a waiflike little thing, and yet, I can sense that it is a sign of so much more potential.

I look down at my chest, and the obsidian branch jutting from it.

“Do you not know who I am?” I say. “You thought that this would kill me?”

“No,” she replies. “But I thought it might even the ground if we are both bleeding.”

I am amused. No wonder this creature has caused such a stir among my brethren.

I grab the branch and pull it free. The jagged tip drips my blood.

“I assume that you are the wayward goddess that everyone is searching for.”

She stiffens. “Perhaps.”

“What is your name?”

“I will tell you if you swear you will not send me back.”

I smile despite myself. “I will not send you back.”

She relaxes slightly. She sweeps a strand of night-hewn hair over her shoulder.

“Nyaxia,” she says.

I lurched back to awareness. I was standing now, and so was Asar. Between us, we held a smooth black branch of an obsidian tree, tough as marble. Its twisted point was coated in shimmering, luminescent blood—the blood of a god, as vibrant now as it was more than two millennia ago.

Asar and I looked at each other, dazed over what we’d just -witnessed—a memory? But Luce let out a frantic bark, reminding us we had no time to waste.

The dead now had overtaken the room. Elias and Chandra had climbed up onto piles of rubble to keep from getting dragged away. Lifeless hands clawed at the guardian’s now-still body.

Asar thrust the branch into his pack and pointed to the opposite side of the room—to the altar, and the pool of blood around it. “Over there.”

I didn’t know how that was going to help us, but I didn’t have time to question it. The altar was so close, and yet making it that far seemed impossible. The temple had been totally overtaken. We fought our way through the onslaught. I clumsily batted my sword around, wincing as each strike tugged on my fresh burns, and only narrowly managed to avoid the hungry, reaching hands of the dead. Asar made it to the altar first and dropped to his knees at the edge of the pool. Blood lapped angrily at the edge, splashing over his knees. Chandra and Elias were at his side. I struggled to fight my way through, the dead closing in. Luce attempted to forge a path for me, dragging corpses aside with her teeth.

Asar thrust his palms into the liquid. A grand arch, a twin to those that lined Morthryn’s halls, rose from the pool of blood, crimson pouring over its frame.

“Chandra,” Asar barked, thrusting his chin to the door.

Chandra didn’t have to be told twice. She bounded into the pool, nearly tripping at its sudden depth, and disappeared through the arch. Shortly after, Elias followed.

I was only a few strides away. Luce had managed to clear a path for me, and I made a mental note to remember to give her some thorough head scratches later. I didn’t care if she was a magical skull wolf. All dogs liked head scratches.

Asar looked over his shoulder at me, waiting.

I stepped into the pool?—

A figure burst from the blood and threw itself at me.

Reaching arms wound around my neck. A voice moaned into my ear, Mische, please, I’ve been waiting so long, I’ve missed you ? —

I whirled around clumsily and found myself staring into a face I hadn’t seen anywhere but nightmares in fifty years. He’d been so handsome once, with those soft boyish features and shiny golden hair. He used to have a dimple on the right side of his mouth, but he didn’t anymore because half of his jaw was missing.

My mouth opened, but I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t move.

Eomin wound himself around me like a flower clinging to light.

Mische, let’s go home ? —

Someone ripped him off me. I gasped for breath and raised my head just in time to see Asar lifting his sword?—

“No!” I screamed.

Asar hesitated, confused, and was rewarded with the grasping hands of three more corpses. I swung my sword wildly, barely fighting them off him.

Not bothering to hide his annoyance, Asar grabbed my arm and hauled me through the arch in what was more of a controlled fall than a purposeful leap.

And we sank down.

And down.

And down.

Until there was nothing.