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

Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“ T hat looks welcoming,” Elias said.

Chandra made the sign of the sun over her chest.

We stood at the end of Morthryn’s hall. An arched doorway towered over us—much grander than the gates Asar and I had been maintaining these last weeks. White smoke swirled within it, and mist clustered around its base, rolling across the floor.

But it, too, was damaged. Long lightning-strike cracks ran through the frame. Red liquid dripped from them, pooling in the intricate filigree and spilling over the tile. The smoke rose and fell with a steady cadence that looked just like a frozen winter’s exhale.

The Sanctum of Breath. The second level of the Descent.

I eyed the blood on the floor. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“It’s part of the Descent,” Asar replied.

“Does that mean…?yes?”

“It means that many things here don’t follow rules.”

He said this like it greatly pained him to admit it. I’d gathered by now that Asar enjoyed rules.

I leaned closer to the arch. A shimmering silver veil, like a translucent silk curtain, fell over the open doorway. It was so delicate that the shadows beyond nearly consumed it, only visible when it caught the light just so.

Asar pulled me back sharply when I ventured too close.

“We step through together. There will be a sheer fall on the other side, and I don’t want anyone getting lost this time.”

“No path?” Elias asked.

He didn’t do a particularly good job of hiding how unnerved he was. He liked threats that he could stab into submission. The ones we were about to face weren’t so simple, as Asar had warned us many times. “The dead we saw before were nothing compared to what we’re about to face,” he had said. “Those still had a body, or at least, parts of it. It’s harder to kill something that doesn’t have one at all.”

Now, Asar simply shook his head. “No. No path this time.”

He offered no elaboration, but I’d seen enough these last few weeks to know the truth behind it. Maybe there had once been a path. But it, like so many things about the Descent, had collapsed.

Then he added, like he couldn’t help himself, “Not that the path helped you last time anyway.”

I resisted the urge to jab him in the ribs.

Chandra summoned a golden glow in her hand—a habit she’d developed these last few weeks—and pressed it to her chest, letting out a shaky breath of resolve.

Asar affixed a thread of shadows to our anchors, binding all five of us together. At his instruction, we formed a chain. Luce was in the front, extending a wriggling tentacle of shadow to Elias, who looked somewhat disgusted before taking it. Then he took Chandra’s hand, who offered me her other one. It was still warm with the remnants of Atroxus’s light. I gave her a bright, encouraging smile.

I offered my other hand to Asar, who was last. His long fingers wound around mine.

To Chandra, I played the role I was born for: bright, reassuring optimist, immune to all doubt. But Asar, I knew, felt my nagging unease. He squeezed once, so quick I questioned if I’d imagined it.

“Ready?” he said.

No one answered. None of us were ready—not really. But Luce stepped forward anyway, sending us toppling through the door. The mists welcomed us with open arms.

And then we were falling, and falling, and falling.

My mouth was full of dust. It was so fine that even after I spit it out, a layer still coated my tongue.

Blegh.

I shook my hair and coughed when it sent up a cloud of gray. Beside me, Elias patted the dirt from his cloak as he rolled onto his hands and knees. Chandra rubbed her temples, as if she was battling a nasty headache. Asar, of course, was already on his feet. Beside him, Luce licked her paw as if she couldn’t imagine what was taking us all so long.

I blinked the sand out of my eyes and looked around.

The first Sanctum, Body, had been the closest to the mortal realm, and the one that most resembled it. Now, we’d ventured deep enough to see the labyrinth of the underworld start to take shape. Above, there was no more sky, only endless layers of red rivers that layered over each other to a sea of ominous dark crimson. Smooth stone walls of bright white towered around us. Dots of red and black beaded on the porous surface. The blood pooled into countless ancient carvings that looked as organic as the veins in leaves.

I touched the nearest wall. Bone.

Luce looked out to the gap between the walls, a long pillar of darkness, and whined.

“Let’s go,” Asar said. “It’s only a matter of time before they notice us. The quicker we get to the temple, the better.”

They. Wraiths.

There would be many of them here—definitely more than Asar and I encountered at the gates. Who else would find me? The dread that I might see Eomin’s face again—or worse, what if I saw?—

Weathered hands wrapped around mine. I’d been shaking. Chandra gave me a comforting smile. Gods, she really did remind me so much of the priestesses when she looked at me like that. I weakly returned her smile and followed the others.

We started toward the gap in the cliffs.

“What exactly are we looking for?” I asked as we walked, grateful to fill the silence. “What does Breath…? look like?”

It had been easy to wrap my mind around Alarus’s sacrifice for the Sanctum of Body—a branch bearing his blood. But Breath was so abstract. It could be interpreted in countless different ways.

Asar took a long time to answer, which by now I knew meant he was trying to avoid saying I don’t know .

“It could be anything that represents…?vivacity.”

My brow furrowed. “Vivacity?”

“A perfect corpse is still not living until it breathes, or its heart beats, or it changes with time. That’s Breath. The nature of being alive. It may be something intangible, but it would represent the essence of connection to life.”

“Makes perfect sense,” Elias grumbled.

“It does, in a way,” I said. “It’s the things that make your heart skip or your breath quicken.”

I thought, involuntarily, of Asar’s hand over mine, and the flush of my skin as darkness writhed between them.

We passed through the narrow opening in the cliffs, and I stopped short.

The world opened up around us. We were on a narrow bridge, hundreds of feet above the dusty ground below. The landscape encapsulated every shade of the mortal world. Undulating waves of a distant sea. Platinum sands like those of the House of Night. Rolling fields of lush green. Blankets of overgrown forests.

Any static picture of it would have been beautiful on its own. But what made it breathtaking was its constant evolution. It changed moment by moment. Mountains towered and leveled. The desert dunes swept away and back again. Forests rose, withered, regrew. All of it constant, like the steady rhythm of a heartbeat.

The wraiths were everywhere—gray spots wandering across the distance and cluttering the ground below. I leaned over the rail to peer down at them. Their bodies were whole, just translucent, a shadow of what they’d once been. A few looked up, as if they smelled my presence. Their mouths opened in a soundless moan as they reached for me.

The dead in the first Sanctum were still angry, raging against their fate. These had moved past anger. They were grieving.

The others had moved ahead, but Asar stopped behind me. “You don’t want them looking at you too long,” he said.

I nodded, but I still stared out at the horizon, at the ever-shifting landscape, and the wraiths, frozen in time, within it.

“Entranced, Dawndrinker?” he said, when I didn’t move.

“I was trying to decide why this felt so familiar,” I said. “And then I realized, this is what it feels like to be Turned. You’re stuck between layers as the entire world changes. And you’re in the middle of it all, watching it happen, and yet none of it can touch you.”

Not living. Not dying. Starving for both.

At Asar’s silence, a wave of self-consciousness passed over me. I chanced a glance at him and was startled by the way he was looking at me. So intently, like he was unraveling a tapestry.

I looked away quickly and shrugged. “I know. That doesn’t make sense.”

But he simply said, “Yes. It does.”

He nudged me along, and we kept walking.

We wound through bridges and pathways, navigating the maze of cliffs. As we walked, the wraiths grew more numerous. Soon, they surrounded us. Up close, they were even more unnerving—faces hollow, eyes white and milky.

“Ignore them,” Asar had told us, keeping his gaze fixed ahead. “They’re attracted to us because they can smell the life on us. But the less attention you give them, the less they have to grab on to. They want to be acknowledged.”

It went against my every instinct to walk past starving souls who wanted to be seen so desperately. I felt their pain every step of the way.

They were particularly attracted to Chandra. Maybe it was because she was human, the stench of her mortality so much stronger. They surrounded her, watching her like a caged animal.

“Asar…” Elias said uneasily as he narrowly avoided the curious reaching hand of what looked to be a dead priestess, blindfold over her eyes.

“Keep walking,” Asar hissed. “Don’t look at them.”

We passed through another hall, which, fortunately, was so narrow that it forced back some of the wraiths. When we emerged, we were at the end of a long, straight path.

“There,” Asar said.

I followed his gaze, and my heart sank.

The building ahead rose straight out of the earth like an organic growth, the bone forming three spires that pierced the rivers of blood in the sky. Deep ridges spiraled around each one, which then interwove around great arched windows and an imposing door. Above the entrance, a massive, circular stained glass window stared down at us—a crimson eye, another mark of Alarus.

Elias let out a curse, and Chandra whispered a shaky prayer.

Beasts surrounded the temple.

They weren’t quite as big as the guardians at the veil, but they were damned close. Their long, reptilian bodies clung to the walls and curled around the spires. The light reflected off sleek black fur, and their eyes glowed with ethereal white. One opened a cavernous mouth and rolled out a long black tongue to lick the glistening red from the bone.

I counted at least ten, and that was just what we could see from this angle.

“Souleaters.” Asar spoke in a near whisper, careful not to draw more attention from the wraiths. “They have a taste for?—”

As we watched, a wraith wandered a little too close to the temple. One minute he was shuffling along, and the next, he was gone; the beast was settling back around the spire and licking its chops.

The name made sense.

“Why are there so many?” Chandra whispered.

“There used to be measures to keep them out of the Descent, but they’ve learned how to slip past,” Asar said. “They’ve multiplied the last few centuries.”

“But why are there so many here ?”

“They’re attracted to the wraiths.”

I pieced together what that meant and swallowed a curse.

“So the temple is full of wraiths?” I said.

Asar didn’t answer, which I took to mean, Yes, but I don’t want to say it and make everyone panic again.

“If we’re quiet and calm, they shouldn’t bother us.” He shot us each a pointed look, one by one. “Quiet. And. Calm.”

The temple seemed at once steps away and painfully far. Most of the distance between us and the door was a wide-open stretch, which meant there were no cliffs or rocks to shield us from the wraiths. We had already assembled quite a following, and as we crossed into open space, more drifted toward us like flies to a rotten carcass.

Up close, the souleaters were terrifyingly large. Their eyes released trails of glowing smoke. Their stares were a thousand miles deep, even as they gave us disinterested, impassive glances. Asar was right. They didn’t seem interested in us so long as we didn’t give them a reason to be.

And to our credit, we did manage quiet and calm . At first.

The pack had tightened around us. It was getting harder and harder to keep ignoring them. The woman moved so swiftly in the crowd, we didn’t even notice her until she had broken through. She wore the ethereal remains of a long white nightgown, though everything from the hips down was covered in black bloodstains. Loose braids hung about her angular face in the remains of a once-elaborate hairstyle, now frizzy and half-undone.

She stretched toward Chandra.

“I kno-o-ow yo-u-u,” she moaned, fanged mouth twisting around the words like they were foreign objects. “I know y-you!”

The wraith lurched closer, long fingers clawing at Chandra’s arm.

In a matter of seconds, quiet and calm unraveled.

Chandra let out a panicked cry as the wraith grabbed her. I pulled Chandra’s other arm, yanking her from the wraith’s grip. Elias swung his sword, which passed harmlessly through the woman’s translucent body. But the strike at least bought me enough time to call the flame, which took too long to come to me.

The wraith threw her hands up with an enraged cry. Asar jumped in, muttering spells under his breath as he swung his sword. One strike, and she dissipated like smoke.

But I raised my head to see the beasts upon the temple walls raising their heads, those eternal eyes spearing through us with renewed, hungry interest.

“The door,” Asar bit out. “Go!”

Quiet and calm was officially abandoned in favor of run as fast as you fucking can .

We’d made it more than halfway to the temple doors. Only about a hundred paces remained. And yet, that distance seemed infinite as we broke into a frantic sprint. Chaos erupted. The wraiths descended upon us, pleas rising to a crescendo, awakened to fresh desperation now that one of their own had touched us.

Luce bounded ahead, clearing the path as best she could. The soul-eaters stirred, more and more white eyes turning to us. As they began to move, she snarled and snapped up at them, like she was ready to take them all down herself.

Thirty paces.

The door loomed. We were an inelegant tangle of running limbs and swords and light and magic, all barely holding off the onslaught.

Two souleaters slithered down from their perches, black tongues sliding free in preparation.

Fifteen paces.

The doors groaned open in an ominous invitation.

I should have been relieved. Instead, dread prickled at the back of my neck. Not that I was in any position to question shelter when both the dead and the beasts that consumed them were bearing down upon us.

Cold, dead fingers closed around my arm, and I stumbled, fighting off the wraith with a sputtering blast of light—the best I could manage.

The ground shook as the first souleater leapt from its perch.

Ten paces.

So close. Luce bounded through the door, quickly followed by Elias, then Chandra.

I pushed myself through one final sprint?—

Something hard caught the toe of my boot. The ground flew up to hit me before I even knew I was falling. My face cracked against the sand, limbs tangling as my momentum threw me into a grotesque somersault. I recovered quickly, but as I pushed myself back up, I found myself staring into a massive open mouth.

I expected teeth, a tongue, all the typical trappings of the jaws of a deadly beast. Instead, within the souleater’s mouth was simply…?nothing. Torturous, starving emptiness, stretching beyond the bounds of this world.

The jaws opened, and opened, and opened.

“Iliae!”

Asar’s shout echoed distantly. I didn’t even have time to turn my head. But then, I didn’t need to look at him—I felt him, just as I did at every gate we repaired. His magic reached up inside of me, an open hand ready to be seized.

I didn’t have to think. I just did it.

A blast of darkness erupted around me, consuming my vision. The souleater let out a high-pitched wail. My body went flying with the force of it, but someone took hold of my arm before I could hit the ground, and together, we ran .

The sand turned to tile beneath my feet. A deafening BOOM rang out just behind me. The next thing I knew, I was on all fours upon a smooth floor. Asar’s hand was still on my arm.

“Holy gods,” I gasped. “I thought?—”

“Too close, Dawndrinker.” Asar sounded more shaken than I might have expected.

I rose shakily. “Thank you. For the help.”

He shook his head. “It was you.”

It wasn’t all me, but it was nice of him to share the credit.

Elias’s voice pulled my attention away. “Didn’t you say that there would be many wraiths in here?”

I looked around at the temple. Beautiful wasn’t the right word. This was complex and dark and interesting. The ceiling rose above us in majestic peaks, white, blood-slicked stone dyed red with the filtered light through stained glass windows. Massive carvings stretched over the walls, depicting the sun, the moon, the earth and sky—countless works of excruciatingly stunning art, so much of it that my eye couldn’t even find a place to rest. Six doors stood before us, each bearing the eye of Alarus at their peak.

My hair rustled with a distant breeze, even though the door was closed. A hollow wheeze echoed through the hallways. Breathing, I realized with a chill. Breathing from the walls.

Elias’s words sank in.

Yes, it felt alive in here, in a strange way. But it was empty. No wraiths. No dead.

Asar’s brow furrowed. He stepped to the center of the room, turning slowly. His scarred eye glowed, silver unfurling from it like funeral incense.

Something was wrong. The dead should be here, drawn to the remaining scrap of Alarus’s power.

They should be, but they weren’t.

Did that mean that Alarus’s power wasn’t here at all?

Or did it mean that something more terrifying was here instead? Something that frightened even the dead away?

Luce let out a low growl. Dread fell over Asar’s face.

“We need to—” he started.

The breathing of the temple stopped.

Everything went dark.

A plume of smoke devoured the light that seeped through the windows. I felt the magic in here sour, like fruit going rotten. My mouth tasted rancid. My skin puckered to gooseflesh.

I could barely make out Asar’s silhouette at the center of the room. The air around him writhed—misty ebony snakes coiling, coiling, coiling around his body.

And then I saw her.

The woman emerged from the darkness like she was rising from beneath the depths of an endless sea.

“I knew you’d come back,” she crooned. “That’s what I always loved about you. You were always so very, very loyal.”