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

Chapter 18

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I t’s odd that Morthryn had started to feel like safety. We stepped back into its familiar halls, and immediately, I let out a shaky breath of relief. Elias let his sword clatter to the stone floor. Chandra sank down on her heels, hands clasped. Even Asar leaned against the wall, head bowed, like the stone was the only thing keeping him from collapsing.

Maybe we were all on the brink of collapse, Morthryn included.

The decay was so much worse here. Shattered windows framed night-black oblivion within twisted metal panes and tattered curtains. Deep gouges ran through the floors, splitting mosaics like gutted carcasses. The distant rumble of settling stone moaned down the hallways, as if warning of impending defeat.

The guardian’s words echoed:

No mortal can complete such a task.

A million damned innocents rest upon your shoulders.

It was not the first time I’d been given an impossible mission. And the guardians were beings created by a god—not mortal, no, but certainly not deities, either. They were fallible, just as we were. I couldn’t say whether they spoke belief or prophecy. Just as I couldn’t say whether those words were directed at Asar, or at me.

I couldn’t decide which was worse.

Elias was the first to speak. He turned to Asar, lip curled into a sneer.

“What. The fuck. Was that ?”

His voice rose with each word, until it boomed from the ceilings in a thunderclap. He stalked toward Asar like a starving wolf.

“You were expecting her,” he snarled. “You knew she was there.”

Her.

Immediately, I knew who we were talking about.

A blanket of cold fell over Asar’s face.

“I warned you that we would see the dead?—”

“Don’t shove that bullshit down my throat. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize her?”

Asar’s eyes slid away, pointedly impassive in a way I knew would drive Elias insane.

“We don’t have time for this,” he said.

“Is that what you’re dragging us to fucking hell for? For her ? I should have known. There was never any quest from Nyaxia, was there? There was just you, the bastard spare prince that no one wanted, and the dead woman you can’t just let?—”

I acted before I thought. It was in my nature to be a peacekeeper, and I could see these two hurtling to catastrophic collision.

I touched Elias’s shoulder. “Let’s just?—”

The impact was so swift that I didn’t even know I’d been hit until I saw stars. When Elias whirled around, he struck me square across the face. His arm was a mass of muscle that he swung with all the unyielding force of a hammer.

Luce snarled. Asar’s left eye flashed with a violent burst of light.

I didn’t even see him move.

One minute, darkness enveloped him. The next, Elias went flying against the wall.

“Do. Not. Touch. Her.” Unlike Elias, Asar didn’t growl, didn’t yell. His words were clear. Four precise swipes of the blade. “It isn’t her fault,” he hissed, “that you can’t handle witnessing the results of your own actions.”

Elias spat blood onto the floor as he pushed himself up. “ My actions? Don’t pretend that you haven’t followed your fair fucking share of unpleasant orders, Warden . And don’t pretend that I was the one who turned her into whatever the fuck that was.”

Asar’s body was a drawn bowstring, ready for another strike. “Get out,” he said quietly. “I don’t care where you go.”

Elias pulled himself up to his full, imposing height, wiping a trickle of black from his lip. “I wish I could,” he scoffed, “instead of following you to the grave. But we can still end this. We don’t have to die because you’re still chasing after her. You’re looking for power, bastard prince? You’re looking to redeem yourself after your exile?” He thrust his palm to Asar’s pack—to the relics within it. “We have two artifacts of Alarus. Two. Did you hear of what the House of Night managed to do with a few of Alarus’s fucking teeth? Imagine what could be done with?—”

“No.”

I put myself between Elias and Asar. I was there during those battles. I saw what had happened when those god teeth, offered by Septimus, Prince of the House of Blood, were used as a weapon. A challenger for the throne had leveraged them to great power, but it had come with catastrophic costs.

“No,” I said again. “You can’t do that. No mortal should have that kind of power.”

I felt like such a fool. I had been so focused on the end goal of this mission that I hadn’t even stopped to think about the sheer power that Asar was casually collecting on the way. The thought of what the wrong hands could do with these items—Alarus’s purest essence—made bile rise in my stomach.

“Is that what your friends in the House of Night think?” Elias said. “That it’s dangerous? Makes them terrible hypocrites, since they’ve been cultivating it, too.”

“That isn’t true,” I said, without hesitation.

The corner of Elias’s mouth quirked, the pleasure of a cat with a bird between its teeth.

“I run the spies, little girl, and we have good ones. Don’t know what your Nightborn friends have, but they have something. And I don’t blame them for it. They pissed off Nyaxia, killed a Shadowborn prince, and made an enemy of the Bloodborn. I’d be hoarding every weapon I could find, too.” The smirk withered as he turned to Asar. “Can’t you taste it in the air? All the Houses are fighting for survival. The House of Blood has conquered a human nation, for fuck’s sake?—”

“They what ?” Chandra gasped. “Where?”

My stomach dropped. If that was true, it crossed a line that had never been challenged since vampires first came to be.

The visions Atroxus had showed me of beaches soaked in blood now seemed terrifyingly imminent.

“Some inconsequential island,” Elias said. “Glana. Glaea. Something like that. Do the details matter? Even the gods are getting restless. We must be ready to fight. Your sister knows that. Your father?—”

“My sister and my father are ignorant .” Asar spat the word with a sneer. “They see nothing but what’s right in front of their faces, and sometimes, not even that. Be lucky that we both still are bound by our oaths, Elias, because otherwise, I’d throw you back out there to rot. And if I listened to your advice, it wouldn’t matter anyway because Nyaxia would smite us all for our disobedience.”

Elias started to speak, but Asar roared, “ Silence .”

Silence. Silence. Silence.

The command—the compulsion—reverberated against stone. Elias’s mouth closed as he stared Asar down with a dagger glare.

Asar surveyed us, shadows clinging to his silhouette. He started to cross to the hallway, then paused at me, eyes lingering at my cheek. Lingering, I realized, at the point of impact where Elias’s arm had met my face.

His lips thinned, and he turned away.

“Rest while you can,” he said to us. “We’ll be moving again soon.”

And with that, he disappeared down the hall, Luce at his heels.