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

Chapter 25

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

L uce dragged us out into the open air. Asar and I fell upon the bone shore together in a heap.

The world assaulted me, light and sound and texture overwhelming. My chest burned as I coughed up lungfuls of rancid blood. It seemed thicker now, as if tainted by the memories it held. Ophelia’s eyes burned into me.

She was here. She was coming. We had to go.

Still, when I lifted my head and looked into Asar’s face, I pressed my hand against his chest just to make sure he was real. His hair was plastered to his forehead in whorls. Red pooled in the grooves of his scars. His left eye shone bright, the storm clouds within thrashing. They calmed slightly as his hand pressed to my cheek—making sure I was real, too.

My hand slipped over his, tracing elegant bones and muscles. Then I pulled it away and looked at it. The Mark on his hand, the eye of death, stared back at me, smoke pulsing from it with his quickening heartbeat.

“Shit,” I whispered, because what else was there to say?

A muscle feathered in Asar’s jaw in a way that said he agreed. But he looked up to the temple looming over us.

“No time,” he said. He stood, arm braced over his midsection, where black bloomed over his shirt. The scent of it made my stomach twist with hunger.

“Chandra?” he asked.

I thought of her reaching hand. Don’t leave me.

I shook my head, and I was grateful that was answer enough for him.

I started to rise and a shock of pain cut through me. I looked down to see my leg twisted at an angle that didn’t seem quite right.

Asar’s face went stone still.

“It’s fine,” I said brightly. “I’m fine. We have to go.”

Ophelia would be here any moment. The wraiths were restless. The souleaters roiled.

But Asar gave me one of those looks—the kind I hated, the kind that cut right through me.

“You don’t deserve this.”

He said it so earnestly, so softly. It reminded me of that little boy clutching a dead dog. Maybe a part of that boy had still been inside him all along. A little boy who still believed in justice. A little boy who still thought people got what they deserved, and that I still deserved anything.

I couldn’t let myself acknowledge that. Not now.

I shook my head, and we staggered for the temple as fast as our pathetic, mangled bodies could carry us.

“We’re almost there,” I said. “Gods, Alarus had a hell of a taste in architecture, didn’t he?” I talked a lot when I was nervous. I couldn’t help it, and the sound of my own voice was preferable to the low murmurings of the dead, growing louder. “Such an affinity for drama. I have to admire it. Really never passed up the opportunity for?—”

We crossed the threshold and my words died. The damage wasn’t visible from the outside, but the temple had started to crumble—the roof was partially caved in here, and rubble blocked half of the double doors. The building moaned as we entered, as if lamenting its sorry state.

We dragged ourselves through, into the belly of the temple.

The front half of the large, open room still remained standing, high ceilings cradling rib-like rafters. But the entire back half had deteriorated into little more than rubble. The rivers ran straight through it, and twisting staircases and arched bridges crossed over them. A twinkling melody played as a few chips of broken glass fell from the ceiling into the bloody pond below.

At the center, perched upon an island atop those winding rivers of scarlet, sat a small marble building. “Building,” actually, was too grand a word for it. It reminded me of a tomb in a graveyard, or the confessional rooms in the monastery—a simple stone box to contain the dead, or sins, or oftentimes both.

Neither Asar nor I had to acknowledge aloud that we felt it. The air bent toward it, vibrating with a silent hum of power. The altar would be in there, surely, and so would the relic.

Shadows of the souleaters circling above us swirled over the floor. The hair rose on the back of my neck. I could sense the countless wraiths encroaching upon the temple, no doubt acutely aware of the presence of mortality by now.

Worse, I could sense her .

Fifty paces to that altar, a clear shot, and it still felt like a trap.

Asar’s blood dripped onto the floor, a rhythm increasing with my heart rate. “Let’s not linger,” he muttered.

The box was smooth save for a single wrought-iron door. It had no handle, and not even any visible hinges. But when Asar reached for it, it swung wide open like parting jaws.

A streak of light burst through the open door.

Asar hissed a curse and leapt out of the way, dragging me with him. The scent of burning flesh filled my lungs. The two of us pressed to the wall just to the right of the entrance. Asar’s right hand, which held me tight to the stone, was smoking, the flesh purple-black where the light had touched him.

The light from within the door was so bright that it slashed a brutal streak of white all the way down the pathway, across the blood rivers, and up the wall.

Atroxus’s trap.

The ground groaned, red liquid trembling, as if the entire Descent was moaning in protest.

They were coming. Ophelia. The wraiths. The souleaters. The thousand blades poised at our hearts.

Hurry, hurry, the wind whispered.

Asar peered at the open door, the light within so blinding it was reducing to a searing square of white. He could barely even look at it, and I could smell the mere proximity eating at his skin.

“Can you manipulate it from here?” he said.

I pressed my palm to the stone. I could sense the power of Atroxus throbbing behind the thick layer of marble—once it might have been invigorating, but now it stung, dissonant like an off-key chord. Still, it was distant. The wall was too thick, and no doubt reinforced by measures that went far beyond the physical. My magic, weak as it was now, couldn’t reach through it.

I shook my head, and Asar’s teeth gritted.

“We can’t go in there,” he said. “We’ll have to find another way.”

But I knew without even looking that there wasn’t any other way. The light was the guard, exactly as Atroxus had planned. Whoever intended to make it to the relic would have to enter the crypt and confront whatever was inside. It was almost funny that the door alone had driven us back when that wasn’t even the test.

I thought of Chandra’s face in her final moments, eyes wide with terror, reaching for me.

I hadn’t even tried to save her. Hadn’t wanted to.

Maybe it served me right. If Chandra was here, she could have walked right through that door without hesitation. The light was nothing to her but warmth.

I looked down at my hand. Only a sliver of the light had touched me before Asar had pushed me out of its path, and he’d been in front of me, taking the brunt of it. My little finger and a slice of my hand throbbed, the skin reddened. But my burn was much less severe than Asar’s.

“I’ll go,” I said.

Asar looked at me like I was an idiot.

“You certainly will not.”

“It’s magic, not sunlight. It won’t kill me.”

“Because Atroxus’s magic has never hurt you before.”

His sarcasm cut deeper than I wished it did. But I forced a smile.

“I said it won’t kill . Not that it won’t hurt.”

Asar did not look convinced. And truthfully, I wasn’t sure if I was, either. A tight ball of fear sat in my stomach. Was I really certain that Atroxus’s magic wouldn’t burn me up, too? Was I really certain that I was different than any other vampire? That I still held enough of his love to earn his protection?

But neither of us had time for doubt.

Asar’s arm locked, pinning me to the wall as if to hold me back by force if necessary.

“If you think I’m about to let you run into?—”

Before he could finish telling me what he wouldn’t let me do—useless, anyway—our time ran out.

The darkness came slowly at first—so slowly I didn’t notice it happening until the entire temple was coated in a thick, grainy fog. I felt her at the back of my neck, the underside of my chin. I felt her breath against my cheek.

“This is my favorite Sanctum, you know.”

Ophelia unfurled from the air like a blooming flower.

“So interesting to see what lives inside those fragile mortal minds. So much of it is the same. The same regrets. The same fears.”

She rose above us, shadow surrounding her like great, powerful wings. And as she raised her arms, the dead surfaced from the bloody water at her call.

Perhaps it was because we were stuck here in such a confined space with them, but when they rose, their pain was momentarily staggering. They were caught exactly halfway between death and life, feeling the deep gouges of both losses on their souls. Stuck here, in the chamber devoted to the memories of what they had once been and the scars of their greatest regret, forever unable to move on. They crawled toward the light, drawn to the rare glimpse of the sun and starving for the life it promised.

There were so, so many of them.

Dozens. Hundreds. They blended together in formless, writhing want.

Asar cursed and drew his sword. I felt his weakness through the bond we shared, though he buried it deep inside himself.

“We run,” he said.

But I could tell that even he knew that wasn’t feasible. There was nowhere to go. The only place that the dead couldn’t follow would be the passage the relic would afford us.

“Go,” he said. “I’ll cover you.”

He was telling me to flee to safety. To Morthryn’s halls.

Behind him, I thrust my hand out into the streak of light and winced at the sting. Smoke rose from my skin, but the burns, while painful, wouldn’t be fatal. The light sang a melody I knew a long time ago, and though my body no longer was as attuned to it as it once had been, I could manipulate the notes enough.

Enough.

I hoped.

I looked back over my shoulder to the rising onslaught, and Asar bracing himself before it all without hesitation, just as he did before those broken gates. Beyond him, and past the wave of dead, Ophe-lia rose, her smile spreading across her lips. She looked past him—straight to me, her interest digging into my soul.

“I know what it feels like.” Her voice slithered around me, cruel and pained. “To call for a great love and hear no answer. I called for him seventy-two times when they murdered me. I counted every one.”

Her fingers rifled through my mind. Found the memory of the attack of the Moon Palace in the Kejari—when I had lain helpless among the demons and the Nightfire, calling and calling in exchange for only a god’s silence.

“I wonder,” she whispered, “if yours will answer you now?”

Me and her both.

But I didn’t have time to doubt it.

Perhaps Asar sensed what I was about to do, because he started to turn, eyes locking to mine.

“Hold them off,” I told him. “Be back soon.”

And as he grabbed for me, I dove into the light.

I had been right. The light didn’t kill me.

But gods, it hurt like a bitch.

It ate at my flesh, acidic and stinging, as I hurled myself through the door. I sang hymns under my breath, as if to remind the magic here that I belonged to it, beneath my vampire flesh. Perhaps to remind myself, too.

I leapt forward blindly, eyes squeezed shut, hands flailing out until my feet tripped over a step and I stumbled against a wall. The burning sensation ebbed, fading to a constant sting instead of a breathtaking agony, and I chanced opening one eye.

I could see, barely, though I had to keep my hand up to shield against the brightness. It all emanated from a smooth marble box at the center of the room. Scattered around it were three broken golden skulls—horse skulls, maybe? Perhaps they had once been guardians, like the panthers in Breath, but they had long ago fallen. It was bigger in here than it appeared from the outside, though I couldn’t tell if it was the work of magic or optical illusion—because the walls were mirrored. My own form stared back at me, silhouetted against the light, duplicated countless times in all directions. A dull roar shook the ground, the walls, set the mirrors trembling. Outside, the sounds of the dead grew louder and louder, and I could feel the echo of Asar’s weakness in the anchor that connected us.

Using my arm to shield myself against the light, I approached the box. It was smooth white marble, like the crypt itself, though concentric circles had been carved into the top of it. Glyphs, or something like them, though more ancient. I ran my hand over it. A bisected circle, a simplified version of the mark of Atroxus, had been carved from the stone—a change clearly made after the fact, because the missing piece cut straight through the older, delicate lines beneath.

It needed to be completed, surely. There had to be a key, or?—

Movement out of the corner of my eye startled me. I lifted my eyes, and leapt backward.

My reflection stood at the other side of the box. My reflection, but…?not. Her large, empty eyes glowed. Her freckles emanated streaks of white, like pinholes against a noon sky. It was difficult to make out what she wore, or much about her body, because a hole in her chest throbbed with searing radiance—so brilliant it hurt to look at her.

I stepped back, but she didn’t. She approached me and stretched out her hand, palm up, over the box.

Beckoned.

I didn’t move.

The sound of the battles beyond the walls had grown louder. Asar’s fear—not on his own behalf, I knew, but on mine—pulsed faster and faster in my chest.

I chanced a tentative step closer.

The reflection smiled, light pouring from her lips.

The moment I moved, she grabbed my wrist with one hand, yanking me closer, as she plunged the other into my chest.

My own scream filled my ears in a world that felt a thousand miles away.

Pain exploded through me, fire in my stomach, in my chest, in my veins. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t pull away. Memories flashed across my vision.

No—not just memories. Sins.

An elbow against mine in my teenage bedroom.

A corpse hitting the ground in the Citadel courtyard.

Lush lips upon my throat.

Chandra’s reaching hand in her final moments.

Countless sips of blood filled with countless shameful pleasures.

A thousand burns, and a thousand unanswered prayers.

And something else—something lost in the cloud of all I couldn’t remember, a faraway memory that twisted like a knife in my gut.

The reflection released me abruptly.

My throat hurt from the screams. My knees were jelly. I nearly collapsed, slumping against the marble box. I touched my chest—whole and unwounded, despite the pain. But the reflection frowned down at the hand she just withdrew from me, which was covered in black sludge, blotting out the brilliance of her glowing form.

In the back of my mind, Asar’s distant voice called to me, his magic banging at the doors to the walls I so carefully maintained: What happened? Where are you?

The reflection shook her head sadly. The word rang out, though her lips did not move:

Tainted .

A clear judgment. My soul had been weighed and found lacking.

But this wasn’t real. This was the Sanctum of Psyche, picking apart my mind and using it against me.

It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

But it felt real when she leveled her empty stare at me again, eyes gleaming, and rushed at me.

Maybe she was Atroxus’s version of the guardians that had lorded over the relic of Breath. Or maybe she was the key. Maybe this was a combination of Atroxus’s magic and the Sanctum’s, twisted to create a horrifying mutation.

It didn’t matter.

My back hit the ground. She leapt over me and I only just managed to stop her before she tore at my face. She was solid, but barely. I swung my sword, but she batted it from my hands easily, sending it skidding across the floor. The skin of my hands, my cheeks, the tip of my nose bubbled as the light within her flared. The hole in her chest sparked flame.

It was in there—the key. I was sure of it. I could feel it, a knot of the sun’s power ready to be unraveled. I just had to pull it apart, like a bow on a gift box.

It would’ve been so painfully easy once.

But now, I couldn’t even find my grip on that magic. I reached down into my heart for humanity, for the sun, and all I found was that black sludge. Tainted, tainted, tainted.

She pressed her hands to my face. Her light flared, igniting me.

My scream ripped me in two.

Iliae!

I wasn’t sure if I was hearing Asar’s voice in my mind or in my ears. All I knew was that it was frantic, and I desperately wanted to answer him.

The reflection frowned thoughtfully. She pushed her hand into my head and plucked out another sin.

The memory of Asar’s body under his wet clothes. His hands against the broken gates of Morthryn, elegant and deft. The muscles of his forearms. The curve of his lower lip. The smell of his skin, of his blood. The sound of his voice around those words: Let me defile you.

The way I felt when I thought of these things. Hungry.

I managed to push her off of me. Managed to roll away, though I could barely drag myself to my feet. Everything hurt. The light had grown brighter, the mirrors reflecting it over and over again. I couldn’t find a door. Had there ever been a door? Or had I been here forever?

My mental walls were in shambles. Asar’s magic pushed through them.

You have thirty seconds to answer me, Iliae!

But I couldn’t grab hold of that magic, either. Couldn’t even make sense of my own thoughts. Every spare breath went to evading her. But she moved as I did—she anticipated every move before I made it. I kept reaching for the sun, and it kept slipping from my grasp. Burns opened over burns.

I was in the Moon Palace all over again, lying on the floor, waiting to die as my god was silent.

The reflection pinned me against a mirrored wall, the glass searing my back. Her brow furrowed in pity.

You should have died there, she said.

I let out a choppy sob.

She was right. I should have.

I attempted once again to reach for her magic, and once again—again, again, again—I failed.

But then, a great, terrible roar shook the floor. The reflection flickered in distraction. I tore my eyes from her face as glass rained over us. The walls trembled. The ground quaked. A pillar of stone crashed through the far corner of the room, ripping open the crypt.

The reflection’s mouth opened in a silent scream, her body flickering with the impact. My eyes struggled to adjust to the stark contrast between the darkness outside the crypt and the blinding brightness within it. I could see movement in the hole opened by the pillar, but couldn’t make sense of what it was at first. I realized it was because the wraiths were so numerous that they had become a living sea.

Yet I felt Asar’s presence more vividly than that of the dead.

My eyes found him in the darkness for just that split second. He was on the other side of the pillar with Luce at his side, his sword drawn and glowing, his magic surrounding him as he fought back wraith after wraith. Long fingers of darkness fanned from his back, wrapping around the pillar. He’d been the one to make the ruin fall. He’d smashed through the stone of hell itself to get to me.

My heart stirred.

He’d had to dive out of the way when the wall shattered and streaks of light spilled over the temple ruins, and he’d done it without breaking his stride in his own battles. But through it all, his eyes met mine over his shoulder, just for a split second, and he looked at me as if the sight of me alive was a prayer answered.

He opened his mouth, like he wanted to say something, but neither of us had time for that.

The reflection solidified again. Two of the mirrors had been destroyed, but the rest remained intact, light bouncing between them. Still, the influx of darkness cleared my head, breaking the disorienting sea of white. When the reflection came for me again, this time, I managed to stave her off at first.

At first.

But still, that sun inside her evaded me. The magic was too -complex—it refused to respond to me. I was wounded. The wraiths were overwhelming Asar. They began to crawl through the opening created by the fallen pillar, licking the sunlight off the stone. Luce snarled and snapped at the reflection, attempting to drag her off of me only to be sent sprawling across the room with a single strike.

In the distance, I could have sworn I heard Ophelia’s amused laugh.

We had no more time.

It was almost over.

I gasped for breath and dragged myself to my sword. But the reflection yanked me back by my ankle. She crawled over me, each touch finding another sin.

Every sip of blood I enjoyed too much. Every brush between my legs at night. Every unanswered prayer.

I reached for the sun.

But my eyes slipped past my own sun-drenched face. To Asar, who stole one more glance over his shoulder at me once again. I felt a tug on the anchor—on the thread of magic that connected us.

I realized what he was trying to say to me:

You are a Shadowborn .

You are a Shadowborn vampire. You are surrounded by your greatest weapon. Use it!

Now I understood.

He hadn’t torn down that wall so he could save me. He had done it to hand me the weapon I could use to save myself.

I couldn’t seize enough control of Atroxus’s magic to snuff out the reflection on my own. But I could manipulate it in the crudest sense. I could pour everything I had into stoking those flames, driving them to uncontrolled madness. And the brighter it burned, the darker the shadows would grow. Even now, I could feel them, rich as the finest alcohol, begging me to let them in—waiting for me, right there in Asar’s open invitation.

But fear clenched in my heart. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear it calling to me over the years. But I’d kept that door inside myself tightly closed. I’d nailed it shut with prayer and sunlight.

What would I unleash if I opened it?

What if I couldn’t close it again?

I fought my way to my feet, trying once again to call the flame?—

But Asar’s voice rang clear in my mind now, the final vestiges of my defenses against him gone.

You are too good to be this afraid of yourself, Iliae, he snapped. You are better than this.

And though his words were harsh, his touch on my mind was soft. I knew that he understood. That he, too, feared the power he had been given by people he hated, and regretted the pain he had caused by using it.

I felt as if I were staring into a different mirror, now, at a more monstrous reflection than the one that pinned me to the temple floor.

I took Asar’s power, and I threw open that dark door in my heart.

I didn’t have time to second-guess.

I grabbed the reflection’s face as she grabbed mine, both of us cradling each other.

Instead of calling to the sun with my joy, I called to it with my anger.

Instead of attempting to control the light, I set it ablaze with my fury.

The reflection’s face shifted to shock, then pain. Her mouth opened, eyes widened. Blazing white poured from them, the light of her freckles spreading like scorched paper catching fire. I was burning, too, but I didn’t feel it anymore. I didn’t feel any of it.

The light grew brighter, and brighter, and brighter, and with it, the shadows became inky black and rich as velvet.

I seized upon them.

They flooded me like a breath of fresh air above the water.

Gods, I hadn’t realized how much energy it had taken to hold it back until this moment. How had I forgotten that magic could feel like this? So right? Using the power of the sun had become so painful. But this was anything but. The shadows enveloped me, protected me, flared around me like wings. I could feel the thoughts and emotions of the dead, waiting for me like strings of an orchestra to be played. I could feel the silent song of the Descent hitting its perfect notes.

And I could feel Asar, walking with me into the dark.

This is what magic should be, a voice whispered. Easy. Like breathing.

Then my own face stared back at me, cracks spreading between brilliant features. The fire spilled from her eyes, her mouth, her nostrils. I felt the magic within her crack, pushed to the limits of its ability, just as the flood of shadow rushed through her. Cracks spiderwebbed across her horrified face. Liquid black bubbled under her skin, growing, consuming, until the flames screamed their death cries against the stifling shadows. And the darkness just kept going, until it smothered the light. Our positions were reversed, though I didn’t remember moving. I pinned her beneath me.

The cracks burst open, darkness spilling from her. For the first time, I stared myself in the face.

Not Mische, chosen of the sun, teenage prodigy of light.

Mische, vampire, Shadowborn, who had already let the dark devour her a long time ago, and had simply refused to see it.

My hand plunged into the hole in her chest. Closed around the core of her power, now drenched in inky shadow.

Tainted , I thought, and I even smiled when she burst apart into blackened shreds.

I didn’t remember standing. My senses blurred, my awareness drowning in sensation and impulse. The wraiths were everywhere. But Asar was pushing them back, drawing from the well of power that we shared together. I understood now that the shadows were simply a part of them—I could feel their souls, reduced to shades of what they once were, all pain and hunger and fear. It was so easy to let this blanket of darkness fall over them, too, ushering them away. I didn’t remember taking Asar’s hand, only that when his fingers intertwined around mine, it felt like a key sliding into a lock.

I wanted to drown in it.

I wanted more—I wanted everything. It all blurred around me. A distant laugh echoed in the layers between worlds—Ophelia. How exciting, she said. The songbird has talons. But what a price she will pay for them.

But even she was inconsequential.

Nothing felt real.

Not until elegant fingers brushed my cheek, cool and smooth, the only real thing in life or death.

I blinked, clearing my eyes.

Wisps of light trailed from his left eye into the sky, intertwining with the magic that still poured from my hands. His thumb swept over the curve of my cheek, and I heard his unspoken comfort: It’s all right. Come back.

The blind fury of my magic faded. I saw another version of myself in his gaze:

Mische, the woman he looked at like that.

We stood before the altar. I didn’t quite remember how we got here. I lifted my hand and looked down at the disc of stone I held within it. The key.

Asar cradled my hand in his. Together, we slid it into place. And when the box fell open, gold surging through the carvings, we reached inside together. Alarus’s memory encircled us.

Nyaxia and I stand at the veil between worlds. Here, we are at the inflection point between all things—the underworld, the mortal world, the Descent, and the land of gods. An obsidian tree towers above us, black leaves gently floating to the ground. In the distance, my kingdom looms.

It is fitting that we do this here, at the collision point of worlds. We are about to shatter the paths of fate.

She wears a poppy in her hair, blood-bright against the galaxies within. Her eyes contain endless shades of night, infinite possibilities.

I hold her hands in mine. I swear myself to her, and her to me. We bind our fates together.

We speak our wedding vows in the old language—a language not spoken now even by the gods. These were the same syllables once used to forge the bedrock of our world. It seems appropriate that they, too, should be the ones we use to destroy it.

When it is done, I slide my ring off my finger. It is a mark that binds me to the White Pantheon, and I have forsaken them now.

My wife kisses me, and I cannot imagine there was ever any other choice.

The past faded. Asar and I withdrew our hands. Sitting in my palm was a simple silver ring, glowing faintly with long-abandoned divinity.

I lifted my gaze to Asar’s. The want still curled low in my stomach, a new, disconcerting wave of it unleashed at the sight of him.

Then his eyes flicked down, and his fear made the world snap back into focus. I began to feel pain.

So much pain.

I looked down.

I was covered in blood.

“Whose is that?” I started to ask, but I only made it halfway through the words before the injuries crashed back into my body, my tether to my magic snapping.

And then I was on the ground, and Asar was holding me.

“I’ve got you, Mische,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”

I smiled.

“You said my name,” I said, and this time, it didn’t feel like power when the darkness took me.