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

Chapter 34

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“ Y ou’re terribly quiet, Iliae.” Asar spoke only as we ventured closer to the entrance of the Citadel. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you go this long without talking. No mundane observations? No pestering about my second cousin’s favorite pet or some equally mind-numbing question?”

He had been glancing back at me every few minutes the entire journey, and every time, the wrinkle between his brows etched deeper. He was concerned about me, and he was doing a bad job of pretending he wasn’t.

The thought hit me with a shockingly powerful pang of affection.

I gave him a cheerful smile, summoned only to the surface of my skin. “I thought you’d enjoy the break.”

His brow furrowed again. I looked away before I spent too much time tracing the angle of it.

“I don’t,” he said.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets and kept walking.

“Eva,” Asar said, a few steps later. “She was a parrot.”

“Hm?”

“My second cousin’s favorite pet.”

“Oh.” I let out a weak, very fake-sounding laugh. Asar stopped so abruptly that I almost walked into him. He turned on his heel, jaw set, left eye pulsing silver.

“Is this because of last night?” he said.

“Is what because of last night?”

“I’m not good at dancing around things.” He sounded a little helpless beneath his frustration, and again, I felt a pang of hurt on his behalf.

He’d been kinder to me than I deserved. And it wasn’t his fault that this place dug its fingers into all my freshest wounds. Most of all, the ones that he’d left on my throat, the ones that had felt so good it burned.

I tried harder for the next smile. Tried to make myself believe it, too. “I’m just a little tired.”

Asar didn’t look like he believed me. Even Luce eyed me suspiciously, tail thumping against the dirt. But my gaze fell behind him, to a glint of gold through the trees, and my eyes widened.

He followed my stare. The three of us pushed through the last thicket of vegetation. The soil and brick beneath my feet gave way to smooth, polished marble.

I let out a shaky breath.

The entrance of the Citadel of the Destined Dawn looked exactly as it had in decades of memories. Gleaming white stairs led to a set of golden double doors, brilliant beneath the unforgiving sun. Grand columns framed the entryway, each bearing a sculpture of another of Atroxus’s symbols—the wings of a phoenix, the disk of the rising sun, torch bearing the flame that never died. Above the entryway was the marble visage of Atroxus himself. He stood with arms open in invitation over the doorframe, long hair falling over his shoulders and crown polished upon his serious brow.

Those white stone eyes felt like they were staring directly at me.

The resemblance was stronger than I remembered, too—the first time I met Atroxus, when I was only eight, I’d been struck by how little he looked like the statue I knew so well. He’d seemed amused when I told him so, too young to know any better.

“Am I such a disappointment?” he had said, and I had shaken my head.

“No,” I’d answered. “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, my light.”

I had meant it then. I was, after all, in the presence of a being that rearranged the fabric of the world simply by existing. He was divine perfection, and he had smiled at me— me, Mische, little beggar girl with dirty feet and freckles—like I brought him genuine joy.

But I was just an innocent child then. Nothing but potential.

How did you manage to get so dirty? a jeering voice whispered in the back of my mind.

Asar was staring at the entrance, too, jaw set. His expression was a mask, but I could sense a fear that felt just like mine.

I touched his arm.

“Just a memory,” I said softly.

His mouth twisted into a wry smile—like he appreciated the attempt at consolation but didn’t quite find it comforting. I understood that. Memories were still dangerous. Especially here, where they blurred into reality.

This was the Sanctum of Secrets. Shame and desire. With the ghost of Asar’s lips still on my throat, a powerful fear lurched in my stomach at the thought of what could be waiting for us beyond these doors.

I drew in a deep breath and stepped forward first. The doors opened before I even touched them, the grand atrium spilling out before me. A mosaic of the sun sprawled over the floor in thousands—tens of thousands—of brilliant ceramic pieces, gleaming beneath flecks of light from the glass ceiling. Tapestries covered the walls, depicting Atroxus’s greatest feats—his conquering of the land of the gods, his coronation as king, and the largest, a grand tableau of him ruling over the other eleven gods of the White Pantheon.

In reality, there had been many hallways branching from this central room. Here, there was only one.

Luce’s stance lowered, smoke unfurling from her spine as if her fur raised in anticipation. Asar nudged my arm, jutting his chin toward his sword at my hip.

“Draw that,” he said.

I did. But holding it called to something within myself that I didn’t want to acknowledge here in my holy homeland, real or no. A pulse of shadow swirled around its edge, sliding up and hovering near my fingertips.

“Maybe you should wield it,” I said. As I knew he would, Asar dismissed me without hesitation.

“I’ll be fine without,” he said. “You need a weapon.”

I didn’t like swords in the best of times, but I especially hated this one—not because it felt clumsy and uncomfortable, like most blades did, but because it didn’t.

Our footsteps echoed in a way that seemed like it didn’t quite fit with the size of the room, as if we were actually in a much bigger space. It was so uncomfortably silent. In every other Sanctum, the temple had been a magnet for wraiths and souleaters, drawn by the call of Alarus’s magic.

Here?

Nothing.

The halls stretched before us and behind us. Finally, I chanced, “Is it strange that there’s nothing here?”

The silence swallowed my words like drops of blood in the ocean.

“Maybe,” Asar said quietly, sounding a bit frustrated by his own uncertainty. We were deeper in purgatory than most mortals ever made it. Who knew what was strange?

We kept walking. Soon, more paths veered off from the main stretch. Sometimes, the hall would split, forcing us to choose a direction. Asar would hesitate for a long moment at each of these branches, weighing our options, before nodding in one direction or the other with no explanation.

Though the layout of the building was far from that of the real Citadel, it still captured my memories with such eerie accuracy. Tapestries lined the walls, a perfect representation of those in my old home. I remembered some specifically, which illustrated Atroxus’s most well-known stories—like the ones of him lifting the sun over a field of livestock or healing Ix after a cursed lion nearly killed her.

But the longer we walked, the more gruesome the artwork became. What began as images of Atroxus’s benevolence became depictions of brutality. Atroxus, hovering over a sea of flame at the beginning of the world, when he purged it to ashes to promote new life. Atroxus, kneeling over Alarus’s body, hacking his head off with Srana’s blade while Ix held him down. Atroxus, standing over Nyaxia, holding her chains as she wept over her husband’s decapitated corpse.

Blood ran into blood, violence into violence.

I stopped at a tapestry that did not seem to depict Atroxus at all. A figure stood silhouetted against an orb of gold thread. Broken bodies, some missing limbs or heads, cluttered the ground around them. A crack split the sun in two.

My brow knitted.

Ahead, Asar turned to me expectantly, Luce at his heels.

I was about to follow him, but then I noticed something odd out of the corner of my eye. A strange, unnatural movement in the shadows where the ceiling met the wall.

I stared at it.

It was hard to tell if it was a trick of the light. The darkness seemed to be writhing. Then it twisted, running down the wall in slow drips.

No…?those were…

I jumped as a wail split the air.

It was distant at first, and so abrupt that I wondered if I’d imagined it—was certain I had, because it held an uncanny resemblance to Chandra’s final scream for help as the wraiths dragged her away. A mocking reminder of what had become many betrayals to my faith.

I froze. My eyes leapt to Asar. He heard it, too. Beside him, Luce’s body coiled, a growl rising from her throat.

This was no mind trick.

The sound came again, horrific and twisted.

“Let’s go,” Asar said urgently, reaching for me as I dove to close the distance between us. Together, we ran. Black now dripped from the ceiling, from underneath the tapestries. I soon realized what had seemed so naggingly odd about those streaks.

They were hands.

They reached from the corners where the ceiling met the wall. From up between the tiles of the floor. From beneath the tapestries, which now immortalized my greatest sins. I couldn’t stop to look at them, and yet, even as they blurred by, I recognized the images. Myself sawing a vampire corpse from a noose. Sitting in the garden with a handsome vampire prince. Denying Chandra her final plea. Asar and I, tangled up in each other, our blood rendered in gleaming black thread.

It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

“Did you think that I wouldn’t find you?”

Ophelia’s features formed one by one—icy eyes, smiling lips, that long, blood-red scarf around her throat.

Asar and I skidded to a clumsy stop. He threw himself in front of me, his hand tightening around my arm. Luce snarled, ready for a fight.

“Let us pass, Ophelia.”

She solidified, though only barely. It was difficult to make out where her body ended and the shadows began. The bounds of her mortal form had deteriorated, as if she sacrificed more and more of what she used to be the farther we journeyed. “Let you pass,” she repeated slowly. “Such irony, my love. Why should I give you what you have denied me?”

My palm was sweaty around the hilt of his blade. It called to my magic in great pulses now, like a heartbeat racing in preparation for the inevitable.

“I can help you,” he said. “If you let us through. If you let me?—”

But Ophelia dissolved, re-formed, floated closer. Her fingertips brushed my cheek. I drew in a sharp breath—in that one touch, her soul flashed through me. I saw a young woman with the world ahead of her and the will to take a bite out of it. I saw her fall in love with a quiet young prince and that love come crashing to the ground.

Ophelia went suddenly still.

“She smells like you, Asar.”

Her voice wavered. I felt sadness, then anger.

Inky tendrils moved to my throat, lingering right over the invisible mark that Asar’s teeth had left.

“Do you think it will end any differently?” she hissed. “You are a regret to every person who ever loved you. I know this better than any other.”

Asar’s eyes met mine. His magic rose beneath the fabric of the world like a surging tide ready to crash to the shore.

I raised his sword.

But Ophelia’s touch evaporated. Her rage strangled the life from the air.

“I do not even need to haunt you, lover,” her voice echoed. “I am the least of your ghosts. Let them consume you.”

The last thing I heard was Asar’s shout.

The last thing I saw was Ophelia’s face, tear-streaked, as she dragged me down.