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

Chapter 42

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

T he Sanctum of Soul was cold. This was the first thought that returned to me.

Something smooth pressed against my cheek. I pushed myself up, and when my eyes opened, I startled.

I was on a sheet of ice-frosted glass, mirror smooth, Luce and Asar asleep beside me. My own face stared back at me. At first, I thought it was a reflection. But this version of myself was different—younger, hair longer, face rounder. She was transparent, like a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. This girl wore Dawndrinker robes. She seemed like she hadn’t yet grown into her freckles.

I scrunched my nose. She scrunched her nose. I opened my mouth. She opened hers—revealing blunt human teeth.

My past self. The part of myself that died when I Turned.

Eerie.

I stood. My reflection did, too, standing upside down beneath me, her feet to mine. I wondered if she let out the same exhale of amazement that I did.

I thought after awhile all these tableaus of death would start to get mundane. But the Descent, it seemed, just kept surprising me.

The glass stretched out in all directions. The rocks and trees and vegetation of the terrain all sat atop it, creating little paths. Here, the leaves grew and turned and fell in a constant loop, caught in the endless passage of time. Their reflections were barren beneath the glass, leaves silver ghosts. Far ahead, a single tower rose up—a fountain, water running the wrong way, mirrored on all sides. The temple.

But none of this was as staggering as the sky. Above us, instead of darkness or sun or our past path through purgatory, was the mortal world, upside down, grayed out and cloudy. Cities and seas, plains and mountains. It floated by like clouds.

It was extraordinary.

Asar stirred. Luce had already gotten up, sniffing him. She had no reflection at all.

I shook him, and his eyes fluttered open. The sight of his left eye struck me for a moment—was it brighter than before?—but he was on his feet too quickly for me to discern why.

When he took in the scene around us, he, too, was speechless.

“The boundary between the mortal and immortal worlds,” I said softly. I pointed to the sky. “Is that?—”

“The land of the living,” Asar finished. Then he gestured to the glass, and the shadowy reflection beneath it. “The underworld.”

“That’s—”

I stopped mid-sentence as my eyes lowered to Asar’s reflection.

It was a blacked-out silhouette, smoke pouring from it, as if seen through the depths of nightfire. Like he was burning eternal. The only visible feature was one bright white eye—his right, the opposite side of his scars.

I gasped. “Why do you look like that?”

Asar hid his surprise well. But I knew him well enough by now to recognize it—those two quick blinks before he nonchalantly looked away.

“I have an interesting relationship to the underworld,” he said dismissively. “I lost half of myself to it the night I tried to bring Ophelia back, and a little more with every night I spent warding over Morthryn.”

I supposed that theory made as much sense as any, which was to say, none. Still, the stare of his silhouetted reflection was unsettling. It was both a perfect likeness and looked nothing like him, as if another visage had been transposed over his own.

But we didn’t have time to sit around dissecting it, as much as the priestess in me would have loved to. We were more exposed here than in any Sanctum before. This close to death, the scent of our life would be overwhelming to the dead. Whatever was coming after us—and there would be things coming after us—would be here quick.

“That’s the temple.” Asar pointed to the tower in the distance. “It’s the inflection point between purgatory and the underworld.”

“That’s where we do the ceremony?”

“That’s where Alarus’s presence will be closest. Yes.”

The intersection between life and death and gods.

I’ll be watching, Atroxus had told me.

Would he come? The veil between the mortal and immortal worlds would be so thin there that any tear, any foothold, would allow a god to pass through, even though it wasn’t their territory. My presence would offer Atroxus his. And Asar’s would call to Nyaxia.

It wasn’t too far to walk. I drew my sword—Asar’s sword—and Asar kept his magic at the ready. Shadows clustered in the reflection of the glass, barely resembling humanoid silhouettes—the dead, peering through to the living, but at least those spirits were safely on the other side of the veil. The ones I was more concerned about were the shadows I didn’t quite see out of the corners of my eyes. I kept catching movement in the trees, only to find nothing when I turned my head. But as the trees grew thicker, I realized what I was seeing. The silhouette was faceless, near formless, at the very top of the tree. It stood on the highest branch, which seemed too thin to support the weight of a person, arms reaching up. Its limbs stretched too long, open hands dissolving into smoke.

“Don’t look at it,” Asar whispered. “Let it stay distracted. We don’t need to rush being noticed.”

I turned away quick. “What is it doing?”

“Reaching for life. It’s been here a long time. That’s why it looks like that.”

Like it was barely clinging to what it once was.

The worst fate I could imagine. Never to rest in death. Never to find life again.

I shuddered.

I wouldn’t let that fate befall Saescha. I wouldn’t.

The silence stretched much longer than I’d expected it to. With every passing uneventful minute, the bowstring of our tension grew tighter. Asar’s shadows poured from his hand now, and mine pulsed at the edge of the blade. Luce was low to the ground, reacting to every minute movement.

But I was the one who saw them first. The hands crawling down from the tops of the trees. Countless hands, all at once, like the blanket of nightfall.

I raised my blade and jabbed my arm into Asar’s side. “Look?—”

But Malach didn’t come from the trees. He came from beneath.

He burst from the darkness. I saw his face only for a moment, handsome and smiling, fangs bared, as I had so often seen it in my nightmares.

I didn’t have time to react before he grabbed me. My back was against the tree. Malach’s face was inches from my own, smiling as he had the night he Turned me. His bodiless hands dug into me, reaching past flesh, as if to rip out my heart itself.

“We share taste in women, brother,” he sneered. “But I got this one first.”

For a moment, I was utterly petrified.

And then, I was angry.

“I already killed you,” I snarled.

I poured all my power into that sword as I drove it into him, using the blade that was supposed to be his and the magic that he had never intended to give me. I struck right over the wound I’d given him the last time I’d skewered his heart.

He wore the same look of surprise as he had that night. It was just as satisfying the second time around.

He staggered backward. Over his shoulder, I saw Asar freeing himself from the wraiths as Luce held them back. He wore a proud smirk that made warmth rise in my chest. Darkness wrapped around him, flowing like water around his graceful movements. It was as if it thrived down here.

Malach regained his footing and whirled to Asar. When I’d known him, the prince had been elegant—cruel, yes, but beneath a veneer of discipline. All that was gone now, peeled away by death. He descended upon Asar like a rabid beast.

The two of them collided, stars in the night.

“This was mine.” Malach’s voice was a twisted distortion of what it once was. “Everything that you have. You’re the bastard. The whore’s son. Our father’s dog, only suitable to lap up scraps. Crying over dead pets and dead lovers.”

He clawed at Asar, his rage mindless. Through every strike, every blow, the words continued. He wanted Asar’s reaction. He wanted to goad him into mistakes, just as he had in life.

But Asar’s face was a mask. The thread of connection between us remained taut. I could feel his anger, hot but restrained; his control, careful in his grip. The two of us circled Malach. He landed his strikes, but we recovered quickly. Bit by bit, we chipped away at him.

In the end, he was only a wraith. Just like all the others.

I distracted him enough that Asar could get in a particularly devastating blow. With a burst of darkness, Malach’s translucent form shuddered like a reflection in disrupted water.

When the smoke faded, Asar’s fist was closed around Malach’s throat, tentacles of darkness pinning him as he flailed.

“They’ll never accept you,” Malach growled. “You were never one of us, and everyone could always tell.”

Asar held him there. The shadows took and took, serpents greedily consuming whatever remained of Malach’s soul. It was horrifying. It was awe-inspiring.

Asar looked upon his half brother as he screamed and snarled, as the very essence of his being was consumed.

And he smiled like a man who was seeing something he had dreamed of for a very, very long time. Serene and calm and cruelly joyous.

He didn’t dignify Malach’s taunts with an acknowledgment. Instead, he looked at me, extending a silent offer.

Soul death was a horrifying fate. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Anyone, maybe, except for Malach.

Some souls, I thought as I drove the blade into Malach’s heart, deserved to burn.

And burn Malach did. He let out a screech as his form exploded into lightning-hot spandrels. Asar jerked me out of the way, shielding me from the blowback. I jolted at his touch for a reason I couldn’t identify—something felt odd about it, even within the connection we shared.

But I didn’t have time to question it.

Because as Asar and I hit the ground, a low hiss slithered from above us.

I lifted my head.

Oh, gods.

The dead approached in a wave of darkness—wraiths upon wraiths upon wraiths, crawling down from the trees, up from the ground, from behind rocks and through grass and even unfurling from nothingness.

All drawn by an unmistakable call.

“So unfair, that she gets the justice that I never did.”

Ophelia’s voice reverberated in the veil that separated life and death. The power of it made goosebumps rise on my arms. More powerful than I’d ever heard it.

The hush of darkness fell over us, second by second, red dusk over the desert.

My back pressed to Asar’s as the dead encroached. Luce circled our legs, growling and hissing.

“Why do you get to have this?” she moaned. “ Another heart to break, when I am here, torn apart upon the pieces you left behind?”

Where was it coming from? She was so near, as if I’d see her when I turned my head, perpetually just out of view.

“Let me help you, Ophelia,” Asar said.

I could feel his fear rising, quick as the tide. His fingernails bit into my wrist, grip trembling with force.

A cold touch brushed us, making my heart jump against my ribs.

“You hold on so tight, my love,” she crooned.

“Ophelia—” Asar started.

“But nothing can stop her from slipping through your fingers.”

I whirled to him, grabbing at his shoulders, panic spearing me.

But I saw his face only for a split second, eyes wide as he reached for me.

Before a great, terrible force wrapped around me, plunging my heart into cold water as Ophelia yanked me away.