The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk

The man opened his palm, shadow unfurling within it. The boy’s heart stuttered at the sight of it.

“I am not offering you an easy life,” the man said. “It will be a life judged by the value of the blood you spill upon it. Your father told me to come here and tell you that you could be king one day. Perhaps you will be, but more likely your father will kill you if you get too powerful, or your siblings will if he decides not to. You will sacrifice beyond what your mind could ever conceive today, and there is only a chance of a chance of a chance that there will ever be a crown on your head in exchange. But I am offering you something far more valuable than a crown.”

The boy hesitated before he asked, “What?”

“When dawn comes, you hide behind the curtains and you peer out into the world when it’s drenched red under the sunrise,” he said. “And sometimes you feel it, don’t you? All those secrets hiding in the haze between the light and the darkness. The books are nothing, boy. Nothing. The things you will see if you learn to walk this path will devastate and delight you.”

“Magic,” the boy said, and the man scoffed, sudden and violent.

“Magic,” he spat. “Any vampire can do magic. I am not talking about the common gifts. You smell like death, boy. Carve out your heart for it and it will give you the world in return. Do you know what it means to conquer every unknown? It means a life free from fear. Think of that. Freedom.”

The boy was silent.

The man spoke to all his secret dreams. He knew that he could survive on this soggy patch of land forever. But for what? For the next fisherman’s carcass? The next swallow of rancid fish blood?

The boy did not want glory. He did not want a crown.

He wanted freedom.

The man’s eyes glinted like stars in the dusk.

“So tell me, young prince,” he said. “What is the next step in our dance?”

Some moments remain permanently engrained into one’s memory, even over the centuries of a vampire lifespan. The boy would remember everything about this one. And yet, oh, how the shadows shift upon the past depending on the light of the present. For years, the boy—the man, the prince, the king—would look at this as the night he was saved.

Only centuries later would he understand the truth.

He had thought the sacrifice came in the form of blood and guts and the pleas that he would never be able to scrub from the inside of his skull. He had thought the sacrifice came in the form of the permanent marks on his body and the invisible ones on his soul.

He had been wrong.

He realized it many years later, when he felt the power of the gods course through his veins, and finally, finally, he received the very thing that his mentor had promised him that night—illumination into every dark corner of the world, power beyond anything he ever could have imagined.

And he cared about none of it, because he was losing the love of his life.

Carve out your heart for it.

In that moment, he would hear his instructor’s words. He would think of that little boy. Turn away, he’d beg his past self.

But the boy takes the man’s hand every time. Death, after all, is inevitable.

This is the tale of how a fallen one ascends.

He does it in countless cascading decisions, over years, over centuries.

He does it with the desperation of a starving soul willing to sacrifice anything, everything, for a single chance at redemption.

But in the end, he loses her every time.

1

MISCHE

What does it feel like to die?

Everyone has asked that question, but perhaps acolytes more than any other. Acolytes are obsessed with death—maybe because it is both the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate reward, the greatest thing we can offer our gods and the greatest thing they can offer us. No acolyte was spoken of in greater admiration than those who left this life ablaze with their love for Atroxus. None wanted to die in their beds.

I did not die in mine.

I died at the doorstep to the underworld, a traitor’s weapon in my hand, drenched in the blood of the god who had given me everything. I died covered in the ashes of his remains and the burns of his punishment.

I died alone, listening to the screams of the love of my life.

What does it feel like to die?

Would I remember how to answer that question?

I’d comforted countless grieving souls in my time as a missionary. We were taught that death was a peaceful end to a grand fight.

When I died, I realized that we had been wrong.

What does it feel like to die?

When I died, it was with my god’s blood on my hands, my lover’s pleas in my ears, and the oblivion of eternal darkness—not eternal dawn—seared into my eyes.

When I died, it did not feel like the peaceful end to a grand fight.

It felt like the beginning of one.

I lay on the ground and stared at my hand, which I held in front of my face. Beyond it, colors danced in the eternity of the sky. My skin was smooth and brown and glistening with the faint translucent dust of death.

I just kept staring at that hand. It looked so alive, and so, so dead.

Blink. I closed my eyes and saw palm trees, a blue sky, white sand. Vostis, the place that had once been my home. The place I had once given my very soul to.

Open.

The underworld hung over me. Unmistakable.

“Get up,” the voice said.

I tore my eyes away from the sky, away from my hand, to the angular face of the man who leaned over me. He swept a strand of long, fair hair behind his ear and gave me an appraising stare.

We had never met—not directly. But of course I recognized him. I’d seen him in countless paintings. I’d seen his visage illuminated over the skyline of Sivrinaj, the capital of the House of Night. And I’d seen his likeness torn down by Rishan soldiers, after Raihn had killed him.

Vincent—dead vampire king of the House of Night—held out a hand to me.

“Get up,” he said. “I hear we have some work to do.”

I stared at him blankly. Beyond him, a split of lightning arced across the sky. Except—no, not lightning. They just kept growing, splitting, bursting open to reveal waves of warring light and darkness—purple, black, blue, green, the essence of galaxies. They reminded me viscerally of something so familiar, something that made my heart ache, but I couldn’t place it.

My lashes fluttered.

Once, as a child in Vostis, I had been caught in a riptide. I had fought and fought, but every time my head bobbed beneath the surface of the water, I was a little farther from shore. What had shocked me then was just how quiet it was. Almost peaceful.

That was what this felt like.

Deceptive, dangerous peace.

“Mische Iliae.” Vincent clutched my arm, yanking me from the riptide. “You cannot go. Not yet.”

I stared at him, confused. Behind him, the cracks shivered across the sky.

Cracks like the sun shattering, as I thrust an arrow into the throat of the god I had once loved.

Cracks like the beautiful scars across Asar’s face.

Asar.

The name flooded over me. With it came the memory of an agonized voice and the final words I had heard.

Stop! I need her!

It was this memory, more than Vincent’s grip, that jerked me awake. A harsh, disorienting reality struck me.

I had died.

Gods help me. I had died.

A powerful force shook the ground. In the sky, the streaks split open, gushing light like blood through torn stitches. Silhouetted, winged bodies slithered through them.

Souleaters, I thought dimly. They were souleaters.

But this realization snagged something sharp in my overwhelmed, blurry mind.

Souleaters shouldn’t be in the underworld.

A wave of darkness passed over me. I felt oblivion beckoning—true death, offering me a welcome embrace. The sun called to me. The scent of the sea. The peace of an easier past.

And oh, I was tired.

But Vincent pulled me closer. “If you go, I cannot find you again. Whatever you are feeling now, it is false. It is a lie. You have work to do.”

A memory of my sister flitted past.

My sister kneeling beside me in the church. Death is the ultimate offering. Death is the ultimate peace. The grand end to our destined battle.

My sister in the last memory I had of her—a wraith, kneeling before Atroxus, drowning in admiration as I killed him.

As I betrayed her.

As I listened to the man I loved being dragged away.

As I watched the sun shatter in the sky forever.

A burst of fury tore through me. The answer was suddenly clear.

What kind of a choice was it, anyway? I was already damned.

With a grunt of exertion, I grabbed Vincent’s other hand. A gushing current of light roared past me, but he held firm. I glimpsed his smirk of satisfaction.

“Correct choice,” he said.

He didn’t understand. It wasn’t a choice at all.

But I didn’t have time to say that as we both fell beneath the darkness.

My eyes opened. Above me, the souleaters wound through the sky. Slow cracks spread across the heavens.

My surroundings shifted and changed. Blink, and the scent of sulfur was replaced by that of the ocean, the lush, sweet aroma of the forest, the elegant whisper of jasmine incense.

I sat upright, the world twisting with the sharpness of the movement. Before me was an altar adorned with a gilded depiction of the sun, rays spilling across the marble floor. Atroxus rose over it, stone hands outstretched, empty eyes spearing me. Somehow, they were every bit as enraged as they had been in his final moments.

This, somehow, managed to elicit a real reaction.

Panic.

I pressed my hand to my chest. I felt as if my heart should have been pounding against my ribs, my lungs gasping for air, but instead, all that panic manifested as . . . silence. As if nothing existed beneath my skin at all.

“Odd, isn’t it?” a low voice said.

I turned to see Vincent leaning against a pillar, arms crossed, gazing out to the soupy mists through the windows.

“The sensation fades quickly,” he said. “Soon you won’t remember what it felt like at all.”

“It?” I croaked.

“Living.”

Gods, I was going to throw up.

I wished I could throw up.

I tried to stand, and nearly toppled over. Not because my muscles offered resistance, but because they didn’t—the movement was too easy, too unburdened by flesh or gravity or the weight of my body.

Because I was dead.

I was dead.

This thought hit me, more surreal than ever, as I stared at the Citadel tapestries.

Vincent cast me a disinterested glance.

“The visions will fade. The things you see here change. More pleasant for some than others, I hear. Punishment or reward, depending on how your immortal soul was judged. Which is it for you?”

I dragged my gaze up to Atroxus’s face, exactly as I remembered it in life—powerful, all-seeing, absolute. It all felt so real, just as I had begged to see it for decades.

Yet the answer was so clear:

Punishment.

I pressed my hands to my eye sockets, hard—hard enough that it should have hurt, but didn’t—and when I removed them, the mists before me had cleared. I no longer was looking at the Citadel.

I stared, silent.

Vincent’s voice came from behind me. “We need to start moving. Best not to stay in one place too long here.”

His words faded off into the background like sand worn down by the sea.

Distant, ghostly silhouettes wandered across the landscape—a landscape that constantly changed, revealing glimpses of grand cities and desolate plains, of oceans and mountains and ravines, of blood-soaked battlefields and bustling metropolises. A million fragments of a million different lives. Maybe they might’ve been beautiful in a sad kind of way, had it not been all so terribly overshadowed by the destruction.

Cracks ran through the ground, the sky. No, cracks wasn’t the right word for them—they were more vicious than that, more organic. Wounds, gushing black and red. Massive beasts lumbered across the horizon, their eyes perfectly round, gaping windows through their silhouetted forms. They plucked souls from the ground, shoving them fistful by fistful into their mouths in too-slow, too-smooth movements.

It was horrifying.

“Is this—am I⁠—”

I didn’t know how to ask the question. My voice sounded far away and hollow.

Again I pressed my palms to my eyes and rubbed, hard. But when I pulled them away, the scene before me was the same.

“What is this?” I demanded.

Vincent stared at me like I was stupid. “This is the underworld.”

“I know. I mean, what is that?” I stabbed a finger out to the view. “All of that? Is that—some kind of vision? Or is that real?”

For a moment I could hope—hope that maybe this was my own personal divine punishment, the mist and the monsters and the cracks and the lightning.

But the faintest ghost of a wince passed over Vincent’s face.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “it is real.”

No. This wasn’t right. The Descent had looked something like this, falling prey to the decay of two thousand years of neglect. Sure, in the Descent there were souleaters and monsters and ravines that swallowed souls. But the underworld was supposed to be safe. The underworld was supposed to be shielded from all of that. And this—gods, this wasn’t decay. This wasn’t neglect. This was⁠—

It was hell. No soul, not even the most deserving, would find peace in a place like this.

I shook my head dumbly. “You’re wrong. It’s not supposed to⁠—”

At those words—you’re wrong—Vincent straightened sharply, the anger of a challenged Obitraen king flashing in his eyes. But before he could speak, a grinding roar wailed through the air.

I whirled around. “What was that?”

“We need to leave,” Vincent said, grabbing my wrist as if he intended to haul me around like a sack of flour. But I remained rooted in place, frozen by dread. In the distance, through desolate puffs of mist, fresh cracks of bright red slithered across the landscape. A distant, crooked tower, silhouetted against the white, collapsed. Souls scattered like frantic ants.

A second tower started to fall, painfully slowly.

I stared, horrified.

“Are those people?” I choked out.

“They were,” Vincent said coldly. “Soon, they will be nothing.”

I couldn’t look away as the structure fell in slow motion, crushing countless dead beneath it. The hunched-over monsters had turned their attention to the wreckage, closing in to scoop up the fleeing souls. One swept up an entire handful of them and raised them slowly to a wide, gaping mouth of white nothingness.

Another boom. The ground quaked.

“We—we have to help them,” I managed, because it was the only thing I could think to say—but even as the words left my lips, I knew how ridiculous they were. The only thing I could do was stand there and watch as dozens more dead fell.

Vincent gave my wrist an unceremonious tug.

“Move,” he barked. “We need to leave before⁠—”

I pulled my hand away and whirled to him.

“You don’t get to drag me around without telling me what’s going on.”

Anger flashed in Vincent’s silver eyes, reminding me that in life, he had been one of the most ruthless vampire kings. Once, that disrespect would’ve been enough to send me to my death.

But I was already dead. So what the hell could he do to me now?

“You have some nerve speaking that way to me,” he hissed, “when you are the reason this happened.”

Me?

My mouth opened, but no words came out.

“Do you think I’m eager to be doing this with you,” Vincent went on, “who helped push my daughter to the man who killed me? In life, I would have⁠—”

“What do you mean, I’m the reason this happened?”

Vincent was silent. His silver eyes took me in, feet to head, in an assessment that I clearly was failing.

“What do you remember of your death?”

My death.

Pain skewered me—burning straight through the center of my chest. My hand flew to it.

A sword through my heart. A god tossing me aside. And fire⁠—

I died. I died. I died.

The truth twisted inside me. And with it came a sudden grief so intense it made me want to curl up on the ground.

I felt something wet on my cheeks, falling like rain.

I blinked and saw my final moments. Asar’s face over mine. And gods, the pain in those eyes.

Not rain.

How could my chest hurt so much if my heart was no longer beating? I pressed my hand to it like a tourniquet, a futile attempt to quell the bleeding.

But I could feel a little solid thread somewhere in that ache. A little sharp stab of pain that reminded me of the spell Asar had drawn between us, once—the spell that had allowed me to pull him from the ritual circle.

I clung to that thread of familiarity. Pain that felt so alive.

“I killed Atroxus,” I managed. “And the sky—and Asar—and the gods—and⁠—”

Asar’s tears. Shiket’s blade. Fire everywhere.

And darkness. So much darkness.

“You killed Atroxus,” Vincent confirmed, though his tone seemed almost insulted he had to admit I’d done such a thing. “The sun fell as he did. Ushering in an endless night.”

He sounded practically lustful. Like he was lost imagining all the things he might’ve done with such a gift in life—all while he gave me a critical once-over, as if he couldn’t imagine how I, of all people, had been responsible for it.

That made two of us. The words still echoed in the back of my head, reverberating with my disbelief.

“You attempted to resurrect Alarus,” he went on. “But instead⁠—”

“I saved Asar.”

I remembered pulling him from the ritual circle, clinging to that tether to him that I refused to sever.

And yet, with the memory of my choice, I saw another face, too. Saescha’s, tilted to Atroxus’s light, bright with adoration.

“You saved him in a sense,” Vincent said. “You refused to sacrifice his soul to the resurrection spell. But the spell was already in motion. You ended it before you completed it, but the incomplete resurrection, along with the destruction of the relics Alarus used to construct the underworld, put stress upon the underworld that it couldn’t bear. Thus.”

He gestured to the wreckage around us. I stared out into the mists, dread rising in my chest. Far in the distance, another mountain collapsed in slow motion. Silently, mundanely, hundreds of souls fell beneath it.

I shook my head.

“No. That can’t be—I can’t have⁠—”

“It is. You did. And this is only the beginning. It will collapse if your lover doesn’t take action.”

I whirled back to Vincent. Somehow, for some reason, I expected this was some kind of joke. But he was stone serious.

“You mean Asar,” I said.

I remembered the gods dragging him away. Dragging him away as he screamed for me.

“Where is he? Is he—” I almost couldn’t bring myself to ask. “Is he alive?”

“From what I hear, he’s better than alive. He holds the power of a god.” Again, that hint of envy. “And only with that can he repair the underworld before it disintegrates altogether.”

“He will.” The words slipped out easily. The memories hit me with such piercing intensity—Asar leaning over countless broken doors, repairing countless shattered glyphs, leading countless lost souls back home. With them came a flood of affection.

“If the underworld needs to be repaired,” I said, “Asar will do it. There’s nothing he loves more.”

And yet, as I said the words, I thought of his tears on my face, and I wondered if perhaps they were untrue.

“He is imprisoned by the White Pantheon,” Vincent said. “He isn’t doing anything as long as that remains true. And, I’m told, if he is to do this, he needs you.”

“Me?”

“You conducted the spell that gave him his power. I’m told he will need your help to gain enough of it to do what must be done.”

Strange that the dead still got headaches. I rubbed my temple. “But . . . why?”

He looked irritated by this question. “I’m a messenger. Don’t expect me to understand the intricacies of your Shadowborn tricks.”

A wrinkle formed between my brows at a new thought and a new cascade of questions.

“A messenger,” I repeated. “So a god sent you.”

Vincent said nothing in a way that I knew was a confirmation.

“Nyaxia?” I said.

It would have to be Nyaxia, wouldn’t it? Vincent had worshipped her for a lifetime of centuries. Her favor, after he won the Kejari, had put the crown on his head.

After a moment, he said, “No. Not Nyaxia.”

“Then who?”

“It isn’t your concern.”

“It is my concern. And why you? I don’t even know you.”

He looked offended. But even at the best of times, I wasn’t known for my tact, and these were not the best of times.

Vincent was a vampire king. And what would any vampire king do to regain their throne after it was snatched away from them so brutally? What would any vampire king do for revenge?

I hated being so cynical. And yet.

He let out an annoyed breath. “Look.”

He pointed to the sky, where the upside-down mirror of the underworld hung over us. I wasn’t sure at first what he was gesturing to, until I noticed that he was tracing a shape with his fingertip. When I looked carefully, I saw that the wisps of light and darkness were not, in fact, random. They collected around the cracks and then extended in a shape that reminded me of veins splitting through a body. I’d seen such patterns in the Descent, too.

“Every structure has weak points,” he said. “All planes are connected to each other—the land of the gods, the land of the mortals, and the land of the dead. What happens here will soon affect the mortal world, if it hasn’t already.”

A chill ran up my spine. I didn’t need Vincent to tell me what that might look like. I’d spent months witnessing the terrible consequences of the Descent’s slow crumbling. The thought of those nightmares spilling into the land of the living was horrifying.

“The boundaries between planes are thinner in some places than others,” he went on. “And some vampire kingdoms were built around these pressure points, precisely because of the power they offered.”

Now I understood. “Like the House of Night.”

“I spent centuries building my kingdom. Dead or no, I refuse to let it fall.”

Of course, it was all about a kingdom. But the sheer enormity of this responsibility settled on my shoulders. Dizzy, I leaned back on my heels, head in my hands.

“Your lover will be looking for you,” Vincent said. “I have been told to bring you toward the veil.”

Asar.

I will find you.

An oath that I felt down to my soul, even now. But my heart ached. With grief, and with the ghost of our connection.

I had lied to him. I had planned to betray him. And even in saving him—in saving all of vampire life—I had still managed to lead the world to the doorstep of so much death.

Saescha’s face flitted through my mind.

But then I thought of the way Asar had looked at my skin, marred by my greatest shames, as if it was still worthy of worship.

I was no stranger to divine missions. I had committed my life to my faith. Had given it every part of my body and soul, in every literal and figurative way. But in the end, the god I had given my soul to had been ready to slaughter my entire race without a second thought.