The Serpent and the Wings of Night (Crowns of Nyaxia Book 1)

My ears rang. My hands went cold and still. I didn’t move. Just stared at this place. This dead, broken place, where countless people had once lived.

Any family I had left.

Gone.

I couldn’t think. Raihn was saying something, but I didn’t know what. I wouldn’t understand the words, even if I could hear him, which I couldn’t.

Salinae is gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Go—

“Oraya, get down!” Raihn roared as he rammed against me.

We had been distracted. We’d stopped counting. Pain seared my left foot, which jutted out beyond the cloak that Raihn had hastily thrown over us both. I felt his body tense, too. It didn’t cover either of us.

For ninety long seconds, we remained that way.

Everything inside of me turned to ice, and I was grateful for it. I would rather be cold and hard and feel nothing than confront this, even though I could feel my grief there, burning under the surface, far too hot to be contained by even a lifetime of frigid control.

Vincent wouldn’t have done this. He couldn’t.

I couldn’t help but think of Nyaxia. Mother, she couldn’t have set it up more perfectly. We were acting out a morbid caricature of the worst moment of her life, when she fought through the wastelands in desperate search of her husband, only to find that he was already dead.

She had been too late. And now, so were we.

Ninety seconds passed. Raihn pulled the cloak away, slowly rising. Yet he still struggled to tear his eyes from the ashy ground. It was littered, I realized now, with little glints of silver and broken metal. Skeletal remains of the city.

“Half a million people,” he choked out. “Half a million people lived here.”

Distantly, a voice whispered in my ear, You need to move. You need to move right now, little serpent—

I looked up to see a figure moving fast towards us over Raihn’s shoulder. A streak of silver, coming right for us.

No time to dodge.

I pushed Raihn out of the way and collided with Ivan at full force.

My back slammed to the ground. Ivan was on top of me, every part of his face but a sliver over his eyes covered by torn strips of fabric. I’d had time to get Raihn out of the way and stop Ivan’s attack, but that meant I had no good counter of my own. My blades had been knocked from my hands. Something cut across my abdomen, shock dulling the pain to a distant throb.

Ivan’s eyes crinkled with a satisfied smile.

And then the pain was suddenly excruciating, like all my blood was being boiled within my veins. Little droplets of red rose into the air, hovering around Ivan’s pale face—my blood, as his magic wrung it from my body.

“For the Halfmoon,” he whispered, and I prepared to meet death fighting—

But then Raihn ripped him off me, hurling him to a pile of rocks with enough force to snap a spine.

“Don’t fucking touch her,” he growled as black light cracked through the air, his Asteris awoken with fresh power.

I tried to move and couldn’t. My strength drained, seeping into the ground like rainwater. I only managed to turn my head—turn it enough to see, through blurring vision, Raihn on top of Ivan, sword raised, getting ready to deal the killing blow.

Behind him, another smear of silver emerged from the smoke. Angelika. Unmistakable, even in the darkness. Like Ivan, she covered her entire body save for her eyes. Still, every line of her radiated power.

“Raihn!” I tried to scream as she raised her bow. It came out only as a strangled grunt, but even that was enough for Raihn’s head to snap up.

“Let him go!” Angelika bellowed.

Through my blurry vision, I noticed something strange: her arrow did not point at Raihn.

It pointed at me.

“Let him go right now or I’ll fucking kill her, Raihn! Another Nessanyn. Do you want that? Let him go!”

Raihn stilled.

Everything went gray and blurry. The voices distant. Vincent’s seemed closer as it whispered to me, You made it so far, little serpent. But at least your bones will lie in your homeland.

My palm pressed to the gritty, ashy sand, fingers loosely closing around a handful of it. I wondered if the bones of my family were here in this dirt, too, ground down to nothing but dust.

I blinked enough to make out Raihn’s form, gripping Ivan’s limp, injured body by the collar. “Fine,” he said, at last. “I’ll let him go.”

And then he ripped Ivan’s mask off his face and hurled him down the steep incline, directly into the incoming wave of deadly smoke.

Raihn threw himself over me. My throat released a whimper as his weight fell across my injured body. A distant wail of agony cut me to the bone—Angelika’s.

At first I thought perhaps she had been caught in the mist, too. Then I realized, no—it was because of Ivan. She was screaming in grief.

Raihn pulled me close to him. When he touched my wound, I let out a weak, involuntary keen, and he stiffened as if with awful realization. He murmured into my ear, “We need to run right now.”

“I’m alright,” I tried to say, even though he didn’t ask me that. I was losing my fight to keep my hold on the world.

“Hold your breath,” he said. And then I was being lifted into the air, and my face was tucked against a solid wall of warmth, and we were flying fast fast fast.

Everything hurt, like my exposed skin was being flayed away in little chunks. Angelika’s scream echoed behind us.

We wouldn’t survive this. Not even a few seconds of it. We were being consumed.

But I forced my head up just in time to see the gate rushing towards us—

—And then it was silent.

Raihn’s land was far from graceful. He’d been moving so fast that he had to stop short to avoid hurling us both against the stone barrier opposite the gate. We ended up in a heap on a packed sand ground.

I tried to push myself up while Raihn’s hold steadied me. My eyes adjusted to familiar gold-and-silver lights over an endless sea of seats.

The colosseum looked so different like this—completely empty. There were no screaming crowds, no cheering voices. Not a single spectator on those countless deserted benches. Only menacing silence.

Before us, a bloody figure sat on the sands with their knees pulled up to their chest, a dark red blanket around their shoulders. They were covered in so much blood. It took me a moment to make out who they were, until their gaze lifted to meet mine.

It was Ibrihim.

And the blanket was not a blanket, but his wings—tattered and bubbling with oozing burns that matched those around his eyes. He’d covered his face as much as he could and had covered the rest of himself with his wings, now destroyed.

Perhaps the look on my face betrayed my horror, because he smiled, a humorless twist of his lips. “The most useful they’ve been in years.”

The Ministaer stood in eerie stillness, four of his acolytes behind him with their heads bowed.

“Welcome, Oraya of the Nightborn and Raihn Ashraj,” the Ministaer said. “Our Mother of the Ravenous Dark is pleased by your service. You have progressed to the final trial.”

I had imagined that I would feel more when I heard those words. Instead, they were met only with a numb sense of dread.

“There has been a change,” the Ministaer said. “The New Moon trial will not take place in three weeks. It will take place tomorrow.”

My brow knitted. What? That was unheard of.

“Tomorrow?” Raihn repeated.

“Why?” I croaked. My fingers dug into his arm. I hoped I was hiding how heavily I was leaning on him.

“It is very important that the Kejari concludes,” the Ministaer replied, simply, as if that answered our question.

Raihn said, “Well, of course. But why—”

“Nyaxia recognizes there is no certainty that Sivrinaj will exist in three weeks.”

The Ministaer’s face lifted in the faintest hint of a nod to the distance.

We turned to follow it.

The gates of the colosseum were wide open, revealing a grand tableau of the city. My eyes rose to the upper stretches of the colosseum walls and the skyline of Sivrinaj beyond them.

“Fuck,” Raihn breathed.

I couldn’t even bring myself to speak, not even to curse.

I knew what Sivrinaj looked like. I’d memorized every shape of this landscape in a million mournful moments at my bedroom window. And though I never forgot that this was a city—a kingdom—of brutality, I never thought that my lethally beautiful home could become… this.

The city of Sivrinaj had always been as sleek as a weapon, but now, the blade had been drawn, and it was covered in death.

Bodies lined the colosseum walls, propped up on stakes. Some still twitched in their final death throes, the life draining from them for Mother-knew how long. There were hundreds of them. So many they stretched into the distance, too far for me to make out the shape of their bodies. But my father did not start anything he could not finish. I knew they would continue for the entire length of the walls, even when I could not see them.

And pinned below each stake, stretched out in garlands of death, were their wings—countless feathered wings, staked through ancient stone. Red-black blood dripped down white marble in deceptively elegant rivulets, glistening in the torchlight beneath a rainbow of brown and gold and white and gray and black feathers.

We had been locked up in the Moon Palace, isolated, for weeks. More than long enough for the war against the Rishan to escalate. Still, the sheer scale of this was staggering. Sickening.

I’ve had three hundred years of practice, Vincent whispered in my ear. It is always important to be decisive and efficient.

“You may want to rest while you have the opportunity,” the Ministaer said, as if nothing of note was happening here. He gestured to another door, which offered a glimpse of the Moon Palace’s great room. “Much has changed.”