“The emperor murdered his own son, his own daughter.” That small piece of Nyx cried out again, and he pushed it down, down, until he couldn’t hear it anymore. “His own wife. If you are loyal to the empire, you will turn your sword on every soldier who swears fealty to Lamont, the killer of children.”
There was a shout and the sound of swords being drawn. A man ran toward Nyx, but Nyx deftly turned his blade aside, piercing him through the throat. Behind him, the fire burned like a living creature, casting light over the field as the soldiers of Iperios bled and died.
Then he heard it. Thunder, rolling over the tents and the bloodstained grass, blending with the roar of the fire until it drowned out even the wailing in Nyx’s heart.
Death was coming, and Nyx would deliver Lamont to him as War burned the empire to ashes.
ChapterFourteen
Death walked the battlefields, rain at his back.
He was not ahe, exactly, but the form he took was that of his avatar, who’d been chosen from among the snow flowers of some long-forgotten village. Before that, he’d worn the form of a woman, and before her, one who was neither, like his sibling Ares.
Azaiah was a kind man. Gentle. Death was neither.
It was Azaiah who stepped onto the field, who stood in the shadows and watched his soldier kill. Azaiah who moved toward Nyx, drawn as he always was to the mortal who’d captivated him… but then he stopped. And Death knew the secret thoughts in his heart, the ache ofHe is not the man I loved. This is not a man who knows compassion; this is a man who knows only hate.
Azaiah was a kind man, but if Death wore the grinning visage of his Winter card, Azaiah was the Fool. He came to Death’s altar smiling and willing, but he had not faced his life with the same eagerness. Mora had known heartbreak. She had known loss. Anger. Hatred, such as this soldier felt for the emperor who’d taken his family.
She had chosen one to succeed her who didn’t have many ties to the world he’d leave behind. She’d thought it would be better for him. Death had watched her drifting into the cave, holding hands with her companion, and wondered whether she knew she’d been wrong.
Mora had been his avatar for long enough that Death missed her when she drifted past him into the world beyond.
Azaiah was fading. Death would be as he always was, but without a successor to guide his boat, the world itself would become the river and there would be no need for an avatar. Perhaps it was time. Everything died, in the end.
Azaiah saw the way Nyx killed, there on the battlefield. No more was he the soldier who placed a sword by the body of his fallen foe. He was brutal, as vicious as any predator who’d been hurt and was reacting only on instinct. Death was that thing: instinct. He understood. Azaiah, a gentle man who’d been drawn to the kindness and compassion Nyx showed for family that was not forced upon him by blood—first his brother Tyr, then Nadia and the children—did not.
Nyx cut them down not like a soldier, but like a butcher. As each of them died, bleeding out in the dirt and the mud, Nyx gave them nary a second thought. No funerary rites for them, soldiers who had once shared his camp, called him “General, Sir.”
And oh, Death could feel Nyx’s joy when he killed them. Could see the face each one wore when Nyx drove his sword deep into their throat, their stomach. Crushed their neck with his boot as they lay gasping in the mud. Uncaring of the rain that fell around him, the storm so loud he had to shout his commands to the army he’d brought down from the hills—another army fueled by anger, by vengeance.
And Death’s sibling, Ares, watched, eyes bright with unholy fire as they laughed and laughed, reveling in the slaughter, the conflict, the anger that drove the man who had once been Azaiah’s beloved and was now merely a sword for War to wield as they wished.
Ares glanced over as Death moved along behind this new person, this soldier who was less a general, more a glaive: weapon made flesh, whose only desire was to rend, to kill.
“You are in your element,” Death said.
“And you are nothing but,” Ares replied. “Where is Azaiah? I did this for him.”
“Iamhim,” Death said idly as a woman with a sword in her gut fell to her knees, begging. Nyx slit her throat with a dagger and kicked her over, pulling his sword from her flesh. Her wailing spirit rose, following as if she could wield the sword and turn it on him.
“My most humble pardon and with all due respect, Storm Lord, but you arenotAzaiah. You may be Death, but he is more than just your aspect.” Ares blinked at him. “Is he still there?”
“Yes.” Death surveyed the battlefield, seeing Nyx fend off an attack and break the neck of his assailant with the edge of his shield. “You say you did this for Azaiah. Yet the soldier wears your mark, fights under your banner of ember and ash.”
“He would have died,” Ares said as a volley of arrows sailed through them. They caught one, smiled, and tucked it like a feather into their braided, fire-tipped hair. “As long as he lives, Azaiah won’t leave.” They sounded like a child… but of course they did. There was nothing so childish as,If you won’t share your toys, I’ll burn down your playroom.
“He could hate him, what he’s become under your patronage.”
“Not Azaiah. He doesn’t know how to hate.” Ares smiled and held out a hand, tinged with soot and crimson with blood. “Come dance with me, then, Brother. The battle has only just begun.”
Death took his sibling’s hand, but he did not dance. He walked, and the dead walked with him, and once, Death saw Nyx turn his face up to the sky, the rain washing blood and grime and death off his skin. Saw him smile.
Who do you want to be, General Nyx of Iperios?Death wondered, as he followed Ares through the ranks of the dead and the dying.My avatar’s companion, my sibling’s sword, or my butcher? It would seem you do not understand that, while Azaiah is Death, I am not Azaiah. I am only an end. If you lose what made you Azaiah’s, you will lose him, and all that will wait for you when it is over is me.
Nyx saw him when the soldiers were making camp, leaving the dishonored dead to rot in the fields of mud. He walked over, grim-faced and filthy, eyes burning with the fervor of war. “There’s one last thing I have to do,” he said. “And then I’m yours.”
“You’re already mine, butcher.” Death laughed as Nyx’s face went white. The rain started to fall, lightning shattering the sky along with thunder so loud it momentarily silenced the chatter in the camp. “What remains to be seen is whether you can ever be his again.”
