Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,185

had caused in him, she flashed back to the way he’d smiled—at her but not at her—and she remembered the radiance that was in him then, and the joy, and how it had made her reel with discovery, like a novice introduced to the lexica, sensing, for the first time, an entire glittering, secret language. She’d seen it again in the bath cavern where he’d waited for… for what she had called, to Nightingale, “his appointment,” not wanting to use the real word for what it was. For what the lovely, blue-haired alien stoked in him, and the radiance that was born of it.

Akiva was in love.

It was a pity, but it wasn’t her problem. Next to the nithilam, it was as a footprint in ash, as fleeting, and as easily brushed away.

Her pause grew too long, and Nightingale, with great grace, tried to take the tale from her like a skein of yarn, to spin this final piece so that she would not have to.

Scarab shook her head and found her voice, and told Akiva the rest herself.

And she felt it in her chest, when he fell to his knees. She thought of Festival, whom she had never known, called to an ugly fate half a world away: to give up her own sanctity to a tyrant king for the sake of bringing this man into being: Akiva of the Misbegotten, who, for some ineffable reason, was powerful beyond all others.

Well, and it was Scarab’s own ugly fate to fell him to his knees, but she thought that Festival would have understood. Ananke digs grooves so deep you can either follow it or live your life trying to scale the sides and escape. Scarab was not going to try to escape. Always, she had been growing toward this, ever since she heard of a harp strung with taken lives, and before that still, to the earliest moment when energies joined in the making of her. Her path lay before her, and Akiva was entangled in it.

She had come on this journey to hunt and kill a magus.

She would return from it armed to hunt and kill gods.

Once upon a time, there was only darkness, and there were monsters vast as worlds who swam in it. They loved the darkness because it concealed their hideousness. Whenever some other creature contrived to make light, they would extinguish it. When stars were born, they swallowed them, and it seemed that darkness would be eternal.

But a race of bright warriors heard of them and traveled from their far world to do battle with them. The war was long, light against dark, and many of the warriors were slain. In the end, when they vanquished the monsters, there were a hundred left alive, and these hundred were the godstars, who brought light to the universe.

Akiva tried to remember the first time he’d heard the myth. World-devouring monsters who swam in darkness. Enemies of light, swallowers of stars. Had it been from his mother? He couldn’t remember. Five years only he’d had her, and so many years since to blot them out. It could have come from the training camp, propaganda to build their hatred of chimaera, because that was how the tale had been twisted in the Empire: into an origin myth so ugly it was silly.

He’d told it to Madrigal their first night together, as they lay atop their clothes on a bank of shrive moss, heavy and lazy with pleasure. They’d laughed at it. “Ugly Uncle Zamzumin, who made me out of a shadow,” she had said. Absurd.

Or not. Scarab called them by another name than the one Akiva knew, but it made its own sense. As sirithar had come to mean, in the Empire, the state of calm in which the godstars work through the swordsman, nithilam had been its opposite: the godless, thick-of-battle frenzy to kill instead of die. These names had once meant something about the nature of their world. Somehow, the truth had been lost.

Now Akiva learned that the monsters were real.

That every second of every day they battered at the veil of the world.

That the people who were half his blood lived their lives in devotion to shoring up that veil with their own life force.

And that he… he… had nearly torn it wide open.

He was on his knees. He was only dimly aware of getting there. What the Faerers had done was only half a cataclysm. In his ignorance, he had almost finished it.

—Not just ignorance,