She is still ravenous.
Their mouths are on each other before she can think. They fuck like they fight, with mindless pursuit of victory, and just as they do after a battle, they collapse in exhaustion afterwards.
At last, her soul is at peace.
It is only once he is asleep that she opens one eye and peers at the profile of her sleeping friend. Something that is both warm and cold settles deep in her core. She knows him better than she knows anyone else. No one has seen so much of her.
She imagines the way the others would whisper: She’s only here because she’s fucking a Farlione.
No one can know, she tells herself. And she pushes her heart away.
Nura is twenty-one years old, and she is a candidate for Arch Commandant.
The tension has erupted into all-out war. She had dreamed of war as opportunity to earn respect. But no one talks about how relentlessly bleak it is. Soon she begins to see human beings as machines of flesh to be dismantled.
Good. It is better to be this cold. The Arch Commandant cannot be soft — especially not her, because she has neither the strength of a family name nor the respect of masculinity to shield her from criticism.
Not like Max. Max, who is also a candidate, and arguably the best one out of the four of them — something that Nura hates to admit, even to herself. Of course, he does not know it. He never knows it.
His mind, instead, is so often preoccupied with the war. He struggles. It is easy to see it in the tense lines of his face, in the way he wakes up in the middle of the night. It scares her to see him so vulnerable. She has learned that the world has no room for such softness. And he is capable of so much when he is strong — he could move souls and spears and ships, if only he could shutter that piece of himself away.
So, when they are together, they do not talk of such things, even when she knows he wants to. To acknowledge his weakness would be to acknowledge her own, and as the days pass and the blood runs heavier and the stakes grow higher, nothing terrifies her more than letting something out of a box that she has worked so hard to lock away.
Max is so sick. He can’t keep anything down, not even water. Nura remains calm on the outside, but inside, a knot of concern grows. She stays by his bedside and does not leave.
He had been called away on some special favor to the Arch Commandant, and came back like this. She does not know what they did to him. But even if they had told her, she wouldn’t have understood. Reshaye is the sort of thing that needs to be witnessed to be believed.
It is days later when Max’s eyes open and someone who is not him stares through them. She knows right away — she knows Max well enough to recognize the difference, even before he opens his mouth. The first time, it’s just a few confused words that barely make sense, and his fingers on her face, like he had forgotten what a human looks like.
He explains to her, later, what it is. He himself seems as if he doesn’t understand it. But the Arch Commandant works closely with him, as does Vardir. She watches as they train him. Still, she does not truly grasp the power of what he holds until one day, some thread of control snaps within him, and he levels the entire training ring without so much as hesitating. It is sheer luck that Nura, Vardir, and the Arch Commandant manage to escape unscathed. Despite the destruction, Vardir is gleefully delighted, and the Arch Commandant is grimly satisfied. Nura isn’t sure whether she is more awed or afraid. Perhaps both.
Time passes. The war grows bloodier. Reshaye grows more comfortable in Max’s skin, even though, for Max, it is the opposite. The first time he uses Reshaye in battle, their victory is so swift and indisputable that it leaves Nura speechless. Everyone is thrilled. But afterward, Max withdraws, leaving the celebration early. She goes to his apartment after, and finds him sitting in the dark, staring at the wall.
“Max? Are you alright?”
He peers over his shoulder at her. For a split second, it is not him. Then the familiarity flickers to life like a candle.
“Just tired,” he says, giving her a weak smile, but Ascended, he was always such an awful liar.
Nura is twenty-two years old, and nothing could ever have prepared her for this. People that she fought beside for a decade were screaming in agony in the streets and she was simply running by. She turned a corner and watched her commander die a brutal death, a rebel spear impaling his chest. And like all the rest, she turned and left him. What could she do?
This should have been a routine mission. The city of Sarlazai was not even supposed to be their final destination. But the rebels had been waiting, and they ambushed them — ambushed them here, practically destroying their own city. The sheer callousness of it overwhelms her.
By the time she makes it back to the rendezvous point, it is clear that this is a slaughter, with no path to victory. An awful realization has fallen over her when she finally recognizes a familiar face in the smoke. She grabs her friend and yanks him back into an alleyway, sheltered, albeit poorly, from the fighting.
Max is a good fighter. His knife is at her throat immediately.
“Don’t you dare kill me,” she says. “There are a hundred rebels who would rather do that instead.”
His knife drops. The look of sheer relief on his face when he recognizes her is gutting. Then she sees how badly he is bleeding, and her stomach drops.
“How much of that is yours?” he asks, taking in the blood on her own jacket, and she shakes her head.
“How much of that is yours?”
“That bad?”
“Very bad. You don’t feel that?”
His eyes are wide open, but she can tell that he is weaving in and out of consciousness. Dread clenches in her chest. He will not remain standing, not like this, not without a healer. Not without…
“We need to retreat,” he tells her.
But Nura is tired of retreating. They will retreat today, and leave behind a slew of corpses that gave their lives for nothing. Tomorrow or next week or next month, she will be cradling another dying child or weeping mother. She will be tossing the ashes of another comrade out to sea, where they will be swept up and lost, like a million others before them.
It will never stop.
And she has nothing more to give.
Her hands are at his cheeks. “We have you,” she whispers. “We have you.”
Revulsion careens across his face. “Hell no.”
“If they want to shit in their own beds, they can lie in it.”
The words are so harsh that they sting her lips. But she is angry. These are innocents, suffering here. And the rebels did start this here, setting fire to their own home.
Yet, the hurt that flickers across her friend’s face clenches her heart. It is so raw. Even when everyone else grew cold out of sheer exhaustion, he held onto that wonderful — dangerous — naiveté.
“I can’t,” he tells her, and she understands it is the truth.
He had been given a gift. But he is too gentle to use it. Even if doing this one terrible thing saves the lives of thousands.
She loves him. She had never let herself think of it in those terms, not even alone to herself. It is a dangerous word. Only now, at the end of the world, does she let herself feel it.
Her fingers move to his temple. She can feel his mind beneath her magic. She already knows the shape of it. She has never known anyone so well.
It would be an honor to let him kill her.
“That bleeding heart will get you killed one day,” she murmurs.
And then she reaches into his mind, pushing brutally hard, deep. Ripping open the door he has so carefully guarded.
Releasing the incredible, war-ending power within him.
She sees the exact moment that his eyes change, betrayal to fear to fury. She almost tells him she’s sorry. She will never know if the words escape her lips.
Because then, the fire is everywhere, and she is on the ground, seeing nothing but flames and flames and flames and death reaching out its hands for her.
> Nura remembers nothing but pain.
She slips in and out of consciousness. One time, she opens her eyes and sees healers holding sheets of her own burnt skin. She can move only enough to tilt her chin down and look at herself. What she sees does not even look like a human body, just an expanse of malformed, charred flesh. She screams, but the healers put her back to sleep. If she is lucky, the darkness will be death.
She swears that she saw Max’s face, staring down at her between curtains of unconsciousness, but she reaches for him and he is gone.
Nura is still in agony, but she is awake. Yet the pain of her body is nothing compared to what rips through her when she hears what had happened to the Farliones. The family that had accepted her into their homes, who had loved her when no one else did — they were gone, and in the most heartbreaking way she could ever imagine.
Sammerin tells her softly, calmly. She says nothing until he leaves the room, and then she lets out a mangled scream through torn-up vocal cords. It echoes through the room and the hall and the Tower, until healers come rushing in to see her, and she turns her head away so they do not see the tears streaming down her face.
They give her a wheelchair that she can use to move around until she is well enough to walk. Even that hurts horrifically, but she listens until she finds out where Max is and wheels herself to his room elsewhere in the Towers.
The sounds she hears from within make all her muscles freeze.
His voice is mangled with agony. There is crashing, as if things are being thrown or fists banged against walls. She listens as his outburst roars to a crescendo and then collapses into muffled silence.
Her own tears are falling down her cheeks, silently. One hand is pressed over her mouth, her eyes squeezed shut.
All of this is her fault.
She wants to be with him. She wants to hold him until the world goes quiet, wants to comfort him, to grieve with him. She wants to fall to her knees and beg for his forgiveness. She wants to carve out her heart and thrust it into his hands — I know this isn’t much, but here it is, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for destroying the best things in both our lives.
But she cannot move.
She isn’t sure how long it has been when the door opens and Sammerin steps out. He gives her a cold stare.
“Are you going in?”
She takes a long time to answer. But finally she says, “No,” and has never felt like more of a coward.
Sammerin turns away. “Good,” he says, and leaves her there alone in the hall, listening to her friend weep.
The war is over. But there are still prices to be paid. Thousands died in the city of Sarlazai, whether in the initial attack or in the chaos that ensued afterwards. And Maxantarius Farlione is to be held responsible.
Nura hears of the charges against him when sitting in her room in the Towers. She is still in a wheelchair, and still helpless.
“Not his fault,” she says to Zeryth. She hates Zeryth — hates him, now, more than she has hated anyone, except perhaps for herself. “You know.”
Every word is hard-fought, her voice raspy.
“He never had trouble controlling it before,” Zeryth says. “The actions were still his. Besides, the world can’t know about Reshaye. You know that.”
This is the first time she realizes that Max never told anyone about what she did. It stings.
“He did…the right thing. Ended the war. I’ll… I’ll testify.”
“Testify? You can barely speak.”
“I. Will. Testify,” she grinds out.
And she does. She sits before a council of fifty judges, one from every district in Ara, and from her wheelchair she answers question after question. She speaks excruciatingly slowly, so the hearing lasts for hours. But she enunciates every single word, spinning a tale of a capable captain who did the best thing for his soldiers and his country, even at great personal cost. By the end, she is spitting blood into the cup of water they had given her. But she has convinced them. When she wheels out of that room, Maxantarius Farlione is a hero, not a criminal.
Nura does not care when the title she wanted more than anything is given to the person she hates most of all. Zeryth Aldris does not earn the title of Arch Commandant. It is handed to him for the dubious honor of being the last remaining candidate. Maia Azeroth is dead. Nura’s injuries forced her to withdraw from consideration. And Max may have escaped Ilyzath, but heavy restrictions were still placed upon him by the Orders, forbidding him from pursuing the title.
Not that he has any desire for such a thing, now.
Nura goes to his apartment a few months after. When he opens the door, she cannot explain everything that wells up in her. Words are too complicated. And so, like they used to a lifetime ago, instead they throw themselves at each other. Perhaps they both think they can reclaim some shred of comfort from the warmth of each other’s bodies. But even their bodies are not familiar anymore, permanently marked by everything that has destroyed them. She sees only a flicker of sadness cross his face when she tears her shirt over her head and he sees the full extent of her burns. Then it is gone beneath feral, ferocious hunger.
Their tryst is a soulless pantomime of something broken that they had done a hundred times before. There was no love in this, only anger and hurt and the desire to outrun the present. When their climax fades, Nura feels nothing but shame.
She rolls over and looks at him. His eyes are different — milky-blue, as if they had somehow been consumed by cataracts — but that isn’t the thing that strikes her most. It’s the hateful emptiness in his gaze that slides between her ribs like a knife.
This has been a mistake. What did she come here for? A chance at reclaiming something that they had once had? There is nothing left to save.
She doesn’t say a word to him — he wouldn’t want to hear anything she could say, anyway. Instead she gets up, throws her clothes on, and leaves. They do not speak once.
Nura lives through the years as if they are merely something to be endured. She recovers and becomes stronger than she has ever been. She fulfills her role as Second to the Arch Commandant with ruthless efficiency.
She will never let anyone know how woefully lonely she is, and how often she thinks of those she has lost. Nor will she ever let anyone know about the records that she quietly searches, looking for one familiar name, or that every week she reads the lists of unidentified bodies found in alleyways or Seveseed dens, praying she will not find a dark-haired young man with peculiar eyes.
There is only one thing that brings her peace. Every week, on her days off, she visits another city and wanders the streets. She watches people live their lives, content. The country is whole again. People are safe and happy.
She did a terrible thing. But she did it for the right reasons, and for this, it was worth it. There is nothing — nothing — that she loves more than she loves Ara.
Still, she is haunted by the past. Every so often, when the nightmares get particularly bad, she goes to the part of the Towers that only a small handful of people can access. She goes into a room of pure white, and looks down at the shriveled up man strapped to the table. His eyes remain sightlessly staring at the ceiling. He is breathing, but other than that, he is barely alive.
And yet the most powerful magic in Ara — perhaps the most powerful magic in the world — is right here, lurking inside of that broken mind.
Waiting for the next time it is needed.
Nura is twenty-eight years old when the unrest begins to stir again. It starts small, a few rebellious Lords fighting with the young queen over taxes or land rights. But even that single thread of growing tension is terrifyingly familiar. She thinks of the day she and Max had sat in the library all those years ago, and how it had been so easy to dismiss the possibility of coming war.
She can no longer sleep at night. The days pass, and the whispers continue, and she wakes up in sweats dreaming of fire.
They do not understand, she tells herself. T
he Queen is young and naive. Zeryth is selfish and stupid. They do not understand the importance of acting quickly.
And she will not, will never, allow all the sacrifices she has made to be in vain.
Eventually, she has had enough. One sleepless night, she goes to that secret corner of the Towers. She stands over the lifeless man in the room of white.
Nearly a decade ago, she watched this magic end a war, taking a thousand lives to save hundreds of thousands. And in the same stroke, she watched it destroy everything that mattered to her.
If anyone is to Wield it now, she decides, it must be her.
She has already been ruined by it once. She has nothing left to lose. And she hates it so much that she needs to be the one to dominate it, this time.
She withdraws her dagger, and she tries to Wield Reshaye for the first time.
{Who are you?}
The voice sounds so strange. Odd, to hear it this way, in a pure form rather than coming from the lips of a human being.
You know who I am.
It turns over her memories like stones. {I do know you.} It stops at the memory of Sarlazai, at her moment of betrayal. She feels its disgust.
I am offering you a new home, she says.
{I have long forgotten what it is to have a home. But I know a place like this, so cold and hostile, is not one.}
Would you rather stay in an empty mind and a white room, then?
A low hiss. {Where is Maxantarius?}
The protectiveness rises before she can stop it. Reshaye grabs onto the emotion.
{You dislike that I ask about him.}
This is between you and me. Not him.
It reaches for another emotion, one she cannot hide away fast enough. The way she felt every time he was praised. Every time he was promoted. The day he was the one to be granted such extraordinary power, power he could not even handle.
Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Page 46