“Is this…?” And when I nodded, he let out air through his teeth. I thought he might question the decision, but he nodded grimly.
“Tell Filias and Serel,” I choked out. “Tell him to get them ready to leave.”
I had made such a mistake, bringing them here. Serving them up to be pawns in yet another country’s wars. Stupid of me. Naive.
“I will,” Sammerin said.
“And protect yourself.”
“I will.”
My eyes burned. “I’m sorry, Sammerin.”
There was no time for me to be sorry. But I was, anyway. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was, for tearing him away from what he had built — for tearing all of the refugees away from the tentative peace they had created.
Sammerin just shook his head.
“Creating is harder than destroying. In the end it’s always worth it.”
Gods. When Sammerin said things, he said them like a promise. I nodded, closed my eyes until they stopped stinging. When I opened them again, I cleared away everything but focus.
“Go,” I said. “Quickly.”
I was already turning away by the time the words were out of my mouth. I did not know how long the energy I stole from the fallen Syrizen would last — and Max was running out of time.
I ran down the stairs. The fog grew thicker, the dense feeling in the air stronger and more painful as I descended. It built inside of me, too, a knot growing in the pit of my stomach.
I wondered if this is how Max had felt as he ran down the halls of Esmaris’s estate, when he came back for me.
He had always come back for me. Just as I would always come for him.
I just had to be fast enough.
Chapter Eighty-Two
Max
Hello.
This was not Reshaye.
It slithered through my head the same way, and had the same inhuman, unmarked quality. But this was a different voice. This connection was more chaotic, more tenuous. I could feel the ragged edges of the thing that was speaking to me, like a silhouette that couldn’t quite step into focus. It was more real than Reshaye. More alive. And its hands were wrapped around my throat, squeezing, squeezing.
The world had fallen away. I was somewhere different now, somewhere I had only caught glimpses of during the worst of my Reshaye-induced fever dreams. A dead plain, and a starry sky. In a physical world that seemed very far away, I understood that my body was still there, time suspended, my knees on the stone ground of the Scar, surrounded by fire.
This place? This was different. Deeper than the physical world. And the voice had dragged me here.
Where are they? it asked.
Who are you? I demanded.
Where are they? Where is she?
She? Tisaanah? Nura? With my confusion, their faces shot through my mind, and the presence grabbed the images.
It paused at Tisaanah’s face. Familiarity.
I didn’t like that. Not one bit.
Who are you? I repeated.
I am the blood of the people that yours have stolen, the voice said. And I’m reclaiming what has been taken from me.
Focus.
If I tried very hard, I could solidify the world — or, the not-world — around me enough to see it as a physical place. If I focused, I could see the shadow as something resembling a person. My magic snaked out towards it.
The images split my vision, like a crack of lightning lighting up the sky for a fractured second at a time. A man’s face, startled and angry, gone too quickly for me to recognize it. Copper gates covered in crawling vines. Overflowing bookshelves and glimpses of writing I did not recognize.
All there and gone in less than a second.
The presence flickered, like it had been struck, then charged towards me with renewed rage.
I sense her in you. In your blood and in your magic. And I will not abandon her, nor any of the others your people have taken from me. Humans are past the point of earning our forgiveness. You had mercy once and squandered it. Now I see that you have never deserved it.
Another avalanche of images. This time of bodies strewn in swampy forest. Dead faces beneath the water. A woman’s face that I did not recognize, with sad violet eyes. The images merged and tangled with those of my own, the aftermath of Sarlazai, my family’s burnt corpses. Tisaanah’s mismatched gaze.
All at once, I realized.
I realized why this magic felt so unfamiliar, so inhuman.
I realized why I had been dragged here, the moment I opened that passageway between me and the deepest levels of magic.
You’re Fey, I said. You’re the Fey king.
Now I understood. The Fey that Nura held— the ones that she was trying to make into the next Reshaye—
She had created it. She had created the war she was trying so hard to stop.
We don’t want a war with you, I said. Your people were taken by one human. One misguided human who doesn’t deserve the power that she had. But her reign is over. And I swear to you that I’ll return the people she took from you.
You are lying to me.
I never lie. It’s a personal flaw.
A humorless chuckle shivered up my spine. You do not know that you lie. But it is a lie, nonetheless. And even if it is not, I am past the point of trusting any word that comes from your fickle mortal minds. And how easy it has been, to turn you against each other. Humans are weak and selfish, easily-divided. My people were that way, once. Too busy squabbling over petty issues of pride to innovate, to fulfill our potential. Not anymore.
He would not stop. He would kill for Reshaye. He would kill Tisaanah for it, and anyone else who stood in his way. He would ravage Ara, and maybe we would deserve it.
But I wouldn’t let it happen.
Listen to me. My magic grabbed for his. We tangled, equally matched. He was very far away. I could feel that. The distance was the only thing keeping him from overpowering me.
A war between our peoples would be bloodier than either of us are prepared for, I said. I don’t support this, and I never will. We can still stop this from happening. I will return your people to you. We will never hurt you again. I swear it.
Funny, how an hour ago, I was begging Nura for the exact same consideration.
You’re right about humans, I said. So much about us is vile. But we also have the potential to be better. Give us that chance.
The presence paused in consideration.
But then the sky lit up. Both of us stopped, our attention snapping to this new intrusion: a burning thread of magic drawing from this deep, deep level.
My blood went cold. I recognized it immediately.
Tisaanah.
The king’s focus on her was all-consuming. He reached out for that thread, as if examining it, pushing further. And it was only then that I realized there was something else intertwined in it, too. It was a faint little fragment of magic, so weak that I wouldn’t have seen it if I wasn’t looking. But once I did, I knew it. Of course I did, because once it was a part of me, too.
The king’s desire was ravenous. He wanted her. He wanted Reshaye.
It was only a split second of distraction. Still too much. I lost my grip on the magic above, my resistance slipping. It was the only opening he needed. He forced his way through the door.
I heard the voice whisper, closer than before,
I have already given you enough chances.
My eyes snapped open. Before me was Tisaanah, emerging from the flames.
But when I stepped forward, my body was not my own.
Chapter Eighty-Three
Tisaanah
I ran down the stairs, cutting through bodies like they were nothing. Something in the air had shifted, the magic growing sicker and sicker. The Syrizen threw themselves at me. When one fell, another was two steps behind. If I’d had time to think about my situation, I would have been amazed I made it this far alive — though perhaps that was because the Syrizen, at least near the end, were not trying to kill
me at all. At one point, a particularly strong one overpowered me. I cringed in anticipation of a blow, but it didn’t come. Instead, she wrapped her arms around me and began to drag me away, and only made it a few steps before my dagger twisted in her gut, her flesh rotting.
No, they weren’t trying to kill me. They were trying to take me.
I had no time to consider what that meant. I fought my way down the stairs, slipping on blood as stone became rougher and more uneven, as the air grew thicker and darker, as it grew harder and harder to see through the flame-dyed fog. My stolen magic was screaming at me, but I wasn’t sure what it was saying.
And somewhere, far beneath all that noise, I might have thought I heard the rumblings of a familiar, wordless whisper.
I staggered down the bottom of the stairs, taking out one Syrizen, then two, and then I was able to run a few steps without being attacked. Perhaps I had killed them all. Perhaps I had simply outrun them.
Through the mist, I saw a familiar silhouette.
Max was standing there, his back to me, surrounded by flames. He wasn’t moving. Wasn’t fighting. I didn’t see Nura. He was just standing there.
Something was wrong. So wrong.
“Max.” My voice barely seemed to reach the air. The magic in it swallowed the sound of his name.
He turned around.
And I suppressed a gasp of horror. The magic that I’d maintained at my fingertips fell away in shock.
It wasn’t him. I knew it immediately. I knew everything about Max, knew every pattern of his movements, and even the turn alone was enough to reek of wrong-ness. The way he looked at me was distant and empty. Black veins surrounded his eyes, the corners of his mouth. They peeked out from beneath his sleeve, too, on the insides of his wrists, darker than I had ever seen them before.
And yet, despite his lack of expression, I knew there was something there. Something behind him.
We had made an awful miscalculation. We had thought we could play with this magic, build this connection to the world below, and outrun the consequences.
At the worst possible time, it had caught up to us.
I approached, slowly. The air was so hot that my skin stung. Max did not move. His eyes, dark, fully open, looked past me.
“Max,” I murmured.
He had to be in there, still. He had to be.
I have been looking for you.
I felt something reaching towards me. Something from within him — from within the magic that we both drank from, right now.
I have been looking for you, the presence whispered again.
A familiar voice inside of me stirred. A voice that I had thought was gone forever.
I barely breathed. I took another step—
—Only to nearly fall to my knees. The floor shook violently, the stone rumbling. Deep fissures opened in the walls, releasing rivers of glowing mist. Boulders tumbled down the ravine edges.
The Scar was collapsing.
I pressed my hands to the ground, threw all of my magic into stabilizing it. But my magic, stolen or not, was not built for such things. Stone didn’t want to listen to me. Fire bit my cheeks. The floor was so hot that my palms burned.
I lifted my eyes, and my mouth went dry.
I thought they were just shadows, at first, slipping from between the openings in the rocks. But they were moving too strangely. It took a moment for my mind to carve out the right shapes — human, but different. Long, wrong-way limbs. Intangible forms. And faceless heads. Monsters. Like the one that had attacked us at the cottage. They crawled up the walls, reaching for the surface.
I tried to pull them back with my magic, but the second I let my attention waver, the walls began to crumble faster. Distantly, I heard footsteps behind me. The Syrizen?
And all this, while Max — not Max — paced towards me.
With every step, the sharp pain at the back of my head grew stronger. That familiar nagging whisper grew louder.
{Let me go.}
I thought I imagined it at first.
Reshaye?
{Let me go!}
“It is you,” Max said, so quietly, so calmly, despite the chaos that rained down around us. “I knew you were here.”
I couldn’t speak. My magic demanded total focus. With one weak scrap of strength, I threw up a shield to keep him from me. His magic tore through it easily. He never broke his gaze from mine. Those eyes, gods, they were not Max’s. They were strange and foreign. They were inhuman.
“Aefe,” he murmured, “do you remember? Or have they taken your memories from you, too?”
{Aefe?}
The name speared me. And all at once, something inside of me was torn open. I felt hands reach inside my mind, pull my thoughts apart. Max’s hands grabbed me. Pain bloomed over the back of my skull as it cracked against the stone wall. I barely felt it. Not with that unfamiliar magic tearing apart my mind.
Reshaye screamed, and I screamed, and our voices mingled somewhere between the physical and spiritual worlds.
{Let me die!} Reshaye wailed. {I was dead! Let me go!}
“You were never dead, Aefe.”
One hand moved to my cheek, cradling it. His face was so close to mine that our noses nearly brushed. His palm was hot against my face, and when it pressed to my temple, his magic surged further into my mind.
The pain was unbearable. So intense I could barely breathe.
And in that moment, several worlds collided. Suddenly I was no longer in the Scar, looking into Max’s familiar and unfamiliar face. I was looking, too, into a face I had never seen before, a man with dark copper hair and moss-green eyes, and pointed ears peeking through the wave of his hair.
And I was looking up, at a starry sky that I recognized as the world beneath this one, the deepest level of magic. I was looking at all the bleeding threads of magic that connected us — me, Max, Reshaye. And so many more streaks, a hundred more, tethered to this — this thing that held Max.
{Why do you call me that?} Reshaye whispered.
I saw Max. But I also saw this man who stood behind him, thousands of miles away and yet also here, his presence floating up from beneath the surface of magic like blood into water. “Aefe,” he whispered. “That is your name.”
{I do not know that name.}
A flicker of sadness. A strangely human emotion. Yes, you do.
The betrayal. Blond hair flowing in the wind.
Golden grass beneath my fingertips.
The warmth of an embrace, the scent of skin. The feeling of safety.
You do know, Aefe.
Aefe. The feeling of hatred — hating the way he said that name. Hating it and loving it. Knowing this person. Trusting them. Mourning them. Perhaps loving them.
You just do not remember.
Tenderness shifted to ice-cold. The threads of magic linking us went dark and malevolent. The copper-haired man’s face hardened in anger.
You do not remember because of all they did to you. But I have come to take you home.
{I have no home,} Reshaye whispered, but the words were barely formed before Max’s hands were at the sides of my face — an ugly mimicry of our goodbye — and the pain split me in two.
As he set to work ripping Reshaye from my mind.
Chapter Eighty-Four
Max
The world was unraveling. I threw every bit of myself, every scrap of magic, every remaining drop of willpower, into fighting it. My flames still roared, out of control. With what little strength I had left, I tried to whisper to them enough to keep them from devouring us all. But almost all of my magic was being siphoned off by this presence that had taken hold inside of me. I couldn’t close myself off from the deepest level of magic — as if something had been wedged inside the door.
Tisaanah was fighting him, albeit weakly, her eyes closed, mouth twisted in a soundless scream of pain. The king reached deep into her mind. Searching. Slicing.
Stop, stop, stop—
It was like slamming my fists aga
inst a sheet of glass.
Tisaanah’s eyelids fluttered. When they opened again, they flicked to me and held there, searching mine, bright with tears.
“He has roots,” she choked out. “Everywhere, Max. He is connected to this world everywhere.”
She could barely form the words.
The horrible realization hit me. In the world beneath this one, the world where I was trapped, I looked up at the sky — at strings of light lashed from star to star.
I realized what I was looking at.
Not stars.
They were him. Holes he had torn into the boundaries between magics. The little threads he had planted to draw himself to Ara.
And the biggest tear of all was within me. I was the opening that he was using to claw his way into this world.
Magic collided with magic, and Tisaanah’s silent scream became a piercing one. I felt her magic withering. I felt him hacking away at the power that still was hidden, deep and weak, within her. Whatever was left beyond it was barely magic at all. And she was stretched so thin, going in so many different directions at once.
If he didn’t stop, he would kill her.
You’ve destroyed everything you’ve ever loved.
Of course it was Nura’s voice, of all things, that floated through my mind, then. Maybe under any other circumstance, I would have been angry that we were here. All of this was a result of selfishness and pettiness and stupid, Ascended-damned human selfishness.
But now, I only could think of one certainty.
Tisaanah needed to close it off — this bleeding wound within me. She could do it, perhaps, under normal circumstances. Not now, with her magic so far gone.
“Caduan.”
The voice made the king stop short.
My face turned. I felt the king’s recognition, and his anger. I felt the distant, distant echoes of Reshaye’s hurt.
Ishqa stood there. He had wings, now, which were tucked in close to his back, golden feathers bathed in the scarlet light of the flames. His white robes were singed. A large sword was in his hands, steel reflecting the licks of fire.
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