Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Carissa Broadbent (best book recommendations txt) 📖

I approached it.

What are you looking at?

And then I felt it. The reaching hand. The overwhelming feeling of being watched.

{It is not what I see,} Reshaye whispered. {It is what sees us.}

I reached out into the darkness—

“Breathe, Tisaanah.”

A shock of ice cold pressed to my forehead. My whole body convulsed and I blindly reached for... something, I wasn’t even sure what, but what I hit was the edge of the basin, into which I violently emptied the contents of my stomach.

When I finished, I blinked into dim lantern light. Nura leaned over me.

“What’re you doing here?” The question slurred. My tongue was not cooperative.

I hadn’t felt like this since… gods, since the beginning.

“You can’t be alone this way. Here.” Nura thrust a small bottle into my hands. “Drink.”

“How did you—”

“What you did out there was remarkable. Even compared to what I had already seen.” She gave me a hard stare. “You forget that I was there through all of it. I know the toll it takes, to do something like that. And forgive me if I didn’t want our best asset to die alone in her room because she was being a showoff. Drink. For your own damned good.”

I swallowed the contents of the bottle and immediately regretted it.

“Don’t throw that up,” Nura said.

“I am trying,” I muttered.

I lifted my head, or tried to. She looked different, her hair loose around her face. And she wore not her typical high-necked jacket, but a camisole that revealed more of her skin than I had ever seen.

Skin that was completely covered in horrible, disfiguring burn scars.

Even though I could barely keep my eyes open, I still found myself staring.

Nura gave me a humorless smirk.

“You and I and our scars. I suppose we both know what it’s like to pay for something.”

We aren’t the same, I wanted to say, but a wave of pain crushed me. Reshaye let out a hideous, wordless wail. The present and the past — mine and so many others — ran together, my senses assaulted by hundreds of fragments of memories all at once.

All of them drowning in white and white and white.

And pain.

When I came back to myself, I was on the floor. Shaking. Sweating. The cold cloth was pressed to my forehead.

“Idiot,” Nura muttered. “Was it worth it? All this to show off out there?”

Funny, how in the depths of agony, you find the most clarity.

If you were standing in my place, would you agree? Zeryth had asked me. You, a slave girl? How would you make them respect you?

Maybe Esmaris had been right. It was not enough to live like a human and die like one. I had to carve myself into their whispers.

Today, they had looked at me not like a slave, not like a woman, but like a god.

“Was it worth it?” Nura asked, as I sagged over the basin. An ugly smile lurched at my lips.

“Yes,” I choked out. “Yes, it was.”

I faded off again after that, reality melding with dreams in a grey smear of darkness. And perhaps I dreamed that, some time later, my eyes fluttered open under the control of another. Perhaps I dreamed that I rolled over to see Nura still in my room, reading, a glass of wine in her hand.

“You,” my voice creaked out.

Nura’s gaze slipped to me, growing colder. She set her wine glass down. “Hello, Reshaye.”

A smirk spasmed across my lips. “Are you not afraid to be here alone with me?”

“If you were going to kill me, you would have done it by now.”

“And yet, I have seen your fear. I know how deep it runs.”

The memories were shards of glass. Nura, her face contorted in hatred, falling to the ground for the fiftieth time. Nura, spilling her blood over an open, lifeless arm, in a room of white and white and white.

Nura, fighting again, and again, and again.

And now Nura, her face doused in moonlight, giving me a slow, cold smile.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But I hate you more than I fear you. And my hate is always stronger.”

“Hate.” I rolled the word over my tongue. My hand pressed to my chest. “She hates you too. She hates you almost as much as I do.”

“I would expect nothing less.”

Slowly, she stood and drew closer to me.

“Why her?” she whispered, at last. “Why did you choose her, when you rejected so many others?”

I let out a low chuckle.

“You envy her.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. And not because she has your former lover, but because she has me. And where would I have lived, in that mind of yours? Did you think that you would lock me in your palace of ice and steel, like everything else you fear?” I sat up, even though my muscles screamed. And I leaned close to her, so close our noses almost touched. “You did not truly want me, because I would have seen everything in you.”

Nura’s face went hard. Her eyes glinted in the darkness like two shards of metal.

“We are not done with each other yet, Reshaye. We can fester in our hatred and let it make us strong, or stupid, or both. And make no mistake, I do hate you. I hate you more than I have ever hated anything.” She pulled away and went to the window, gazing out over the mountains. “But you and I know that there is something else coming. And our paths are still tangled.”

A shudder ran over my skin. For a moment, I thought I could see it — a shadow looming, a silhouette with their face turned to me, far beneath the layers of magic.

Consciousness seeped away, the world fading back into my dreams.

And the last thing I heard was Nura’s voice. “The real fight,” she murmured, “has barely begun.”

Chapter Fifteen

Max

We were on Antedale’s doorstep when I received word of the attack on Korvius. The letter was nothing more and nothing less than a military report, the entire ordeal reduced to