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

golden skin damp in the humidity, muscles tensed. His sword, normally sheathed down his spine, was in his hands. I noticed that two symmetrical scars ran down his shoulder blades, perfectly straight and perfectly parallel.

The House of Reeds built out rather than up, their structures balanced on stilts to lift them out of the brackish tidewater. We were up to our ankles, and then our shins in water. Only then did the paths turn into stone stairs, then raised pathways lined with moss-covered railings. We came first to tiny homes built of wood and moss. Ahead, closer to the main city, the larger, more ornate homes rose through the fog.

It was very, very still.

“Did you see bodies?” I asked, quietly.

“No. We did not.”

“Then perhaps they fled.”

“Perhaps.” His voice said what his words didn’t. This place reeked of death.

The little homes were empty. Some were in great disarray, plates smashed on the floor, blankets torn off of beds, bookshelves overturned. Others looked untouched. None held any signs of the Fey who had once lived there.

Ahead, the central capital of the House of Reeds loomed. These buildings were constructed of iron and stone rather than wood. At the center of it all stood the Reeds’ temple, the only building that rose up towards the sky, a moss-draped spire of metal surrounded by taller bamboo shoots topped with crimson flowers. The stalks were so tall that the petals hovered high up in the mist, fluttering in the breeze, like blurry, bloody butterflies.

When we reached the door, I touched the stone, then brushed my fingertips to my lips. The taste made my entire body recoil.

“What?” Ishqa said, reading my face. “What do you sense?”

“I don’t know. On the surface it’s right, but something deeper… it’s…”

“What?”

“Just… wrong.” I unsheathed both of my blades. “Be ready.”

Ishqa inclined his chin, and tightened his grip around his sword as he pushed the temple gates open.

I had never been within the temples of the House of Reeds before. They were built like mazes, narrow hallways lined with of exquisitely etched stonework and decorated with tapestries that now swung lazily in the wind. Swamp water ran along the edges of the halls, and the floor sometimes broke like stone lily pads. I could imagine that under normal circumstances, lit with the ceremonial lanterns that dangled in the open-air arches above our heads, all of this intricacy was beautiful and haunting. Now, it just felt dangerous — so many corners to hide behind, and so many twists to lose track of.

We were deep into the temple when we heard the voice.

It was a woman’s voice, broken up with a terrified sob. At first, too far away for us to understand her words.

Ishqa and I both froze, then shot each other wary stares. His entire demeanor changed, as if shifting into a version of himself built only for a single task.

“Survivors,” I breathed, but Ishqa was already off, and we hurried down the hall, around a corner, and then another, until—

“Don’t take them…!”

This time, I understood the words. They were barely legible with terror and the Reedsborns’ brogue, and… something else, something that was barely a voice. It ran together like water and was as thin as the wind.

Then we rounded another corner, and saw her.

The figure was at the end of one of the hallways, her back facing us. I could tell it was a female by the long flow of braided hair, the sweep of fine chiffon skirts, the delicate curve of her body. She was kneeling, hunched over — hunched over at an angle that, the closer I got, seemed more and more gut-wrenchingly wrong, the twist of her spine too severe, the wrench in her shoulders unnatural.

“Don’t take them…! Don’t take them…!”

“My Lady—” Ishqa called out.

“Don’t take them…!”

I didn’t even see her move. One moment, she was there, kneeling on the ground. The next, she was lunging towards us.

I had to stifle a gasp of sheer horror.

She didn’t have a face.

At first, I thought it was some trick of the mind, as if she was moving so quickly her features had simply smeared in movement. But no — it was like there was something intangible just missing where her face should have been, flesh instead turning to strange blurry mist. My eyes couldn’t focus on her.

Not that I had time to stand there and try.

“Stop!” Ishqa commanded. “We come to—”

He barely got the words out. She was upon us, all shrieks and spindly limbs. Ishqa’s sword was raised in seconds. He looked beautiful wielding it — the kind of image that seemed it should be carved in polished stone, unlike me, who fought like a creature that crawled out of the dirt. One graceful strike, and the woman should have fallen.

Should have.

I flinched at the hot spray of blood across my face. It took me a few addled seconds to realize it: she had not stopped.

She continued to run through Ishqa’s blade.

“Don’t take them…!”

The words came in the exact same intonation every time, like a fragment of a memory stuck in a cycle.

I swore under my breath as she barreled into me. I dodged just in time, my shortsword striking her gut and the dagger glancing her shoulder. The blades cut through her, but not the way I was used to feeling steel slice through flesh. The resistance was strangely weak, as if I was slicing through the half-rotten meat of a dead deer already ravaged by wolves.

And when she touched me? The pain was so intense that my breath shriveled in my lungs.

I leaped away from her. Her strange, faceless stare was locked on me. She lunged, and I dropped. Ishqa seized upon that distraction, dancing forward with another blow of his sword, another blow that the woman — the creature — barely reacted to. So quick — Mathira, so quick — she whirled around and reached for him.

“Don’t take them…!”

Ishqa’s sword impaled her, and she let out a chilling, wordless shriek as her fingers clutched at