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

Walking through the rooms was like stepping into a grim, greyscale version of my memory. And yet, there was an odd comfort in it, too. In allowing myself to see the marks they had left on the world. Tisaanah asked little, innocuous questions — “When did he start drawing?” or “Why did she like these books so much?” — and while at first, my answers were stilted, soon I slipped more easily into the past. For so long, my grief had overshadowed their lives, an insurmountable wall between the present and any happiness that had once lived in the past. For the first time in a long, long time, I found myself peering over it.

Atraclius’s room was last. I opened the door, and stopped short.

I was expecting his to look the way the others’ did, preserved in the past. I was ready to see a room that was messy, an unmade bed, trinkets scattered across the floor. Instead, it was immaculate. It took me a moment to realize why.

Because Atraclius had died here.

The room had been cleaned and purged of all that made it his, because it needed to be, when his body was taken away.

My eyes drifted down. Burn marks peeked out from beneath the carpet.

I suddenly felt ill. I stepped backwards, closing the door too quickly. I glanced at Tisaanah, and I saw her wince, her fingers going to her temple. I wondered if Reshaye was whispering to her, awakened by the memory of what had happened here.

This had been a mistake.

I was halfway down the hall before I even realized I was moving, then down the grand staircase. I didn’t stop until I flung open a door and felt the rush of cold mountain air against my face.

I let out two shaky breaths and opened my eyes.

I hadn’t even paid attention to where I was walking, moving solely on instinct. I stood on the balcony. Before me was a breathtaking view of the mountains, the forts illuminated like distant candles, the snowcapped peaks glowing beneath the moonlight.

I felt warmth surround me. Tisaanah leaned against my shoulder. Her touch was a grounding presence, tethering me back to the earth.

“Their lives were worth so much more than the way they ended, Max,” she murmured, softly. “Don’t let their deaths take that away from you. It is the most precious thing you have.”

A lump rose in my throat.

Ascended above, I wished it was that easy. But their deaths had taken so much. From their memories, from their lives. From me.

“I wish you could have known them,” I said. “I wish I was introducing you to them, instead of showing you their empty bedrooms. I wish I was showing you this house when it was a home, not a shrine to the dead. And sometimes…” I let out a breath through my teeth. “Sometimes I wish you had known me, the way I used to be. Sometimes I wish that was the version of myself I could give you. A better version. One that wasn’t so…”

Broken.

I had thought that, when I noticed my feelings for Tisaanah beginning to change. The night I had given her the butterfly necklace, I had spent the rest of the evening trying to ignore the pleasant burn on my knuckles where they had brushed her skin. And when I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep because of this persistent, nagging fantasy that I couldn’t shake, a cold voice had echoed through my mind: Maybe once, long ago, you could have been worthy of her. Maybe before you were a collection of scars.

Tisaanah’s arm wound around mine.

“I do not think I would have liked you then,” she said, so plainly that despite myself a smile tugged at my mouth.

“I had far less crippling disillusionment then.”

“Perhaps I like your crippling disillusionment.”

The remnants of my smile faded. “It was more than that. I had a home. A family. I had… this.” I gestured to the house. “All of this ridiculous excess. I could have given all of that to you. I wish I could give all that to you.”

I looked to Tisaanah. Ascended, she was stunning, the white in her hair glowing in the silver light, her eyes a million miles deep. For a moment I could picture that idealized fantasy — the way she would have looked with them, laughing with Atraclius, chatting with my mother, collecting bugs with Kira. I could picture the way she would have painted the horrible parties here in rainbow colors.

Tisaanah gave me a sad smile.

“You could have tried,” she said, “but that world would not have wanted me, Max. And perhaps I would not have wanted it, either.”

There it was. The truth.

I closed my eyes, and one by one, the images faded.

Because Tisaanah was a former slave, a foreigner with no name and no prospects. I so wanted to believe that my family wouldn’t have seen her that way. Maybe, as individual people, they wouldn’t have. But the roots of the life we lived ran deeper than that, choking out what didn’t belong.

And maybe Tisaanah was too damned good for all of it, anyway.

I had loved my family. I had loved my childhood. But now I turned around and looked at this beautiful house, and thought of how it was built from the riches of career warfare. For the Farliones, it was simply what we did — a game to gain honor and money and respect from other people like us.

But Tisaanah? Tisaanah knew what it was to be one of the pieces on the board. People like us reduced people like her to faceless numbers. Like she was just one of a thousand, an asset to be leveraged or sacrificed, instead of a person.

Grief and anger warred with each other deep in my chest. The conflict I’d suppressed these long weeks, the thing that festered every time I looked at Moth, bubbled up to the surface.

“I don’t know how to reconcile