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

around, dragging him around the corner until he regained his senses enough to push forward.

By the time we got to the entrance, it was so dark that I struggled to see. The door was bigger than I remembered it, tall and narrow and black. The symbols on it glinted through the shadows, despite there being no light to reflect.

Max put his hand on the door.

It did not move.

The symbols were rearranging, like bugs crawling towards a carcass, collecting around us.

I pushed the door, too.

“Let us out,” I murmured in Thereni, as if to plead with Ilyzath herself. “We do not belong here.”

You do not?

The whisper surrounded us.

“Alright, Ilyzath,” Max muttered. “We’re appropriately fucking impressed with you. Now let us go.”

The symbols in the wall all skittered towards Max, framing his silhouette. Shadows reached from the corners of the room, caressing him.

It sounded nothing like a voice, and yet I could understand its words perfectly:

Why should I let you go now that you have returned to me? Perhaps you escaped me once. But you belong here.

“No.” I thrust my palm against the door and threw all of my magic — all of Reshaye’s magic — behind it. A surge of light hit my fingertips.

More and more shadows reached for Max, like ravenous hands.

This is your home, Ilyzath crooned to him. And what difference does a few weeks make?

The door held for one more moment.

But another burst of power, and it flew open. Max and I stumbled through. My eyes recoiled against the brightness of the outside world. Max yanked parchment from his pocket and drew a Stratagram. He had to do it twice — his hand was shaking too badly to make the circle the first time.

We landed behind the Farlione estate. It was a beautiful day. People were all around us, walking or chatting. So peaceful it was surreal.

My gaze flicked to Max, and the two of us stared at each other in silence. His jaw was tight, and his face pale. My hand clutched his so tightly that it trembled. So tightly that I thought I would never let it go.

We had seen many horrible things within those walls, but only Ilyzath’s whispers to Max followed me out:

You belong here. What difference does a few weeks make?

Chapter Thirty-Six

Max

I could feel Tisaanah’s stare picking me apart, though I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. My heart was still racing, palms still sweating, unwelcome images behind my eyes every time I blinked.

Neither of us spoke until we were back in her room.

“What— what was that?” she murmured.

“It was fucking with us.”

You belong here.

I blinked, trying to force the words away, but that only invited an onslaught of nightmares in the darkness.

“That’s what that place does,” I said. “It takes your worst fears and tortures you with them. It’s… people say it’s… alive.”

“Alive?”

“It’s not. I don’t believe it for a second. It’s just… a fancy, magical mirror, reflecting your nightmares.” I cleared my throat. “That’s all it was doing, in there. Fucking with us.”

Tisaanah flinched, as if one of her own visions was racking through her mind. I could only imagine what she had seen. Her past was so dark. There would have been plenty for Ilyzath to work with.

I shouldn’t have brought her there.

“Why didn’t it let us leave?” she said.

“Far be it from me to interpret the motivations of an ancient sentient prison.”

“Has that happened before? Does it… do that?”

Not that I’d heard of. But then again, Ilyzath was universally regarded to be mysterious and horrible, and no one truly understood it.

I ran my hand through my hair. “Maybe… it’s because of our magic. Perhaps it responded to us differently because of it.” Ancient and mystical and evil. Just like Ilyzath.

“Perhaps,” Tisaanah said, but I could tell that she wasn’t satisfied with this answer.

You escaped me once.

I fought a shudder and went to the window, mostly because it gave me an excuse to turn away from Tisaanah’s stare — one that, as always, saw too much.

“We have more important things to worry about than Ilyzath’s sadistic tendencies, anyway,” I said.

Tisaanah and I did what we always did when we mutually needed a distraction that night: we trained. There was comforting familiarity in the two of us throwing ourselves into work with no room for other unpleasant realities. Tisaanah had gotten better since I left, especially at combat. Il’Sahaj now worked as an extension of her body and her magic, almost as well as my staff worked as an extension of mine. But it was still unnervingly strange whenever I caught glimpses of my own tactics in her movements — a reminder of why we were here, and the terrifying thing that now bound us together deeper than our friendship or our affection.

We trained until our bodies no longer cooperated, and then we rinsed ourselves off and collapsed into bed, where we lay in silence pretending to be asleep. We left the lanterns on, and neither of us discussed why.

You belong here.

It was past midnight when I felt Tisaanah’s limbs wind around me. Her voice was quiet in my ear.

“When they charged you, after Sarlazai,” she murmured, “if you had been found guilty, is that where they would have sent you?”

I’d known the question was coming, and was dreading it. “If I had been convicted, yes.” War crimes. That had been my charge. What other word was there for what had happened in Sarlazai?

It was oddly difficult to speak. “It would have been the right place. To send someone who was responsible for that.”

“It wasn’t you, Max,” she whispered.

Sometimes, I wasn’t sure how much it mattered.

“I wasn’t even at the trial. I was… distracted. But I heard that the survivors were there. They came and testified before the Orders because they wanted justice, just days after they buried whatever was left to bury…” I cleared my throat. “I was only freed because Nura fought for me. Sometimes I think about that. How those