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
