I tried and failed, twice, to push myself to my hands and knees. The floor seemed to be tilting. The walls quaked and trembled. Stones tumbled down.
I succeeded in rising to my knees, then my feet, staggering forward.
I only made it three paces.
Something yanked me back. I fell in a heap.
And then a grey-eyed woman with silver braided hair leaned over me. There was blood on her face and hatred in her eyes.
Nura.
That name came to me fast.
My hand closed around the dagger on the ground. My body knew the movements, but my muscles wouldn’t cooperate. She disarmed me in seconds. The blade went sliding across the floor.
More and more stones fell. The ravine was collapsing.
And Nura’s eyes never left mine.
Figures, that this is how it would end.
The thought floated through my broken mind. And maybe it was because all of those individual pieces were lost that the culmination seemed suddenly so inevitable. A thousand moments leading here, to this place, this act. A million twisted pathways that all arrive at this destination.
Is this what they call fate? Me and her, destroying each other?
“You don’t get to run away, Max,” she said. “Not this time.”
The rumbles of shifting stone swallowed her words. Her face was close to mine.
“You should have killed me,” she whispered. “I warned you about that bleeding heart.”
The walls collapsed.
And then, darkness.
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Aefe
Reshaye
Aefe
Sound came first. The sound of birds. Then, the rustle of a breeze through leaves. The distant click of footsteps on a polished floor. All things that perhaps I knew once.
Then, touch. The soft sensation of cushions beneath me, of smooth fabric on aching skin. Smell. The clean scent of damp earth, of distant flowers. Of strong tea. Of lilies. How did I know it was lilies?
I opened my eyes.
I stared at a ceiling formed of intricate patterns crafted in copper, vines and moss twining around them. Those patterns framed glass, which revealed a churning grey sky.
I twitched my fingers.
My fingers.
I expected to feel someone else, here — someone else in this body who would fight me for control or linger just out of reach.
But I was met with nothing but silence. My mind was cavernous, empty, lonely. There was no one here but me.
“Aefe.”
Warm fingertips brushed my hand, and on instinct, I yanked it away. I sat up, too fast, making my head spin and stomach churn.
“You are safe,” the voice murmured.
You are safe. I heard it in Tisaanah’s voice, in her thoughts, within the mind we had once shared. My mind was empty, now.
I turned, a snarl at my lips, already lunging out of the bed. I collided with a figure and the two of us were on the ground, me crawling over him, his hands gripping my shoulders, before I even had a moment to look at him.
“It’s me, Aefe.”
“Do not call me that,” I snarled.
And then I looked at him, and stopped.
I did know him. Even though I didn’t understand how. He was a ghost from a life I no longer remembered. Someone else’s life, not my own. It was always someone else’s life. He had a sharp, angular face, a smattering of freckles across his cheeks, auburn hair that waved over his forehead. A copper crown, formed in the shape of a stag’s horns, sat upon his head. But it was his eyes that froze me. A familiar mossy green, and now, they were looking at me as if they saw me. As if they knew me.
I did not like it. I did not want to be seen.
I hissed and leapt away, staggering backwards until I fell against a wall. I was in a bedchamber — a fine one, from what I understood of such things. The tile was cold beneath my feet.
“Where am I?” I blurted out. “Who— what is this—”
I did not know how to word my question. I looked down at my splayed hands. They were not Tisaanah’s. They were not Maxantarius’s. They were not the withered hands of the man in the room of white and white.
The copper-haired man approached me slowly, carefully. I did not like the way he looked at me, as if I was something to be examined, something to be understood. It was easier not to be understood.
“The body is yours,” he said, quietly. “Come. Look at it.”
“I have no body.”
“Look.”
He held out a hand, gesturing to a mirror on the other side of the room. I regarded it warily before stepping towards it.
What I saw within it made my heart clench, though I did not understand why.
A female Fey stood there, wearing a simple white shift. She had tan skin, and long deep-red hair, and a smattering of pearlescent purple across her cheeks. Her eyes were a dark violet. They were deep-set, and tired, and very afraid.
I stepped backwards.
“You recognize yourself,” the man said.
“I—”
I did not know how to answer the question. My head hurt. An image burst through my mind, an image of three beautiful people in a room of polished black stone. An image of a face in a mirror, a face that looked like this one.
“It’s alright,” the man said, gently. “You have time.”
I looked down at my hands again. My gaze trailed up, to my arms, and the expanse of smooth tan skin there. Unmarked skin. I did not understand why something about that seemed… wrong.
Then I turned my hand, and saw black ink tattooed on my inner wrist. Three symbols, swirls with varying contents. I knew they were words, but I could not understand them. Yet the sight of them hurt. I blinked, and thought of a sheet of black stone reaching towards the sky, covered in symbols just like this.
“The body is a recreation of yours,” the man said, quietly. “But only a recreation. You had tattoos, once. Telling your story. You have already
