Tall black doors opened before me like loving arms or parting jaws.
Welcome home, it whispered.
I didn’t move.
Something still lingered behind curtains in my mind that I couldn’t part — something so important. But my mind was a collection of broken pieces that didn’t fit together. Something escaped me. Something was missing.
I peered over my shoulder. I could have sworn I saw a figure there, shrouded in fog and the mist of the sea. A woman with mismatched eyes and spotted skin, reaching out for me.
Come back, Max.
“Come on,” one of the guards muttered, and pushed me forward. The cold shadow of the prison enveloped me. It seemed to slither, a serpent of shadows, and it wrapped around me like a lover’s embrace.
I told you, Ilyzath crooned, this is where you belong.
I did not belong here.
I stopped short, just before the doors.
“Move—” the guard growled, but I whirled around.
All at once, the broken pieces snapped together. I remembered all of it, every moment rendered in perfect, fleeting clarity.
Nura stood still, watching me.
“Does this feel good, Nura?” I ground out. “Does this feel right?”
She said nothing.
One of the guards tried to grab me, but I held my ground.
I thought of Tisaanah. I thought of Sammerin. I thought of Moth, and the people who had relied on me to lead them, to protect them.
I had let them down.
Tisaanah would keep fighting. The thought came to me with an equal measure of pride and sadness. All I’d wanted was for this world to be good enough to let her rest. Now she would be fighting forever.
I resisted the guards’ grips for one more second, meeting Nura’s stare.
I pitied her.
“You have made such a massive mistake,” I said.
“Come on—” the guard growled. I pushed his grip away and turned around. I didn’t hesitate as I walked into Ilyzath’s open maw. It was only after the shadows enveloped me that the fear took hold. My memories withered. I was seized by sudden desperate desire to turn back one last time, to see if there was someone there reaching for me — a girl with spotted skin and mismatched eyes.
Max, come back—
Too late. The door had closed.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
Tisaanah
The garden was especially lovely today. When I looked outside the window, I saw nothing but a sun-drenched expanse of color, like paint spattered upon a canvas. It was overgrown and feral. The way I loved it most.
Day turned to sunset turned to night. The familiar clutter of our bedroom surrounded us. I felt so safe here. Max’s lips were at my earlobe, my throat, my jaw. And then, at last, my mouth. Kissing him felt like coming home. Our bodies melted into each other, limbs intertwining, heat mingling, until there were no boundaries where he ended and I began.
“Tisaanah,” he murmured.
“Hm?”
“What if this was always us?” Another kiss, and another. I was drunk on them.
“This?”
“All of this.” He pulled away, just enough for me to look into his eyes, our lips still nearly brushing. “Do you ever think about that? What if this was us, forever?”
Gods, the way he said it. The way he looked at me. Like it was a question he truly wanted to know the answer to. Fear clenched in my stomach — the fear that I hadn’t made myself into someone deserving enough of this kind of love, yet. The fear that when I opened my fingers to give him whatever I had locked away for so long, it would not be something worth taking.
But I looked at him, and I loved him, and that love was more powerful than the fear of it. I placed my hands on either side of his face.
“I think about it,” I whispered. “I think about it all the time. It is a dream so vivid that I know every detail. I know what your eyes look like surrounded by the lines of age. I know what your hand feels like beneath mine weathered by decades of life. I know the way our features look combined in our children, the cadence of their voices, the way you sound when you call their names. And I already love them.”
I kissed him again, deeply.
“You make me selfish. You make me want. And nothing has ever been enough, except for you.”
I felt his smile beneath my kiss. Felt his warmth envelop me. And whatever fear I felt in allowing myself to voice such a ridiculous dream, voice a dream that would be so painful to lose, was drowned out by his affection.
How silly of me, I thought. To ever have been afraid of something so beautiful.
But then, my eyes opened. Outside the window, where there had once been flowers, there now was only ash and a burning pile of hands. Where Max’s form had once been, there now was only cold sheets.
Dread fell over me. Dread and horrible regret.
I tore out the door, searching for him. He couldn’t leave me. I hadn’t told him the most important truths. I hadn’t given him my dream to share. There was so much he needed to know.
And I could not lose him.
I could not lose him.
I ran outside, ash still burning beneath my feet, scorching my skin.
I screamed his name.
But he was already gone.
The sky was blue and cloudless.
No — it wasn’t the sky. It was fabric. The roof of a tent, made of faded blue cotton. The floor seemed to shift and move. My mouth was so dry it felt as if it was full of sand. When I jerked upright, I did it so clumsily that I tumbled out of the makeshift bed and fell in a heap on the floor.
The air smelled different. And it was hot, dry. Not the moist cool air of Ara in the winter.
Reality came back to me in pieces. The Arch Commandant battle. The attack by the Syrizen, by the shadows — by
