Page 194 of Daughter of No Worlds

The eyes opened. And I recognized the thing that stared back at me, though I couldn’t quite say how: Reshaye.

{You!}

The word was a roll of thunder. The ground shook. And suddenly, before I could speak or move, Reshaye dove for me, surrounding me. Its form shifted, morphed, into something almost resembling some grotesque variation of a human — long, spindling limbs that moved in fits and starts. A cloudy face. A pair of white, savage eyes.

And long, bladed fingers that were suddenly at my throat.

{You betrayed me!}it wailed.{After everything I did for you, you betrayed me!}

The pain hit me all at once — pain so intense I could barely breathe, barely think. Images bombarded me. White, white, white. Flashes of long blonde hair.

{I gave you EVERYTHING!}

One strike with those inhuman, powerful fists, and I was on the ground. Its claws dug into my shoulders. I felt the burning warmth of blood running down my back. And when Reshaye pulled back, it now wore Esmaris’s face.

A flare of fury rose in me.

No. I wasdone.

“No,” I snarled. “No more.”

No more ofanyof it. No more dividing myself up as an offering to more powerful monsters.

No more sacrificing those I loved in the name of their own safety.

And no more would I fail to unleash the full potential of the power —my power— at my disposal.

Reshaye’s fingers tightened around my throat. I looked into those empty eyes, those eyes that were somehow nothing and everything all at once.

It is a form of raw magic,Nura had told me, once. That’s all it was. Magic to be Wielded.

And Wield it, I would.

I plunged my hands into the misty form of Reshaye’s smoky form.

It let out a bone-piercing screech, but I barely heard it, because the pain was so intense that I momentarily lost my grip on my senses.

I thought I knew pain. I had been wrong. Nothing, nothing, would ever compare to this.

Through the agony, I pulled Reshaye to me. I Wielded its murky form the way I once Wielded water in a pond, so many months ago. It fought me every step of the way, sinking its teeth into my soul.

My own life flashed before my eyes in bloody fragments. A little faceless girl playing with flowers and paper butterflies in her village. A scared almost-woman sitting in the back of a rolling cart. Esmaris’s home, my solitary dancing practice, my nights in his bed. A teenage girl weeping as her friend tended to her wounds and her heartbreak.

And then, of course, some years later, the crack of a whip, the sails of a ship, the stark gleam of two towers on a rocky shore.

Reshaye wailed. Thrashed.

{You betrayed me, you, you, you…!}it wept, voice dissolving, unraveling.

I grabbed onto Reshaye the way I had grabbed onto Esmaris’s mind, the day I first killed. And that was when I felt it: the agony of it. Not only my own pain, but Reshaye’s, too — the agony of being so many different pieces stitched together, shattered remnants of half-lost memories, grief over faceless deaths and nameless betrayals.

White walls.

Golden hair.

Bright eyes and champagne feathers.

A forgotten name, screamed over and over and over again, until it was swallowed by stone.

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