Page 105 of Children of Fallen Gods

“I wish you could have known them,” I said. “I wish I was introducing you to them, instead of showing you their empty bedrooms. I wish I was showing you this house when it was a home, not a shrine to the dead. And sometimes…” I let out a breath through my teeth. “Sometimes I wish you had knownme, the way I used to be. Sometimes I wish that was the version of myself I could give you. A better version. One that wasn’t so…”

Broken.

I had thought that, when I noticed my feelings for Tisaanah beginning to change. The night I had given her the butterfly necklace, I had spent the rest of the evening trying to ignore the pleasant burn on my knuckles where they had brushed her skin. And when I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep because of this persistent, nagging fantasy that I couldn’t shake, a cold voice had echoed through my mind:Maybe once, long ago, you could have been worthy of her. Maybe before you were a collection of scars.

Tisaanah’s arm wound around mine.

“I do not think I would have liked you then,” she said, so plainly that despite myself a smile tugged at my mouth.

“I had far less crippling disillusionment then.”

“Perhaps I like your crippling disillusionment.”

The remnants of my smile faded. “It was more than that. I had a home. A family. I had… this.” I gestured to the house. “All of this ridiculous excess. I could have given all of that to you. IwishI could give all that to you.”

I looked to Tisaanah. Ascended, she was stunning, the white in her hair glowing in the silver light, her eyes a million miles deep. For a moment I could picture that idealized fantasy — the way she would have looked with them, laughing with Atraclius, chatting with my mother, collecting bugs with Kira. I could picture the way she would have painted the horrible parties here in rainbow colors.

Tisaanah gave me a sad smile.

“You could have tried,” she said, “but that world would not have wanted me, Max. And perhaps I would not have wanted it, either.”

There it was. The truth.

I closed my eyes, and one by one, the images faded.

Because Tisaanah was a former slave, a foreigner with no name and no prospects. I so wanted to believe that my family wouldn’t have seen her that way. Maybe, as individual people, they wouldn’t have. But the roots of the life we lived ran deeper than that, choking out what didn’t belong.

And maybe Tisaanah was too damned good for all of it, anyway.

I had loved my family. I had loved my childhood. But now I turned around and looked at this beautiful house, and thought of how it was built from the riches of career warfare. For the Farliones, it was simply what we did — a game to gain honor and money and respect from other people like us.

But Tisaanah? Tisaanah knew what it was to be one of the pieces on the board. People like us reduced people like her to faceless numbers. Like she was just one of a thousand, an asset to be leveraged or sacrificed, instead of a person.

Grief and anger warred with each other deep in my chest. The conflict I’d suppressed these long weeks, the thing that festered every time I looked at Moth, bubbled up to the surface.

“I don’t know how to reconcile it,” I said. “The bad with the good. The things that I loved with the things that I hate. And there is so fucking much that I hate, now, about what we were. So many things that I didn’t see back then. But despite it, I still—”

I had to stop, abruptly, because I couldn’t say the words without breaking:I still miss them so, so much.

There was a long silence. When Tisaanah spoke, her voice was a low murmur.

“I have known so many people,” she said, “who are willing to do awful things and look away from the consequences. I have learned to live in their world and play by their rules, because I thought it was the only way. But you… you are not willing to compromise. You are not willing to sacrifice. Youdemandbetter. When I met you, I had never known anyone like that before.”

Her hand slid into mine.

“You told me once that the world would be simpler if people were all one thing. But we will never live in a world that easy. Your family is a part of you. Of course you will love them. Of course you will miss them. And… of course you will want to make a better world than they did. You will build upon what they gave you. You will draw from their strengths and confront their mistakes. You will make something better, because that is what you do. You dream, Max. And Ilovethat in you.”

Her words dug deep, brushing everything I buried — the old wounds of my family’s deaths, and the fresh ones from these last awful weeks. Brushing everything that smothered me when I would lie alone at night, wondering if any of it would ever beworthanything.

And yet, she made it so easy to believe her. As if her conviction was strong enough to breathe life into everything I dismissed as impossible.

My vision blurred.

In one abrupt movement, I pulled her into an embrace, clutching her with my face buried in her hair. I couldn’t speak, even though I wished I could. I wished I could weave words beautiful enough to capture this — the way that she made the past and the future seem, somehow, reconcilable.

She didn’t pull away, and I was grateful, because I wasn’t ready to let go. Perhaps I never would be.

I had always lived my life with one foot in the past, while Tisaanah relentlessly charged to the future. It was only here, when we were together, that we collided. It was only here that we stood still.

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