Page 240 of Children of Fallen Gods

{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 it pressed to my temple, his magic surged further into my mind.

The pain was unbearable. So intense I could barely breathe.

And in that moment, several worlds collided. Suddenly I was no longer in the Scar, looking into Max’s familiar and unfamiliar face. I was looking, too, into a face I had never seen before, a man with dark copper hair and moss-green eyes, and pointed ears peeking through the wave of his hair.

And I was looking up, at a starry sky that I recognized as the world beneath this one, the deepest level of magic. I was looking at all the bleeding threads of magic that connected us — me, Max, Reshaye. And so many more streaks, a hundred more, tethered to this — thisthingthat held Max.

{Why do you call me that?}Reshaye whispered.

I saw Max. But I also saw this man who stood behind him, thousands of miles away and yet alsohere, his presence floating up from beneath the surface of magic like blood into water. “Aefe,” he whispered. “That is your name.”

{I do not know that name.}

A flicker of sadness. A strangely human emotion.Yes, you do.

The betrayal. Blond hair flowing in the wind.

Golden grass beneath my fingertips.

The warmth of an embrace, the scent of skin. The feeling of safety.

You do know, Aefe.

Aefe. The feeling of hatred — hating the way he said that name. Hating it and loving it. Knowing this person. Trusting them. Mourning them. Perhaps loving them.

You just do not remember.

Tenderness shifted to ice-cold. The threads of magic linking us went dark and malevolent. The copper-haired man’s face hardened in anger.

You do not remember because of all they did to you. But I have come to take you home.

{I have no home,}Reshaye whispered, but the words were barely formed before Max’s hands were at the sides of my face — an ugly mimicry of our goodbye — and the pain split me in two.

As he set to work ripping Reshaye from my mind.

---