Page 30 of Children of Fallen Gods

Not sadness. More like…

What was it? I let it see the memory of leaving Serel behind, the way that I had craved his company in the minutes since. The still-seeping wound of the loss of my mother, even though that had been so many years that my memory lost the details of her features.

{Grief,}Reshaye murmured.

I was surprised, that it understood grief.I suppose it is grief, in a way. To mourn an absence of someone.

{I felt that for Maxantarius. Before you came.}

I suppressed my revulsion. I wanted to say,What right did you have to mourn him, to miss him? After everything you did to him?But I carefully hid those thoughts, tucked away beneath a shroud, far away from Reshaye’s reach.

Instead I asked,What about before that?

{There is nothing before that.}

What about the other people who carried you?

{Before Maxantarius, there was only white and white and white. There were others. But now, they are nothing more than shattered windows into other lives.}

The smell of the sea. A woman peering into a mirror, drawing copper hair back from her face. The taste of raspberries.

And before?

{Before what?}

Before you were with others. Is this what you always were?

Silence. A mournful emptiness.{I do not think so,}it whispered.{Perhaps once I was something. But I do not remember what. And maybe I have never been anything but the discarded remains of others.}

Hands through the fields. Again and again. Gold beneath the sun. A sheet of glossy black, and a reflection within it with a face that would never come into focus, no matter how Reshaye clawed at the memory.

It felt almost… human. That sadness.

What do you want, Reshaye?

It seemed silly, now, that it had taken me so long to ask. Perhaps I thought I knew what Reshaye wanted — love, or its dark, twisted version of it. Unyielding loyalty, with no demands.

There was a long pause. I felt it grapple with this question.

{I want a story.}

A story?

{A story is the thing that proves something existed between life and death. I have lingered in-between for so long. I want…}It groped for the right word, reaching and failing.{I want something that is real. And I want life, or death, but not this nothingness between.}

I blinked back my surprise. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but it wasn’t for Reshaye to wish for death. But then, wouldn’t I, if I lived as it did?

We have work to do, I murmured.We will need to show them all what we’re capable of. And we will need to do it very carefully. But if you help me, Reshaye, I will find a way to give you a story. And I will find a way to give you death.

{Why should I listen to you? You have betrayed me many times.}

In the sparring ring. Max’s hands on my body. The way I had shut it out in the Mikov estate.

I cannot prove my truth to you. You will just have to trust me.

{Trust,}Reshaye spat, with an ugly laugh.{How humans treasure such things. To believe in something without reason.}

Or you will fight me, and I will win. Just as I won when we were in Threll.

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