Page 113 of Children of Fallen Gods

“What?” I asked. “What are you looking at?”

No answer.

“Max—”

He turned away, pale. “Let’s just get out of here.”

I could have sworn I heard a voiceless whisper:

Stay.

{Go,}Reshaye whispered.{Faster.}

We rushed around another corner, and I stumbled to a sudden stop.

There was a figure standing before us — a woman with wild black hair and eyes that looked like home.

“Tisaanah,” she called to me, her hand outstretched. “Tisaanah, my love. My sweet daughter, my strong daughter. I missed you so much.”

I could not make myself move.

This is not right, a small part of me whispered, far in the back of my mind.

And yet, everything else within me pulled to her. I could even smell her — salt and jasmine. The scent of childhood safety.

“It’s not real, Tisaanah.” Max’s hand clasped mine, holding me back. “Whatever you’re seeing. It’s not real.”

“I have missed you so much,” she breathed, tears streaking her cheeks. “I called for you so many times. But you never came.”

I blinked, and her face was bloody, her outstretched hands decaying. “I died alone in the dark, and you never—”

“It’s not real, Tisaanah.” Max grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and after a stumble, I was running again.

Go back,a voice seemed to whisper.Don’t abandon her again.It echoed with her pleas, fading behind me: “Please, Tisaanah, please, help me, come back…”

“That’s what this place does,” Max muttered. “It feeds on you. Don’t stop, no matter what it shows you.”

My mother was only the beginning. I saw Max, chained and bloody, marred by decay that I immediately recognized as my own magic. I saw Serel, starving and emaciated, collapsed under the tear of countless lashes. Sammerin, Moth. The Threllian refugees. Always the same:Help me, help me.

Max, too, lurched to a stop several times, growing paler and quieter each time. I could only imagine what he saw. Once, I needed to hold him back from turning around, dragging him around the corner until he regained his senses enough to push forward.

By the time we got to the entrance, it was so dark that I struggled to see. The door was bigger than I remembered it, tall and narrow and black. The symbols on it glinted through the shadows, despite there being no light to reflect.

Max put his hand on the door.

It did not move.

The symbols were rearranging, like bugs crawling towards a carcass, collecting around us.

I pushed the door, too.

“Let us out,” I murmured in Thereni, as if to plead with Ilyzath herself. “We do not belong here.”

You do not?

The whisper surrounded us.

“Alright, Ilyzath,” Max muttered. “We’re appropriately fucking impressed with you. Now let us go.”

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