Page 201 of Children of Fallen Gods

I wasn’t expecting her to look like this.

I had fought alongside Nura for years, but I had never seen her this way. Yes, there was the blood and the dirt. But her disheveled appearance wasn’t nearly as disconcerting as the half-panicked look on her face.

She closed the door and sagged against it.

“Ascended fucking above,” she muttered, pressing her palm to her eye. “I thought that you two were… Do you know how long I searched?”

“Nura, whathappened?” I asked, and Nura snorted.

“What happened? I just came fromyourhouse. Or whatever’s left of it.”

Whatever’s left of it.That statement kicked me in the gut.

“So you saw them,” Tisaanah said, quietly. “The…creatures.”

“They killed eight Syrizen.”

I cursed beneath my breath. I’d been in battles of thousands that hadn’t managed to take out that many Syrizen in one swoop.

Nura didn’t meet my gaze. Instead, her eyes kept going far away, as if shuffling through scenarios only she could see. She looked terrified. Hell, she wastrembling.

A realization fell into place. This wasn’t shock. This was worse than shock. This was abjecthorror, the horror of someone who knew exactly what they were facing, and how bad it was.

“You know something,” I murmured. “What is it, Nura?”

Her gaze flicked to me. For just a moment, I saw something there that I hadn’t seen in Nura’s eyes for nearly ten years — raw fear, the kind of vulnerability that she had spent so long trying to shield carefully from the world.

She swallowed.

“I need to show you something,” she said.

* * *

I didn’t even knowthe Towers went this deep below ground. Nura brought us down past the entry floor, down even beneath the lowest levels used for storage. Yet when the platform finally came to a stop, the hallway before us didn’t look like an underground basement. It was white and clean and silver-adorned, just like the other hallways in the Tower of Midnight, brightly lit even though there were no windows.

Nura did not speak as we walked. She led us down the hall, past a number of closed heavy doors, until we reached the very end. She opened the final door, and ushered us into what appeared to be a study. The shelves were crowded, lined with books that at a glance appeared to be even older than the tomes in the Towers’ libraries. There were tables strewn about the room, one covered in books, one covered in scribbled notes, another holding many glass jars and vials of various substances.

“Old friends!” a rough voice wheezed behind us.

I tensed. Ascended fucking above. It couldn’t be.

I turned, and immediately cursed.

“What ishedoing here?”

Vardir, who sat at one of the messy tables — here, in the Towers, and very muchnotrotting his life away in Ilyzath — grinned at me.

“How fate would see it! For us to meet again so soon.” His wild eyes fell to Tisaanah, and the grin widened, veins popping up beneath the paper-thin skin of his neck. “And with such interesting company. I haven’t been so invigorated in—”

“Vardir,” Nura said, curtly, “leave us.”

“Leave? So soon? But we have so much to—”

“I can send you to your room or I can send you back to Ilyzath. Your choice.Go.”

Vardir scowled, but begrudgingly rose. I glared at Nura, who went to one of the other desks on the opposite side of the room, her back to us.

“What is he doing here?” I said again.

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