Page 206 of Children of Fallen Gods

It would be an honor to let him kill her.

“That bleeding heart will get you killed one day,” she murmurs.

And then she reaches into his mind, pushing brutally hard, deep. Ripping open the door he has so carefully guarded.

Releasing the incredible, war-ending power within him.

She sees the exact moment that his eyes change, betrayal to fear to fury. She almost tells him she’s sorry. She will never know if the words escape her lips.

Because then, the fire is everywhere, and she is on the ground, seeing nothing but flames and flames and flames and death reaching out its hands for her.

* * *

Nura remembers nothing but pain.

She slips in and out of consciousness. One time, she opens her eyes and sees healers holding sheets of her own burnt skin. She can move only enough to tilt her chin down and look at herself. What she sees does not even look like a human body, just an expanse of malformed, charred flesh. She screams, but the healers put her back to sleep. If she is lucky, the darkness will be death.

She swears that she saw Max’s face, staring down at her between curtains of unconsciousness, but she reaches for him and he is gone.

* * *

Nura is still in agony,but she is awake. Yet the pain of her body is nothing compared to what rips through her when she hears what had happened to the Farliones. The family that had accepted her into their homes, who had loved her when no one else did — they were gone, and in the most heartbreaking way she could ever imagine.

Sammerin tells her softly, calmly. She says nothing until he leaves the room, and then she lets out a mangled scream through torn-up vocal cords. It echoes through the room and the hall and the Tower, until healers come rushing in to see her, and she turns her head away so they do not see the tears streaming down her face.

* * *

They giveher a wheelchair that she can use to move around until she is well enough to walk. Even that hurts horrifically, but she listens until she finds out where Max is and wheels herself to his room elsewhere in the Towers.

The sounds she hears from within make all her muscles freeze.

His voice is mangled with agony. There is crashing, as if things are being thrown or fists banged against walls. She listens as his outburst roars to a crescendo and then collapses into muffled silence.

Her own tears are falling down her cheeks, silently. One hand is pressed over her mouth, her eyes squeezed shut.

All of this is her fault.

She wants to be with him. She wants to hold him until the world goes quiet, wants to comfort him, to grieve with him. She wants to fall to her knees and beg for his forgiveness. She wants to carve out her heart and thrust it into his hands —I know this isn’t much, but here it is, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for destroying the best things in both our lives.

But she cannot move.

She isn’t sure how long it has been when the door opens and Sammerin steps out. He gives her a cold stare.

“Are you going in?”

She takes a long time to answer. But finally she says, “No,” and has never felt like more of a coward.

Sammerin turns away. “Good,” he says, and leaves her there alone in the hall, listening to her friend weep.

* * *

The war is over.But there are still prices to be paid. Thousands died in the city of Sarlazai, whether in the initial attack or in the chaos that ensued afterwards. And Maxantarius Farlione is to be held responsible.

Nura hears of the charges against him when sitting in her room in the Towers. She is still in a wheelchair, and still helpless.

“Not his fault,” she says to Zeryth. She hates Zeryth — hates him, now, more than she has hated anyone, except perhaps for herself. “Youknow.”

Every word is hard-fought, her voice raspy.

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