Page 50 of Children of Fallen Gods

All of them drowning in white and white and white.

Andpain.

When I came back to myself, I was on the floor. Shaking. Sweating. The cold cloth was pressed to my forehead.

“Idiot,” Nura muttered. “Was it worth it? All this to show off out there?”

Funny, how in the depths of agony, you find the most clarity.

If you were standing in my place, would you agree?Zeryth had asked me.You, a slave girl? How would you make them respect you?

Maybe Esmaris had been right. It was not enough to live like a human and die like one. I had to carve myself into their whispers.

Today, they had looked at me not like a slave, not like a woman, but like a god.

“Was it worth it?” Nura asked, as I sagged over the basin. An ugly smile lurched at my lips.

“Yes,” I choked out. “Yes, it was.”

I faded off again after that, reality melding with dreams in a grey smear of darkness. And perhaps I dreamed that, some time later, my eyes fluttered open under the control of another. Perhaps I dreamed that I rolled over to see Nura still in my room, reading, a glass of wine in her hand.

“You,” my voice creaked out.

Nura’s gaze slipped to me, growing colder. She set her wine glass down. “Hello, Reshaye.”

A smirk spasmed across my lips. “Are you not afraid to be here alone with me?”

“If you were going to kill me, you would have done it by now.”

“And yet, I have seen your fear. I know how deep it runs.”

The memories were shards of glass. Nura, her face contorted in hatred, falling to the ground for the fiftieth time. Nura, spilling her blood over an open, lifeless arm, in a room of white and white and white.

Nura, fighting again, and again, and again.

And now Nura, her face doused in moonlight, giving me a slow, cold smile.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But I hate you more than I fear you. And my hate is always stronger.”

“Hate.” I rolled the word over my tongue. My hand pressed to my chest. “She hates you too. She hates you almost as much as I do.”

“I would expect nothing less.”

Slowly, she stood and drew closer to me.

“Why her?” she whispered, at last. “Why did you choose her, when you rejected so many others?”

I let out a low chuckle.

“You envy her.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. And not because she has your former lover, but because she hasme. And where would I have lived, in that mind of yours? Did you think that you would lock me in your palace of ice and steel, like everything else you fear?” I sat up, even though my muscles screamed. And I leaned close to her, so close our noses almost touched. “You did not truly want me, because I would have seen everything in you.”

Nura’s face went hard. Her eyes glinted in the darkness like two shards of metal.

“We are not done with each other yet, Reshaye. We can fester in our hatred and let it make us strong, or stupid, or both. And make no mistake, I do hate you. I hate you more than I have ever hated anything.” She pulled away and went to the window, gazing out over the mountains. “But you and I know that there is something else coming. And our paths are still tangled.”

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