Page 141 of Mother of Death and Dawn

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere.

My breath caught. No. This wasn’t real. That voice didn’t exist anymore. Reshaye, at least as it had once existed, was gone.

{Is anything ever really gone?}

“Yes.” I said it out loud because I wanted to hear my own voice. It sounded flat and empty.

A low laugh. A different voice.What a naïve response, coming from someone who bears so many marks of her past.

I felt hands on my back, my scars. I drew in a gasp and lurched away, my eyes searching desperately and finding nothing but endless black. I heard no movement in the surrounding water.

I questioned my sanity.

“Who are you?”

You don’t recognize me?

Now, the voice of a young girl, perhaps of ten or twelve, speaking Thereni so close to my ear that I should have been able to feel her breath.

Despite myself, panic was building.

Do not be afraid.

Esmaris. That was Esmaris’s voice, unfurling through the darkness like smoke. The sound of it paralyzed me with fear against my will. I was thirteen years old again.

Why are you frightened?he whispered, and the most terrifying thing is that he sounded so genuinely tender—I had forgotten that he had sounded that way, sometimes.I am the one that used to rock you back to sleep at night. I gave you so many of your best days.

It was the truth. Esmaris had been my oppressor, but he had also been my lover, my father. All roles that should never have been so sickeningly combined.

“You’re dead,” I whispered.

I’m dead?Esmaris laughed, the way that he often did when I had done something silly and charming.So innocent. I can never die. By marking you, I will live forever.

His hands caressed my back—after all this time, I still knew exactly what they felt like, right down to the placement of their callouses.

Think, Tisaanah,I told myself.This is not real. Where are you? You are standing in water, in Niraja. You are going to find the Lejara here. This is deep, powerful, nonsensical magic. You are half in another world.

“Stop,” I commanded.

The hands disappeared.

Silence. I steadied myself in the beat of my pounding heart. I touched my own face to remind myself of my physical presence.

My name is Tisaanah Vytezic. I am in the city of Niraja. I am here to reach the Lejara. I am here because my people need me.

I rooted myself in this purpose.

I looked up. Above me, two realities blended together. One was the ruins, the arches and marble soaring above me—the physical world. But superimposed over it was what looked like a starry night sky, violet streaks slashing across it.

I was in two places. My body, in the ruins. And my mind, which had been pulled far into the fathomless layers of magic.

I had to be close to the Lejara, to have been pulled in this deeply without realizing it. But I still didn’t know what I was looking for, let alone how to use it. Was it… a consciousness, as Reshaye had been?

“What are you?” I asked.

You don’t know yet?Max’s breath was warm against the shell of my ear. The ghost of his embrace enveloped me, only to disintegrate into the stagnant air.

Not real,I told myself.

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