Page 279 of Mother of Death and Dawn

I answered the only way I knew how. “Death.”

“I do not— It does not feel—”

Her breathing was rapid. She pressed her hand to her chest, squeezed her eyes shut, then looked to me abruptly.

“It would kill you. Why would you go down there?”

Funny. She was confused about that as Reshaye, too, the day she gave her life for mine.

I clutched my abdomen.Dripdripdripdripdripdrip. Now my blood and Max’s both drained to the water, tinting the black around us red.

“Because if he does this, it will end so much more, Aefe,” I said, softly. “It will end everything.”

She turned to the door again. She looked so torn—like she wanted to run there, but something was holding her back. Every expression on her face was so loud, every emotion so vivid. She turned sharply back to me.

“I do not understand,” she choked out. “I have never understood.”

I didn’t know why I did this. Perhaps it was just because there was nothing else I could do. But I reached out my mind towards hers, opened myself to her emotions and thoughts.

I had to brace myself against the force of them. Gods, it was— it was just somuch. An explosion of hurt and betrayal, five hundred years of it. The rage at everyone who had damaged her. The bitter agony of grief. The terror of powerlessness.

I dug deeper. And there, at the core of it all, was something I did not expect to ever find in Reshaye’s heart—love.

She had experienced so much pain. But this love was the greatest torment of all.

My brow furrowed. “You want to save him.”

“Do not tell me what I want,” she hissed.

“Why aren’t you going to him?”

“I—”

The plants around her feet lived and died faster, crumbling before they even had the chance to reach for her flesh.

She did not speak. Yet I felt her reply in my magic, too loud to remain within the boundaries of her mind.

She did not go because she was afraid. She was afraid of the truth.

“Because you know you can’t,” I whispered. “You know you can’t save him.”

The blade moved so fast I didn’t see it coming until pain bloomed over my cheek. The black knife was buried in the stone right beside my eye, Aefe’s face so close to mine that our noses brushed.

“Yes I can,” she said. “Who are you to tell me what I cannot do?”

“Someone who knows you. Someone who knows loss.”

“You knownothingabout me.”

Her emotions still rolled over me, complex and layered and yet… and yet so innocent, so simple. Gods, how had I not understood her more when she was a part of me? She was just… lost. A poor, lost heart like I had once been, ripped from world after world, belonging to nothing and everything, desperate for connection.

“This is not love, Aefe. Love is selfless. If he does this, he will be doing the same thing that they did to you. Perhaps his intentions started well. They always do. But he will destroy everything. The world is cruel, but it does not deserve that. Not mine, and not yours.”

“Yes it does,” she snarled. “Maybe letting all of it die is the only justice.”

But I saw beneath that rage. I knew that she did not believe it.

“What good is justice, if there is nobody left to witness it?”

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