Page 7 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“Why did you do this to me?” she asked. “Why would you of all people do this to me? Those were my last thoughts, you know. It hurt worse than any of this.”

She gestured, weakly, to her burning body.

And there was something there, just for a moment, some shard of a memory that kicked me in the gut. Gone before I could wrap my fingers around it.

Or maybe… maybe I stopped myself before I let myself remember.

I looked away.

“You’re not real,” I muttered.

“Yes, I am.”

“Nothing in this place is real. You’re just another nightmare.”

The stench of burning flesh now seared my nostrils. I forced my eyes back to the ground. As I suspected, the marks I had etched into it minutes ago were now gone.

Oh well.

I started again—always, the same three shapes, again, again, again.

Still, out of the corner of my eye, I could see the markings on Ilyzath’s walls shifting, as if all to orient themselves towards me.

Ah, you think this is a nightmare?

It wasn’t quite a voice. Ilyzath spoke in a million blended inconsequential sounds, creaks and wind and groans of stone bleeding into something like words.

I didn’t answer. Sure, I’d talk to my hallucinations, but I generally tried not to speak to the prison itself. A man had to draw a line somewhere.

What makes you think, Maxantarius, that nightmares are not real? Perhaps it is all real, and that is the greatest nightmare of all.

My jaw tightened, and my hand paused its familiar path. I wouldn’t admit it—not even silently to myself—but that thought struck a nerve.

There was, after all, so much I didn’t know about my own past.

The time before I came to Ilyzath was a blur, like a hundred colors of paint all running together in the same soupy sewer water. Every so often I’d grasp glimpses of images, memories, sensations—sometimes the smell of flowers and a certain shade of green were seared into my head, vivid enough to almost lead me to the memories they kept, always just out of reach. Sometimes they were darker, ash and moans and the feel of my hands around blood-slicked, unforgiving metal. Burning and burning and burning.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

Only a nightmare, Max. Pull yourself together.

The burning girl was still standing there.

I would not look.

“Max—” she said again, but then the sound of grinding stone cut her short.

All at once, the shadows and the glow of the fire disappeared. I looked up to see that a door had opened in my cell, two eyeless, black-clad soldiers standing there, spears in hand.

“Get up,” the blond one said. “The Queen needs to see you again.”

I was already rising to my feet. Honestly, I’d take the Queen’s torture over Ilyzath’s any day.

And today, at least, I had a plan.

* * *

Things had gotten worse.

---