Chapter Text
“I need you to check on Eris for me.”
Rhysand’s voice had that almost bored quality to it that he always put on when he wanted you to think that he didn’t care about something, but it didn’t fool Azriel.
Keeping his own equally monotone, he grunted, “Why.”
Slowly swirling the amber liquid in his thick crystal glass, Rhys appeared to be contemplating his response. Azriel almost rolled his eyes at his brother’s theatrics, wishing he would just get to the point. However, a not so small part of him didn’t want to press on; didn’t want to appear as though he cared.
“Because,” Rhys answered with a crooked smile, “he missed a meeting in the Hewn City yesterday, and he has yet to give a reason why.”
Azriel didn’t let himself react – kept his face as bored as his brother’s voice.
“So,” the High Lord continued silkily, “I need you to find out if he’s ignoring us on purpose, or if his father has found out about his… scheming tendencies.”
If Azriel’s pulse jumped at the thought, it was lost behind an impenetrable wall of shadows. Even with his family he kept his guard up, kept his reactions in check and hidden. It wasn’t really on purpose, but after 500 years of embarrassing yearning he had fruitlessly tried to keep from them, it happened without a second thought.
“Are you sure he isn’t just playing hard to get,” Azriel intoned. He crossed his arms in what he decided was a casual gesture. “Making pretend that he’s too busy and important.”
A look of amusement in Rhysand’s eyes, he cocked his head.
“Even so, we should pay him a visit to remind him of his promises to this court.”
“And if he’s unreachable?”
“Then you find a way to reach him, Az.”
“I mean,” Azriel pressed, his stomach clenching even as he uttered the words, “if he’s unreachable because Beron has put a stopper to his scheming once and for all.”
Rhys raised his eyebrows and leaned back in his chair. “Do you really think we wouldn’t know if Eris was dead? That you wouldn’t know?”
One side of Azriel’s upper lip lifted slightly, exposing his teeth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That you’re spymaster, of course,” Rhysand answered easily. “What else could it mean?”
Azriel snorted. His shadows swirled around him in a motion reminiscent of the contents in his brother’s glass, only quicker, more restless. Rhysand didn’t seem to notice, only studying Azriel’s face as if it was a riddle. It made him agitated.
“Why the hell should I care about Eris Vanserra?”
…
Why the hell should he care about Eris Vanserra?
Azriel didn’t have an answer, only an anxious beating in his chest that had silently rejoiced at an opportunity to go to Autumn. He had, of course, noted Eris’s absence from the meeting, knowing full well that he was supposed to have been there. If it wasn’t so far below him to play fetch-the-redhead, he would have gone straight to the Forest House to get him – but that would have implied that he cared, which he obviously didn’t. No, Azriel was merely annoyed at the princeling’s inability to keep appointments. That was all.
At least that was what he was telling himself as he walked resolutely out of Rhysand’s office, vaguely thinking that he had to prove to both himself and Rhys that he wasn’t in such a rush to get to Autumn that he needed to shadow walk right as the conversation ended. Besides, he should think through his steps. He couldn’t just barge into the Forest House without a plan.
Though the Vanserra brat would probably just be lounging on his bed as Azriel entered the room, an indifferent smirk on his full lips as he asked Azriel whatever he could possibly want with him, there was also the possibility that he was nowhere to be found. And both scenarios required a well-thought-out strategy – or as thought out as it could get until Azriel reached the front door, his boot-clad feet hitting the hardwood in an increasingly faster pattern the further he got from Rhysand’s knowing half-smile.
If it turned out to be the former scenario, there were several things to consider, but the most pressing one would honestly be to find ways to conduct himself that wouldn’t make him look stupid. He could see Eris for his mind’s eye: vibrant and expensive fabrics covering long, elegant limbs sprawled out casually on the covers as the male lifted an auburn brow, as if questioning Azriel’s whole existence without uttering a single sound. There was just something about the cunning male that rendered Azriel strangely affected, with his thoughts in a clumsy disarray that made every word sound dumb.
Eris always bested him, and it frustrated him to no end. The male was able to sharpen his words into weapons, while Azriel’s arsenal was solely physical. Besides throwing the princeling down onto the floor, scarred hands wrapping around his neck to stop the pretty syllables from flowing, there was little Azriel could do to halt that oral armory. He had tried that strategy before, and the only thing it gave him was a few seconds of reprieve from the painfully effective bombardment, as well as a confusing feeling of heat in his blood that he couldn’t completely blame on his anger.
The memory of Eris’s scent – brown sugar, spiced whiskey and the alluringly familiar smoke of bonfires – was so strong it almost felt corporeal when Azriel finally reached the front door, practically ripping it open, the final click of the handle still resounding as he wrapped himself in the soothing darkness of shadows.
He could have landed in Eris’s bedroom. Mother above, he could have landed on top of his desk if he so wished, cluttering immaculate piles of awfully important papers, but for some reason Azriel found the thought too intimate. Instead he landed in a dark corner of a hallway close to the throne room, reasoning that Eris might as well be attending a meeting, and that it would seem too eager to pop up in the middle of the male’s personal space.
His mind stuttered – too eager for what? Doing his job? The male wasn’t even physically present, and already he was making Azriel’s thoughts scramble around in an illogical mess. Safely hidden within his shadowed companions, he attempted to collect his thoughts, reminding himself of the need for a plan. Any plan. Even for the dreaded second scenario.
The end goal was to find Eris and question him about why he missed the meeting with Rhys – purely a business call. It didn’t have anything at all to do with Azriel, so there was no reason for him to mix his personal thoughts and feelings into it. Eris certainly wouldn’t. What he would do was delight in Azriel’s confusing feelings on the matter.
He had always secretly envied the Autumn heir for his tight control over outward emotion. Eris Vanserra was never affected by trivial matters, and never let his feelings run amok, causing him to act rashly. Azriel was certain the male hadn’t acted childishly even when he was a child. No – he had probably excited his mother’s womb already the perfect socialite and courtier, hair combed back and pinky outstretched. Nothing other people could say would make him act out of turn.
Azriel, on the other hand, foolishly threw males across the room just from a sentence’s worth of harsh words, ignoring laws binding all of the courts and jeopardizing the fate of the whole of Prythian in the process. They were on the opposite ends of every means of measurement for Fae: from their contrasting personalities to their backgrounds and ambition; from fair, unblemished hands made to rule, to brown, marred skin gripping bloody knives wielded under another’s command –
The creak of a door moving on ancient hinges brought Azriel out of his stupor, and he looked around sheepishly to make sure he was still concealed, knowing full well his shadows would never abandon him in a moment of need. He took a deep, steadying breath, allowing his instincts to sharpen like a hidden blade. Following an invisible, darkened path to the throne room, Azriel walked in the shadows of the Forest House, unbeknownst to the armored guards stationed on both sides of the massive oak doors. Their expressions were carefully neutral, that of thoroughly trained professionals, yet unable to hide the hint of tired boredom that hours at attention inevitably led to.
The carved wood between them depicted a pattern that looked both like vines growing with wild abandon, and like flames devouring everything in their path. Though it wasn’t nearly the first time Azriel saw the patterned door, he was yet again struck by the ironic contrast of it. Where Autumn was harvesting the fruits of labour, the flames that guarded the court were the continual threat of destruction – life and death existing in careful symbiosis.
Peering into the grand hall beyond the ambiguous carvings, however, none who could wield that Cauldron-given flame were present. Azriel let his shadows investigate the space nonetheless, searching for any lead that could help him find the court’s heir. Their cacophonous voices hissed reports of many a courtier’s recent presence, of Beron and his Lady, of their younger sons – but not a whisper of the eldest of the litter. His scent was nowhere to be found where it should have been in rank with his brothers.
A stone fell into Azriel’s stomach, his mind suddenly working at high speed to figure out the reason for the discrepancy. There had been no words of Eris leaving his court, no messages of explanation.
He glanced around the hall quickly. If he had died, would the banners of the Forest House not be changed out for the powdery gray left after funeral pyres? The numerous flags were their usual pine and rust, the golden Vanserra “V” bright against the flickering flames of candles and fireplaces. Surely, Eris couldn’t be dead if there were no signs of mourning – could he?
Unless – Azriel tried to swallow against the horrible dryness constricting his throat – unless his death was not something to mourn. Unless Beron really had found out about his oldest’s plans to overthrow him, and had put a stopper to the inevitable patricide by reversing their roles. Azriel could feel his pulse rapidly quickening at the thought of Eris’s remains fluttering on the cruel Autumn winds, nothing but pale ash remaining of the vibrant life of the jeweled heir.
Desperately sending out shadows to search every corner of the house and its estate, Azriel rushed into the dark, flying unseen through hushed corridors helped by his constant companions, the dissonance of reports elevating his heart rate as more and more confirmed the heir’s absence.
Damn his pride, he should have gone to Eris’s quarters first, looking for a trace of him directly from the most likely source. Surging out from the dark behind a heavy tapestry, Azriel entered the space already drawing in a big breath through his nose, wildly chasing after that infuriating scent while his eyes scanned every corner.
The room smelled like dust and disappointment, no hint of that rich sweetness he was hunting. Azriel strode over to the massive bed, taking in the mountain of pillows at its head, the colors imitating the leaf-strewn ground outside. For a few seconds, he just stared, his hands in hard fists by his sides. He hesitated, twitching as if uncertain about whether or not he would move, before bending cautiously at the waist.
A sour taste in the back of his dry throat, Azriel took a deep whiff of the bedding, and he cursed the lurch in his stomach at the miniscule hint of aroma he found there. He picked up one of the pillows, glancing around himself even though he knew he was alone, then drew it close to his face. His nose touching the golden fabric, Azriel breathed in again. The air that pooled into his lungs was ripe with that forbidden fragrance, and a rush of relief flooded his system, even if the trace of the princeling’s aroma was older than he would have liked.
Eris hadn’t slept in his own bed for several days, maybe a whole week, and the thought alarmed him.
Before Azriel knew what he was doing, he was taking another breath, then another, his nostrils burrowing into the soft textile covering the pillow. The scent both grounded him and incensed him, the potency of it washing over him like a wave, and he felt his blood heat with a convoluted mess of emotions that he didn’t possibly have room to discover the origins of, but a foreboding sense of urgency stood out as the most prominent.
The whispering voices of his shadows suddenly grew shrill and insistent, spitting out words and sensations so quickly that Azriel had a hard time keeping track. But when he finally made out the words “ He is hurt,” closely followed by “ blood” and “ dungeons”, he felt the final straw of his rationality snap.
Vaguely aware of dropping the pillow onto the carpet, he spun around, his heart rate quickly going into overdrive and his body moving on its own accord through the murky depths of his shadows, following the voices of the most urgent ones. Thoughts were galloping recklessly through his mind, showing him gruesome scenarios of the Autumn prince beaten to a pulp and unrestrained screams coming out of his mouth more resembling a wounded animal than a court-bred heir.
The gravity of those phantom screams propelled Azriel even faster, his teeth gritting together so fiercely it hurt, the hasty beats of his pulse in his ears resembling the drums before an execution, and he dreaded the moment they would stop.
Crashing through that final invisible barrier into a dark corner of the Forest House dungeons, Azriel felt a sickening clamminess coat his skin, and the smell of rust and rot and damp earth invaded his nostrils, a nauseating sense of despair and panic permeating the atmosphere of the underground chamber. It reminded him too much of the small room he had spent his early childhood locked in, raising the hairs on his neck and drying out the back of his throat as he resisted falling into a panic of his own, the desperate adrenaline coursing through his veins the only reason he didn’t. He scanned the room quickly, eyes shooting around the space like those of a starved predator on the hunt while he drew more of that disgusting air into his lungs in search of sugar, smoke and whiskey to chase away the wrongness.
There were no windows on the stone walls of the long hallway, only a row of evenly spaced doors behind which he’d surely find all kinds of monstrosities, but as he chased past he knew that none of them held who he was hunting. The eternal flames of Autumn torches bent and and licked after him where he ran, at a full sprint now as he neared the end of the corridor. The door was left slightly ajar, and as Azriel reached it to peek into the room beyond, his stomach fell through the worn slate floor and straight into hell.
In the center of the circular room was a large fire pit that went down into the floor, a metal beam that held a cauldron with steaming contents suspended over the pit, occasionally making the fire beneath spit and hiss as the boiling drops within leapt over the edge.
Oil – meant for scalding someone made of flame. It lit a pyre for Azriel’s sanity.
On one side of the pit was a raised landing with a grand chair next to a table of gruesome instruments and a single ruby-encrusted goblet. On the other was a wooden frame taller than a fully grown male, a sunken figure suspended between the beams by leather straps holding his arms and legs out like a torn and bloodied star in this lightless hole. His head was lolling forward, making grimy, red strands obscure any other distinguishing features than the hair and strong, pale limbs grotesquely extended outwards.
He was a far cry from the pampered prince Azriel had expected to find. Still, the familiarity of those limbs, the hue of that long hair, and the remnants of a shirt so fine it could belong to no other – there was no mistaking the identity of the person hung so horridly between the beams. Azriel felt queasy with destructive wrath as he took in the abomination against nature that the room represented: of a father wishing his own child so ill he locked him in a dark cell underground, to bend him until he broke either to his will, or until he broke altogether.
Intense dread washed over him at the thought of what had already been done to ensure that break, both by the heir’s father and by the guards stationed on each side of the massive frame. The bored expressions on their faces were so infuriating that it made Azriel’s insides burn – as if being in this grotesque hell-hole didn’t mean anything. As if the broken male hanging between them didn’t matter.
Then one of them fucking yawned, stretching his arms idly and swinging them around himself to get his circulation going, and the miniscule motion in the air was all it took. Damp rot and despair was briefly interrupted by the godsdamned smell of Eris Vanserra, and Azriel’s eyes closed on their own accord.
Yet the ambrosia was spoiled by an unmistakable tang of blood both old and new that did not belong, and it made him see red. Feeling close to instinctual, Azriel was filled with an intense need for every threat against Eris to be obliterated from the surface of the earth, and for every trace of wrongdoing to be rewarded tenfold and doled out personally by the shadowsinger himself.
He didn’t realize he had acted before he heard the yawning guard cry out in alarm at the sudden dark presence right in front of him. That surprised cry was the last sound he uttered in this reality, the snarl on the feared shadowsinger’s face his parting sight as the torture master set to work.
Truth-teller in hand, Azriel stabbed the guard in the stomach and yanked the blade resolutely up while frenzied shadows restrained the body in bone-crushing binds. He used his other hand to grab the male by the hair and pull until hair and skin came loose with a wet rip, breaking the sentry like one he had been guarding. Then Azriel brought the knife to the male’s neck and slashed a deep line from ear to ear before dropping his body with a soft thud, already rounding on the other guard. In the few seconds Azriel had used to discard his companion, the male had barely registered what was happening, merely raising his sword feebly in anticipation of what was to come.
Swiftly cloaking himself in darkness, Azriel reappeared behind the male, furiously stabbing and twisting while shadows strangled the cries in his throat. When their master wrangled his blade out of their victim’s ruined back, it was painted as deeply red as their bloodlust. A feral growl rumbling in his throat, Azriel placed a large hand on each side of the male’s head and twisted sharply, the loud crack resembling an exaggerated pop of flames in the pit below.
Snapping his gaze towards the wooden frame, Azriel found the shadows already working on the restraints, their sharp voices overlapping each other urgently. He rushed over, readying to catch the lank body, when a piercing pain radiated out of his shoulder blade, sending a chill so deep throughout his body that his power felt frozen in his veins. Distant shouts of several men reached his pounding ears, and Azriel turned partially to see the source of the closest one being overtaken by furious dark swirls just as he aimed a second arrow towards them. The jagged hisses of his shadows turned into fervent cries as the last of the leather straps finally fell away, and the Autumn prince landed roughly in the shadowsinger’s arms.
Wrapping them in darkness felt like moving through molasses, and the hasty screams of shadows reached a new pitch, urging Azriel to hurry and go faster and save him, until the voices abruptly stopped, and the thick syrup was replaced by utter nothingness as Azriel felt himself fall through the ether.