A short sketch of the scene in chapter 80 of ACOWAR where Feyre gives her speech, told from Tamlin’s POV:
He felt heat up and down his skin, flooding his face. He sat still, apart from the others. And earned a momentary glance from Feyre before she continued on, a sea of black leather at her side. Lucien wrapped up in it, too. The transformation had happened. In the chrysalis of his house, the petals had finally fallen, the fruits grown ripe, it was close to harvest now. What was sown would be reaped. He understood this. Poisonous flowers, carnivorous flowers, luring one in, and then stuck inside, devoured within.
He hadn’t bothered trying to heal himself. Lucien could have done it. But he wanted the scars, the bandages, the blood. The final thing he had been able to do, with what he was. He could imagine himself human, rest, and poultices reapplied, and seeing the wound, and how reassuring it was to see it, the proof of it. And how it healed, slowly. That was reassuring too, the time it took. Healing took time, wounds sometimes never healed at all.
This house had been hers, he had bought it for her. He wondered why she had chosen it, wrecked and ruined as it was.
He supposed that was the reason.
She looked now with love, and joy, at her mate, who looked back on her with pride, and the same. And a certain smugness he knew he was not imagining. All of them.
Everything he touched turned to this. Blossoms opened but briefly, and quickly withered, or blew on the breeze. Spring was ephemeral, really. It was never meant to last.
She beamed. She was beaming. The sadness in her voice, the discomfort scattered on the wind as she spoke of seeing Velaris for the first time. He wondered if he had ever seen it, when he was young, before everything started. And if Rhysand had erased it from his mind. He would never go there now. It was pointless.
The speeches went on for hours. One after the other, telling their stories, human and fae and half-fae. So many he had never seen, would never know. Animated, and ecstatic, and sorrowful, and angry, all of it, everything he loved—and he remembered, when she looked at him like that. Wildly and deeply and all at once. Such joy in her, she had not tried to hide it when it came. There had been no deceit in her then.
He could still feel the mask, he figured he always would. The shadow of it, how it covered him. His face unchanged, unmoving, beneath. He knew how to be still. He was very still, now. The tension before had been too much, he had held himself in for too long, and he had forgotten, he had forgotten himself. All of his selves had exploded out, the manor, the entire world exploded around him, wrecked, and ruined, like this. A final remnant of what had been, before. But he remembered, and he was still now. Very still.
Talk now of the wall. He crossed his arms when they looked to him, it was his court, his land, after all. What did it matter, if there was a wall, or not. He would be the wall. He would keep everyone out, by himself. He had already been doing such a good job of driving people away.
An echo, through his empty head, of Lucien’s laughter through the halls, purifying them, and oh, how much life he had brought to it. How much Feyre had. Never from him. Never from himself. He took it from them, saw the joy leach out over weeks, over centuries, until he had used them up, and only the rotted heart was left. This husk, this shell of a person. Sloughed off, and discarded. Adorned in stars, in moonlight.
Their wings on the wall. In his haste, his father hadn’t even bothered to clean them. And the smell of them, when they burned.
He would burn himself. Everything he had ever been, and tried to be. One layer after another off of him.
The long speeches were over. Everyone stood up, mingled, talked, shook hands. It should have been a triumphant moment. It was. For her, for everyone. The first bit of progress, after 500 years of stasis. It was not a part of him though, it was far from him, he had long since shed that self. And all he could see, as the remaining six High Lords spoke, and shook hands, were talons, and claws, and wings, mouths extended into canine jaws, he could feel the tickling underneath. Masks and leather and smooth skin to cover it up. All manner of dressing.
This was who the humans were shaking hands with, were trusting. Cat’s eyes and fox’s tongue and serpent’s tail. The truth of it on the battlefield. Beasts, all of them.
He would transform, become snake and caterpillar and bird. Cocoon, and molt, and shed. Everything that he had built up over 500 years. Layer after layer.
Friend. Soldier. Son. Brother. Lover. Fae. High lord.
All of them, all the way back, to what his becoming High Lord had revealed.
He remained standing a moment more, then turned, and, without a word, lost amidst the crowd, disappeared into the night. And felt them leaving him. What a weight lifted. To stop pretending. To be anything else but a beast.
For @tamlinweek2023 Day 1: Beasts
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