Imagine reading “no matter how much she claimed to be part of this court it sucked the life from her” and still believing that Elain will permanently stay in the night court to plant flowers, bake and fuck Azriel for the rest of her life.
When Rhysand’s mother decided his future wife must be able to escape the clutches of a death god in order to prove her love for her son, Rhysand straight up surrendered Feyre to the Weaver. He sent his mate to a trap no other fae ever survived solely to satisfy his dead mother and his own ego.
When Tamlin had to make a woman profess her love for him in order to save all of Prythian at the risk of her getting harmed, he sent Feyre home.
Tarquin's face didn't so much as shift from cold wrath. "When you went into the Spring Court and deceived Tamlin as well about your true nature, when you destroyed his territory ... You left the door open for Hybern. They had docked in his harbors." No doubt to wait for the wall to collapse and sail south. Tarquin snarled, "It was an easy trip to my doorstep. You did this."
ACOWAR, chapter 38
Tarquin, being an absolute King and calling out Feyre's petty war criminal behavior.
For Elain supposedly being sweet and kind, she sure rage-baited Nesta and then turned around and victimized herself.
First of all, Elain had no right to just show up in the HoW without Nesta's consent.
Then she started off their conversation with, "Are you enjoying your time up here?" Nesta's not on a vacation, Elain. She's locked up in a cage. Elain is so dense. Could you imagine if someone had asked Feyre if she enjoyed her time in the Spring Court manor after she had been locked up? Feyre probably would have punched said person in their face.
Nesta, justifiably, responds with, "I don't have any choice but to be here, so I don't see how I could be enjoying myself." Nesta calmly expressed to Elain how she was feeling about receiving the Tamlin Treatment.
Elain continued to rage-bait Nesta with, "I know the circumstances for your coming here were awful, Nesta, but it doesn't mean you need to be so miserable about it." Nesta wasn't being miserable. She simply stated her feelings, and Elain decided to make it all about her. If anything, Elain was being the miserable and insufferable one.
Elain then proceeded to act like she's better than Nesta because she handled her trauma differently.
Nesta, once again, opened up about how Elain, Feyre, and Rhys had hurt her feelings. "For packing my things while Rhysand and Feyre told me I'm a worthless pile of shit? Yes."
Then Elain, once again, makes Nesta's feelings and Nesta's imprisonment all about her: "Feyre warned me this might happen." Yet another rage-baiting line on Elain's part. This should have been Elain's opportunity to tell Nesta that they loved her and were trying to help her, but no, she made Nesta's feelings all about her rather than re-affirming to Nesta that they love her. If the takeaway message from an intervention is that the person feels ganged up on and feels like everyone thinks they're a worthless pile of shit, then the intervention was a complete failure. Elain doesn't even apologize or own up to it and instead places the blame on Nesta.
And then Elain's parting rage-bait: "Cassian said he thought the training was helping." It's been two weeks. Nesta's rage isn't just going to go away overnight. She's not going to heal from twenty-five years of trauma in two weeks. Especially not when her cruel and manipulative little sister comes over for the sole purpose of baiting Nesta into a rage.
Elain left crying, trying to play the victim, but she was the aggressor. If anything, Nesta was Elain's victim. Both sisters had their feelings hurt. Just because Elain's hurt feelings show via tears and Nesta's hurt feelings show via her raging, does not make Elain's feelings more valid than Nesta's. Elain spent that entire conversation talking down to Nesta and invalidating her feelings; she had no right to leave and play the victim.
I know right! I can't help but hate Elain and her character so much. Girly pop was legit growing FLOWERS instead of food when her family was dying of starvation. Like way to go miss
More Elain hate because @flat-neines reminded me of the High Lady of Spring propaganda.
How daft someone needs to be to posture Elain as a ruler all because she likes flowers. She is portrayed as an immature woman in her twenties who couldn't even bother to worry about her little sister when she comes home from hunting covered in blood and grime, and these people think she is good enough to care for an entire kingdom? She doesn't even bat an eye when Feyre returns from Adriatta battle and is busy baking bread. She doesn't even check on Nesta who spent the entire day tending to the wounded after the battle or Feyre who ran off to catch a dangerous creature after consulting her. But yes, Elain is a nurturing figure to rule not one court but the entire Prythian.
Yes, such a self-centered person is a better fit to revive an entire court than the man who was willing to let Amarantha take him at the end of 50 years so his friends don't have to die, the man who was willing to open his court to refugees, the man who played spy risking his life for his people, the man who still allied with his enemy for the good, the man who sacrificed literally everything for the sake of others over and over again.
I really love headcanoning that the unnamed Vanserra brothers are not just evil, discardable sons of Beron - but just as complex as Eris and Lucien in their own ways with distinct relationships that they have with each of their brothers.
It would be such a disservice imo to make the other brothers invisible to the narrative by flattening them to villains that only serve the purpose of getting out of the way by the end.
They all grew up with Beron's abusive authority and their mother's gentle love. Each one of them have different pressures placed on their shoulders because of their birth order or what label was given to them at an early age. They are forced to form alliances or stab brothers in the back in the competitive pit that Beron creates in their family. They make their own way existing in a cruel, high pressure environment. Some lean into their role as the spare where others find comfort in never being considered at all.
And importantly, each of them struggles with how to love, knowing what it feels like but unable to truly hold it safely in their grasp. Unable to call anything theirs.
I think the Vanserras are a perfect opportunity to explore the ways that domestic abuse shapes a family. The way each member finds survival in their role, how violence is a language that makes victims and perpetrators of everyone involved.
Give me Vanserra brothers with depth and range. Vanserra brothers I can root for and others who I reluctantly know need to be left behind. Vanserra brothers with dreams and ambitions of their own.
So cute ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Pairing: Azriel (super minor Azriel x Reader), Az and Cassian being bros
Summary: Before meeting you, Azriel has always been the Night Court’s blade—useful, expendable, expected not to come back. In the aftermath of a brutal Illyrian raid, he ends up on the roof of the House of Wind—bloody, broken, and very close to the edge—while Cassian sits frozen on the stairs below.
A/N: follow-up scene inspired from this fic, made myself cry a bit writing this ahhh, all the love to az bby, gonna write a part 2 where az is on the roof again but reader is with him this time, lmk if you all wanna read that!! special shoutout to @caninne for their lovely rambles and inspiring this fic <3
Warnings: depictions of violence, suicidal thoughts
Part 2, Part 3
⸻
They’d cut his leathers off him on the roof.
He remembered it in jagged, stuttering pieces: the cold slap of stone under his back; the thunder of wings as Cassian and two other Illyrians half-carried, half-dropped him onto the terrace; voices, too sharp in his ringing ears.
“Madja—now—”
“Gods, Az, stay with me—”
A hand smacking his cheek. Fingers pressing against his throat, counting.
He tried to bat them away. Not out of pride—he didn’t have the strength left for pride—but because every touch hurt, and because some part of him was still in that valley, still trying to decide who to reach for first.
The upper left quadrant of his vision was just… white. Whatever had hit his head had done it well. Everything smelled like smoke and hot metal and burned hair. His right wing was a single sheet of pain; his chest, a furnace. Each breath dragged through him like broken glass.
A different voice sliced through the haze, dry as old stone. “He’s not dying on my floor. Not tonight.”
Cool hands. The rip of leather as armor straps were sliced away. Air hitting raw, mangled skin. Someone cursed softly at the state of his ribs. At the puncture along his side where the pike had gone in.
He floated in and out as they worked.
Every time consciousness snagged on him, the same images burned behind his eyes: tents half-collapsed in fire. Bodies in the mud. The small, crumpled shape near the supply wagon. The soot-streaked face that hadn’t moved when he’d shaken it. The boy with the too-wide eyes staring up at him as Azriel’s knife went in where Rhysand’s orders had pointed.
He heard his own voice once, shredded and wrong in his ears: “He was just—”
A hand fisted in his hair, tipping his head back. Something bitter shoved between his teeth.
“Sleep,” that stone voice ordered.
He tried.
His body obeyed before his mind did.
—
When he clawed his way back up, the world was smaller.
The infirmary lamp had been turned low. The sharp clatter and barked orders of earlier had settled into the soft clink of glass and the distant hum of the House. The air smelled of herbs and metal and the faint trace of his own blood.
He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling.
Bandages pinned his ribs. His wing was strapped tight to his spine in a brace that made his shoulder throb with every heartbeat. His mouth tasted like iron and tonic. Each breath scraped, but didn’t catch.
He listened to his own slow heartbeat. Thud. Thud. Stubborn, steady, indifferent to everything he’d done to it.
Alive, then.
For a certain value of the word.
—
The door to the roof creaked when he pushed it open.
Cold air hit him like a slap.
The roof spread wide and empty before him. No torches burned tonight; the House, in its strange, sentient way, seemed to understand that when he came up here like this, he wanted the dark. The parapet was a pale line ahead—the only thing between stone and sky and everything below.
Velaris lay in a bowl of shadow and starlight. The Sidra cut its curve through the city, catching moonlight in broken shards. Lanterns bobbed along distant streets. Somewhere, faint and impossibly far away, someone laughed.
A peaceful city.
The one he’d just set on fire in another shape, miles away.
He walked to the edge.
Every step tugged at the stitches in his ribs. Warm dampness spread under the bandages where he’d torn them open again. His right wing dragged slightly, feathers catching in the faint breeze.
He sat on the parapet, armor creaking. One boot on the safe side, solid on stone. The other dangling into nothing.
Soaked in blood. Armor still on.
Didn’t bother to heal himself.
Didn’t bother to change.
Just… sat.
From here, the drop seemed almost abstract. A dark throat plunging down, swallowing the base of the House and the streets and the river. The mountains beyond were a jagged silhouette, their teeth chewing up the horizon. The moon was a thin, cruel curve.
He stared at his hands.
Old blood had dried to a rust-brown crust in the seams of his gloves. It flaked when he flexed his fingers. Under the torn sleeves, his bare forearms were still stained, the smears in different shades—the dark, almost black of Illyrian; the thinner, uglier red of the child by the wagon.
He rubbed his thumb over one particular streak, where the blood had sunk deeper, like it had decided his skin was home.
He hadn’t meant for the raid to go like that.
He could see it perfectly now, each moment sharper than the last.
The boy on his knees in the mud, hands bound roughly in front of him, eyes too big and too bright. The arguments, shouted over the roar of the wind: disobedience, desertion, raiding a caravan that had borne the Night Court’s crest.
Rhys’s voice in his memory, almost gentle: If we don’t answer this, Az, we invite worse. You know what they’re capable of. You go in, you end it, you make sure the others understand what defiance costs.
A message.
He’d been the message.
He’d gone in alone.
That was how it worked. Shadows slipping through tents, blades whisper-quiet. A dozen males dead before the first body hit the ground. Efficient. Precise.
Until the alarm went up.
Until some idiot lit a signal fire and panic turned calculated violence into chaos.
He’d waded through it, trying—gods, he’d tried—to keep it to the ones who mattered. The commanders. The brutalists. The males who’d thought it clever to raid a caravan flaunting the Night Court’s sigil.
But panic didn’t listen to intention.
Someone knocked over a brazier. Canvas went up like kindling. The mountain wind snatched the flames and ran with them.
The blast had come from the left. Some desperate bastard had jammed one of the unstable charges into the fire and hoped for the best.
The world tipped, went white and roaring.
He didn’t remember hitting the ground. Didn’t remember how long he lay there, ears ringing, chest seized, the taste of copper choking him. He remembered trying to move, his hand scrabbling through mud and ash, fingers finding someone else’s hair, someone else’s shoulder.
He remembered the knife fitting into his palm like it belonged there. The way the boy had said, “Please,” like he didn’t understand that none of this had started with Azriel—that Az was just the blade at the end of someone else’s hand.
He remembered the camp commander’s face when he’d turned on him next.
He remembered tents collapsing, braziers overturning, fire ripping along canvas. The explosion. The child.
The child hadn’t been breathing.
He’d tried. He knew he had.
He’d pounded that tiny chest with fingers that wouldn’t hold steady, forced air into lungs that wouldn’t open. Shadows had tangled uselessly around his wrists, frantic, as if they could tip the scales.
By the time Cassian found him, he’d been kneeling in the sludge, shoulder pouring blood, wing at a sick angle, both hands on a limp, cooling body.
“Az,” Cassian had said—or shouted; Az couldn’t tell over the ringing. “Az, we have to go. Az—”
“We can’t leave him.” His own voice, raw and shredded. “I can’t—”
“He’s gone.” Hands closing on his shoulders, trying to haul him up. “The camp’s falling—we have to move—”
He hadn’t moved.
Someone had cursed, vicious and half-broken, and then more hands, more strength, dragging him away as the wagon behind them exploded into splinters.
He’d fought them, at first. Clawed at the mud, shadows lashing, lungs burning. But his body was done. His vision narrowed, turned gray at the edges. The last thing he saw before darkness took him was the camp, burning from the inside out.
He wondered how many of those flames he’d lit. How many ghosts he’d brought home on his skin.
The wind on the roof tasted cleaner than the air in that valley. It didn’t matter. His chest still felt full of smoke.
He pressed his fingers to his eyelids until starbursts flared behind them, trying to scrub the images out.
They didn’t go.
Duty, Rhys would say, jaw tight, eyes hard. Necessary. Strategic. They raided us first. They had to know.
Useful, another voice in him whispered; older, colder. The only word that had ever mattered in the house where he’d grown up.
He drew a breath that hurt.
He had always been good at this.
Good at slipping into places no one else could reach. Good at listening from the shadows, learning what no one meant to show him. Good at making examples.
Good at doing the things that even his brothers didn’t want to watch.
That was why he was still here.
The thought rose, sour and ugly: If you couldn’t do this—if your shadows vanished, if your knives slipped, if you lost that talent for walking into the dark and coming back with answers—what would you be to them?
What was left of Azriel, without the blade?
A brother, they would say. Family. Home. Rhys would say it with those earnest, earnest eyes. Cassian would cuff him on the shoulder and call him an idiot for asking. Mor would laugh and tell him he was being dramatic.
They believed it.
He believed they believed it.
He just didn’t know if it was true.
He’d seen the look, too many times, to pretend he hadn’t. Before missions. Before raids. Before nights like this.
That flicker in Rhys’s eyes. The moment Cassian’s hand lingered a heartbeat too long on his shoulder. The quiet that fell around the table when Azriel said, I’ll take it. The way no one ever tried very hard to say, No, let me go instead.
They loved him.
They also, somewhere deep behind all their brave smiles and plans, expected to mourn him.
Of course they did. Who else would it be? Not the High Lord. Not the General. Not the bright, golden pieces of the Night Court whose loss would tear holes in the world.
Better the blade.
Blades could be replaced.
“Fuck,” he whispered into the wind.
The word scraped out of him, thin and frayed.
His shadows shifted uneasily at his feet. They’d followed him up here in a thin black veil, pooling at his boots like spilled ink. Every time his weight rocked closer to the drop, they shied back, then crept in again, as if they could hold him here through sheer insistence.
The drop was… quiet.
Not dramatic. Not a screaming call in his blood. Just a still, blank possibility.
He imagined, for half a second, leaning forward. Letting his center of gravity slide past the point of no return. Wings strapped and useless against his back. Ribs too torn to expand enough for a rescue dive.
Wind in his hair. Stone rushing up. An impact he’d never feel.
It would be… simple. In a life where nothing was simple.
Rhys would break something. Cassian would roar and punch a wall until his hands shattered. Mor would drink until her laugh cracked. They would bury him. They would say all the things they already believed—that he’d been loyal, and strong, and more than the blade he carried.
Velaris would still shine.
The camps would still simmer.
The world would rearrange around the hole he left.
It always did.
He thought about the boy he’d been in the Illyrian camp, long before Rhysand had found him. Locked in a dark cell, listening to his own breath wheeze, counting footsteps in the hall. That boy had scraped and clawed and bitten his way toward survival with a ferocity that had surprised even him.
That boy would not understand this male sitting on a rooftop, contemplating stone and sky.
He almost laughed.
How ironic, that the more he had to live for—the city he’d helped keep safe, the brothers who genuinely loved him—the less certain he was that he belonged in the world he’d protected.
The man on this roof couldn’t see the point of continuing like this, either. Of being sharpened and used and wiped clean and sheathed, only to be dragged out again. Until there was nothing left but edge.
His chest ached with it. Not the torn ribs, not the bruised lung—something underneath. Deeper. Hollow and scraping.
A sound from behind him, soft and almost swallowed by the wind: the faint scuff of a boot on stone. Leather creaking. The shift of weight on a stair.
Azriel didn’t turn.
He didn’t need to.
He knew that beat of footsteps. That particular mix of steel and sweat and Illyrian campfire in the air.
Cassian.
Of course.
He could picture him without looking: big frame wedged onto the top step where the stairs met the roof, elbows braced on his knees, hands hanging loose between them. Bruises blooming on his face. Shirt torn along one bicep where someone’s blade had gotten lucky. Hair a mess, eyes probably bloodshot and burning.
Cassian could have gone to bed.
Could have gone to Rhys and slammed his hands on a desk and demanded to know why Az had been sent in alone. Could have gone to the training ring and punched the dummies until his knuckles split.
Instead he’d come here.
Almost here.
Azriel heard the moment he stopped.
The last two or three stairs between them stayed empty. Cassian settled there, on the threshold, a presence just below the surface of Azriel’s awareness. Not quite on the roof. Not quite gone.
Close enough to move fast.
Far enough that they didn’t have to talk.
That twisted ribbon of humor in Aziel’s chest flickered once, bitterly.
Of course. Close enough to grab him if he fell. Not close enough to ask why he wanted to sit on the edge.
They’d never been good at that.
At sitting in the dark and saying, I see you. I see where your head is. I am afraid of what you might do.
They were good at bleeding together. At laughing. At hurling insults and plates and training knives until their ribs hurt.
They were not good at this.
He stared down at Velaris until the lights blurred.
Words felt… dangerous. Fragile. If he cracked the seal on them now, he didn’t know what would pour out—the dead boy’s voice; the child’s limp limbs; the question that had lodged in him the first time Rhys had put a blade in his hand and said, I trust you to do what I can’t:
Do you love me, or do you love what I do for you?
Would you still look at me the same way if I said no?
Behind him, leather creaked as Cassian’s grip tightened on the rail.
Azriel shifted—not much. A breath’s worth of weight. A small adjustment around aching ribs. Enough that his dangling foot swung a little further out over the drop.
Cassian’s heartbeat jumped.
Az could feel the way his hand shot out into empty space, fingers flexing instinctively, as if he could catch a fall that hadn’t happened. As if he was already braced for the moment Az decided he was done.
The knowledge slid under Azriel’s skin like heat and ice together.
At least one person in this House was paying enough attention to be terrified.
He didn’t know whether that made it better or worse.
The wind gusted, tugging at his hair, at the ragged hem of his leathers. His shadows pressed tighter against him, a living, shivering blanket.
He thought about Rhys.
About the way his brother had looked when he’d given the orders. Hard. Determined. A little haunted. About the quiet line Rhys walked every day between mercy and the kind of cruelty that kept their people safe.
He thought about how easy it had been—for all of them—to let Azriel be the solution to that problem. Let the spymaster carry the weight of the necessary horrors so the High Lord could say, with a straight face, that his hands weren’t quite as dirty as they could be.
He thought about Cassian, who saw it and didn’t always stop it. Who believed in Rhys, and in the Court, and in him, too, and somehow never learned how to put a hand on Az’s chest and say, Enough. Not this time.
He thought about himself.
About this body, carved and scarred and bleeding on the edge of the world. About the way everyone flinched, just a little, when he volunteered. Not because they didn’t want him hurt—but because some part of them had already accepted that if someone had to be lost, it would be him.
If I were just a male, he thought, with no shadows, no knives, no talent for this—if I were just Azriel, with bad wings and burned hands and nothing else—would you keep me?
He didn’t know.
He would never ask.
He’d always been better at enduring than at questioning.
The thought of Rhys’s face if someone told him—if Madja came up these stairs and said, too late, he jumped—
It hit low and vicious.
Rhys, who had already lost too much. Who had built this city and this life and this fragile, glittering peace out of blood and stubbornness. Who still, sometimes, looked at Az like he couldn’t quite believe he’d stayed.
Cassian, on the stairs, would never forgive himself. For this night. For every night he’d stopped just short of the roof. For every time he’d joked instead of asked.
Mor would splinter quietly. Laugh too loudly for weeks. Drink like she could drown the space where his shadows had been.
And the Court—this House—would take that story and use it. A caution. An excuse. A whispered proof that even the strongest blade could snap if you pushed it hard enough.
If Azriel broke, finally, under the weight of being the weapon… what did that say to the ones who weren’t half as forged for it?
He could see it. In a year, in ten. Another disaster. Another choice. Cassian on some other edge, saying, If Az couldn’t bear it, why should I?
The idea slid through him like ice.
If something was going to break, let it be him.
Let it be his body, his mind, his soul, whatever the Cauldron wanted—but not like this. Not in a way that taught everyone watching that stepping over the edge was an answer.
Let him be the one who stood here and chose, over and over, to go back down the stairs instead of forward into the fall. Let him keep walking into the dark so Rhys and Feyre and Cassian and everyone else could keep pretending the night was a little less cruel than it truly was.
He didn’t think he deserved more than that.
He did think they did.
A breath in. A breath out.
His ribs screamed. His wing burned. The wound in his side pulsed with his heartbeat.
He was so godsdamned tired.
He slid his dangling foot back over the parapet until it found stone.
On the stairs, Cassian’s exhale was a shaky, audible rush.
Azriel ignored it.
He stayed where he was for a while longer, letting the worst of the impulse ebb like a receding tide. The emptiness didn’t go. The self-loathing didn’t fade. But the razor edge of it dulled to a quieter ache.
When he finally pushed himself off the parapet, his fingers left red smears on the stone.
His vision tunneled; the world went gray and narrow. He braced a hand on the wall until it passed.
He stood facing the mountains, swaying a little. The horizon was paling by degrees. Early dawn had drawn a thin, colorless line along the teeth of rock. Lamps flicked on in Velaris below, the first bakers, the first early risers.
The city didn’t know.
It didn’t care.
It just kept breathing.
He didn’t feel hopeful.
He felt like the shell of a weapon someone had forgotten to put away.
But some stupid, battered piece of him—the one that had kept drawing breath in that cellar, the one that had clawed through mud for a child he’d already known was gone—refused to give this night the final word.
If he was going to die, it would not be here because he was tired.
It would not be easy.
It would not be something they could point to and say, See? Even he couldn’t keep carrying this.
He turned away from the view.
He didn’t look at the stairwell as he walked past it.
Cassian was there, a broad, solid weight in his peripheral sense—slumped on the step, fingers still clenched white-knuckled around the rail. Az caught the edge of his scent as he passed: smoke and sweat and fear sharpened into something raw.
They didn’t speak.
They didn’t reach out.
The door into the House shut behind Azriel with a soft, final click.
His shadows slipped through after him, one by one, their edges brushing Cassian’s boots like chastened cats before vanishing into the dim corridor.
On the stairs, Cassian stayed where he was.
His hands hurt.
He stared at the place on the parapet where Azriel had been, at the dark, drying smear his brother’s blood had left on the pale stone. At the scuffed mark where a boot had dragged back from the edge instead of over it.
He could still feel the ghost of that almost-fall in his muscles. The way every instinct in him had screamed Move when Az had leaned forward that fraction too far.
“You idiot,” he whispered, throat thick. “You absolute idiot.”
He wasn’t sure if he meant Azriel or himself.
Probably both.
He let himself, just for a moment, imagine climbing those last few steps and finding only empty stone and the fading echo of wings in the air.
Bile burned his throat.
Coward, a voice in him said. You should have gone up there. Sat beside him. Said, I know, and I’m not letting you go. Said anything.
He pushed to his feet eventually and climbed the last few steps.
The drop beyond the parapet seemed deeper from up here. The air felt thinner. He set his hands on the stone and looked down anyway, letting his stomach tilt.
It would have taken so little.
Half a breath.
A fraction of doubt.
A choice made in silence.
Cassian tore his gaze away.
He was a fighter. He was good at punching problems until they broke. He had never learned how to put his hands on his brother’s shoulders and say, I can’t lose you, and I’m terrified that one day you’ll decide that’s a kindness.
So he’d sat on the stairs instead, like a dog at a threshold, watching the door.
Waiting to see which way the blade would fall.
He turned from the parapet and went back down the stairs, his footsteps swallowed by stone and wind and the faint, stubborn pulse of a Court that had no idea how close it had come tonight to losing the hand that wielded its sharpest weapon.
Years from now, he’d remember this night.
He’d sit on another balcony with Rhys, watching Azriel in the sun with a female who loved him for more than his shadows, and think of how close they’d come to never giving him that chance.
He would be grateful, then, in a way that made his chest hurt, that on this cold, smoky night, habit and stubbornness and some nameless, grim instinct had made Azriel step back instead of forward.
That he had endured long enough to reach a future where he didn’t sit on rooftops alone anymore.
But that was still a long way off.
For now, there was only smoke in the halls, blood drying where it had dripped, and a shadowsinger walking through another dawn because he didn’t know how to stop.
Because he was the blade.
And blades, until they broke or were taken from the hand that wielded them, did only one thing:
If my sister forced me to socialise with HER family. I'd be pissed off too! Stop making nesta out to be a bitchy barking woman in heat or something! She was having her trauma and needed time to heal. And guess what her "family" did... they forced her into a situation where she doesn't want to be in!
Idc that feyre was trying to "Help" nesta. Idc that it was what was "better" for nesta. What I see is a sister who thinks she is the boss of Nesta simply because she hunted for the family and kept her alive. Feyre was being selfish, self centered and conceited like omg look at these awesome people who are the family of my second hubby in the last year. Omg they so amazing. They are your family toooo from now on. It doesn't matter that u don't like them and my mate is constantly a bitch to you, you have to indulge them and be a sweetheart and be more like fragile elain.
And don't even get me started on elain! If anyone amongst the archerons did the least for the family it's her.
Papa Archeron= was a successful merchant in the beginning and gave a good life to the girls. After his fall he did get back up and rally his troops for his daughters and even died for them
Feyre= we all know she hunted for them and was essentially the father of the house bcz her father fell short
Nesta= the girlie tried to marry a certain man for the sustainance he could provide them as instilled by her ma
And what did Elain do...? She knew gardening and planted FLOWERS when her sisters were almost DYING in hunger... BISH WHAT HAPPENED TO VEGETABLES...
And then guess what she does when she clearly sees nesta struggling, THE NESTA who would've willingly sold herself for elain.... elain packed her bags and essentially helped feyre clip nesta wings. They put her in a box she didnt want to fit into. They dimmed out her fury. Why? Because apparently a traumatised person doesn't know what's good for them
This time showcasing Acotar. Or accurately lucien, his identity and the fate of Autumn Court. I personally find it inaccurate if he'd suddenly ditch his entire vibe once he realizes 'OH I'm actually Day Court'. So what I want is for him to retain his identity as both an Autumn Court AND Day Court citizen.
As for Autumn Court. Obviously Eris will likely be the ruler after Berons much awaited demise. But ykw F that. I want Lady Autumn to be the one holding the true power. Mama Autumn has suffered enough and I'd like to see some at least some tiny tiny amount of strength in her. Imagine her being mother fucking bad bitch. Yeah. I'm rooting for it. So although I doubt SJM will make her the HIGH High Lady. BUT she can at least be Eris's advisor
I hope you guys enjoy this! I had so much fun coming up with all the jokes for this one and drawing all the ridiculous outfits. I hope you guys enjoy and continue to support my mid-life naruto phase.
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