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WHERE THE MOON SHINES BETWEEN US – one Azriel x Rhysand's sister!reader

synopsis As the sister to the greatest Night Court High Lord in history, the one thing you share with Azriel is that you live in Rhysand’s shadows—each in your own way. But even being hidden can’t stop your life from shattering, over and over again. When a bargain ties you and the shadowsinger together, what will stop that from being fractured, too?

tags yearning, slow burn, angst, hurt-comfort, mutual pining, childhood friends to lovers, inner circle, found family, did i mention SLOW BURN, this fic is literally her entire immortal life,

warnings features the spring court attack, under the mountain with rhys centuries later, & everything before, after, and in between. in this chapter: violence, angst, grief, mentions of war, spring court attack described in detail

word count 7.5k

author's note she's here. rhysand's sister if she survives and grows to rely on a certain shadowsinger more than she ever could have expected. technically i consider this two chapters, but we're setting everything in motion right off the bat regardless – expect no shortage of angst & yearning w everyone's favorite shadowsinger to come <3

series masterlist | next chapter | read on ao3 | taglist open

THE BEGINNING

Two years after you were born, a pair of boys opened the door to a windowless cell and pulled out their younger brother. He squinted, stumbling out into the open field under the dusky sun, and winced as his brothers tugged on his too-smooth hands that had only seen eight years of life. They threw him on the grass, soil staining his teeth, and splayed out his arms.

They wanted to test the healing that came from his blood, and so they did the first thing they could think of. The second-eldest brother kept him in place as oil sloshed over his palms, fingers, wrists. The eldest brother was the one to light the match.

The boy’s screams were what saved him.

Seven years before that, your brother was born. For Fae, the five years between you was barely a breath, but to Rhys, he might as well have been double your age. Your mother didn’t need to raise him to care for you—it was innate, the way he wanted to shield you, to protect you.

He taught you to fly. Gently. When it didn’t work, your mother took it into her own hands, doing precisely what she had done to Rhys. It worked. And you’d fly with him, sometimes, whenever you returned to the Night Court after a rotation throughout Prythian. You’d tell him of Dawn and Day and Summer, and he’d look at you, grinning like you were showing him the world.

With a past of deprivation and enclosure, your mother knew more of what she didn’t want for you than what she did want. She wanted none of the barrenness that came from being raised an Illyrian woman, terrified to lose her wings. Doing anything to prevent her cycle, to deny her body its natural course, only to have it come anyway, sending her to the square to have her freedom stripped. Caged. Clipped.

She wanted none of that for you.

You grew up around Prythian—as free as she could make you. It was a boarding school sort of arrangement; cycled throughout the courts for your schooling. Dawn, Day, Winter, Summer. Night Court was but a resting point, a home. You did your basic schooling there, but it was among the other four courts you attended that you truly grew, meeting new people who taught you various crafts and trades.

Your mother justified the system to your father by claiming it would teach you how to gain the favor of the other courts, encouraging alliances. For all you knew, perhaps it would lead to marrying you off someday. The daughter of a High Lord, even half-Illyrian, was still a daughter, after all. But for the first decades of your life, you couldn’t be bothered to care. Not when women in your court—women like your own cousin—were suffering from within their cages, trapped.

It was thanks to your mother that you were nothing like them. That you were happy, safe, free.

You were barely twelve when Morrigan was brutalized by her own family, too young to truly understand the capacity of your eighteen year-old cousin’s suffering at the time. But you grew to appreciate the gift your mother gave you. It became your guiding star, your saving grace.

Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.

Even with so much time away from the Night Court, you saw Rhys often; despite being as worthy a warrior as his bastard brothers, he was in and out of Illyria to visit the Night Court as the High Lord’s son. You’d grown to know many sons of High Lords and found your brother to be a better, gentler, more cunning heir than the rest. More importantly, even as you saw him growing stronger, he was still just your brother; you saw none of that politics in him. He always seemed to make sure of that around you, as if he’d wanted to spare you. Considering he was the one your father focused on for such things, it wasn’t too difficult. It was your mother that placed any weight in your endeavors, who knew you truly.

Your mother had been merciless to Rhys in the way most Illyrian mothers were, though not unkind and generous—far from it. You knew it was your mother that made Rhys the way he was, who made your brother someone so fiercely loving despite your father and not someone cold and sharp because of him.

You might not have seen him often, but never once did you doubt him.

Rhys’s love always glimmered behind his eyes, even in that stony mask of cold he put on outside in court matters. You could see it whenever you met his gaze, that hidden warmth behind his cunning violet. But you most often saw that part of him that was a brother more than anything in your mother’s house—when he was with the two he considered his own siblings.

It was different for you, to know those two other Illyrian boys. You never stayed in your mother’s Illyrian house—she did all she could to keep you from Illyria, after all—and when you first began to visit her house at eighteen during your Night Court months, sick of staying in the Hewn City and desperate not to become what had been destined for Mor, it felt like being among intruders. Because throughout your life, you had been moving constantly, from court to court and back again. You had never had one safe harbor or refuge besides people. Home was Rhys and your mother—not these two Illyrians. Yet they were here, familiar to your home and not to you, born before you were even conceived. And they fit like puzzle pieces, even if you did not recognize them.

You were no stranger to Illyrians and their twisted ways; it was part of why your mother was so insistent on having you study abroad so often, unchained to any sort of possibility of what she had endured. That made you wary of Cassian and Azriel. What your mother had suffered—and almost suffered—at the hands of their kind, her kind, was horrific. Nearly unspeakable. Illyrians were brash, ruthless, lethal, merciless, and these two were no exception. But you soon learned the brash and ruthless one had been shamed and abandoned, had lost his own mother. And the lethal and merciless one had endured horrors and torture that turned his soul inwards. Yet neither brought their wrath upon you. No, they seemed tentative, careful with you at first. And yet—urgent. Steadfastly attentive. As if anything with a drop of their honorary brother’s blood was their own.

You would remember that day forever: returning from a month in Day Court, languid and sleepy after poring endlessly in Helion’s sprawling, glittering libraries, and opening the door to a swaggering, thunderous Cassian who moved rather comfortably in the house. You'd opened your mouth when your mother embraced you, wanting to mention that she hadn’t mentioned there would be other people here, too. You’d shaken hands with a quiet, cool Azriel introducing himself without an ounce of acknowledgement of the shadows cloaking him or the fact that he was a stranger in your home. A sleepy-eyed Rhys had slid into the house after dusk, shrugging off his leathers and kissing the top of your head before collapsing into one of the dinner table chairs. Then he smiled and chuckled and laughed, as if those two filled him with life.

For years, you couldn’t help your spark of ire.

A part of you—a hateful part of you—considered that perhaps you weren’t sufficient. But then Rhys would come home and you’d see how his eyes would crease in the corners when he faced his brothers. His voice would lilt between the brothers’ animalistic fighting and thrown words, and even silent Azriel’s eyes would sometimes grow soft, losing that fogged, haunted gaze that had always seemed to cloud him. And so even if they were more brothers than you were a sister, perhaps Cass and Az were Rhys’s brothers. And if anything, you were glad there was a place for him to keep tending to the flames of his warmth.

There was a period later on, of course, when he’d become withdrawn at the hands of your father, who separated him from his brothers entirely. You’d seen little of them, with the shadowsinger at the High Lord's whim and Cassian commanding legions. Rhys only had you until the trio reunited at the Blood Rite. That week, you were staying at the Night Court, and you couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think. You had no doubt in Rhys, in his abilities, and you had heard enough about his brothers by then to know that they, too, were formidable. But there was always a chance. And those who expected Rhys’s survival—all of the Night Court—thought him unbreakable. But you had seen him broken and softened too many times to imagine him as the rest of Prythian did.

And when Rhys won the Blood Rite and returned… he’d come back with his brothers, but you were the first place he winnowed to, taking you into his arms and holding you with such ferocity you thought you might crumble. He’d always cared for you, loved you as your brother, fiercely protective in the way many Fae males were, and you had always attributed it to those instincts and later; his guilt. But that day, when he’d held you so tightly, like it was this he’d been waiting for after reaching the top of Ramiel, you he was climbing towards rather than the summit, you realized how much he loved you for the sake of it. How much he needed you. And how much you needed him.

Nearly two decades drifted by. The war passed. Rhys gained and lost legions—gained and lost himself. He’d fought in battle, again separated from Cassian among the troops while Azriel was kept close to your father as spymaster. There were no more warm days in Illyria, no more voices filling the walls of your mother’s home. You hadn’t realized that it was the presence of those three and your mother that had made Illyria bearable at all—made it feel like a home at all.

You spent most of those seven years in Dawn, Day, and Velaris. Your mother, too, retreated from Illyria as it busied with warriors and preparations and kept to the City of Starlight.

Your brother, at least, kept in touch through your mind. There was no bond there, no steady assurance between you, but sometimes you’d be within one of Helion’s libraries when Rhys’s voice would find you, courts away.

He tried to hide it every time—how war hollowed him, stripped him bare.

And his walls were always up—those mental shields, blocking out the horrors of what he’d seen. Whenever the Illyrian legions returned to their home bases, you’d abandon Velaris entirely, relieved to find Rhys with your mother in her home. You always knew he was alive—nearly every night, he’d manage to send some kind of message to you, which you’d pass to your mother—but that never dulled the blow when you finally saw him.

One night, though, he hadn’t sent word before his arrival. You’d woken to the sound of the door opening, and you found him in the living room, sitting on the ground, wings drooping and his head in his hands, as if he’d been too tired to even sit on the couch.

I couldn’t find them, he’d always tell you first. It was often the first thing he’d update you with—if he’d found his brothers among the dead. This time, however, he hadn’t noticed you. Hadn’t even lifted his head. Instinctively, you slipped into his mind, finding the answer without startling him—

And was struck with the scene, so visceral and bloody you stopped short in your tracks.

That carnal, raw violence of the final stretches of battle, when weapons did little. When it was flesh upon flesh, brute force against brute force, and will against will. Bones cracking and guttural screams. No mercy. And the aftermath: bodies upon bodies, piling under the smoke. Flies and insects like maidens of death, flitting about the sea of the fallen.

And your brother, digging through them, hurling corpses aside at every sight of a wing.

Gently—so gently—you retreated from his mind. So smoothly and soft, as if you were part of his own darkness, soft enough for him not to notice.

“Rhys,” you whispered, and his chin lifted to you. His eyes were black, but his face was raw. “Are you hurt?”

He shook his head. Rasped, “Didn’t find them.”

Good news, a relief. But there was little warmth in your brother’s voice. Only exhaustion. Bone-deep and so, so, lonely.

You said nothing. You only kneeled at his side and held him. Let him shed his tears in this darkness and solitude so that his legions would never know the heir to command was breaking apart. You knew that this place was a reprieve for him, that it was a pocket of the world that didn’t know bloodlust and death. You and your mother helped Rhys heal from that absence of love during the War, but it was difficult when there was always a return to the battlefield.

That night you saw your mother from her doorway, woken from sleep. Even an Illyrian mother, never coddling, her eyes would narrow in that way they always did when she saw either of you in pain—in true pain. In sorrow and desolation. As if she felt it, too.

Yet so softly, she would smile. As if her children, loving each other in a realm of so many brothers and sisters warring for power across the courts—it made up for it.

Impossibly, those seven years passed. You’d barely been able to study or focus knowing Rhys was off in the war, and to even imagine the rest of those you knew fighting made you sick.

Morrigan. Cassian. Azriel.

Your cousin, you were the most assured of. For she was making legends of herself with her successes, and there was always word of her—off with the human queens, leading the charges and strategy, formidable and guided by truth. And Cassian, though never in the same rotations as Rhys, would pass through the Illyrian camp near your mother’s house with his own legion, and whenever you were there, the relief was disarming. You’d find Rhys’s mind—or try to; he had always been better at the ways of daemati than you—and tell him his brother was still alive.

But Azriel… he was nowhere to be found. Nowhere at all.

Rhys told you it must have been because he was with your father, working closely as spymaster. You had little access to your father as it was and only Rhys’s word to count on. But you couldn’t erase the shadowsinger’s nature from your memory, no matter how vague it was. He was the only one who might thrive in solitude. In desolation. Still—at least Rhys and Cass were able to reconnect with your family in their own ways, no matter how rarely. Meanwhile, Azriel was the only Night Court spymaster there was. For all any of you knew, he could have been entirely alone with his shadows for those seven years. Just as he had been long, long ago.

As your family fought, you traveled between allied courts and mastered all else. Your studies were a welcome distraction as you grew, cultured yourself. You learned academics and the ways of healing and crafting and art. You practiced magic and glamours and fostered power. By three decades of life you knew things that Fae in their centuries hadn’t yet learned.

By the end of the war, when the wall was built and humans were given freedom, you were not hailed as a hero, as the others were, but had still become formidable in your own way. A jewel of all courts.

You did not know politics, however. Not like Rhys. And you had met Tamlin before, albeit briefly, and Rhys had spoken highly of him. You didn’t know that the rest of the Spring Court—Tamlin’s father and two brothers—hated your court for ridding them of their human slaves. Hated Rhys for the power he so clearly demonstrated. What you knew was what your studies and travels had shown you: the kindness of Fae. The warmth of different courts.

It hadn’t occurred to you that there was a reason you’d never been sent to Spring Court. No more than their stance on humans in the past.

Five years after the war ended, your benefit of the doubt was enough for the sight of Tamlin’s father, the Spring Court High Lord, at the traveling Illyrian camp not to scare you. Not when you saw him over her mother’s shoulder.

Not until he drew a blade and plunged it through your mother’s chest.

You had learned healing in Dawn and Day, been taught things overseas that many your age would never have acquired. And though your power was not the same as those with such magic native to them, you think there had always been a part of you, unexplainable, that could tap into anything. Any little bit of magic if you tried hard enough. And it was Dawn and Day you had honed most finely, grown to feel at home in. It was the skills learned there that let you survive the onslaught and play dead, fashion a glamour until you seemed no more than a corpse for him to abandon. To try to heal your mother through the tears and delirium—to mend the horrific, bloody strips of membrane left from being cut off. To somehow heal where the wings had been serrated from her, taken as if meant to be some prize or decoration. Her life force and freedom stolen to be framed like a prize of war.

You had failed in healing her, of course. Her head was already gone by then. But that didn’t stop you from being covered in your mother’s blood by the time Rhys found you. You still don’t remember what happened after that. Only the sight of Rhys when you woke in the House of Wind: his face in his hands, shuddering, too worn and shattered to even hear you wake. To even prevent you from hearing his voice when he thought you were asleep. It should have been me. It should have been me.

You did not fly after that. Not because you couldn’t—your wings were intact, summoned at will like Rhys—but rather because there was no part of you that could face your own Illyrian blood again. To use so freely what your mother had lost in agony with her life. Because it could have been you. Could have been you, keeping your wings in your mother’s place rather than tucked back behind you, disappearing into wisps of shadow. You could have been the prize, the target, rather than the spare that survived only because the Spring High Lord had underestimated you.

You never told Rhys what you heard him say when you first woke in the House of Wind, but you so terribly wanted to tell him that he was wrong. That it should have been you.

“Just something. Anything.”

You hated it when Rhys sounded like this. Strained. As if it physically hurt him, grated the insides of his throat to speak to you.

“Please,” he said for perhaps the sixth time that morning, his chin tipped down so low that he looked through his lashes at you, hugging yourself under the covers. His violet eyes glistened with miserably breathtaking beauty. Beauty you hated yourself for dimming. “You love the Rainbow. Come on. Just an hour. Half an hour.”

“Rhys.” You sounded hoarse. “Leave.”

He didn’t answer for a moment, but you saw him stiffen. It was the first time you’d spoken in nine days. It had been like this for three months, having you lock yourself into your room in the House of Wind, with Rhys visiting every morning and night to try to coax you out of bed. Nobody else had tried to. Nobody else could.

Robbed of your mother, you had abandoned everything, body and mind. You didn’t want to move or eat or speak. You did not use your wings. Did not summon them.

“I don’t know,” Rhys said at last, impossibly soft. “I don’t know how to help you.”

You swallowed a wince at the pang that shot through you. It hurt to see him this way, and you turned your back.

He called your name so desperately that you nearly whipped around.

“Please,” he repeated, and the break in his voice this time was unfamiliar. Strange. “Father wants to send you to the Hewn City. But if you find a life here in Velaris, I think you can… I don’t know,” he said, nearly frantic. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I—” His voice cracked entirely, and there was a sharp intake of breath that made the first tear slip down your cheek. “Please. You need to get up. You can’t be like this forever. If Father sends you down there, I don’t know if you’ll come back.”

To the Hewn City. To the place you insisted on being sent away from barely a decade ago, just a few years before the start of the War.

“Rhysand,” you breathed. “Go. Away.”

“Like hell I will,” he growled, but his voice died instantly. “I’m not leaving you here to rot any longer. I need you to let me help you. You need to live again. Even just a little.”

You squeezed your eyes shut. “Why?”

“You can’t—can’t be sent down there. You know what’ll happen.”

Whatever would have happened to Morrigan.

You all but pounced past the barriers of your brother’s mental shields, tearing through walls of dark, foggy smoke. Get the fuck out of my room, you snarled into his mind.

Get up and make me.

Prodding my anger won’t get you what you want, Rhysand.

A pause. All I want is for you to be all right.

For a moment, you saw yourself from his eyes—a silhouette under the covers, cloaked in night. You felt his anguish and fear and rage. The deep, languid shadows of his mind were familiar, warm to you despite their inherent cold, and he was permitting you free rein—you knew he was—but you also knew that you could pass through his defenses most of the time already. You retreated back into your own mind, sending out your next words, brisk and toneless: Get out.

Let me see it, he replied.

No.

I won’t do anything to hurt you.

No.

I just need to see what hap—

No.

Father has been wanting to—

GET OUT.

Out of your head. Your room. Your life. Your grief. You thinned your defenses to the scrape of his talons on your shields, letting your brother see precisely what it was you meant, what it was you wanted. To wither away, to fall from the cliffs you’d once flown from. After years of soaring in the sky, to crash headfirst into the ground.

Rhys slipped past your mental shields like smoke spilling into glass. I’m mourning her too, he said. I didn’t endure what you did, but I understand your pain, sister. I want to help alleviate it. Any way I can. Let me.

You said nothing.

He sighed. I can arrange for someone else to escort you out, if you’d like.

The very thought of anyone new, unfamiliar, untrustworthy made your stomach roil.

Cassian, then. He’d be happy to join you.

I barely know Cassian.

You trust him.

No more than you.

Who would you trust more than me, then?

Your mother’s face flashed into your mind.

I’m sorry.

Get out of my head.

You felt him retreat.

“Please,” Rhys said out loud. Again. “Just let me watch the memory. It could help Father find him. Make him pay. If you want, I can remove—”

Don’t finish that sentence. Your pillowcase was damp now, and you didn’t have the energy to speak. Just go.

For a moment, there was only stillness. I’ve apologized to you endlessly, and I’ll continue to do it until the day I die, he said. But I need to help you. How about Day? I’m sure Helion would be willing to host you for a time.

Helion has a court to run.

You are like a daughter to him.

I am nobody’s daughter anymore.

Rhys let out a shuddering breath.

“Go,” you said hoarsely. “Please.”

He sounded faint. “How can I leave you like this?”

Just like you have every other night I ignore you.

Talons scraped against your shields.

If my company is the issue, he said, consider Cassian or Azriel, at least. Genuinely. Just let them take you to the Artist’s Quarter for twenty minutes. Walk around. Say nothing. Wear a glamour for a while. Just leave the house. Even the room. I don’t have to be with you.

You felt it then, his pain. His guilt. Felt his regret at not meeting you and your mother halfway on your way to him as he was meant to, instead training his Illyrian legions. For mentioning to Tamlin where you were at all.

You turned back over to your brother. Faced his twisted expression. Your company is not the issue, Rhys.

Your brother’s brows quivered. How could you have forgotten, you thought, that he was the same male who had blamed himself for every fall you made when learning to fly? Who’d snarled at even Cassian’s sly remarks at your expense in the first year you’d lived with them for your Night Court visits? He had been gifted the power to experience the minds and lives of others—yet it surely tormented him now, to feel any of it.

You were evil, you thought, for making someone so fiercely loyal suffer with you like this.

His eyes softened. “Tell me what to do to make it better for you. Tell me how, and I’ll do it.”

And you knew he meant it.

For the first time, you settled in a place indefinitely. You moved to Velaris and dealt with the grief until it dulled enough to paint itself into the sky rather than every living thing the sun touched; just enough to function again. To start visiting Dawn or Day again and even sometimes Summer or Winter.

Never Spring. Never Autumn.

The latter was filled with power hungry hounds. Beron’s sons, you’d learned, weren’t all terrible—Eris was somewhat tolerable alone, you’d discovered in a solstice ball, when he’d proven himself not as vile as his brothers—and in turn had learned you were not as the Night Court had been made out to be.

Lucien Vanserra was the only Autumn Court son you’d come to somewhat befriend. You’d seen how his own court was cruel to him, how he, too, had love stripped away from him before his eyes. But when he fled Autumn to serve as an emissary for the Spring Court, you never saw him or sought to. You wouldn’t hold it against Lucien, knowing that in a life like his, any kindness at all, any safe harbor, was deeply, wholly necessary. Let him have it, even under the court that killed your mother. Even after you would hear years later that the order for your head instated by Tamlin’s father had been annulled by Tamlin himself upon coming to power. Let Lucien have that kindness; so long as you would never lay any eye upon it.

You kept to Velaris. You had already been fond of it, but you grew to find a true, steadfast love for it, walking along the Sidra and visiting the Artist’s Quarter. Nodding to passersby faeries who had never needed to face the monstrosity of the world beyond.

You still did not fly. Did not summon your wings.

Even as you began to smile again, enjoy yourself again—when fleeting moments of joy would find you, and for just a breath, you would forget the hole burrowed deep within you—seeing Illyrian wings made you want to collapse in on yourself. They struck you like the memory of blood against stone, like a fragment of the past thrust upon the present.

Rhys had never summoned his wings when begging for you to leave your chambers those first few months of your grief. He had no reason to. And outside of your nightmares, you never saw such wings at all, But half a year after your mother’s murder, when you did try, slowly, to live again, it turned out Azriel had begun to take partial residence in Velaris almost immediately following the incident while serving as your father’s spymaster.

“He’s rarely here because of missions,” Rhys told you a month after you began to join him for dinner. “He’ll be here for this week before the next. I just thought you should be made aware if you hear someone arrive in the middle of the night, or if you see any shadows slipping around. Chances are you won’t hear him at all.”

That much, you knew. In your mother’s house, Azriel was only heard when he wanted to be—when he knew you needed to know someone was in the house or approaching. Mostly when Rhys or Cassian were doing Cauldron knew what in their chambers and Azriel’s presence was enough to humiliate them into silence.

“When was the last time you saw him?” Rhys asked over his shoulder. He looked rested today—though worn. He’d been warmer lately, almost relieved. Perhaps he thought you were truly getting better.

“Starfall,” you said absently, following Rhys to the hall. You’d seen Azriel in the years following the war before your mother’s death. You’d taken those five years for granted—your brother, his brothers, and your cousin who felt more like your sister finally united with you again. There had still been affairs following the war that drew them to their duties, but you’d been able to sleep easily for once and learn to work without an undercurrent of dread. Gods, you’d replay the memory of Azriel coming back to the House of Wind forever after the War: how he’d embraced Rhysand and Cassian like they were air. The shadowsinger had never been so overwrought with emotion—and your brother never so relieved.

And you, watching them reunite… you’d decided right then that you would never forgive your father.

“That’s almost a year,” replied Rhysand.

You hummed distractedly, gaze trailing the archway. A month ago, you’d finally agreed to leave your bedroom to join Rhys for dinner—and only because you’d heard him arguing with your father. The High Lord had visited you those first few months, but you were too hollowed out and empty to care. After that, whenever he came, you often only heard the tenor of his voice burgeoning until Rhysand’s joined him—until they were roaring at one another, then the sound barrier would come up, and you would lose any hold on what they said. It became clear to you, though, what was happening.

Rhys was suffering for what you had become, in more ways than one.

You had decided that would be no longer. Even if a part of you would always thrum with dread when you opened a door to an unfamiliar knock, even if you would never fly again, at least Rhysand could heal. He could thrive if he didn’t have you weighing on his conscience. You could endure being hollow and broken, but you were tired of being a burden.

As you followed Rhys into the dining room, you saw Azriel—his back to you as he moved something along the kitchen counter. Behind him, as they often were, his wings were tucked in tight.

The memory struck you like thunder.

It was clear as day: wings, discarded and shriveled from detachment, as if they had tucked into themselves without their host. Red fluid from the membrane glimmering over wooden floors.

You stopped short, blood screaming through your veins.

A hand caught your shoulder, and you flinched, a yelp slipping from you. Rhys’s eyes were round, and the certainty of the panic in his expression—as if he wasn’t surprised but ready for this, waiting for you to crumble even if he didn’t know why—struck you with startling humiliation.

This is what you had become. Something skittish and fragile. So easily shattered.

“What is it?” Rhys asked softly. Behind him, Azriel had turned, brows lifted—then settled as he found you. Shadows danced around him like ocean currents.

He said nothing, eyes flicking to Rhysand first. You already knew there was a conversation happening between them.

“Speak out loud,” you snapped. “Don’t tread around me like a child.”

Azriel’s gaze finally landed upon you. Darkness incarnate. Yet warm. “I’ve been wanting to check on you for weeks, but Rhys said you wanted to be alone.” His eyes were unreadable, but his throat shifted. “How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

His chin dipped, as if it were a perfectly sufficient response. You’d forgotten what it was like to speak to Azriel, the only one of those three brothers who seemed to accept your silence.

What is it? Rhys repeated. Your mental shields weren’t up—they rarely were lately, with how little you left the House. And how little energy you had.

You swallowed, passing by your brother to get a glass from the cabinet. Nothing.

Something exasperated and tiresome pulsed towards your mind. Please don’t do this.

I’m too tired to push you out, Rhys.

Good. I don’t want you to. You practically threw terror at my shields a moment ago.

Azriel reached over you when you opened the cabinet, giving you a glass from the upper shelf. “Thank you,” you murmured.

Still waiting, by the way.

Your fingers clenched around the glass as you went to the faucet. Go back to Azriel’s head.

I’m afraid he already beat you to cursing me and throwing up his walls.

You slammed your shields up—much to your detriment, squinting your eyes for a moment as you filled the glass. Azriel’s gaze warmed you from your side, but you pretended not to notice for the sake of your dignity. There was already one Illyrian male coddling you. One too many.

Clouds of darkness surrounded your mental shields, slipping into the thinnest of crevices of your mind. Don’t tell me you forgot we can bypass each other, sister dearest, Rhys purred.

You jerked the faucet down and whipped around to him, glaring. Stop. Out.

Won’t do that.

Rhysand.

Tell me.

Why the fuck do you want to know so badly?

Because I haven’t felt that level of fear from you in months, he said. Did something trigger it?

You loosed a breath. I’m fine.

For Cauldron’s sake, stop trying to put on a show. His eyes burned. Just tell me what’s fucking wrong.

“My mother is dead is what’s fucking wrong,” you hissed, then froze. Azriel was at your side, and you could have sworn his shadows winced. Rhys blinked, then his features seemed to twist.

Shame flushed over you in an instant. “Fuck,” you muttered, practically dropping the glass into the sink and shouldering past Azriel.

You were already out the door by the time you heard Rhys call your name.

It wasn’t your room you went to, but the balcony outside the dining room.

When you’d begun to leave the House again, whenever your brother was out carrying your father’s orders, you were often left entirely by yourself. Rhys had managed to modify the wards of the House to allow you—and only you—to winnow in and out so that you wouldn’t be dependent upon his flying.

Because you certainly couldn’t depend on yours.

Rhys knew why you wouldn’t fly. He knew. But that hadn’t stopped him from pressing, over and over again, for weeks, months. And now, as you heard footsteps approaching behind you, you braced yourself for more questions, more why’s and tell me’s even though he knew damn well what had happened to you. It was as if enough questions would give the truth room to change. As if you could return to the way you were half a year ago, before the attack.

Biting your cheek as you stared out towards Velaris, you managed a weak, “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Hear what?”

You turned to Azriel. He glanced over his shoulder, as if your brother would be there.

“He left, if you’re expecting him.” The shadowsinger reached your side, looking out onto the glowing streets far below. “I think he understands now.”

“Understands what?” you asked.

“That he crossed a line.”

“No shit,” you muttered.

HIs gaze flicked to you. But he kept quiet.

“I shouldn’t have told him that,” you said. “I was just… I don’t know.”

Azriel shrugged. His shadows trickled onto the terrace rails, curling over your fingers. “He was pushing you too far.”

“You couldn’t even hear him.”

“No,” he admitted. “But I could see you.”

You felt your neck flush. “Lovely knowing my brother isn’t the only one watching me closely for damage control.”

“I’m not watching closely. It’s obvious. You’re an open book.”

“I’m not an open book. You’re just a spymaster. It’s your job to observe.”

He shrugged again. But his shadows seemed to compress—darken.

You frowned at him as his gaze drifted along the winding Sidra. “When did you start working directly under my father again?” After the war, his duties had loosened considerably—enough for him not to work at your father’s every whim. Enough for your brother to see him again.

“Only this year. After the ambush.”

The ambush. Not the Spring Court attack. Not your mother’s murder. Nameless yet direct. You didn’t know what to make of it.

“Is it… all right?” you asked. When his eyes met yours, questioning, you added, “I mean, I remember the war—how long you were gone. And I know my father. I can imagine working under his command is… demanding. Besides, the last time I saw you was last year.” You scoped his features. Azriel did look tired, you realized. Not entirely, but enough, with darkness pooling in more places than before—under his eyes, in the hollows under his cheekbones. The angles and planes of that undeniably beautiful Illyrian face had been sharpened. Honed. “You seem… preoccupied.”

“It’s been fine,” he answered simply, not wasting a breath. Rhys had told you the truth—that Azriel had been on constant missions, put under even more unrelenting pressure than even Rhys himself. At least your brother had the comfort of familial bonds to push back against your father when needed. Azriel had nobody and nothing to protect him. Nothing but his duty and honor as a shadowsinger.

“How’s Cassian?” you asked. You’d only seen him weekly since moving to Velaris. According to Rhys, he’d tried to visit almost every other day during those first few months when you isolated yourself, but Rhys hadn’t allowed anyone to see you. You’d barely been able to face your own brother and father, much less anyone else. When you began to enter the world again, it was Cassian and Mor who escorted you to the Rainbow on the days Rhys went off to his duties. Cass was kind, warm, easy. A welcome light in your pit of darkness.

And you hated it, how both him and your brother so easily looked after you.

“I haven’t seen him in a month,” Azriel replied. “But he seemed fine when I last did.”

You shifted on your feet. When you had resided in your mother’s home, Rhys and his brothers couldn’t go more than a day without needing each other’s company. Now things felt like the war—but without their resistance as they tried so desperately to find each other. “Rhys said he barely sees you these days, too.”

His wings seemed to tighten impossibly more—drawing your attention to them again and lodging in your chest.

Blood on wood. Blood on stone. Blood on wings. Blood on your hands.

Your breath caught, and you pressed a palm to the marble rails, drumming your fingers to stay in reality. To feel the cold. This is real, you told yourself. Velaris glittered, pulsed at your feet. This is where you are. The memories are just memories. What happened in them is over.

“What you said to Rhys wasn’t wrong,” Azriel told you suddenly. You looked at him. He was already watching you. “I know you regret telling him that. But if anything, it made Rhys see a little more clearly.”

You exhaled. “I just… feel bad. He’s suffering.”

Azriel swallowed. “I know.”

“I don’t know what to do. How to make it easier for him. I feel like I’m making him suffer more.”

Azriel looked at you. Blinked, as if… startled.

You bristled. “What?”

He seemed to regain his focus. “Nothing, just… he said the exact same thing about you just now. Word for word.”

Somehow, that made it worse. More tangible. You were the face of Rhys’s guilt, and you knew it.

“I know that you know,” he went on, “but he cares for you. Deeply. The kind of love he has for you is rare, even among siblings. Just be patient with him.”

You winced and hated yourself for it. Your brother loved you, and you knew it, and yet the idea only felt like a burden. “I don’t want him to. I don’t want him to worry for me anymore.”

“It can’t be helped,” Azriel said. “Both of you need time to heal. He’s grieving for himself, but he’s also grieving for you. You’ve always meant the world to him. You’re one of the only things he has that the court can’t take away from him.”

Perhaps when you were being schooled all across Prythian so long ago, when you had recounted the other courts to Rhys and he looked at you with such wondrous love, as if you were the world—it had been the world you were showing him. Perhaps to your brother, you had been a breath of freedom. And when you collapsed into yourself—turned into a shell—he had lost that. Been trapped in the world he was born into again.

Heat welled into your vision. “Fuck,” you said, and you turned from Azriel, now humiliated as much as you were heartbroken. If you weren’t so damn fragile, so weak-hearted, Rhys wouldn’t know you were irreparable. He could have found peace if you could just force this fear down, this grief. He could have had you as a safe harbor while his brothers were gone, pulled apart by politics and time and war.

Azriel shifted behind you, coming closer. You felt his shadow pass over you. “They will pay,” he said, deathly soft. “They will pay for everything they did to you.”

You squeezed your eyes shut, tears slipping down your cheeks. Shook your head. “They might not.”

“I swear it.” He sounded rougher now. Sharper. “I swear to the Mother.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Give me your hand.”

You sniffed, turning back to him. “What?”

“Give me your hand.” He extended his palm to you. “I’ll make a bargain with you. My primary task under your father has been to find the Spring Court’s weaknesses to counterattack.” His shadows whirled around him, almost entirely shrouding his wings. “Let me prove it to you. Let me promise you.”

You blinked. “I don’t… don’t want to force you.”

“I’m already bound to this mission by the High Lord himself. There’s no more forcing to be done.”

You held Azriel’s gaze, that hazel in the gilded fae light. They carried more than you had ever seen from him in those passing months each year in your youth.

“I swear on my life, daughter of the Night Court,” he said. “The High Lord of Spring and his sons will pay for what they did to you.”

Your brows furrowed. “That’s a vow, not a bargain.”

He inclined his head. “Then if I succeed, you’ll do a favor of my choosing. Deal?”

Azriel’s outstretched hand was lined and marred with scars, whorls of roughened skin. Memory, nightmares, permanently engrained into him. The darkest backbone of his life, wearing his promise.

You accepted. It felt like something had finally steadied within you as Azriel’s hand gripped yours, warm and firm. “It’s a deal, Shadowsinger.”

Almost imperceptibly, Azriel’s mouth tugged. And when you finally released his hand, your own was inked with the mark of the bargain, covered in night-dark lines.

author's note thank u for reading lovelies <3 let me know what you think! i've been in genuine flow state writing this fic because the concept of a half-illyrian daemati who isn't rhys and is a girlboss is just… well yes. i'm hoping to update weeklyish if not sooner. taglist is open, just comment to be added!

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