27. profane
for the micro story game :)
we're going back to aisriel for this one, tw azriel and uh feet stuff
Aisling was awake again.
Azriel's shadows woke him violently, whispering of her thrashing out of bed and fleeing out into the street. The darkness she had left behind her was cloying, but he knew their bedroom at the townhouse well enough that it did not slow him.
She had taken to doing this, some time in the first month after they had been wed. At first he thought her meaning to flee, some deceitful attempt to escape Velaris, but he had found her drenched with sweat and wide-eyed down an alley. She had struck at him when he grabbed her, but it was of fright, not anger. He could see it in her blue eyes, some wildness rearing its dark head. It would take time to tame it from her and to gentle her to the softer ways of Velaris. He could commit himself to the task. She would come to know him for the safety he offered her, in the end.
Azriel did not ask what plagued her, knowing she would not have told him in any case. The habit continued. Always at night, when he slept beside her; and yet she never refused him, either. Her legs would fall open when he touched her, wet as he wished her to be, but she would close her eyes against him and turn her face away.
"She will settle," Rhys had said when Azriel spoke of his concerns. He could parse threat from reassurance better than any. Azriel reverted to silence on the matter, after that.
The hall and stairwell were shrouded, as well; a blackness so total that he had not seen it outside of all but the deepest of dungeons. He plunged through it, then out the door, into the empty street lit only by stars.
His shadows spoke of which way she ran, but her blood was dotted against the street after a few paces in a trail that led him right to her. The night longed to hide her and drew itself tight around her. He could feel it in the bite of the cold air, but there she was: wilted against a fence beside the Sidra. Gossamer as a pixie's wing, moonglow against the small dark hours. Her face was a pale mask.
Aisling wore only a gown of sheer faerie-silk that settled across her bare body as finely as a dusting of frost. She was entirely bare to him, her nipples pebbled to diamond points in the chill, despite the heat that poured off of her. His shadows pressed in close, seeking the source of her distress, her blood; he could see them, sweeping across the taut skin of her waist, the curve of her hip, the slender bow of her thighs. He swept her dark hair back as she merely breathed, unwilling to even glance at him yet, blue eyes turned to the ribbon of stars above.
She was still so pale, even after some months out of the Hewn City. She seemed edged in silver. Perhaps she always would be.
Blood was smudged across her delicate feet, unused to anything but velvet slippers and marble floors. She was not built for running bare-footed across cobbles. The blood was still ruby-fresh and wet, smeared across the tender skin of her toes.
He could not leave her long, so naked and bleeding on the street. And so, no matter how much she might inwardly rage at him, he swept her up.
Aisling still refused to look at him, haughty despite that he plucked her easily, her tits pressing full against his chest as he hefted her. The gauze of her dress hid nothing, and so he held her closer, fingers curling into the curve of her ribs. Azriel did not step through the shadows back to the townhouse, knowing she loathed it. He followed the bloody trail in reverse instead.
Aisling kept her face turned to the moon, and softened against him with a sigh.
"Is it nightmares that plague you?" Azriel finally asked when her silence grew taxing.
"That house mislikes me," she said coldly, neither confirmation nor denial. She was artful in that. "It chokes me when you look away."
She spoke the way Rhys' father had, in riddles and nets, and always from the side of what she meant. Azriel didn't puzzle over her words any longer than he had to. It would only twist him into knots. "The house has no magic to harm you."
"An Illyrian could not understand," she said, closing her eyes against him once more. Her lashes were long and dark against the fine arch of her cheekbones, enough that Azriel could count them if he wished, like spider-legs.
The darkness she summoned while she slept had dissipated while they were gone, and the townhouse door shut snugly against the chill behind them. Azriel set her on one of the high-backed sofas carefully. He had taken her on this sofa, he remembered suddenly as he cast his eye down her body to see where else she might have harmed herself. Not long after they had been wed at Rhys' urging. She was still shy of him, then, and preferred to keep herself covered, so he had merely lifted her skirts and draped her over the back of chaise.
She revealed herself to him carelessly now. She tossed her dark hair back, imperious, an entirely different manner of creature than the one he had thrust into his hands in the Court of Nightmares.
The blood would need to be cleaned from her feet.
Azriel would not make her stoop to do so herself. It had been a struggle for Aisling, cossetted as she had been since birth, to learn to manage things on her own; and still, there were days where she would rather go hungry than prepare her own food.
Azriel knelt before her carefully, lifting one pale foot. She had sliced ribbons into it, somehow, in her flight down the street; he saw the truth of it, as he washed the blood carefully. Working the cloth between her toes made her hiss, but the tacky blood sloughed off.
"You will heal by the morning," he told her, holding her ankle carefully. It was slim enough to wrap his fingers entirely around it, the scars she so loathed a shocking, profane contrast against the pale skin.
Aisling had never seen scars before, she told him once. High Fae were unblemished and eternal. She misliked to look at them.
He picked her other foot up to clean.
thank you angels @eatsbooks @olenvasynyt for hitting this with the Porn Ray 0:) and gentle parenting me through writing again