Poster for 'The Survival of St. Joan', a medieval rock opera by American rock band, Smoke Rise, from an original concept and libretto by playwright and screenwriter James Lineberger (1971). Artwork by David Edward Byrd.
Pairing: Azriel x Elain
Rating: Explicit
Summary: It's the night of Nyx's birth, and Azriel finds himself at Elain's door. Unwilling and unable to be separated any longer, and with the fate of Prythian hanging over their heads, they turn to the experimental magic of the Hewn City, unleashing their desires and hiding from the IC in plain sight. But when earth-shattering intimacy crumbles their defenses, Elain and Azriel are forced to face the roles they have adopted to survive. For to be touched is to be known, and no Fae can love without being changed forever...
[Slow-burn, multi-chapter, shared POV, heavy on the angst, heavy on the pining. Expect deep-dive explorations of character, love, sprituality, magic and trauma, and smut of varying kink, light and darkness.]
Chapter summary: Elain steals a moment of respite; Azriel crash-lands into Hels.
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
Elain slips through the hallway shadows, content to steal away, just for a moment. Rhys had insisted on using magic to clear the table, yet Elain had waved the notion away, grateful for the respite of the cool, empty kitchen.
She pauses to rest against a wall and the three large oval dishes she cradles in her arms jangle, shifting when she twists her ankle to readjust her silk slipper.
It feels wicked to disparage the good fortune of her sisters. Little else but honest joy lives in her heart, yet the energy it takes to sit amongst such rugged chatter, such bristling affection, leaves her increasingly depleted. Her temples ache and she is restless and agitated.
He didn’t join them. Again. With the summer creeping in it feels a fool’s errand to hope he ever will. After that night, after Nyx, she imagined he might once again seek out the friendships of his brothers, to mark the moments together.
But still Azriel stays away, and now nobody thinks to ask. That has not stopped Elain from adjusting the recipes so there would be enough, just in case, her sad, hopeful hands always reaching for that eighth plate. For she so wishes for him to feel welcome.
Elain uses her shoulder to push off the wall, sending the weighty plates clattering beneath. She glances down at the sugary scraps left atop the engravings of jasmine and of stars. Her gaze is downcast, her movement entirely automatic, disconnected, until a viscous swirl of sultry night bursts before her.
Azriel turns from where he winnowed, eyes momentarily widened before the cold mask of impassivity drops. An instinctive, relieved smile graces Elain’s mouth, but instantly it falters, confusion and self-censorship making a battlefield of her features. She supposes he did not expect to encounter anyone in this quiet artery of the house, least of all herself, and despite the pattering in her chest she wonders how often he comes and goes unnoticed. She thought she might have sensed it, his being so close.
In the ugly pause Elain swallows and shifts her weight. She opens her mouth only to abruptly shut it, searching for any sign of warmth in Azriel’s face. She finds little beneath the shield, and certainly nothing to betray the night they spent four weeks back, laying on her bed, deep in night.
Perhaps it was presumptuous, or worse, naive to imagine anything different.
Azriel’s gaze flicks to Elain’s overburdened arms and the plates that have started to rattle from the strain. At his side a single fist clenches, the once-familiar shadows shimmering. The low-lit lamps grow hazy in their ripple, a dark mist gathering close. He only stares, hazel eyes somehow both alarmingly present and woefully distant. A couple of seconds pass and Elain thinks he might be about to pierce their silence, but when a shared giggle echoes from the dining hall Azriel merely takes a step as if to pass her, a trailing shadow coiling around his ankle.
“You missed dessert,” she states pointlessly, the words reaching before she can stop them.
He stills, politely turning back. The scent of violence cloaks him and embarrassment inches up Elain’s neck at her own banality. She tries not to drink him in, how the leather clings like a lover, the armour undulating as a second skin. Scales glint with each unhurried breath, a hundred menacing eyes winking, watching through the wicked light.
“I am to meet with Rhys,” he replies, as if forcing himself to endure the mundane exchange.
Elain nods, smiling weakly. She should release him, and yet she cannot help wait for something, anything, to crack through his surface.
To show her it was real.
“Of course,” she tries, after too-long a pause. “Of course you are.”
She wills herself to sound soft, casual, to meet his eye, but Azriel only watches with a passionless expression. Momentum swirls behind his eyes, reminding her she interrupted a male of purpose, of subterfuge. She shifts the plates to the crook of her aching elbow, noting the muscle that tightens in Azriel’s jaw at the pitched sound of their protest. How strange it must be, Elain thinks, to weave between the interrogation room and domesticity. How watery and insipid they must all appear to the obsidian wall that towers before her.
How lonely.
Elain tilts her head towards the souls chiming behind them.
“You are missed,” she offers, her voice only half-full.
Something inscrutable flashes across Azriel’s features.
“And always welcome,” she adds, blushing uncomfortably in the semi-dark. In this ugly silence the far-off trill of chatter seems incongruous.
“As I said,” Azriel’s voice is low and smooth - utterly devoid. “I am to meet with Rhys.”
A violent yet restrained judder ripples through Azriel’s shadows. Elain tracks the movement with curiosity before her large, soft eyes drift back to his. In the low light his siphons surge. Such a beautiful blue.
Nothing further follows. No warmth nor pleasantry.
Elain shifts again, transferring the weight of the plates to her other arm. Once more Azriel’s eyes dart down to the white, jittery china, the flick of his pupils so quick it would be easy to miss.
“You’re well.”
It’s not even a question. Not quite.
“Am I?” Elain laughs, the sardonic note making Azriel’s head turn a fraction.
“I - you seem so.”
Finality bristles in his voice. It leaves no space for further discussion and Elain irritatedly licks her bottom lip, the dart of pink bright in the sultry light. Don’t let me keep you, she’s about to bite, resentment and frustration congealing in her blood. She’s getting rather tired of the indignity; of pushing through his icy mantle while her palm sits outstretched for anything he might give her.
It’s then, with silky a glimmer, a figure appears, quieting Elain’s unruly tongue as if the rebuke was already spoken.
Cerridwen.
Soundless, the half-wraith slinks up to Elain and relieves her of her burden, her shoulders hunching lightly when she settles the plates in her own almost-glittering arms.
“Allow me,” Cerridwen smiles, her voice little more than a brush of velvet.
Elain stiffens in both embarrassment and relief but casts a thankful look at her friend. Cerridwen nods and then, passing between her and Azriel, directs an opaque, knowing look in her superior’s direction.
Heat spills across Elain’s cheeks. She notes but does not understand the silent conversation they share, nor why Azriel, eyebrows lifting a fraction, stares Cerridwen down in a pointed, layered reply. Nor, when she knows the twins can move like water, Azriel is forced to angle away to avoid her knocking his shoulder when she passes.
A veil of irritation simmers between Azriel's shadows but the evasive movement of his head leaves a ruby dribble glinting in the fae light. It’s in his hair, behind his ear. Oily sickness pools in Elain’s belly and her face grows slack while she traces its journey down his neck.
“You’re bleeding.”
Azriel’s attention snaps back to her. That preternatural fae stillness seeps like smoke and yet he says nothing, weighing something, the line of his mouth tight.
Elain frowns, bemused by his behaviour.
“Azriel-”
Instinctively she steps near, hand raised, but Azriel only leans from her, that heated gaze scoring her own. Swallowing, blushing, Elain curls her fingers into her palm and withdraws, stroking her now empty hands across her apron.
Something shatters.
A bridge tumbling, beyond repair.
Pained, tense, the two glance away, Elain to a glittering sconce, Azriel to the floor.
“I did not mean to make you uncomfortable, Azriel.”
His eyes flash upwards to her forlorn resignation, chin jerking with the force of it. A muscle twitches in his face, punches of breath streaming tightly through his nostrils while the leather around his wrists creaks.
“It’s nothing.”
She thinks he is trying to be soft, yet the words are stained by the hard lines of his body. Elain nods knowingly and lifts her face, schooling it into pleasant passivity. The tension is horrific, so alien, and she shakes her head imperceptibly as their past tender exchanges breach her mental walls.
The emotional whiplash this creature evokes. She can hardly catch her breath. Chattering self-doubt chews at her and the tremor in her thighs is highly unwelcome. Turning steely, and for want of anything else to say, Elain glances mindlessly to where Cassian, Nesta and Rhys amicably chatter. Infant babbling weaves beneath the noise and the clinking of glasses make their own kind of music.
Faraway a bottle is uncorked.
“You could, that is to say, I could-”
“Forgive me, Elain. I-,” Azriel glances away for a second, his immaculate profile illuminated with weak cobalt light. “It’s only, I am expected elsewhere.”
A flash of tension pulls over Elain’s cheekbones and a feeling altogether darker than embarrassment lodges in her chest. But just as her mother taught her, Elain stays silent, holding Azriel's gaze while she places her back to the wall to let him pass.
Trailing like a cloak, a dark mess of shadow, cedar and night shimmer in Azriel’s wake. Elain does not let her gaze follow, instead steeling herself against his scent and the coldness his departure has wrought on her body.
A door closes, soft, and the sound of a hushed lullaby, sang by two, drifts close.
Breathing fast, over-stimulated and numb, Elain clutches at the wall. After some moments, she moves to push herself off it, but there, gleaming on the floor like a jewel is a single drop of blood.
Elain does not rejoin her family. She merely retreats, like a wave, to the sanctity of her room and tries once more to will her heart to ash.
-----
The gash at Azriel’s hairline has congealed, a crust of blood pulling his skin taut when he moves. It’s an apt punishment, especially when he was too distracted to parry the blow that left his ears ringing and stars smattering his vision.
He sighs as he glances upwards, rolling his neck. The sky is stained mauve, a close summer air threatening his armour with dew. Water idles along the bank of the River House garden, the last lights of the city winking from across the Sidra.
It’s too late to sleep, yet too early for anything else, and in the silence it feels as if all the world is sleeping save himself and his shadows.
Azriel sighs tersely, hands gripping the stone balustrade overlooking the river.
“Fuck,” he whispers.
Even if he did not want to replay that sorry interaction, his shadows won’t let him forget. They remind him of his mistimed arrival and a disgracefully familiar bleakness cast across Elain’s face. They report how the others languished in their seats whilst she once again laboured unaided, and hush around the lingering scent now clinging to his leathers.
From that abysmal Helsfire Azriel strode into an altogether different type of disquiet, sitting for no less than four hours with his High Lord brother. The relationship between Azriel and Rhys remains tense, the pair of them distant while they debriefed and schemed with one another, intelligence traded and orders crafted as if they weren’t brothers at all. Not anything close.
Azriel idly reaches a hand to graze the cut behind his ear. His face remains impassive despite the sting, and perhaps more so when he pulls away to detatchedly study the stain on his fingertips.
Again Azriel inhales deeply. His eyes are raw with fatigue and a shadow wearily slinks over his shoulder, brushing his cheekbone.
Home, it says; it asks.
And where would that be? he cannot help but respond, ignoring the nudge in the back of his mind when his shadows offer their reply.
A warming breeze ruffles his hair, offering notes of honeysuckle and earth. Azriel allows it caress him, eyes closing for the briefest of moments. The ugly knot in his chest loosens a little and the tension in his shoulders settles. He gazes down at his hands and at the lilac light that catches in the ridges of scar tissue. He turns them, watching, thinking of all the things they have done and all that they have not.
A pastel-toned movement to his left catches his eye. He turns unhurriedly to the branch of a hydrangea that seems to reach, its soft blooms like open palms, swaying in the night.
Azriel lifts a hand to caress the blue petal with his fingertip. It yields under his touch, swaying, and his brows soften, the edges of his eyes warming while for a moment he forgets.
Azriel abruptly pulls away his hand.
Then he calls his shadows close and once more winnows away.
