Chapter Text
Chapter 1
Azriel knew there were three hundred and twelve stones in the eastern wall.
He knew that seventeen of them had cracks running through them, that six had been replaced sometime in the last century, and that one, about level with his left shoulder, contained the fossilised remains of something with far too many legs. He knew there were forty-seven links in the chain hanging from the ceiling, that the male tied to the chair in front of him had broken his right index finger sometime in childhood and that it had healed badly, that there was a mouse inside the western wall and that one of the guards stationed outside had developed a blister on his heel.
He also knew there were six drops of blood on the floor beside his left boot. Seven now.
Azriel stared at the male in the chair.
"Again."
He coughed up blood, a speck landed on the floor, the rest going down the front of his shirt.
Eight.
"I told you."
Azriel waited.
The male's breathing was ragged now, his head hanging forward between his shoulders. One eye had swollen almost completely shut, blood had soaked through the front of his shirt and dried in darker patches across his collar, and several more stains had found their way onto Azriel's own leathers over the last hour. His gloves were considerably worse, black leather made slick and unpleasant enough that Azriel had already decided they were going in the fire rather than being cleaned. He’d have to remember to get another pair.
Azriel had been doing this for a very long time. He knew precisely how much pain a body could tolerate before pain stopped being useful, when fear worked better, when silence was more effective than either, when to leave someone alone with the anticipation of what might happen next and when to make absolutely certain there was no time for anticipation at all.
He also knew the male was lying. What Azriel did not know was what the bastard had said approximately thirty seconds ago.
Mouse moved.
Azriel's jaw tightened.
Guard outside shifted weight. Eleven drops of blood. Prisoner's pulse one hundred and twenty-six. Water beneath the floor.
He leaned one hip against the table behind him and folded his arms, the movement deliberately casual. He had discovered centuries ago that people found it considerably more frightening when their interrogator looked bored.
Inside, Azriel was trying to reconstruct the last minute of conversation. The male had given him a name. Probably, no, a location. Had he?
Fuck.
"You heard me," the prisoner rasped.
Azriel looked at him. "I did."
You did not. Azriel ignored the shadow curling around his ear. The prisoner's mouth twisted, something almost triumphant appearing there, and it irritated Azriel far more than it should have.
"Then you know I don't have anything else."
Lie. That, at least, was useful.
Azriel pushed away from the table, and the male's triumph disappeared. "Let's try again."
"I already fucking told you-" Before he could finish, Azriel caught the back of the chair and dragged it forward across the stone, the screech of wood against the floor echoing through the chamber.
Chair moved three feet. Left leg unstable. Fourteen drops of blood. Mouse stopped moving.
"Where is the second meeting point?"
The male stared at him, blood dripping fuller onto the ground, while Azriel stared back. A bead of sweat slipped from the prisoner's temple.
Pulse increasing. 131. The male swallowed. 134.
Azriel could hear footsteps somewhere above them. Two levels. Guard. Female. Carrying metal.
The prisoner glanced toward the door. Azriel caught the movement.
"Nobody is coming for you."
The male looked back at him. 138. Then at last he spoke, "Go fuck yourself."
Azriel sighed.
Twenty minutes later, he had the location: a warehouse near the southern border of the Autumn Court, registered under the name of a merchant who had supposedly died eleven years ago. There were two couriers, a rotating guard every third night, and the next exchange was scheduled for four days from now.
Useful information. Important information. Information Rhys had been waiting nearly three weeks to obtain, and information Azriel should have been able to pull from the male in half the time if his own shadows hadn't spent most of the interrogation providing a running inventory of the fucking room.
He stood over the table and wrote everything down while the prisoner sagged against the restraints behind him.
Ink stain on thumb. Azriel continued writing. Prisoner bleeding from mouth. He knew that one. 78 stones in western wall.
His pen stopped as he slowly lifted his head, so this was how today was going to be. He had good days and bad days, today his shadows were having a bad day.
There was a pause.
79 if the fractured stone beside the door is counted separately. He put the pen down. "Enough."
The shadows curled around his shoulders, and for perhaps three blessed seconds, none of them spoke.
Azriel finished the report before gathering the prisoner's confiscated belongings from the smaller table beside the door: two knives, six copper coins, a folded scrap of paper covered in meaningless numbers, a signet ring belonging to a family the prisoner was not related to, and a narrow black pendant hanging from a silver chain.
Azriel picked it up by the chain.
The stone hanging beneath it was smooth and polished into a thin oval no larger than the first joint of his thumb, black enough that the faelight overhead seemed to disappear into it rather than reflect from its surface.
Obsidian.
Nothing particularly remarkable about that. Azriel had seen obsidian weapons, jewellery and decorative pieces throughout Prythian. The Night Court mountains were volcanic in places, though most known deposits lay considerably farther north.
The setting interested him more because there wasn't one. No silver cage around the stone, no engraving or maker's mark. Someone had simply bored a tiny hole through the obsidian and threaded the chain directly through it, an old-fashioned and surprisingly cheap piece of jewellery compared with everything else the male had been carrying.
Azriel glanced over his shoulder. The prisoner's good eye had fixed on his hand. Interesting. Azriel lifted the pendant slightly by its chain. "This yours?"
The male looked away.
Pulse increased.
"Apparently."
"Fuck you."
Azriel let the pendant turn slowly beneath his gloved fingers. "Sentimental?"
Pulse 114.
"Religious?"
The male's jaw tightened. 119. Azriel looked at the pendant again.
"Or useful?"
The prisoner said nothing.
Azriel slipped the chain into one of the pockets inside his jacket, and the reaction was immediate enough that the male forgot himself.
"Don't."
Azriel stopped and looked back at him. The prisoner seemed to realise his mistake almost immediately, his mouth snapping closed as Azriel raised an eyebrow.
"No?"
Silence.
Azriel waited, but the male only looked at the floor.
He could have continued. An hour ago, he would have, but now Azriel found himself abruptly and profoundly exhausted. He had what Rhys needed, the couriers would be watched, the warehouse searched, and the network dismantled before the prisoner had another opportunity to see daylight. Whatever significance the pendant held could wait until Azriel had slept for more than three consecutive hours.
He stripped off his gloves as he crossed toward the door, grimacing when the tacky leather dragged over his scarred fingers. There was blood across the palms and worked into the seams around his knuckles, most of it not his, and he had neither the patience nor inclination to clean them. He dropped them onto the table beside the ruined instruments and flexed his bare hands once, resisting the familiar impulse to look too closely at the scar tissue before opening the door.
The two guards outside straightened.
"Water," Azriel said. "Then move him upstairs."
One nodded in acknowledgement as Azriel started walking. Right guard nervous. Left guard has blister. Torch needs replacing.
He took the first stair.
One.
Azriel stopped.
The shadows drifted around his boots as he looked up the narrow staircase spiralling toward the levels above and silently cursed whoever had designed the wards around the lower cells. No winnowing. No shadow-walking. No magical transport of any kind between the interrogation levels and the upper entrance, a precaution sensible enough when imprisoning fae capable of disappearing through space and considerably less charming when Azriel was the one forced to climb the entire fucking thing afterward.
"No."
Two.
He resumed climbing.
Three.
"Don't."
Four.
Azriel rubbed a hand over his face.
The lower levels beneath the Hewn City had been built long before Rhys's father had taken power, carved directly into the mountain rather than constructed within it. The stairs were uneven, narrow in places and worn smooth in the centre by centuries of boots, and Azriel had walked them thousands of times without ever once wondering how many there were.
Five. Six. Seven. Another shadow brushed his wing. Guard coughing above. Eight. Water dripping behind eastern wall. Nine. Prisoner moved. Ten.
"Enough."
His voice travelled strangely through the stairwell. The shadows ignored him. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Crack in fourth stone above you.
Azriel's jaw clenched as he kept walking. Fourteen. The blood drying across the front of his leathers pulled slightly when he moved.
Fifteen. He could smell iron. Sixteen. His own, perhaps. The prisoner's. Both.
Seventeen.
"Stop counting."
Eighteen.
Azriel stopped so abruptly that one of the shadows following his boots drifted past him before curling backward. His hand closed around the stone railing as he reminded himself that he was tired.
That was all.
He had spent most of the last week moving between courts, slept perhaps four hours the night before, and had spent the better part of this morning pulling information out of a male trained specifically to withstand interrogation. Anyone would be tired, and his shadows had always talked. Perhaps they had become somewhat more enthusiastic recently, but they were shadows. Enthusiasm was not exactly something Azriel could discipline out of them.
There are two hundred and eleven steps remaining.
Azriel stared into the darkness above. "Thank you."
He started climbing again.
You are angry. "Brilliant observation."
Twenty.
"Fuck off."
The shadow curled affectionately around his wrist, and Azriel continued upward, refusing to acknowledge the tiny part of him that found the gesture comforting even while he wanted to strangle the incorporeal thing responsible for it.
He made it another thirty steps before something shifted against his chest. The pendant, he had forgotten he'd put it there.
Azriel slipped two bare fingers into the inner pocket of his jacket and caught the little piece of obsidian, intending only to move it somewhere it would stop knocking against the buckle of his leathers.
His fingers closed directly around the stone.
Fifty-one. Water behin-. Silence.
Azriel stopped.
His boot remained suspended above the next stair for several seconds before he slowly lowered it onto the stone. Water dripped somewhere inside the mountain. He could hear it.
A torch crackled on the level above. Someone coughed. Far beneath him, metal scraped against stone as the guards began moving the prisoner, followed by the low murmur of voices too distant for Azriel to make out.
He could hear all of it, there was nothing beneath it.
No murmur threaded through his thoughts. No whisper pressed intimately against his ear. No voice informing him that the torch had burned precisely two-thirds of the way through its oil, that the guard above had coughed four times in the last minute, or that there were two hundred and sixty stones between Azriel and the next landing.
Nothing.
Azriel stood completely still.
For perhaps the first time in longer than he could remember, the only things he knew were the things he could see, hear, smell and feel for himself.
His own breathing sounded strangely loud. The faint scrape of his thumb against polished stone.
His heartbeat. Azriel stared down at his closed fist. His pulse had begun to quicken. No shadow told him so.
He knew because he could feel it.
Slowly, Azriel opened his hand. The pendant rested against his scarred palm. Black, smooth and entirely ordinary.
A shadow stirred near his shoulder.
Fifty-two.
Another slipped beneath his wing.
Guard above. Female. Sword on left hip. A third whispered from somewhere below. Prisoner is crying.
Azriel looked at the stone. Then closed his fingers around it again.
Silence.
His breath caught.
That frightened him enough that his hand opened almost immediately.
The shadows rushed back into the space.
Blood on your collar. Fifty-three. Your pulse increased. Mouse beneath floor.
Azriel stood very still, staring at the small piece of obsidian lying against the ruined skin of his palm.
Nothing about it looked magical. Nothing about it felt magical.
Yet for those few seconds, something that had been with him for centuries, something so constant he barely remembered what existence had felt like before it, had simply stopped.
Stopped talking. Azriel closed his hand again.
Nothing. This time he kept it there.
One second. Two. Three.
His breathing.
The distant scrape of boots.
Nothing else. He didn’t understand, at one point in his life, he surely would have touched obsidian before, he had, at multiple points. None of this was making sense.
Azriel hadn't realised how tired he was of knowing things. The thought arrived quietly enough that he almost missed it.
His fingers opened.
Fifty-four.
Azriel swallowed.
For the first time that morning, the number of stones in the wall did not matter.
"Well," he murmured.
The shadows gathered closer, almost suspicious of the little black stone in his hand.
He closed his hand again, silence not of the outside world but just in his mind. What day is it? Nothing responded, how many birds on the wall? Nothing. He opened his hand again.
Family dinner. Three birds.
It was then that he remembered Feyre had made him promise to attend family dinner that evening.
He stared upward at the remaining stairs.
Two hundred and seven.
Azriel closed his eyes.
"Fuck."
He had absolutely no intention of going to family dinner tonight.
Azriel slipped the pendant carefully back into his pocket.
—-
He had absolutely no intention of going to family dinner tonight.
By the time Azriel reached the upper levels, he had developed what he considered an entirely reasonable alternative plan.
He would deliver the report to Rhys, hand the prisoner’s possessions over to whoever was cataloguing evidence, return to his apartment, take a bath hot enough to remove the smell of blood from his skin and sleep until sometime tomorrow afternoon. If Feyre complained, he would apologise. If Cassian complained, he would ignore him. If Rhys attempted to drag him there personally, Azriel would remind his High Lord that forcing his spymaster to attend dinner immediately after an interrogation was an excellent way to ruin everyone’s appetite.
It was a good plan.
A sensible plan.
Unfortunately, the piece of obsidian in his pocket remained quiet all the way back to Velaris.
Not literally quiet. The shadows had resumed their relentless commentary the moment Azriel stopped touching it, and by the time he emerged from the wards and shadow-walked away from the Hewn City they had informed him of the weather over three separate mountain ranges, two Illyrian patrols, a broken wheel on a merchant’s cart and, for reasons known only to themselves, the fact that a fox had recently pissed against a tree approximately six minutes east of his flight path.
Azriel did not ask how they knew that.
He had learned long ago that some questions were better left unanswered.
The pendant itself, however, did nothing. It sat against his chest completely ordinary and inert.
Azriel hated it.
He shadow-walked into his office at the House of Wind shortly after midday, appearing behind his desk with the prisoner’s report still tucked beneath one arm. The room was empty, which was fortunate considering the state of him. Blood had dried almost black across his leathers, some of it spattered over his chest and thighs, more worked into the seams around his sleeves. He had washed his hands before leaving the Hewn City, but a faint reddish stain remained around one thumbnail and another had settled stubbornly into the deepest scars across his palm.
Azriel looked at it for precisely as long as necessary to recognise what it was.
Cassian training. He dropped the report onto his desk. Rhys at River House.
He removed Truth-Teller from his thigh. Feyre with Nyx. One siphon came next, then another.
Female crying two floors below. Azriel paused. His head turned automatically toward the door. The shadow curled closer.
Kitchen.
He waited. Nothing else. “Why?” The shadow drifted around his shoulder. Onion.
Azriel stared at it.
The shadow seemed entirely unrepentant. “Thank the Mother.”
He continued stripping off his weapons until he wasn’t carrying around their weight anymore. Only the shadows
They had always been useful, that was the problem, he couldn’t just hold the necklace.
Azriel had survived because of them. He had learned secrets that changed wars because of them. He had found missing children, uncovered assassination attempts, followed enemies through terrain where no ordinary spy could have tracked them and returned from places where Rhys had privately admitted he had expected Azriel to die.
The shadows had warned him about blades before they struck. Poisons before they were swallowed. Enemies before they entered the room.
He trusted them.
More than that, there were times he trusted them more than he trusted himself.
Which made resenting them feel dangerously close to ingratitude.
Azriel lowered himself into his chair. Something hard pressed against his ribs.
His hand stopped at the pendant, he should have handed it over with everything else.
Azriel knew that.
He had confiscated it from a prisoner during an official interrogation conducted under Rhys’s authority. It belonged in evidence until he determined whether it had any relevance to the intelligence network they were dismantling.
Instead, it was still in his pocket.
Azriel withdrew it by the chain and lowered it onto the desk.
Black stone against dark wood. The shadows reacted immediately, not overtly dramatically but they simply made room for it. This was worth noticing because they never did that.
Usually anything unfamiliar attracted them. New objects were investigated, wrapped in darkness, slipped beneath and around until every surface and secret had been catalogued.
None approached the obsidian.
One shadow that had been resting along Azriel’s forearm slid slowly toward his elbow.
Azriel looked at it, then at the pendant.
“Do you know what this is?”
Silence. 53 books in the room. Not what he asked and that alone was unusual enough to make him sit straighter.
Azriel reached toward the stone. The shadows in kind retreated another inch.
His fingers stopped above it. “What is it?”
Nothing. He lowered one scarred fingertip onto the obsidian.
The shadows vanished.
Azriel inhaled. There it was again. Silence. He kept his finger against the stone this time.
His office changed? No. That wasn’t right.
Nothing about the room had changed. The desk remained beneath his arms. Sunlight still entered through the windows. Somewhere beyond the walls, someone dragged a chair across a floor and the faint sound reached him normally.
Azriel had changed or perhaps something had been removed. For five hundred years, there had always been another layer beneath the world.
Whispers, Movement, Awareness.
He had never considered its weight because he had carried it for so long that it had ceased to feel like weight at all.
Now it was gone. Azriel sat very still. He could hear himself breathe. His own heartbeat was faint but present.
There was wind outside the window. Nothing told him where Cassian was. Nothing told him whether Rhys had left the River House. Nothing told him who was walking along the corridor three floors beneath him.
Azriel didn’t know. The realisation sent something strange through his chest. Fear.
His finger lifted.
Cassian struck Devlon’s nephew. Azriel blinked. “What?”
Training.
Another shadow appeared near his ear. Not angry.
A third curled around the back of his chair. Male approaching western stairwell. Rhys still at River House. Nyx asleep. Kitchen fire extinguished. Twelve people in training ring.
The information crashed back into him so quickly that Azriel’s eyes closed.
“Enough.”
The whispers softened only slightly. Azriel looked down at the pendant.
There were many things he should have done next. He should have taken it directly to Rhys. He should have asked Amren whether she recognised it.
He should have placed it inside a warded box and left it alone until someone with considerably more knowledge of strange magical objects had determined whether touching it with bare skin was an exceptionally stupid idea.
Instead, Azriel picked it up again and silence swallowed the room.
He exhaled. His shoulders dropped slightly. Azriel’s mouth tightened. He put the pendant down and the shadows predictably returned.
He picked it up. Silence.
Down. Wind changed.
Up. Nothing.
Down. Cassian swearing. Four Birds North.
Up. Nothing.
Azriel stared at the stone in his hand. “This is ridiculous.”
No shadow answered. He almost smiled.
Then someone knocked on the door. Azriel jumped. Actually jumped.
Truth-Teller was in his hand before thought caught up with movement, the blade appearing between one breath and the next as Azriel surged halfway out of his chair.
The door remained closed. Azriel stared at it, confusion rising, another knock.
His pulse started hammering. For one completely absurd second, he could not understand what had happened.
Then he looked down. The pendant remained trapped beneath his fingers.
No shadows had warned him. He dropped the stone, it landed on the floor, and he quickly pushed it slightly under his desk with his foot.
Rhys.
“Yes,” Azriel said.
The door opened. Rhys stepped inside, took one look at Truth-Teller in Azriel’s hand and stopped. His eyes moved from the blade to Azriel’s face.
“Expecting someone?”
Azriel slid Truth-Teller onto the desk.
“No.”
Rhys’s eyebrow rose. Azriel didn’t elaborate.
His brother entered and shut the door behind him, dressed considerably more casually than he had been the last time Azriel saw him, his jacket absent and the sleeves of his shirt pushed to his elbows. His gaze dropped almost immediately to the blood covering Azriel’s leathers.
“You look terrible.”
“I’ve been working.”
“Is that yours?” Nodding towards the blood.
“Only a little.”
Rhys nodded once.
That was all.
It was one of the things Azriel appreciated most about him.
Rhys knew what his work required. He knew what Azriel sometimes had to do in rooms beneath mountains, and while neither of them pretended it was pleasant, Rhys had never demanded Azriel return from those places untouched by them.
His gaze shifted to the report. “You got it?”
“Warehouse near the southern border. Everything’s there.”
Rhys picked up the pages and skimmed the first one. Azriel watched him.
Reading faster than usual. He ignored it. Jaw tense. Ignored that too. Feyre asked about you. Of course, can’t just be here to check in? Azriel looked toward the window.
Rhys continued reading. “Feyre says you’re coming tonight.”
“I was considering developing a sudden illness.”
Rhys’s mouth twitched. “She’ll send Madja.”
“Then I’ll develop something contagious.”
“She’ll still send Madja.”
Azriel sighed. Rhys lowered the report. “She misses you.”
The humour disappeared, and Azriel just raised an eyebrow in question. Rhys shrugged one shoulder. “Her words.”
“I saw her four days ago.”
“You walked through the River House, handed me a report and left.”
“I spoke to her.”
“You said hello.”
“That is speaking.”
Rhys stared at him and Azriel stared right back. Eventually Rhys rubbed two fingers against his forehead.
“Just come to dinner.”
Azriel looked down at the blood drying across his chest.
“I’ve been working.”
“We’ve noticed.”
There was no accusation in his tone, but the undertones of disapproval was there. Rhys tucked the report beneath his arm.
“Mor’s back.”
Azriel’s attention shifted despite himself. The reaction was tiny, Old and Automatic.
He hated it anyway. His shadows noticed. Of course they did.
Pulse increased.
Rhys either didn’t notice or was kind enough to pretend he hadn’t.
“Nesta and Cassian are coming. Elain too. Feyre has apparently decided that because all of us are in the same city, we’re legally obligated to occupy the same room for several hours.”
“Sounds horrific.”
“That’s what I said.”
“And yet you’re going.”
“I’m sleeping with the person organising it. My options are limited.”
Despite himself, Azriel huffed a laugh.
Rhys smiled as his expression softened. “Come, Az.”
Not an order from his High Lord but his brother, asking for his presence.
Azriel hated when they did that.
It was considerably easier to refuse Rhysand, High Lord of the Night Court, than Rhys, who had known him since they were boys and was currently standing in his office pretending not to look concerned.
Azriel leaned back in his chair.
“Fine.”
Rhys blinked. “Fine?”
“Don’t make me reconsider.”
Rhys lifted both hands. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He turned toward the door. “Seven.”
Azriel frowned. Only six birds on the roof. Rhys looked over his shoulder. “Dinner is at seven.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Get out.” He had assumed it was around seven. Rhys laughed and disappeared through the door.
The moment it closed, Azriel’s expression fell. Rhys worried. “I know.”
The shadow curled around his shoulder.
Azriel looked down at the obsidian. He had several hours before dinner, during which he should sleep.
Instead, he picked up the pendant from under the table and went looking for a book.
——
The first three books told him nothing.
The fourth informed Azriel that obsidian had been used extensively for decorative purposes during the reign of a High Lord whose name had been lost sometime around the second century of the Night Court, which was fascinating only in the sense that Azriel briefly considered using the book to beat himself unconscious.
The fifth contained drawings of knives.
The sixth was written entirely in an ancient dialect he could technically read but had no desire to translate word by fucking word when his head already hurt.
By the seventh, Azriel had moved from his office to one of the older archives beneath the House of Wind and begun regretting every decision that had brought him there.
Dust on third shelf. Azriel turned a page. Someone walking two floors above. Another page.
Four spiders behind eastern bookcase. “Thrilling.”
One shadow curled over the edge of the table. One is missing a leg. “Devastating.”
The pendant lay beside his right hand. He had placed it there nearly an hour ago and had been making a concerted effort not to touch it.
That had lasted approximately six minutes.
Now Azriel picked it up whenever the shadows became particularly irritating, held it until the silence stopped feeling quite so strange, then put it down again and continued reading.
It was becoming a habit at least Azriel recognised that. He chose not to examine it too closely.
The eighth book finally gave him something. A single paragraph buried halfway through a chapter concerning pre-Court magical practices, written in handwriting so cramped that Azriel had to bring another faelight closer to the page.
Black glass was favoured among early practitioners whose magic existed beyond the corporeal self. Obsidian possesses little power of its own, though several traditions believed it capable of providing an anchor between that which is physical and that which is not.
Azriel read it twice. Anchor. “I can read.”
The shadow slipped across the page. Azriel continued.
Most of the remaining text concerned death rites, burial customs and something involving the preservation of souls that Azriel decided he had absolutely no interest in experimenting with.
But someone had written in the margin. Not the original author. Different ink, Different handwriting.
Three words. Not anchor. Door. The shadows crowded closer.
He touched the handwriting. Old ink, very old.
“Door to what?”
Naturally, nobody answered. Azriel looked at the pendant. It sat innocently beside the book.
He should have found Amren. The thought occurred to him with enough clarity that he would later resent himself for ignoring it.
Amren had existed before Prythian. Amren had forgotten more about old magic than most scholars would ever learn. Amren also possessed the deeply irritating habit of recognising dangerous objects and then asking Azriel exactly what idiotic thing he had done with them before explaining why he should not have done it.
Azriel looked at the time.
He still had nearly two hours before dinner.
Plenty of time. That was his first mistake. He picked up the pendant and the shadows disappeared.
Azriel studied the obsidian between his fingers.
“An anchor,” he murmured. “Or a door.” Azriel reached for the faint thread of magic inside himself.
Not his siphons, the Illyrian power humming beneath his skin.
Something older, the part of him the shadows answered.
Azriel had never possessed a proper name for it. Shadowsinging was what others called his gift, but the term had always felt inadequate. He didn’t create shadows. He didn’t control darkness. The shadows had simply found him when he was a child and, for reasons Azriel still didn’t entirely understand, decided to stay.
He let a thin strand of that power slide toward the obsidian.
Nothing happened, and Azriel frowned. He tried again, nothing happened. “Useful.”
He increased the pressure this time, the stone warmed.
Azriel froze, there, barely perceptible, was a tiny bit of warmth. He sent another thread of power into it, and the warmth deepened.
Something shifted.
Not in the room.
Somewhere else.
Azriel’s shadows appeared all at once.
They did not whisper, they recoiled. Every tendril of darkness in the archive snapped backward so violently that several faelights flickered.
Azriel went still. “What?”
The shadows crowded behind him, almost like they were kidding.
Azriel stared at them. In five centuries, he had seen his shadows frightened.
He knew what that looked like, but this? This was different.
Don’t.
The word was so quiet Azriel almost thought he’d imagined it. His gaze dropped to the obsidian.
“What is it?”
Don’t.
Azriel should have listened. That was his second mistake. Instead, he pushed.
The world disappeared. There was no sensation of falling. Falling required direction. This moment had none.
One moment Azriel was sitting in an archive beneath the House of Wind with an obsidian pendant trapped between his fingers.
The next, Nothing. Not darkness; darkness was something Azriel understood.
Darkness belonged to rooms without candles and moonless skies and the space beneath mountains. Darkness could be moved through. Hidden inside. Befriended.
This was absence.
Azriel had no body.
No wings.
No hands.
No heartbeat.
For one impossible moment, he could not remember whether he had ever possessed any of those things.
There was no above. No below. No distance, and yet something stretched infinitely beneath him.
Azriel became aware of it slowly.
Depth.
Not a place. Not exactly.
Something vast enough that his mind refused to understand its edges. His instincts screamed.
Azriel reached for his shadows.
Nothing answered.
He reached for Truth-Teller. He had no hand with which to hold it. He reached for Rhys.
Nothing.
For the first time since he had been eight years old and locked beneath his father’s house, Azriel was completely alone.
Then something moved.
Far below him.
Or above.
Or inside.
Azriel could not tell.
Something enormous shifted through the absence.
His mind caught only pieces of it, impressions too large to become images. A curve that might have been a limb. Something opening where nothing should have been capable of opening. A pressure against whatever remained of his consciousness.
Azriel stopped thinking.
Something had noticed him. The attention of it settled over him.
Azriel had stood before High Lords.
He had faced ancient creatures beneath mountains, fought beings older than his bloodline and looked into the eyes of things that could have killed him before he drew a blade.
None of them had ever made him feel small.
This did. Azriel tried to pull back.
Nothing happened, and for the first time, fear became panic.
He pushed against whatever held him.
The absence stretched. Something moved closer, and somewhere impossibly far away, Azriel heard his shadows screaming.
That sound gave him something to follow.
He seized it and pulled with all his might. The thing below him moved again. Azriel pulled harder, now desperate. Pain exploded through his skull.
Then he was back. His chair struck the floor hard enough to crack one leg. Azriel hit the stone beside it.
For several seconds he could do nothing except exist. Air tore into his lungs.
His wings had flared wide enough that one had struck the table and sent three books crashing to the floor. His hands shook violently against the stone, scarred fingers digging into the gaps between the tiles as though the floor might disappear beneath him again.
The shadows swarmed him. Not speaking, just touching. His wrists. His shoulders. His wings. His face.
Azriel dragged in another breath.
“What the fuck.”
Something warm struck his hand. He looked down to see a splotch of red.
Blood.
Another drop landed beside it, Azriel lifted his fingers to his nose.
Red. “Wonderful.” The shadows erupted. Blood.
“I noticed.”
Ears. Azriel frowned, then felt the warmth sliding down the side of his neck.
His hand rose, more blood coming from both ears.
“Fuck.”
He pushed himself upright. The room tilted for some reason, and Azriel only just caught the table.
Sit.
“I’m fine.”
Sit.
“Stop.”
Blood.
“Yes.”
Too far. Azriel froze. The shadow wrapped around his wrist was trembling. He looked down at it.
“What?” The shadows pressed closer. Too far.
“Where?”
No answer. Azriel looked at the obsidian. It had landed several feet away. The pendant lay on the floor beneath the overturned chair, looking exactly as it had before. Looking completely harmless.
Azriel did not touch itand For once, his curiosity was lost.
He stood carefully and immediately regretted it when pressure drove through the centre of his skull hard enough to make his vision pulse.
Azriel braced both hands against the table.
“Fine.” The shadows disagreed enthusiastically. Blood. Blood. Blood. “Still aware.”
Pulse high.
“Stop.”
You are injured.
“Thank you.”
Rhys.
“No.”
Several shadows immediately moved toward the door. Azriel snapped his head up. “Don’t.”
They stopped.
“Nobody tells Rhys.” The shadows shifted, which at this point in time would be the last thing he needed. Azriel narrowed his eyes.
“I mean it.”
A pause. Feyre.
“No.”
Cassian.
“Absolutely not.” The shadows curled unhappily around his shoulders. Azriel straightened slowly.
He might need a healer. He knew that much at least. Blood coming from both ears after accidentally sending his consciousness into whatever the fuck that had been was generally the sort of thing one should probably mention to someone with medical training.
He would, of course, just not right now, but eventually.
First he needed to determine what had happened, and before that, Azriel glanced toward the clock.
He stared. “No.”
The shadows remained wisely silent. Azriel looked again.
Dinner had started six minutes ago. For a moment he genuinely considered simply not going.
It would be easy.
He could return to his apartment, lock the door, sleep for twelve hours and tell Feyre tomorrow that something had come up.
Then he remembered Rhys standing in his office.
She misses you. Azriel closed his eyes.
“Fuck.”
Changing would take time, bathing would take longer. He looked down at himself.
The prisoner’s blood still stained his leathers from earlier, dried dark across his chest and sleeves. His own blood had now joined it, fresh streaks running from beneath both ears and disappearing beneath his collar. More remained beneath his nose and across the back of the hand he’d used to wipe it away.
He looked like he’d spent the afternoon being murdered.
Azriel considered this, reached for his magic, and glamour slid over him.
Blood disappeared. The stains across his leathers vanished beneath clean black fabric. The redness around his nose faded. The wet tracks beneath his ears disappeared, followed by the burst vessels beginning to show around his eyes.
Azriel inspected himself in the reflection of the darkened window.
Perfectly presentable.
His head throbbed. That problem was less easily fixed.
He retrieved the obsidian pendant using the chain, very deliberately avoiding touching the stone, and slipped it into his pocket.
The shadows recoiled from it. Azriel pretended not to notice. “You tell no one.”
A shadow curled around his ear. Bad idea. Azriel stared at it. “Which part?”
The shadow offered no clarification.
He summoned Truth-Teller, fastened it against his thigh, and straightened his jacket.
His reflection looked back at him.
Clean.
Controlled.
Untouched.
Exactly as everyone expected, Azriel drew one careful breath.
Then shadow-walked to dinner.
—-
Azriel arrived twenty-three minutes late to dinner.
He knew this because one of his shadows informed him the moment he stepped through the River House.
Twenty-three minutes. “Thank you.”
The shadow curled around his shoulder. Everyone is already seated. “Even better.”
He had almost turned around twice before coming here. His apartment was fifteen minutes away. Less if he shadow-walked. There was a bed there. Silence, theoretically.
No Cassian.
No Rhys.
No questions.
No family dinner.
Then Azriel had remembered Feyre saying she missed him. So here he fucking was.
He paused beside the mirror in the entrance hall and checked the glamour.
Two rats left side barn. Blood still there.
Clean black leathers stared back at him. No blood across his chest. Nothing beneath his nose. Nothing running from his ears or disappearing beneath his collar. Even the tiny ruptured vessels around his eyes had been concealed, leaving only the exhaustion he hadn’t bothered hiding because everyone already expected that from him.
Good enough.
The headache was getting worse.
That was less convenient.
It had settled behind his eyes as a constant, vicious pressure, occasionally pulsing hard enough that the edges of his vision blurred. His shadows had also become increasingly agitated since the archive. They hadn’t stopped touching him since he’d returned from wherever the obsidian had taken him, winding around his wrists, wings and shoulders as though repeatedly confirming he was still physically present.
Azriel wasn’t particularly interested in examining what that meant.
He entered the dining room.
“There he is,” Feyre said immediately.
Every head at the table turned, Azriel regretted coming he should have just gone home to sleep.
“Sorry.”
Feyre smiled from beside Rhys. Nyx was absent, presumably already asleep upstairs, which removed at least one person Azriel had to pretend he hadn’t spent his afternoon covered in another male’s blood around.
“You came.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am.”
Ouch. He lets that slide because she’s not wrong. The long table had been unnecessarily filled despite there being only seven of them. Rhys sat at one end with Feyre beside him, Cassian and Nesta opposite each other farther down, Mor beside Feyre and Elain near the empty chair apparently reserved for Azriel. Amren nowhere to be seen, maybe for the best, she’d probably have a way to find out what he did.
Of course it was beside Elain and opposite Mor. Azriel briefly considered taking the chair at the other end.
Feyre was watching him as He sat.
Elain’s pulse increased.
Azriel reached for his wine. Absolutely not.
Mor watching. Even better.
He took a drink.
“Long day?” Cassian asked.
Azriel looked at him. Cassian’s gaze had moved over his clothes, seeing nothing except what the glamour wanted him to see.
“Something like that.”
“Rhys said you were working.”
“Rhys says many things.”
“I do,” Rhys agreed.
Elain quietly pushed a serving dish toward him.
“You haven’t eaten.”
Azriel looked down.
His plate was empty.
“I’ve been here thirty seconds.”
A small smile touched her mouth.
“Exactly.”
Something uncomfortable shifted beneath Azriel’s ribs. It was different from what happened when he looked at Mor. That was the problem.
For centuries, whatever he felt for Mor had become so familiar that Azriel knew precisely how to bury it. He knew where to put his eyes, how far away to sit, when to leave a room and exactly how much wine he could consume before his carefully constructed indifference became harder to maintain.
Elain was newer, softer, and more complicated than he’d like, which therefore made it considerably more irritating
Mor looked at Elain.
Azriel’s fingers tightened around his fork.
“Don’t.”
Elain blinked. “Sorry?”
Azriel realised too late he’d spoken aloud. “Not you.”
There was a pause. Cassian glanced toward the shadows moving restlessly around Azriel’s shoulders.
“Are they bothering you?”
“No.”
Lie.
Azriel stabbed a potato. Cassian’s mouth twitched. Azriel pointed the fork at him. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I was thinking about it.”
“Think quieter.”
Nesta snorted into her wine. The conversation moved on. For approximately four minutes, dinner was almost tolerable.
Feyre told Mor something Nyx had done earlier that week. Cassian interrupted twice, once to dispute a detail despite not having been present for the event, and Nesta informed him that this was why nobody liked telling him stories. Elain asked Rhys about some work being done to the gardens. Mor stole food from Feyre’s plate.
It was a painfully normal experience. Azriel sat there in silence, if you could really call it that, and tried to listen to his family talk.
Nyx asleep upstairs. He cut another piece of meat. Two guards outside. Mor was saying something. Servant entering kitchen.
Elain laughed. Fire shifted. Cassian started telling a story about training. Three people walking beside the Sidra.
Azriel concentrated on Cassian, he was pretty sure it was Something about the Illyrians.
One is carrying flowers. Dog beneath neighbouring table. There was no neighbouring table and Azriel frowned.
House across street. Of course, why didn’t he think of that?
“-which you would know,” Cassian was saying, “if you’d actually been there.”
Azriel looked up.
Rhys’s expression had cooled. Whatever peace dinner had been pretending to possess vanished.
“I told you why I wasn’t.”
“You sent me to deal with it.”
“Yes.”
“Without telling me you’d already changed the rotation.”
Rhys set his wine down. “I didn’t realise I needed your permission.”
Nesta’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. Azriel closed his eyes internally. Apparently this was happening.
Cassian leaned back in his chair. “That’s not what I said.”
“It sounded remarkably similar.”
“I said if you’re going to change the rotation of people I’m responsible for training, you might consider telling me before half of them disappear.”
“They didn’t disappear.”
“They were reassigned.”
“Yes.”
“Without telling me.”
Rhys’s jaw tightened.
Rhys irritated. Azriel knew. Cassian angry. He knew that too. Feyre preparing to speak.
“Can we perhaps—” Feyre began.
“No,” Cassian said.
Feyre stared at him.
Cassian winced.
“Not no to you.”
“Excellent recovery,” Mor said.
“Stay out of it.” Mor’s eyebrows rose.
Cassian immediately looked as though he wanted to retrieve the words and swallow them.
Nesta smiled without humour.
“Oh, this should go well.”
Azriel took another drink. The wine did absolutely nothing for his headache.
Blood.
His hand stopped. A shadow brushed beneath his left ear. Azriel resisted the urge to touch it. The glamour remained intact.
Everything was fine. Across the table, Rhys was still arguing.
“I needed people on the western border.”
“And I needed to know my unit was being cut in half.”
“They’re not your unit, Cassian.”
Silence.
Cassian’s expression changed.
Azriel slowly lowered his glass.
There were some sentences that could not be put back once spoken. Rhys knew it too.
His shoulders dropped slightly. “That’s not what I meant.”
“No,” Cassian said. “I’m pretty sure it was.”
“Cas-”
“They’re Illyrians under your command,” Cassian continued. “I know. Believe me, Rhys, you’ve made that abundantly fucking clear.”
Nesta put down her fork. Feyre looked at Rhys. Mor shifted in her chair. Elain became very interested in her plate, and Azriel’s shadows exploded into commentary.
Cassian pulse 109. Rhys magic rising. Nesta angry. Mor watching Cassian. Feyre’s left hand beneath table. Elain stopped eating. Blood beneath your ear.
Servant in hallway. Nyx moved upstairs.
Azriel rubbed his thumb against the side of his index finger.
“Could we not?” Nobody heard him, or maybe they did and chose not to.
Cassian and Rhys were both speaking now.
Nesta joined in, then Mor, Feyre attempted to intervene.
Five voices. Six. Footsteps upstairs. Rhys angry. Cassian hurt. Nesta’s pulse increased. Mor lying.
Azriel’s head snapped toward her. Mor was speaking to Cassian.
He had no idea what she’d said.
Lie.
About what? The shadows didn’t elaborate. Of course they didn’t why would they?
Pain pulsed behind Azriel’s eyes. He pressed two fingers briefly against his temple. The obsidian pendant rested inside his jacket.
For one deeply tempting moment, Azriel considered reaching for it.
Just touching it, five seconds, just enough to make everything stop.
His fingers moved toward his chest.
Then stopped. Something had been inside that silence. Something vast. Something that had noticed him. Azriel lowered his hand.
No.
He would tolerate the shadows. He had tolerated worse. He always did.
“You’re acting like he did it to spite you,” Mor was saying.
Cassian laughed sharply. “That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point is that everyone in this fucking family disappears whenever they want and apparently nobody owes anybody an explanation.”
Mor went still. Azriel wished desperately that he could become incorporeal.
Cassian realised what he’d done.
Mor leaned back. “Excuse me?”
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
“Don’t insult me.”
“Mor.”
“No. Go on.” She gestured toward him. “You’ve clearly been waiting to say it.”
Cassian rubbed both hands over his face. “I am not doing this.”
“You started it.”
“I was talking about Rhys.”
“And somehow managed to look directly at me.”
“Because you were talking!”
“Children,” Rhys muttered.
Cassian rounded on him. “You don’t get to say that.”
“Can everyone please stop?” Feyre said.
Nobody did. Azriel, taking a page from Elian’s book just stared at his plate.
Mor angry. Cassian angry. Rhys irritated. Nesta enjoying this.
Azriel glanced at Nesta. She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. At least someone was having a good evening.
Then the shadows started counting.
Eight candles.
Azriel’s jaw tightened.
Twenty-four plates. Thirty-seven pieces of cutlery.
“Stop.” Nobody noticed.
Three birds. His headache throbbed. 4 bottles of wine.
Across the table, Mor was saying something about spending months dealing with Court business only to come home and be accused of abandoning everyone.
Cassian fired something back. Nesta, in turn, defended him. Rhys told both of them they were being ridiculous.
5 windows. Azriel closed his eyes and just tried to breathe.
Blood.
“Enough.” This time he said it louder.
The table quieted, not completely but enough to get people’s attention. Then and only then did Azriel open his eyes.
Everyone was looking at him. Fantastic. He rubbed at his temple.
“Can we not do this tonight?”
Cassian’s anger faded a fraction. Feyre looked relieved, and Rhys just leaned back.
For one beautiful second, Azriel thought that might actually be the end of it.
Then Mor laughed. There was no humour in it.
“Easy for you to say.”
Azriel looked at her. Mor’s face was flushed, her own frustration still burning too hot from the argument with Cassian for her to notice the warning in Feyre’s expression.
Azriel didn’t respond. He didn’t have the energy. Apparently that made it worse.
“You don’t get to sit there looking miserable because the rest of us are actually talking to each other.”
“Mor,” Feyre said quietly.
Azriel stared at her.
Something old and humiliating twisted inside his chest. Of course it had to be her.
“Leave it,” Cassian said.
“No.” Mor looked around the table. “Apparently we’re saying what we think tonight, aren’t we?”
Cassian’s face tightened. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then perhaps you should have thought before you said it.”
“And perhaps you should do the same,” Nesta said.
Mor turned toward her, a sneer on her face. Azriel’s head pounded.
Blood beneath right ear. He ignored it.
“Mor.”
His voice was quiet. She looked back at him. Azriel shook his head once.
Please.
He didn’t say it. He would never say it. But perhaps something showed anyway. Mor was too angry to see it.
“What?” she demanded. “You want everyone to stop because you’re uncomfortable?”
Azriel said nothing.
“You’re always uncomfortable.”
The room went still around the edges.
Mor kept going.
“Cas thinks I’m barely here, but it's you who is barely here anymore, Az. You disappear for days, sometimes weeks, then walk back in whenever Rhys needs something and act like the rest of us are supposed to pretend that’s normal.”
“Mor,” Rhys warned.
She ignored him.
“You hide in your office. You disappear into whatever hole you’ve found this month. Half the time nobody even knows where you are.”
Azriel felt something inside himself simply… stop.
Not break, he was too tired to break.
Mor gestured toward him.
“And you’re sitting right in front of us wearing a glamour.”
Nobody moved, and this is the moment Mor’s anger faltered, but not enough to stop talking.
“When was the last time any of us actually saw you?”
Silence.
Real silence this time. Even the shadows seemed to hesitate.
Azriel looked at Mor, and her expression changed immediately, she knew she had just crossed a line. It didn’t show on his face, but instinctively she knew she’d gone too far.
“Az-”
Mor regrets it. Cassian angry. Feyre afraid. Rhys moving. Elain watching. Blood.
Azriel was still sitting down, looking at Mor. He made a decision and reached for his magic, with that, the glamour disappeared.
Nobody spoke.
The clean black leathers vanished first.
Blood covered him.
Dark, dried stains spread across his chest and abdomen, soaked into one sleeve and streaked along his collar. More marked his thighs and cuffs, old enough to have dried almost brown-black against the leather.
Someone else’s.
That much was obvious.
Then they saw his face.
Feyre inhaled sharply.
Blood had dried beneath Azriel’s nose and over his upper lip, though he’d wiped most of it away earlier. Thin tracks ran from both ears, disappearing down the sides of his neck and beneath his collar. Tiny ruptured vessels webbed red through the whites of his eyes and scattered beneath the skin around them.
A fresh line of blood had begun slipping from his left ear.
Nobody at the table moved. Cassian had gone completely still. Nesta’s amusement was gone. Rhys looked like someone had struck him. Elain’s hand covered her mouth.
Azriel didn’t look at Mor for long.
He couldn’t, not because he was angry. That would have been easier. He simply didn’t possess whatever was required to deal with her expression right now.
Rhys’s heart rate increased. Cassian afraid. Feyre moving.
Mor-
“Don’t.”
The shadows stopped. Feyre had started to rise. Azriel looked at her. She froze.
“Azriel,” Rhys said.
Azriel turned toward him. Rhys’s eyes moved from the blood beneath his ears to the stains covering his leathers.
Azriel knew what he was seeing.
The interrogation and Something else. Too much blood from too many places.
“What happened?”
Azriel looked around the table.
At his family.
At the dinner he’d promised Feyre he would attend.
At the food he’d barely touched.
At Mor.
His head fucking hurt.
“I’ve been working.”
Cassian made a strangled sound. “That is not fucking work.”
Azriel almost smiled.
He reached for the glamour again. Blood disappeared beneath immaculate black. The tracks beneath his ears vanished.
His eyes cleared.
In less than a heartbeat, Azriel was exactly as he’d been when he entered the room.
Controlled.
Clean.
Fine.
The effect seemed to horrify them more than the blood had. Azriel pushed his chair back.
“Excuse me for the night.”
“Az-” Feyre began.
“I’m tired.” He interrupted her.
He stood, and the room tilted slightly as he caught himself unceremoniously on the chair. Azriel ignored it.
“And I seem to have a headache.”
Rhys was already rising.
Cassian shoved his chair backward.
Mor said his name.
Azriel didn’t wait to hear any of them.
The shadows rose around him.
He was gone.