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Chapter 18. ACOMAF. Rhysey-Piecey. A very angsty, miserable Rhysey-Piecey. I take no credit for dialogue nor ideas. They belong to Sarah J. Maas.
In the Darkness
“Who is he? What is he?” Feyre asked.
The walls of the prison were stiff and dark making it difficult to see and understand. Memories of Under the Mountain were amplified in the stale silence where creeping whisperings could almost be heard. Almost, but not quite.
“No one knows,” I replied. “He’ll appear as he wants to appear.”
“Shape-shifter?”
“Yes and no. He’ll appear to you as one thing, and I might be standing right beside you and see another.”
It was the question that had haunted me all day as we trekked up the mountain side towards the rock fortress. The Bone Carver. Feyre was already petrified to be here. I was enormously pleased and proud to find her mental shields well in tact when we winnowed to our starting point, but how easily would they crack? What would the Bone Carver transfigure himself into that might break her?
The worst part of it all was that I wouldn’t even know. The Carver would likely show me something entirely different from Feyre and if her shields held, I wouldn’t see it. I only prayed to the Cauldron that whatever the Carver chose to show her, it wouldn’t be Amarantha.
Anything but that.
“And the bone carving?”
“You’ll see.”
We arrived at a slick stone cover hiding the Bone Carver’s den. I released my grip on Feyre’s hand, which had grown sweaty with anticipation in my palm, and touched the smooth surface willing it to release. In the blink of an eye, the stone melted into a cascade of bones, hundreds of them, each one intricately carved to detail every scene imaginable with magnificent, gruesome splendor. Beside me, Feyre inhaled sharply.
And then, the Bone Carver spoke.
“I have carved the doors for every prisoner in this place, but my own remains my favorite.”
“I’d have to agree,” I said, stepping into the Carver’s den where I was shocked by the sight of the him. He sat low and crouched on the dirty floor of his cell drinking in the sight of Feyre, his eyes roaming the length of her body hungry for new information. Feyre did not balk, and I knew the Carver could not have taken on Amarantha’s form for her, thank the Cauldron. But what I saw, the person I saw slide his eyes to me as I magicked a bag into my hands, was the very last person I had expected and I felt foolish to not have seen it coming.
I felt more than saw Feyre tense beside me as I pulled the bone out of my bag and tossed it at the Carver, an offering to begin our game. “The calf-bone that made the final kill when Feyre slew the Middengard Wyrm,” I said. The Carver looked delighted and it disgusted me to see that smirk on the new face he wore especially for me.
“Come inside,” he said. Feyre chanced but a single step. “It has been an age since something new came into this world.”
“Hello,” Feyre said, her voice far too light, the Carver far too happy. It made my stomach feel sick knowing how he would dance with her.
“Are you frightened?”
“Yes.”
The Carver stood, but did not approach, a subtle indication he would play. “Feyre,” he said. “Fay-ruh. Where did you go when you died?”
“A question for a question,” Feyre offered and though he did not take his eyes from her, he nodded smartly at me.
“You were always smarter than your forefathers. Tell me where you went, what you saw - and I will answer your question.”
Feyre looked at me and I nodded, urging her to go on with the hope that she wouldn’t see the worry in my veins that this would tax her too much. Or worse, that she would think I didn’t believe enough in her to do it, which could not have been further from the truth. The seconds dragged on and I didn’t need to breach her shields to know what thoughts flitted through her head of pain and agony and death.
Just when the Carver began to look particularly intrigued, perhaps enough to begin taunting Feyre with her weaknesses, Feyre’s hands bundled into fists at her sides and she spoke, and with each word, words so honest and haunting that I had not expected them, I started to cleave inside.
“I heard the crack,” Feyre said, my eyes abandoning the Carver to watch her instead. “I heard the crack when she broke my neck. It was in my ears, but also inside my skull. I was gone before I felt anything more than the first lash of pain. And then it was dark. A different sort of dark than this place. But there was a... thread.”
My heart sped up. She couldn’t possibly have meant...
“A tether. And I yanked on it - and suddenly I could see. Not through my eyes, but - but his...” Her hands uncurled from her fists as if a mighty weight had removed itself in admitting such a truth.
The Bond. She was talking about the mating bond, did she even realize? She’d felt it that day the same as I had. I had thought myself alone in feeling it between us, that Feyre could never have felt the bond between us due to her hatred of me, much less accepted it. I had thought myself alone in reaching for it, but after everything, she had groped for it in the darkness too. It was all we had in death, the bond between us.
We had pulled together.
“And I knew I was dead,” Feyre continued, each word placing a grip on my heart that was equal parts ice and fire. “And this tiny scrap of spirit was all that was left of me, clinging to the thread of our bargain.”
“But was there anyone there - were you seeing anything beyond?” the Carver asked.
“There was only that bond in the darkness. And when i was Made anew, I followed that bond back - to me. I knew that home was on the other end of it. There was light then. Like swimming up through sparkling wine.”
Feyre finally looked at me then and I think my soul exploded, desperate to collide with hers and restitch itself back together in fury and passion.
My mate. My mate. My mate.
“Were you afraid?” the Carver next asked. Question Two.
“All I wanted was to return to - to the people around me. I wanted it badly enough I didn’t have room for fear. The worst had happened, and the darkness was calm and quiet. it did not seem like a bad thing to fade into. But I wanted to go home. So I followed the bone home.”
Home. Home. Home.
The thought beat a steady rhythm in my head as everything from unbounding joy to nervousness to sorrow tore at me.
Was I Feyre’s home?
“There was no other world?” the Carver asked. Question Three.
“If there was or is, I did not see it.”
“No light, no portal?”
“It was only peace and darkness.”
“Did you have a body?”
“No.”
“Did-”
“That’s enough from you,” I purred, quickly resuming my persona reserved for the outside world. Feyre didn’t need to relive every detail, she had offered him enough to make him talk. But I also selfishly wanted to stop his interrogation for myself, before Feyre’s story had a chance to thoroughly wreck me to the point of never coming back. “You said a question for a question. Now you’ve asked... six.”
Mercifully, the Carver relaxed and so too, I think, did Feyre at having the ball thrown into her court.
“It is a rare day when I meet someone who comes back from true death,” the Carver said. “Forgive me for wanting to peer behind the curtain. Ask it, girl.”
With renewed confidence I was glad to hear in her voice, Feyre spoke, “If there was no body - nothing but perhaps a bit of bone, would there be a way to resurrect that person? To grow them a new body, put their soul into it.”
"Was the soul somehow preserved? Contained?”
“Yes.”
“There is no way. Unless... Long ago, before the High Fae, before man, there was a Cauldron... They say all the magic was contained inside it, that the world was born in it. But it fell into the wrong hands. And great and horrible things were done with it. Things were forged with it. Such wicked things that the Cauldron was eventually stolen back at great cost. It could not be destroyed, for it had Made all things, and if it were broken, then life would cease to be. So it was hidden. And forgotten. Only with that Cauldron could something that is dead be reforged like that.”
“Where did they hide it?” I asked casually.
“Tell me a secret no one knows, Lord of Night, and I’ll tell you mine.”
I shrugged, almost enjoying toying with him. “My right knee gets a twinge of pain when it rains. I wrecked it during the War, and it’s hurt ever since.”
The Bone Carver’s laugh barked through the air. Feyre was gaping open mouthed at me, not entirely unamused herself.
“You always were my favorite,” the Carver said. “Very well. The Cauldron was hidden at the bottom of a frozen lake in Lapplund and vanished a long, long time ago. I don’t know where it went to - or where it is now. Millennia before you were born, the three feet on which it stands were successfully cleaved from its base in an attempt to fracture some of its power. It worked - barely.
“Removing the feet was like cutting off the first knuckle of a finger. irksome, but you could still use the rest with some difficulty. The feet were hidden at three different temples - Cesere, Sangravah, and Itica. If they have gone missing, it is likely the Cauldron is active once more - and that the wielder wants it at full power and not a wisp of it missing.”
“I don’t suppose you know who now has the Cauldron,” I asked, more casually still. I felt anger wash over me as I watched the Carver point a long, bony finger - his finger - at Feyre.
“Promise that you’ll give me her bones when she dies and I’ll think about it.” My blood went cold and I stilled, the Carver chuckling at me like a cat toying with a mouse. “No - I don’t think even you would promise that, Rhysand.”
“Thank you for your help,” I said, my voice made of steel. I moved to guide Feyre out of the room. We were done with his games. Much as his affirmation of my suspicions would have been nice, I didn’t need it to really know who was responsible. And the subtle threat at Feyre was enough to make me wish her and I far, far away from this prison camp.
But Feyre did not follow with me. Her body froze beneath my hand pressing in on her lower back as she turned her gaze back to the Carver sensing how to unravel him. Little did she know she would unravel me in the process.
“There was a choice - in Death,” she said. One simple phrase and I could sense without looking at him, could feel it in the scent of him, that he was rapt with attention.
“I knew that I could drift away into the dark. And I chose to fight - to hold on for a bit longer. Yet I knew if I wanted, I could have faded. And maybe it would be a new world, a realm of rest and peace. But I wasn’t ready for it - not to go there alone. I knew there was something else waiting beyond that dark. Something good.”
The Carver looked ravenous when he spoke. “You know who has the Cauldron, Rhysand. Who has been pillaging the temples. You only came here to confirm what you have long guessed.”
My gut twisted. “The King of Hybern.”
Silence sifted through us as we waited, but the Carver kept quiet. I felt Feyre shifting beside me, weighing her options. There was more to give, but the bastard still wanted more in return first and Feyre - my sweet, bold Feyre - was too willing to oblige him with her pain.
“When Amarantha made me kill those two faeries,” she said, “if the third hadn’t been Tamlin, I would have put the dagger in my own heart at the end. I knew there was no coming back from what I’d done. And once I broke their curse, once I knew I’d saved them, I just wanted enough time to turn that dagger on myself. I only decided I wanted to live when she killed me, and I knew I had not finished whatever... whatever it was I’d been born to do.”
Nothing and no one could have ever prepared me for those words. I had to quickly mask the devastation written all over my face as Feyre turned that beautiful face of hers on me and caught the heartbreak in my eyes.
I searched my mind, my memories of that day. My mind had been so wholly connected with her thoughts trying to will her the last morsels of my strength just so she could keep a level head and defeat Amarantha. How had I not seen her break so entirely? To the point that she wanted to - no, I could not even think the words.
But then a vision came sweeping into my mind of Tamlin and what had really been the Attor sitting on the dais next to Amarantha as they watched Feyre slaughter the first two faeries. Realizing what was about to happen was the sole moment I’d lost my hold on Feyre’s thoughts, the exact moment the veil over the real Tamlin kneeling before her was lifted, when she felt...
My chest sank. The guilt of how I’d failed her in that one small moment when she felt the most alone, when I had silently promised never to leave her, gutted me. If it weren’t for the fact that it would mean reliving the horrors of that day, I’d go back right that very second and never leave her side ever again.
“With the Cauldron,” the Carver said with surprisingly softness, “you could do other things than raise the dead. You could shatter the wall. It is likely that Hybern has been quiet for so many years because he was hunting the Cauldron, learning its secrets. Resurrection of a specific individual might very well have been his first test once the feet were reunited - and now he finds that the Cauldron is pure energy, pure power. And like any magic, it can be depleted. So he will let it rest, let it gather strength - learn its secrets to feed it more energy, more power.”
“Is there a way to stop it?” Feyre asked.
“Don’t offer him one more-” I started to say at the Carver’s silence, but he cut me off.
“When the Cauldron was made, its dark maker used the last of the molten ore to forge a book. The Book of Breathings. In it, written between the carved words, are the spells to negate the Cauldron’s power - or control it wholly. But after the War, it was split into two pieces. One went to the Fae, one to the six human queens. it was part of the Treaty, purely symbolic, as the Cauldron had been lost for millennia and considered mere myth. The Book was believed harmless, because like calls to like - and only that which was Made can speak those spells and summon its power. No creature born of the earth may wield it, so the High Lords and humans dismissed it as little more than a historical heirloom, but if the Book were in the hands of something reforged... You would have to test such a theory, of course - but... it might be possible.”
Feyre nearly gasped beside me as she realized the implications.
“So now the High Lord of Summer possesses our piece, and the reigning mortal queens have the other entombed in their shining palace by the sea. Prythian’s half is guarded, protected with blood-spells keyed to Summer himself. The one belonging to the mortal queens.... They were crafty, when they received their gift. They used our own kind to spell the Book, to bind it - so that if it were ever stolen, if, let’s say, a High Lord were to winnow into their castle to steal it... the Book would melt into ore and be lost. It must be freely given by a mortal queen, with no trickery, no magic involved.” The Carver chuckled, amused. “Such clever, lovely creatures, humans.
“Reunite both halves of the Book of Breathings and you will be able to nullify the powers of the Cauldron. Hopefully before it returns to full strength and shatters that wall.”
Without a fight, Feyre moved with me to leave the chamber as I grabbed her hand gingerly in my own. Though she did not have the mental strength to grip my hand in return, her mere touch on my skin warmed and soothed my spirit after all the Carver had to say.
“I shall carve your death in here, Feyre,” were the Carver’s parting words and then we were gone.
We did not speak for a very long while afterwards, not until we were far away from his hideous existence.
“What did you see?” Feyre asked.
“You first,” I replied, wondering if her vision would in any way match my own. But what she said surprised me.
“A boy - around eight; dark-haired and blue-eyed.”
I shuddered. It was not nearly as bad as Amarantha, but to use a child to manipulate an already abused and broken individual seemed particularly cruel.
“What did you see?” she pressed and with a deep breath, I replied.
“Jurian,” I said. “He appeared exactly as Jurian looked the last time I saw him: facing Amarantha when they fought to the death.”
It was Feyre’s turn to shudder this time.
xx