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I let a small gasp escape me as I’m jolted awake and into darkness. Disorientated, mind still thick with the fog of sleep, it takes me a moment to understand what’s happening.
I had been curled against Rhys’ warm body, my head pillowed on his chest, my hair a sea of molten gold covering his night dark tattoos. His arm had been draped lazily around my shoulders drawing me in close to him. Our typical position for the nights we were fortunate enough to spend together - which are few enough with the war raging around us.
As I calm myself and take stock of my surrounding at last, understanding floods me and causes my heart to tighten as though it’s been caught in a snare.
Rhys.
The moment my eyes find my mate I know that something is wrong. Nightmares. I can tell at once from the rigid set of his body and the way he lurches away from me, as though a physical force compels us apart. Seeking to protect me from those torments, distancing me from them– and from himself.
I watch from where I now sit upright in the middle of our bed, utterly frozen, as his wings flare with the tension that pulses and ripples through him. Then he staggers as far from me as he can can, spilling out onto the balcony beyond. His limbs flicker uncontrollably between human and talon as he fights to control himself and to reign in that beast within that longs to escape, to roar, to fight, to unleash itself upon the darker demons that lurk beneath his skin.
At last he manages to reach the stone wall that rings our chambers and he grips it with a desperate tightness that makes my heart clench with pain again. Bracing himself against it for support his claws quickly reduce chunks of it to powder as they flex and gouge deep cuts into it as he struggles to pull himself back. Back from the black abyss of his past that’s opening out before him, threatening to swallow him once more.
My soul aches for his pain, for the horrors that still haunt him and may never release him. We both got out – something he tells me so often to calm me whenever I have one of those, thankfully now rare, panics – We both escaped from Under the Mountain, shattered the chains Amarantha had bound us with. But I know that some part of him remains a prisoner to her and the things he endured beneath the earth and always will.
I know that’s why he sought out the balcony, the cool, calming kiss of the wind the sings in his bones lightly caressing his sweat slick skin. That and the smooth blanket of stars sprawled out above him – stretching on endlessly to every horizon, reminds him that he’s free now, free.
On instinct I reach out to him through our bond, seeking to soothe and reassure but I feel –nothing. My throat tightens with emotion even as a loud throb of panic constricts my chest like a clenching fist. Shielding me from whatever agony now twists his soul, from the things that dirty it so much he won’t allow even me to see them. He can’t even allow his mate to share in the heavy, dark burdens I see bowing his shoulders and hollowing him out.
I can’t blame him for this, for not being ready. I know it’s not a question of trust or the belief that I might somehow not be able to handle what he hides. But for fifty years my mate carried the weight of the world’s only free hearts and souls upon his shoulders – alone and in a cage of darkness and spite.
A habit – a promise, like the one I had made to my mother about keeping my family safe and whole. These were the only things that kept us going, kept us surviving in the years we struggled for each day; each moment, each breath.
I understand too well that burden, the odd comfort the weight bearing down upon you starts to provide over time. It’s familiar. It’s an anchor to cling to when the seas grow too rough, when the world feels impossibly small and begins to close in, suffocating, crushing the air from lungs, it’s a reminder to breathe. To try and take that from him before he’s ready....I can’t bring myself to.
Even though it takes every fragment of strength I possess to will myself to do nothing while my mate suffers. Taking every bit of self control I have to sit on our bed so meekly and quietly without acting while every fibre of my being screams for me to do something; anything. I’m urged to go to him, to hold him, to save him. But I know that’s not what he needs. That right now he needs to know that he can still save himself.
So I sit taut and silent but wary, ready to go to him if he needs me, as he fights to compose himself. I watch the strong muscles of his back bunch and knot writhing beneath his skin like they’re trying to break free of it. His whole outline is so stiff and hard and tense I might have thought him carved of stone had I not seen him shaking violently.
When the tension at last begins to drain from him and exhaustion and defeat start to displace the lingering, lightning aftermath of the nightmare, I snap the leash on myself. The sight of his wings sagging, as though they’ve been filled with lead and are now too heavy to hold up, the way his body caves in upon itself is too much for me to bear. I go to him, as I’ve been desperate to do since he first withdrew from me, sensing that he’s ready for me now.
But I don’t run to him as my heart cries out to do but instead make myself go slow, not wanting to startle or upset him, giving him time to note my approach. Drawing up behind him I gently ease my hands beneath his wings and wrap my arms around his waist, fingers locking in place across his abdomen, holding him close to me.
“Shh,” I whisper softly onto his skin, squeezing him gently. I drag my nose lightly along his spine between his wings, seeking to soothe with the soft, intimate gesture.
“Shh,” I breathe again, resting my brow in the valley that separates his shoulder blades, keeping myself strong for him as I hold his broken pieces together and stop him shattering.
“Shh,” I murmur once more, cradling him to me as his body shakes, wracked by the silent sobs he can’t – and doesn’t have to – contain any more now I’m holding him in my arms.
I reach for him again and this time find the bond shuddering like a recently released bowstring between us, emotion thrumming through me. Back. It’s back. He’s still in there.
Let me in I send down it to him, not a demand or even a true request, more a gentle invitation to open up to me if he’s ready- a hope. He grants it. Pain and darkness, shapeless as smoke but just as suffocating, wash over me from him. My heart clenches tightly again but I push the sensation down deep and allow my own darkness to seep into him, enveloping him in our night. It is still and patient and eternal, always ready to quietly show him the way back home. He follows it to me and I feel him gradually start to settle and calm in my arms.
Even so, I let my voice wrap tenderly around him like a soft, midnight breeze, wanting nothing more than to comfort and ground him. “You’re safe, Rhys,” I promise him. “It was only a dream. I’m here. I’m here with you now. You’re safe, you’re safe.”
Safe with me. Safe in my arms where I won’t let the world touch him; where I will never allow harm to come to him – my mate, my lord, my love.
After a long while held close to me, breathing in our combined scent he straightens from the hunched bow the monsters in his chest had dragged him in to and I know he’s come back to me. Slowly, so reluctantly, I withdraw from him and move to stand by his side.
“Feyre,” he murmurs softly to me.
His voice is hoarse but within that one word and the life he breathes into it when he lets it fall from his tongue- my name contains eternity. The answer to every question he’s ever posed, the axis upon which his world sits and shifts, the beginning and end of everything he is or may yet be.
Reaching out to him I cup his cheek softly in my hand and ask, my gaze fixed on his, “Do you trust me?”
The stars in the rich, violet velvet of his eyes seem to burn as he answers me without hesitation, “With everything.”
I swallow tightly past the lump in my throat. With everything. Everything he is; everything he has; everything he holds most dear. He is mine. As I am his.
Wordlessly, aware of his eyes on me, I balance upon the broad lip of the elegantly carved stone wall that wraps around the balcony. Then I spread my wings. Rhys’ eyes go wide with wonder as they always do whenever I reveal them and I feel that now familiar thrill of dark delight down the bond. With one powerful beat I’m airborne and Rhys radiates nothing but awed pride as he watches me.
“Feyre, darling,” he purrs, revenant as a prayer whispered directly into the ear of a god as he beholds me. “You’ve been practicing,” he observes, a delicious blend of pleasure and reproach gilding his words.
Pleasure that I can now hold my own with him in the skies; reproach that I kept the long, gruelling hours of training to myself and didn’t let him share the fun. His reaction now was worth every second.
I extend my hand to him in invitation. “Coming?” I ask, my lips quirking into a faint, daring smile.
He slips his hand into mine, cool and callused, the perfect fit as always, but doesn’t move to join me. “To where?” he asks, a bright gleam kindling in those wicked dark eyes.
In answer I only let my smile broaden as I tenderly stroke the bond. Trust me I murmur into his mind.
Rhys launches himself into the air before my heart has time to get in another beat.
We fly far more slowly than I know he’s capable of on account of my inexperience but neither of us minds. There’s no rush to get to our destination. And this flight, this first flight together, is about us, about being together and banishing the pain of our pasts as we look forward to forging our future together.
My mate seems incapable of looking at me with anything other than radiant wonder whenever his eyes find me as he drifts around me in lazy circles. Show off I shoot at him as he floats serenely past again. He only smirks at me.
There’s an effortless grace to the way he moves through the air, a natural ease, the same kind of thing that comes to me whenever I hold a paintbrush. It’s something inherent within us, something we were born with and that no other being can ever be taught. I know I could fly and train for centuries, could live up here amongst the clouds and never possess even a fraction of his skill.
This is one of the places that he belongs. In the arms of the heavens – as in mine – he comes truly alive.
As we reach the outskirts of Velaris, the mountains that keep our city nestled safe within their embrace, I begin to gradually spiral downwards. Rhys follows me without hesitation, his eyes on me all the while. As we land my first thought, as it is every time Rhys has brought me here before, one of his favourite spots in the world I know, is that I would love to paint it.
The city spread out beneath us is a living mirror of the night sky sprawling above. The only difference being that its constellations are created by the lights of streets and homes rather than the wheeling heavens. Towering over it all like the bones of some great, fallen beast is the ruin of the temple we now stand in. Ancient and glorious, though it crumbles, beautiful for the history it remembers, for the things it has seen rise and fall, outlasting it all.
The three walls that remain bear carvings of such rich complexity and detail that I could spend an eternity trying to capture them all and never even come close. But it’s the fourth wall we head to, wordlessly, on some shared instinctive impulse- or at least its ghost.
We sit side by side upon the barren foundations – all that remains of the once mighty structure – our wings still spread, our legs dangling off the edge of the world. As a mortal girl I would have been terrified to perch here and look down at that drop, nothing but air and cold between me and certain death.
But now, with my wings, with my mate, that fear is gone. Flying, as Rhys had once told me before I’d mastered it and asked him if it ever scared him, is only falling with the knowledge that the wind will always catch you. Indeed, I close my eyes and let a soft smile lift my lips as a cool breeze rises to meet me and caresses my skin, running its fingers through my hair, tossing it up around my face.
When I look up and take in my surroundings again I find Rhys watching me. He trails his hand softly through my thick brassy hair, tucking a few of the loose strands behind my ear with exaggerated tenderness. When he lowers his hand to brace against the cold stone beneath us again, tearing his gaze from me to look out over Velaris, this one oasis of peace amidst chaos and carnage, I realise that he’s still shaking.
Even with nothing but the gentle light of the moon and the stars to help me I can tell that he’s pale too – his skin leached of the colour the Mountain had stolen and the warm sun of the Night Court had returned to him over time.
Reaching for him once more I take his hand in mine and squeeze gently. “Close your eyes,” I murmur quietly to him.
Rhys’ eyes blaze as they lock with mine for a single, thundering heartbeat that seems to contain enough power and force to rattle the very bones of the earth had I not kept it contained within my chest. Then he obeys me. I smile faintly and close my eyes too.
Then I fill the world around us with music.
I begin soft and slow, wanting to get it just right for him. I want to use the sounds to mend the torn fabric of his soul, to surround him with that emotion, that majesty that consumes the being of any who stumbles across it and wrap him in the gentle, soothing embrace of familiarity and pleasure. I want to stop him from breaking the way I know he’s still so close to doing. As he had once done for me.
The piece is the same one he sent to me in that bleak, lonely frigid cell Under the Mountain. It’s one of his favourites, I’d come to discover. Whenever it’s being played in the city I take him to see it and tear my eyes away from the musicians and the spectacle to just watch him.
Each time he would sit so, so still, as though frozen within this one moment where nothing existed but him and the music. I swear he stopped breathing during every performance. As though he was afraid that even that would interrupt the magic – one beyond either of our abilities, one reserved only for gods and dreams – that seemed to swell around him. The intensity with which he had listened; with which he had given himself entirely to that music, could have toppled empires and levelled worlds.
The first time he had taken me with him to see it played I had found myself crying silently in my seat beside him. I had understood what he was sharing with me in that moment but had also only then realised the enormity of what he had shared with me Under the Mountain.
A gift – not only of relief, not only of salvation that I had so desperately needed as I had teetered upon the edge of an abyss from which I would never have emerged, but also of him. A piece of himself; of his soul, the only thing they had not managed to take away from him or twist and blacken in that darkness. The only piece of hope he’d had he’d given to me to save me when I’d believed that no more hope existed in the world.
From the first few tentative bars I know he recognises it as I see his spine snap straight and that unearthly stillness enclose his whole body, his whole being, once more. He sways slowly in time with the music, brushing faintly against me each time. But he lets it consume his body, giving it free reign over his limbs and movements. It’s as though each line I let play connects a new string to his body now a mere puppet to the whims of the music. I let it build into a crescendo to shatter the pain that still clings to his soul like a shadow, ever present, inescapable, eternal.
When it ends, leaving an echoing silence that thrums with the memory of the melody he slowly opens his eyes and meets mine. They’re faintly gilded with silver and I reach up and use the ball of my thumb to brush away the single tear that falls.
“Feyre.”
He whispers my name again like a newborn god giving life to its dearest creation. And the power of it, the love he infuses it with shudders through the very core of me. He cradles my cheek in one perfectly steady hand then draws me in close until our lips meet again.
It’s a tender kiss, all lips and tongues and warmth but it’s deep and long and intense and aching too. It’s a kiss that takes a little of me and gifts it to him as he claims me; and I him. It’s a kiss that lives and breathes and loves all on its own, guiding and filling and fixing us. It’s a kiss that binds and burns and forges that bond between our souls in a way that tells me I’ll never lose him, my mate, my equal, my eternity. It’s a kiss I never want to end.
I’m breathless when it does and feel...not entirely myself. As though some part of me still lingers in the missing space between our mouths. His thumb softly strokes my face where it still lingers, calling me back to myself, back to him.
“Thank you,” he whispers to me, such thick emotion coating his voice and pulsing into me through our bond that I feel my throat go tight again. Too tight for speech so I only nod to him. It’s enough.
Together we lean in to one another and touch brows. His hand slides around behind my head, his fingers easing deeply into my hair as he pulls us even closer. I breathe him in with every breath and it makes my spine shiver like it’s being showered with shooting stars.
“I love you,” I whisper to him in the darkness that cloaks us and hides us for just a moment from the ravenous gaze of the insatiable world beyond.
A declaration of truth – the greatest one I possess. It’s a promise to him that I will never leave him, never let him linger alone in that darkness while I still draw breath. And it’s a prayer to whoever and whatever might listen and still care that they never allow anything to take him from me.
“And I you,” he murmurs back. He’s still so close to me. His lips graze mine with every word he speaks, every syllable pressed tangibly onto my mouth. “My lady. My love. My darling. My mate.” The last word is spoken with such reverence, such devotion that it might have been holy, might have been the last sacred thing left to us, to the world.
Our hands manage to meet as we kiss again and I squeeze his and he squeezes mine in turn. When we break apart we nestle in close to one another, cocooning each other in our wings for warmth. Then we turn simultaneously and face the distant horizon and the soft, warm glow that spills above it as the sun rises, heralding a new day, bringing with it more war, more blood, more pain, more nightmares.
And we’ll face them together – as High Lord and Lady of the Night Court. As friends. As partners. As mates. As one.
*****