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Chapter Text

Death.

“Et tu, Brute?” — Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

The sky burned red and did not move.

Smoke clawed down Azriel’s throat with every breath. Ash clung to his lashes and hair, worming into the seams of his leathers until it wore him like a second skin. The ground bowed beneath his knees—charred, wet, unstable, as if it too wanted to give way and vanish.

Timber crashed in the distance, one heavy strike like the beat of a war drum. The air reeked of iron and rot, of blood baked into mud.

And in the center of it all, Azriel knelt.

His shadows curled to his ribs, weak, thin, dragging against the smoke as if even they feared to wander. His wings hung limp as though the sky itself weighed them down, soot turning the membranes gray. Sweat streaked in black lines from his nape to his collar.

He bowed his head until his breathing leveled into something steady. Then slowly, heavily, he looked up.

His face looked carved—brows drawn tight, jaw locked, lips cut into a sharp line. The tremor in him betrayed nothing but fury and grief laced too close together.

When he spoke, it sounded as though each word carved him from the inside.

“You have painted the world red with blood and flame.”

The field did not answer. A roof collapsed in the distance, sparks scattering like dying stars.

Then—

Boots crushed ash and bone.

Azriel froze. His hand twitched toward a blade that wasn’t there. Shadows stuttered at his wrist, then fled.

Through the smoke, a figure approached. Tall. Straight-backed. Deliberate. Firelight tried to cling, but slipped away into the blackness that held him tighter still. The air cooled around him, each step leeching heat from the ruin.

Azriel’s heart bucked. His wings twitched open, nerves screaming—then dropped under the weight.

The figure halted. Slowly, the glow from the fire revealed the whites of his eyes. A grin, too sharp, too wrong.

Azriel’s mouth worked. The questions— how, why, what did you do —died before sound.

The figure laughed.

It started low, a hollow vibration that rattled the air. Empty. Without joy, without warmth. It rose, sharp and echoing. His hands spread, palms up—not in surrender but in presentation. Behind him, Prythian burned—hills glowing like coals, the Sidra running red with blood, towns collapsing into ash.

Azriel clenched his fist. Skin split under the force, blood slicking until ash dulled it. His shadows swirled, tried to harden, then unraveled again, waiting.

“You killed them,” he forced out, breath ragged. “You killed them all.”

Shadows bled from the figure’s steps, starlight winking out as if light refused to follow him. Darkness climbed Azriel’s body until he shivered despite himself.

When their eyes met, Azriel saw too much.

Violet eyes blown wide, veins burst red at the edges. Anger tight at the lids. But deeper still: the hollow of grief, the manic flicker of euphoria, a twitch of brows dragged down and then spasming upward. A face torn between rage, sorrow, and something far worse—clarity.

“I do not think you would understand, brother.”

The word brother landed like salt in an open wound.

Rhysand reached out, fingers cool, steady, brushing soot and stubble along Azriel’s jaw. For a heartbeat, almost gentle. Then the grip locked hard, bones pinched tight, tilting Azriel’s face up like he was nothing.

Azriel’s breath broke. “Tell me why.”

“You should know better than to ask questions you already know the answer to.”

Smoke shifted. Somewhere, a scream split the quiet, then ended.

“I did the world a favor.” His voice was low, conspiratorial. A secret between them.

“It wasn’t your choice!” Azriel snarled, louder now, voice breaking. His throat closed on the name but he forced it out. “Feyre would hate you for this. You didn’t have to become a monster—you should’ve trusted us. Trusted me. Trusted them. We were your family. ”

Rhysand stilled, eyes narrowing with a strange light, violet swallowing black. For a moment—calm. Almost pity. Then his hand clenched, nails scraping into skin, pressing to the brink of fracture. Azriel’s teeth rattled, vision sparking white.

Rhysand leaned close, voice soft. “You never knew how to follow orders quietly, Spymaster.” The words were silk around a garrote.

Azriel’s jaw screamed as the thumb ground harder, cruel enough to crack bone. And then—just as suddenly—the pressure was gone. Rhysand withdrew, smoothed his fingers across the same bruised skin like he might soothe what he had just nearly broken. His tone slipped back into evenness, chillingly composed.

“You see slaughter,” he murmured, spreading his hands as if unveiling the ruin. “I see seeds.”

Rhysand paced through the smoke, boots dragging ash. His hands flexed, opened, curled again.

“Feyre was proof.” A sharp turn of his head, eyes catching the firelight. “The Mother wove a bargain, thread to thread—we would live and die. Together.”

Rhysand stopped. Breathing hard. Shoulders lifting, dropping. “And when she needed it, it failed.” His hand cut the air. “Left her. Left me.”

Azriel shifted, throat working, but Rhysand spoke over the quiet.

“The Mother gave me life,” he said, softer now, like it burned his mouth. “And then she betrayed me.”

His gaze raked the ruin. “The world weighed her—and said die. It weighed me—and said live.”

He smiled, wild and thin. “So I’ll burn what made that call.”

His nails scraped along his jaw, as though trying to claw out the words before they rotted in him.

“You ask about children. The innocent.” His eyes darted back to Azriel. Unblinking. “There are none. Not in a world that let her die alone.” A breath. A swallow. “This is mercy.”

Rhysand stopped moving. Stillness so sudden it felt wrong.

“I did not become a monster.” The words were gentle. He tilted his head, lips parting, smile thin as a blade.

“I only stopped pretending I wasn’t one.”

He looked back to Azriel then, shadows deepening his smile. “I didn’t lose my soul. I laid it down. An even trade. A new world for her name.”

The silence that followed was worse than the speech.

Tears carved tracks down Azriel’s ash-streaked face. He didn’t hide them. He didn’t look away. His voice, hoarse and desperate, broke. “I know you’re in there, Rhys. This isn’t you.”

Rhysand closed his eyes, as though humoring the notion. When he opened them, they were empty.

“No. I’m not. ”

Azriel’s chest hollowed in reply. It should have been him. He had always been closer to the dark, closer to the knife. Not Rhys. Never Rhys.

And Azriel broke.

Something inside him cracked and burned clean through. He twisted free of the phantom touch, shoved himself upright, spine stacking into something rigid, inevitable.

Wings that had hung dead began to spread—slow, grinding, agonized. Ash cracked and flaked from the membranes as they unfurled into a full, black span. They caught the red sky like a defiant wall.

His shadows surged, hardened in his palm. Truth-Teller answered him—its familiar weight, black steel forged for stealth, settling against his hand as if it had been waiting. The blade hummed.

“You didn’t save us,” Azriel said, hoarse. “You killed us. And there’s no one left but me to stop you.”

Rhysand smiled, strained and pained. Pride and pity. Tenderness twisted. “Good. You understand. You’ve always been pragmatic.”

Rhysand’s eyes found the dagger and lingered. His voice was low, nearly reverent. “Truth-Teller. Does it always strike true? Shall we prove it wrong?”

Azriel lunges.

Truth Teller sings. Night rises. The world ends at their feet.

They write its next line in blood.

The clash closes over them—metal in a thunderhead, Night on shadow—then splits. Azriel comes out of it low, breath ragged, blade down for the tendons behind Rhysand’s knee. Frost skitters away from the cut like frightened glass.

Rhys lifts his hand.

Everything around Azriel hardens.

Pressure takes his shoulders first—a clean, deliberate weight that crushes the air from his lungs. Then it slides lower. Intelligent. Searching. It finds the hinges where wing meets back, the braid of nerves laced into cartilage. Not brute force. The cold precision of Night, shaped to break what it touches.

Azriel moves on instinct. Wings snap wide—too late. Night is already there, slick and everywhere at once. It seeps between membrane and skin, into the hinge, into the meat.

His stomach drops.

Don’t, he says without voice, throat scraped raw.

“I asked you to stop,” Rhysand murmurs.

The hold tightens.

Pain detonates. White, clean. A line hammered through his spine, fanning to the edges of both wings. Joints light up as if spikes had been driven through the sockets and set alight. His vision collapses to a pin. A scream tears loose—animal, endless—and only afterward does he know it’s his.

He hits the ground—knees, then hands, then face. Teeth snap against grit. Blood pools copper on his tongue. Ash grinds his gums. He tries to curl in, but the grip forces his chest open, wings wrenched wide like prey nailed to a table.

Rhys steps closer. The cold deepens.

“I did not want this,” he says. “You made me.”

Azriel claws at the ground. Splinters and wet ash. His hand reaches for the blade, but nerves detonate and his fingers clench on nothing.

“Rhys,” he rasps, the name cracked in half.

The sockets seize. Bone moves in ways it was never meant to. A bright nerve-line lances down his back, rattling his teeth in his skull.

“Shh,” Rhysand soothes, as to a fevered child.

Something gives.

Not one break. A series—wet snaps, ligaments surrendering one by one. His body bows. The scream rips straight through his chest. The membrane tears with a sound half cloth, half meat. Cold air rushes over raw surface, too new, too exposed. His vision whites out.

He bites down on wood, splits it, fills his mouth with splinters. Still the sound comes.

The wing comes away in inches, peeled slow, seam by seam. His voice is not a choice; it rips out until there is no air left, then drags more in only to scream again.

Nails crack, split, and tear from the beds with a wet snap. His scarred fingers keep clawing anyway, scraping trenches with bone and blood until they no longer look like hands.

Copper. Smoke. The sweet-sick stench of opened flesh.

The last strip of ligament resists, dragging on everything it crosses, and then it, too, snaps. The weight that has been his balance since boyhood is gone. He is half of himself.

He curls the other wing tight to shield it. Night pries it open like another hand unfolding a hand.

Azriel is no longer quiet. No longer stoic. He is a beast in iron, voice shredded against the thing dismantling him. He begs the dirt for something to bite, finds only wood and blood, chokes, spits, chokes again.

“I did not want this,” Rhys repeats, closer now. “I remember the day I learned what they did.”

Azriel hears because the pain breaks him open to everything.

Rhysand presses Azriel’s face into the dirt, knee grinding his spine. The world narrows to dirt and blood and the faint sound of fire eating everything left behind.

Then Rhys’s voice, steady as if he were recounting a story in the House of Wind’s sitting room: “Do you know what they did to my mother, Az? To my sister? Tamlin’s father and his brothers stormed their camp. They cut them down like animals—left them bleeding in the snow and sent off their heads. My mother’s wings were nailed to the walls of his father’s study. My sister’s too. I swore I would never let it happen again. I swore our blood would never be hung up like trophies.”

His hand clamps harder.

“And yet—look at you. You’ve become worse than a trophy. A threat. A weapon I didn’t ask for. Something I can’t control.”

Azriel jerks. Rhys only presses down.

“I loved you like a brother. But I will not have you rise higher than me. I cannot let you stop me.”

Then comes the tearing. No poetry, no flourish. Just cartilage splitting, ligaments ripped from bone, the sound of a body dismantled by the person who once swore to protect it.

Silence floods back in.

It’s not silence. The world is still burning. Something collapses nearby with a rush of flame and sparks. The river whispers under fire. The frost ticks as it spreads and cracks. But compared to what had just lived inside Azriel, it’s a quiet that roars.

He drops. Night lets him fall. His back is raw heat and cold together, a confusion of nerves howling themselves empty.

He rolls onto his side because his arms won’t hold him and then onto his stomach because he remembers, even destroyed, that it keeps the bleeding where it belongs. He breathes in short, animal snatches. Every expansion drags fire over the exposed places and scrapes them against ash.

He reaches under himself with a hand that isn’t a hand anymore and finds the blade by accident, his fingers closing around the hilt because they used to know how to do that.

Rhysand looks down at him. Ash has stuck to the blood splashed across his suit; it collects in the seam of his mouth. His cheek still wears the line Azriel opened there. He touches it and his fingers come away red, and for a heartbeat he looks fascinated. Then the expression clicks away.

“This is mercy,” he says. “You will live. And you will not fly into my path again.”

He turns from Azriel and begins to walk.

The frost sheet follows his step, safe path through fire, a corridor opened by absence.

“Next I move to Autumn.” He touches the line on his cheek again, as if to remember it exactly. “Eris still shields what’s left of his. Vanserras are stubborn when the wind tells them to bend. Stubborn breaks. Spring will be next. They’ll make a show of hope. They always do. They will be let down the way all hopeful things are.”

He doesn’t look back.

Azriel sets his face against the ground. The raw hollows of his back scream at contact. That scream radiates out through every nerve, unsettling his hands, curling his feet. He can’t breathe but forces air in anyway. He wants to be sick. He is. It splashes out across ash and blood and spreads cold quick under Rhys’s frost.

“Then I will come for the rest,” Rhys says.

The pain drowns him, wave after wave. He lets the first wave take him, then the second, then the third, and somewhere under them he finds something thin and mean. Not strength. Not anything noble. A wire. He knows how to pull it when he has nothing else.

He spits again. Blood and ash and bile turn black in the cold. He drags his knees under himself. He can feel every grain of ruined ground against the new edges of him. It is wrong, like a harp with every string snapped and strung again in the wrong places.

He gets one elbow under him. The joint gives and drops him. He tries again.

The noise that comes out of him is jagged, torn from the deepest part of his chest. He hooks the blade nearer with his forearm because his hand won’t do what he asks. It leaves a black track through ash where it passes.

Rhysand keeps walking. He is talking to the fire now more than to Azriel. To any witness, he would sound sane.

He says, “Do you remember, Az? The cold mornings when we dug graves in the snow because it was easier than waiting for the thaw? I do. I remember every finger that went numb and every breath that hurt. I remember the look on a boy’s face when he woke without wings. I remember counting the spines that had been shattered so they would not rise again.”

He stops. Turns his head slightly, looking at a thing that isn’t there and never was.

“I remember the day I stood in a camp yard and understood that my name was a promise I did not make. That I would be used until using me broke the world. So I decided to break first.”

He starts again. “Autumn. Spring. Then Summer will fold by itself. Day Court—” the corner of his mouth moves “—will say there must be order. They will help me stack a new one.”

Azriel gets his second elbow under him. His arms wobble as if they belong to someone else. Each time his back flexes, it feels like a wire brush drawn across raw meat. He breathes shallow and keeps it shallow. Anything deeper lights the whole map again.

He tucks his chin so he doesn’t have to drag his face along the ground. It hurts because everything hurts. He moves anyway.

His shadows—what’s left of them—haven’t left him. They are small now, thin as threads in a high wind, flickering where the air is safe behind stones and bodies. They touch his skin where they can without brushing the raw places. They show him where the ground dips. They cool the spots where the frost set quickest. They don’t carry him. They can’t. They do what they have always done: make the distance knowable.

He uses that. Inch by inch.

Rhys’s footsteps make a sound like thin ice flexing. Azriel measures by it. One drag of a knee. One set of fingers catching a root. The blade drawn along behind him a little farther. The world tilts. He waits for it to steady, because he can’t afford to be sick again.

Rhys says, “Eris thinks he is clever. He believes in lines drawn on ash. He believes fire is a shield.” He laughs under his breath. “He forgets what ash knows: fire is only the memory of the dying.”

Azriel almost laughs. The sound would break him in half. He tightens everything he has left around the pain and moves.

He gets his feet under him enough to push. He does not stand. He will never stand the same way again. He drags. He is less man than will, hauling the wreck of a keep across broken stone. He keeps the blade under his hand and lets the weight of it pull him forward when his body would stop.

The cold helps now. It seals some bleeding where it falls. It makes the ground slick enough to slide on. It makes his breath visible in small, quick ghosts that reassure him he’s still here.

Rhys’s back is a straight line moving through smoke. Azriel knows that back. He knows the slope of the shoulders, the set of the head, the way the coat moves at a certain speed. He has followed that back into wars. He has kept it alive with the work of his hands.

He knows where the ribs end and where the heart sits.

There is no romance to the moment. No sudden bubble of strength. No miracle of grace. There is only the blade, his hand, and the distance closing in ugly little jerks.

He gets close enough to smell Rhys beyond the blood and the smoke—soap and the faint bitter of cold magic, the clean nothing that has always clung to him like the void between stars. He presses himself to the ground when Rhys half-turns, waits for the black bright to pass from the edges of his sight, then hauls himself another arm’s length forward.

He is shaking so hard the blade scrapes a line along the ground.

Rhys stops.

He tilts his head as if listening, but not to Azriel. To plans. To the version of the world he is already standing in. “This will be quick,” he promises the fire, or the quiet, or himself. “Kindness is speed.”

Azriel pushes up onto a knee that won’t hold him. It doesn’t need to, not for long. He feels the air pooling in his chest and not going anywhere. He stabs anyway—not because he thinks it will work, but because the muscle remembers what to do and does it while the rest of him is busy dying.

Truth-Teller goes in under the left shoulder blade, low enough to miss the thicker bone and high enough to find the space between ribs. It bites through muscle with a wet, resistant give, kisses the slick of a lung, then hits the hard beat of what it came for.

It is not clean. There is a crunch where there should be none as the edge mars the rigid ring around the heart before sliding in. There is a pressure change that bucks the hilt in Azriel’s hand. Rhys’s body makes a noise no body should make—something like a cough and like a sob and like a word trying to be born.

Azriel’s weight, such as it is, carries him the last inch. The blade goes through. The point presses against sternum from the inside, testing it, then stops where bone says enough.

Rhys stands very still.

His breath goes out in a long, surprised push. The frost around his feet falters. Night hiccups and then draws back like a tide caught wrong.

He looks down at the hilt protruding from his chest as if noticing a button undone.

Then his knees decide for him. He goes backwards.

Azriel goes with him because his hand is still on the blade and because there is nowhere else to go. Rhys’s weight lands across him and it is too much and not enough. The world bursts white, then sways, then narrows to the line of Rhys’s throat and the rise that isn’t rising the way it should.

Rhys blinks up at the red sky. Ash lands on his lashes and melts from the heat of him. He smiles. It is the same smile Azriel has seen after victory, after being proven right, after dragging himself from the depths with nothing but stubbornness.

“You—” He has to stop to cough. Blood bubbles up bright, the color of a sunset seen through wine, and spills down his cheek into his ear. He laughs with it in his mouth. The sound is giddy and small. “You did it.”

Azriel is crying without any of the cues he is used to. There is no swelling, no breath hitch. Tears run out of him because his body has decided this is another way to bleed. They cut clean tracks through the ash and stop where there is no more face for them to run to.

He drags Rhys closer, not to comfort him—there is no comfort—but because the weight makes something in him quiet. He has held this man for other reasons. This reason writes over all of them.

“I didn’t want—” he tries to say, but his throat has been sanded down. Nothing comes out.

Rhys finds him with his eyes. He looks at Azriel’s face as if memorizing it.

“I told you,” he whispers, and the whisper wets Azriel’s cheek with red. “You see. Of all of us, you see. I thought—” He has to stop to breathe, and the breath has a hole in it now. It whistles. “I thought you would be the one to tell it straight when they wrote it wrong. I thought—” A little laugh bounces in his throat and breaks. “I didn’t think you could.”

He sounds proud. He sounds wrecked with it.

“You shouldn’t be proud of this,” Azriel says, and the words tear themselves raw on the way out.

Rhys considers that. The consideration moves across his face like a cloud across sun—shading, shifting, gone.

“I am,” he says simply. “I am proud of you.”

Azriel folds around that because there is nothing else to fold around. His back tells him this is a bad shape to make; the pain flares, then holds. He doesn’t care. He puts his forehead against Rhys’s temple. It is hot. The blood smells sweet and wrong and like every battlefield they ever made, together and apart.

“You saved me once,” he says, and it’s not an accusation and not a benediction. It is a fact laid down between them, heavy as a stone.

Rhys’s mouth tugs. “Then we’re even.”

The blade in Rhys’s chest ticks under Azriel’s hand in time with what is left of a heartbeat, then ticks slower, then stops.

Rhys’s eyes go to the sky again. He smiles at it as if it has told him a joke and he is polite. The breath he takes grabs, stutters, and then never finishes. His weight changes the way weight does when something leaves it.

Azriel feels it not with his hands but with the part of him that knows when a shadow is his and when it isn’t.

He waits for Night to come back. It doesn’t.

He closes Rhysand’s eyes with the backs of his fingers because his palms are slick and because he has done that for strangers and would not fail his brother the same mercy.

The quiet that follows is a shape. It sits in the ruined field like a body. The world holds its breath for no one, but it feels as if it holds it for this.

Azriel’s breath comes and goes in shards.

The pain is still here. It is not dramatic anymore. It is the labor of a body trying to go on without parts of itself. It hums under everything like lightning. Phantom weight. Phantom angles. Every part of him corrects for balance he doesn’t have. His shoulders twitch trying to fold what is gone. The urge to lift, to shelter, to shield is there with nowhere to go.

He lays Rhys down. He does it carefully because he cannot stop being careful where this male is concerned. He straightens the legs out of an old habit that says the dead deserve it. He pulls Truth-Teller free. It comes out with a slick, resistant sigh. Blood follows, then slows. He wipes the hilt on his own ruined clothes because there’s nowhere clean.

He sits with him a little while. A minute. An hour. A lifetime measured in breaths that don’t come the way they should.

It bites down on him from the inside. It finds the cavity where grief sits and fills it with echoes.

The sound that tears out of him starts low in the place his wings attached and runs up his spine like fire. It pulls his ribs apart. It ruins what’s left of his voice. It goes on long past the breath he has to feed it with and drags more air in to keep going. It is not a word. It is all of them.

It is alone.

The field answers by not answering. Houses fall. Frost cracks. The red sky does not change its mind.

Ash falls soft on Rhysand’s suit and on Azriel’s hair and on the raw, awful new edges of his back. It fills the lines in their hands. It turns the blood dull.

There is nothing else in the world but that violent hush and the scream and the work that comes after both.

Autumn waits.

Azriel breathes because that is the work right now. He looks at the distance he will have to cross with no wings and sets his jaw around it. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

He stands because he can’t and stands anyway. His whole body shakes with it. He takes a step. The ground feels wrong. He takes another.

Behind him, the scream hovers in the air a little longer and then thins, and the ruined field takes it, swallows it, and keeps it.

The sky stays red.

Chapter Text

Rebirth

The world folded wrong when he shadow-walked. It didn’t carry him cleanly but ripped him jagged through darkness, as if stone itself had chewed him and spit him out.

The Autumn palace—its endless, fire-lit halls—swallow him whole. Gold-veined marble gleams. High torches hiss with scarlet flame. It should smell of pine smoke and polished wood. Instead, the stink of blood trails with him, thick as tar.

The silence breaks with each drag of his blade. The steel rasps against the floor in jerks, slipping on tile slicked red from his palm. He doesn’t realize until later that it is his blood making the trail—thick, dark, arterial.

His steps echo. Too loud. Too slow. The shadows that once clung to him hang ragged, thin as cobwebs. His shoulders tilt forward. Where his wings should be is only raw ruin, muscle torn back to bone. Each stagger pulls a new line of agony through him.

The courtiers see him first. A servant carrying scrolls rounds a corner, freezes, and drops them with a clatter. Azriel’s eyes, sunken and rimmed with soot, lift just long enough for the male to bolt in terror. The echoes of running footsteps rebound down the hall. Others scatter—skirts rustling, boots striking marble—until the vast corridors ring only with flight.

Azriel keeps moving. Step, drag. Step, drag. The blade sings across stone. His breathing rattles. 

When the next figure appears, Azriel thinks—hopes—it’s another phantom. But no. The tall red-haired male, crowned not in metal but in firelight, is real. Eris Vanserra. High Lord of Autumn.

For a moment Azriel can’t breathe. Something yanks low in his chest, sharp as a cord pulled taut—his mate. His mate, whole and alive. Against all odds, alive.

His lips crack as he forces sound out. The words scrape. “It’s done.”

Eris doesn’t walk—he breaks rank. Courtly cool burns off him. He stops like he’s hit a wall only he can see, hand lifting, stopping, shaking.

“Mother above.” It lands as a prayer and a failure.

When he reaches Azriel, he stops dead. His e\es rake over him once, then fix on the place where wings should rise. Horror slackens his mouth. His hand jerks upward as if to touch, to confirm, then hovers in the air, trembling.

“Mother above,” Eris whispers. It isn’t enough. Louder, urgent, a roar through the echoing hall: “HEALER! NOW!” 

His voice carries like fire down every corridor. He can’t look away from the spaces his wings should’ve been. His throat works around a sound he won’t let out.

Azriel sways. The room tilts. Eris grips his arms, steadying him. The heat of that touch burns through the blood and haze. Azriel stares up, vision hazed, and for a flicker he sees the mate-bond flare—light in the dark.

Other voices arrive. Nesta’s sharp breath, Elain’s quiet sob, Lucien’s curse of disbelief. They are here. Alive. Waiting. Watching.

Cassian is gone. Mor is gone. Amren is gone. Rhysand—Rhys—is gone.

Azriel’s body remembers before his mind does. The tearing. The laughter. The silence after. His throat works, but no words come. Only a shudder that wracks him from spine to ruined back, a sound caught between a sob and a scream.

Eris pulls him in, heedless of blood, grime, or who is watching. His mate is shaking in his arms, broken and wingless, and Eris holds on like he is the only thing left tethering Azriel to the world.

Azriel doesn’t realize until later that the sound echoing through the palace—the raw, animal noise ripping free of him—is his own.

The cry for a healer still echoes when footsteps thunder from every direction. Courtiers who fled moments ago now return with Autumn’s medics in their crimson robes. The sharp tang of herbs and iron instruments fills the air as cases snap open, salves uncorked.

Azriel doesn’t resist at first when they descend on him—hands pressing, cloth dabbing at wounds. But the first time someone brushes too close to the ruin of his back, his whole body convulses. A sound tears from him, guttural and raw, enough to freeze every hand mid-motion.

“Stop,” Eris barks, his voice slicing through the hall like fire. He’s crouched low in front of Azriel, one hand still firm on his arm. “Do not touch his back until I say.”

Azriel pants, head bowed, hair plastered with sweat and soot. His shadows coil uselessly on the floor, twitching like dying things.

“Keep him awake,” one healer murmurs, already binding a wound on his thigh. “He’s lost too much blood.”

Nesta’s voice cuts in, sharp and commanding as a blade. “Then move faster. If you let him slip—” She doesn’t finish. Her hands are fists at her sides, white-knuckled.

Elain stands behind her sister, pale, lips parted as if in prayer. She cannot look at Azriel for more than a second before flinching away, but she does not leave.

Lucien lingers further back, his mechanical eye whirring as it locks on the blade still dangling from Azriel’s hand. The blade that killed his High Lord. His friend. He doesn’t speak. Not yet.

Azriel blinks sluggishly. His voice is a whisper scraped raw. “Gone. They’re gone.”

Eris leans closer, catching every broken syllable. “Not all. Look at me.”

Azriel tries. His gaze snags on Eris’s face, the only point of light in the blur. The mate-bond thrums faint but insistent, tether pulling him back from the dark.

But then—someone’s fingers brush his back again. The phantom pain detonates.

Azriel lashes out. Shadows whip like blades, cracking against the marble, shattering a torch from the wall. The healers stumble back in terror. One screams.

“It’s alright,” Eris says quickly, his voice hard enough to cut through panic but pitched low to Azriel alone. He grabs Azriel’s bloodied hand, not flinching even as the shadows recoil. “It’s me. Look at me, Az. Stay here.”

Azriel trembles violently, chest heaving. His eyes dart around the hall as if it’s still the battlefield, as if Rhysand is still standing over him. He cannot breathe. He cannot remember if the war is done.

Nesta steps forward, unafraid. She kneels opposite Eris, eyes burning like tempered steel. “Azriel,” she says firmly, anchoring him with the same voice she once used to command death itself. “You are not there. You are here. Do you understand?”

Azriel stares between them, Eris and Nesta, their voices weaving through the fog. Slowly, slowly, the shadows still. His grip on the blade slackens.

Eris pries it gently from his fingers and tosses it aside. The steel clatters across the marble. The sound echoes like a verdict.

For the first time since he staggered into the palace, Azriel slumps. His head falls forward against Eris’s shoulder, dead weight. The High Lord catches him, holding on as if he can shield him from the memory itself.

Behind them, the hall is chaos: healers scrambling, survivors standing rigid with grief, servants whispering. But in the circle of blood and silence where Azriel kneels, there are only two truths—

He is broken.

And Eris will not let him fall.

Eris breathes like counting—four in, four held, four out—and Azriel steals the rhythm because it’s the only thing that doesn’t hurt.

Days later.

The chamber was too still. Too clean, after all the blood.

Azriel lay sleeping, breath shallow but steady, stripped of the grime of war. His shoulders were bound in white linen, stark against his skin, where wings had once spread. The sight hollowed Eris out every time he looked.

Nesta sat at the bedside, Azriel’s hand in hers, her face a mask of steel cracked by grief.

“They’ve cancelled the dinner,” Eris said at last, his voice rough from silence.

Nesta’s eyes flicked to him.

“It was meant for strategy,” he explained. “Supplies, reinforcements, how to hold the line while Azriel hunted Rhysand. But now…” He swallowed. “Now there is no more war council to hold. Only… rebuilding.”

Nesta’s fingers tightened around Azriel’s. She said nothing.

“They’re already whispering about celebrations,” Eris went on, bitterness creeping in despite himself. “Feasts, songs. They’ll call it victory.”

Her eyes burned, wet but sharp. “Does this look like victory to you?”

Eris looked at his mate. The bandages, the scars that would never fade, the absence where wings had been. He looked younger like this. Mortal, almost. Like a boy dragged too far into a war no one could win.

“No,” Eris said quietly. “It looks like the cost of it.”

Nesta bowed her head over Azriel’s hand. When she spoke, her voice was raw. “Cassian would be… he would be very proud.” The words caught, broke in her throat. She forced them out anyway. “So would Mor. And Amren.”

Their names hung heavy in the room, the silence after like a grave.

Eris shut his eyes briefly. “Their sacrifice will not be forgotten.” He forced his voice steady, though it shook inside. “Nor the lands that fell. Winter. Day. Dawn. Night. None of it will be forgotten.”

Nesta nodded, though her face was drawn tight, pale. “They fought so Rhysand wouldn’t reach the rest of Prythian. So people could still live. So there would be something left to save.”

Her gaze swept over Azriel’s sleeping form, lingered on the bandages, the curve of his jaw softened by lamplight. “And he… he gave more than any of us.”

Eris lowered himself into the chair across from her. His chest ached, the bond thrumming faintly, like some reminder of life still tethered. “He saved us all,” he said, voice rough. “And no one will ever repay him. Not truly.”

Nesta’s thumb brushed over Azriel’s knuckles. “He wouldn’t want repayment. He’d only want us to remember.”

Eris let out a low breath, watching his mate’s chest rise and fall. “And to keep going.”

Nesta’s mouth twisted. “Even without him to lead us. Even when it feels impossible.”

For a moment, neither spoke. Then Nesta’s voice wavered, softer, more human. “I thought we’d lost him. When he walked into that throne room—when I saw him covered in blood, dragging that sword—I thought it was the last of him. I thought I’d have to bury him, too.”

Eris’s throat closed. “I thought the same. And yet… he’s here.” His hand reached instinctively, brushing a lock of hair from Azriel’s brow. “He’s still here.”

Nesta’s eyes glistened. “Thank the Mother for that.”

The words, simple as they were, struck like a prayer.

Outside the chamber, faint sounds of celebration were beginning—bells ringing, voices raised. Prythian’s survivors marking the end of a nightmare.

Eris leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “They’ll sing of him. Of all of them. But songs aren’t enough.”

Nesta’s gaze didn’t leave Azriel. “Songs are for the living. This—” she squeezed his hand tighter “—this is what matters. That he wakes tomorrow. That he knows he’s not alone.”

Weeks later.

Sound first—not flame’s roar or the iron rasp of a city giving way, but a voice reading, steady and low, turning pages with the brush of paper.

“…and if you’d seen Lucien’s face when Nesta told him he had three seconds to put the torch down—well. He put it down.” A smile in the words. “We planted the new trees anyway.”

Scent next: clean linen, astringent herbs, a hint of roasted apple and clove from somewhere deeper in the palace, and—closest of all—fresh cut stems, green and bright, the cool breath of them mixing with warm autumn bloom.

He opened his eyes into lamplight. The room held its shape slowly: high carved ceiling; a banked fire; orange marigolds and small foxgloves and shockingly red leaves in a glass vase on the table; Elain seated in a low chair, a book open on her lap, hair pulled back with a thin ribbon that matched the leaves. Her eyes lifted at his movement.

“You’re awake,” she whispered, as if the world might spook and run if she spoke louder.

His mouth moved. What came out was only a scrape of breath. She set the book aside at once and reached for a clay cup on the nightstand, helping him lift his head. Water touched his tongue—cool, clean. It stung going down and settled like mercy.

“There,” she said softly. “We’ve been waiting.”

He had to try twice to make the word. “We?”

“Elain, Nesta, Lucien. Eris.” A little laugh—relief releasing a knot. “Especially Eris. He’s been a storm in a bottle. If I didn’t sit here and make him go sleep for two hours at a time, he’d have worn a path through the tile.”

The name sent something through him—a cord pulling taut, sure as the first step off a ledge when you know you can fly. Memory lurched up after it and he fought it back, not ready to touch the part with blood and cold and the sound he’d made when—

Elain’s hand came to rest very lightly over his, grounding. “Don’t rush. Your body’ll do that for you. Let the rest come without force.” She glanced at the flowers. “They’re from the northern orchard. Little ones, but stubborn. They insisted on blooming. I thought you’d like them.”

He swallowed again. “I do.”

Her eyes went damp. She leaned in and pressed a kiss to his temple, soft as breath. “I’m going to get him. Perfect timing, Az. Don’t go anywhere.”

The door clicked and the quiet changed—still, but expectant, as if the room itself had braced to hold him. He lifted his left hand, watched the tendons shift under skin, turned his palm up and down. Small things first. Fingers still obeyed. Forearm healed, a faint throb where bone had been bruised to chalk. The white linen wrapping his shoulders tugged when he moved, firm and careful. He rolled his head; his neck crackled, then eased.

He dragged air a little deeper and the emptiness hit.

Not breathless. Weightless. The balance of his body was wrong, as if someone had lifted a counterweight off a scale and now every small adjustment slid too far. He pushed himself higher on the pillows and the world tilted—no, not the world; his sense in it. Instinct made him shift for wings that were not there, to brace against the headboard with membrane and spar, to catch and set. The movement sent a new lightning through the raw hollows at his back, clean and cold and bright. Phantom, and not phantom.

He went still, jaw hard, eyes fixed on the far wall until it ebbed.

He looked down. Linen, clean and white, wrapped over both scapular plates and down the new planes where sockets had been. No slits in the sleep shirt. No dark arch of leathered skin. He laid a palm against bandage and felt heat, heartbeat, the strange unanchored lightness of a life he didn’t recognize yet.

Not a nightmare, then. Not something the mind had made because it could not deal with the shape of the truth. Memory returned in slices, and he let it pass like cold wind: Rhys’s eyes, too bright; the thin laugh; the weightless second between point and heart; the quiet after. The scream he’d left in that field had never quite stopped ringing in him. It hummed now, low, part of the room’s new quiet.

Bootsteps hit the hall outside: fast, decisive, a pattern he could have picked out blind from a thousand—a rhythm he’d matched stride for stride for decades, sometimes in battle, sometimes across a floor at midnight with only hands and mouths and the bond speaking.

The door opened hard enough to knock against the stopper.

Eris crossed the chamber in three long strides and then didn’t seem to know where to put his hands first. His fingers framed Azriel’s face; his mouth found Azriel’s mouth, then cheek, then brow, each kiss stuttered with relief that made Azriel’s own lungs seize. Eris tasted like firefruit and mint and the iron tang of holding himself together too long.

“You’re here,” Eris said into his skin. “You’re here.”

It came out ragged. Azriel’s laugh did, too. “So are you.”

Eris pulled back only far enough to look at him, eyes bright, the fox-amber of them hot and wet. “The healers cleared you if you didn’t turn green the moment you sat up,” he said, attempting brisk, failing, then not bothering. “You’ve been asleep for… weeks. We’ve been counting breaths. There’s something I need to show you. Now. Please.” He was already moving to the chest at the foot of the bed, pulling shirts, swearing under his breath at wing slits, rejecting them, digging deeper.

He came up with a dark, fine-woven shirt—Autumn’s red so deep it read nearly black, soft as water in the hands. No slits. His eyes flicked to Azriel’s bandaged back and something in them went fierce and tender at once.

“My shirts,” Eris said, as if he’d been waiting to speak it. “They’ll do. For now.” No pity in it; only offering.

“Help me up,” Azriel said.

Eris slid an arm around his ribs, mindful of wrappings. The first shift from bed to sitting sent a fresh roll of phantom weight through Azriel’s shoulders; he rode it, jaw locked, heat beading in his palms. Eris’s hand at his spine was steady as a post set deep in good ground.

Trousers, then. The new muscles in his back tried to map balance without wings and overcompensated twice before he got his legs into them. Eris swore again—not at him; at the fastenings that wouldn’t be quick enough. Boots made the floor real under his feet, leather hugging his calves, the old ritual of lacing grounding hand to hand. Eris’s fingers worked fast, then slowed. He leaned in and kissed the edge of a new scar where linen ended, lips brushing careful against the raised seam.

Azriel’s breath hitched. Not at pain. At being seen and not flinched from.

“Tell me if anything pulls,” Eris said, voice low and even again through effort. He lifted the shirt, paused. “You ready?”

As ready as anyone can be to put cloth across what used to be wings. Azriel nodded. Eris set the shirt to his arms, drew it up, and then around, easing it over bandages. The slide of fabric across the raw map made Azriel’s vision blur white for a heartbeat; when it cleared, Eris was there, hands flat to his chest, eyes on him, breath measured with his.

“Here,” Eris said, and buttoned the shirt closed with deft, familiar motions. “Here,” and his mouth pressed once, reverent, to the new line of Azriel’s shoulder. “Here,” another kiss, lower, at a place that would always ache when the weather turned. Azriel was shaking and couldn’t stop. Eris didn’t try to stop the shake, only stayed with it until it ran its course.

When they stood, Azriel expected the floor to sway. It didn’t. His body did: a small back-and-forth like a ship that had lost a mast and was learning a new center. Eris took his weight without comment. The bond hummed, a note tuned at last to something other than loss.

“Where is everyone?” Azriel asked as they stepped into the corridor.

The hall ran long and gold, firelight held in the polished wood as if Autumn had kept a piece of afternoon for itself. The tapestries had been brushed clean; someone had righted a table he remembered charred; new candles burned in iron sconces, their flames steady. No courtiers murmured at the edges. No servants moved bowls of apples and jars of spices from one gleaming sideboard to another. Their footfalls echoed, lonely as a bell in clear air.

Eris only smiled, small and secret, and squeezed his hand. “You’ll see.”

They went past the inner court—the fountain running again, water cutting a silver line through the hush—past the long gallery of old High Lords. Azriel’s shadows, thin as threads these days, slid out and tasted the air and went still, not warning, not afraid. Waiting.

Eris matched his pace. No hurry that would cost him. No slowing that would insult what pride he had left. 

When Azriel stumbled—over nothing, over the echo of what wasn’t there—Eris’s hand at his waist tightened and he let himself lean, just for that step, and the world didn’t tilt all the way over. 

He could feel the old reflex flicker again—wings would flare to steady—and the cold blank that answered it. The shirt moved against bandage and skin, and he was grateful all at once and broken all over again. Eris’s thumb brushed the place his body had fed the pain into his expression. Azriel breathed. They went on.

At the end of the corridor stood the tall doors—carved oak; foxes running in leaves; bands of hammered copper catching the light. Two guards had always stood there, spears crossed for ceremony and lifted for joy. Today there were none. The emptiness made the hair on Azriel’s arms stir.

Eris stopped with him. His hand stayed at Azriel’s back in the permission and promise touch they’d made between them long ago. “One thing,” he said quietly, eyes on the doors. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“What wasn’t?”

“The rest.” Eris’s mouth tugged up at one corner, pride and something like awe flickering over his face. “It was theirs.”

Azriel’s brow knit. “Eris—”

The High Lord didn’t answer. He pushed the doors.

Light slammed into them. Azriel flinched, eyes closing on instinct he hadn’t needed in years. Once, he had lived in rooms too dark for light to reach—windowless stone where screams echoed until they burned down to whimpers. He had been the terror people spoke of in whispers: the Spymaster, the shadow that dragged secrets from throats. Light had never welcomed him. It had always revealed victims.

But the world outside the healing room was not stone. It was bright coins and white heat. Music threaded the air—drums, pipes, voices, not cries. Air moved, clean and sweet: cedar sap, bread, smoke, roasted nuts. It did not stink of fear.

He blinked against the glare. The shapes resolved. The palace steps spilled down into a green choked with bodies. Every inch of it full.

Autumn burnished gold, Spring flower-crowned, Winter in mourning white, Dawn pale and luminous, Day dimmed by ash, Night bruised but present. Illyrians in leather, wings bound or healing. Witches with their scars bared. High Fae. Lesser fae. All turned toward him. None of them hid their eyes.

For most of his life, crowds had looked away when he entered. Or worse—stared at his hands, at the shadows, and paled. He had been the knife Rhysand sent into the dark. He had never been the thing people waited for.

Now faces turned up, shining with hope—and it unsettled him. He thought they should look away, not cheer. Yet they didn’t. They kept looking.

Children sat on shoulders. A toddler in green waved a paper angel until it bent in half. A veteran with one arm tied wildflowers to his sleeve and raised it as if it were a banner.

And then the banners.

Some bore the old image: wings wide, blade raised, the monster of nightmares painted on tavern walls. The angel of death.

But others—others remade him. A girl had scrawled THANK YOU, SHADOWSINGER under a crooked drawing of him in plain clothes. Another banner, just a charcoal smudge of wings with the word ALIVE. Boys had drawn him with too-wide smiles, teeth too many, heads too big; their clumsy joy undid him more than the fear he once inspired.

It landed like steel under the ribs. They did not fear him. They looked up to him.

The sound broke over him then. Not courtly, not rehearsed. A raw, chest-born cheer, the kind of noise people make when relief tears free of them. It was not the sound of someone begging him to stop. It was the sound of people living because he hadn’t.

Azriel swayed. Eris’s hand at his waist steadied him. His throat closed. He had carried bodies out of rooms. He had broken men on orders he did not question. He had walked with blood on his hands and known he would never be clean.

He bowed his head. The sob rose sharp and clean in his chest, and he let it. He wept, and no one cowered. No one begged. They only bowed with him, not to the Spymaster, not to the shadowed hand of Night, but to the man who had gone to death’s edge and carried them back.

For the first time in his life, Azriel was not the monster in the dark. He was the hero standing in the light.

The hush broke when a girl darted forward. Quick as a sparrow. Her hand was small, smudged with charcoal, clutching something too tightly. The crowd shifted, ready to pull her back.

Azriel lifted a hand before anyone could. The old gesture—the signal that once meant bring the prisoner in. Now it stilled fear instead of summoning it.

She stopped three paces away and opened her fist. A wooden angel. Crooked. Smiling. No wings. Two notches where they might have been.

“For you,” she said, solemn as an oath.

His throat locked. How many times had he held out a hand to take something—truth, name, confession torn from bone-deep fear? But the little angel was pressed into his palm like a secret too precious to drop. His hand closed over it, and the tilt of the world shifted.

A man rose shakily from the kneeling crowd. One arm gone. Wildflowers knotted to the empty sleeve. His voice cracked. “You carried my wife from the north road. The babe in her shawl. You—” His throat gave. “They lived because of you.”

Azriel tried to speak. What came was a rasp. “She did that.” He couldn’t take the praise, but he couldn’t refuse it either. His eyes said the rest.

And then more came.

A soldier with bandaged eyes, led by a comrade, laid a single arrow at Azriel’s feet and bowed low over it, as if offering a brother. A witch from the borderlands pressed a stub of candle into his hand, murmuring in a tongue he didn’t know. Once, candles had guttered in cells while he pulled truths out of bloodied throats. Now this one was offered to keep darkness away.

A jar of honey. A loaf of bread. A sprig of rosemary.

Not confessions. Not names. Not pleas to stop. But gifts—willing, freely given—to a man who had saved them.

He felt it then, sharper than any blade: he was no longer the shadow feared in corridors, the whisper that made enemies quake. He was the one they looked to as proof that survival could be more than crawling from the dark.

Eris’s hand anchored him at the waist, steady through each offering. Nesta stepped forward when the press grew too tight. Lucien eased into place at his side. Elain moved in quiet arcs, guiding trembling hands, catching tokens before they brushed scars raw.

No one begged him now. No one feared him. They offered, they thanked, they wept—and in every eye turned toward him, Azriel saw not terror, but something far more unbearable.

Hope.

The offerings slowed. The circle widened. What had begun as fear-tinged awe became something steadier, almost reverent. Not worship, not duty. Something simpler. Recognition.

Azriel felt it shift inside him. He had once been the knife in the dark, the hand no one wanted to see, the whisper that sent whole war camps trembling. He had believed that would be the sum of him until the end—that he would die feared, and it would be enough.

And yet here he stood, and they did not fear him. They lifted their children to see him. They laid their grief at his feet, yes, but also their thanks, their proof of survival. They looked at him as if he were the reason the world had not ended.

He could hardly breathe under it. He could not look away.

Azriel’s hand stayed curled around the small wooden angel. He could still feel the child’s grubby fingers against his own, the trust in them.

He blinked against the sting in his vision, but it didn’t pass. Eris’s palm pressed firm at his waist, keeping him upright when his balance faltered again. Nesta and Lucien stood to either side, silent as pillars. Elain moved a little ahead, steadying each person who dared step closer, turning their trembling into something manageable. They had once feared his shadows; now they reached for them like children reaching for fireflies.

And then the crowd shifted. Not away from him—but around.

A lane opened through the green, parting in slow waves. No shouts, no orders. Just the simple, reverent moving of bodies making space for something else.

At the far end of the lane stood a canvas so wide it seemed to drink the sky. Draped in white cloth, tall enough to swallow the palace gates behind it. Ropes waited, taut in the hands of fae from every court.

Eris leaned in, voice a brush of warmth against Azriel’s ear. “Artists from every court came. Painters, masons, glaziers. Even children. Weeks they spent here, working together. They wouldn’t let me keep it quiet.” A pause, soft pride beneath the words. “They made it for you. For them. For all of us.”

The ropes pulled. The cloth fell.

The mural roared into light.

Color and shadow across stone, spilling wide. Cassian stood at its center, wings arched, mouth half-open in that grin he never shed even with blood at his throat. His eyes seemed to follow, bright and unbreakable. To his left, Mor, cloak flung wide, head thrown back mid-laugh as if she’d dared death itself to keep up with her. Amren glimmered smaller, silver and dark, her stare sharp enough to pierce any who looked too long.

Around them spread the courts.

Helion painted with sunfire in his hair, his hand lifted to cast brilliance outward. Varian by the sea, foam at his feet, gaze steady as the tide. Kallias’s ice, Vassa’s flame, Thesan’s soft dawn light, even Beron rendered in stern lines beside his sons. None erased. None forgotten.

And among them: soldiers with faces plain and unremarkable, merchants with baskets, witches with scarred arms, Illyrians in battered leathers. The nameless given place beside the mighty.

At the mural’s edge, shadow curled—not menacing, but cradling. Out of it rose a figure, wings half-spread, scars visible, blade lowered. Not Spymaster. Not Torturer. Not monster.

Azriel.

Not as the world had once feared him, but as the world had chosen to remember him. Alive.

The crowd breathed as one. No cheer this time. Just the sound of hearts catching in throats.

Azriel swayed, and the only thing that held him upright was Eris’s hand and the bond thrumming steady between them. His voice broke out of him low, cracked. “Cassian. Mor. Amren…”

The names fell like prayers.

Nesta’s hand landed firm at his back. Elain’s fingers brushed his arm. Lucien’s head bowed low, his fox-bright eye wet in the sun. Around them, the people stood not in mourning, but in fierce, living witness.

Azriel let his tears fall openly, salt and ash streaking his face. Not hidden in shadow. Not carved into silence.

He looked at the mural until the shapes blurred into color. Until Cassian’s grin seemed to burn behind his eyelids. Until he could almost hear Mor’s laugh, Amren’s sharp-tongued scold.

And when he could breathe again, he did. The light was hot on his skin. The air thick with rosemary and cedar smoke. Eris’s voice steady in his ear: “They’ll never forget.”

Azriel nodded once, jaw set, hand still clenched around the crooked angel. “Good.” His voice carried farther than he meant. “Neither will I.”

The mural towered behind them. The crowd stood unbroken before them. And for the first time in his long, shadowed life, Azriel knew what it was to be not feared, but revered.

Not Spymaster.

Not monster.

Savior.