Erm, hello. Something I've been sitting on for a while. Like a really long while. Months. But because I love my darling Jem, I finally finished it for you lovely readers. (And because I was so immensely happy to get Jem back in COHF that I had to write about it)
In the darkness, he sees fire. Brilliantly bright and impossibly gold. The blood of angels spreading out across endless plains. He sees a sky streaked with clouds of flame, and pillars of fire reaching down to the earth.
He feels like he himself is burning along with this heavenly scene. He feels his bones crumble and turn to ash, only to reform and repeat again and again. He feels like his very soul is burning away, leaving space for something that is at the same time very new and very old and very much forgotten about to creep in and take hold.
He wonders if this is how she felt after the cave in Cadair Idris and Ithuriel. After she touched this fire and changed.
He sees a black haired, blue eyed boy. He's smiling and calling him a traitorous bastard, and he tries to smile back. The boy tells him to go. That it isn't time for his heart to be weighed and he needs to go. The boy touches his shoulder, where a rune, once black but now faded to silver, sits, and he feels like he's falling.
Then the darkness is gone, and the new scene is even more beautiful and impossible as the one before. An arching ceiling stretching up and away from him. Three bare walls, and one that only has a row of windows. A plain wooden floor, and a free standing mirror by his bed. The sheets around him are as stark white as the pillow under his head. There's a simple round table and matching chair by the window, and his parchment colored robe sits neatly folded on top.
An unremarkable scene in truth, he knows. Dull even, if one was to be honest. It's a room designed for efficiency, in standard Shadowhunter custom.
But for the first time in one hundred and thirty years, and in a way he never imagined he would again, he is seeing it with his own eyes, and it becomes the most wonderful thing he's seen in a very long time.
He doesn't need to look out the window to know it shows a breathtaking view of Alicante. He knows exactly which room he's in from his years of treating Shadowhunters in this building, and he's not all that interested in the view. It seems to be early morning anyway, and the darkness outside is causing the widow to reflect the room back at him.
Instead, he takes the time to stare of his own reflection in the mirror. It's been well over a century since he was last concerned about his appearance, and then it was still the thin and silver version of himself that he grew used to when he was human. He can tell he's still thin, but not sickly so. His hair is the raven color it was supposed to be, a color he hasn't seen since he was twelve, and his eyes are so startlingly dark the color nearly blends in with the iris, with only bits of gold and silver shot through to show the difference.
True Carstairs colors, he think. So much like his father and uncle.
Even he can tell there is a new aura about him that no Silent Brother had ever possessed before. It speaks of soul and spirit and the strange sense of constant motion that comes with life.
It speaks of a change he never thought he'd get to see.
It speaks of humanity.