Author's Notes:
This chapter takes place in the middle of Chapter 39 in "A Court of Mist and Fury", in the weeks between Amren getting the Fae half of the Book of Breathings and beginning to translate it and Azriel attempting to break into the mortal queen's courts. Feyre makes mention that it's "weeks of waiting" before they hear any response from the queens to their request to meet, and in that time, Azriel is missing on a daily basis from the House of Wind, returning in the evenings (if at all some nights).
I'm making use of that blank period of time to head canon this chapter to allow Azriel to visit the Bone Carver.
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~.~.~.~.~
"I'd met him once, when Rhys took me with him to ask a question. At the time, I didn't know I was looking into the face of Andromache, my future lover. In retrospect, I think the Bone Carver gave me that vision…to give me a little hope and some peace from a world that was trying to tear ME into little pieces, and destroy my hope."
~ from "The Carver's Legacy", excerpt by Morrigan
~.~.~.~.~
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"Where were you born?"
It was gently asked, but I could feel Azriel's hunger for my secrets, even across the distance that separated us. I'm sure he'd spent some of the last seven days since our last discussion obsessing over how he could manipulate me into telling him everything I knew.
As if he could, if I didn't wish it.
Fortunately for him, I'd chosen him for my biographer years ago. No deceit necessary.
"On a dying world made of red sand and storm-ravaged earth, far across the Void," I told him.
From his position sitting on the floor across the room from me, I watched him shift positions several times—not from physical discomfort, but mental. The Fae and Humans of this world clung to their ancient beliefs that they had been specially created by the Mother and the Cauldron, and that no other world but this one existed. The theory that they were somehow special and unique in the universe, and somehow blessed for it, had just been disproved.
In one sentence, I'd changed his entire view of his faith. I'd turned his reality on its head.
"The Void?"
I settled against the wall at my back, the smooth bones I'd magicked flat and inlaid across it over the last week giving me a comfortable position to recline against. As it touched my skin—or rather, the skin of my current avatar, the Morrigan—I could feel the residual emotions contained within the transfigured material: the thrill and fear of the chase, the triumph of the kill, and the resignation of death. It took concentration on my part to shut out the eroticism of such impressions.
"There are a multitude of habitable worlds in the cosmos, shadowsinger, and they each contain an army of life in many beautiful and grotesque forms. These planets are separated by vast expanses of utter darkness and complete silence—a blanket of death for all living things that attempt to cross it. This is the Void. It was made to keep us apart, to ensure noninterference. Separate worlds, separate species, never meant to meet or mate."
I watched Azriel turn that information over in his brain, watched until it became clear he'd riddled through my words and understood the ramifications of what I was telling him: First that his world was not as unique as the Fae and humans would have their kind believe. They were but one of thousands of planets that could and did sustain life, and that each world had its own evolved predators and prey that were unique to its natural order. Second that I had somehow managed to break that natural order.
"Yet, somehow you crossed that Void and came here."
I nodded. "An accident, believe it or not."
"How?"
Indeed. That was the question, wasn't it?
"I don't know what power tore the way open between my world and yours, to be honest." My mind's eye turned inward as I relived the memory. "That day, my two siblings and I were deep under the surface of our planet, traveling through subterranean caverns, determined to escape the disease that had ravaged our crèche and killed most of our people. And we came across this strange light…and we fell through it and tumbled, literally, into your world."
"Disease? But…you're a god!" he protested.
Azriel had latched on to the one part of my tale I hadn't intended to lead with, ironically enough.
I laughed at such a silly claim. "No, I'm merely like your Amren and the others here in The Prison: a being with innate powers that are greater than those normally found in your world. To your primitive ancestors, that made me a god, but I am no more immortal than you are." At his doubtful expression, I reminded him, "I have already told you I will die, and soon."
That dark head of his shook with disbelief. "That seems impossible to believe. You don't eat, you don't sleep, and you don't age as mortals do."
I waved off his contention. "Oh, I do all of those things. You just don't see it. Time here in Prythian is different from my home world. It's…slower."
"I don't understand."
In a blink, I was next to him, kneeling at his feet. No winnowing required. He didn't even see me move. He did see me once I'd stopped, however, and that caused him to jerk back, pulling up his legs so they were tight to his body. His wings and his shadows gathered around his hunched form at the presence of a presumed threat and his siphons flared to life, banishing the darkest corners of my lair with their blue flame.
I grinned at him, finding his reaction entertaining. "I don't make it a habit of doing that very often, as it takes tremendous energy for me to move at my 'normal' speed here, but as you can see, it can be done."
Azriel did not reply. Instead, he simply stared at me…in wide-eyed fear.
My amusement fled.
I really should not have felt any guilt or regret for scaring him. That he held me at arm's length and stared at me in awe was how it should be, in fact. I wasn't Fae, wasn't human, I wasn't even Illyrian—I was the monster whose seed combined with a High Fae of this world to create their race. I was progenitor, and he was not my friend and should not be my lover. I was a soldier of death, doomed and dooming to all who came too close.
The longer I stared into his beautiful, haunted face, though, the more difficult it became to justify what I was thinking. When I dropped my eyes to his scarred hands, my resolve shattered completely.
He'd been terrorized enough in his life, and I'd had enough of menacing others for the time being.
"I won't hurt you," I told him, sitting back on my haunches and assuming a non-threatening pose. "In all the years of our acquaintance, I never have, have I?"
His throat dipped as he swallowed rather hard. "No, you haven't." Again, he was wary and deferential in how he spoke to me; as if he knew he was tempting a wild animal of greater power. His wings and shadows stayed between us as a shield, although the siphons on his armor flickered out, dimming the room until only the dull, orange torchlight was all that remained between us and total darkness. "But the record of The Prison kept in the library beneath the House of Wind called you a 'Death Knight'."
I dropped my eyes to the floor with shame, recalling precisely how I'd attained that title. "And you assumed the name was well-earned."
"Wasn't it?"
I huffed bitterly. The list of my sins was long enough to pave the road between here and Valeris; the accounting of the names of my victims a tome the size of which could rival the mountain we sat under. My Ruin, and the ruin of my siblings, had ended an Age. "Yes. I have done unspeakable things, Illyrian. I will not pretend otherwise."
He was silent for a bit. "We all have," he finally admitted. "In that, you are not alone."
I chanced a look at his face, was oddly relieved to find it a bit less wary, a little more accepting. "You researched me, then?"
Strangely, that made my heart beat a little faster.
"Yes," he said. "There was very little to be found out, however."
I nodded. "No, I'd expect not. Most of the knowledge of the First and Second Ages of this world were lost long ago, and I arrived here at the end of the former and the beginning of the later. Not even the Day Court's extensive libraries contain reference to much of those years." Slowly, I wiggled forward as I spoke, stopping once more at the creaking of his leathery wings tightening up to preserve the barrier he'd earlier erected between us, reminding me that trust was a thing that took time to build. "I will promise you this, Azriel," I offered, desperate to have him return after today. If for no other reason, I truly had need of him, and could not afford to jeopardize this last chance with my monstrous reputation and ways. "I will do you no harm. Not ever."
There was silence for a long while after I dropped that offer between us.
His gold-green eyes studied me, their hawkish intelligence attempting to read my intentions and study my sincerity. He weighed his odds and his options in those few moments.
"And what if I was to betray you? To attempt to kill you right here?"
I peeked up at him through impossibly long, sooty lashes and considered how best to prove my sincerity. The answer came to me a moment later in a flash of intuition: the Morrigan's power of truth.
One of the perks of my curse was the ability to take on not just the face and form of others, but to be able to conjure their abilities, too. I doubted my 'captor'—my High Fae lover, Phaedra, had known such an outcome would occur when she'd cast this unholy spell upon me all those millennia ago, because she'd certainly have taken steps then to prevent it. Fortunately, she hadn't guessed at such a consequence, and I'd used her lack of insight to my advantage. Quite often, in fact. It was how I'd managed to escape my cell that first morning, when the Lord of the Night Court then had seen his blooded son in my place, thus allowing me to step through his magical wards after him…
Harnessing the power of my current form, I wielded it to my advantage this time, too.
"I would allow you to strike true without retribution, as I am a creature of my word," I answered him, and I watched him shrink back further against the wall as my TRUTH washed over him. "However, I ask you to consider this much before you do: my memories contain thirty-thousand years of your world's history, as well as all the knowledge I had of my home world. Would you risk the loss of all that information and knowledge, all that history and discovery?" I leaned towards him, met his eye. "There are no written records for the things I know, Spy Master. None. They all burned in the Great Cataclysm at the end of the Second Age."
I knew I had his interest then with the mention of a historical event which none of his modern records contained.
"Would you risk that simply to rid the world of me?"
To my surprise, he seemed legitimately torn.
Using the Morrigan's powers once more, this time in reverse, I read his TRUTH from his mind: to him, I was a monster. I was 'other', 'outsider', a creature who did not belong here. Worse, I divined and brought death. That was my talent, my malediction, and therefore I was a threat to his friends and family. I knew he would do anything for them—for the woman he loved and for his High Lord, for his brother-in-arms, Cassian, and even his future High Lady. He would kill both myself and the angel, Amren, if need be, and he would lose no sleep over such an act if he felt it was to keep his own safe.
He would destroy me if need be, but he would mourn my loss, if only for the knowledge I held.
In desperation, I threw out another lure in an attempt to change his mind. "You would attempt to kill me, despite my fated involvement in the war to come?"
He sat up straighter at that, suddenly interested.
Moving slowly, I reached out and lightly caressed along the ridge of one of his wings, making him shiver with something other than fear for the first time. I was, after all, wearing the face of his lady-love. "Twice you've asked about my death, Azriel, and I know what it is you really wish to know about it: will it come in service to your cause or in opposition?"
"You would fight for Hybern then?" he asked, and moved his wing out of my reach.
My chest caved a little at his accusation, but I smiled through it, though I knew it to be a sad smile. "No, I will not." I looked at him again, at the impossibly handsome face that had begun haunting my dreams of late, and despite all the screaming in my head in warning, I bared a piece of my soul to him and spoke with Morrigan's TRUTH once more: "I will meet my end for your cause, Illyrian, standing between you and your enemies."
Between one heartbeat and the next, he just stopped breathing.
"What?"
He sounded genuinely distressed and astonished at what I'd revealed.
I sat back, dropping away from the temptation he presented. I was getting too close again, and that was something I couldn't allow. Hadn't I learned my lesson the first time I'd wanted someone I couldn't have? What foolishness that had been…
"You have my promise of no-harm," I said, climbing to my feet and standing over him. I stepped backwards slowly while keeping my eyes on him, trusting my shadows to cushion me before I met the wall. "And now I will tell you the story of my arrival here on your world, if you would stay to hear it."
Perhaps it was the fact that I'd spoken earnestly to him and appeased his concerns about my loyalty, but his wings slowly unfolded and his shadows relaxed, falling as a soft mist around him to the floor. He leaned his elbows on his bent knees and leaned back against the wall, indicating that he had agreed to my terms, and was now all-ears.
"I'm listening," he said.
~.~.~.~
I told him of my doomed red world with its fickle climate and its erratic storms, and about my people and their descent into barbarity with the rapid decline of their civilization.
Azriel was both enthralled with my tale, and horrified by it.
"Once, we soared the sky and embraced the winds as you Illyrians, Seraphim, and Peregryns do now," I told him, "but at some point, my people became too enamoured of the riches to be found within the ground, and so they stopped being creatures of the air and instead became beasts of the earth. In their greed, they drilled deep into the planet's crust, destabilizing it as they mined for prized gems and special rocks and precious fuels. For centuries, they scorched our sky with the fires of that ravenous industry as well, destroying the rivers and the oceans and the vast forests. The result was a thinning of the natural air barrier between us and the Void, which allowed for more light and heat to bear down on us from our bright day star in the sky."
"Bright day star…your sun, you mean?"
I nodded. "Much of the great oceans boiled away over time because of the increased warming. The weather changed, becoming more violent, less forgiving. Sometimes the winds were cold enough to freeze a person where they stood, and other times, they were hot enough to bake you in your skin. By then, our surface-dwelling cities had rapidly dissolved in the extreme conditions, until they were little more than particles of rust adding to the red-orange landscape, and so my people were driven underground. We came up only when there was a lull in the storms."
I knew that to the Fae, who were creatures of the whispering forest, and of the moving waters, and enjoyed the playful winds at their very heart, the dead world I described was anathema.
"Where we lived, there was only dead soil and rock in every direction—a vast desert, that surrounded our little oasis, what we called our 'crèche'."
"A tragedy," my companion said of the situation, and there was no masking his repugnance of what I'd recounted. I agreed. What my predecessors had done centuries before my birth had driven us, their legacy, into a fierce struggle for survival. "How did you endure?"
I glanced at him. "As all things do when they must: savagely."
We discussed the crèches then, those small pockets of rock in the middle of the desert that were entrances to the caves, where the last of us lived, and their interconnected web-work of underground tunnels—ironically, those carved out by our voracious ancestors—that allowed brave, daring traders to pass from one to the other beneath the surface to avoid the storms and the heat. Their constant movement, their trade of information and goods, was the last stubborn remnant of our fading society.
"No crèche was ever large enough to sustain a population of more than fifty or sixty at a time, so we had to split up between them," I explained, when he asked why we didn't all dwell in the same place. "Also, some caves in other parts of the world were better for growing the different kinds of moss and lichen we subsisted off of, and under others, there were giant lakes where fish and other creatures lived and were cultivated for food or harvested for their fur, their scales, their shells, or sea-silk. It was a delicate balance we all had to maintain, and we worked together across the miles to make it work. At first, we all knew that no single crèche could afford to become greedy, or it would be the end of us all. But over time…things changed."
I told him then about our religious practises, which had evolved with our circumstances. "Our sky gods became earth demons, and our once-upon-a-time devotion to life morphed into one for death."
"Is that why you're called a 'Death Knight'?"
"No. I earned that name here, in this world."
He was silent, but I could hear his unspoken desire to know what it meant, what it entailed. I sighed resigned to tell that story, eventually, but I wasn't ready to tread there today. Not yet. Instead, I gave him an indirect answer, hoping to lead him off in another direction. "It was a title given to me in cruel jest." I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the cool wall. "It's the same for the sobriquet, 'the Bone Carver'."
"A mockery? By whom?"
"Someone I once loved."
Azriel remained quiet for a long time after that revelation. Apparently, I'd shocked him with the thought that I could ever feel such an emotion, much less be betrayed by it.
"I…I never considered‒" he began, but stopped, unsure if he should go on.
I smiled at the return of his wariness. "That I had feelings? You aren't the first to think that way."
He said nothing, and when I opened my eyes and looked at him again, he was staring at his scarred hands, frowning. "I've only ever thought of you as a monster," he admitted, "as 'the Bone Carver'—as a creature, not a person. Just as so many have looked and thought of me when they see my shadows and realise I am not like them." He glanced up at me, and there was real regret in his flickering hazel eyes. "Forgive me."
We stared at each other for a long while and said nothing, and although I knew Azriel looked and saw the beautiful, wild Morrigan staring back at him, I also thought that, for the first time in a very long time, someone could see me underneath the mask, too.
The torch's light grew low, beginning to dim at long last. He'd stayed longer than the allotted three hours of our deal. I felt a reward was in order for that alone. "Ask me," I whispered, for I knew what he wanted to know…even as I knew I would be unable to answer his question.
His chest expanded as he took a deep breath, and then he let it out slowly. "What is your true name?"
I felt hot, hateful tears slip down my porcelain-perfect cheeks, felt my heart catch with such resentment that I thought it would crush me under its weight.
"I wish, more than anything, that I could tell you."
‒Because for the first time in ages, I wanted someone to know the real me.
The torch gutted out, plunging us into darkness.
"But it seems our time is up," I said instead.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Author's Notes:
Any guesses as to what I planned to called 'the Bone Carver' in this tale? Use your knowledge of the books and the hints I've sprinkled here and there over this and the last 3 chapters, and see if you can come up with it. I'll dedicate the next chappie to whoever figures it out.
XOXO,
- RZZMG
