I know it's been a while, and this is such a short chapter, but I swear the next chapter is when stuff starts getting interesting, so please, bear with me.

Disclaimer: I don't own the ACOTAR franchise; it belongs to Sarah J. Maas.

Rhysand

Everything was about to go to hell.

I knew it even as Amarantha smiled and chatted with her underlings. I knew it even as a stray breeze rustled again my back, making me ache to unfurl my wings and fly far away from here. I knew it even as I watched the sun slide over the horizon as though, it too, couldn't stomach the sight of the mass slaughter that was about to occur.

It was a small force of faeries, barely a hundred strong. We'd been marching over from the border with the Spring Court for the past two days, and now we were ensconced somewhere in the woods, deep enough that no hunter would dare venture that far, but near enough to the village that I occasionally noticed the Attor or one of its ilk lift its nose to sniff the scent of human prey that drifted over with the wind. I swallowed. That human huntress would not survive this. I wished she'd accepted my help.

But then, neither of us would have survived this.

But even as I knew this as keenly as I knew the edge of the blade strapped to my waist, or the phantom weight of the wings I was forced to keep hidden at my back, I knew other things.

I knew that the way the wind was blowing wasn't opportune, and that the wood stank of human inhabitation anyway.

I knew that whether or not this village put up a fight, this was be ugly. Amarantha would sweep in with fire and arrows and gore, and leave no survivors.

And I knew, somehow, that something was going to go wrong. That the huntress's hopes hadn't been in vain, after all.

And I knew that with certainty as I crested the hill and surveyed our small - almost pitiful, though I knew the meagre numbers was a testament to Amarantha's arrogance and low opinion of humans - army. Then I turned to the tiny village nestled in the dip between two hills, not a single light winking in the cobbled streets. And that darkness, above all, was what told me something was wrong.

Or right, depending on how you look at it.

Only once did I ever ask Azriel about his shadows, and what they told him, or how they told him anything. He'd just looked at me, face wrapped in a shade of his own making, and replied that I of all people should know the difference between the darkness of sleep and the darkness of death. That I should know better than anyone just how alive the darkness could be sometimes, and what it could tell you.

It told me a lot today. During the previous nights, I'd observed the cosy, warm darkness that shrouded the town; a darkness sprung from a simple lack of need for light; the darkness of dreams; the darkness of a door firmly shut and locked against the outside world. The darkness tonight was different.

It was the thick, inky stamp of a stranger's shadow against the silhouette of the door. It was the blackest night beyond the protective circle of a campfire. It was the darkness of squeezing your eyes shut, the covers thrown over your head to hide from the monster under your bed.

It was the darkness that fell in the earliest hours of dawn, before a massacre occurred.

What I didn't expect, was for the faeries to be the ones slaughtered.

Amarantha's grin was blindingly feral when one of her faeries lit a torch, and the glow of the flame illuminated her face. The second moon in the sky, watching from the top of the hill as a home went up alight. She tossed her mane of red hair back like a lion ready to roar, and opened her mouth to speak.

But the minute - almost inaudible - scrape of flint against flint cut her off. She froze, and the faeries around her froze too.

Only a few hundred feet away, lights began to spark in the village. Individual torches, like the one Amarantha now held, but far more of them. Dozens, sweeping through the town like a flame spirit danced the streets.

Pale faces lined with fear, courage, anger, you name it, stared them down. Human faces, with the unfinished, shoddy edge to the skin that meant it did not glow like a High Fae's, with the murky colours of their eyes and hair.

The twang of a bowstring rang out moments before a lesser faerie screamed. The army jostled uncertainly and I used the chance to push forward to where the male who had been shot now lay dead. An arrow - ash, by the looks of it; where the hell had they gotten ash? - had been fired straight through his heart. And that scent wrapped round the shaft. . .

Cauldron damn me.

I searched the crowd of villagers. By the time I'd spotted my huntress crouched in the shadows of the roof of one of the highest buildings, she'd fired three more arrows, each with brutal precision, and Amarantha had already given the order to attack.

I saw the moment the terror overcame the villagers, but they held fast as they let the faeries come to them. I was impressed. They raised their weapons - pitchforks and butcher's knives and clubs and were those ash stakes - and waited for the wave to break.

And break it did.

I casually stood by Amarantha under the pretence of trying to protect her so I could observe, though I actively sought out the minds of the humans and faeries alike who were about to fall, and stole away their pain as they died. So many died that night, with blood soaking the cobblestones until they ran like crimson rivers with the dawn. But it was obvious who was flagging.

Somehow, against all odds, the humans had emerged victorious.

That human huntress had taken the resources she'd gathered and put them to good use. Ash arrows, ash stakes, ash sticks sharpened until the edges were knives. The clothes the villagers wore, as the faeries soon learned, were stitched with the shards of the chains Hybern mined that nullified a High Fae's powers, so it took more effort than they were willing to expend in hand to hand combat to use magic on their opponent. They fell like dominos poised to topple, but the set of their jaws and the fire in their eyes didn't lessen, and they fought dirty, even with a fatal wound pumping blood out of their stomachs.

They fought like half wild beasts.

Cassian would be so proud.

I felt Amarantha grow still and cold beside me as the too-few sentinels she'd brought to fight this war for her fell.

They were skilled. They were, undoubtably, more gifted than the humans. They could have won. But in Amarantha's arrogance she'd forgotten to consider how a man or woman dies to defend their family and home. She'd forgotten how many people they'd face. She'd forgotten how much she was trying to take from them.

And finally, finally, she ordered a retreat. We fled into the woods to stake a camp and consider our options.

The remaining villagers would have sent messages to the surrounding villages. Soon, the entirety of the mortal lands on this Cauldron-damned island would know what had happened. Not only would the news spread that humans had defeated the faeries all by themselves for the first time in living history, but then the news would spread across the Bharat, to the mainland, and then north to Vallahan, and the rest of the world.

This would mean war again.

And now, the humans knew it was coming. They knew they had the means to beat us.

We could launch an attack again, and rely on their weakened state and damaged weapons to work in our favour, but we were weakened just as much as them. It was a two day trip through the forest to the Wall, and more from there to Tamlin's manor, where the rest of the army awaited orders. And apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed the huntress picking off faeries like game amongst the fray, because another High Fae mentioned bitterly that for all we knew, that pretty human archer might come and treat us to ash arrows in our throats whilst we slept.

Amarantha was silent for most of the discussion, only chiming in occasionally to call order when the debating got out of hand. She'd dispatched the Attor early on in the discussion to do something, and when it returned, it whispered something to her.

Only then did she smile.

She addressed the crowd. "I've received word that Tamlin and Lucien were the ones who sold us out." She stated. A ripple of unease spread through the gathered as the faeries wondered how she would take to the news that her "lover" was a traitor. "They're currently living in a small cottage - tiny, really; far below their usual taste, but who can fault them for it in their desperacy - with three human sisters, who somehow managed to orchestrate the whole thing."

My heart leapt into my throat. What she would do to those girls would make a mass slaughter look merciful. And that they'd orchestrated it. . . I grew cold. Surely - surely - the huntress couldn't be one of them?

She turned to a faerie sitting near her, who cringed back in fright. "You will go with the Attor to scope out these girls, and bring one of them back here for questioning." We all knew what "questioning" was a euphemism for. The woman would be made an example of. "Do you understand?"

The faerie nodded, and Amarantha suddenly looked pleased with herself.

It was horrible, really, I thought, how everything could go to shit, but so long as she could punish the person at fault, she'd be thrilled.