Rhysand:
The darkness was everything. It was the world, and the universe, and the storm that raged all around us. Not my formidable darkness. Not a thing even remotely under my control. It was the power of the Cauldron, and it was cold. So very cold. My arms tightened around Feyre, pulling her to me—cherishing every place our bodies touched as my power flowed from me…through her, and into that icy black presence from each point of contact.
Her eyes were closed in concentration, every muscle in her body tense and shaking with effort. Even as exhausted as I had been from battle, the amount of power that I willed into her, pushed through our joined bodies and minds, would have misted dozens—perhaps hundreds, and still she took it in, channeled it through her own body, changed it, as she had once been changed.
The made and the unmade.
It was still there—the thing that Feyre had sensed looming in the Cauldron. I could feel it in the deepest part of that black storm. A large furious aura. A shape and not a shape. A power so great that it dwarfed my own. Made mine and Feyre's and all the High Lords' powers nothing more than a flicker in a great dark void. It was the light and the dark. The end and the beginning. It consumed everything…the Eater of Worlds. And my mate was tethered to it.
She leaned into me, grasping for more down the bond, and I gave her everything that I had left inside me. My body convulsed in protest and agony, every instinct I had acquired in half a millennia screaming at me to stop.
But Feyre moaned in my arms. My mate. My beautiful mate. The human who had walked willingly into her own death to save us all once before. The immortal with the power of seven High Lords. The vessel through which all life…all power now flowed.
The mother…
I love you. Whispered directly into her mind. My own was shut tight against her.
Because I knew for certain now…had known when I'd offered my power to forge the Cauldron anew. She would live. She would recreate the Cauldron and reforge the alliances that I had dreamed of for centuries. She would become the High Lady that the Night Court would need in the trying times to come. She would be a ruler. She would be a mother.
She would live. But I would not.
I felt my power flickering out—a wave of dying embers, and in the ashes, there burned a pain like I had never experienced in a lifetime of war and torture. It took root in my skin and began to bore into every pore, wiping away the last of my healing ability. I stifled my own cry and held her tighter.
Past the pain, past the death coming fast on its heels…over everything else in that moment, I felt her warmth. Her love. Her triumph as the spell took form. I felt her power like rays of brightest light all around her—absorbing everything I had in me to destroy, and transforming it. Using it to create.
It's almost whole again. Her excitement was palpable down the bond. We're doing it!
I had no strength left for the pride that should have welled inside me. No time to mourn the life that I would not have with her as I channeled the last of my power through her. Searching in the deepest recesses of my mind and soul. Giving her every bit of darkness that was left. I felt it draining me completely, washing away an immortality that had protected me for over five hundred years.
I love you.
My last thought. Pushed toward her with my last strength as my mind emptied entirely. I loved her. Gods above, I loved her.
Death was supposed to be written in black—in terms of terror…of blood, and pain, and loss.
My death was silver fire.