Chapter 15 — Azriel / Feyre - A Court of Splintered Harmony

Azriel had been standing in line—Elain so painfully close that he savored her scent, even with her mate mere steps away—when Nesta picked up on something before anyone else. Before his shadows, even.

Not that his shadows were here. Elain had chased them away with her proximity, bright to his dark, scattering them beyond the temple’s boundaries.

When the first scrap of darkness had appeared in the open temple doorway, for a moment he’d thought it was his shadows coming to extend their own blessing. Then the blackness had devoured everything.

He knew that darkness—knew its name: Bryaxis.

Its power was that of pure, unfiltered fear. One’s deepest terrors personified and amplified to deadly effect. It took all of a second for someone—Elain—to scream. Not a scream of alarm, but of absolute horror.

Azriel’s power erupted, blue light exploding outward to kill and to protect, but the darkness was impenetrable. It swallowed his Siphons’ light with a single bite.

Cassian bellowed, a sound of gut-wrenching torment. Had Rhys and Feyre gotten Nyx out? Had they sliced that ribbon off their hands so they could face this nightmare given form?

Elain screamed again, and Az whirled, Siphons illuminating the dark in a wash of blue. His shadows were gone—his shadows couldn’t find him, couldn’t come near, somehow—

Lucien was shouting for his mate, but that shout turned to a roar of agony.

Drawing from the Siphon at his right hand, Az shaped his power into a sword of blue light, and as he brandished it, the dark cleared. The scene it revealed turned him to stone. Into the living dead.

Bodies lay scattered on the temple floor, bloodied and broken. Rhys. Cassian. Feyre—and a tiny, fragile body lay half-covered by Feyre, blood leaking from Nyx’s small hands.

Az looked down at himself. There was blood on him, too. On his own hands. On Truth-Teller, somehow back in his grip. He’d done this to them, as he’d done this to his kin long ago, with the same blade.

Yesterday, he’d been so sure that he didn’t regret it—insisted, as he’d stared Ramiel down, that he didn’t care. But this time, with his friends—that beautiful baby—dead at his hands, hands that were now unable to release Truth-Teller’s blood-slick hilt—

This wasn’t real.

Elain was crawling toward him through the gore, reaching bloodied fingers for his stained boots. “Please,” she begged—to spare her or to end her pain, he didn’t know. He’d done this to all of them; he’d gone to a place within him that he’d dreaded Rhys or anyone ever finding out about, a place as hollow as Ramiel. He couldn’t let go of Truth-Teller. The knife was bound to his very flesh.

Rhys began screaming. Not the prone corpse before him, but off in the distance.

This wasn’t real. But Rhys’s scream of suffering was, and their temple, their city was under attack. Bryaxis, Fear itself, had come.

Feyre was sobbing somewhere beyond the unbearable field of death, too. “No,” she cried. “No, no, no.”

He had to fight it. Had to stop seeing it. But there was Mor, inches away from his bloodied boots, her naked body brutalized again, a note nailed to her abdomen.

This time it read, YOU DID THIS.

Az dropped to his knees, Truth-Teller still in his right hand. Blood sprayed—so real he felt its wetness soak into his legs.

There was nothing worth fighting for. Not anymore. He’d destroyed everything. There was nothing left in the world to care about, either, if he was even capable of caring in the first place.

Then Nyx wailed in terror, again from that far-off place and not the vision before him, and the pain began.

So much pain. Az could feel it in his hands. He lifted the one not holding Truth-Teller, already knowing what he’d see. The oil slathered on what little flesh remained. Bone and tendons where it had melted away.

Nyx’s wail turned into a shriek—a scream. It was the same scream that had once come out of Azriel’s mouth, all those centuries ago, when his half brothers had doused his hands in oil. Then in fire.

Screams for a mother who could not come to save him.

His hands, his hands, his hands—

My son was screaming, and I could not reach him.

I’d never known my child could make those sounds, never known that my happy, sweet boy possessed the capacity to be so scared, so hurt. He screamed for me, frantic, and every muscle in my body contorted, willing myself to move off the floor, to rise, to get to him—

He’d vanished. He’d been in my arms one moment, the ribbon binding us, and then he was gone, and then there was the fetid darkness, and my son was in pain and I could do nothing.

I tried and failed to get off the stone floor. To find him in this swirling, endless night.

His shrieks echoed all around me. Someone was hurting him, someone who had no mercy for how small he was, how helpless and innocent, and they would enjoy tearing him apart piece by piece, breaking limbs and wings—

My body wouldn’t move. Couldn’t move. I could do nothing to help him, nothing at all, and I would die from it, this despair and agony.

Please, I tried to beg that darkness. Please.

Anything. I’d give anything for him to be safe. My life, my territory, my—

Would you give that, too?

Rhys’s agonized yells sounded, and I could tell, somehow I could tell that those shouts weren’t his pain so much as a reaction to what he was seeing.

Would you trade your mate for your son?

I sobbed wordlessly, heaving. It had to stop. I knew it wasn’t real, but it was. In a way, it was, and witnessing that unbearable possible future tore me apart. The cost of refusing to heed wise counsel from good friends, the cost of wasting what little time we had on fool’s plans, the cost of choices that were mine and mine alone.

The darkness cleared. Before me lay my son. Or rather, what had once been my son.

And everything in my existence went silent.