Chapter Text
When you open your eyes, you know you are laying inside a glass coffin, staring at the high ceiling of a cave that looks like a crypt. It’s ancient and smells of dust, and the air is stale. You remember being put in a coffin by an Unseelie fae, a prince in exile, a curse weaver who turned your misfortune into deadly charms as you wished. For a mere second, you wonder what your misfortune was until it all comes back to you as if you didn’t spend a thousand lifetimes in your coffin.
Your kind sister, faking her guilty expression when she held the hand of your betrothed whom she stole from you. Your cruel lover whom you gave your human heart, thinking he would cherish it when he tore it apart to look what human hearts are made of. Your indifferent father, approving of misery you were put in by those you loved because he saw gain in it. Oh, you don’t regret turning to the last unseelie fae for a curse befitting them all, even though all you asked him for was putting you out of your misery.
You hope they all felt what you felt when the curse weaver put you in a glass coffin, making his curse wreak havoc on the land you despised in your stead.
How long has it been, you wonder when you look at the ceiling through the glass, your eyes growing accustomed to the dark all too well. You can sense it in your bones: it must have been ages. It is a miracle your almost-human body could last so long, but maybe you aren’t as human as you hoped. Maybe fae’s blood run through your veins just like your sister’s, and for a second you hate yourself for it.
No, it must have been a curse. You ask yourself what good it did to the unseelie prince to keep you alive for so long, but he’s still a fae, and you would never understand them. Even when you thought you did, they soon proved how futile you attempts were, how you didn’t belong to their world despite being the daugther of a fae lord.
It no longer matters. The world of fairies you knew is dead, and for a second, you feel happy.
But then you hear someone’s heavy breathing, and by its intensity you can tell there is a human crouching down to the ground near your coffin. It is a strong human heart beating inside his chest, and the sounds of it make you feel like crying.
You longed for this sound, the sound of a heart just like your mother’s.
When the man pulls himself up and make it to where you lay, he trips and nearly falls on the lid, his hands staining the glass as he stares back at you, and you see horror on his face.
Of course, you doubt he expected to see an undead half-human looking at him through the glass lid of her coffin.
But the man neither screams nor runs as he stares at you, clearly taken aback by you but regaining his composure nearly immediately - as if he thought something worse could happen to him. As if he came prepared for it.
You say nothing when he moves the heavy lid, and the stale air of the cave seems like summer breeze to you. How many years has it been? You can’t help but wonder, watching the man dressed in knight’s armor bending over to you. You half expect him to stab you in the chest with his sword, but he gently lifts your head up instead as if you are a newborn. The tenderness nearly brings you to tears, and you wish he stabbed you instead.
“How many years has it been?” You ask him, and your lips move as if they don’t belong to a woman who spent a thousand lifetimes in a tomb.
It takes him only a second to recover from the sound of your voice, probably too human to his liking. “I don’t know, my Queen. I’m too young to answer your question.”
Why did he call you his queen? It takes you some time to stop yourself from thinking of it because there are much more pressing matters.
Then you think he’s probably right about being too young to know when you were put in a coffin, albeit it doesn’t stop you from demanding an answer. “What year it is for the Seelie Court?”
“The Seelie Court ceased to exist long before my ancestors took in first human in the family,” he tells you, surprised, his blonde brows furrowed. “And now it is humans who decide whether to take a fae in the family or not.”
It has been many, many years indeed, you think, suprised by the Court’s diminishing but not sad. You detest the unkind creatures with all human there is in you, and there’s nothing sweeter to know they finally got what they deserved.
“I wish I were there to see fairies perish,” you say, lowering your gaze to the knight’s chest where his heart is, shielded from you by his mortal flesh and iron armor.
When he extends his hand to you, wiping your cheek, you realize you’re crying.
Huh, you grew softhearted over the centuries you spent in your tomb, it seems.
“I thought you were there,” the knight mutters, even more perplexed with you than before, his bare hand on your forehead so warm it makes you want to nuzzle against it. “I thought you watched how your curse kills them.”
“The Court?” You smirk, wondering what’s going on in that pretty human head of his. “I never wanted to kill fairies of the Court. I didn’t even ask for a curse that would kill anyone but me.”
You see the shock on his face as if you just told him something unimaginable like the sky and sea changing their places at your command. He is bent over to you with one of his hands carefully supporting your head and neck, and the other one now rests on your chest as if he wants to feel whether your heart is still beating. Who is he? Why did he come to your abode, a human man dressed as a knight with no distinctive heraldic bearing whatsoever? You realize you don’t even see his face well because everything around you is blurry. Is it his protective charms? Glamour? A spell? A curse?
“You are so weak,” he whipers all of a sudden, catching you by surprise. You can recognize pity in his voice. “It’s like you weight nothing when I hold you like this.”
Oh, pity, something you craved so much when you were still young, hoping a fae would pity you, a mortal unable to escape the world of fairies. But does this man truly pity you? If he thinks it was you who brought misfortune upon the Seelie Court, why does he look at you the way if you are the victim? He knows nothing of who you are and what you’ve done. His tenderness scares you, but you still wish he would hold you like this a little longer.
“It seems it’s the time I spent here that made me weak,” you finally say, avoiding his stare. “I don’t see well, and my other senses have weakened too. If I am the one responsible for the fall of fairies, seemingly your ancestors, I take it you came to seek justice. Stab me in the chest, I’m weak enough to die from it.”
For a couple of moments he falls silent, his gaze heavy on you as you look at the ceiling, hoping he will take his sword and plunge it in your body. Then you think he looks angry with his blonde brows drawn together: he must have hoped to give you more painful death. You don’t mind it either.
“I am no murderer. I came to plead for your forgiveness on behalf of all those who wronged you.”
You almost think you imagined him saying it. It couldn’t be true, the voice inside your head tells you as you look into knight’s undoubtedly handsome face you barely see.
Forgiveness? From you?
“I am only a descendant of the fairies you speak,” he continues, not giving you the time to process his words. “And it seems my ancestors had been either misinterpreting or lying about you all along, but I beg for your forgiveness, nonetheless. Please release your curse. Spare what is left of the fae kind.”
If you thought you imagined him begging for your forgiveness before, you can’t pretend you didn’t hear him just now. The human was pleading you to release a curse you have been bearing, a curse that should have hurt you, not the others. You knew the unseelie prince made it so those who wronged you would pay the price for their betrayal, but you barely imagined your hate for the fairy kind would destroy them all.
It takes you a few more minutes before you try to move, asking the man to help you crawl away from the coffin you’re suddenly sick of. Before you do anything, you want to know what happened to the world you once lived in, you tell him as you sit on the ground with your back against the glass, the knight kneeling in front of you.
Slowly, he explains to you what he knows about the destruction of the Seelie Court from the legends and ancient books, but he tells you this knowledge is fickle, untrustworthy because too much time had passed, and too many mouths twisted the truth - or a lie the fae had carefully constructed from the very beginning.
He tells you of the Queen of Unseelie Court fae believed you to be, of her love for the mortal man who chose her sister instead, and of her wrath she unleashed upon all the fae for her misfortune. Then he tells you a story about a daughter of a fae lord, but aside from the beginning, the story is same - she fell in love with a fae who loved her sister instead, and she cursed them both in return; her hate was so strong it was spread to all the fae surrounding her, poisoning them, making them die a horrible death.
As you listen to the man speak, you wonder how come those traitors still managed to turn the great tragedy in their favor even after their deaths.
But what you’re worried about is how come a simple curse you asked for yourself turned into something that could bring destruction to many generations of fae until they went nearly extinct. Even the man who kneels to you now is much more human than you will ever be with your mother’s heart beating in your chest. It is almost impossible to sense fae’s vile blood in him.
Surely, it isn’t your doing despite all your hate for the fairies. It must be the last Unseelie prince, the master of curses who made you a tool in his hands to avenge the faes of Unseelie Court, all murdered before you were even born. You don’t mind being his pawn, not even in the sligthest. You just wonder how surprised your knight gonna be when you tell him the truth.
And so you do, starting your story about a girl who was too human to live happily in the world of unkind magic creatures, a daughter of a fae lord and a mortal woman. Your mother birthed two girls, but your sister took nearly all magic intended to be shared between the two of you, and you got a human heart instead. With that, your fate was predetermined in a place where mortals had always been looked down upon.
As you grew older, you knew the fair folk would never take you as their own, and you stopped trying to win your father’s approval, spending your days on the meadows where you spied on humans you cherished so much. You wanted to exchange the world of magic for the world of mortals, and you would succeed if only you didn’t fall in love with a young fae, a boy who looked like a prince and spoke like a poet. In his arms you felt like nothing else mattered, neither your father’s indifference nor your family’s hostility. The fae boy seemed as invisible and unimportant to others as you, and the both of you planned to run away from the Court to somewhere deep in the woods where you would meet no one but driads, left alone to the fate you yourselves chose.
You were so young then, you say when you think how unimaginably silly and impossible that plan was. Oh, but you were such a helpless romantic back then you would never believe anyone who told you of the stupidity of your hopes.
Of course, the boy wasn’t someone unimportant. Of course, he turned to you so he could gain access to the house of your father, a fae lord, in whom he confided about being a royalty in exile who needed support. Of course, he chose your powerful sister instead of you as he was gradually regaining his position at the Court. Of course, they all knew the truth, and they all took pleasure in tricking you.
“When my sister and my lover asked me to attend their wedding, I realized it would take me a thousand lifetimes to heal,” you said plainly, raising your head up to stare at the dark ceiling again - it seemed to calm you. “So I thought it would be better to end my life there and then. I was so angry, so mad, but I still couldn’t force myself to jump out of the window or bring a knife to my throat. So I came to the man I knew would help me for sure, the last remaining member of the Unseelie Court. He took immense pleasure in murder, and he was skilled in weaving curses like a spider with a cobweb.”
“How did you come to know him?” The knight raises his brows. “And how come such a dangerous man was left to live, less alone be brought to the Seelie Court?”
“The prince was fated to die in misery, unable to bring death to those who murdered his family. The royals of the Court treated him like a buffoon who couldn’t do anything to hurt them,” you say, remembering a sick skinny prince with his eyes blue like the summer sky. “I’ve met him at the Court just like everybody else. He thought we were somewhat alike in our misfortunes, I suppose. Maybe that’s why one time, long before I fell in love, he told me he would grant me a curse when I will need it the most.”
The knight’s eyes are glowing in the dark with such ferocity you are almost afraid of him. “I see. He must have known your fate, then, using you as means of exacting revenge. Then it’s him to blame for the death of our kind. I must say I have never anticipated it.”
“I can’t be sure,” you mutter under your breath. “He is the creator of my curse, but I am it’s bearer. Without my hatred for the fairy folk, the curse wouldn’t gain so much power, would it?”
There is an uncomfortable silence between the two of you, but you refuse to feel guilty. They all deserved it. All those cruel, heartless creatures who enjoyed mocking and hurting others, they all deserved what happened to them.
When you remember their humiliating stares and tricky words, made to feel like those weren’t insults when they clearly were, you think you aren’t sorry even the slightest bit. Worse, those ugly creatures weren’t unkind to just human beings, they detested everyone and everything - you remember seeing fae abandoning their newborns because they cried too much or wanted to cuddle for too long; you remember fae children dying of hunger or diseases because their parents couldn’t bother taking care of them. People believed children of fairies to be too sick, born with weak bodies, but they weren’t weaker than human newborns. It’s just that people nurtured their children, and fae parents nurtured themselves instead.
Since the life of a fae lasts much longer than the life of a mortal, they were never bothered with the survival of their kind, thinking they will live forever. You are glad they were proven wrong, you think, and something wicked blooms in your chest like a poisonous flower, making it harder to breathe.
But you don’t say anything to the knight who sits in front of you in an uncomfortable position because of his armor, his expression thoughtful, perplexed, and somewhat sad. He must have expected to find the Queen of Curses, an evil deity, a woman who could kill with her eyes if she didn’t like the way he spoke to her, but instead he found you, a half-human who wanted nothing but a petty revenge and was tricked into committing atrocities by the Unseelie prince. What a shame, he probably thinks.
“I suppose you imagined my offense to be much greater than this, but this is how it is,” you say, sighing. “There is nothing worthy of making a legend out of it. I guess, that’s why the fair folk created a story so different from truth, to keep whatever dignity they had left.”
Surely, a legend of a mighty Queen of the Unseelie Court taking revenge on her unfaithful lover is much better than your story, a story of half-human who got tricked by the curse weaver so easily.
“I don’t think it’s unworthy of a legend,” the man finally says, making you flinch from his stare, “I think it’s just too human for fairies to understand.”