Chapter Text
Modern girl in Prythian because sometimes we don't dream what it would be like?
Rhiannon, a modern young woman, is accidentally transported to Prythian – the world of the series "Court of Thorns and Roses" (ACOTAR). Far from her reality and out of her time, she faces a universe more dangerous and complex than she had imagined in her readings, challenging her comfort zone and forcing her to mature.
°•°• Vivamus, moriendum est.
Let us live, for we must die. °•°•
The story was written in a way for fun, it takes place at the end of the story, besides I forgot to put Nesta in the story so, please don't get angry, this fanfic was written to be fun, so I accept constructive comments, I hope you like it.
this is a fanfic with the romantic couple Lucian Vanserra.
NOTHING belongs to me but the plot and the character RHIANNON JESMINDA ABRIL belong to me.
MahSkywalker_
Chapter Text
Rhiannon Abril is a summer child who was given a strange crystal by her aunt and her father turned it into a necklace for her before he and her mother left for a trip abroad. She decides to spend the last nights of autumn in the mountains to have the experience of stargazing on the full moon and enjoy her comfort surrounded by nature.
However, 19-year-old Rhiannon, a lover of books and drinking tea, found herself falling into the world of acotar, before the events. And she has the feeling that the strange crystal may have been the cause of this and combined with a strange mark of three mountain peaks and a flame, as well as a constellation of a set of stars... Rhiannon wakes up wide-eyed, hearing a voice in her head.
"You have traveled a lot through the stars and many worlds... Not all those who wander are lost, and not all those who are lost wander. Look deep into your heart and you will find what you need."
The sun was very strong and it hurt. She blinked, then closed her eyes and moaned as she sat up. Okay, the ribs hurt too. That was probably to be expected, considering she fell to the ground after that pull.
Wait. She opened her eyes, squinting them in the bright light. A goat looked placidly at her from across a bright green field, filled with birdsong and the mix of scents of spring flowers and manure. She blinked back.
As he turned around, he noticed the complete lack of trees, with some snow, his rental car, greenery, and most importantly, any indication of anyone who knew what was going on. She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath, wincing as she felt a strain in her ribs.
"It's okay," she said aloud, consciously controlling her panic. "First step, get up." I can do that.
Getting up was smooth and she took the time to take a quick inventory. Her clothes were clean enough, considering she was lying in a field (here she looked at a large pile of manure with displeasure), and although she was sure she would soon have some nasty bruises, she wasn't bleeding and nothing looked broken. . Well, at least without bones... She moaned as she took her phone out of her pocket and found the screen broken and black.
"I expected this one to last another year or two..." She sighed. "Step two... And here she stopped, her eyes widening as she watched seeing that it didn't make sense where she was, she looked at the horizon and saw what looked like a village from those period soap operas.
She watched him, then closed her eyes again, took two deep breaths, and pinched herself on her arm.
there.
No. Still here.
She spun slowly, carefully cataloguing her environment. And also the absence of film crews, tourists or signs of modern life.
What a shit. That doesn't... No. I refuse. This is a prank, or a dream, or...
She was startled when a hot nose hit her shoulder, then turned to look at the goat with whom she still shared the field.
Wow, that goat was big, quite fat. He nudged her again and she sighed, leaning in as she scratched her forehead.
"Okay boy, help me here." I know I haven't passed out long enough for someone to drag me here, this is definitely not a dream because I can feel pain and I counted all my fingers twice. But falling into fantasy worlds doesn't really happen, so what's happening?
The goat just stared. She sighed.
"That's very helpful, thank you."
What were her options? She couldn't call anyone, her phone was broken.
She probably couldn't enter the village, not wearing it that way. She doesn't know where she is, but she sure doesn't want to be called a witch and burned at the stake.
She looked around and saw a backpack, like a school bag, only instead of cloth it was a leather — approaching her, she picked up a gain on the ground and poked her, nothing happened. Feeling that it was safe, he took the backpack and opened it.
In it there was a plastic bottle, a simple dress, but in a royal blue, with some lace, a tiara with blue stones, which looked super expensive, a cloth bag, with which it looked like gold coins and finally a leather cardene. When Rhiannon opened it, it had a folded paper and on it was written:
Rhiannon
If you're reading this it means I failed, tried so hard, but I couldn't... I'm not the first and I'm not the last either. I spent the whole year wondering where I went wrong. You and I are the same. We came from another world and were literally isekai in acotar.
In this book I wrote everything I remembered, and I saw... As time goes by you will also have visions, be careful, because the future is deceptive and not everything is what it seems.
You are exactly 80 years before the birth of Feyre Archeron and 100 years before she broke the curse. You are probably in denial. So let me be transparent, you are, or , you will become a seer, you will not grow old and you will not get sick, because fate has placed you here and only he will take you away.
You will have the gift of seeing versions of futures, pasts and presents, but be careful not to eloquete. For the gift, at certain times, will be a curse.
So I just say, good luck.
You're going to need it.
Arya, the previous seer.
As she closed the note, she sat on the floor, incredulous at what she read. Taking a deep breath, he opened the book and on the first page of the book, Arya's writing, began:
"I've lived my life around three simple rules; Keep your head down, don't stand out, and don't get attached. Here's the story of how I broke those rules countless times."
When she read this paragraph, she was impacted. As these words hit her and she promised herself that she would not be silent and would stop helping and would not do nothing in the name of the greater good.
"I learned a few things in this life, and one of them in this world is:
There is strength in kindness.
There is power in forgiveness.
In this world only those who have known only war, the very act of mercy can be revolutionary, and when the powers that be are steeped in injustice and greed, there is nothing left to do but rebel. I participated in countless wars, started and ended them. I loved, hated and I lived so that a future was possible. If you're reading this diary, Rhiannon, I hope you can forgive a fool, who loved and lost herself because of it."
Chapter Text
"There is no gift that does not have teeth."
The spring sky shimmered with clouds as delicate as silk veils, the scent of damp grass, and wildflowers rising in the air like a subtle spell. Rhiannon held Arya's journal as if it were a map... or a gun.
His heart beat wildly as he reread the note. Each word was like a magic seal, unveiling something she had always quietly suspected—that there was more among the stars than just ancient light.
She swallowed, eyes fixed on the blue stone tiara. Even under the sun, there was a spark in them that seemed... hooray.
"I'm a fortune teller..." she whispered, her voice faint as the echo of a memory.
The goat mooed softly, as if to confirm. Rhiannon raised an eyebrow.
"Are you my magical familiar now?" Some kind of... four-legged leash?
The answer was a whinny. A whinny?
She turned around so quickly that her ribs protested. And then he did. Not far away, a magnificent horse—or perhaps a fey steed—standing in the shade of a tree. Its fur was black as obsidian, and its eyes glowed an almost human amber hue. She swallowed hard again. Whatever that was, it was no ordinary animal.
Instinct made her retreat, but the horse—no, him—tilted its head, as if recognizing her. A wind blew out of nowhere, and the leather cloak that wrapped around Rhiannon's backpack shook, revealing once again the symbol marked on it: three mountain peaks and a flame in the center, as if they were parts of a constellation.
"Not all those who wander are lost..." The voice whispered in his mind again.
The ground beneath his feet seemed... more solid suddenly, as if, by recognizing its own destiny, the world had accepted it.
She knew three things for sure:
The constellation in his vision was real.
She was in Prythian, and that wasn't a dream.
And whoever Arya was, she tried to help.
Rhiannon looked at the notebook again, turned the page. A drawing occupied the next page—the silhouette of a woman standing before a fortress surrounded by walls of thorns. And just below, written in red ink:
Spring Cut. Don't rely on smiles.
Rhiannon closed the book tightly. That was real. And even though she didn't know what to do yet, she knew that the first step was to find shelter — and understand what kind of magic was involved with that necklace and the crystal.
The goat walked away, and the black horse... He turned, trotting lightly toward the nearest forest. Then it stopped. And he waited.
She sighed, threw her backpack on her back, pressed the notebook to her chest and muttered:
"Okay, fate. Let's see what you have for me.
And then, with the spring breeze blowing against her face and the sun beginning to set, Rhiannon Abril began to walk. Towards the unknown.
But no longer afraid.
+
The sound of her own footsteps was all Rhiannon could hear as she walked down the hill toward the village of Vereda. The tall grass brushed against her legs as the royal blue dress rippled around her ankles, already a little dirty on the bar across the field. The simple fabric hid well the otherworldly clothes she still wore underneath—and hopefully, it would also help hide who she really was.
The pages of Arya's diary were neatly tucked away inside the leather backpack, protected by a cloth and the weight of Rhiannon's notebook, which now looked almost ridiculous next to the words of a psychic from the past.
Eighty years before Feyre.
That thought stuck in his mind like frozen dew, impossible to shake away.
The streets of Vereda were narrow, lined with small wooden houses with thatched roofs, some covered in moss, others with hand-sewn curtains fluttering in the windows. The smell of the countryside was replaced by smoke from fireplaces, baking bread and something else... something darker. An invisible tension hung in the air, as if the entire village was waiting for a storm.
"Between the Bloody Mountains and the Whispering Wood," Arya said in her diary.
And now that Rhiannon was there, she felt that the name "Whispering Wood" was not poetic. It was a warning.
She approached what looked like a tavern—a sturdier building with a worn sign dangling on the door: The Autumn Leaf. The place seemed calm, but not empty.
He entered with his heart racing, trying to control the nervousness that threatened to rise up his throat. Several glances turned to her. A stranger, alone, decently dressed, but clearly not belonging.
"Do you need anything, girl?" A stout woman asked behind the counter, a scarf covering her dark hair and wrinkles marking her eyes. The distrust was disguised by a practical courtesy.
Rhiannon swallowed hard and tried to smile.
"Food." And... maybe a fourth. For a few days, if possible.
The woman nodded, eyes attentive to the bag of coins that Rhiannon was taking from her backpack. Gold shone as a promise, but also as a risk.
As she ate a dark bread with goat cheese and root soup, Rhiannon noticed that the whispers didn't stop. Men murmured about troops marching farther north, about fae prowling the edges of the forests, about disappearances. Prythian was far away, but his shadows were already spreading through human corners.
And then, he came in.
The sound of the door opening was drowned out by a sudden silence. A man in a dark cloak, red hair held together by a leather ribbon, eyes like old wood—brown but deep. It didn't have the otherworldly beauty of the High Fae that Rhiannon had imagined in the books, but there was something about him that silenced the environment. Quiet authority. Presence.
He walked to the counter and ordered wine. Nothing more. The voice was deep, serene, and the accent... it was not human.
Rhiannon froze. His gut told him that he wasn't just a fae—he was a High Fae. But he looked too young, and at the same time... He carried centuries on his shoulders. Arya had written that fae didn't tend to venture so openly into human villages—unless they were looking for something.
Or someone.
She lowered her head, remembering Arya's advice: Keep your head down. Don't stand out.
But it was too late. The man's eyes met hers. Just a moment. And then he dodged it, as if it was nothing.
But something inside her said it was nothing.
Chapter Text
"Seeing the future is like holding a blade on both sides: you bleed, even if you hit it."
The wind blew gently through the trees of the Forest. There was moisture in the air, as if the forest had cried the night before. Rhiannon — now Jesminda — walked along a trail of dry leaves alongside Lucien, whose golden eyes were turned to the sky.
"Aren't you really afraid to walk around here?" He asked, breaking the silence that had lasted since they met for the second time.
"I'm afraid of things that don't show themselves. She replied calmly, without looking at him. "What can be named, understood... can be faced.
Lucien seemed to reflect on this, frowning slightly. He was still young, probably in his hundreds—which, among fae, was little more than a young adult. But his eyes already knew about loss, even though he hadn't faced the worst part of it yet.
"You speak like someone who has seen a lot," he said. "But he carries little baggage.
"It's just that the biggest scars don't show themselves on the body.
He didn't answer, but his golden eyes studied her for long moments, as if looking for those scars in the folds of her soul.
They walked in silence again to a stream that cut through the forest. She bent down to wash her face, and Lucien sat on a nearby rock, watching the water.
"Why did you come to Vereda?" He asked at last. "You don't belong here.
She didn't know if he was testing her or protecting her. Maybe both.
"I'm looking for a place where my presence isn't an offense," he replied frankly.
"Then the Autumn Court is the last place for that," he said, laughing humorlessly. "Here, even the wind has to ask pride for permission.
Jesminda stared at him.
"And you?" Why is it still here?
Lucien looked out at the forest. There was a sadness there that she recognized.
"Because I still have siblings. It's a name that haunts me.
She wanted to ask more. I wanted to touch him, somehow. But instead, she sat down next to him.
"Have you ever loved?" She asked, without thinking.
He turned his face slowly, surprised by the question.
"I don't know. Maybe you dreamed about it. Or with someone. But no... not really.
Jesminda looked at the crystal under her clothing, which slightly warmed her skin. Something there vibrated in tune with that conversation. As if fate were recording every word.
"What is love, if not the perseverance of pain?"
The phrase popped into his mind as if it were written by Arya. Or by herself, in some distant future.
Later that day, when she returned to Vereda, she felt that she was not alone.
The aura has changed. The air has thickened. And the fire of the torches seemed to bend to an invisible presence.
And then she saw him.
At the entrance to the village, leaning against a fence, as if he were just watching the sunset — Eris Vanserra. The same as she had seen in visions. Blood-golden hair, amber eyes that seemed to carry both judgment and desire for redemption. His cloak was of coarse wool, with the coat of arms of his House discreetly embroidered on the collar. But there was no guard, no announcement. Only him.
He saw her. He smiled—slowly, like a blade emerging from the sheath.
"Jesminda," he said, as if tasting the name.
She froze.
"How do you know my name?"
Eris tilted her head.
"Because it was whispered by the woods. And by fire. And for guilt.
Jesminda frowned.
"Do we know each other?"
He approached slowly, like a flame approaching a dry wick.
"Not yet. But there's something about you... that burns with the past that has not yet happened.
He studied her intensively, and for the first time, Rhiannon felt that Eris was not a villain. Or a hero. He was... discomfort. Nondescript. Like a distorted mirror of what she could become.
"Stay away from me," she said firmly.
Eris didn't move. But his smile disappeared.
"As you wish, Jesminda. But know that the names we choose say more about us than the ones we are given. And your... He was chosen with pain.
He walked away, disappearing on the trail that led into the forest. Jesminda stood still, her heart on fire.
Later, while reading Arya's diary by candlelight, she found a sentence scrawled at the bottom of an old page:
"There will be three who will burn: the one who loves, the one who betrays, and the one who keeps. They are not always different."
She looked out the window, where Lucien was talking to a villager. And in the distance, where the trail faded into the darkness, the trail of Eris's warmth still hovered.
Jesminda closed her eyes, feeling the weight of the future.
Perhaps tragedy was never the end... Just the beginning of a story told by eyes that never saw it completely.
+
In the days that followed, Jesminda and Lucien walked together along the trails of the Whispering Wood—as if the world brought them together by sheer insistence. They never arranged meetings, but they always met. Sometimes at the foot of the stream, sometimes under the great twisted fig tree, or just on the way back from the tavern, as if their presence orbited the same invisible star.
He brought berries, she shared pieces of bread.
He spoke of the birds of the forest, she told stories that she pretended to be legends, but which were veiled visions.
And between these exchanges, something grew.
It was not hasty passion. It was a bond.
That kind of tenderness that is only born when two souls recognize each other in pain.
One morning, Lucien appeared with a minor wound on the side of his face. A thin line of blood under the temple. Jesminda went to him before she even thought.
"What happened?"
"I train with my brothers," he said gruffly. "Accidents" happen.
She touched the wound gently, the innate magic she had carried since her arrival vibrating beneath her skin. A slight warmth passed from his fingers to his skin, and the wound closed almost instantly.
Lucien looked at her with surprise.
"Do you have gifts?"
"Small things," he replied, looking away. "Most don't even notice.
He did not insist. And she was grateful for that.
One night, a creature appeared at the edge of the village—a shadow of golden eyes, paws like cracked hooves, and obsidian teeth. An aberration, coming from the broken boundaries between the Courts, where magic and corruption mixed.
The villagers shouted, and the torches were raised. Jesminda hid behind a stable, but Lucien was the first to act.
He raised his bow, eyes fixed, breathing steadily. The arrow flew — accurate — but not enough. The creature continued to advance.
And then Jesminda ran.
He didn't think.
He did not hesitate.
He reached out, and as if the crystal in his chest pulsed with a life of its own, a burst of golden light enveloped the creature. The beast cried out, retreating, the shadows fading like mist in the sun.
Silence.
The villagers looked at her with reverence and fear. Lucien stared at her with something more.
Fascination.
That night they sat alone under the crooked fig tree. He took off his cloak and put it on her shoulders, for the forest wind was biting.
"You could have died," he said, a low voice.
"I know.
"Why?"
She turned, eyes on his.
"Because you didn't deserve to die alone."
Lucien looked away, as if something inside him had been touched too deeply.
"Sometimes I feel like I've known you for a long time. He said.
Jesminda smiled.
"Maybe... Somehow, get to know it.
A comfortable silence settled. The kind of silence where feelings don't need words.
But the world around him did not rest.
Eris watched her from a distance. Always in the shade of a tree, at the end of an eaves, behind a horse on the road. As if testing the limits of what she knew. And what it was becoming.
And one afternoon, after a long walk, Lucien stopped halfway.
"Did you know... Was Jesminda the name of the first woman I loved? Or maybe... What shall I love?
Jesminda felt her blood run cold.
"Maybe fate repeats names so we can fix the stories."
Lucien smiled, a sad smile.
"Or so that we can suffer for them again."
But what is love if not the courage to endure pain again—knowing the end, and yet saying "yes"?
Jesminda looked at him. And even though she knew that her name was a shadow of a future history, at that moment, she decided to live the truth that was before her.
Even if the world tried to turn her into just a legend.
Chapter Text
❈ "Not all love is written in songs. Some are engraved on the skin. And others, in the silence between two smiles."
— Last page of Arya's diary
Autumn advanced with cold and golden fingers. In the Grove, the once-vibrant leaves had turned into a cloak of aged, blood-red gold, detaching from the branches with a sigh with each biting breeze. The air bore the pungent and comforting perfume of burnt wood in the fireplaces of distant houses, but under it, almost imperceptibly, floated a bitter aftertaste of broken promises and announced finals. Inside Jesminda's small wooden hut, the warmth of the fireplace fought against the cold that crept in through the cracks.
The sound that woke her up was neither shrill nor impatient. There were firm, familiar knocks on the solid wood door, echoing in the stillness of the cold morning. A rhythm she knew in her bones. Jesminda's heart jumped against her ribs before her mind even fully awakened. She wrapped herself in a thick shawl over her nightgown, her bare feet meeting the icy plank floor. When he opened the door, the autumnal air invaded, bringing with him the figure that filled the frame.
Lucien.
But not the arrogant prince, nor the carefree lover of spring. This Lucien bore the marks of invisible conflicts. A thin layer of soot darkened one of his red temples and jawline, as if he had rubbed himself with a dirty hand. On the side of her face, just above the chin line, a fresh scar, still pink and raw, cut through her pale skin – a silent testimony to the violence she faced. Her amber eyes, however, retained a familiar intensity, a mixture of tiredness and something deeper, more urgent, when he found her.
"I came to get it... "Bread," he said, his voice a little hoarse, broken by fatigue or suppressed emotion. Her index finger pointed to the bundle of raw fabric she always ritually left on the tavern windowsill for travelers in need.
Jesminda arched an eyebrow, a restrained smile playing on her lips, momentarily pushing away the worry that the sight of him had aroused.
"You crossed half the forest, how cold it is and... *this* on her face," she gestured slightly toward the soot and scar, "for a piece of bread?"
He shrugged his shoulders that tried to appear carefree, but failed. It was a tense, charged gesture.
"Maybe I'm hungry for other things. The sentence hung in the cold air between them, heavier than any direct statement.
A low laugh escaped Jesminda, a sound that began as surprise and ended as a trapped sigh finally freed. It sounded fragile in the stillness of the morning.
"Then come in." But don't expect blind morning courtesy. I only have bread and tea. And maybe a little jam.
He crossed the threshold, his presence instantly filling the small, welcoming space. The cold smell of the forest and the distant smoke he brought with him mingled with the aroma of the herbal tea that already rested on the wood stove and the sweet perfume of the dried lavender hanging from the rafters.
"With you, Jes, this already feels like a Solstice feast." The sincerity in his voice was palpable, a hunger that went far beyond the physical.
They sat down at the rustic table, the bundle of bread open between them. The silence that followed the tearing of the crusty bread and the pouring of the steaming tea was not empty. It was dense, electric. The eyes said everything that the mouths did not dare. He watched her every move, the curve of her neck as she drank the tea, the way her fingers held the slice of bread. She studied the exhaustion on her shoulders, the shadow in her eyes, the raw scar line. When his hand—rougher than she remembered, scarred by recent work or struggle—slid across the table and covered hers, neither of them pretended it was a casual or accidental gesture. It was an anchor, a tactile confession.
"Do you feel it?" Lucien's question came softly, almost whispered, breaking the silence only to fill it with something deeper. His fingers tightened lightly against hers. "Like we were... On the verge of something? As if the ground beneath our feet is about to give way?
Jesminda felt the lump in her throat tighten. She didn't have to pretend she didn't understand. The pressure in the air, the urgency in it, autumn itself withering the world outside... everything screamed the same truth. She nodded, slowly, her breath held in her chest.
"As if something was about to end. She paused infinitesimally, looking for courage. "Or—" begin. Something irrevocable.
Lucien leaned forward across the table, his gaze intense, burning it.
"So what if it were now?" His voice was a hoarse stream, charged with a decision precipitated by the imminence they both felt.
She frowned, a line of confusion and fear brief between her eyebrows.
"What?"
"What if we stopped pretending?" He insisted, her hand now firmly in his. "Stop pretending that this," he looked at his clasped hands, then her eyes, "isn't happening?" Which is not... everything?
He stood up, pulling her slowly but with undeniable strength. She rose to her feet, her body responding before the mind could even process the fear, the anticipation, the overwhelming desire. The kiss that followed was the diametrical opposite of that first hungry kiss in the sunshine forest. It was not the fury of spring, but the depth of autumn. It was hot, yes, but a deep ember, not a flame. It was slow, agonizingly slow, every movement of the lips a minute exploration, a record. It was full—filled with all the contained longing of weeks away, the unbearable tension of the table, the accumulated tenderness that the imminence of the end made almost painful. It was a kiss that knew the farewell and the final claim.
Without breaking the contact of their lips, Jesminda guided him, step by slow step, backwards, towards the small adjoining room. The wooden door creaked softly as it was pushed. There, the air was warmer, impregnated by the comforting smell of dried lavender hidden among the clean sheets and by the residual heat of the fireplace that heated the nearby wall. There, in that little sanctuary against the cold and the advancing world, the outside world really fell apart. The clothes, useless barriers, were dispensed not with frantic urgency, but with a solemn reverence. It was only skin under the dim light that came in through the small window, hoarse sighs that echoed in the small room, and silent promises intertwined in the fingers that tightened, seeking to fuse bones.
Lying next to him, Jesminda raised her hand. His fingers, light as wings, ran over the fresh scar on his jaw, then descended to other, older marks that dotted his shoulder and chest—scars from training, from conflict, from the life he led. It was as if she read a story written in silence in his flesh, a story of pain and survival that he never told with words. He, in turn, held her face in his hands, his rough palms contrasting with the softness of her skin. He held it as if it were holding something infinitely precious, something he had waited a lifetime to deserve to touch, something he felt slipping through his fingers like sand.
Then, when his breathing calmed and their bodies settled under the thick wool blankets, the shared warmth creating an island against the autumnal cold, Lucien turned his head on the shared pillow. Her amber eyes, reflecting the faint glow of the day, stared at her with an intensity that cut the soul.
"You're my choice, Jesminda. His voice was a deep whisper, a solemn declaration thrown into the shadows. "My only true choice." Even if everything else... even if the whole world collapses around it.
Jesminda closed her eyes. His words echoed in her chest, warm and perfect, and part of her burned to turn and whisper back, "And you're mine." The truth of it was like the very blood running through his veins. But another part—a cold, clairvoyant part that had been growing ever since he had knocked on the door with soot on his face and a new scar—rose like a wall. Behind the closed eyelids, there was no darkness, only relentless visions, like nightmarish paintings projected in his mind:
A tall, dark stone tower, consumed by orange flames that licked the night sky, casting dancing and grotesque shadows.
A lake of still waters as black as opal, reflecting a cold and distant moon, a place of gloomy omens.
Eris, Lucien's older brother, not the arrogant prince, but a broken figure, kneeling on a stone floor stained with fresh blood and surrounded by the sinister glow of fire.
And, clearer than all, Lucien. Lucien himself now lay beside him. But not here. Not safe. Alone in a dark and desolate place, his face distorted by primal pain, his mouth open in a mute cry that she could hear in his heart – a desperate, lacerating cry, echoing in the darkness: "JESMINDA!"
She squinted harder, trying to banish the images, trying to cling to his warmth, the smell of lavender, the whispered promise. But the premonition, cold and accurate as a blade, had already taken root. The world he had sworn to face for her... It was already beginning to crumble, and the desperate cry was the only echo left.
The night was cold and silent, as if the Grove held its breath. The moonlight, filtered through swift clouds, bathed Jesminda's clearing and hut in liquid silver and deep shadows. Inside, under the blankets warmed by Lucien's sleeping body, the air was charged with the smell of him—burnt wood, warm skin, and the lavender from the sheets—and the deep peace of his exhausted sleep. But Jesminda couldn't breathe. A restlessness, colder and sharper than the previous premonition, spread through her veins, solidifying in a specific spot under her collarbone, where the small blue crystal she had always worn, a family heirloom, rested.
It was as if the innocuous stone had turned into a red-hot coal. The heat was not external; It sprang from within the yolk itself, pulsing in increasingly intense and painful waves, burning her skin like a red-hot iron. A sign. A warning that is impossible to ignore.
With slow movements, careful not to disturb Lucien – whose face, even at rest, still bore the shadow of the fresh scar and a residual tension in her eyebrows – she slid out of bed. The cold of the wooden floor pierced the soles of his bare feet like a stab, contrasting brutally with the internal burn of the crystal. She wrapped herself in the thick shawl, but the tremor that shook her came from within.
She slipped through the door, closing it with a minimal click. The night air, sharp and filled with the smell of dead leaves and imminent frost, welcomed her like an icy bath. But the crystal continued to burn, an incandescent black star attached to his chest, demanding attention.
Guided by an instinct stronger than reason, Jesminda walked through the damp, silvery grass to the old crooked fig tree that stood like a solitary guardian at the edge of the clearing. It was there, under its twisted branches that writhed against the night sky, that she had always found a fragile refuge. He knelt on the cold, soft earth, his hands pressing against the burning crystal, trying to stifle the fire within, to soothe the heart that hammered against his ribs like a trapped and terrified bird.
"Please," the whisper escaped his lips, a prayer with no clear addressee, vaporizing in the cold air. "Just more time." A little more.
But the world, or fate, or the forces that wove the threads of their lives, did not respond with mercy. He answered with vision.
It was not a dream. It was a brutal, total invasion of the senses. A veil was torn before her closed eyes, and she was hurled into a vivid and inescapable nightmare:
**Fire.** Not the cozy warmth of the fireplace, but an all-consuming hell of tall black stone walls. Orange and voracious flames licked vaulted ceilings, casting dancing and grotesque reflections over everything. The heat was physical, oppressive, a wall that pushed against his face.
Thick, heavy, black iron and cold shackles. They creaked with a metallic, cruel sound, visible around bruised wrists and shuffling legs. They were not just objects; they were symbols of loss, of capture, of crushed freedom.
A Throne Room. Recognizable even in the distortion of horror. Immense, cold, built to intimidate. But now illuminated only by devouring fire and flickering and sinister lights. In the center, the tall and gloomy throne.
Beron laughing. The High Lord, Lucien's father. His face, a mask of power and cruelty, distorted not by joy, but by a perverse and utter triumph. The sound of his laughter was not loud; It was a deep, satisfied growl that vibrated in the bones, echoing in the burning room, more terrifying than any scream.
[Lucien being dragged. Two imposing, hooded guards, silhouetted against the fire, grabbed him with brutal force. He fought, not with desperate strength, but with the impotent fury of a wounded and cornered animal. Was his face stained with soot and something darker – blood? – the amber eyes, which she knew so well, wide not with fear but with a pure and lacerating hatred, fixed on Beron. A mute scream tore at his throat. And Jesminda knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the marrow, that he was screaming for her.
And she... The view changed angle. It was there, on the cold floor of the same room or a nearby place. Not fallen after the fight, but broken by it. Lying on her side, her simple dress stained with something that was not red, but gold. Golden, luminous and strange blood, oozing from a terrible wound in his chest, forming a bright and surreal puddle on the stone floor. Pain was an absence. A cold emptiness. She wasn't dying. It was already beyond.
But he did not die. Not completely. Not there.
That was when the vision reached a metaphysical, unbearable depth. The soul broke. Like glass under extreme pressure. A break that is not physical, but essential. Something immense, bright, and vital within her—the core of what Jesminda was—cracked with a sound that echoed in the silence of her own consciousness. A part, the largest, remained there, linked to the fallen body, to the pain, to the despair of Lucien screaming. But something was loaded. A tiny fragment, a spark of pure, indestructible light, was torn from the center of the rupture. Preserved.
Like a precious pearl wrapped in velvet, like a seed buried in the harshest winter. Someone, or something, with gentle, intangible hands, carried that spark away from the fire, the shackles, the laughter of Beron. To a place of absolute stillness, of infinite waiting.
The vision dissipated like smoke. Jesminda gasped, returning sharply to her body kneeling under the crooked fig tree. The cold night air entered his lungs like knives. The crystal in his chest still pulsated, but now it was a residual heat, an echo of the burn, superimposed on a cold that penetrated to the bone. His body trembled uncontrollably. The tears, when they came, were silent and warm, running down her icy face and dripping into the dark earth. They were not just out of fear. They were for sure. Of anticipatory mourning. Of absolute and devastating knowledge.
When he managed to get up, his legs trembling and his heart a weight of lead in his chest, the way back to the cabin seemed endless. Every step was a conscious effort. The door creaked slightly under his touch.
Inside, the air was still warm, heavy with deep sleep and his presence. Lucien was asleep. No problem. Her face relaxed, her breathing slow and regular, a lock of dark red hair falling over her forehead. A sigh escaped her, a stolen image of peace and innocence that broke Jesminda's heart in half.
She stood on the threshold, motionless, watching him. His fingers itched with a physical, almost painful need to touch him. To feel the rough-smooth texture of your skin, the lively warmth of it, to curl your fingers in your hair. To wake him up. To dive into his arms, to whisper terror, to seek refuge in the strength that emanated even while asleep. To scream: Let's run away! Now! While there is still time!
But he did not.
The hand that had begun to reach out froze in mid-air, halfway to the bed. He retracted, closing himself in a tight fist close to his body, burying his nails in his palm.
Because she knew.
With the glacial clarity that only true vision could give, she knew.
Their history was made up of two times.
A time: The one she was in now. The time he still breathed, the time of the warmth shared under the blankets, the smell of lavender, the taste of bread and tea, the trapped laughter escaping. The time that could still be happy, even if every moment was a stolen loan, a grain of sand running irretrievably in the hourglass. The present time, fragile and precious.
And another time: What she had seen under the crooked fig tree. The time of fire, of fetters, of golden blood and of the broken soul. The time that was already written in the cold stars, in Beron's laughter, in Lucien's desperate scream. Time that advanced relentlessly, minute by minute, like the frost that covered the grass outside. The future time, doomed.
Waking him up would do no good. It would not change the fate that closed over them like a steel trap. It would only steal these last hours of illusory peace, of happiness that is still possible. He would only anticipate the pain she had seen stamped on his face in the vision.
Then, Jesminda took a deep breath, swallowing the scream, the ground, the terror. Moving with the lightness of a shadow, she crossed the small space, slid back under the still-warm blankets, leaning carefully against Lucien's sleeping body. She felt his warmth, his breathing steady, his life pulsing strongly under his skin. She closed her eyes, pressing her eyelids hard, trying to memorize every sensation, every detail, every beat of his heart against her back.
And there, lying beside the man she loved in the time that could yet be happy, she kept the preserved fragment of her own soul—the spark that had witnessed the future doomed—and prepared silently for the end that had already begun.
The humid air still carried the fresh smell of the upturned earth and the leaves washed by the recent rain. The low light of the afternoon, golden and oblique, filtered through scattered clouds, painted the clearing in warm tones. Lucien ripped off his stiff leather boots with jerky movements, leaving them lying on the muddy bank of the swollen stream. He ran barefoot, his feet sinking into the cold, soft earth, his coarse linen trousers rolled up to his knees exposing mud-spattered legs. His footsteps splashed hard among the mirrored puddles that splattered the grass, scattering drops like liquid diamonds that glistened in the setting sun.
Jesminda watched, lying on the tall, damp grass that swayed gently in the breeze. Her body formed a depression on the green carpet, and her red hair, loose and vibrant, spread like a crown of fire and light around her, contrasting with the fresh vegetation. A wide smile lit up his freckle-speckled face, and his clear laughter echoed in the stillness of the countryside, mingling with the late singing of birds and the distant buzzing of insects.
"That's humiliating for a son of the Great Lord, you know? She sneered, her green eyes twinkling with amusement. Lightly, he brought a sheet of flexible grass to his mouth, biting it with his white teeth, a carefree and defiant gesture.
Lucien paused for a moment, panting, his chest rising and falling under his thin shirt, stained with mud around the edges. A sliver of golden light caught the sweat that pierced his temple.
"Ah, but look..." he replied, his voice hoarse and charged with a playful energy. In a sudden, flowing motion, he threw himself upon her, plunging into the tall grass that enveloped them like a cloak. His body, hot from the effort and dirty with fresh mud, collided with hers, soft and receptive. "It is you who will pay for this insolence.
She looked at him from the bottom up, her eyes narrowing in clear defiance – but there was something more to her depths. A spark of warmth, a promise, a vulnerability disguised as boldness. The grass smelled of life, wet earth, youth.
"Then shut me up, Vanserra. The challenge in the voice was an invitation, the forgotten blade of grass by his side.
The kiss that followed was not shy. It was like a sudden summer storm: burning hunger, warmth emanating from the center of them and spreading through their skin. It was spring in fury, tearing at the chest, releasing something wild and dormant. His hands, still cold from the mud, met the warm skin of his neck, his waist under his light shirt, while hers buried themselves in his dark, damp hair, drawing lines of possession on his back. Hoarse laughter escaped between his teeth, muffled by his lips joined, a sound of pure joy and discovery. Their bodies glued together, intertwined in the grass, seeking not only proximity, but a fusion, as if by merging they could erase everything else – names, titles, the weight of the world outside. The grass formed a green dome all around, the wind whispered in the leaves of the distant trees, silent witness.
And for that afternoon, under the sky that was tinged with orange and pink, as the shadows lengthened and the air grew cooler, the world really forgot. He forgot the lineage, the expectations, the uncertain future. There was only the warmth of the intertwined bodies, the taste of the kiss, the smell of the earth and the grass, and the echo of the laughter that was lost in the twilight that was announced. The clearing was a complete universe, isolated by the sound of cicadas beginning their nocturnal serene and the faint murmur of water running in the puddles.
The golden twilight of the clearing had given way to the starry night, and the crisp spring air, still laden with the damp smell of rain, now mingled with earthy scents from the nearby chimneys. Inside the rustic wooden kitchen, lit by the flutter of fat candles attached to iron candlesticks and the living fire of the fireplace, a different atmosphere was simmering—more intimate, domestic, and charged with a sweetly ironic tension.
Jesminda sat on the wide waxed wooden counter, her back lightly resting on the cold stone wall. A bright red apple, already half-eaten, rested carelessly in his hand. His bare feet, still with remnants of dry mud from the adventure by the stream, swayed freely in the air, almost touching the floorboards with each coming and going. The simple pale yellow linen dress contrasted with the darkness that could be seen through the small open window.
Lucien, standing in front of the masonry stove, was an unusual – and frankly comical – sight for Jesminda. Over his fine but now flour-stained garments, he wore an apron of coarse cloth, too short for his stature, tied tightly at the waist. The fabric, worn and patched in a corner, seemed to protest against the nobility of its wearer. His face, illuminated by the fire of fire, was concentrated in an expression of deep personal offense. With clumsy movements and a wooden spoon too big for the iron pot, he stirred a thick, bubbly porridge that gave off a pleasant but simple smell of oatmeal and cinnamon.
"You don't know how to cook, do you?" The question escaped Jesminda like a laughing sigh, her green eyes twinkling with pure amusement as she watched her efforts. She bit into another small portion of the apple, the crunchy sound echoing in the quiet kitchen, except for the crackling of the fire and the bubbling of the porridge.
Lucien looked up, a strand of his dark red hair falling over his furrowed brow. He looked at the pot as if it had challenged him to a duel.
"I command legions, Jes. I plan strategies that break down walls. His voice was grave, but charged with genuine exasperation. He dipped the spoon hard into the porridge, turning it over as if turning over dirt. "But these cursed seeds... that liquid that insists on sticking or burning..." He sighed, defeated, his shoulders sagging a little under the ridiculous apron. "No. I don't know. I recognize my defeat in front of the grain.
A new laugh, soft and warm, escaped Jesminda. She slid gently off the counter, her feet finding the cold floor. The half-eaten apple was left aside, on the wood. With slow, deliberate steps, she approached him, her yellow dress swaying slightly around her legs. The candlelight cast dancing shadows over her face, highlighting the curve of her smile.
"You're beautiful when you're frustrated," she murmured, stopping a few inches from him. His eyes ran over his tense face, the line of his jaw clenched, the furrow between his red eyebrows.
He turned completely to her, the spoon forgotten in the pot. The porridge began to bubble harder, ignored.
"And you are..." he began, his voice softer now, but hesitated as she raised her hand. His intense amber eyes locked on hers, frustration giving way to sharp, almost vulnerable attention.
She said nothing more. His free hand—small but firm—first met the rough fabric of his apron at the height of his chest. Her fingers slid upward, slowly, almost reverently, tracing their way through the fabric that covered his torso, feeling the heat of his body underneath. The movement was deliberate, hypnotic. He climbed higher, past his strong neck, where his pulse beat fast, until he found the dark red strands on the back of his neck. Her fingers curled into his hair, soft but firm, and then she pulled him down slightly, reducing the height difference. Their faces were now very close, their breath mingling—hers sweet the apple, his with a hint of smoke from the stove.
Her eyes challenged, played, promised. The kitchen seemed to have shrunk, the world reduced to the circle of candlelight and the space between them.
"What am I, Lucien?" She whispered, her voice a thread of biting silk.
He leaned even wider, his hands instinctively finding her waist, pulling her against him. The rough apron kneaded between them.
"Dangerous," he whispered back, the hot breath brushing his lips. The word was a hoarse confession, an acknowledgment of the power she had over him. "And I'd love to be destroyed by you."
This time, there was no hesitation from her. It was Jesminda who closed the remaining small space, who captured her lips with hers. The kiss that followed was not like that of the clearing, fierce and hungry. This one was slow. Deliberately slow. Sweet. A patient and intoxicating exploration. He knew the fresh apple she had just eaten, the warm cinnamon that hung in the air, and the suppressed laughter that still trembled at the corners of their joined mouths. It was a kiss that spoke of discovered intimacy, of complicity, of a desire that no longer needed haste, only the depth of the moment.
His hands were lost behind her back, under the light fabric of her dress, seeking the warm skin. Hers went deeper into his hair, keeping him close. The outside world – the legions, the expectations, the night – disappeared. There was only the shared taste, the warmth of the pressed bodies, the smell of cinnamon, of burning wood and of themselves.
And that night, inside the small candlelit kitchen, under the complicit gaze of the dancing flames in the fireplace, the bubbly, neglected porridge in the iron pot finally met its fate. With a last and desperate glup, it stuck to the bottom and burned, releasing a thin thread of acrid smoke and a bitter smell of charred cereal that slowly began to fill the air, an involuntary and sacrificial witness to the oblivion of the world that was consumed there.
Chapter Text
"To love someone is to see them die in all possibilities... and still choose to stay."
The hall of the House of the Wind was shrouded in a heavy amber light, filtered through burgundy velvet curtains that fluttered like dying wings under the cold breath of the night. Silence was not just the absence of sound; It was a living, thick and suffocating entity, like frozen mist hanging over the group. Even the wind that hissed through the cracks of the high windows seemed to hold its breath, aware that secrets buried centuries ago were about to be unearthed with the very claws of pain. At the center of that emotional package, by the fireplace where the flames danced with restrained fury, Lucien Vanserra stood still. His fingers, though, betrayed the façade of control—crispy on the cold black marble edge of the fireplace, the white joints of tension beneath the gilded skin, as if trying to crush the stone or cling to it so they wouldn't fall.
On the other side, sitting on a deep velvet sofa that seemed to swallow her, Elain Archeron kept her hands clasped in a knot of nerves on her lap. Her nails, pale and delicate, were dug into her palms with enough force to make a red half-moon. His gaze, normally soft and distant, was fixed on the intricate pattern of the Persian carpet, unable to lift itself to Lucien. The weight of guilt – or was it the violent intrusion that curiosity (or barely concealed jealousy) had committed that morning – crushed her. She found a worn-out wooden box, hidden like a shameful secret under dusty maps and forgotten papers. Inside, the piece of royal blue fabric, faded by time but still vibrant like a stolen piece of sky, and the necklace. The necklace with the antique crystal. Innocuous at first glance, just an opaque stone set in darkened metal. But the way Lucien reacted to seeing him in his hands... An icy "Sai," sharp as a blade of ice, a voice so communicative of pain and frozen rage that even Cassian, the unbeatable warrior, had stiffened as if preparing for a blow. The memory of his gaze, amber turned into opaque and lethal metal, still makes her shudder.
Hours later they all sat there, in the heart of the Inner Circle. Lucien, standing, arms crossed, stared at the fireplace fire with eyes like opaque gold.
Amren, reclining in her aging leather armchair that looked like a smaller throne, twirled the artifacts between thin, pale fingers. The magic stone, smooth and cold as a pebble from the bottom of the sea, reflected the flames of the fireplace in its opaque recesses, like a blind eye that insisted on seeing. The chalice of red blood – so dark that it bordered on black – lay beside him, untouched.
Amren, with a cup of red blood in hand, was the one who courted silence:
"There's a stone. An ancient craftsman, from the times of the judges of the sea. Allow yourself to see fragments of the past, as long as the feeling is strong enough to mark you.
Rhys looked at Lucien, who still wasn't moving.
"You don't have to, Lucien. If you want to keep it to yourself...
"This stone doesn't lie, Little Fox," Amren interrupted Rhysand, her voice hoarse as the creaking of an ancient door in a crypt. He shaved his ears, loaded with the weight of countless eons. She drinks from the source of the deepest feelings, from the moments that sink her claws into the soul and never let go. It shows what the heart insists on burying alive. Are you absolutely sure you want to dig this up here? What do you want them to see?
The hall of the House of the Wind was shrouded in an amber light, filtered through the heavy curtains that flickered in the night breeze. The silence was biting, as if even the wind knew that ancient secrets were about to tear the veil of time. Lucien stood by the fireplace, his fingers crispy on the marble of the fireplace, his knuckles white with tension. Elain, sitting on the burgundy velvet sofa, kept her hands clasped in her lap, her nails dug into her palms. She dared not look into the eyes—not after she had found the ancient crystal necklace hidden in a worn-out wooden box, under piles of forgotten maps, as well as the letters and journal.
Amren, reclining in a leather armchair, twirled a magic stone between her fingers. Its opaque glow reflects the light of fire, like a closed eye waiting to awaken.
"That stone doesn't lie," she said, her voice hoarse like dry leaves being trampled underfoot. "She shows what the heart insists on hiding. Do you really want them to see it, Little Fox?
Lucien didn't react immediately. Her shoulders, under the simple linen tunic, trembled almost imperceptibly, a shiver that was not from cold, but from an emotion so restrained that it threatened to intimidate her seams. The air around him didn't just smell of ashes from the fireplace; there was a ghost there, the bittersweet, decadent scent of wilted flowers of the Autumn Court—autumnal chrysanthemums and rotting leaves. It was the smell of memory, of loss.
Rhysand, sitting next to Feyre on a wider sofa, leaning forward. Her black wings, majestic and protective, spread moderately in an instinctive gesture, creating a shadow that enveloped Feyre. His violet eyes, normally impenetrable, were fixed on Lucien with a worried intensity.
"No one in this room will judge you, Lucien," he said, his voice soft as silk on steel, trying to penetrate the invisible barrier Lucien had erected. "Whatever happened, whatever this stone reveals... remains yours. If you want to keep it to yourself, the stone will fall silent. We will respect it.
It was as if Rhys's words were the spark that lit the fuse. Lucien barned his head in a sharp motion. His eyes, when they were fixed first on Rhys and then on the stone in Amren's hands, were no longer dull. They were like embers under ashes, a glowing amber of pain and fury suppressed for centuries.
"Julgar?" The word came out like a spit, rough and rusty. "They've already judged, Rhys. They have been judging for centuries. With voices in the corridors, with looks of disdain disguised as pity. His voice gained volume, echoing in the silent hall like a hammer striking an anvil. "They say she was a fool." An insignificant peasant woman. A minor fairy who is nothing more than a whim of the lost son of a High Lord. The term minor fairy came out laden with a poison so pure that Elain shrank still more. "But Jesminda..." The name, when it left her lips, was a hoarse sigh, charged with a devotion that time had not erased. It was a sacred name, desecrated by the ignorance of others. His gaze burned the stone in Amren's hands. "Show them, Amren. Show who she really was. Before I change my mind.
An even deeper silence fell over the hall. Cassian was tense as a bowstring, his muscles bulging under his clothing, his eyes fixed on Lucien with a mixture of alertness and a rare empathy. Azriel, ever a shadow among shadows, seemed even more still, his own shadows curled in his arms like nervous serpents. Morrigan watched her singing, expression impenetrable, but her fingers drummed lightly on the arm of the armchair. Feyre opened Rhys's hand, his face a reflection of the anticipated pain.
Amren didn't hesitate. With a flowing motion that denoted familiarity with power, she leaned over and placed the smooth, cold stone in the center of the low ebony table, which looked like a makeshift altar. The sound of the object touching the ecological wood or as a funeral bell.
"Touch it, son of Autumn," he tried, his voice losing some of its harshness, taking on an almost solemn tone. "And let the memory flow."
Lucien closed his eyes for a brief moment, as if preparing for a dive into deep, treacherous waters. When they opened them, there was a fierce resolve in them. He reached out, his fingers still slightly quivering. The touch of his skin on the cold, inert surface of the stone was like a shock.
A shudder ran through the room. It wasn't just metaphorical. The ancient stone walls of the House of the Wind seemed to recede for an instant, as if the building itself felt the encroachment of the past. The flames in the fireplace slammed violently, almost extinguished, casting dancing and grotesque shadows on the walls. The natural light of the night, already dim, was completely engulfed. Not by darkness, but by a mist of mist that appeared out of nowhere, enveloping the table and those present in a luminous and ethereal mist. It was a warm and melancholy of ours, like the autumn sunset over an abandoned battlefield. The air became heavy, saturated with the sudden smell of damp earth, fallen leaves and... something else. A delicate, wild fragrance, like trampled wildflowers.
Within the golden mist, the shapes coalesce. Blurred silhouettes gain contours, colors, life. In the past, kept the seven keys in Lucien Vanserra's torn heart, he was about to be unveiled to the Inner Circle. And the weight of that revelation, the sacrifice of his most sacred privacy, hung in the air, more tangible than the fog itself. Lucien's breath became audible, a hoarse and controlled rhythm, the only one but the now muffled crackling of flames. He was handing Jesminda over to them. It's not a legend, it's not a victim, but it's a truth. And the cost of that shone in his eyes like tears that refused to fall.
The golden mist that enveloped the hall of the House of the Wind pulsated, like a heart beating in the womb of time. Inside it, the scene that materialized was not just an image; It was a total sensory experience, a fragment of the past so vivid that those present felt the damp grass under their backs and the warmth of the sun filtered through the leaves. It was a season of seasons: our warm and melancholy autumn tinting the light, but with the raw vitality and promise of spring blowing in the breeze that ruffled the hair of the young figures.
Lucien Vanserra, much younger, was a vision of unbroken promise. Lying on his back in the soft, damp grass beneath the canopy of the gnarled old fig tree—those branches writhing like ornate bones against the blue sky—he radiated a lightness that today's Lucien had lost eons ago. His face was free of the cruel scar that now marked his jaw, his skin smooth and golden by the sun. Her red hair, loose and disheveled, was like burning leaves scattered on the green grass, catching the light and turning it into a liquid fire. His amber eyes, unheavier of centuries and betrayals, shone with a carefree mood, fixed on the figure he rode on his torso.
Jesminda was sitting on it, not with the pose of a lady, but with the defiant casualness of someone who knows her power. His head was tossed back in a laugh that seemed to spring from the entrances, an explosion of pure joy that reverberated in the silent clearing. Her long, graceful neck, exposed like an offering to the sun, pulsated with the life that flowed in her. It was not conventionally below the standards of the Féricas; her beauty was wilder, truer. Their brown hair, thick and unruly like the mane of a wild foal, escaped a loose braid, intertwined not with jewelry but with withered wildflowers—daisies and poppies—that they think were unceremoniously picked while hiking. His hands, visible as they traced invisible, smooth patterns on Lucien's muscular chest through his thin shirt, told another story: they were strong hands, calloused by the earth, by the branches, by honest work. Marks of a vivid life away from the marble halls.
But it was his eyes that captured and held the attention, even in the ethereal vision. A green so deep and vibrant that it seemed to have sucked the very essence of the oldest forest. It was a green that promised secrets and challenges, and that, even under full sun, seemed to hold a luminescence of its own, like the eyes of a nocturnal predator watching the darkness – full of wild intelligence and a keen perception that surpassed the ordinary.
"You're a pathetic prince, you know?" Her voice came up, clear as stream water, charged with an affectionate mockery that only deep intimacy allowed. One of his calloused fingers hooked onto a loose strand of his red hair, tugging at it with an addition that contrasted with the words. "A prince who prefers to ride frightened deer through the woods rather than ride those sparkling battle stallions. Who collects smooth stones from the stream and colored leaves instead of sharp swords and war trophies. His smile was a challenge, an invitation.
Lucien laughed, a light, unimpeded sound that echoed in his memory like a distant bell. His eyes shone with excitement and amusement.
"I'm a prince who prefers you, Jesminda," he retorted, his voice softer but full of a truth that sounded like an oath. In a fluid motion, he abandoned his laziness, his hands meeting his waist with familiarity. He pulled her down, sealing her lips with his in a kiss that was less about possession and more about celebrations. It was a kiss of youth, of discovery, full of the taste of the sun and the grass and the uncontained promise.
The kiss, however, was interrupted not of his own volition, but by thunder. Not an immediate rumble, but a deep, menacing growl that rolled in from far away, coming from the horizon where, suddenly, black, heavy clouds began to gather, tinting the edge of the sky an ominous gray. Jesminda's occurrence was instantaneous and visceral. She shuddered like a leaf in a sudden wind, all the laughter and lightness evaporating from her body. The fingers that had moments before drawn caresses on Lucien's chest twitched, clinging to the fabric of his shirt suddenly tightly. Her green eyes, so vibrant, darkened like a dense forest under the sudden darkness of a storm. The predatory glow intensified, but now it was the gaze of a cornered creature smelling danger.
"Your father..." her suggestion escaped, hoarse, charged with an ancestral fear that seemed to spring from a deep and dark knowledge. Her fingers trembled against his face, no longer caressing, but seeking anchor. "He's going to kill me one day, Lucien. I feel it in the bone. No blood.
Lucien laughed again, but the sound was different now. Vacio. Forced. A failed attempt to dispel the shadow that hung over them. His arms wrapped her in a protective embrace, pressing her against his body, as if he could hide her from the world, from the storm, from the distant and omnipotent father. His face buried itself in the crook of his neck, breathing in the scent of it – earth, sun, and something indefinably wild.
"He doesn't know you exist," he murmured against her skin, like muffled words, trying to convince himself more than her. "You're a secret of mine. Only mine.
Jesminda let out a sound that was just a sob step away, a sad, hopeless laugh.
"You lie to yourself as well as you lie to me, Lucien Vanserra," she hissed, her voice heavy with sharp pain. She left her head back enough to face him. Her green eyes, now moist, were wells of deep sadness and frightful clairvoyance. "You know. Deep down, you know. You will never cease to be his. Son. Heir. Tool. "Each word was a small façade. "And I..." She looked away, staring at the menacing horizon, where the black clouds advanced like a gloomy army. His body, once relaxed and cheerful, was rigid, prepared. "I'll never be yours alone." Am... something else. Something he cannot tolerate. Something he will eradicate.
The scene began to fade, not with a sharp cut, but like paint dripping on water. The vibrant colors—the green of the grass, the gold of the sun, the fire of Lucien's hair, the deep green of Jesminda's eyes—faded to sepia tones, then to the golden mist that had brought them. But before they disappeared completely, two inspired elements, imprinted on the senses of all present in the silent hall of the House of the Wind:
Then, a golden mist completely dissipated, sucking the vision back into the void of the stone. The hall of the House of the Wind returned to its silent reality, lit only by the fire that crackled in the fireplace and the flickering candles. But the smell of damp earth, withered flowers, and primal fear seemed to hang in the air for a moment longer, a sensory ghost of the truth that had just been revealed. The lightness of the kiss, Lucien's promise of escape, all had been engulfed by the shadow of Jesminda's prophecy and the growl of distant thunder. The first act of his tragedy was staged
-
The golden mist of the magic stone did not completely dissipate from the first sight. Instead, it pulsated, like a staggering heart, before recomposing itself into a new form. This time, it was not a dynamic scene, but a condensed image, a vivid and feeling-saturated photograph, drawn from the deep reservoir of Lucien's memory. It was a seemingly simple moment, but loaded with an intimidation that made the air in the hall of the Casa do Vento even heavier.
Jesminda sat on the bare roots of the old crooked fig tree, her constant refuge. Her normally unruly brown hair was tied in a braid that started out tight at the nape of her neck but crumbled into loose, silky strands along the way, as if defying the very idea of restraint. A few tiny, blue flowers—no more than buds—were stubbornly woven near the temple, resisting dismantling. His face was lit up by a genuine, wide, carefree laugh that comes from green eyes stretched out like lakes in the full sun. It was a laugh provoked by something Lucien had just said or done, a laugh that was a gift of his own.
And Lucien, the young Lucien of this memory, was sitting on the grass before her, reclining on his elbows. And he smiled. Not the cutting and cynical smile of the Emissary, nor the bitter smile of the survivor. It was a light, unarmed smile that reached his amber eyes and turned them into pools of warm light. The lines of tension that future scars and betrayals would mark on his face were non-existent. In this frozen image, he looked... lighter. As if the relentless weight of being a Vanserra, the expectations, the shadows of his father and brothers, had been momentarily suspended. As if the world, with all its cruelty, had not yet managed to hurt him deeply. As if, at that moment under the crooked fig tree, there was only Jesminda and her joy.
Her voice rose in the mist, clear and musical, like a wind chime:
"If you told me you were from the Day Court, I'd believe it," she said, the laughter still trembling at the corners of her lips, her green eyes twinkling with a mixture of enthusiasm and provocation. She leaned forward a little. "You shine when you smile, Lucien Vanserra. Literally. As if he had swallowed a piece of the sun.
Lucien's occurrence in memory was instantaneous and revealed. The broad smile dissolved, replaced by a blush that rose from his collarbones to the tips of his ears. He averted his eyes, fixing them on a spot in the grass between them, as if the intensity of her gaze and the truth of the statement were too great to resist. It was a sweet, almost adolescent shame, a vulnerability that he rarely allowed anyone to see—and that only Jesminda could extract so easily. The "glow" she mentioned was perhaps metaphorical, or perhaps a literal reflection of the sun in amber eyes, but its occurrence was of someone caught up in an intimate truth.
Jesminda didn't back down. His own smile softened, becoming more thoughtful, deeper. Her green eyes, which moments before had shone with amusement, acquired a layer of seriousness, a depth that seemed disproportionate to her apparent age.
"I don't exist, Lucien," she said, her voice lower now, but still clear. "Not in the way they expect. Not in the way this world expects me to exist.
Lucien in memory mentioned the eyes, confusion and a trace of alarm replacing shame. "Them"? Who were "they"? But before he could ask, she continues, her gaze fixing on him with an almost physical intensity.
"But who really is the one who waits?" She paused infinitesimally, letting a question hover, heavy as a stone in the autumnal air. "Who is the Lucien they're waiting for?" And... Is he the same one who is sitting here with me now?
The question was not just about her. It was a challenge thrown at him, a probe cast into the very identity he struggled to define between the criteria of the Autumn Court and the refuge that lay with it. It was a question about hiding places, masks, and hidden truths.
The scene, then, did not slowly fade away. It disappeared like smoke. An invisible breath swept through the golden mist, dispelling the image of the fig tree, the golden light, Lucien's slight smile, and Jesminda's deep gaze. It was as abrupt as the awakening of a dream.
The silence that fell over the hall of the House of the Wind was as thick as snow about to fall. Heavy, suffocating, loaded with the echo of that final question and the raw vulnerability that memory had exposed. The Lucien present, standing by the fireplace, was rigid, his profile turned to the fire where the flames now draw the shadows of that happy and unsettling past. The boy's lightness in memory contrasted brutally with the man's centuries-old posture in front of them.
It was then that he spoke, his voice a harsh murmur that broke the silence like broken glass, addressing not anyone in particular, but the charged air, the perception he felt emanating from others—the reduced, simplistic perception he had always had of Jesminda.
"You think she was just a minor fairy," he said, each word coming out with effort, as if they were barbs. "A whim. A mistake of youth. Something insignificant or enough to be swept away by the wind and forgotten.
He closed his eyes for a brief moment, as if he saw again the image of her under the fig tree, her hair unraveling, her green eyes piercing him with a question that echoed through the years.
"But Jesminda..." The name, when it came out, was a sigh full of pain, admiration and eternal frustration. "Jesminda was an enigma. An unanswered question written in a language that no one else can read. He opened his eyes, looking at the embers in the fireplace, not at the others. "And I—" a bitter self-criticism tinged his voice, "I was just one of those who couldn't decipher it. Perhaps the one that was closest, but still... Failed.
The confession hung in the air, more revealed than any image of the stone. It was the admission that his love, however intense, had not been enough to understand the totality of the woman he had loved. And that this misunderstanding was perhaps part of the tragedy that followed. The silence that followed was no longer just heavy; It was reverent, as before a mystery that finally revealed itself, just to show how deep it really was.--
The golden mist of the magic stone, still reverberating with the tragic lightness of the previous memory, was suddenly torn apart. Not by a fading, but by a brutal invasion. The second memory burst into the hall of Casa do Vento not only as an image, but as an overwhelming sensory wave. The first warning was the odor: burnt flesh. Sweet, nauseating, penetrating. Not the distant smell of a campfire, but the intimate, disgusting stench of skin and charred, mixed with a metallic tang of blood that instantly filled the nostrils of everyone present, causing Elain to put her hand to her mouth and Cassian to clench her fists.
The vision that imposes itself was of a graphic and cold violence, bathed in the somber colors of the night and the sinister glare of the torches. The setting was the inner courtyard of the Vanserra mansion in the Autumn Court. Tall, dark stones, hewn to intimidate, formed walls that leaned over the space, captured by the trembling flames of the torches. These flames cast dancing shadows, grotesque and elongated, which writhed on the walls like demons laughing at the spectacle below. The air was cold, biting, but saturated with the smell of torch smoke, fear, and burnt flesh.
At the center of the nightmare, two figures dominated:
Beron Vanserra, the High Lord of Autumn. Tall, imposing as a fallen and damaged god of war, his figure was a shadow of absolute power and calculating cruelty. He wore dark, rich garments that sucked in the light, and his face, illuminated from below by the glare of torches, was a mask of glacial contempt. In one hand, he held Jesminda by the hair, not with brute force, but with precise and humiliating control, like someone holding an unwanted animal by the neck, forcing its head back.
Jesminda. The contrast was shocking. Barefoot, her feet dirty with dirt and perhaps blood on the cold stones. She wore only a simple dress of raw linen, now torn and stained with dirt and, visibly, with something darker. But despite the violence of the position, the humiliation, his chin was up. It is not a historic challenge, but with a terrible serenity. His green eyes, those eyes that shone like a predator's in happy memory, were now calm glasses in the midst of the chaos, fixed on a point beyond the courtyard, beyond Beron, perhaps beyond his own pain. Her lips were clenched, compressing any scream.
On the left, kneeling on the rough stone, was Lucien. But not the carefree young prince. This Lucien was a caged animal, torn apart by powerlessness and fury. Three of his brothers – tough figures, trained in obedience and violence – immobilized him. Two held his arms twisted back with brutal force, while the third held a heavy hand on his shoulder, forcing him to remain on his knees. He fought his grip with desperate force, his muscles tense as ropes, his amber eyes, usually so expressive, reduced to golden slits of pure hatred and terror, fixed only on Jesminda and Beron. Blood escorts him from his periods off, where he had bitten while trying to free himself.
To Beron's right, advancing behind, as a privileged spectator of the horror, was Eris, the older brother. His face was a mask of perfect impassibility, sculpted in the rigors of cutting and survival. No muscle tremor. No glance was averted. But the focus of his vision, sharpened by the magic of the stone or Lucien's traumatic memory, captured a crucial detail: his hands, hidden behind his back, trembled. A thin, uncontrollable tremor, a violent betrayal of the ice façade.
Beron's voice cut through the heavy air, a deep growl that echoed through the stone walls:
"A minor fairy," he spat the words as if they were rotten poison, his gaze sweeping over Jesminda's frail body in disgust. "You stain our blood, our bloodline, with this... thing? Do you think you can shove this garbage into our house?
Lucien's response was a hoarse, lacerated scream, the voice of a cornered animal that knows the end is near but refuses to accept it:
"She's no lesser! The scream echoed, defiantly and desperately useless. "She's... different. Special! The word 'special' came out as a plea, a failed attempt to get your father to see what he saw.
Beron laughed. A dry, humorless sound that made even the shadows seem to recede.
"Special?" He emphasized the word with a cutting sarcasm. His free hand, the one that didn't hold Jesminda's hair, suddenly lifted and opened her neck tightly. The knuckles have whitened. Jesminda gasped, her eyes widened for a moment, but her chin appeared stubbornly up. Beron forced her face closer to his. "Then show me, creature." Show me what special power you have to bewitch my son to this point of insanity. Show me why I shouldn't reduce you to ashes here and now!
It was then that Jesminda acted. With surprising energy, she spat it out. A jet of blood – not bright red, but of a darker shade, almost black in the torchlight – hit Beron's flawless face, making it across his forehead and running down his cheekbone. The gesture was one of absolute contempt. Beron stopped, warm for a moment. The courtyard fell silent, the air filled with shock.
Jesminda's voice then came, a hoarse but incredibly clear hiss, related to a force that came not from the body, but from a deeper place:
"My power..." she spat out the word with the remaining blood on her lips, staring at Beron with those green eyes that now shone with ancient and terrible knowledge, "... it's knowing that you fear another love that you don't control... than any army at its gates. You tremble before the freedom of a heart.
The statement was a direct blow. Beron's bloodstained face distorted into primordial fury. A beastly roar came out of his throat, shaking the foundations of the courtyard. Before anyone could react, bluish flames—cold, ravenous, the mark of the Autumn High Lord's power—enveloped his free hand like a glove. Without hesitation, with one brutal motion, he pressed his flaming hand against Jesminda's exposed chest, high above her heart.
The smell of burnt skin intensified exponentially, becoming suffocating, mixed with the acrid odor of incinerated tissue. A horrible crackling sound filled the air. But Jesminda doesn't coincide. His body arched violently at the impact, a convulsion of extreme pain, but his throat silently. His green eyes, watering now with physical pain, met Lucien's through the smoke rising from his own flesh. And in them, despite the agony, there was no fear. Had... peace. A deep approach, a love so intense that it transcended the horror of the moment, a last comfort offered to the man she loved and who watched her destruction. It was a look that said: Okay. I knew it. I chose.
A hoarse, barely audible voice escaped Eris, breaking her impassibility for a split second, her eyes fixed on the blue flame that consumed Jesminda's flesh:
"She's not human..." her voice was a wisp of wind, charged with a mysterious and belated understanding. "She's something... older. Something he doesn't understand..." There was almost a despair in the realization, a perception that Beron was making a much bigger mistake than he imagined.
But Beron had already made his final decision. The flaming hand withdrew, revealing a black, smoldering mark, horrible, on Jesminda's chest. She staggered, the force slipping from her legs. Beron let go of her, pushing her disdainfully. She fell to her knees, panting, her dress burning hot around the wound.
"End this," Beron tried, his voice now cold and flat, as if ordering the slaughter of a sick animal. "Clean up this filth from my patio."
One of the guards who didn't hold Lucien rushed forward. The blade of the short sword gleamed as it reflected the light of the torches. The movement was fast and efficient. The sound of metal cutting through the air and then the flesh was cutting like a scream in the sudden silence. A clean blow.
Eris turned her face. Not a dramatic movement, but a quick, involuntary one, as if it could not withstand the final moment. His eyes closed for a split second, the mask cracking irreparably.
Lucien collapsed. The forces that sustained him – fury, despair, struggle – evaporated. The brothers who held him let go of him, retreating a step, as if he himself were contagious. A roar came out of his throat, a primitive, lacerating sound that didn't sound human. It was the cry of a soul being torn out by force, of a heart bursting into a thousand pieces. It was a sound of agony so pure and deep that even Azriel, the Lord of Shadows, whose own shadows writhed around him like open, nervous wounds, clenched his jaws tightly, an expression of rare reflex pain crossing his normally impassive face. Cassian stared at the floor, his face pale. Rhysand opened Feyre's hand tightly.
The vision began to fade, the horror of the courtyard yielding to the mist of the stone. But before it disappeared completely, the senses of those present caught Jesminda's last suggestion. Not directed at Lucien, his love, but at Eris. His lips moved, almost soundless, but the words echoed in Lucien's memory and therefore in the stone:
"You were... my only truth... Eris...
The words were not of romantic love, but of deep gratitude and somber recognition. Eris, the impassive brother, who tries to argue through the logic of exile, who exchanges letters in secret, who understands something about her that not even Lucien has fully grasped. He had been their "truth" in the court of lies and cruelty. The bearer of your ultimate confidence. The keeper of your deepest secret.
Then the vision faded, leaving the hall of the House of the Wind plunged into absolute silence, heavy as a tomb, pervaded by the ghost of the smell of burning flesh and the echo of Lucien's torn scream. The price of truth was paid in blood, fire and a pain that transcended centuries.
The magic stone in the center of the table suddenly darkened, like a star consuming its last breath of light. The golden veil that brought the horror of the Vanserra courtyard dissipated, sucking with it the nauseating smell of burning flesh and the echo of Lucien's lacerating scream. What remained was absolute silence, heavier than the stone walls of the House of the Wind themselves. It was the silence of shock, of shame, of shared pain that paralyzed the tongue.
No one breathed. The air seemed solidified. The crackling of the fireplace sounded obscenely loud.
Elain had her hands pressed against her mouth, her fingers white with strength. His body trembled minutely, like a leaf under silence. Silent tears did not ask permission; They trickled in warm streams down her pale cheeks, wetting their hands and dripping into the dark dark of her dress. She did not cry only for the violence, but for the violation – she, who tampered with the sacred secret, had been the occurrence of this unearthing of horror.
Cassian, at his side, was pale as the dead moon. His usual military posture had collapsed; He was progressively bent forward, as if taking a blow to the stomach. Its powerful wings, usually relaxed or ready for flight, were taut as sharp blades, the membranes taut and rigid, the tips slightly quivering. It was an instinctive fact of a warrior in the face of an atrocity against whom he could not fight.
Amren, the immortal, the ancient, the holder of unspeakable secrets, for the first time in centuries, seemed speechless. His silver eyes, normally full of superior knowledge and a sardonic boredom, were fixed on the dark stone on the table, but they saw something far beyond. There was a spark of... recognition ? Of disturbing familiarity? Her thin lips were parted, her breath bated. The chalice of red blood was forgotten beside him.
It was Rhysand who cut through the unbearable silence. His voice came up, soft as a sheathed knife, cutting the vacuum cleaner without alarm, but with a precision that specifically answered,
"Eris?" The question was simple, but loaded with layers. Why was Jesminda's last breath for him? What happened to that "truth"?
Lucien closed his eyes. It was a slow, heavy movement, as if the feats were iron doors sealing a chamber of torment. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse but strangely flat, as if reporting distant events.
"He loved her... as a sister. The statement stopped, strange and revealed. "I don't eat... Right. A slight vague gesture indicated the feeling between him and Jesminda. "They exchanged letters. In secret. He... he taught her to read. To write better. A hoarse sigh escaped him. -Tried. By the Seven, he tried. He argued with Beron. He said that exile was protection enough, that killing her would be a waste, that it would tarnish the honor of the court..." Lucien swallowed, the sound loud in the stillness. "But Jesminda... She didn't want to run away. He refused the offer of exile that Eris managed to extract. He said—" His voice failed for a moment, and when he resumed, it was charged with a painful admiration, — ... that he would rather die standing, with his name, than live on his knees and in hiding.
Feyre touched Rhys's arm, an instinctive gesture of seeking connection in the face of other people's pain. His eyes, blue as the Prythian sky, were filled with painful understanding. She, who knows the weight of oppression, the struggle for identity.
"She wasn't human," Feyre inhaled, her voice a whisper full of certainty. "Not just fairy. What was she, Lucien? Actually?
Lucien opened his eyes. And in them, Rhys, Feyre, everyone, could see. Not just the pain of the moment, but centuries of loneliness. An arid and vast landscape of loss and isolation that time does not erase.
"She never told me. "The confession came out as a discharge of failure. "And I... I never wanted to. He looked at the fire, avoiding their eyes. "Perhaps she was an exile from another court. Spring? Do Day? From a place we don't even know... Maybe something older. Much more. Like the beings who roamed these lands before the walls were erected, before the Courts were forged. Spirits of the earth, of the wind..." His voice cut off, emotion finally breaking through the barrier. "But she was mine." That's it... That was all that mattered to me. Everything.
Amren leaned forward, breaking through her stasis. His silver eyes shone with an intense, almost feverish light of repentant and disturbing knowledge. The ancient language she had muttered before seemed to have found an answer.
"The blade that killed her..." his voice was a sharp edge, "... Did it bleed gold or red?
The question was direct, brutal. Lucien shuddered as if the blade had hit him now. His eyes close for a moment, reliving the final gushe.
The word came out like a groan. "Not red." Golden. Express. Bright. How... like honey poured out in the light of the full moon.
Amren recoiled in her armchair as if she had been shocked. His small, modified face had lost some of its usual color. Her lips moved silently, forming words in a forgotten, guttural, ancient language that seemed to make the air vibrate. Then she whispered, for all to hear, the verdict,
"She was Ancient Blood." The term hovered, laden with obscure meaning. "A spirit... of primordial forests. A spark of life that existed before order, before rules..." His silver eyes met Lucien's, filled with a rare bewilderment. "It shouldn't be possible... Survive. Hide so long. To love like this...
Lucien drew abruptly, his chair creaking on the stone floor. His movement was abrupt, a physical selection in the direction of the conversation.
"It doesn't matter!" The statement was a blow, cutting the thread of Amren's discovery. "She's gone. He is dead. And I..." he looked around, his amber gaze burning with a mixture of pain and defiance, "... I'm not from that place anymore. Nor from that time.
No one moved. Lucien's statement was a wall erected. Cassian cleared his throat, a hoarse sound that echoed in the silence, but no words came out. In this room of resisted warriors, even words knew when it was best to be silent. Lucien's pain was sacred territory, inviolable at that moment.
It was Rhys who found a loophole, not to break in, but to be serious.
"You..." he began, choosing the words with the care of someone who handles broken glass, "... I never said she was... different. Like this.
Lucien turned to face the Grand Lord of the Night Court. A bitter smile curled his lips, without any trace of humor.
"She didn't want to be a legend, Rhys. He said, the voice shared with a posthumous tenderness. "I didn't want to be an artifact, a mystery, a case. I just wanted... to be . Jesminda. And I..." he paused, pride mingling with pain, "... I respected her for that. Until the end.
Elain, still pale, tears drying in salty trails on her face, found the courage to speak, her voice a frail whisper,
"She... Was she your love? Your... True love?
Lucien looked. It was a direct, intense look. But where before there might have been a glimmer of affection, or even conflict about his own feelings for Elain, there was now only calm. A terrible calm, like the smooth surface of a very deep lake. However, under this calm, there was something hard. A barrier erected with the stones of the newly relived memory, insurmountable at that moment. He did not answer. I don't need to. The look was a sufficient answer.
It was then that the impossible happened. The magic stone, now cold and opaque like an ordinary pebble on the table, shone again. Not a faint glow, but a sudden pulsating flash, like a reanimated heart. A shock or group shudder. None of them had touched her. The connection with Lucien seemed severed. She simply... Answered. Something beyond them.
Amren was the first to react, her silver eyes widening with sheer surprise – a rarity.
"This shouldn't be happening," she murmured, her hoarse voice filled with real bewilderment. She was sent again, as if in need of support. "The emotional connection... The sports... Lucien disengaged. Memory should be exhausted. Unless..." She didn't finish, her gaze fixed on the stone that pulsed with its own light.
The light that emanated from the stone this time was neither golden nor violent. It was a cold, silvery light, silent and soft as a nightly whisper. It did not invade; enveloping the hall in a cold, clear mist, like condensed moonlight. The image that emerged within this silver mist was different from the others. It was not an explosion of youthful feeling, nor a nightmare of horror. It was private. Intimate. A stolen moment, kept not only in Lucien's memory, but perhaps in the very essence of the crystal that Jesminda trusted in Eris.
The silvery mist solidified into a deep night, under the familiar canopy of the crooked fig tree in the village grove. Tiny fairy lights—fireflies or lesser spirits—twinkled like diamonds suspended between the twisted branches, dimly illuminating the scene with a ghostly light. The air was still, the wind held its breath, as if the world knew the importance of what was being here.
Jesminda was sitting on an exposed root that served as a natural bench. Her dress was the simple royal blue of the piece of fabric that Elain found, already worn by the edges. Her hair was loose, a cascade that fell over her shoulders, faintly reflecting the fairy light. But his appearance was different. Weak. Pale. There were deep shadows under her green eyes, which still retained their intensity, but now let you see beyond – far beyond the clearing, beyond the night, perhaps beyond time itself. An immense fatigue weighed on her, not only physically, but of the soul.
In front of her, standing, with her arms crossed and the posture of someone trying to contain an internal storm, was Eris Vanserra. His aristocratic face, illuminated by the fairy lights, had his brow furrowed in a deep wrinkle of contained worry. No impassibility now. Only deep fear and helpless frustration.
"You're... "Eris said, her voice softer than Lucien had ever heard, but charged with a cutting tension. "Weak. Translucent. As if..." He couldn't finish, the fear of strangling the word.
Jesminda happy, a tired gesture that barely touched her lips.
"I see a lot, Eris. His voice was serene, but there was a tremor hidden in it, a vibration of effort. "Too much." More than this way... more than me... should be able to see. The line of my time..." She paused, her green eyes getting lost in the darkness among the trees, "... is coming to an end. I feel it unraveling.
In the present, in the hall of the House of Wind, Lucien's pain was tangible. It was as if he was reliving not a memory of his own, but a secret of others, a final confession from which he had been excluded. Amren whispered, not with malice, but with a keen, almost cruel understanding of the irony of fate,
"He's got a guy, this one. Visionaries with a tendency to tragedy. "The comment was a low blow at the most vulnerable moment.
Lucien declared himself in a jump, a roar of animal fury stuck in his throat. Her golden eyes burned like living embers, fixed on Amren.
"Watch your tongue, Amren!" The threat hung in the air, past centuries of pent-up pain.
But before the tension exploded, the memory in the continuous silver mist, imposing its deepest truth.
Jesminda stared at Eris, her green eyes catching the dim light and reflecting it with an otherworldly intensity.
"I need a favor, Eris." One last favor.
Eris, who had recently shown emotion, tensed like a bow about to shoot. His survival instinct, his political project, screamed inside him.
"If that's what I'm thinking..." his voice was hoarse, "... I'll say no. Don't ask me to protect you from Beron. I can't. I've tried. He kills me along with you. Without hesitation. "There was despair under the logical statement.
Jesminda slowly relinquished her head, a sad and understanding smile touching her lips.
"No. The denial was soft, but final. "I didn't come to ask for my salvation. She... has already been chosen. Otherwise.
It has declared itself, a movement that requires visible effort. She approached him, stopping a few inches away. With hands that trembled slightly, but with absolute determination, she pulled the necklace from under her blue dress. The ancient crystal, smooth and opaque to dim light, suspended in a darkened silver cord. He held it in front of Eris.
"I want you to take care of that."
Eris took a step back, instinctively, as if the object emanated heat or repulsion. His eyes, amber like Lucien's but colder, fixed on the crystal with suspicion and a trace of fear.
"What... What is it? The question was a harsh whisper.
Jesminda didn't back down. She stepped forward, took his hand—the hand that trembled behind her back in the memory of the execution—and placed the crystal in it. The stone rested in his palm, cold and inert.
"My soul." In parts. She spoke with an astonishing calm. "My visions." My name. My... truth. All that I am, what I was, what could have been... stuck here. She closed his fingers over the crystal with both hands. "In the future... Someone will look for it. Perhaps... myself. Somehow. Or someone like me. Her green eyes pierced his. "Someone you'll consider." Not by the face, Eris. But for the flame. By the flame you see in your brother. That you see in yourself, when you dare to look.
Eris stared at her. The mask of the prince, the heirs, the calculator, has completely collapsed. His face was devastated. Overwhelmed by a sincere pain, by an impending loss that he understood on a deep, perhaps even primordial, level. Her eyes shone with an unshed moisture.
"This... Is this a farewell? The question came out hoarse, almost childish in its need for confirmation.
Jesminda agreed, a single solemn shake of the head.
"I was selfish to ask you that, I know." He admitted, a soft voice. "It's a burden. A danger. She opened his hands around the crystal. "But you... You are the only one who will understand what keeping silence means. The only one who knows the weight and value of what is not here. And what is... Protect something that no one else will value. Until it's too late.
The vision began to fade, the silvery mist dissolving, sucking in the contours of the fig tree, the night, the figures. But before it disappeared completely, Jesminda looked directly into Eris's eyes. A last look, full of deep gratitude and infinite sadness. And his final words, before the silence and darkness, echoed with crystal clarity, no longer a dying whisper, but a conscious, full declaration,
"Thank you... for not loving me that way, Eris Vanserra. I wouldn't have supported it... Two hearts broken for me.
The light of the stone was extinguished forever. This time, definitively. The crystal on the table was once again just a cold, opaque stone. But the echo of that final gratitude, of the deep understanding between Jesminda and the brother who was not her love but her silent accomplice, stopped in the silence that stirred—a silence now different. No longer just of horror, but of reverence in the face of sacrifice, premonition and the legacy of a woman who, even in the face of the end, sowed her essence for the future.
The silver light of the magic stone was extinguished forever, plunging the hall into relative darkness, only broken by the trembling of flames in the fireplace and the faint light of the stars through the tall windows. The silence that was shaken was not empty; it was a revealing veil of shock, reverence, and unprocessed pain. The air still carried the phantom echo of the smell of burning flesh and Jesminda's serene voice accepting her fate.
Feyre had her hands clasped with Rhys's with a force that whitened her joints. It wasn't just a search for comfort; it was an anchor for reality after reflection on the horror of others. His eyes, moist, reflected the flame and the realization of the unbearable weight that Lucien carried alone for centuries. Elain, motionless on the couch, looked at Lucien with a desperate intensity. His face was livid, with tear marks still fresh. His gaze does not ask for forgiveness; He asked for absolution for the intrusion that unleashed the tsunami of memories. It was a look that said: I didn't know. I'm so sorry.
But Lucien didn't look at anyone. His body was turned to the embers of the fireplace, but his amber eyes point fixed on a point far beyond the walls of the House of Wind, far beyond the present time. His shoulders were stiff as steel under maximum tension, each muscle training the herculean effort to maintain control, so as not to collapse right there. The quivering chin was the only visible concession to the storm within—a small tremor that spoke of centuries of compromised pain, now on the verge of collapse.
It was Rhys who finally broke through the veil, his voice emerging silky smooth over a blade, cutting through the silence violently but with surgical precision:
"She knew," he said, not as a question but as a solemn statement. He knew the end. He knew the role of Eris. He knew the need to protect his truth.
Lucien didn't move, but his voice rose, a hoarse murmur that seemed to come from the depths of his cracked soul:
"She's always known," he received, bitterness giving way to deeper, more intimate pain. "From the beginning, under the fig tree... from the distant thunders. And yet..." He closed his eyes for a moment, swallowing hard, "... He never told me. To save me. To give me... more time of lightness. More time of happy ignorance.
Amren, this time, was silent. There was no sarcastic comment, no dispassionate analysis. Her silvery eyes, fixed on the now inert crystal on the table, already contemplated the echoes of a very ancient, very rare power, which she considered too late. A rare, silent reverence to the Ancient Blood who chose love over survival.
Lucien declared himself. The movement was slow, deliberate, as if each joint did. He didn't look at Elain, nor at the others. His footsteps echoed off the silent stones as he approached the table. His hand – the same one that had touched the magic stone and unleashed the past – reached out. His fingers touched the crystal that was there. The same piece that Elain found, which kept the echo of Jesminda's soul. The touch was light, almost reverent, but loaded with infinite weight.
"Eris," he said his brother's name, not with hatred, but with a new complexity, "... He still has this secret. Even now. Even after everything. He hides his gaze, finally meeting Rhys' violet eyes. In it there was a question, a spark of something that he did not even dare to name: hope? "Do you think he... Know? Is she really dead? If something... if that spark...
Cassiano, always the most direct, could not contain himself:
- Do you think she might not be? His voice was low, restrained, but the question echoed like thunder in the silence. It was a doubt that everyone felt after Amren's revelations and the pact with Eris. Ancient Blood... a preserved soul... Was it possible?
Lucien did not answer. Not with words. Instead, he turned around completely, moving away from the table, from the crystal, from the circle. Her golden eyes, now bare, filled with centuries of pain, of lost love, of unanswered questions, looked out into the night outside. To the black mountains against the starry sky, to the endless shadows that envelop Velaris. The answer he did not give was in that silent contemplation, in the pain that still pulsated in him like a phantom limb.
Perhaps death, thought each one in the room, following his gaze into the darkness, was just the name the world gave to the disappearance of a woman who never wanted to be discovered. Or maybe... it was just a portal to something else.
+
On the balcony, the night air was cold and clear, washing away some of the emotional soot from the hall. The stars twinkled coldly, seeming to mock the human pain they witnessed below. Lucien was on his back, his hands resting on the cold stone balustrade, his shoulders still carrying that immense weight. He sensed Rhys's presence before he heard him—a change in air pressure, a silent shadow joining his.
"She's still in you," said Rhysand, the High Lord of the Night Court. His voice was not one of empty consolation, but of acute observation. "Not like a ghost haunting you." But how... heal. Woven into your flesh, into your soul. Shaping every choice, every mistrust, every act of courage that came after.
Lucien didn't turn around. He continued to look at the adorned valley, bathed in starlight and distant fires.
"She is," shoppers, her voice hoarse but clear in the stillness. "In every leaf that falls in autumn, golden and passeira. In every fire that refuses to go out, no matter how much they try to smother it. A hollow laugh escaped him, a dry, joyless sound that echoed through the night. "Beron... He thought he was burning an embarrassment. Erasing a stain. He drew his hand, looking at the palm as if he saw the flames of the past. "But he didn't understand. He only kept the seeds. She... she sowed something in me, Rhys. Something that neither his fire, nor time, burns burned. A resistance. A reminder of what it is to love without measure.
Rhys stood by her side, shoulder to shoulder, also watching the distant mountains, symbols of permanence and defiance. The silence that was silenced was complicit, respectful. Then, with the insight that defined him, he brought up the other end of Lucien's dilemma:
"What about Elain?"
Lucien clenched his fists at the cold stone. The mention of the name was like a shock, pulling him from the painful past to a complex and uncertain present.
"Elain..." he began, his name coming out like a heavy sigh. "Elain is the future. A possibility. A different light. He closed his eyes, as if confronting a painful truth. "Jesminda is the past. A root. The wound that never heals, but that also defines me. A lonely tear escaped, tracing a silver path through its temple, a river opened after centuries of drought. "And I..." the voice cut off, the emotion finally overflowing the barrier, "... I am the bridge that never found the other shore. Suspended between what was and what could be. Loving ghosts and fearing the light.
As Rhys went, quietly retreating into the house, leaving Lucien with his grief and the stars, the solitude of the porch seemed to reveal itself. But it was a necessary solitude. Lucien stands motionless for long moments, only breathing in the cold air, feeling the weight of the stars' gaze.
Then, slowly, he took out his pocket for the crystal necklace. The object rested on his palm, cold and familiar. Starlight captured something at its core: a tiny fig leaf, perfect in its details, attached, fossilized in golden amber and translucent in the center of the opaque stone. It was a fragment of his sanctuary, of his first love, preserved for eternity. One last gift? An accident? A symbol?
His fingers closed softly around the crystal, feeling its shape, its coldness, its history. He deliberately held it up to eye level, staring at the eternalized sheet. The memory of her laughter under the fig tree, of the green eyes shining, of the affectionate accusation – "You shine when you smile" – flooded him with a painful and beautiful clarification.
And then, for the first time in centuries, Lucien Vanserra let the tears come. It was not hysterical sobs, nor uncontrolled crying. They were silent, warm and salty tears, which flowed in continuous files down his face, wetting the collar of his tunic, falling on the cold stone of the balcony. Tears for Jesminda. For the lost love. For the secret kept. For the lonely bridge that he was. For the lightness of the boy who shone when he smiled and who had been consumed by the autumn flames. It was a moment of absolute surrender, of finally vivid mourning, under the indifferent sky, with the weight of the crystal – and the eternal leaf – held like a talisman against oblivion. The pain did not disappear, but in that instant, it flowed. And in that flow, there was a minimal clearance, a first step to cross the bridge.
Chapter Text
"Time is not a road — it is a mirror. And what you hate today may be what you were yesterday."
❈ Prythian – Past
Spring, with its veils of fine rain and timid flowers, gave way to the incipient summer. In Vereda — the forgotten village between blue mountains and ancient woods, where time seemed to run like thick honey — life went on with the slowness of the herbs growing in the cracks of the stone houses. But not for them. For Lucien and Jesminda, every moment stolen was an expanding universe.
They found refuge in each other as one who finds shade in the desert heat. Lucien's shadow was the escape from the oppressive court, from the weight of the surname Vanserra, from the critical eyes of his father and from the poisonous competition of his brothers. Jesminda's shadow was the protection against her own strangeness, against the visions that haunted her, against the feeling of being an enigma walking among ordinary people. Under the canopy of the old crooked fig tree—whose branches writhed like the bones of a wise elder—or on the edge of the stream of clear waters, they breathed.
It was in the silences that they said the most. Silences filled with the sharing of freshly picked apples, juicy and tart, their juice running down their fingers as they watched the clouds. Silences where he left a smaller bow, carefully taped and varnished, leaning against her humble door, feigning an oversight, but knowing that she would understand the gift: Train. Protect yourself. I care. Silences in which she waited for him at nightfall, at the edge of the forest, after his exhausting training with his brothers who looked more like torture sessions. With steady hands despite the fatigue that clouded her green eyes, she cleaned his wounds—sword cuts, bruises from punches, marks of humiliation—using crushed consolda-major leaves and ancient murmurs in a tongue that sounded like the wind in the leaves, words that seemed to bring a cold and immediate relief to the inflamed skin.
"You're too light for this place," he had once said in one of those silences, watching her as she dug her fingers into the damp earth around the fig tree, as if she felt the pulse of the world below.
She just smiled, a sad, lucid reflection in her eyes.
"Light can also set fire, Lucien. The answer was soft, but loaded with a truth that he still didn't fully grasp.
Lucien didn't know what to answer. The statement hung among them, a gentle warning, a personal prophecy.
It was Eris who first discovered that Jesminda was more than she appeared. Not by espionage, but by keen observation and a strange affinity. One afternoon, he found her alone in the woods, sitting on an exposed root, drawing complex circles and constellations in the damp earth with a stick. The drawing did not correspond to any known celestial map.
"You read the wind before it comes," Eris remarked, her voice neutral, without her usual tone of disdain. He stopped at a respectful distance, noting the precise strokes.
She wasn't scared. He raised his green eyes, which seemed to reflect the filtered light differently.
"It's not reading. He corrected calmly. "yes... listening.
Eris frowned slightly, puzzled.
"Do you hear the time?" "The question was direct, a shot in the dark that hit the target.
Jesminda did not deny it. He kept his gaze. And that was enough. At that moment, a silent pact was sealed between the heir of Autumn and the enigmatic peasant woman. Eris traveled beyond the surface, perceiving the hidden depth.
From then on, Eris never treated her with condescension. Nor did he try to dispute it with Lucien. His affection was different—not the fire of passion, but the solidity of respectful understanding. It was deep, silent, undemanding. An alternative safe haven.
"You're the only person who talks to me like I'm not Vanserra," he confessed on a hot summer afternoon, sitting beside her in the shade of the ancient oak trees, out of sight of the court. There was a rare vulnerability in his voice.
Jesminda was picking wildflowers. Without looking at him, she replied with the frankness that was natural to her:
"Because you try so hard not to be.
Eris let out a low, humorless laugh.
"I can't be anything else. It's the blood. It's the jail.
She finally looked at him, her green eyes serious.
"Not on the outside. He conceded. "But inside, maybe." The place where only you live.
He held out a delicate lilac flower that he had just picked. Eris accepted it, her long, aristocratic fingers closing gently around the fragile stem. He kept the flower. And, true to its reserved character and the symbolic importance of the gesture, for many years he kept it inside an ancient grimoire with a worn leather cover, a book of forbidden and forgotten knowledge, where it dried, preserving its ghostly shape and color, a botanical secret kept between pages of power.
Lucien was not mated to Jesminda. No court ritual, no political arrangement had united them. But the love that grew between them defied any notion of predestination. It was a wild, organic force that sprang from the shared soil of mutual understanding and need.
He would look for her on rest days, riding hours in the sun to reach Vereda, the dust of the path mingling with the sweat on his face. She healed him—not just his physical wounds, but his tormented soul—with trembling hands that conveyed an otherworldly calm. They danced once. Alone, under a starry sky that seemed to shed silver light, to the deafening sound of cicadas and the rustling of leaves dancing with the warm breeze. There was no music, just the rhythm of hearts and bare feet in the damp grass. Lucien, clumsily, stumbled. She laughed so hard—a clear, free sound that echoed through the night—that she sat on the floor, her eyes filled with tears of joy.
"You're worse than me at this!" She teased, still panting with laughter, pointing at him.
Lucien, lying on the grass beside her, panting and flushing but radiant, replied with a sincerity that made her stop laughing,
"I'm trying to keep up with your feet..." he paused, his amber gaze fixing hers with intensity, "... and his soul, Jesminda.
The air between them changed. Lightness gave way to a sweet and electrifying tension. It was that night that he kissed her for the first time. Not with the rash passion of youth, but with hesitation. With reverence. As if their lips touched something sacred, fragile, made of fragments of stars harvested from the sky above them. A kiss that was a question, a promise, an anticipated goodbye.
Jesminda didn't cry. But in that kiss she knew. With the cold, utter certainty of their visions: Their time was running out. Happiness was a bird with broken wings, and Beron's shadow stretched over Vereda.
Beron knew. Of course I knew. Their webs of information were vast. Everything that flourished out of his order, he pulled out by the roots. The "thing" that bewitched his most troubled son was a weed to be eliminated.
Lucien was summoned to the manor. The hearing was short, brutal. Beron did not shout. He spoke with a coldness that was worse than fury. The threats were not directed at Lucien, but at what he loved. He returned in silence. No visible wounds, but with opaque eyes, as if a vital part of him had been extinguished. The weight of that silence was more eloquent than any scream.
And that same night, Jesminda was intercepted by Eris in the woods, near the crooked fig tree. He emerged from the shadows, his face pale in the moonlight, his eyes dilated with genuine fear – a very rare emotion in him.
"You need to run away!" His voice was an urgent, almost hoarse whisper. "Now!" He won't wait. Take what you can, go to the mountains, disappear!
Jesminda looked at him, her expression was of an unnatural, terrible calm. Like the smooth surface of a lake before a storm.
"It's no use, Eris. "The answer was soft, fatalistic. "I saw it. The chains, the fire, the golden blood... I can't change what is written. She paused, her green eyes shining with an inner light. "Only what I leave behind.
And then she proposed. He took the smooth, cold crystal from his neck, hanging from a simple leather cord. He extended it to Eris.
"The crystal." Promise me you'll keep it. Keep it safe. Even after. Even when all seems lost.
Eris looked at the object as if it were a serpent. "Jesminda..." The name was a moan, a refusal.
"Eris." "She used the nickname that only she dared, the one that made him feel human, not a Vanserra. His voice was firm, relentless. "You'll live for a long time." More than Lucien, perhaps—" she hesitated, "... maybe more than I should. "The admission was painful. "And one day someone will come..." Her eyes seemed to see through him, into the distant future, "... Someone who will need to remember who I really was. Not the peasant woman, not the mistress, not the victim. I. Everything. Keep my truth, Eris.
Eris wanted to scream. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. He wanted to break that truth with his hands, to destroy the crystal, to force her to flee. But she held his face between the rough hands of a worker, a surprisingly intimate and motherly gesture. Her thumbs ran over his high cheekbones.
"You are my brother by choice, not by blood. He whispered, his eyes filled with immense pain and a deep but platonic love. "And that's worth more. I love you, Eris. But... Not like that.
He closed his eyes, swallowing the lump in his throat. Acceptance was a cold blade.
"I know. He mumbled, his voice hoarse, broken. "But that doesn't make it any easier.
A sad smile touched her lips, a reflection of infinite understanding.
"Nothing is true, Eris. Nothing worthwhile.
She let go of her face. Eris closed her hand tightly around the crystal, feeling its coldness ]
When Beron's soldiers came, it was quick and efficient. They didn't use the colors of autumn; they were shadows dressed in black. Lucien tried to stop them. He fought like a madman, with the fury of despair, his firepower surging in chaotic flames. But there were many, and he was exhausted from the internal struggle, from the pain of the audience with his father. They overpowered him with cold iron chains that suppressed his magic. Eris feigned indifference. On the outside. Inside, it was torn. Lucien's every scream, every sudden movement of the soldiers against Jesminda, was a stab. The dried lilac flower in the grimoire seemed to burn on his chest.
She was taken to the center of the clearing. The same clearing where they danced. Where the grass still kept the memory of his bare feet. Where they kissed. Where the future seemed possible. Where they laughed. Now, the air smelled of fear and the earth damp.
Jesminda didn't fight. He walked with a dignity that made even the most hardened soldiers hesitate. Her green eyes met Lucien's, imprisoned and powerless, her face distorted by impotent hatred and torn love. A soldier pushed her, she fell to her knees on the land she loved.
As the blade shimmered in the moonlight, Jesminda stared at Lucien as she bled—a blood that wasn't red but golden and thick oozing from the wound in her chest, glowing supernaturally against the dark earth. And in his eyes, there was no fear. There was acceptance. There was love. And one last thought, clear as spring water, that pierced through the pain and chaos, straight to Lucien's heart, as if she whispered to him,
"You were the easiest choice I made."
And then she was gone. The body fell forward, the light in the green eyes going out. The silence that followed was more terrifying than any scream.
Or so everyone believed.
With Eris. The cold crystal weighed like a mountain in his inner pocket, hidden against his heart. Hidden. Like the lilac flower in the grimoire. Like the truth he now carried. Waiting. For the day. By the person. By the way.
And on the long nights, while the Autumn Court feasted or conspired, Eris secluded herself in her tower. He opened the grimoire, touched the dried flower, felt the weight of the crystal. And he swore to hear her voice in the wind whistling in the cracks, a whisper that was not memory, but presence:
— "It's not the end, Eris. Just a fold in time."
The promise echoed in the darkness, a thread of hope woven with threads of pain, guarded by the prince who had learned to love in silence and to hope in the shadow. Jesminda's story was far from over; it was just asleep, preserved in amber and crystal, waiting for the right fold in the fabric of time to be reborn.
❈ Prythian – Present: The Forest of Secrets and Ashes
The forest of the Autumn Court breathed melancholy and mystery. A thick, persistent, unnatural mist enveloped the gnarled trunks of ancient oak trees and silver-barked beeches, as if the tree spirits themselves exhaled their last breaths in an effort to hide the secrets buried in their roots. The air was cold and damp, heavy with the smell of wet earth, rotting leaves, and a moisture that penetrated the bones. Underfoot, the floor was a carpet of soggy autumnal leaves and cold mud that sucked in every step.
Lucien advanced through this maze of shadows and steam, his sturdy leather boots sinking with a low, wet sound with every movement. His heart beat with a heavy rhythm, synchronized with the dull pulse emanating from the object in his inner pocket. The crystal. He felt her presence like a cold ember, a constant, painful beat against his skin, a slow, painful rhythm, like the ringing of a doomed clock marking the final seconds of an agonizing wait. It was more than a burden; it was as if he carried Jesminda's bones in his own flesh, a sacred and cursed relic.
"Keep it well. He'll call her again."
Eris's words, spoken in a conspiratorial whisper weeks earlier during a furtive encounter in the abandoned gardens of the Night Court, echoed in her mind, blending ominously with the constant rustling of the dry leaves beneath her feet and the whimper of the wind on the tall branches. The promise was a hook in his soul, pulling him back to this place of pain.
When he warned the secluded hut through the curtain of mist, his stomach twitched. It was a small, decaying structure, almost swallowed by the black ivy that covered its rotting wooden walls and shaggy thatched roof. A black stone chimney, partially collapsed, testified to abandonment. But it was before her, sitting on a fallen trunk covered in moss, that the familiar figure stood.
Eris.
The heir of Autumn lay motionless, like a statue carved in despair. In front of him, the charred remains of a campfire formed a black circle in the damp earth, cold ashes scattered by the wind. His hands, normally so controlled, hung inert between his knees, palms facing upwards as if offering something to the void. Her red hair, usually a crown of fire, looked dull, lifeless, in the dim gray light of dawn that barely penetrated the mist. He seemed part of the melancholy landscape, a specter of the past guarding its own ruins.
Lucien stopped a few steps away, his throat so tight that the pain almost prevented him from speaking. The smell of cold ashes and damp earth permeated the air, a ghost of fire that had consumed much more than firewood.
"You kept it. Lucien's voice sounded strange even to himself, hoarse and rough, like the earth cracked after a devastating fire. "All this time. All this time, knowing... and silent.
Eris didn't move. He did not raise his head. His gaze remained fixed on the dead ashes.
"She asked me. His words were whispered in the wind, so low that they were almost lost in the moan of the trees, almost swallowed by the hostile environment. "I told you you'd need him one day." That he would be the key... That he would bring her back. That it wasn't the end, just... a fold in time.
Lucien rushed forward, driven by a wave of anger and pain that made his steps trembling. The distance between them narrowed, but the emotional rift seemed insurmountable.
"You should have told me." She accused him, her voice gaining volume, charged with a bitter disappointment that had brewed for centuries. His hands clenched into fists tightly, his nails digging into his palms with a sharp, welcome pain, a focus against the storm within. "She wasn't just yours to keep, Eris!" She was mine! My life! My end! You didn't have the right..." The voice cracked, strangled by emotion.
Finally, Eris looked up. The action was slow, heavy. The gray light revealed his face marked by fatigue and an old pain. But it was his amber eyes that trapped Lucien. Not cold and calculating as usual. They were shallow. Empty. Like dry lakes under the relentless sun, without depth, without reflection, only the aridity of loss and guilt fulfilled.
"She's dead, Lucien. "The statement was a low, direct blow. But then his voice broke, betraying the icy façade, revealing the crack through which the true emotion flowed. "But not like us." Not like mortals, or like fairies..." He paused, swallowing hard. "She... fell apart. Before my eyes. After the blade fell... There was no body. It turned into gold dust. Light. And then... the crystal..." His eyes rested on Lucien's pocket, where the object pulsated, "... The crystal swallowed what was left. Like a shooting star sucked back into the night sky. It was fast. Was... beautiful. And terrible.
Lucien shuddered. The description resonated with the vivid memory that tormented him: the golden blood running down Jesminda's chest, the otherworldly glow that had persisted even after her last breath, the feeling that something greater was breaking free. Eris confirmed the vision, giving it an even more frightening and mystical dimension.
"Why?" The question came out like a moan, Lucien's voice reduced to a thread, about to break. "Why didn't you let me see it?" Why did you deprive me of this? From your... True goodbye?
Eris stood up, slowly, as if every muscle, every bone, ached with the movement. His scarlet cloak, stained with mud at the edges, dragged on the damp earth. He approached the edge of the dead fire, his fingers touching the charred edge, black with soot.
"Because you would have thrown yourself into the fire after her." "The answer was simple, brutal, full of painful certainty. "Literally. Or metaphorically, consumed by pain, anger, uncontrolled magic. She knew. I knew you would do it. That you would need to do this. He turned to face Lucien, his empty eyes meeting his brother's, inflamed with pain. "You asked me to protect you... of himself. It was his last true request. Before the crystal. Before the powder.
A bitter laugh, short and dry as the crack of a dead branch, escaped Lucien.
"And you obeyed?" The mockery in his voice was a blade. "You, Eris Vanserra, who have never obeyed anyone?" Who challenges Beron in secret, who plays his own game from the cradle? Did he obey a dying 'minor fairy'?
Eris was not offended. An equally bitter smile touched his lips, humorless.
"She made me promise. He closed his eyes, as if he saw the scene again: Jesminda fallen, her blood golden, her green eyes fixed on him with an unearthly intensity. "That night, while Beron was burning her... as the blade fell..." His voice became a trickle of wind, a secret shared with the dark forest, "... She whispered my name. Not yours, Lucien. My. 'Eris'. Clear. Calm. As a... thanks. A confirmation. So that I knew. So that I would never forget... that it was also my fault. For not having achieved more. For not being strong enough. For being a Vanserra.
The silence that followed was absolute, cut only by the distant and lonely cawing of a raven, an ominous sound that echoed in the mist. It was as if the forest itself held its breath.
It was then that Lucien felt it. An intense, sudden vibration emanating from the crystal in his pocket. No longer a slow, painful pulse, but a strong, rapid tremor, like a heart reborn from a long torpor. It was hot now, almost burning against his skin, pulsing with an energy he hadn't felt since days under the crooked fig tree. Eris's promise echoed again in Lucien's mind, but this time not as a memory, but as a tangible omen: "He's going to call her again."
Lucien's eyes met Eris's. The emptiness in the older brother's eyes had given way to a sharp gleam, a frightening understanding. Both felt it. The air between them changed, charged no longer only with the weight of the past, but with the electrifying potential of the impossible. The mist around seemed to vibrate slightly, as if the forest, and the spirits in it, were whispering in unison: It comes
❈ Another World – Earth
Rhiannon Abril woke up with a gasp that tore through the silence of the room, her body gasping on the bed as if she had been pulled from an abyss. The cold sweat ran down his back, sticking his thin shirt to his skin. Her room in London was plunged into darkness, the only light coming from the full moon outside, whose silvery glow poured in through the half-open window, drawing ghostly streaks on the wooden floor. But the focus, as always, was on the dark oak desk. On it, resting on a cracked porcelain saucer, the crystal – the one she had brought with her when she "woke up" in this world – pulsated. Not with the intense light of vivid memories, but with a faint, intermittent amber glow, like the last breath of a firefly trapped in a bottle. A sign of remote, agonizing life.
She stood up, her trembling legs threatening to give way. Each movement was an effort, as if her physical body was still struggling to contain the strange energy that inhabited it. He shuffled to the table, his hand finding support in the cold wood. His fingers, thin and pale, traced the cold, smooth surface of the stone. The feeling was familiar and strange at the same time – an echo of another skin, another life.
"Are you there?" The whisper escaped his lips, hoarse, a nocturnal ritual, a desperate prayer thrown into the void. As he did every night.
No response. Just the persistent, intrusive echo of memories that did not belong to this world, but that inhabited every fiber of his being:
Lucien, so vivid that she could feel the warmth of the autumn court sun. Laughing under the crooked fig tree, her head thrown back, her hair red like liquid fire, her golden eyes – those eyes that consumed her – illuminated by the light filtered by the leaves, full of a lightness that the world had later stolen from her. Eris, in a secret library full of dust and secrets. Teaching her to read ancient runes by flickering candlelight, his voice, normally sharp, softened by an expression of concentrated patience – a face he never showed to others. The proximity, the smell of old parchment and ashes. The sudden, metallic and sweet taste of golden blood filling her mouth, trickling down her throat as the cold blade hit her in the clearing. The surprise, the cold pain, the sight of Lucien screaming his name in mute despair.
Rhiannon curled up on the cold floor next to the desk, her arms wrapping around her knees tightly, as if she could protect herself from the invasions of the past. Two years. Two years since she had woken up in this teenage room that no longer belonged to her, with the crystal clenched in her hand like a relic of war and an invisible but pulsating scar on her chest – the echo of Jesminda's mortal wound. Two years of trying to forget that her heart was still beating in two places at once: here, in this body of Rhiannon Abril, an art student in London, and there, in Prythian, where an amber-eyed redhead and an ice prince carried their legacy of pain.
That night, however, something was profoundly different. The air was charged, electric, like before a storm. The pulse of the crystal seemed more insistent, almost... eager. When fatigue and emotional turmoil finally overcame her and she fell asleep again on the floor, leaning against the bed, the vision came not as a dream, but as a flood, dragging her to her epicenter:
Lucien. Not the young lover, but the man scarred for centuries. Kneeling on the damp ground of a dark, ancient forest in Prythian. In his hand, the crystal twin to his was pressed against his forehead like a talisman against madness. Her tears, silent and heavy, shone like dew under the silvery light of the same moon that bathed her London bedroom, running down a scar she resembled in a suit.
Eris. Standing on the edge of a steep cliff, the wind howling around him, shaking his dark cloak. Her lips moved, murmuring a prayer or an invocation in a guttural, ancient language that made the air vibrate and burned like fire in the dreamer's ears. His eyes, usually so calculating, were closed, his face a mask of extreme concentration and contained pain.
And then, a Voice. Not human, not fey. Deep as the womb of the earth, resonant as the rolling of stones in immense caves, echoing in his mind: "Find the threshold. He is at the roots." The phrase was an order, a key, a primitive call that reverberated in every cell of his being.
Rhiannon woke up again, this time with a violent start. I was no longer on the floor, but sitting on the bed. And in his hand, the crystal was burning. Not metaphorically. A wave of intense, almost unbearable heat emanated from the stone, as if a small sun was trapped in its core. The amber light pulsed furiously, illuminating the room with dancing shadows.
She looked at the burning stone, then at the window, where the silver moon witnessed. The sight, the voice, the phantom chest pain, the burn on the palm of the hand... It was too much. The fatigue of two years of flight, of denial, of lacerating longing, crystallized into a cold and sharp decision.
"Enough," she said into the void, her voice surprisingly firm, cutting through the night air. It was not a shout, but a statement. Rising to her feet with a phantom determination that seemed borrowed from Jesminda herself, Rhiannon squeezed the burning crystal. Her roots called her. The threshold awaited. It was time to return home.
❈ Prythian – Present
The setting was a makeshift camp deep in an Autumn Court forest, far from the Manor's ears. A dying fire sent low flames that lit up the tense faces of the two half-brothers. The air smelled of ash, damp earth, and pine.
Eris Vanserra was standing, her posture stiff as ever, but there was an unusual agitation in her amber eyes, reflecting the embers. In his outstretched hand, resting on his palm like a dangerous offering, was the crystal. But it wasn't the opaque stone Lucien remembered. Now, it shone with a constant, strong inner light, as if fueled by an invisible flame that burned at its core. The light was golden-amber, pulsing gently in tune with... something.
"She's coming back," Eris said, her voice hoarse, charged with a raw emotion he rarely allowed to show—a mixture of hope, dread, and something close to the veneration he dared not name. His fingers trembled slightly as he grasped the living stone.
Lucien, sitting on a fallen log in front of the fire, felt his heart stop and then accelerate violently. His own golden eyes, so similar to his brother's, fixed on the beating stone like a captured heart. He knew the legends, the properties of the artifact. The glow was... undeniable. A sign.
"The crystal only reacts like this when..." Eris began, but Lucien already knew. The knowledge was engraved in his soul.
— ... when the soul he guards is near. Lucien added, his voice a hoarse thread of sound. He closed his fingers carefully, almost reverently, around the stone that Eris handed him. The instant his skin touched the surface, a wave of comforting heat and sharp pain mixed through his arm, followed by a deep resonance that echoed in his own chest. It was her. An echo, a promise.
Eris nodded, a brief, tense shake of her head. His chin trembled slightly, the only visible concession to the storm that was raging inside him. The calculating prince was disarmed by the possibility.
The silence that followed was heavy, fraught with centuries of rivalry, mistrust, and a shared secret that bound them together more deeply than blood. Lucien looked at his brother, really looked, seeing not only the heir of Autumn, but the faithful guardian, Jesminda's silent accomplice. A question, stored for eons, burned in his throat.
"Did you love her?" The question escaped Lucien like a sigh, laden with the weight of centuries of doubt, unadmitted jealousy, and an acute need to understand Eris's place in her heart.
For a moment, he thought Eris wouldn't answer. The High Fae turned, looking at the dying brass, his profile a sharp cut against the darkness of the forest. His breath seemed breached. Then, slowly, he lowered his eyes to his own hands. Hands of a warrior, a politician, a manipulator. Old scars – from blades, from fire, from difficult choices – drew maps of past guilt on his skin.
When Eris's voice finally came, it was so low that it was almost lost in the whisper of the wind among the trees, but every word hit Lucien like an arrow:
"It was impossible not to love her," he confessed. There was no defense, just a simple and devastating truth. He looked up, not at Lucien, but at the darkness, as if he saw her ghost dancing among the logs. "She reminded me..." a pause, an emotional choke, "... that there could be beauty even in the deepest rottenness. That light could spring from decay.
Lucien swallowed. Confession did not bring relief, but a new, complex pain. It was not the possession of romantic love, but a different, perhaps purer, devotion that Eris had offered. As he processed, the crystal in his hand pulsed faster now, the amber light intensifying, beating against his skin like a racing heart, almost painfully. It was as if the soul contained in it reacted to the proximity, to the raw emotion of the moment.
"She still haunts me," Lucien murmured, not to Eris, but to the shadow of Jesminda that her mind insisted on projecting dancing among the trees, laughing under the fig tree, bleeding in the clearing. A constant presence, a ghost of love and loss.
Eris turned completely to him. For the first time in centuries, perhaps for the first time in his life, he put his hand on his shoulder. The touch was firm, heavy, a rare gesture of affection and understanding that crossed decades of hostility.
"She's not a ghost, Lucien," he said, his voice regaining some of its characteristic strength, but softer. "It's a seed. Planted in the past. Preserved in winter. His amber eyes, reflecting the light of the crystal, fixed on Lucien's with intensity. "And you... a slight squeeze on the shoulder, ... You've always been good at making things grow. In nurturing life where others only see ashes.
The affirmation was a gift, a recognition, a passing of the torch. As Lucien departed, plunging into the darkness of the forest, the crystal held tight like a beacon and an anchor, his silhouette was soon swallowed by the shadows.
Eris stood alone, watching the dead embers of the campfire. The small circle of light and heat faded, leaving only cold ashes and the memory of the crystal's intense brilliance. The wind howled, carrying the smell of earth and decay. He closed his eyes, not to pray, but to listen. To hear if, in the whisper of the leaves, there was an echo of the voice he had kept for so long. When he spoke, it was a whisper to the ashes, to the night, to the woman who was a soul sister:
"Come back soon, sister," his voice, normally so controlled, was charged with a pleading urgency. "Before he too gets lost in the shadows. Before this seed needs to germinate on its own.
The forest swallowed his words, but the amber light of the crystal that disappeared between the trees was a silent response, pulsing in the rhythm of a heart that beat in two worlds. The fold in time was about to close.
Chapter Text
❈ Prythian – Present
The mist in the forest of the Autumn Court was a heavy, damp veil, ingrained with the smell of wet earth and sweet decay. Lucien's every step was a muffled echo, absorbed by the thick moss and burlap that covered the ancient floor. In his pocket, the crystal shard didn't pulsate—he moaned, a deep, sonic vibration that echoed through his bones, a decades-old lament that finally found his voice.
He found Eris exactly where he knew he would be: in front of the charred skeleton of the old fig tree, a mark of pain and betrayal. The place where Jesminda had been torn from the world, and where, in some paradoxical way, her essence had stubbornly persisted.
"You kept it," Lucien's voice came out rough, weighed down by years of silent accusations. His eyes sparkled, golden as those of the autumn that surrounded them, but flaming with a summer rage. "You let her die... and kept the only part that remained, like a macabre trophy?
Eris didn't turn around. His posture was one of real rigidity, his eyes fixed on the black, twisted roots that clung to the ground like petrified claws.
"I did what she asked me. That night. With his last breath.
Lucien moved forward, closing the gap between them. The air trembled with the restrained magic of both.
"Do you always do what they ask?" Even when the price is someone's soul? Even when it costs everything?
Eris laughed, a dry sound empty of any humor other than the most cynical of resignations.
"Do you think it was about obeying?" He finally turned, and his face was bare of his usual mask of disdain. There was a pain there as old and deep as the roots of the tree. "She didn't ask for salvation, Lucien. She knew that salvation was impossible. She asked for silence. He asked me to protect what was left. So that one day... that could come back.
Lucien pulled the crystal out of his pocket. The object was cracked, a web of thin lines capturing the faint light. Inside, a pulsating light beat like a heart—amber and gold intertwining, fighting, merging like two souls sharing the same fragile prison.
"You're waking up," Eris murmured, her voice almost a breath of reverence. "Do you feel that?" She's not just coming back... She's remembering.
Lucien stared at his brother, distrust a barrier between them.
"Remembering?" Remembering what?
Eris kept her gaze, and for the first time, Lucien saw not the cruel prince, but the accomplice of a harrowing secret.
"Everything. From us. She is no longer just Jesminda. Not only Rhiannon. It is something new, forged in the fire of two lives. But what connects her to us... the memory of what we were... still lives. And she will find us again.
Lucien squeezed the crystal tightly, feeling its sharp edges against his skin.
"Will she remember me?" The question came out broken, the voice of a passionate and hopeless young man who still lived inside him.
Eris smiled, an expression charged with a melancholy so vast that it seemed to span centuries.
"She never forgot, Lucien. Forgetting would be much kinder.
❈ Real World
Time in the human world was a slow, muddy river compared to the swift torrent of Prythian.
Rhiannon Abril—or the conglomerate of who she had been and what she had become—looked at the world through a double lens. His days were of studied stillness, lived in a wooden house inherited from an aunt who also seemed to have her secrets. The house was nestled against the mountains, surrounded by a primordial forest where the trees whispered stories in forgotten languages.
His room was his sanctuary and his prison. Stacks of books on astronomy and ancient mythology piled up on the tables. Star maps, drawn by his hand on sleepless nights, adorned the walls. An aged leather diary—her diary, Jesminda's—rested on the bed, always open. And on the chest of drawers, on a cracked ceramic plate that resembled the crystal it once contained, was the golden dust remaining from the necklace that had been her portal, her anchor, her divided soul.
Some nights, the dust emitted a soft glow, a lonely beacon. That night, it burned.
Rhiannon woke up from a jump, not with a scream, but with a stolen sigh. It wasn't a nightmare; It was an invasion. His mind had been hijacked by a stream of visions so vivid that his skin still retained the warmth of the fire he had seen, the chill of the tears he had witnessed.
She had seen:
Lucien, kneeling on the forest floor, his shoulders shaking with a silent wail, his tears darkening the land where her blood had fallen.
Eris, standing before an obsidian mirror, repeating a name—her name—in a language that made the air tremble.
Arya, draped in a crown of flowering white thorns, her smile was both a blessing and a warning.
And for a fleeting moment, she found herself—or saw Jesminda—in a sky-blue dress, dancing alone in a clearing lit by golden flowers that sprouted from the ground like fallen stars.
"You're back, little star." Arya's voice echoed, not in her ears, but in her own marrow. "But be careful: if you want to be whole, you can't be just one. She will have to lose herself again. Are you willing?"
Rhiannon rose to her feet in bed, her body throbbing not from muscle pain but from a deep internal reorganization. Alchemy of the soul. Something new was rising from the ashes of two existences.
In the fogged bathroom mirror, her eyes were no longer just Rhiannon's greens. They shimmered with a golden background—the color of Jesminda's power, the color of Lucien's autumn—and a blue spark—the color of her dress, the color of the sky of her world. A merger.
"I'm not just Rhiannon anymore," she whispered to her foreign reflection. "But I'm not just Jesminda.
She walked over to the plate and dipped her fingers in the hot powder. It was like touching cold embers that burned inside. The dust vibrated in unison with the howl of the wind outside, as if the atmosphere itself were singing a return song.
She rubbed the grains between her fingers, closed her eyes, and saw.
Lucien. Walking alone among the shattered columns of a temple in the Autumn Court. His face was a mask of determination and despair. His mouth moved, forming a word, a name: hers.
And then, Eris. Leaning over an ancient grimoire, his quill pen scratching the parchment with an ink the color of dried blood. He murmured to the fireplace flames, "She'll find the threshold. And then, we'll all have to choose."
The vision was shattered, but the world to which she returned was no longer the same. Rhiannon was anchored there, in that bathroom, but half of her soul now sang an old song, intertwined with the roots of a distant world.
In the fireplace in the living room, the flames crackled, but the sound molded into a whisper that echoed in his mind, clear as a bell:
"It is no longer the crystal that guides. It's you."
She lay back on the bed, staring blankly at the ceiling in the dark, and didn't wait for sleep. He waited for the next dream. For the next memory. For the next piece of himself.
❈ Autumn Cut
The crooked fig tree bloomed.
It was not a gradual blossoming, a triumph of spring. It was a blast. An event. During the night, the withered black branches were filled with flowers that defied the autumnal palette: petals of a deep blue, almost nocturnal, with golden veins that shone with their own light.
The magic emanating from them was unlike anything Lucien had ever felt. It was not the cutting, political magic of the High Fae, nor the raw, brutal magic of pure power. It was something older, more organic, wilder. It was the magic that ran under the earth, before the Cortes, before the names.
Eris arrived moments later, her face pale and her eyes burning with indescribable emotion. He had felt it too—the convulsion in the earth, the tugging in his own blood. They looked at each other, and decades of hatred, jealousy, distrust, and a shared secret hung between them, not dispelled but momentarily silenced by astonishment.
"She's coming back," Lucien breathed, the words coming out like a prayer, a request for confirmation.
"Or it's already partially back," Eris corrected, her voice soft. He reached out and touched one of the flowers. It crumbled under his finger, not into withered petals, but into a golden-and-blue powder that hung in the air like solid light. "She's reassuring.
The soil around the tree was no longer intact. Deep cracks snaked from the trunk, as if the earth was pregnant with a long-buried truth, and was about to go into labor.
❈ Velaris
The atmosphere in the meeting room of the Sovereign family home was charged, the air dense with the smell of ancient parchment, bitter coffee, and unspoken tension.
Feyre, Rhys, Amren, Azriel, Cassian... and Elain, who stood away from the table, her eyes fixed on the three-dimensional map that hovered over the polished wood. A new point of pulsating light shone brightly in the south, on the hazy border of the Autumn Court.
"The magic is moving," Amren declared, her voice as high as a blade. His small, dark eyes shone with wicked interest. "And it's not fay." It is earlier. It is from the Ancient Blood. Someone poked the backbone of the world.
Rhysand frowned, his dark wings twitching slightly behind him.
"Someone or something has awakened Jesminda's essence." Or what it has become. Right... Resets the board.
Elain clenched her fists, the knuckles of her white fingers. The sweet and gentle Elain seemed to have swallowed ashes.
"Why now?" His voice was colder than winter. "She died. She had the tragic end that everyone tells. And Lucien..." she swallowed hard, "... He has already made his choices.
Feyre cast a glance at her sister, full of care and a hint of irritation.
"You still feel the connection of the bond, don't you?" You know it's not that simple.
"It's not about the connection!" Elain burst out, and the sound was so unexpected that even Azriel raised his head slightly. "It's just that... He never, ever looked at me the way he looked at her. Even when she was nothing but a ghost among us!
A heavy silence fell over the room. Her pain was tangible, a thorny, ugly thing in the midst of all her cultivated sweetness.
Amren, impatient, snorted.
"Jealous of an undead woman?" Now? As a seer of the Ancient Blood, a walking archetype, threatens to collapse the very timelines that keep us from reality?
Elain did not answer. She simply turned and walked out of the room, her silent footsteps echoing in the marble staircase.
But the expression on his face, before he turned around, was not only one of anger or hurt.
It was pure and simple fear.
❈ Real World
Rhiannon shivered not from cold, but from discovery. She watched from her kitchen window as the fig tree identical to the one in the Prythian forest—her fig tree—began to bloom with the same blue and gold petals.
It was as if the roots of the two trees were one, crossing the veil between the worlds, feeding on the same awakened magic.
And then, a shadow materialized on the tree line, at the entrance to the forest. Tall, imposing, wrapped in a cloak that looked like a fabric of darkness and embers. Hair like living fire.
Eris.
But it wasn't him in the flesh. It was a projection, an eidolon of pure will and magic. Its contours flickered, and through it, she could see the trees swaying.
"Do you remember me?" His voice echoed, not in the air, but directly in her mind, charged with a longing so deep that it hurt, and underlying it, an urgent warning.
She didn't have to think. His assent was an almost imperceptible movement of the head, an acceptance that came not from Rhiannon, the young human, nor from Jesminda, the faerie lover, but from a third consciousness that was the sum of both.
"Something is opening," Eris's projection said, her form fluttering like air over the fire. "And it needs you." The threshold does not stand on its own. But you'll have to choose... Rhiannon. Or Jesminda. The vase must have a single name to cross.
"Can't I be both?" His voice sounded strange to his own ears, reverberating with an old accent.
He stared at her, and his fiery eyes, even in his ghostly form, conveyed an unrelenting truth.
Not for long, his gaze said. The world was not made to contain two souls in one body. One must give in.Al
Back in Prythian, Lucien touched one of the petals of the crooked fig tree. It was warm, pulsating. He bowed his head, and the wind, which smelled of flowers and upturned earth, whispered in his ear a single sentence, in a voice he would never forget:
"The truth is buried where you first cried."
His heart stopped. He knew exactly where it was.
And in the distance, in Velaris, in her flower-scented room, Elain Archeron awoke to a muffled scream. The taste of blood—not her own, but someone else's—filled her mouth, and the overwhelming feeling that something she had always considered rightfully hers, even though she didn't want it, was being irrevocably taken for something that had never truly been hers to begin with.
Chapter Text
The silence in Feyre's chamber was so deep that she could hear the sigh of the stars outside. That was what woke her up – not a noise, but the absence of it, followed by a sudden and violent change in air pressure. She sat up on the bed, her eyes instantly seeking Rhysand's dark form already standing by the arched window. Its wings, a larger shadow in the dim light, were slightly bristling, sensitive to the subtler vibrations of the world's magic.
"Did you feel it?" His voice was low, no more than a breath, but loaded with an ancestral weight.
Feyre didn't have to ask what. She had felt it. It was not a pang of danger, it was not the cry of an alarm. It was as if Prythian's own fabric had been pulled and rearranged, a seam remade on the world's great loom. A relief and a terror at the same time.
"Not as a threat," she agreed, joining him at the window. "But... as a rebalancing. As if a missing piece, which we had all forgotten was missing, had finally fallen into place.
Rhysand didn't take his eyes off the night sky, where the stars seemed to twinkle with a different frequency, their silvery light curving slightly toward the south.
"She's here." Not in body, not yet. But in weight. As a result. He touched the cold window glass with his fingertips. "The magic is distorting itself to accommodate you." Even the stars are bending down to see.
On the other side of Velaris, in his austere chambers smelling of metal and red wine, Amren did not sleep. She rarely did. His attention was focused on a row of fine crystal glasses, each filled with a wine from a different region of Prythian. She snapped her fingers over the nearest cup, and the red liquid inside her rippled, not because of the movement, but in response to a frequency that only she could perceive. His narrow eyes, which had already witnessed the birth and death of constellations, shone with voracious interest.
"She tastes like Ancient Blood," he murmured to the silence, his voice a hiss of a sharp knife. "But it's not like the others that came before. This one does not ask permission. It doesn't drag on. She... declares.
The air in Lucien's room weighed like a damp blanket. Three nights ago he had not known true sleep. She lay on sheets that smelled of ashes and memory, staring at the wooden beams of the ceiling as she danced in her dreams. Jesminda, but not Jesminda. Her ebony black hair now blended with streaks of a soft brown of Rhiannon; His hands, which had once caressed his face with the delicacy of petals, now dissipated like smoke in the wind. Dreams always ended the same way: with pomegranates, his favorite fruit, burning in silent flames, an agonizing symbol of all he had not been able to save.
That night, however, the dream changed. Rhiannon's grimoire, resting on his heavy oak table, pulsed with a golden light that seemed to breathe. Lucien watched him out of the corner of his eye, his trembling fingers wrapped around a glass of wine he had no intention of drinking. "Why did I keep this?" he asked himself for the thousandth time. It was pure masochism. Or perhaps, deep in his broken heart, a part of him still believed that the ink-stained pages and tears held the answers he had been searching for.
When fatigue finally dragged him into bed, the dreams came more vivid than ever. This time, it was Rhiannon — not the young woman he had known, but an entity made of silver mist and the light of shooting stars. His eyes, once green as the woods of spring, now shone like chrysolites, refracting colors that belonged to no Prythian Court. She reached out to him, and Lucien ran, his heart beating like a war drum, but each step plunged him deeper into a swamp of withered flowers and buried pasts.
He woke up with a muffled moan, sweat running down his back like tears he refused to shed awake. The light of the grimoire had intensified, casting dancing and distorted shadows on the stone walls.
It was then that the Silence arrived.
It was not the silence of solitude, but the one that precedes the roar of thunder. The air froze, heavy and dense as a funeral veil. Even the fire in the fireplace froze, its flames trapped in translucent amber, like insects in resin. Lucien rose in a fluid motion, his hand instinctively going to the dagger he held under his pillow—an old habit of a courtier who had learned to rely only on his own blade.
It appeared under the ancient fig tree that grew beyond the open window. Not as a body of flesh and blood, but as condensed light—an aurora borealis imprisoned in a vaguely feminine form. Her hair was made of mist and moonlight, her clothes flowing like streams snaking under the moon.
"Rhiannon," the name escaped her lips like a prayer and a curse intertwined.
She was no longer the young faerie he had loved. Nor the shadow that had haunted his nightmares. It was something bigger, something that transcended the simple concepts of life and death, memory and oblivion.
Lucien fell to his knees, his legs refusing to support him. The earth beneath him was cold, but his chest burned—as if his heart, after centuries of hibernating in pain, had decided to burn again.
"Why now?" Her voice sounded broken, exposing cracks in her soul that even Amarantha had not been able to create. "Why do you come back when there is nothing whole in me to offer?"
The figure approached, floating on a carpet of dry leaves that didn't crackle under his nonexistent feet. His touch was a mere breath of warmth on Lucien's shoulder, but it was enough to set off an avalanche of memories: lost mornings when Rhiannon would wake him up with soft kisses and laughter that echoed like bells.
"You were the one who taught me to love," her voice whispered, echoing not through the air, but inside her own mind. It was Rhiannon's voice, but also... something else. An ancient and wild resonance, like the earth singing under the full moon. "Now teach yourself to accept what I have become."
Lucien raised his face, defiant even in the depth of his pain:
"You're not her. Not completely.
The creature — because it couldn't just be a woman — leaned down. In his twinkling eyes, Lucien saw himself reflected: a fragmented man, half machine, half ash, holding the pieces of what had once been a whole.
"Nor are you the same as you were," whispered the voice, as fingers made of light and shadow traced the line of her mechanical scar. "But love doesn't need continuity to be true. It just needs courage to transform itself."
Lucien laughed, a harsh sound devoid of any humor.
"Courage?" His hands clenched into fists so tense that his nails dug into his palms. The dagger fell to the ground with a metallic tinkling that seemed to desecrate that sacred silence. "Do you call that courage?" Love a ghost that carries the face of the woman I failed?
The presence then enveloped him, not like an embrace, but like the persistent root of a tree enveloping a stone—slow, inevitable, inexorable.
"Don't love me for what I was," he ordered, as the amber glow of his form began to dissipate. "Love what I can become. And what can you become with me."
When Lucien finally dared to raise his hand to touch it, his fingers pierced only the icy night air. All that remained was the echo of a promise engraved on his bones and the grimoire, now silent and dark, resting on the table.
On the open page, a new line of text appeared, written in ink that glowed with soft golden light:
"Sometimes, to be reborn is to learn to love the remains of what has burned down."
And so, for the first time in decades, Lucien allowed the tears to flow freely. Not just for the Rhiannon he had lost, but for the woman she could become—and for the part of him who, even after so much suffering, still feared he wouldn't be worthy to meet her.
Lucien woke up the next day, alone in his room, but with a new certainty embedded in his being: he was no longer just waiting for a ghost from the past.
He was preparing to find a new truth.
And she... was coming back.
Not to be simply loved.
But to be finally understood.
Elain Archeron walked through the gardens, the grass damp and cold beneath her bare feet. Her fingers were tightly closed around a small, smooth, dark stone she had found in the river—a stone that, according to an old legend she had read, could help her "read the tides of time," a gift she possessed but had never fully understood or controlled.
The arrival of Rhiannon's magic—or Jesminda's, or the fusion of the two—had brought something with it to Velaris, and Elain was too sensitive not to notice.
She felt it. He felt like an emptiness, a hole that opened up in the place of his chest where there should be... something. Something that was rightfully hers, even if she had never truly wanted or claimed it.
She had seen him in Lucien's eyes, even in his deepest silences. She had heard him in the murmured and worried words exchanged between the Inner Circle.
Jesminda... Rhiannon... She... She... She.
Never Elain.
The anger did not come as uncontrollable fury. It came as a terrible, icy calm, a shallow lake that hid treacherous, deep currents.
She knelt at the edge of the ornamental reflecting pool, her image reflected and distorted by the full moon. From the depths of her coat, she pulled out not her pruning shears, but a thin, sharp blade that she used to graft roses. Without hesitation, she turned her hand and cut off her own palm.
The blood, bright red and hot, trickled and dripped into the still water, spreading like crimson ink on wet parchment.
"Show me," she whispered into the water, her voice a trickle of poisoned wind. "Show me what was taken from me. Which is rightfully mine.
The water shook. The placid surface writhed, rippling violently as if it were being boiled.
And then, the vision formed. Not Rhiannon as a shadow or a specter, but as a living, radiant star, her body a constellation of amber and blue light, her eyes closed in deep concentration as roots of ancient power enveloped her. And in the reflection, next to this image of pure power, Elain saw herself—her own image in the reflecting pool—fade, becoming translucent, insignificant, until she almost disappeared completely.
A scream ripped from Elain's throat, a sound of sheer terror and denial that she herself did not recognize.
And at the very moment that his cry echoed through the gardens, all the flowers around him—the roses, the hyacinths, the dahlias—instantly withered, their petals fading and falling like dark tears to the ground.
❈ Somewhere Between Worlds
The Keeper of the Veil stood motionless, her bare feet hovering over the silvery, ethereal void that separated all the realms of existence. His eyes, two black suns in eternal eclipse, reflected the vast and complex tangle of golden threads that wove reality—some vibrant and singing like birds at dawn, others faded and fragile like tears dried in the sun. The Veil was not a place, but an in-between: an eternal threshold where the sweetest dreams of mortals intertwined with the darkest nightmares of the sleeping gods.
And there, like a unique pearl embedded in a cosmic spider's web, shone the newly fused soul of Rhiannon Jesminda Abril. It was a tranquil but intense light, wrapped in a root system of amber and blue light that anchored it firmly to the land of two worlds.
The Guardian tilted her head, an expression of ancestral curiosity on her impenetrable face. His slender fingers ran along the threads of fate that emanated from Rhiannon. Some were new—firm, resilient, and golden, like the ties that bound her to the metallic-eyed, broken-hearted hunter. Others were ancient and twisted, still carrying the ghostly smell of spilled blood and promises made under the threat of death.
But then, his fingers found something different.
A dark thread.
It was not a thread of ordinary sadness or passing jealousy. This one was thick, slimy, pulsating with a rage so old and deep that it smelled of rust, broken bones, and the earth of shallow graves. Someone hated Rhiannon with an intensity that transcended life and death, time and space. Someone who would not be content to see her suffer—someone who wished to erase her from the very tapestry of existence, by erasing her name from all books and her memory from all minds.
The Guardian held out a translucent hand, and the dark, menacing thread wrapped around her finger like a poisonous serpent. The magic in him was cold, hungry, and conscious. For an instant that lasted an eternity, she saw:
A forest under an eternally cloudy sky of ash. A grotesque throne, carved in black thorns and bones. And a face — or the absence of it; a mask of pure shadow, with eyes that were not eyes, but abysses within abysses, sucking all the light around.
The thread cut through his divine skin, and the Guardian let go of it with a hoarse whisper of surprise. A single drop of his blood—a shiny, silvery liquid that smelled of ozone and stars—fell into the void, creating ripples of energy that rippled across infinite worlds, a silent warning.
"He knows," she murmured, turning not to anything but to all the shadows in between. "He saw her.
From the darkest depths of the Veil, something laughed.
It was not an audible sound, but a pure vibration of malice that made all the threads of fate tremble with repudiation. The Guardian clenched her fists, and the Veil around her instantly responded—the silver mists condensed into gleaming shields, the golden lights turned into sharp spears of pure energy. She was not a warrior in the conventional sense, but the Protector of the Threshold. And that primordial black magic, as powerful as it was, wouldn't traverse his realm without a titanic struggle.
Still, a rare emotion for such an ancient entity tightened his incorporeal chest: worry. Rhiannon was strong, yes. A double soul, forged in the fire of sacrifice and fused with the waters of forgiveness. But the hatred that haunted her was not mortal. It was paramount. The kind that had already knocked stars out of the firmament and poisoned entire oceans in its nurseries.
The Guardian moved to the point where the dark thread penetrated the Veil, seeping like a poison into golden veins. With a complex gesture of her fingers, she wrapped him in a web of starlight, containing its evil expansion. She couldn't cut it—not without causing Rhiannon excruciating pain—but it could slow her progress, give her time.
"Until when?" She asked into the void, knowing that the darkness would hear her.
The answer came not in words, but in fragments of nightmares thrown at his mind:
A ritual under a black moon and without stars. An ancient knife, studded with obsidian and hatred. Hoarse voices singing in forbidden languages that time itself had striven to erase.
She backed off. I knew what that meant. Someone, somewhere, was willing to tear the very fabric of reality, to sacrifice entire worlds, to reach Rhiannon.
Before dissipating into the aether to strengthen the Threshold's defenses, the Guardian cast one last glance at the glowing soul at the center of the web. The golden threads around him trembled slightly, as if sensing the approaching storm.
"You carry the light that can blind even the deepest darkness," he whispered, not to Rhiannon, but to fate itself, to the balance that hung over a knife. "Don't let them turn it into a simple candle to be blown out.
And then, with a fluid, graceful movement of her arms, she began to weave new protective threads around Rhiannon's perimeter—threads made of fallen stars, of unspoken promises, and of stubborn hopes. A fragile barrier in the face of the threat that was coming, but which would be enough. For the time being.
As his form dissipated, merging with the mists of the Veil, his voice echoed like a solemn warning through all planes of existence:
"Beware, daughter of earth and fire. They come for you."
And in the darkest depths of the in-between, the shadow laughed once more, a sound of endless hunger and eternal patience.
Chapter Text
Death had arrived in the gardens of the House of the Wind in a silent and methodical way. The roses, once bursts of crimson and amber, now hung like withered black rags, their petals scattered on the ground like ashes from an invisible fire. The sweet and heavy aroma was replaced by the harsh smell of arid land and decay.
Oleczka26 on Chapter 9 Sat 06 Sep 2025 10:26AM UTC
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MahSkywalker on Chapter 9 Sat 06 Sep 2025 02:29PM UTC
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Oleczka26 on Chapter 10 Sat 06 Sep 2025 10:29AM UTC
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MahSkywalker on Chapter 10 Sat 06 Sep 2025 02:34PM UTC
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