Chapter Text
When the visions had started, it was easy to mistake them for madness. She'd certainly felt like she was floating through a fever dream from the moment she and Nesta had been ripped from their beds and plunged into the icy depths of the Cauldron. They'd never spoken to each other of what they'd gone through in those moments, though sometimes Elain was tempted to ask her sister what it had felt like for her. Had she, too, found herself sinking down into murky waters, to depths that seemed impossible? Had it felt like she was floating in some hollow space in between, untethered to anything, simply drifting off into some unknowable void?
It must have been only moments she'd been down there, but in that space she felt the weight of eons, felt a power that had pulsed since time immemorial. She'd felt that slumbering power stir, eyes she could not see turning in her direction, taking in every trembling inch of her and then…
…well, it was hard to put into words, exactly, what she'd felt in that moment, only that it seemed like that ancient unspeakable thing almost seemed to smile, bearing teeth and fangs that she could feel but not see and then it blinked and she was cast out onto a cold stone floor, the human bits stripped, but something else given in return, a gift unasked for.
In that moment, those branches of her human life began to crack like twigs under footsteps, snapping as they were tread on one by one.
As they broke, new shoots emerged, but she didn't want them, didn't want these strange markers of a life unchosen. She didn't know how to understand the things she dreamt while waking, couldn't make sense of the tug of a bond on a heart that she thought she'd left behind, beyond a wall she'd never hoped to cross.
She could feel herself withering. She almost welcomed the decay, longed to return to the earth, to be buried beneath the soil and start again in another form. No matter how many shutters and curtains were thrown wide, no matter how many hours spent staring out windows, there was never enough sunshine to make it bloom again, to help her reroot herself into this new body she'd been planted into.
And just when she was ready to let the last of her petals fade into the wind, he taught her what it meant to fly.
They'd spoken of it once, polite strangers at an awkward dinner table, but no words, however lovely, could have prepared her for that first time he'd gently lifted her into his arms there at the House of Wind, taking to the skies in a crack of leathery wings.
She should have been scared, she supposed, to be carried so high, where a simple slip of his hands could have sent her tumbling down to her death. There was a time when she questioned him on the subject, and perhaps somewhere in the tangles of her mind those words had lingered as she'd gazed down at the city below, as she'd listened to how the wind almost seemed to whistle in a high, lovely song as he descended towards the Townhouse, carrying her across the threshold before setting her down with the gentleness of a lover.
He'd extended an arm to her, so finely mannered that for a moment she might have been back in her human lands. For just a moment, she could forget the strange new body she found herself in, could pretend that she wasn't tormented day and night by waking nightmares she couldn't interpret, that she was simply a woman taking a turn about a garden with a man who might become a dear companion.
She'd taken the arm, gaze dropping down at the hand that bore markers of horrors unspoken, a hand that had suffered and healed and was extended to her with such care and gentleness that she found herself breathless.
"Beautiful," she'd exhaled, nearly weeping at this portrait of resilience carved into flesh.
They could only have ever been called friends in those early moments, both of them clinging to hopes that remained out of reach. Elain had so rarely had anyone to call a friend, much less a true one. There had been family, of course, strained as that was so often, but her friendships in the human lands had been an ephemeral thing, flourishing or falling with her family fortunes. It was a novelty, in so many ways, to have someone to simply sit in a garden with her, with no expectation of anything but company. Moreso, since it came in the form of a fae male she might once have trembled to see.
Looking back, she could not pinpoint the moment she began to fall for him. It had come so silently it might have been one of his shadows, knotting its way around her heart until she found herself looking for him in every room, anticipating which door he might walk through.
She could not pinpoint the moment he began to long for her either, though it seemed to happen in the space of the same time, when his gaze no longer sought Mor first in every room, finding her first instead.
When she'd fallen for Graysen, it had happened so suddenly, in the way only first loves ever truly could, in an explosion of emotion that blinded you to all the little problems you might have seen, if you'd observed the scene with more patient eyes.
When she'd fallen for Azriel, it felt like something carefully tended to, a seed taken root and sheltered carefully enough that it had a chance to reach for the surface, yearning to bloom into something bright and beautiful.
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"This was a mistake."
When he'd left her in that darkened room, she could not understand how she had seen everything so wrong.
The visions had started after that first Solstice, mere glimpses of scarred hands against skin and gasps she'd recognized as her own. They came to her late at night, short bursts of sound and image as she'd lain in her bed trying to drift off to sleep. They were so vivid, so much clearer than the hazy illusions that she usually saw when something was looming that she hadn't been sure if they were prophecies at all.
However true or not the things she saw, there was no mistaking the warmth that bloomed between her thighs as night after night they increased in intensity until she found herself squirming beneath her covers in heated frustration at the fantasy of a dark head of hair peeking out from between her thighs, mouth drawing wicked melodies from her throat.
Elain had never allowed herself these sorts of fantasies, certainly not when she was human. Even that first time with Graysen, it had come out of some certainty that she was close enough to being his wife in name that it had felt almost natural to come together in that way, some heat of the moment that had found their needy skin coming together in a moment that was just for them. When the last hope of that relationship had died, she'd been so reluctant to long for anything else, so certain that the things she wanted didn't matter because the whims of fate had always robbed her of her own will since the moment she'd taken her first breaths.
Fae life had done little to change that, the gifts the Cauldron had given her coming with strings attached that she had little hope of freeing herself from, no matter how much she tried to shut out visions that pulled at her mind or bonds that tugged at her chest. And so she kept to her garden, the only place she was allowed any sort of control over her life. She smiled and pretended all was well, that she had no wants but this, a simple life spent in sunshine among carefully tended rows of blooming beauty.
But at night, when darkness fell, her fingers sought her center, giving in to wants she didn't dare speak out loud.
Her first attempts to find her own pleasure were fumbling things, embarrassment burning a path across her skin even as she pretended the slender fingers making tentative circles around her swollen bud were larger ones, tender for all their brutal history. She imagined the hands that teased her nipples weren't her own, that molten hazel eyes watched in the darkness as her body arched with each pass.
It was several nights before she finally came close enough to that precipice to tumble off it, stars exploding behind her vision as her body shook, voice singing to the shadows in high pitched cries. She could have wept as she finally found that release and it seemed like the very darkness sighed with her as her body relaxed with wonder into soft sheets.
The next morning, when he found her in the garden, she'd been so lost in her own daydreams of the night before that she'd startled, trowel slipping from her grasp and on to the ground. He'd retrieved it before she had a moment to recover and as his fingers grazed hers when he returned the tool to her, she wondered if those keen senses of his knew what she'd done with those fingers the night before. She wondered whether the shadows that so dutifully reported on all the things that happened in the darkness had tattled on her somehow. Did he know that it was his face that she imagined in those secret moments? Could he hear how her body nearly purred when he stood close enough to touch?
A corner of his mouth quirked as his hand reluctantly slid away from hers and as she gazed up at him, all she could think about was how she longed to kiss that audacious little smirk, whether he would crush her lips to his in return, boldly pulling her body until she was flush against his chest.
Over the course of a year, those nightly visions grew stronger, until she could not tell what was fantasy and what was fated. She saw hands on her legs, her breasts, the pale expanse of her throat. She saw his body braced over her, wings flared wide as he claimed her. She could almost feel him sinking into her, the exact way it felt as he stretched her with pulsing thrusts until he was seated to the hilt, her legs quivering at the sudden fullness.
It became harder and harder to stay near him for long, even as her whole body craved that proximity. She found herself wondering more and more how the reality would compare to the thoughts that plagued her at night. She longed to bury her nose into his skin, to coat herself in the cool, woodsy scent of him, to let her fill all of her senses until she knew nothing but him.
After a while, it was difficult to hold his gaze for long, lest the flush of her skin reveal all the thoughts that burned inside her to his careful eyes. Her need for him itched at the very underside of her skin, begging for release.
By the following Solstice, she couldn't stand it anymore. The nightly thoughts of him near tormented her with promises of his hand stroking her throat, head tipping down to meet hers in a long-awaited kiss. Something had to give, and as she took that fateful descent down those stairs to where he stood, she could feel that tension roiling off him as if he, too, had known this moment had to come.
A first taste, where only the Mother could see.
As she pivoted into his touch, warmth spreading across her body at each pass of his thumb, it felt like taking to the skies again.
She simply hadn't anticipated that this time, he'd let her fall.
-----
For weeks after, she found herself questioning everything.
There was little to do with the garden at this time of the year, save plan for the coming season, and even that possibility was too loaded with memory to sound appealing, too easily reminding her of a better Solstice night, when she'd stayed up until the early hours showing sketches of flower beds, discussing plans for a warmer season.
She threw herself instead into baking, filling the River Estate so thoroughly with the scent of bread and baked treats that it chased out any other scent that might shadow her footsteps.
Not that Azriel came, if he could help it. The spymaster might well have been a ghost, never truly visible, but somehow managing to haunt her all the same.
Even as she willed herself to forget him, to convince herself that she'd misread every cue, or that perhaps she'd only been a passing fancy for him between his fading love for Mor and whatever the future held for him, night after night, the thoughts she had of him remained unchanged.
Whether fantasy or unfulfilled future, her heart remained inescapably his.
It was nearly spring before she felt his presence again, in a near invisible twist of shadow that skirted along the floor of the small greenhouse Rhys had built for her. The garden itself still slumbered as she filled rows of tiny pots with small seeds purchased in garden shops. They lined her little wooden workbench like a row of little promises, just waiting to escape their casings.
She'd debated feigning ignorance, and perhaps that would have been the wisest thing, but as that shadow stubbornly lingered, she found her face turning towards it, just slightly.
"Tell your master I'm still waiting," she exhaled, as the shadow darted off.
He did not come, but more and more shadows haunted her footsteps, lingering in eaves and crevices where they kept silent vigil. She would catch them sometimes, suspended in shady corners as she pulled bread from ovens or wiped soil from her apron. Some days they drifted dangerously close, as if they longed to touch her, to wind themselves around her like an affectionate cat.
Perhaps it was nothing more than a mere apology, an expression of the regret he'd felt at leaving her that night, some months ago. She tried not to think too carefully on the matter, too afraid to let her desires sprout wings, lest it hear the song of the wind again.
But when he stepped into the dining room one early Spring evening, the rest of their friends already seated as she carried the last of the dishes to the table, she felt that tiny seed of hope root somewhere deep in her chest.