#beasts creatures n critters | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

animasola86 · 2 months ago

Text

🦇 FANGS TO REMEMBER

m!vampires x f!reader 🔥 very explicit 🔥 words: 3.6k

On your way back to the party, you come across a graveyard. Unbeknownst to you, you are trespassing onto someone's property, and they are not happy about it. Or are they?

WARNINGS: NSFW! Explicit sexual content! Vampires! Noncon/dubcon! Threesome! Spitroasting! Biting! (READ ON AO3!)

A/N: This is part 5 of my CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE smut series! 1 🔸 2 🔸 3 🔸 4 🔸 5 🔸 6 🔸 7 This is the continuation of OPTION 3/PART 4 - but can be read individually, let me just set the scene:

CONTEXT: You were invited to a Halloween party in a mysterious house, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, and after drinking a strange drink, you decide to get some fresh air, running into a werewolf who instantly decides to knot and breed you, and after that ordeal is done, you flee from him, and come across a graveyard...

ADDITIONAL WARNING: This one is very dark. It's more noncon than dubcon, so if you don't like the themes, you can skip it (imagine something dark happening) and read the next part here.

You look around, but there's only one way forward: through the graveyard. It's too dark to see anything else, no maze, no garden, no house, you can't even see the cabin anymore you just left. The night is eerily quiet, no critters, nothing. Even the wind seems to take a break for now.

Inhaling deeply, you hug your arms around your body and take a step through the large wrought-iron gates, looking left and right at the rows of crooked tomb stones. A strange mist wafts close to the ground, giving off an otherworldly glow. The moon is long gone it seems, the sky too cloudy to show any stars, but still you can see the various shapes around you.

You're not easily spooked, usually, but being alone in a cemetery at night makes your imagination run wild, wilder than it has been all evening. The slightest movement makes you flinch as you tread carefully along the path, goosebumps rippling over your exposed skin whenever something brushes against your bare legs. The shirt is soft and warm, but in the end not long enough after all, no matter how hard you tug at its hem.

A sudden shuffling sound makes your blood run cold and you freeze on the spot, your heart beating out of your chest, cold fear gripping your limbs. It came from behind one of the larger tomb stones, decorated with a small angel statue. You stare into the darkness, pressing your lips together to keep the noises from spilling past them. Probably just an animal. Your mind is surely playing tricks on you.

But when the same sound comes from right behind you, you whirl around with a shriek, stumbling back as you see a large black shadow blocking your view. You expect to fall onto your butt, but something keeps you from it, another shadow – and this one has hands. Hands that grip your arms, holding you tightly. Another scream rips from your throat as you thrash about, trying to get away, before another hand finds its way to your mouth, muffling all the noises you want to let out.

Your eyes are wide when the shadows around you form into the shapes of two big men, pale in the eerie light, tall and muscular, dressed surprisingly well for creatures that lurk in the dark.

“What do we have here?” the one with his hand on your mouth says, tilting his head, giving you a smile that makes his handsome face look almost diabolical. “A little rabbit? In our cemetery?”

“Did you get lost, little one?” the other man, the one behind you, whispers as he leans his head closer, rubbing his smooth cheek against yours. It's cold to the touch.

You stiffen, unable to do or say anything. Maybe you're still dreaming, or again. But the way these men grab you feels too real. They are strong. Intimidatingly so. You swallow hard, gasping when the one behind you gives you a deep sniff.

“Ugh, she reeks of dog,” he says with a drawl. “Had some fun with the beast, didn't you?”

Suddenly you feel a hand between your legs, a cold touch, coaxing a muffled yelp out of you as you feel probing fingers right against your warm crotch. “Huh, yeah, he got to her alright. Filled to the brim...” He pulls his fingers away and raises them to your face, and you can see the thick substance coating them. “Too bad, really, I was looking forward to ravaging that sweet cunt...”

You glare at him, both in shock and indignation. He pulls his hand from your mouth and shoves his soiled fingers between your lips. A muffled grunt of protest slips from your throat, but your attempts to get away are futile as the other man still holds your arms tightly. A bitter and slightly salty taste fills your mouth, but with how the man presses his digits onto your tongue you can't do anything but flick it around them, licking them clean.

“At least she seems quite obedient,” he muses with a menacing tone, watching you closely, moving his fingers in and out of your mouth.

“We can still have some fun with her,” the man behind you says quietly, his nose nuzzling your neck. “He hasn't marked her yet. She's fair game.”

“Splendid,” the other replies with a laugh and pulls his fingers away with a wet popping sound. You quickly swallow the spit gathered on your tongue and lick your quivering lips. “So, little bunny, do you wanna try to run? I would die for a little hunt... if I wasn't already dead,” he adds with a reverberating laugh that makes you shiver deeply.

You just stare at him, your chest rising and falling faster. “I don't think she'll come far,” the man rubbing his hands over your arms retorts. “She seems weakened. The beast clearly got her good. Let's just enjoy her until her heart gives out, hm?”

You gasp at the implication, immediately silenced by a hand reaching out to grab your chin. “Fine. It is already enough to hear this beautiful beat,” the man in front of you whispers as he leans closer. “Are you scared, rabbit?”

Your eyes dart over his pale face, and when he bares his teeth and licks them slowly, you stare at his pointy canines. After having just met a real werewolf (or so you think, it's all so fuzzy in your head right now), you shouldn't be surprised to meet actual vampires, in a graveyard no less, pale and cold and strong, with sharp fangs and insatiable appetites, but your body still reacts as if you were indeed just a bunny cornered by two predators. A tiny whimper escapes your throat. “Please...”

“Hmm? Please what? Use your words, darling!” the man behind you snarls, rubbing his nose against your neck before you feel his lips on your pulse, nibbling teasingly.

“Please let me go...” you press out.

“Not going to happen, sweetheart,” he replies, his low voice muffled. “You came to us. Walked right onto our property. It's our right to do with you whatever we like...”

You squirm in his hold when he laps his tongue up your neck. The other man watches you, rubbing his thumb over your bottom lip before he suddenly leans closer, pressing his forehead to yours. You gasp, staring at him. “You won't regret it, little one,” he breathes against you. His skin feels cold, but the close proximity makes your cheeks burn up badly. “We'll give you a good time, don't worry your pretty little head!”

And suddenly you are being lifted, nausea rolling over you as you find yourself somehow floating in the air. It's all a blur at this point. Footsteps crunch over gravel and dead leaves, thump against stone plates, old hinges screech as a door is being opened. The fresh air becomes stale and dusty, the light even darker. You move down a set of stairs, but you can't move, your head is swimming, your insides tensing up in a way that borders on painful. You can barely breathe, and you have no idea why.

Candle light flickers to life when the men take you through a large wooden door. Your eyes blink into focus slowly. You seem to be in some sort of mausoleum, old looking, corners full of cobwebs, aged statues lining the walls. In the middle of the round room, there are two stone coffins, both of them open, their heavy stone slabs pushed to the side. You swallow hard, trying to see this as a scene, a decorated room fit for an elaborate Halloween party.

But somehow you doubt this is part of it.

“Excuse the mess,” one of the men says as he walks to the coffins. “We didn't expect company tonight...”

He raises a hand – and as you're being set down on your feet again, you witness how the heavy slab moves seemingly on its own or by a strange unseen force, leaving you even more confused. Both coffins are closed now, and before you can question anything else, you are being draped over the short side of one of them, stomach pressed to the cold stone, arms and legs hanging off the edges. A groan escapes you.

“Let's clean her up first, I can't stand the stink of wolf,” one man says as he steps behind you, pushing your legs further apart. You feel a strange coldness rushing through your body, like water, but not really wet, a sensation that leaves you choking on your own spit. “There, better. Don't you feel better too, darling? No longer stuffed full of disgusting beast semen? Well, I don't want to kink shame or anything, maybe you are into being bred, but we do like our holes squeaky clean – for us to soil all over again.”

You squirm on the stone slab, your hands trying to find purchase on the smooth surface, your legs kicking helplessly, but before you can do anything, the other man steps in front of you, grabbing your chin and lifting your head up. You find yourself face-to-face with his throbbing cock. They don't seem to waste any time, huh? He presses his thumb and finger into your cheeks, forcing your mouth open. You issue a groan of protest that is quickly muffled by his surprisingly warm member. You have no choice but to close your lips around it. (Even if you wanted to bite down on him, you couldn't, his hand is still holding your jaw open.)

“Good bunny, you know what to do, hm?” he tells you, slowly rolling his hips against you, his tip scraping along your gums, teasing at the back of your throat. Saliva pools on your tongue, and you feel the need to swallow it before it drips past your lips. When you do, he groans quietly. “Oh, yes, like that. Do that again.” Somehow his words seem to encourage you, and you swallow around him once more, straining your throat enough for tears to fill your eyes.

Behind you, you feel two cold hands rubbing up and down your thighs, gripping them, pulling them apart, before they slip up your rear and push the large shirt out of the way. “So I assume after your little werewolf ordeal, your poor little cunt is a little tired, wouldn't you agree?” he rasps teasingly. “Good thing you have another hole, huh, my sweet?”

You let out a series of muffled cries around the cock in your mouth when you feel probing fingers between your ass cheeks. “Mhmmnngh!” you croak out, thrashing on the stone slab, trying to get away. A sudden slap on your soft rear makes you howl, but ultimately stops your fidgeting. Your skin burns and throbs horribly. “Shh, relax, rabbit. You can take it. See?”

Before you can react, you feel a strange pressure against your sphincter, a teasing touch but unrelenting, and suddenly you have a finger in your ass. Your tight muscles clench around the thick digit, and you wriggle in your compromised position, almost gagging yourself on the dick between your lips when you push yourself against the man's groin and his cock deeper into your mouth. A jerk goes through your body, your hands fruitlessly trying to hold onto anything.

You don't feel in control of your limbs anymore, it's strange. You can feel everything, but you can't move, only rock back and forth on the coffin. The man behind you pushes his finger deeper, then pulls it out and replaces it with two. The stretch hurts, and you let out a muffled wail. Your noises seem to encourage him when he moves them in and out faster, deeper, a hard press against your protesting muscles.

Meanwhile the man holding your jaw increases the pace of his hips slamming against your face. His cock pushes deep, and you gag violently when he breaches your throat, your body convulsing, spit filling your mouth. He pulls back slightly, allows you to breathe and cough and swallow, but then repeats the motion, and you gag again, and the cycle continues. Your head is spinning by the fifth time he forced his length down your throat, and you feel too weak to protest anymore.

Not even when you notice that the man playing with your ass has added another finger and is plunging his hand hard against your rear, a dizzying rhythm, forceful, stretching you for whatever comes next. You can guess and it scares you. But there's nothing you can do as he suddenly pulls his fingers out with a wet pop and you feel his cockhead pressing against your slightly gaping hole. A deep grunt escapes him when he rocks his pelvis forward, sinking into your depths without mercy, carving his way through your impossible tightness.

Your muffled scream is overpowered by loud gurgling noises as the cock in your mouth pistons in and out fast, always pushing deep, bulging your neck, his crotch slapping into your face with each thrust. You are pushed and pulled, rocked back and forth, impaled front and back, cold hands holding your head up or digging into your hips as the two men use you for their pleasure, their grunts filling the space around you.

Despite their rough handling, you feel a strange heat growing inside you, and you realize that with every slam into your ass or snap into your throat, you are rubbed over the rough stone, and your clit quickly feels raw and swollen from the added stimulation. Moaning into the rapidly moving cock in your mouth, you focus on the good feelings, not the burning friction in your rear, not the rawness of your throat, the lack of air or the helplessness, just the bliss that tries to fight through the pain and discomfort.

But before you can even imagine any edge to fall over, they suddenly slow down, languid strokes that push deep until they stop altogether, one cock buried deep in your ass, the other pushed all the way down your throat as pubic hair tickles your nostrils. Your eyes roll back, your lungs burn, your body spasms fruitlessly. Groans echo in your ear.

“Let's turn her around,” one says.

“You wanna switch places too?” the other replies, almost a little breathlessly.

“Sure, I bet she doesn't mind a little ass to mouth action, huh, sugar?”

A loud slap against your bruised rear makes you gag violently, and as spit fills your mouth and tears stream down your face, you are being rotated on the cold stone slab, arms still hanging limply to the ground while your legs twitch as they're being pushed up and against your heaving chest, opening you up further. Cold air brushes over your exposed skin, and for a short moment they let go of you, cocks pull back, leaving trails of stickiness all over your face and crotch.

You are lightheaded, barely able to function, and that moment of reprieve is short-lived. You didn't even get the chance to swallow or breathe properly before a cock is being shoved back into your mouth. Hands curl around the back of your head, holding it up as the stiff and slimy length is pushed straight into your bruised throat. You can only croak out a muffled grunt before a heavy pair of balls slam against your nose.

“Tongue out,” the man above you orders, and you comply, hoping it'll be easier with your mouth wide open and your tongue extended to guide the throbbing cock in and out. “Good. Just like that. Look at that neck bulging. Ugh,” he continues, groaning as he rams deep into your throat and rests there, cutting off any air flow you may have had earlier. You squirm on the coffin, limbs twitching helplessly.

Before you drift off into unconsciousness, he pulls back and slaps your cheek. The pain drags you back immediately. “No fainting, rabbit, we need you awake for this.” You cough hoarsely, spit and precum flying through the air. You're too weak to open your eyes, and it doesn't matter anyway. His hand is on your neck now, squeezing slightly. “Ahh, yes, listen to that frantic heartbeat,” he rasps, slowly slipping his cock back between your lips. “Are you afraid to choke, hm? Or does that turn you on?”

You gag when he presses into your throat slowly, your whole body jerking against the man on the other side, who's holding your legs open and pressed to your chest. You are allowed to cough and swallow before it happens all over again, again and again, and while one man fucks your throat with reckless abandon, the other rubs his cold hand down your mound, teasing at your swollen clit, parting your puffy labia, but then he dips his finger into your ass, completely ignoring your hungrily clenching cunt.

There's no further preparation, and a moment later he shoves his cock into your tight hole, making you wail against the dick in your throat. He lets go of your legs, causing them to flop about wildly with each thrust as he starts pounding into you hard and fast, then you feel his long fingers on your burrowed shirt. You barely register how it's ripped open, but you do feel those cold palms pressing onto your soft mounds, pebbling your skin, your nipples hardening instantly. The touch is almost soothing among all the other things happening to you.

It's a whirlwind of sensations, the lack of air and strain to your throat and jaw on one side, the rough friction and burning heat and hard pummeling on the other. You are moved back and forth on the stone surface, a limp body to be used. You don't know how long this is going on, but these guys seem to have incredible stamina. They just won't stop.

Whenever you feel as if you're slipping into the welcoming darkness, you are slapped and brought back, your cheeks burning and throbbing, but it's only one of many aches by now. You can't decide which is worse, the suffocating stretch when a cock buries deep into your throat, or the rough pummeling of sore muscles when the other cock rams into your tight ass. It's all a blur in the end.

The men are groaning and grunting, snapping their hips against you, uncaring of your discomforts. They're chasing their own orgasms while you remain teetering far away from any sort of release. The room is filled with loud squelching noises, gurgles and slurps, slapping of skin against skin, a soundscape that seems to be your only form of stimulation. Not even the cold hands on your breasts push you further to the edge, they are just there, holding you, groping hard, anchoring you as you are pushed back and forth.

At least they have a rhythm now, in and out in an alternating way, almost like a seesaw, in goes the one in your throat, out moves the one in your ass, and then it's the other way around. And somehow you find comfort in it as you lie there, held in place, unable to move, your eyelids fluttering, tears and snot drying on your sweat-slick skin.

It's then that you feel cold fingers brushing down your quivering belly, down, down, until they rub against your clit, and you arch your back, inhale that cock in your throat, jerk your hips against the one pounding into your ass, and you come, clenching down hard, stiffening, eyes rolling back, bliss exploding through the veils of darkness.

You feel like floating, leaning into the wave of pleasure that washes over you as you let it all happen. And as you do, the men's motions grow jerkier, rougher, faster, and they come too, almost at the same time. Cum shoots down your throat, and you'd expect to feel the same sensation in your ass, but the man there pulls out and empties himself all over your mound and stomach, all the way to your neck. The pressure in your throat loosens then, and similar spurts of wet warmth hit your face.

Raspy breaths make it past your soiled, swollen lips as you lie there with your eyes closed. Strong hands move you until you're lying fully on your back, legs outstretched, arms put at the sides of your body, head supported by the hard stone slab beneath you. Cold fingers trail your skin.

“I wish we could keep her,” you hear a quiet voice that barely makes it past the cotton in your head.

“I'm not risking another war with those savages just because of one puny human...” says a different voice. “We'll find another one.”

“Let's feed and get her back onto the path.”

You blink your eyes open, noticing the two men, the two vampires, standing over you, staring down at you from both sides of the coffin. Their teeth are bared, fangs glistening in the swaying candle light, and before you can do anything, they lean down, one goes straight for your neck, his pointy canines sinking deeply into your skin, and you feel it, despite your fucked-out state, you feel the cold crashing through your veins.

The same sensation happens between your legs, on one of your inner thighs as the other bites down into your soft flesh. You whimper soundlessly, throat hoarse and sore, body too weak to move against the assault. They suck your blood noisily, like the thirsty monsters they are, and you just let it happen, again, what other choice do you have? Your head is spinning as you feel the cold spread through your trembling limbs.

And the world fades...

1 🔸 2 🔸 3 🔸 4 🔸 5 🔸 6 🔸 7

End notes: The last part is here!

By the way, this is a nod towards my standalone Vampire oneshot Down the Rabbit Hole which also has dubcon elements and more than one vampire, but isn't as dark.

MASTERLIST // AO3 // ORIGINAL WORKS

KINKTOBER 2024 MASTERLIST

190 notes · View notes

kiame-sama · 3 months ago

Text

Humans Are Extinct (Yandere!TWST x Fem!Reader) Monster AU pt 7

(Last of my predrawn beast men, so I should probably see if I can get the next chapter picture drawn despite my slow af laptop fighting me for every bit of existence)

Warnings; Yandere, platonic yandere, romantic yandere yandere behavior, yandere tempers, yandere attitudes, custody battle, poaching, territorial behavior, hoard guarding, implied violence, cooking, casual threats, untrusting yet kind-hearted reader, fem pronouned reader, Vampire Bat, Raiju, Cervitaur, Dragon, Crow, Unicorn, Cecilia, Harpy, Nemean Lion, Shinigami, Water Nymph, Gnoll, Crow,

~~~~~~~~

The loud crack of thunder drew you from your deep sleep. You had been pressing your face and entire body into the warmth beneath you and you could already feel the faint imprints along your cheek from whatever you were laying on. Thunder continued to roll outside and you slowly tried to gather your bearings.

Currently, you were in the nest Malleus had constructed in Ramshackle, though you were not the only occupant when you fell asleep or when you woke up. Lilia and Sebek were awake, their gazes turned outside and it was still rather dark out. You slowly sat up, trying to see what was so interesting outside when a green bolt of lighting struck the ground near Ramschackle. The sudden lighting forced a squeak of fright to escape you which drew the attention of Lilia and Sebek.

"I was worried he would wake you. It's alright, (Y/n), go back to sleep."

"What's going on, Lilia?"

"An unfortunate poacher decided to try their luck and Malleus was the one who took note of their presence. Don't worry, you're safe."

"Is Malleus okay?"

Lilia giggled at this, reaching out a hand to pat your head in an affectionate way. He was acting as if he didn't just say Malleus was fighting someone who was trying to hunt you down for their own nefarious gains.

"Of course he is. Malleus is a Dragon and there are very few who can actually stand up against a Dragon."

You were going to respond to Lilia when you noticed something strange. Silver didn't seem to be present and he certainly wasn't with Lilia or Sebek. Worry began to bubble up in your chest as to where the Reindeer man could possibly be before you felt the warm bed beneath you breathe.

Looking down, you were both horrifed with yourself and the situation as you realized you had been laying across Silver's Reindeer half like a bed. Your legs straddled the Reindeer's hips and you had likely been nuzzled down into the shoulder blades of the deer half. His human half was sitting up and completely still even as one of his blue and purple aurora colored eyes stared at you over his shoulder.

He was very warm and soft.

"Oh? Oh! Goodness, Silver, I'm so sorry-!"

As soon as it hit you that you must have crawled on top of the Reindeer during the night, you were quickly trying to get off of his back. Lilia actually started to laugh as you quickly dismounted from the Reindeer's back, falling back into a pile of pillows and disrupting poor Grim. The cat-like creature responded in a startled way to being jostled, his pronged tail lashing wildly as his fur stood on end in fear. You would have laughed at the startled response if you didn't feel so badly about frightening him to that point.

"Myeh?! Hey! What's the big deal? I'm sleeping-"

Another crack of thunder sent the furball diving forward to hide against your stomach, shaking in abject horror from the uncomfortably close sound. Of course Grim would be terrified of lightning, who knows how easily that 'den' of his would flood in a storm or how close he has been to being struck by a bolt. You couldn't help but pull the soft gray critter closer, petting his torn ears and back to try and soothe him even as his little wings shook.

"... You can lay on my back if that will help you sleep."

The almost tired drawl came from Silver as he slightly turned to look at you better, his Reindeer half partially rolling to one side when he yawned. Despite how inviting the offer was, you were still upset with yourself and worried you had offended the silver haired man somehow. Though you had been dubious about sharing the large nest with your- mostly uninvited- guests, you had been the one to invade his personal space and even climbed on his back while you slept.

"No! No, it's okay. I'm so sorry, Silver. I didn't mean to-"

"Why are you so upset?"

"... What?"

"I'm not angry, if that's why you're worried. Father sleeps on my back quite often during the day. I'm not angry you chose me as your sleeping companion."

"But I didn't mean to-"

"I know. You likely were drawn to how warm I typically am. It is quite drafty in this building, and it doesn't seem like there is any central heating."

You made a mental note to ask the professors about potentially acquiring a heated blanket to avoid cuddling your bed companions while you slept. It seemed like Silver was being truthful with you as Lilia crawled over to your side from where he had been gazing out the window. He was quick to flop down across the secondary shoulders of the large Reindeer and ruffled the silver fur with his Bat wings as he made himself comfortable.

"Silver's nice and soft, and his coat always keeps him warm even in winter. He really does make a good bed whenever I need a quick nap. Besides, he makes such cute little snoring sounds-"

"Father!"

"Keeheehee, just saying~ (Y/n), you should have seen him when he was just a little wobbly calf. I have some pictures back at Diasomnia I can show you. His legs were so long and he always tripped over them-"

"Father, please."

Lilia's joking helped calm your stress from the situation and also seemed to be helping Grim calm down. The blue-eyed cat-bat finally lifted his head from where he had been hiding his face against your stomach, reaching out a paw to touch the Reindeer's side. He clearly must have liked how warm and soft Silver was as he crawled out of your arms, curling up next to Lilia on Silver's back and snuggling down into the shaggy fur. You almost missed it, but as you looked up at Silver you could see a clear bright pink blush painting his fair cheeks before he looked away.

"It's over. My liege is on his way back."

Sebek said calmly, still looking outside with an almost unreadable expression. The lightning hadn't struck more than once and the thunder quickly quieted down after the first boom that woke you. It was almost like the storm was not actually a storm and you wondered just what it was that caused the lightning or why it was green.

He entered the room silently, only his bright green eyes were visible in the dark of the hallway as if he were wreathed in shadows themselves before he entered the room. Moonlight streamed across his form and he was once again the odd Dragon that had stumbled across you that first day.

"Did I wake you, child of man?"

"The thunder did."

"My apologies."

"Why are you apologizing for thunder? You didn't make it happen... Right?"

Malleus smiled as he returned to the nest, settling by your side and smiling at you patiently. It must not have been raining as he didn't seem to have a drop of water on him. He tilted his head and regarded you affectionately as if he were watching a beloved pet paw at him for attention.

"How little you know... Don't worry, there won't be anymore thunder tonight. I have the feeling that my message was recieved loud and clear."

"Did..." you found it oddly difficult to talk, "did you kill someone?"

Malleus didn't answer you, he just slowly blinked and reached out a clawed hand, patting your head gently. You found yourself wanting a bit more distance from the Dragon, wondering if you made a mistake to ask a question you truly did not want the answer to. As per usual, Lilia was quick to interrupt the tension with a loud yawn and stretch as if to imply you all should return to sleep.

"Here, (Y/n), I'll groom you to sleep again!"

"You really don't have to, Lilia."

"But I want to."

"One of these days I need to talk to everyone about personal space..."

~•§•~

The early morning dawn seemed to be a sleepy one as things slowly emerged from their warm beds and into the brisk morning. The low roll of thunder heard late in the night was certainly not lost on anyone as to the source of the sound. Even the few who rose for an early meeting seemed to be acutely aware of the Dragon's absence.

"Good morning, all. I have called this meeting at the behest of Riddle concerning the most recent events of orientation."

The Headmage stood at the head of the table, his feathers slightly ruffled from sleep as it was still quite early in the day. He usually rose with the sun and clearly had more energy than some of the Housewardens sitting at the table. Leona was barely awake as he lay with his head on the table, only the flicking tail showed the Nemean Lion was even conscious.

"As I am sure you all know by now, we have a Human living in the dorm on the main campus. Unlike most dorms, you do not need to enter a mirror to get to it and so it is easier for outsiders to access. However, there is no other place the Human can stay without putting her at risk of too curious students. Riddle, you told me you had a solution in mind for this?"

Riddle nodded, clearing his throat and straightening his bow.

"(Y/n) is Human and we all understand the gravity of the situation at hand. Humans died out from Twisted Wonderland centuries ago and now one has appeared in our school. It is our duty as Housewardens to assist in the safeguarding of this Human as her survival could mean the beginning of advancements made far beyond our lifetimes and even in our lives now. I'm sure we all understand the importance of keeping her safe. This being said, I am of the mind that it's time to switch out who is safeguarding (Y/n). This should be a shared duty of all the Housewardens, not just a privilege exclusive to Diasomnia."

Crowley nodded, leaning against his hand as he gave the proposition more thought. It seemed several of the other Housewardens were in agreement- at least, those who were physically present- at the idea of a shared responsibility.

"I, for one, think this is a wonderful idea, Riddle. Octavinelle is ready to open our doors to this poor unfortunate soul and keep her safe."

"You aren't usually one to offer help without a price, Azul. What are you looking to get out of this?"

"Nothing, of course! Just looking to help the less fortunate."

"I highly doubt that, Azul."

It was then Vil spoke up, the Harpy regarding the other Housewardens as if assessing them while he spoke. He could raise issue with letting the soft Human stay with any one of these uncouth ruffians.

"I agree that we all need to take turns guarding the Human, but how many of us can honestly be trusted with her? It is clear now that all of Twisted Wonderland will soon know she is here if they don't already. Frankly I wouldn't trust any one of you with her safety. Riddle, what makes you think you should be the one to protect her?"

"W-What?"

"It was one of your dorm's students who decided to post a picture of her. I think your dorm has done enough damage for now. I should think you would agree to revoke your own rights to guard her until you can prove you are able to keep your students in line."

"What is that supposed to mean, Vil?"

"Oh? Do I have to spell it out for you? Usually you're smarter than this, Riddle."

Vil stood, his crest raised and an almost cruel smile curling his lips as he approached the distraught Unicorn. As far as Riddle was concerned, only he knew the rules to taking proper care of a Human so only he could provide adequate accommodations for her. But the way Vil spoke made a dark kind of doubt seep into Riddle's mind, wondering if the Harpy could be right and that alone was an upsetting reality Riddle didn't really want to face at the moment.

"You can't even begin to protect that Human from students in your own dorm, how can you hope protect her from actual threats?"

Riddle wanted to retort or have the grinning Harpy's head but he couldn't find the words to respond to the proud bird. Vil only grinned wider at the silence he was met with before turning to the other Housewardens with that same energy.

"None of you can. Leona shouldn't even be considered given he's a Nemean Lion. Azul will try to make a deal with her. Kalim will lose her within minutes. Idia can't even talk to us let alone talk to and protect her. Really, the only two who could be of any use are Malleus and I. Malleus is genetically wired to be a good guardian and I certainly have enough skill to actually keep her alive."

Crowley considered Vil's words, tilting his head side to side as he thought about what the Harpy said. He was of the mind to just let the Human choose her own guard, but maybe he would have to reconsider that given how upset the Housewardens were getting over her and it had only been two days. There was truth to the unusual charm of the extinct species and the hold they clearly had over others even in such a short time.

"I think you all are ignoring the bigger truth and being selfish as hell."

The growl came from the golden lion that now lifted his head from the table he had been resting it on. His green eyes glinted in the morning light and the faint sunrays seemed to shine off of his golden coat. Even his wild tresses held a faint glimmer that made the prince look every bit as regal as his lineage suggested.

"She isn't from here. She has a home she likely wants to go back to. We can't talk like we're keeping her when we should find a way to send that Mousey home."

"I would agree with you, Leona," Azul started, his eyes glinting with humor at the knowledge he was about to reveal, "but there are a few problems with that notion. Jade and I spoke with her yesterday and she claims she came from somewhere filled with Humans. There is nowhere like that left in Twisted Wonderland. I would wager she is from another reality entirely, one where only Humans thrive. One that we can't get to despite many trying in the past to prove we are not alone. I don't know how she got here, but she is stuck here now. Besides, do you really want to be the one to tell Malleus we are taking his Human away? I get you don't pay attention in classes, but I certainly do and I have heard the many tales of Dragons going as far as to kidnap Humans they are fond of."

Leona growled a low warning to the Cecilia to watch his words lest he be the recieving party of the Lion's ire. Though he was a lazy Lion and didn't seem to be bothered with much, he was still a force to be reckoned with when he actually decided to fight.

"Why the hell should I care why that damn lizzard wants the Human?"

"Well, Dragons and other Fae did take the extinction of Humans the hardest and mourn the longest, I would wager the older ones are still in mourning. Next to them, the Merfolk were the next most heartbroken by the ending of such a fascinating species. I wouldn't expect you to understand- being a Nemean Lion and all- but-"

"Keep talking, Cephalo-punk and I'll give you something to mourn over."

Azul closed his mouth quickly, knowing he wouldn't actually stand a chance if pitted against the weapon-immune golden Lion. For all his abilities, so many seemed to pale in comparison to the sheer strength Leona contained in his form alone. Out of the water, a Lion would always win in a direct fight against an octopus, the same was true for Nemean Lions and Cecilia.

"I can protect her better than most of you but none of you want to admit that. You all want to pretend I'll gobble that little Mousey up and refuse to even let me stand my own ground. What? Too afraid she'll like me more than you lot?"

This got Vil's feathers to ruffle as the Harpy seemed ready to fight the grinning Lion that so clearly challenged those at the table. Luckily for everyone else, the floating tablet finally decided to interrupt the conversation.

"Fine, we all gotta do it. I vote everyone's dorm gets put in a raffle and the next Housewarden to guard her is chosen that way."

"This is unlike you, Idia. You don't even show up in person to most classes."

"Humans were the best inventors we had before they died out. The last human lived on the Isle of Woe and made enough inventions to keep the Shroud family rich for centuries. Why wouldn't I want the best story telling species and most inventive species to give me new ideas? Probably why you want her too, Azul."

"Well, I certainly understand a profitable business venture when one is presented to me..."

"Exactly my point."

Crowley nodded, clapping his hands together and drawing the attention of those at the table. He heard exactly what he wanted to hear and he was willing to give every Housewarden a fair chance, even Leona.

"I believe a raffle is a fantastic idea, Mr. Shroud! And because I am just so kind to all, every Housewarden will be given a fair shot."

"Headmage, I beg you to reconsider-"

"Let's start this raffle!"

Riddle tried to start but the Crow had made up his mind and there was no changing it. As he used magic to summon his usual way of raffling students, he glanced around the room for a moment. Odd, he only counted six but there should be seven?

"... Did no one remember to invite Mr. Draconia to today's meeting?"

~•§•~

You stood in the kitchen of Ramschackle dorms, tiredly cooking up enough breakfast to feed your uninvited guests, Cater, yourself, and Grim. Despite your annoyance at being the only one to cook- let alone being the only one who really knew how- you dutifully continued your task. According to Silver, Lilia actually cooked often but was so abysmally bad at it they all thought cooking was a useless skill. It wasn't until you cooked for them that they even realized cooking food could actually make it taste better and not worse.

"If you all insist on making me cook for you, I'm going to insist you all provide the ingredients. The kitchen may be well stocked now, but if I have to keep feeding extra mouths every day the pantry is going to eventually run out."

You idly listened to the sizzle as you half-jokingly scolded the group that milled about your kitchen and sniffed in your direction occasionally. They were eager to get some breakfast from you and had all woken up before you did in anticipation for the warm meal you would no doubt create. Apparently you had once again moved to cuddle Silver's warm body in your sleep and the Reindeer refused to let Grim or even Lilia wake you before the sun was mostly up. The five others in the shared nest were all in agreement to let you wake on your own time, but your actual invited guest was quick to herald in the morning and woke you. It seemed like Malleus and Sebek were ready to attack the redhead but quickly calmed when you pulled yourself out of the nest to start cooking.

Cater had been an affectionate nuisance and asked you nonstop questions about what you were doing and how Humans cooked things. It became very clear to you- based on his questions and curiosity- that junkfood really didn't exist in Twisted Wonderland. Despite how you wanted to cry upon hearing this and mourn the loss of your comfort foods, you realized that you may be able to make your own junkfoods. You would certainly need help acquiring things, but there had to be some kind of inventive monster on this campus that could help you.

"I agree! These guys can bring the food and you can cook it! Why let them get all this free stuff if they don't help with getting or making it?"

"I can help cook-"

You were quick to smack the reaching hand with your wooden spoon, startling Lilia as his wings fluffed out in surprise.

"You," you started with a near threatening tone, "will keep your hands off of the things in my kitchen. Silver already told me how your cooking is and I will not allow you to scorch my meals."

"I think I'm a pretty good cook-"

"The answer is 'no'. You don't get to cook in my kitchen. I agree with Grim that it would be a welcome change to have you all bring me the foods you want and maybe even more spices than the few I have here, but you aren't cooking. If you really want to help me right now, you can start washing dishes."

Silver sent a silent thanks your way for sparing him and the others from another evening spent eating Lilia's cooking. The Bat Fae had learned to love cooking from the few Humans he had the pleasure of meeting, but he was so abysmally bad at it that his 'meals' could barely be considered food. Malleus and Sebek were also relieved to see you quickly shut down any idea of letting Lilia cook and they all breathed a sigh of relief.

"I can do dishes! Riddle and Trey make me do them all the time. Don't know why Trey never lets me help him bake things though."

Cater was quick to roll up his sleeves, starting on the pile of dishes that had already begun to accumulate in the large sink. Maybe it wouldn't be all that bad if you could get your freeloaders to help clean or gather ingredients instead of doing it all yourself. Despite calling them freeloaders, you were appreciative of at least Malleus and Lilia being fairly adept guards for your safety. It did make you wonder what Malleus had done last night, but you also felt in your heart of hearts that you didn't really want to know if the lovely Dragon had killed someone on your behalf.

"Hey," there was loud scratching at that side door again and you already knew who it was, "the door's locked again. Please, have mercy, I'm just a starving Gnoll."

"... I really shouldn't have fed him. He's gonna come back every day and night for more."

You had the foresight to add extra to what you were making, anticipating the unusual pull your cooking seemed to have on the local monster population. Part of you wanted to keep feeding Ruggie as the gaunt appearance of the ever hungry Gnoll pulled at your heartstrings. His clear hunger and almost non-existent stomach told you just how little the Hyena man actually ate and it genuinely saddened you to know he was likely actually starving.

"Lilia, can you get the door?"

"On it~"

Ruggie was quick to scamper up to your side and sniff loudly at the food you were cooking. His tail wagged at almost impossible speeds as his stomach howled to be satiated, his Hyena head bobbing up and down when he began to cackle in excitement. Despite the warnings you had received about Gnolls, Ruggie didn't act like a slavering beast that sought Human flesh, instead he seemed much like someone who grew up never knowing when he could eat again or if he would be safe in the night. He reminded you so much of that first good look you got at Grim, covered in all the scars that riddled his little body and marred his cute appearance with tales of agony sustained. Both of them made you want to protect them however you could.

As you moved over to another pan which you had been using to cook up some scrambled eggs, you couldn't help but chuckle when Ruggie continued to vocalize his excitement. The cackling and whooping from the Hyena was almost a comforting song in the background of your morning. It was only when he reached a grizzled paw towards the pans that you barked out a similar whoop at him. Your sound startled the Gnoll as his gaze snapped to you in surprise, his nose working overtime as if to find the fellow Gnoll that whooped in response to his sounds.

"Woah! You didn't say you knew how to speak Gnoll!"

"I don't."

"What was that then?"

"Where I'm from, Humans are typically quite good at vocal mimicry because it is how most of our infants learn to speak. You were whooping, so I whooped back."

Ruggie cocked his head to the side curiously, you could almost see the gears in his head turning and grinding as he took in your words. His short tail had been still as he lost himself in thought before it resumed the rapid wagging pace as his brain caught back up to the rest of him.

"Cool! What other sounds can you make?"

The rest of your time cooking was spent making various noises- from growls, to cackles, even to various barking- to entertain the Gnoll and distract him from the food. Once it was ready, you had Sebek get enough plates for the eight of you and set to divvying up the meals. Naturally, Ruggie and Grim were the first to happily dig in to their breakfasts.

Things were peaceful and somewhat quiet, but as it usually was in this strange new world, things were not going to stay quiet for long.

"(Y/n)," a familiar voice called from the direction of the door to your dorms, recognizing the voice of the Headmage Crow, "I have news and a gift for you, my little chick! Where are you?"

"We're in the kitchen!"

The Headmage was surprised to see the odd group you had gathered in your kitchen, looking over the various students in surprise.

"Mr. Diamond? What are you doing here?"

"I told Cater he could stay here for the night since he was kicked out of his dorm. Sure, what he did was stupid and I am still mad about it, but no one should have to spend a night in those woods. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if something terrible happened to him, especially in the name of protecting me."

"It's beautiful," the Crow sniffed as if he were about to cry, "such a heartwarming display of genuine kindness! I would expect nothing less from the beautiful heart of a Human! I've missed you wonderfully naïve and forgiving little creatures so much! Nothing quite like a Human's forgiveness to soothe the turbulent soul!"

You were stunned when the Crow actually burst into tears, covering his face with his hands and openly weeping from your- in your mind- simple act of kindness. It seemed the others weren't prepared for this behavior either as they all stared at the fully grown Crow Fae man weeping and bawling like an infant. He was quick to compose himself despite the sudden onslaught of tears as he pulled you into a hug you were too surprised to return, wondering what his problem was that he was so ready to emotionally break down in front of you.

"My beautiful little chick is the kindest soul to ever live and grace these halls with such a warm heart!"

"Um..."

"Here," he interrupted your confusion and pulled back to shove a hastily wrapped package into your hands, "A gift from your professors! It's a cellular device to let you communicate with us when you need. Sam assures me Idia has already programed our numbers into it and it is ready to be used whenever you wish."

"Thanks? Why-"

"Also! The other Housewardens and I have come to an agreement concerning your continued need for guards due to Mr. Diamond's actions. All Housewardens and their accompanying Vice-Housewardens will contribute to protecting this dorm and will switch out every week based on a raffle. This week is Diasomnia's turn, next week is Ignihyde's turn. You haven't met Idia or Ortho yet, but they'll be by to introduce themselves soon. Well, Ortho probably will be, Idia is excited to meet you but he isn't one to socialize much..."

A deep snarl came from where Malleus stood, casually setting his plate down to face the Crow directly and continue the deep percussive noise of his displeasure. It was more than obvious to everyone that the Dragon was not content with the idea of giving you up even for others to guard.

"You dare divvy up my hoard like I should have no say in what happens to her? My Human is not a pet to trade with anyone and everyone who takes interest."

"I'm not saying that, Malleus, what I am saying is her protection should be taken seriously by all students at Night Raven College and the best way to show others she is worth defending is to allow them time to form their own bonds with her by protecting her. Besides, Diasomnia needs their Housewarden and Vice-Housewarden. It isn't fair to those students to be left without yourself and Mr. Vanrouge permanently."

Malleus just growled in response, knowing Crowley was right but still furious he was not part of the decision making process.

"And Kingscholar? What of his dorm?"

"Mr. Kingscholar is a Housewarden and has made a convincing argument for allowing himself to be one of (Y/n)'s guards. As Savanaclaw has no Vice-Housewarden, it will soley fall on his shoulders when his name is drawn."

Ruggie then spoke up, trying to give yourself and Malleus a wide berth to not upset the Dragon further. Though the Gnoll was quick to fold to more powerful mages, he was excited to hear Leona would be given a chance and equal respect as a Housewarden.

"If Leona actually asked to help, no way he will let anyone tell him no. He doesn't like doing extra work, so the fact he volunteered for extra work shows he actually means to do it!"

"Exactly my thinking! Why deny such a strong student a chance to prove himself? Who knows, perhaps his time with (Y/n) will prove Nemean Lions do not deserve the negative view society has of them."

You were irritated that none of these men bothered to ask you how you feel about the situation, but if the nighttime interruptions were anything to go off of, you were still in danger. Though the prospect of being bounced around between several monster men didn't excite you, there was obviously need for their protective behavior.

"Now, I hope you all enjoy your classes today. I hear there may even be an unbirthday party happening in Heartslabuyl that you may wish to attend. Have a pleasant morning, my little chick."

#kiame-sama #yandere #x reader #yandere x reader #reader insert #tw yandere #yandere twisted wonderland #twst yandere #twst monster au #Humans Are Extinct TWST AU

364 notes · View notes

raptorfae53 · 2 years ago

Photo

This art is so cool.

Humpback Whale with Ancestors

“Look how much we’ve changed”

#beasts creatures n critters

16K notes · View notes

edgeray · 6 months ago

Note

Hello 🍉anon again, hope you’re doing okay and I hope my writing is not atrocious for this request. This idea has been on my mind for an Arlecchino x dragon reader(similar to Neuvillette). So, Arlecchino receive a report from her operatives that an unknown creature is lurking in the shadow near Poisson, that keeps on attacking the others fatui members and stealing their rations. She tells them that she will look into it eventually as she doesn’t want their ressources to be stolen. She starts to investigate to gather information on this creature and possibly locate it and by a twisted turn of fate, stumbles into a dragon(secretly the reader)that look awfully hurt and almost on the verge of dying. Arlecchino took pity on the rather tiny looking dragon (tought it seems to be an adult one) and brought them to the house of the heart to treat their wounds.

As the times pass and Arlecchino started to grow fond of the dragon, she see in the corner of the room, a human. Visibly confused, she starts to draw her scythe ready to impale the person in front of her should they pose a threat. Then the reader just go up to her and nuzzle into her as if it was the most natural thing in the world and it was at this moment that she realized it was the dragon she had rescued. They start to bond and eventually grow more intimate with each others.

My Little Fire

(Arlecchino x GN! Reader)

A/N - Hi 🍉 Anon! Nice to see you again <3. Sorry this took so long. I just spoiled you guys with dragon arle, but how about dragon reader? Great idea, anon. Y'all really love dragons huh? Dragons are cool af, I don't blame you guys. Unfortunately, I dunno a whole lot of genshin lore, so how genshin dragons work, idrk. I made you a Pyro Dragon, because bonding over fire abilities >>> Dunno why I was so braindead while writing this, but that's why this took me an extra day to write this. By the way, the title is the english translation of the last three words. I headcanon that Arlecchino can speak Fontainian (French). Content warnings / info - monster x human, reader is a dragon, reader is referred to ‘it’ for the most part, not second pov until the middle, arle's pov, reader is gn!, 1.7k words

Arlecchino didn't typically deal with these sorts of outings, not when her job typically dealt with information gathering and diplomacy. However, she couldn't turn a blind eye to this report in another Fatui camp situated in Poisson. Purportedly, rations have been going missing despite attempts to secure and protect them. Fatui operatives have been injured, and while Arlecchino does not doubt that some incompetence may have come into play, she does not believe that they are truly that incompetent. The operatives confirm that it is some type of creature, given the claws marks and the teeth indents the harmed operatives detailed. Whatever it was, it was too quick for the members to see, and so she now had to deal with it.

Arriving at the camp, witness accounts didn't prove to be very helpful in terms of identifying the troublesome critter. However, the storage room, where the rations were stored, provided an interesting story to her. Unsurprisingly, clawed scratches littered around the containers of food, though she notices the indentures were caused by rather small paws. Despite the suggestion that the creature was rather tiny, it did not mean that creature was not weak, able to cut through solid metal. Interestingly enough, scorch marks also surrounded the area, even though there were no burns recorded in the injury accounts. The creature also seems rather famished. Each occurrence it raids the storage room, a considerable amount of food was stolen. Fascinating. Arlecchino can think of very few creatures like this but all of them seem implausible.

However, there was a pattern to this creature’s visits. Every three nights, it came, wrecking havoc to whatever was in its way, but Arlecchino is sure that she'd be successful in capturing the beast tonight. She orders that no operatives are around the area–the last thing she desires is some inept fool getting in her way–and then she waits outside.

It's near midnight when she first sees a glimpse of the creature's silhouette, about the size of a cat, but she can make out a long tail with spikes. Just as she anticipated, the creature appeared, flying through the open window she purposely opened. It pauses at the entrance, as if observing the lack of guards, but not questioning it as it dashes across the floor. Either this isn't a very smart creature, or its desperation for food outweighs the risks. Regardless, it just made a mistake.

She uses her speed to enter the room before the creature has time to react, standing in front of the window it entered through. She closes the window, her eyes narrowing down on the now cornered beast. A scaled creature, with horns and wings. Its ears flattens against its head and their wings press against its body, imitating the fearful behavior a mutt would display. The longer she observers the creature the more she realizes that these traits match those of a dragon, albeit a very small dragon. She wonders if this was just a hatchling.

The small dragon snarls at her, and a blaze emanates from its spine, the flames coursing down to its tail. The bright flames illuminate the dragon's features more, and it's when she notices that blood is spewing from a gruesome cut on its leg.

An injured Pyro Dragon? It's terribly small, and she can't imagine how this one is still alive given its injury. Although the fire is an indicator it's a mature adult, the size is a cause of concern. What a pitiful thing.

Arlecchino’s eyes flicker over to the box that the dragon tried getting into. As she approaches it, the dragon snarls, tensing its body to lunge at her at any second, however, she simply ignores it. Opening the lid, she's met with thick cuts of raw meat. She takes several cuts of the meat from the insulated container, before holding it out in front of the dragon. If the dragon needs raw meat, she has a particular selection of premium raw meat for herself that she could use for the dragon.

“Eat,” she demands as she offers the food. The dragon, still maintaining its anxious behavior, stalks closer, sniffing the food before it latches its teeth on the steak.

“I have as much meat as you could want, better quality as well. I'll feed you, shelter you, and take care of that cut for you. Come with me.” She says, offering another slab of meat.

The dragon doesn't respond, nor stop eating, but its body relaxes. By the time it reaches its last piece of meat, it's eating out of her hand. Arlecchino uses the close proximity to examine the dragon's injuries. The dragon nudges its head against her hand, and Arlecchino strokes the dragon's head.

“Will you come home with me?”

The dragon gives her an affirmative croak.

—

The dragon did not grow any larger even in the months it stayed with her, nor did it transform into its human form yet. Its wound had been festering for quite a while, however under her care, it is healing remarkably quickly. Arlecchino proposes that the dragon is using its energy to heal from the wound. Had the dragon not done so, it would have surely met an agonizing fate. This continuous depletion didn't allow for the dragon to grow in size, transform, or use its powers and it would have continued in that state for years had she not rescued it.

It must be because of this that the dragon does not take long to get attached to her.

The dragon always sticks near her, sometimes physically on top of her. If it's not on her shoulder or head, then it's on her lap. Getting accustomed to how clingy the dragon is was a struggle, but she soon learns.

If she'd allow it, it'd follow her everywhere. It's almost endearing.

It only took three days for the dragon to sneak into her bedroom. The morning after, she awakened with an unfamiliar weight over her torso, and she found that the dragon was nestled on top of her. The next night that she slept, it was nuzzled against her neck and sprawled over her right shoulder. She'd be lying if she said it was an unwelcome sight, and it became a nightly occurrence.

Often the dragon would play and entertain the House of the Hearth children. Sometimes, it'd accompany her outside, but only on certain missions. After all, she needed to test the dragon’s abilities in its current condition, and who better to test it on than the scum of Fontaine?

Something else she finds intriguing is that the dragon devours fire, much like how the Iudex fancies his water, though the dragon is particular to her blood flames than any typical flames. On occasion, she uses her powers as a treat that the creature happily indulges in.

Arlecchino only wonders what more she would learn once the dragon finally transforms.

—

Arlecchino returns to the House of the Hearth after another irritating Harbinger meeting, rather exasperated and irked by some of the impudence and dimness of her ‘coworkers.’ She reaches her bedroom, exhaling a sigh. Before she enters, she hears scuffling from beyond her bedroom door. Her door is slightly cracked open, implying that someone had entered during her absence. From the small opening of her door, she catches a glimpse of a figure. Instantly, her eyes narrow and she withdraws her scythe.

Intruders have no place in her house. She knows that no children are inside, as it's one of the first things she's instilled when they first come: stay away from her room under any circumstance. So who is this audacious soul that dares trespass into her chambers?

Upon opening the door, she does not expect the speed of her assailant, as a figure crashes into her, wrapping their arms around her neck, face pressed against her neck. Arlecchino is momentarily stunned by the action, but for some reason, it feels familiar. The body is abnormally hot, too warm for a human being. This isn't someone she recognizes, and she was about to throw the being off of her when she paused. A purr erupts from the other person's throat, the vibrations coursing through the Harbinger.

“Arle…” the person murmurs, the name making Arlecchino hesitate. They lean away, tilting their head and glancing up at her, and then her breath hitches. Vibrant, slitted eyes stare back at her, that gaze only belonging to a certain dragon she knows.

“You're the–”

“–Dragon. It's finally nice to meet you, Arlecchino,” you say, as you finally uncoil your arms around her. Arlecchino observes you for longer, her scythe disappearing. Now that there's no threat, Arlecchino takes the time to observe your human form.

“Are you fully healed?”

You nod, giving her a soft smile. “I am. Thank you. I'm indebted to you. I'm sure you know of this, but I would not have survived for much longer if it weren't for your help. If you'd allow me, I'd like to work under you as a repayment. I'm sure you'd like what I have to offer.”

Arlecchino closes her eyes, a ghost of a smile appearing over her lips. “Very well.”

—

Arlecchino learns many things about you. She learns of your favorite food, which happens to be her blood fire. The way you favor your meat served and how you're incredibly food-excitable. She learns that your wings and tails are incredibly sensitive underneath her fingertips and she is well aware that she abuses this knowledge. She learns that your presence lifts her heart and it’s only you that can appreciate her curse.

Your favorite touch from her is your head. Everyday, she'd pat you on the head the same way she did the night she saved you. Kissing your forehead and carding through your hair are close seconds.

She learns that there are some things that don't change even with your new form. While you never return to your small size in your dragon form, it does not mean you still do not linger around her, sitting in her lap when she's at her desk. You still play with the children, often acting as the ‘Mother’ role that the children did not have. And every night, you return to her bedside, embraced in her arms.

There are a few things that have changed with your new form. Arlecchino feels as if you've rekindled her, your love is another flame in her veins that doesn't scorch her being, but instead, you warm her soul, consuming her cursed blood flames.

It's what inspires the name that she always calls you before you drift to sleep.

“Mon petit feu.”

#arlecchino x reader #arlecchino x you #arlecchino #genshin impact x reader #genshin x reader #genshin impact fic #genshin impact fanfics #genshin fics #genshin fanfics #edgeray.writes #edgeray.requests #edgeray.🍉anon

218 notes · View notes

skelizard · 6 months ago

Text

COMMISSIONS: CLOSED!

G'day! I have a dumb fuckin' thing growin' inside of me (nothin' too scary, but I am gonna needa get surgery to remove it most likely). SO I am opening commissions!

Please note that my prices are in Australian Dollars (AUD), which means the prices are about 1/3rd cheaper for you USD/EUR peeps. Use a currency convertor to estimate the price in your currency.

I specialise in all sorts of monsters and creatures, animals, dinosaurs, anthros n furries, humanoids and body horror. I would love to draw your OCs and RPG characters, give me your cool beasts n critters! If you have any questions feel free to send me an Ask or an email.

🦎 If you are interested please visit my carrd for all the info and my Terms of Service. https://skelizard-coms.carrd.co/ 🦎

Alternatively, if you enjoy my art and want to support me but can't afford a commission, I have a tip jar at my Ko-Fi Page.

Any and all support including sharing this post or any of my art around in general is greatly appreciated. Thankyou in advance!

192 notes · View notes

brittle-doughie · 1 year ago

Note

Not gonna lie, this has been on my head for WEEKS now after I read Tales of Sweetness (Valentines Special) over and over again even though Valentines day is already over-

And I read the part where Pomegranate Cookie and Red Velvet Cookie are argueing if Y/n will like their Valentine Chocolates or not (anddd of course, Y/n likes it in the end), and it made me very interested on the title of Y/n Cookie if they join the Dark Cookies Team;

"Lord/Lady of Darkness"

So- I was thinking...

May I request of What is Licorice Cookie, Poison Mushroom Cookie, Dark Choco Cookie, Strawberry Crepe Cookie, Pomegranate Cookie, Red Velvet Cookie and Dark Enchantress Cookie Opinions or Reactions to Lord/Lady Y/n?

And how does these dark Cookies treat Lord/Lady Y/n Cookie, as well as what these Cookies respect obsess/love Y/n cookie?

Also, I won't forget that I read the part where Lord/Lady Y/n Cookie rides a frikin' Cake Dragon- add that part of how these cookies react that Y/n cookie can tame a Cake Dragon too.

I think some of them will go 😲 or 🤯 or 😱 at Lord/Lady Y/n taming AND riding a big Cake Dragon, of course- 🤣🤣🤣

Cookie Details - Lord/Lady Harbinger Cookie (Y/N Cookie) - (CoD Ver.)

“Am I a joke to you?”

In comparison to the other members of the CoD, Lord/Lady Harbinger Cookie is considered the strongest among them, acting as Dark Enchantress Cookie’s enforcer of her will.

They’re slightly larger then the average cookie, Dark Choco Cookie being able to reach up to where their neck is located. Their main weapon of choice is a halberd as they’re decked out in tough chocolate armor while wearing a dinosaur-like skull for a helmet.

One skill Lord/Lady Harbinger Cookie pertains to is their beastmaster capabilities, not too different to Red Velvet Cookie, but cranked up ten-fold. When given enough time will have Harbinger Cookie tame even large beasts such as Cake Dragons.

Dark Enchantress Cookie has complete faith in Harbinger Cookie carrying out her orders, something that the other members caught onto. Did the both of them perhaps remembered each other before?

Relationship Charts Amongst the CoD

Pomegranate Cookie

[Admiration] “I would gladly serve under their reign..”’

Pomegranate Cookie grew to admire Harbinger Cookie to the point where she treats them similarly to Dark Enchantress Cookie, never would any disrespect head their way with Pomegranate Cookie around.

Has a rivalry with Licorice Cookie over favorites, leading to arguments over who gets to do the tasks Harbinger Cookie brings up. It leads to Pomegranate having to be around them often to prevent Licorice from swiping them from under her. You’re often annoyed at their bickering.

Has a portion of her room dedicated to you. Photos, old weapons you won’t miss, the damn body pillow she keeps tucked in her bed. Others may find it a little creepy, but Pomegranate could care less, she was just showing the extent her devotion goes.

[Admiration] “You can depend on me, I’ll never fail you!”

Licorice Cookie is all about trying to be a better cookie then Pomegranate with whatever you want him to, getting your praise and approval is his main motivator!

You get Dark Choco to handle whatever you need, you’re tired of having Licorice and Pomegranate butting heads with frequent arguments over their perceived achievements over one another.

Will have his licorice servants be at your beck and call, ready to take any orders you would like to request. May or may not summon some of them to swipe things from your room.

Red Velvet Cookie

[Trust] “My Lord/Lady has plans for the new world, I’ll be behind them until the end.”

Harbinger Cookie is a valiant fighter in the eyes of Red Velvet Cookie, training him under their wing. It’s an added bonus that you’re considerate of the cake hounds and other critters that you come across.

Nothing gets him more happy then seeing you being a loving caretaker to the cakes, playing around with them and giving them their treats. Endearing these creatures has only made him endear you more in return.

There is this lingering hint of jealousy he has when you’re too busy playing with the cake hounds with not enough time spent for him, then it would be a situation where he has to shoo them away so he could get to you!

Dark Choco Cookie

[Trust] “Me and them are not so different..”

You’re the only cookie Dark Choco could confide in with the darkness that lurks within his very soul. That trust only goes deeper that you understood him with his past…since you used to be a hero yourself, now having your fate lie within darkness.

Like Red Velvet, he respects your strength, believing that any cookie who could challenge you were simply foolish in their efforts, either ending up being crumbs or utterly defeated.

When he eventually leaves the CoD, he feels a sense of sorrow, knowing that your once pure soul has been tainted and corrupted by the darkness all around you. He wants to believe that you can still be saved and be the Cookie you once were, but as time goes by, that hope diminishes…

Poison Mushroom Cookie

[Friendly] “Have shroomies, they’ll make you feel better…!”

Harbinger Cookie can have their off days, this is where Poison Mushroom Cookie steps in. They never fail to put a smile on their face, offering shroomies to them to lighten up their attitude.

This is returned by Harbinger Cookie playing around Poison Mushroom, lifting them up and allowing them on their shoulder. It strikes the heartstrings of Pomegranate and Licorice Cookie watching Harbinger be a parent to Poison Mushroom!

Strawberry Crepe Cookie

[Friendly] “I can’t seem to pinpoint their ingredients, I’ll need further analysis on them!”

Harbinger Cookie was such an anomaly to Strawberry Crepe…and that’s what makes them so interesting to Crepe! The sheer mystery of what lies in Harbinger’s dough means Crepe is always ready for any opportunity to get a closer look.

You did find Strawberry’s shenanigans a little annoying, but you couldn’t fault the young cookie, they were only curious about what you’re made of, hell, you were to. Dark Enchantress wouldn’t allow it though and you couldn’t exactly go against her…

There’s also the squabbles between Crepe and Mushroom, both wanted your complete attention and neither were willing to cooperate with the other for your care. It leads to you and the others agreeing to never keep them in the same room for too long with you, a fight is the last thing you needed with the two cookies on your shoulders…

Dark Enchantress Cookie

[Friendly] “It’s good to welcome you home, my dear Y/N Cookie..”

Dark Enchantress Cookie, the cookie whom you’ve pledged your loyalty to, the cookie who’ll bring forth a new world, the cookie who brought you in when you were at your lowest..she gave you a second chance and you couldn’t have been more thankful for that.

The only cookie to know your “real name”, or at least she claimed it was. It made the interactions between you and her a lot more personal, as well as how touchy she could be with a hand on your arm or shoulder as she spoke to you.

The life you have now was better then the one you had, she’ll tell you. Just stick to her and she’ll give you the world and so much more, all you have to do is take her hand and never let go..

#brittle answers #cookie run x you #cookie run x reader #cr x reader #cookie run #crk x reader #cookie run kingdom x reader #cookie run kingdom #cookie run ovenbreak #cr kingdom #cookies of darkness #pomegranate cookie #licorice cookie #poison mushroom cookie #dark choco cookie #strawberry crepe cookie #red velvet cookie #dark enchantress cookie

480 notes · View notes

raptorfae53 · 2 years ago

Text

Goofy lil guys.

baby spinos, for fun, based on baby pelicans

#skrunklies #beasts creatures n critters

4K notes · View notes

hooter-n-company · 15 days ago

Text

Since I mentioned him here, might as well officially introduce this big fella. Also because @twistedtummies2 is a big fan. 😉

No one knows exactly where Bubba came from, but ancient legend goes that he is the living essence of the primordial swamp, laying dormant beneath the muck for who knows how long before he was discovered by the local tribes. The humans noticed a section of the ground beneath their feet shifting, rising and falling with the beast’s breath. Believing it to be some kind of slumbering god, they created ceremonies, myths, and cautionary tales warning to never disturb the deity from his slumber, or risk incurring his wrath. However, a corrupt shaman thought that he could control and exploit the powerful “god” for his own gain and proceeded to cross onto the sacred patch of land where he slept before digging him out. Unfortunately, the shaman didn’t have much time to enact his plan as he was immediately gobbled up by the creature, who promptly vanished into the murky depths.

Despite his elusive nature, the amphibious creature can still be seen roaming the swamp, devouring all in his path. The tribes still revere him as a godly figure, providing him with numerous offerings to appease him…and to keep him from turning his appetite back on them one day…

More info under the cut:

Name: Bubba

Pronouns: He/him

Age: Unknown

Species: Unknown amphibian/fish hybrid/possibly a god

Role: Pred

Height: 10 feet tall, 17 feet long

Abilities: Elastic tongue, super sticky saliva, tissue regeneration, can hibernate for centuries, breathes both air and water

Personality: A lazy, greedy, gluttonous, and incredibly territorial beast. He’s a complete loner who is perfectly content living by himself and views all other creatures are potentially edible, incredibly annoying, or both at the same time. However, he isn’t a sadistic creature who goes out of his way to hurt people. He just wants to be left alone with some peace and quiet, so if you keep your distance, he will happily do the same. When Bubba is alone in his element, he can be surprisingly relaxed, mellow, and laid back, even jovial at times when he’s engaged in his own personal interests. His appetite heavily dictates his mood, as he tends to get irritable and short tempered when his stomach is empty. He is driven by simple motivations (mostly filling his belly), but he can be a surprisingly cultured and curious creature with a fair amount of intelligence.

Likes: Food (especially jambalaya and gumbo), cooking, discovering tasty ingredients, collecting unique trinkets and useful items, sleeping, mud baths, hot n’ humid weather, learning about the outside world, scaring people for fun, living a minimalist lifestyle, being alone, smoking

Dislikes: Bland meals, severe boredom, trespassers, poachers, pollution, rival predators in his territory, people interrupting his naps, an empty stomach, annoyingly loud critters, cold snaps

Other Info:

-Has a THICK southern accent.

-Has taken up cooking as one of his main hobbies. Despite not being picky in the slightest, he has developed quite a refined palate. He really loves gumbo and jambalaya.

-He begrudgingly tolerates the local tribes who worship him, mostly because they provide him with food and useful materials at his request. Although he does get a kick out of scaring the bu-jeezus out of individuals who wander into his territory.

-When injured, Bubba can regenerate large chunks of damaged tissue, including entire organs and limbs if given enough time.

-Croaks like an enormous frog to warn nearby creatures to stay out of his territory. Can also puff himself up for defense and intimidating enemies

-His first stomach is like a “storage pouch” to hold extra food, but also has powerful muscles to churn meals and coat it with enzymes. These aren’t strong enough to cause serious acid damage, but they work in tandem with the juices of the second, primary stomach, making it easier to digest tough meat and hard materials like shells and bone.

#hoot hoots #hooter’s ocs #hooter draws #bubba #character bio #vore pred

20 notes · View notes

script-a-world · 5 months ago

Text

Submitted via Google Form:

Any tips on creating monsters? Especially if these monsters are simply some of the native life forms of an isolated location our heroes find themselves on? I mean sure, I think of whatever creepy and scary idea you can think of and chuck it in... but there would probably be reasons they evolved that way naturally and it isn't to terrorise outsiders.

Also, if I have one of those monsters secreting a toxin, how possible is to to have one of my humans someone be immune to it, or otherwise has minimal effect on them?

Addy: If you're looking to make something fit an ecological niche, start with what already exists and work from there. Not necessarily a cut-and-paste, but take inspiration from it.

For example, there's something to be said about the simple bear. Bears are scary. They're big, they're tough, they're pretty fast, they can climb trees, they're reasonably clever, and they're very hard to kill. The word "bear" basically means "the brown one," as people used to be so scared of bears they wouldn't say their name, in case a bear got summoned.

Also wild boars. Pigs are freakishly big, and wild hogs are worse. Boar spears have a crossguard to keep the hog from just running the spear through its whole body as it runs at you. You also get into jaguars (they're like IRL drop bears in the shape of cats), crocodiles, and all sorts of kinds of things. Even hippos.

You want somewhere to start? Take a large, bulky predator (or omnivore or big herbivore) and give it some weird traits. Adapt it to the demands of your local environment. Give it a niche to fill, with a lot of the basic premise/heavy lifting done for you by nature. How about a giant bat? Or a coyote with mange (likely the origin of the capybara tale)? Or a cannibalistic giant lizard? Then add spooky and scary stuff, go for it. But remember - some of the creatures that we find very normal and commonplace? They were once considered monsters too.

For toxins... it depends on what the toxin is. If it shuts down specific metabolic processes, then your characters could be totally immune, as they have different biology. Or maybe it's like how alliums (garlic, onions, and leeks) are super toxic to most pet and livestock species, but not us. Our blood is just a bit different in a way that makes n-propyl disulfide (the compound that makes alliums toxic) wayyyy less toxic. The toxin could also be intended for birds or reptiles or whatever else, and therefore have a lesser effect on mammals. Or maybe humans are just special.

Also, threat displays are very much a thing. They're big, they're flashy, they're scary. You can have a critter that hisses and growls and blows up a neck pouch for intimidation, and the intended purpose of that is to scare off creatures that would try to steal its food.

Feral: I’m gonna take a slightly different approach to monster making than filling an evolutionary niche. Classic horror monsters often derive from thematic or symbolic exploration. Vampires are a seductive Other; although they come from older folktales, the vampire of today was born in the early 19th century to explore the racist, xenophobic, and homophobic anxieties of English society. Werewolves also have much older origins than the common version in modern media but have always blurred the line between a civilized human and a primal beast.

Looking to the horror King, It fed on fear, taking the shape of the children’s fears - monsters from B-movies like werewolves, a clown, a woman from a creepy portrait, a syphilis-infected homeless man, a zombified Georgie - which the narrative used to explore more abstract fears - leaving childhood and going through puberty, not to mention the overall terrorizing effect of racism, misogyny, and homophobia on the population. The Shining doesn’t even try to pretend it’s not about alcoholism and the effects of substance abuse on a family.

You mention that this story will take place in an isolated setting. Isolation is terrifically thematic. How can you lean into it? What if everyone who dies seems to be totally alone when it happens? And even after they realize they’re in danger, they keep putting themselves in a situation to be alone? Pair that with your monster’s evolution to better survive. Does the monster have some way of peeling one person off from the pack as part of how they hunt - maybe they have some form of vocal mimicry like some birds or a cat that makes the person think they are going towards a crying baby or wounded animal? Does it have exceptional camouflage so no one suspects they are not alone when they’re in a vulnerable position? You mention there being a toxin - instead of killing, can it produce hallucinations or paranoia that would cause a person to split from the group? These could all help the monster hunt whatever its normal prey would be while still tapping into much more abstract fears that you want to explore.

#google submitted #species

25 notes · View notes

cowboylament · 7 months ago

Text

Around the corner, I found the dining room doors open. I could hear their murmurs. They weren’t displeased, not in any great way, it was pleasant even. If I upset them I had to believe that this could not ruin what had begun, our small and sacred acts of seeing. I approached still with quiet silent steps. From the hall I glanced in, neither High Lord noticing me. The shadowed edge of the table, the light other. Someone else was there. Someone in color at the opposite end, all brightness, and his face, watching me already.

Oh.

There was no change in the eyes. Or eye, the other, metal.

Or Y/N was forgotten until Lucien remembers Dawn!reader x Lucien

Part Two, Part Three Part Four (AO3)

Whatever had followed me home was hungry.

The summer frogs and critters had gone silent. Beneath my window, twigs snapped, as the creature made its third pass by my room. I’d have known it was there even in silence. Circling my home a heavy dread peaked and fell as it circled. Once it rounded the corner away from me did it fall again to a powerful hum, steady, like a heartbeat. With each pass, its steps grew more sure so I suspected I had little time. Lying in bed staring at the ceiling so still, taking long breaths, deep even ones, I waited in that hum, waiting for the ascending dread. This was not a dweller of the woods. I’d known it when it began to stalk me. Nothing in Dawn Court was capable of such feelings, to warp and wield dread so intentionally. It was not like the danger of death, it had everything to do with being alive. Whatever it was felt my fear and reached for it. The beginning shift came, the rising hum. The feeling settled in my ears, my throat, and only once it reached my chest did I turn over and flick on my bedroom light.

I fell from my bed and winnowed to the kitchen below. I ducked under the window just as it latched itself to the brick. A dark shadow, darker than all the night around us, passed over the small glass and blocked at once the moon. It was almost unbearable, the dread this close, as if such pure terror could cause physical pain. This creature really, proof that it could.

The world was still, like I was already dead. The bed shifted above me. Then silence.

I did not swallow or dare anything. With death this close, I barred from my body any proof of life, even blinking. But even if I had managed something it would’ve ceased the moment I heard that laugh. Gutteral, rasped, unnatural it plunged into the air with enough weight to cut a hole in the world.

A voice followed, razor-sharp, precise, slithering through all things, “Strange, your kind is not usually so clever.”

It knew I was here and yet I knew it was there, but its voice came from all things, untraceable and I did not dare answer it.

“Rare was it when I wouldn’t find them in their beds, but you. I’m not surprised. I could feel it in you, as I sense it now, something…else. Do you know it as I know it, what makes us so alike?”

I gave no answer, not even a breath. Silence fell in the house, but I knew without sound it was circling above me, the dread coming with little reprieve.

Another laugh, quieter, more pleased than amused. “It lives where I lived. It is born where I was born. What is in you is as old as pain. I feel that too, as you feel me. I know where you have been. I know where are. Wait and I will show you what you know.”

I was so utterly frozen in place. The voice both closer and far away, in my ear and in my bones. The dread and despair remained constant, never wavering, never moving. And yet the beast, it was somewhere in my house. It was somewhere up above. It was—

“Oh what you’ve begun, now I must have you,” It said, and suddenly from the silence came one creak on the stairs.

The grass bowed to me. The seconds after landing at the far end of the meadow were serene in a way. No crickets, no wind, not even a flutter of some winged insect. Just my breath caught on its fear rising into the full mooned sky, the bent grass in surrender and sacrifice to me, broken under my feet. All before the world erupted.

Wood splintered and stone exploded, and I ducked behind the trees knowing it was too late. It knew where I was and where I was going. It would’ve known this even had I been able to put greater distance between us. From behind me came a snarl, far enough to have time, but not enough for comfort. This was a delay of the inevitable, I knew that, but I’d lasted so long. And I’d last as long as I could. So I ran through the thicket before the border of Day Court. The patch of woods gave way to even more grass. That endless field I’d sat afternoons in, lounging for the sun. How it stretched across the land like open arms for me once. It held me as nothing had ever held me. I would remember it, the gentleness of this part of the world. I was tired already, the starving winter hadn’t been gone long enough to give a body that could fight for very long.

But I fought anyway. Into the clearing, I kept on, a second and third snarl much closer. I just wanted more time. More time to sit with the world and its beauty. I wanted to see spring again, feel the heat break in the evening, watch the moon wane. I spared a glance, that round full thing arcing the sky. Day was not far, real day, and the court. I’d not known it was the last, that sun streak through the window that had brushed against my lips, did not know that as it warmed my lips it had been a kiss goodbye. So I held the memory as I ran, a final goodness of the world, that there was light.

I made it a few more steps before the creature swiped at my side and I fell. I whirled at it as soon as my hips hit the soil. What had I been expecting from a creature that produced such pure dread? Claws and scales or too many teeth, but in fact it was not that at all. It was terror undiluted. The marrow dissolved from my bones. All hope winked out. Otherworldly, it seemed and confined by this one to take an almost shape. Yet I saw it nonetheless, its power and its being, as if veiled by a poorly made glamour. This strange creature, stuck in one world and belonging to another, straddling many words and belonging wholly to none.

As I paused to watch it, it watched me too, head cocking to the side less the predator, more curious. Like it had not expected me either. Above us was nothing but as clear a night as ever, I didn’t even need to look directly at it to know it was there. Whatever end there was, my eyes would fall back, land on that beautiful sky lit by stars, beyond it darkness, and beyond that eternal darkness. A tendril of the beast's power seemed to swallow my power. It was a different darkness almost leathery, clawing away at the light beneath my skin. It replaced everything with fear so full and rich I froze. All but my mind was paralyzed, a rapid succession of thoughts slipping before me: would it hurt? Yes, it would. That day in the woods I’d thought it was death but it was not and this was surer than anything, as sure as memory, as forgetting. But there’d be somewhere else after with grass, and rivers, the sun would be as warm, life would be full again, onward, new goodness, new things. That I could hope for, this I could never lose. And the final thought came vivid and bright like dawn, remembering was waiting. Two faces, outstretched arms, voices saying I know you. I couldn’t smile, but my blood sang.

And yet, as if touching a nerve, suddenly the terror rippled and broke open. The beast flinched back. Paralysis took hold, but no longer of me. Beneath the skin, something hot and unending boiled. I had no choice but to use it. I closed my eyes.

The world bathed itself in light.

And when I could no longer see the thing everything seemed to right itself in a kind of way. The fear bottomed out and in the wake of not a snarl, but a terrified hopeless scream. The grass was beneath my feet again. I was running. The inevitability of the world vanished. So I kept on, faster than before. Wind swept across the grass and I could’ve laughed, not because it felt so beautiful, but because despite everything going on I’d noticed the beauty at all.

Beyond the border, a figure appeared from nothing. His hands already in motion were telling me to run, faster, further. The tall grass gave way to a clearing and it didn’t seem as if I’d crossed anywhere different but I had. I could smell the slightest change, relief made real. I was close enough now to hear him over the beast.

“Don’t look back.” He yelled, truly yelled though the world in my head was quiet. “Jump.”

I thought of no fate other than his outstretched hands. Just out of reach, three long strides, my feet struck the soft earth, and I leaped. The space clearing between us, he moved into my trajectory, catching me. His arms barely closed, we began to fold in. The last sound of that part of the world I’d guarded those years rattled with rage. I would not hear its end, just the terrible building arc of that godless scream.

***

It was hard to say what I realized first, that I was awake or that I was gasping. The air had been so thin, so slight before he’d grabbed me. I’d not even thought to breathe. Perhaps all death was like that, a forgetting to breathe. I remembered thoroughly, even defiantly, though by the time my eyes opened. Someone lunged to grab me again in my momentum as I swung upward. Their arms bracing against my chest, I turned, their eyes hard.

The same male.

I flinched. Skin on skin—it hurt almost. Not in the place where we met, he managed a softness about him. It was a kind of pain that reached from the past. How long had it been, really, since someone had put hands on me? That final night I don’t think anyone touched me at all. There’d been no time, but there’d been maybe one moment… I pulled at the memory as if flattening crinkles in a page to see the words better, but it revealed nothing. I couldn’t remember. I hadn’t thought to remember as I should’ve. My hands closed in the hopes I might hold the past here a little longer, but I found more skin, skin that was not my own.

Digging my heels into the firm mattress, I pushed off the bed out of his reach, and slammed the crown of my head into the headboard. I let in a sharp inhale, collapsing forward, pulling my whole body closer to me. It wouldn’t get hurt that way, if I kept it close, somewhere I could hide it. I pressed my fingers into my hair and found the throbbing bone.

“Relax,” the male said. His voice was firm, commanding. Within me, some taut muscle, or something even thinner than that, the blood rushing, calmed. I closed my eyes feeling for the impending respite. Each vertebrae, each joint, every hair on my arms, my legs, fell looser than it should’ve. All that panic fell away like rain in summer, there and gone again. I pressed the skin of my scalp feeling for a lump. It was easy to find. Lulling fast circles around it, I slowed as the pain began to soothe.

Yes, there was my body.

It revealed itself more readily now, nosing at the sheets, curling into the mattress, grabbing for something to hold onto. I nuzzled close to the linen, too soft to be cheap. This was a home. I could tell despite the creases in the fabric that stretched down as far as I had sight. They all ran parallel to each other, the markings that came when fabric was cared for or unused, tightly folded in a cupboard. I wouldn’t have known which it was, the cause for such lines, if they didn’t have that scent of use. Yes, a home.

This was a grass. The smell on these, I think, or simply fresh, something that had been found close to my home. I stopped my fingers. It would take me a little while to know what. Half a century ago I would’ve known immediately. But things change, time passes. Time had already passed.

I closed my knees before I removed my face. The only way I could sit up was by force, by pushing myself out of my own safe and hidden space. I was in a room, I realized, in a very big and equally fine bed to house such sheets. The creased linen seemed to cover a bed that extended a lifetime. A few people might lay here shoulder to shoulder with space to turn on either side. A single divot in the mattress told a story I knew very well. I was alone.

But I was not alone.

The male watched me from my bedside. Any lingering tension I had evaporated. For all his sternness he could not hide the handsomeness of his face. He had a civilized reluctance. The tentative primal suspicion that naive and truly wild animals can never quite be. Approaching on wobbly legs, ready to dash, nose first, smelling for motive. On the fae such suspicion was different, a careful hand outstretched with permission. Look how slow I move, but I can be quick, if you are quick. I can be deadly, even if you are deadly too. But I knew when not to bite. I could recall those long lost my manners.

“Are you alright?”

I rolled my shoulders, my neck, and turned my body from side to side but met no resistance beyond exhaustion. I twisted with slow caution back to face him, not wanting to cause alarm, and shook my head. I knew I was not a threat, but perhaps such a thing is never as obvious as we think because his reluctance did not leave his shoulders or mouth. In fact, he seemed more tense than before. Some inner conflict was waging inside him. His eyes, like mine, shifted left and right, studying. I settled with certain personifications, trying to make such body language larger and easier to see.

“You've been out for a few days. A precaution.”

After a while alone you lose track of the days. I was used to such ambiguity, of living based on the seasons. Crocuses marked the passing of one year to the next and birthdays had become pointless. Everything new and good started in spring. Then there was the elongating light, more sun, more time for things, and the creatures that revealed themselves with the spoils of warmth. Lucky I was to be in a solar court, perhaps the weather would do well in Spring Court, but time would be impossible to gauge. Here, I might finally learn again the month we were in.

“You gave us a scare. Do you…remember what happened?”

A thread of terror in me sang. I’m sure that dreaded note was always there, but never with such volume. Now it had woven itself inside my ribs and I don’t think I could ever forget where it was. A vacant space, a phantom note, was filled and I could never unknow it. So of course I remembered. It was my job, to preserve such memories. I nodded.

“Do you know what attacked you?”

Shoulders sagging I shook my head. I didn’t know it. It was like nothing I’d ever seen or researched. Behaving in ways familiar to something wild and predatory, but I had no name, not even a guess or inkling. That was a rare thing. I’d dedicated so much time to the natural world and I’d been out there long enough to know it. If not by name then at least by sight. I couldn’t even guess what family it had come from or from where it had strayed.

“Did you see it?”

The question conjured its image immediately behind my eyelids. The heel of my palm dug into my forehead as if I could push out the memory of that creature between worlds, how it had looked at me so curiously. Such humanity, in its wonder. But it was distinctly inhuman, from somewhere far away and between, where dreaded thoughts and things come from. I negated its words. It did not live where I lived, was not born where I’d been born. We were made of opposite things.

“I understand,” he said simply. “We’ve been tracking the thing for weeks. It’s why I was out there, how I heard you. So far it's managed to evade us, but the few who have seen it, they don’t speak of it. I just needed to be sure.”

Sure? I must’ve said the question with my face because he gave an answer.

“It’s not supposed to be in the wild, it’s supposed to be in a library in another court. After a few sightings and an attack on a village close by, I began tracking it as a favor for a friend, the friend whose library it came from. We’re trying to put it back where it belongs, but unfortunately, it’s very clever.”

I pulled my knees in and rested my cheek against them. I was in new clothes, they were buttery and fine as everything here, wherever here was. So the stalking had been random, I was just someone close by. It had caught my scent and went that way. Unlucky. But what library needed such a thing? None I could think, not at least of the ones we knew and talked about before. After her burnings and demolition perhaps the ones that survived had taken better precautions now. Good news to return to. I’d consider this a good thing, what we’ve learned to protect.

I pulled the blankets tighter. Goosebumps had risen against my skin despite the balmy weather. Through the open window, the curtains curved against a stronger gust than all the rest. Summer was not nearly over, but it was beginning to fray at the edges. Or maybe the weather behaved differently here, maybe we’d left Day Court for somewhere else. Through one of the windows, tall fescues swayed outside of it, the view looking right out onto a lawn. That was the smell, on the sheets, fescue. I remembered now. I shut my eyes a moment and inhaled. Warmth pressed at my eyelids, illuminating the skin. The image of the beast was gone. Such richness instead, the vivid color, it was hard to say what was different about the light here, but something in the quality was brighter. Day Court then, no doubt.

“You’re from Dawn.”

Not a question. It was not very easy to forget he was there, to slip into the passing beauty of mid-day when the small space between us rippled. I felt its hum. Power. Such a thing is always familiar in the way that what you don’t have feels familiar by lack. Knowing the shape of something's absence also means knowing its presence, so when it does arrive it is then unmistakable.

He had power. It filled the room in the places I did not and never had. Relax, he’d said, and I had listened. My eyes slid back to his. Such grace, how he moved, how he sat, and the handsomeness of his face. A High Lord. One who was waiting now, staring at me. High Lord of Day Court.

“I saw your light. I winnowed as close as I could, but.” His voice fell off. It wasn’t obvious in face but disappointment shadowed everything he did. I could feel it the way you feel anger in even the biggest of houses. If he didn’t want me to feel it he could do nothing about it. It was there. He continued, “The creature seemed to be, by the time I got there, wounded somehow. Or so it sounded at least. Did you have anything to do with that?”

I didn’t know how to answer that one. Yes and no seemed elusive. But it’s scream, that light, the feeling of its magic along my own. How it had twined its way, how it had touched something, something deeper than bone. A pit in my stomach opened up, sweat began to form at my nape, and a radiating heat hovered along my skin. I pressed a hand over my mouth. The pit, it was trying to come out. The male’s eyes went wide and he reached for something, pulling it from the nothing. A pail. He shoved it into my lap and I retched as soon as my eyes landed on the dark bottom. Bile, nothing but bile. The acidic flem burned my throat. It took a few minutes to will my stomach to settle, to not let the bitter taste in my mouth turn my stomach inside out. He handed me a damp rag, removing the bucket from my lap in an unfair trade. I wiped at my face, bowing in thanks.

Whatever question he’d asked was lost to him, unimportant, or perhaps he simply didn’t notice it, the silence. I’d made a noise. I suppose that was easy to mistake for participation. Which was fine, I couldn’t remember being much of a conversationalist, of ever needing to be. His eyes fell over my shoulder into a distance I couldn’t see, contemplating something, something I hadn’t said. I didn’t mind. It gave me a moment to recover. His gaze sharpened eventually, turning back to me.

“I went back. It took me a minute, but I found your home. There were holes, in the wards, I can see those things.” He paused. I’d tried to repair them but the magic was complex and my knowledge was incredibly limited. As was most of my mending abilities which over 50 years would’ve been helpful. I’d learned some, but. “The deterioration was relatively new but those are very powerful and old wards. The fact there were holes suggests they’ve been protecting something a while.”

In a way.

“Is there someone I can get for you? A relative, a friend?”

No. I shook my head, no one at all.

“No one else was there. I checked. But did you leave anyone behind?”

No again.

“No one is in trouble. We want to prevent another attack.”

We. Strange word for someone singular. Strange assumptions too between us. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would be in trouble to begin with, truthfully. I’d seen enough of a dangerous situation I suppose I’d begun to believe I’d know it on feel alone. But he didn’t seem at all dangerous to me, even with the power he wielded. If he’d wanted to harm me he could. That was a fact of life, of nature. I’d learned not to lament over fate like that. Death passes through and sometimes you’re struck, sometimes it skims by you, sometimes it forgets you’re there at all. Predator or prey, we got to be those things from time to time. I wasn’t special. So if he could be quick, I could be quick too.

Until then I shook my head. It was the truth, there was no one there.

His gaze turned heavy and contemplative. He tilted his head to watch me from a new perspective, eyes narrowing. I dropped my gaze, my fingers interlaced. I undid each one and placed my palms slow and flat along the bed, turning them over for him. They were calloused. It was the best proof I had. His eyes fell and the silence didn’t reveal to me what he’d seen in them, if anything. I did not close my hands. I wanted to. I wanted to close my body around myself and retreat again somewhere less real like a dream. I knew one thing with such certainty. It was me in that house. No one else. And he, I don’t know if he believed me. Denial of such a fact was worse than forgetting. I was at risk of disappearing entirely. But this, to be with others, had been a dream once too.

I let out a breath as he watched.

A contemplative hum left him. I had no idea what he meant.

“I can take you back there. If there are things you need, but…it’s…”

He didn’t want to deliver the news that I had known well and true, what I had heard that night without needing to look back. The house, it was ruined. He could say it all he liked, but what had been there had ceased as many and all things eventually did. And maybe the structure was left, the outline, the memory, but that was not enough. Plenty of things stay in this world that way without use or existence.

I made to swallow, but my mouth was too dry. His eyes flicked to my throat before he reached for a glass at the bedside and passed it to me. How available it was, no well or spout. Not at least, here between us. Just a glass. Just a glass in an expensive large room. I held it to the light out of habit but I knew it was clean and brought the cool cup to my lips, forcing myself to take it in slow sips instead of insatiable gulps. As anyone did, as anyone who had such amenities would. His reluctance seemed to have subsided. Reassurance, that was what the fae liked. I guess I’d given some.

See, I thought, I’m like you.

He nodded as if he understood this unspoken desire but I knew better than to think he’d heard me. He was pleased merely that I finished the glass. I think he was pleased also to have been the one who provided it. Once I handed the cup back he stared at the emptiness as it caught the light. His fingers moved it back and forth as he studied it. I didn’t mind the quiet, it had lost that touch of awkwardness a long time ago. I could stand a long pause. I let him collect his thoughts and watched as the pleasure fell away into an emotion I had difficulty placing. Sadness, but closer, more precise.

“I’m sorry. We didn’t know it had strayed that far, that it had left my court. I would’ve—”

He stopped himself, finally placing the glass on the nightstand. Guilt. That was the emotion. But what could he have done? The house was warded, even if he could see those things he had no reason to believe I was there. There was no record of me. He’d seen me, for that I was grateful. To me that was already enough. My fingers twitched like I might reach for him, my mouth parted like I might say it’s okay, but neither occurred. I didn’t feel I had the control to make either thing happen.

His mouth pulled into a tight line, “The friend, I told him what happened. He got here immediately and we’d like to help you.”

For a moment all I wanted was to have the words. To say, don’t bother, to say, I’ll be okay you do not need to trouble yourself, to say your guilt is enormous but it doesn’t need to be, yet all of those things seemed wrong in different ways. Either because they were untrue or because I knew they wouldn’t help.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen or—” He cleared his throat, leaning his elbows on his knees, “When did you get there before or after the war?”

War.

I’d known things were tense, for lack of a better more informed word. It showed itself in many ways. People passed through. I didn’t make a habit of showing myself, but I’d listened. I’d been caught only once and the wards, they’d worked. However, there were times I’d been afraid. Times when I knew even with the precautions in place not to look out my window. But I didn’t know there’d been a war. He noticed my confusion and stiffened.

“You were unaware.”

No, I confirmed for him, I wasn’t aware of anything. Knowing the curse broke, knowing she was gone, that had been a blessing of chance from the mother in and of itself.

Now he swallowed, throat bobbing, “After the 50 years you didn’t go—“

I shook my head. There was no after the 50 years. I had been there the whole time, alone. I had not gone to that cottage because Amarantha was gone, I’d been there because she showed up. And it was now another 6 years later since she left. I’d tried going back. There was no returning, not after her. And today I was somewhere else. Today was another different day and another different life.

His face paled ever so slightly, the seriousness turned sad. I closed my hands, stuffing them under the blankets. I didn’t return to be pitied. That was worse than being lost. At least alone I understood. There was beauty and goodness where I was from. I would let no one tarnish it.

“You’ve been there since the curse.”

I nodded.

His words became flimsy. He searched for the right thing to say and said only what came to mind immediately it seemed, “Forgive me. I assumed that the house was old, that perhaps after she—that you returned looking for someone. That they had not survived.”

Wrong. If anything, someone should’ve come looking for me. I could feel the hardness of my gaze. I didn’t need to give an answer he could see it on my face.

“What then were you doing there?”

I drew in a long relaxed breath and turned away, eyes trailing the room. The walls were so nicely decorated, so ornate, the door seemed to disappear behind them. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I couldn’t miss it. The glittering handle, its gold coat. Somewhere else lay waiting behind it. Maybe I could go.

His question was not totally lost to me. Such a question required words, but what was the answer really? I was there to guard, to protect what we’d gotten away those years ago after she’d arrived. I belonged there, to the field, and the cold creak, with the birds. There was much to say and yet I don’t know if anything I could say would convey the totality of the truth. Despite all manners and reason, I wanted at least to give him that. If he were to help me, if this ‘we’ were to help me, then I thought it would be important that they know everything immediately. There would be no trouble. I just had to say it, had to find those words. I had gone there whether I knew it or not to be forgotten, to remember, to be the one who did the remembering.

I licked my lips but after another minute he opened his mouth. Whatever he had planned he didn’t get to say. A knock came at the door. He sighed, rising to his feet, and as he put distance between us a small thread of disappointment had been plucked. He made no noise as he walked. Yet when he saw who or what was on the other side of the door, his eyebrows lifted. It was muted, the voice, but it was certainly a female’s.

The High Lord turned to me, “Just a minute,” he said smiling with feigned emotion before he ducked out.

As soon as I heard the door shut I collapsed into the bed face down, groaning. It was refreshing, mildly, to hear my own voice. For so long this was all I wanted, someone there when I woke up, an excuse to talk, and despite knowing this—knowing what I wanted, having was another thing entirely. I guess I thought it would feel differently. I thought it would be a relief. I took in a breath, steadying the thudding of my heart. My throat constricted around the place a voice would be. My eyes burned.

I watched the empty glass at my bedside table. In the light, I could see where my lip print had been. Look, I thought, you were here. I took a steadier deeper breath.

Most people like caring for others. That was one of those things that I liked about living, something I missed. In the woods, I cared for myself. So small a thing too, but the more I thought about it, the more sacred it became what we’d done. Knowing what you need and asking for it, is that not innate proof of living? And being the one to give it, proof of togetherness, of something shared. Sacred was the closest word but there was probably a better one. I bowed my head in thanks for the reminder though he was not there to see it. It had been a long time since I was alive.

The voided margin of my life seemed, so slightly, to fill the longer I stared at it. Such a thing hadn’t happened for a few years. I mouthed a thank you to the mother until I made the sheets damp, manifesting the words in a physical way, and sat up again as I had been.

It was a good world. It would be a good life. Soon. I hoped.

The door opened again. He returned in a way no one ever did and with new skin. Or to say, some deeper tension, that battle in his mind had settled. So there was something more natural, more real about him than when he’d sat there before. His face was taken with embarrassment and charm at the same time, a slight smile, the shake of his head. He had another question, but this one I liked.

“Would you like to go outside?”

My mouth twitched, almost a smile. Not quite an answer, but sound, I nodded,“Mhm.”

***

Someone dressed me, the female outside the door apparently, who’d chided the High Lord, driving him outside before he could utter another word, which it had seemed he greatly wanted to. She brought with her food that, like the water, I practiced not eating ravenously. The smell alone boasted of flavors I had never forgotten, even as they’d begun to be out of reach from me. I couldn’t, at that time, remember seeing a plate of such abundance.

She took care of me. Stiff in body, unsure, and second-guessing all meaning of directions, I tried to let her take care of me. Her nimble fingers worked through my hair, sometimes grabbing my head and righting it if it began to sag too far in one direction as I ate. She told me about the Summer Solstice celebrations they’d had a few weeks ago, how the swelter here had been unbearable. The heat though broke in the night and they, the workers included, had celebrated until dawn with Helion. Helion, she kept saying, Helion did this or that. She spoke about him with a casualty that at first, I had no idea who she meant.

“Did he introduce himself?”

He had in a way, at least enough for me to figure out who he was. High Lord of Day Court. Everything suggested as much. My court he’d said, and the beast had slipped through here. There was no closer court, it was not so difficult to put together, even if I didn’t know his name. But he didn’t know mine either. So I guess neither of us was showing our best manners. My thoughts continued, sifting through, and as I realized I was thinking too long it occurred to me also that she hadn’t spoken again, that she was actually waiting for my answer. I shook my head, deciding to be literal. No, no introductions.

“I knew it! Helion thinks everyone knows him by sight.”

Helion, the High Lord then.

“Stupid fool,” She muttered, “And I’ll tell him so.”

I didn’t doubt it.

The clothes she gave me were light, good for the weather. I didn’t need anyone’s help putting it on. There were no buttons, no ties too complex, but when I, out of instinct, reached for the garment she grabbed it first with a coy smile.

“Turn around.”

In the hall she walked with me, filling the empty space with her voice. There was never enough to say. I’d missed decades of life outside my own so I suppose there would never again be enough to say. I’d never catch up. A silent gratitude passed between us though, for her chatter and life. As we walked, turning a corner into a long bright corridor where two large glass doors opened she nodded in acknowledgment for what I didn’t say. We approached the entry and the yard began to reveal its rolling hills but between them and myself two figures could be seen through the glass. I stuttered in my step, walking now silently.

She turned toward me with nonchalance, “Don’t let them scare you.”

It wasn’t quite fear that I felt, but I understood why it seemed that way. It was really a genuine curiosity. Helion was with someone. A male. I could hear the jovial laughter they exchanged, their bodies angled toward each other, hands moving as they spoke, brushing shoulders and falling with ceratin comfortable and routined laughter. Their familiarity was easy to read on them and it made me ache. Yet despite this, they could not have appeared more different from one another. While Helion seemed to brighten standing in the sun, the other seemed warm, yes, but the light only further contrasted the shadows of his face.

Was this the friend, the ‘we’ he’d meant? I’d assumed he meant someone of this court, but it was plainly obvious he did not belong to this place. That he was not born here.

We reached the door and she opened it for me. The two males calming from their laughter turned, soft smiled, toward us. With slow steps, I interlaced my fingers, squeezed my own hand, and took a step into the light on the terrace. Similar to Helion it was not difficult to notice it, the power the other male had. Through his shirt, I could see whirls of tattoos. It was not hard to guess once we faced each other. He, I knew by reputation. High Lord of the Night Court. His name escaped me. We stared at one another, Helion looking between us brows pushed so slightly inward to conceal the totality of his concern.

“You wanted something embarrassing?” The female behind me said, breaking the silence. I could hear her smugness. Our gazes broke and he looked beyond me, raising a brow in interest, his smile sharpening with delight. The two seemed to have allied, a private joke among them all. Helion’s face fell flat with annoyance though he didn’t use his position over her. “He didn’t even introduce himself. His ego so big I’m sure he was relying on looks of his alone.”

The High Lord of Night Court crossed his arms and peered at Helion, “He’s got the face for it.”

Helion said, “I wasn’t.”

The female scoffed, “Well, you certainly weren’t relying on charm and niceties. Ask him what her name is too. If he’d asked for it he would know.”

“Helion,” the other High Lord smiled, “Don’t tell me I’m beginning to have the better manners of us.”

“The Suriel revealed your bond to your mate. I don’t think it will bode well for you to begin a contest of things we didn’t say.”

The two smirked between them, each conceding to the other's point. I’d disappeared again. I didn’t know them as they knew each other. I couldn’t really participate. Sometimes when I missed the world I tried to imagine all the things that no longer happened since I’d left. I’d make a list in my head of everything I guessed was gone, and when I found a world I liked stripped of its vices I’d make a longer list of everything I hoped that remained. It was nice to see what always stayed, the gentle teasing, the way two people know each other. It was nice to see two people who weren’t miserable.

“Rhysand’s ego is still the biggest, it gets in the way, don’t let it this time,” said the female with finality before I heard the door close. Both male’s brows were raised and they gave each other a sidelong glance.

Rhysand. I said it in my head which felt like saying it aloud until I remembered that this was no longer the same thing. That logic had abated with the house.

Rhysand turned to Helion, “I like her.”

“I knew you would.”

The pair's eyes then landed on me but now with unwavering focus and I felt it. They’d pulled me into the light. The other male bowed, “Hello, it's nice to finally meet you. I’m Rhys, High Lord of the Night Court.”

I nodded back.

“You’ll have to forgive Helion, he’s usually more polite. He’s High Lord of Day,” He said turning back to look at the male who’d saved me that night, who’d sat with me only an hour ago mostly unknown to me. The both of them were calm, all manner of teasing having vanished. I looked between the two. Helion gave a small nod. I turned my eyes back to Rhysand who had seen the whole thing and bowed my head. He gave a small smile, “Despite his behavior, it seems you made a good impression on her Helion.”

“I’m not as brutish as you.”

Rhysand laughed, “My tactics are an acquired taste.”

Helion turned to me, “Be glad I found you. He’s been known to have controversial methods when it comes to…rehabilitation. Tossing to the wolves some have said.”

Rhysand rolled his eyes, “Cassian and Feyre have gotten to you.”

The High Lord of Day gave a cool smile and it struck me now the full spectrum of his beauty, “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

I could tell that something was funny but I didn’t know what. I was on the outside of the context, some closed quotation that had happened before. A shut door lay between me and the amusement I felt them share, at least they could. It did not escape my notice this small pleasure that came with being witness to that kind of thing. The way happiness and amusement even when you’re not versed in their circumstances allowed for some participation just the same. I held the hand by this that touched me.

“Don’t listen to him,” Rhysand said. “He’s a bore as much as I’m a brute and asked you a thousand questions which I have no intention of doing.”

“What then were you going to do, bring her to the weaver?” Muttered Helion.

Rhysand ignored him gesturing to the lawn, “Shall we walk?”

The light off the terrace hummed, reaching for me, waiting. It held a whisper, come home. I didn’t answer his question, just walked toward that call, as if enthralled by some spell. Stepping down into the grass I closed my eyes, turned my head up toward the sun, and took a long breath in. There lay no smile on my face, but something had pulled itself pleased. I dropped my gaze, didn’t look back at the two High Lords, and began to walk.

Rhysand and Helion let me stray ahead, their voices managing to reach me still as they spoke idly of family, of people I didn’t know and names I couldn’t commit to memory. Day Court was all green, bright, more shrubbery than flowers and blooms. It was something my parents would’ve liked.

My father said I married heaven and earth. He who studied the sky, my mother who studied the sea, and me the in-between—I united us. We three, together, knew everything we’d believed. On afternoons like this, after we’d left the library, we’d take the long way home, walking through fields, running. It was like the test, we’d point out things we knew and say what they were, explain them, and whatever I didn’t know they did. The feathergrass would sway and bend and we’d wade into it sometimes until it got dark. Here there was no feathergrass, just lawn, but I didn’t mind. Before I would’ve minded, if it were another afternoon of ages ago I would’ve told Helion what better grasses there were, how they’d glow gold in the sun of his court.

I wandered in all directions. There was nothing denied to me, no call from behind telling me to go another way. It was all the comforts of living alone without being alone. I took in a long breath. Fescue, salt, pine, oak, it all mingled with me, following from the other side of the border. Where you go I go it seemed to say, so I was never too far from where I’d been. Some things were forever. It warmed the insides. So as I walked I told the wind the story of how it all happened until my feet hurt, until I reached an incline at the other end of the estate pausing below it.

I turned back, the two males were in that same familiar stance I’d found them, standing close, fingers accidentally brushing as they spoke with their hands. All the while I was bumping shoulders with a ghost. I knew only one person well in the way they knew each other. They were far away. A good thing I’d learned.

I looked ahead and climbed the hill I’d found myself at the bottom of. From atop I met ocean. It was too far now to touch, but I could see it again. Waves glittered, breaking and reforming the light along their surface. A breeze sent pleats across the grass and I sat back, the dress rising higher, the sun soaking through. It was a privilege, I knew that now, to feel these things. I was not so much taking advantage of this second chance, I’d always paid this kind of attention, but I remembered the feeling of sadness, the thought of never feeling the warmth of the sun again and so I noticed it more acutely than ever. I’m sure when death came I’d miss the world, but for now, it was here and I could stretch out across it, leave an indent, if only until someone or something else came.

“You’re the talk of the house though no one knows your name. I, however, would like to call you something.”

I turned just enough to see Rhysand standing behind me. Helion was at the bottom of the hill still, speaking with someone. I looked back toward the High Lord of Night Court. I tried to imagine him saying my name back to me if I answered. It would be more real an existence I’d had since I got out there. It had been a long time since someone else had said it, too long since it had a place and weight in the world, cutting through the air, tumbling out of a mouth, mumbled in secret. I could not hear it on anyone else's tongue anymore even in my mind. At the cottage, you never need to use your name. Almost never, but I’d begun to say it sometimes. First at night, then calling myself in for dinner, then saying good morning. I didn’t want to forget, if a person could forget such a thing. The boundaries of memory had gone blurry.

It would be easy to say it. It would be good to say it. Nothing though came. Such silence made other people uncomfortable. Rhysand waited though, a good while, staring at a face he didn’t know well enough to sense it was trying, and eventually put his hands up in surrender. My shoulders fell, too slight to notice. The opportunity seemed lost though the letters were there rolling up from my stomach. Just tell him anyway, I thought. Say it now. But nothing came. I let out a breath. A breeze curled up over the hill and I smelled the sea. I could find the good in plenty. I concluded it was better this way. You cannot forget what you were never told. Maybe that was the secret all along to living for forever.

Rhysand admired the land before us, “It's beautiful, this court.”

I agreed with a bow of the head, the both of us staring across the water where it met the sky. The delicate heart behind my ribs began to beat louder, harder, not faster but pushing against my skin as if to reveal itself, to prove it still worked.

“I’m biased, I think my court's scenery is best, but Helion’s hosts such spectacular afternoons. It’s my second favorite. And not just because he’s a friend.” Rhysand said, adding with a sidelong glance, “I’d actually say our friendship makes it even less likely for me to admit that.”

My mouth slightly pulled at the edges. I was in on this joke. I’d seen it for myself, his friendship. I’d had one friend like that. The love had been of such comfort. You think you’ll never lose it, that was what we thought at least. Helion's laughter rose up the hill but I didn’t turn back to see it. I forgot the buoyancy of that sound, how it rises to meet you. I took in a long breath as if it would enter my body and become my own. I missed that feeling, the sensation of not being able to hold all that goodness in. But it was, again, like having in a different way, not having it. Helion’s was enough.

“I suppose you’ve seen beautiful mornings yourself out there though.” His voice lacked any pain, any pity. There was something almost sacred in this act as well, where you are not denied the life you’ve lived or made to be its victim. The preciousness of recognition, that such good things, no matter how small, could be fawned over in such a way. I liked him for that. It seemed to settle any question I had about who he was.

My attention drifted skyward. The potential those first moments of daylight held, the soft tints, those lingering mornings. I could feel the lifetime I had in those early hours, where it seemed for all the world I’d do more than survive. I nodded.

“Good, I’m glad,” He said. “Have you traveled much to the other courts?”

I shook my head. My family had not strayed too far. We’d gone to the sea often enough, but never much further. I liked Dawn and knew it intimately, but it had never occurred to me to leave it. Not because I didn’t want to but why would I have? Now I wasn’t sure I could stomach a return, if that was what their help meant. I would have to tell them of that at least, of what I couldn’t do.

“You should see it sometime, my court,” He mused. “Perhaps you will become as biased as me.”

I looked over at him with a raised brow. The Hewn City wasn’t exactly on my list of places to visit. I’d seen sketches of it once while working. It gave the impression, the court at least, that it was more a prison than a home. The library, however, from which that beast had come, that would be worth a journey no doubt. I’d known nothing of it, but I’d be interested to see what needed such protection.

Rhysand laughed lightly at my reluctance, “I don’t mean the court under the mountain, a different city.” His words seemed tight despite his laughter. As if that place, even its name, haunted something deep within him. It relaxed though, quickly. Helion mentioned a mate, the emotions he revealed and what he didn’t were for their understanding. I couldn’t pretend to comprehend the shifts of his face, the change in his diction. It was a language made for someone else. He turned to look back at the sea, relaxing, thinking, “Though after facing Bryaxis and living I’m sure you’d manage just fine.”

Bryaxis, the beast had a name. I mouthed it, rolling each syllable from the back of my mouth and letting it disintegrate into silence and air. Bryaxis who had spoken to me, had targeted me, Bryaxis who had watched me in its curiosity and hesitated. I didn’t know it. Even now knowing the name I knew I’d truly never heard it, not even in passing.

“What did you do before you tormented beasts?”

I huffed something like a laugh, something like what had become of my laugh. That was an answer I could say. I knew the word, knew it better than any other. My eyes on the horizon and yet again my voice strained, falling deeper in my chest. I suddenly had nowhere to begin. The words I’d had snagged in my throat by their inadequacy. He waited, but my mouth only opened and closed.

Rhysand made to speak. Say it I thought. I’m alive. I am not gone from history, the answers are not yet erased. Slowly, unnervingly quiet, I managed one word. It fell into my lap like a lead burden.

“Archivist.”

Despite the flatness of the answer, he gave me a look of casual surprise. It's cause I wasn’t sure, the occupation itself or the fact I answered at all, but he asked, “In a library?”

I nodded, pulling my knees into my chest. The sun began to fall toward the water. It painted our faces a deep orange. I threaded my fingers through the cool lawn, pulling up a few strands and tossing them to the wind.

“So you studied?”

My eyes widened slightly at that. Archivist positions, they weren’t scholars. Most people hadn’t asked about studying once they’d learned what I did. But that was then. I had been a scholar—or I was very close. If I’d had a little more time, if she hadn’t sent them that night to Dawn for destruction, if there hadn’t been the gap, then I would’ve. And then I wouldn’t have been in that cottage at all. Then everything would be different.

But it wasn’t. This was my life. I traced my eyes over the beauty that was really here instead of the imagined one. Rhysand waited for my answer, expecting it now since I’d given one. This was the story I’d practiced telling many times, but every flourish I’d memorized, every bend I’d been telling and retelling alone evaded me, presented only a false start. I hoped that maybe the wind would say what I could not, that the memory it held would catch a gale and whisper into his ear. That it would pull everything from the past in a way I couldn’t then. There was no concise way, no summary that seemed to be true enough. The wind died down, so I confirmed without words.

He put his hands in his pocket, his chin dipping, “What was it you studied?”

I gestured to everything around us.

“Day Court.”

I shook my head.

He thought a minute, mouth falling open with an ahh sound, “Nature.”

“Mhm.”

“Out there then, it came in handy.” He’d developed a slight smile but it shrank as he thought a moment, “It’s what helped you survive so long.”

I shrugged more or less. His throat bobbed and I saw it, how he was aware of something. I knew then that Helion had told him everything. Despite the laughter and the conversation, despite all appearances, he was aware of me. But this was different from how Helion had been. Maybe the wind did talk. Whatever thought or idea had come into clarity changed the shape of his body, the way it lay against the world. There still came no pity, but I knew. He’d heard something I had not said, something maybe he only suspected. Something bad had happened. Not simply the cabin itself, but something else. He could feel it. There was a wound. I said I’d tell him. When I knew what to say I would tell him.

He avoided my eye, his own searching the horizon again. We used this world as a crutch between us. He waited a moment, another, then again and I knew that words were coming, difficult words, “I was sorry to hear of your home.”

It was my turn to withdraw from this part of the world for a more pleasant one. I went to the cottage for a minute and let myself visit one final time. I recalled with such clarity those late afternoons in spring when I’d come to the field and lie down beneath the grass to hide from the cool atmosphere. When the sunlight was enough, a shawl to thaw away the last dregs of winter. How fine a home it had been, protecting and nurturing, holding the last of a memory that for now had never been.

“It's not easy.”

Loss, I shook my head, no easy was not the term. The wind returned in time and pushed through my hair like a comb. I thanked quietly the earth for its care. For those long years nothing had touched me as those natural things, that quiet life in between moments and places. It was not the same in this place and these people, but they proved caring, regardless of what Helion had implied. There were no wolves. It was all gentle, if only in its own way, and I liked gentle things.

Helion’s footfall came up the hill. It paused on the edge of the moment, not quite part of it and yet witness too. A silence overwhelmed the moment and I could tell it was one in which two people are communicating silently with each other. My back turned they had a minute to shift their faces, to say what it was they needed to say. Rhysand continued, “Did you have any questions for us?”

The force of my question rose with great curiosity. Enough that I momentarily lost sight of what couldn’t be said. It was simple, but I wanted it. I wanted to know and so I tried. I asked.

“The date.”

We returned a while later to the manor and both males were quieter as we walked. I narrowed my eyes at them a few times, watching. I could see it; some thoughts passed first through Rhysand and then into Helion. The two were not so much conspiring, but mulling something over. What to do with me maybe. Whatever it was, whatever they were thinking and could tell in the other, I didn’t mind too much. Privacy is a fine thing and while they were occupied I had a moment alone too.

As the days progressed we acclimated to one another. I forgot the way people would meet you where you were but it did not go unnoticed to me all they did. The slight change from long-form questions to yes and no, the working around my silence. It was just a little too hard otherwise, to think of everything I wanted to say. I wanted to gather my thoughts. I practiced though, managing sometimes an audible yes, an audible no. I could tell they liked it when this happened, that it made them feel as if they were helping. They were. I would tell them when I could. When I had the words I knew they’d listen.

At night I said my name to the ceiling. By morning all simplicity vanished. But I tried.

After our routine, after dinner a week from the attack, the two High Lords bid me goodnight, crossing the hall into a sitting room where the door did not quite click into place. In consequence, I was not far enough away to not hear the beginning tension of their conversation. Curiosity got the better of me. I walked backward on silent feet, my ear angled to the door.

“I’ve had Azriel do a flyover every day since I arrived. He can feel it near the border.”

Helion swore under his breath, “Has it bothered anyone else?”

“No.”

But it would. The silence between them said as much.

“What are you going to do?”

Rhysand sighed, “I don’t know. I’ve found nothing on how they put it in the library in the first place. Nothing on its deterrents, your men from Dawn haven’t had similar abilities when they’ve gotten close so it's not a matter of the court power itself. And that scream…I’ve faced it more than once, Cassian’s faced it, and never has it made such a noise.”

“I’ll consult the library.”

“Please.”

In my room, my hair was pulled from its pins as the female who’d been my company between the walks talked on. For the first time I wasn’t really listening. I liked it usually, hearing of her joy, of what she’d thought and seen. My mind though had gone elsewhere. Do you know it as I know it, what makes us so alike? Outside the moon had risen, waning. Time was passing over our idleness. The wind blew in the window with a familiar story. I relayed it over and over again in my mind, feeling its edges, the grooves, feeling for the dimensions where I knew they ended.

“Where does Rhysand stay.”

I’d never interrupted her. It seemed simple, there in my head, everything. I’d had to interrupt her while it remained so. She stared at me in the mirror unphased to learn I could speak.

“He’s been in the study late,” She said before leaning in to whisper. “I feel bad for his mate. Up at all hours.”

“How do I get there?”

I followed the directions I was given. The soft-hued night painted everything blue, even the hall. It made the light falling through the crack in the door more obvious. As if the sun were there in that part of the world and nowhere else. I gave a soft knock. Something stilled, something behind the door bigger than a body, maybe the entirety of the life I felt waiting on the edge of everything. A long shadow passed in the crack beneath the door before it opened. Rhysand looked surprised before he’d even opened it. He knew it was me. I didn’t wait for him this time.

“I could help you,” I said with a quiet made for night only. It was a voice that had bled into everything I did. Like no part of me would risk betraying what I’d learned to do, how I’d survived by not being alive.

His mouth turned downward with confusion. I forgot again. Things have gone unsaid. An hour or two had passed. Our minds were not linked by thought and obsession. He couldn’t know what I had not told him.

“Bryaxis.”

I knew I’d lose if he said no and he seemed inclined to do so. I didn’t have it in me to argue, didn’t have enough time to find my words and think, to articulate. He stared at me, hard. The room, his thoughts, everything about him really I didn’t have much access to. I could see a sliver of the study, a half emotion on his brow. I had only guessed what Helion had meant by his teasing, how he could be. Perhaps he’d let me with the wolves if I chose it.

“Why?”

“A library should be protected.”

His mouth pursed slightly, “That’s not your only reason.”

It wasn’t. I knew he’d wait for this answer, he’d probably wait all night. I could not escape it. The window in the study was open and a draft plucked at my ankles. I knew what it was saying.

“It seems plain to me—like I’d been planning on helping all along and I just figured it out.”

“And a good omen that this has got you talking.” Rhysand nodded slowly, thinking it over but I could tell he’d already made a decision, “Okay,” he said and stepped away from the door gesturing me to come in. “Have you decided to see my city then?”

Both he and Helion had offered me a place to stay. I didn’t know where I’d go, knowing was not the word, but there was a premonition. I could only describe it as how I imagine the migration of birds, some ancient memory in the bones pushing them in a direction even if they’d never gone that way before. It seemed I was going regardless, already flying, but I did not know until now which way it was, until he said yes.

I nodded.

He gestured to a seat and I took it. At the bar he’d strayed, offering a glass to me but I declined. He poured one for himself anyway. It was quiet here even with the window open. Bryaxis was lingering near the border but even the mention of the beast seemed to send life here to the very edge of everything.

“If you wanted to stay with Helion you could. We could come get you.”

“I know.”

He fell into his chair and rested the cool glass against his knee. The dew on the outside of his drink was already dripping onto his pants wetting the fabric. The heat of summer had ebbed and flowed, but tonight it didn’t want to break.

“There will be a lot to discuss before we can go out there,” He said bringing the glass to his mouth and swallowing with a sigh. “We have some time, not much.”

I bowed my head, opening my mouth to speak. There was plenty to be said, if only I said it. Sweat beaded along my hairline, I wrung my hand before wiping my damp palms on my clothes. We were rarely so solitary, our attentions so focused, and perhaps that’s why he noticed the inclination I had to speak, the moment I needed to gather the words.

“There are…things you don’t know,” I said swallowing. My brows furrowed but still he waited. He’d leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees like he’d find my words by proximity. “I’ve been trying…”

The sentence died out there. The air had gone noticeably stagnant, the simplicity of everything vanishing again without sign of return. I turned my attention to the window. Outside the tallest branches sat unmoved. I closed my eyes, clenched my jaw, I could remember. The wide maw of my life opened fast, descending rapidly. It heard more than felt the speed of my heart, it a similar beast ready to bite.

“I’m not supposed to be…” I pressed my fingers to my forehead smoothing out a wrinkle. Show me the words. All of them. Please. Who was I talking to?

“It’s okay,” Rhysand said, with obvious gentleness. My despair was great, too great to miss. You did not have to know me to feel it. A rush of sympathy overcame me at Helion’s guilt. I couldn’t look at him, could not face this level of care coming from his being. “You can show me.”

It was like a cold front. The edge of two things, one sweeping in from the margins and pushing out the other. The hair on my arms stood up. I knew what he meant. I did not have to ask. My eyes met his and he took fear for question.

He continued, unaware, “You know of the gift of daemati?”

I tripped over the table to my left, surging again, away from Rhysand with speed that did not account for such things. Glass broke. I walked over it. I knew I had by context not by feeling. I couldn’t have missed it. The noise booming in the quiet intruded, breaking the peace and stillness. I was so much like that beast. It was right. He stared blank-faced at me as I backed myself toward a wall, stranded in a room with something wild and no idea what to do or how to help. And the trouble was I knew he wanted to, I knew he’d suggested this only to help, but I could not fight it, that terror rising like bile.

“No.”

“I don’t—”

I shook my head, “No.”

He took a breath and I saw it, how it had calmed him. I tried the same to no relief. The pause only added to the growing tension, sharpening like a needle with which life would pierce me.

“I only see what you choose. It won’t hurt.”

Something familiar crept inside me, clawing, and opened a hole in my stomach. I felt it fill with something foul, something from another place, somewhere I’d never been. I shut my eyes as if that would prevent the lens with which I saw the world to become filled with it, but even behind my eyes I watched it rise in my waterline until it passed over the iris, until suddenly the world was swimming in the tint of gloom.

Helion burst through the door. Rhysand raised a hand to him before either could speak again. I couldn’t tell if he’d arrived with speed, time had begun to mean nothing again. All I knew was it was summer and the world was very dark despite the odds.

“I can tell you. I know the words,” I said turning to look at him praying just the assertion would conjure them. But doing so only illuminated to me something else. Rhysand had betrayed me. Such sadness had overcome him. A face of pity. I had wanted more than anything to have the words, but now they’d never come.

He must have seen it on my face because he spoke, “Even if you did, I need to see what you saw that night.”

“What about the Veritas orb?” Helion said. I’d forgotten he was there. How quiet he was. He turned to me, eyes falling to the floor. The glass. I was a poor guest. I was bleeding all over his fine house. I’d stain. I’d never leave. I’d haunt everything.

Rhysand shook his head, “It shows only glimpses. I need everything, every feeling, every sound.”

I took in a breath, the biggest I could remember needing. I wanted to yell, I wanted to give him what he wanted, but instead what came was that soft voice made to conceal everything, “I’ll tell you what it said.”

The solution I hoped the offer would bring seemed further after I’d made it. The pair looked at me. “Bryaxis spoke to you?”

I nodded.

Rhysand rubbed at his forehead, “I can’t send you out there without knowing. It’s too dangerous. With how clever it is I need to know precisely what was said, what you felt, if your magic reacted.”

I winced. Stepping back the glass crunched and I forced myself to feel it. The males cringed, and suddenly I could smell the tang of my blood. Slowly I remembered what had been forgotten. I’m in this world. I’m in this room.

Rhysand continued, guilt-ridden, and I understood—I’d understood before, “I can no more give back your house than I can your life.”

But I could not do it. I turned away, my eyes blurred, stomach in my throat. I said into my shoulder, even quieter than before, like my voice knew before me it would no longer be needed, “But I remember.”

Rhysand met the quiet with his own, “I believe you.”

His final words were unsaid, but I heard them. I need to see. I waited a moment so as not to be rude.

“No,” I said and left.

I lost track of time easily like a habit. I made sure not to get blood anywhere. In that very large bed, too large for even two people, I climbed, already having pulled the glass from my flesh. The wounds in a momentary glow stitched together and within a minute it was like they hadn’t been there at all. I tried to remember they were, tried to remember how many pieces I pulled out, but that was already leaving me. I didn’t have the space for it. I let my head meet the pillow, tugged the blanket to my chin, and did not know the number of days it took me to get up again.

***

“You were at the library of Aurora.”

Once I got out of bed they came to see me often even though I did not talk. Unmoving, staring out the open window, they spoke to my back. The branches in the distance were a mimicked stillness. They hadn’t moved since that night. I ignored the cold sweat that began to buzz against my skin. My stomach and its emptiness clawed to get out. I ignored the echo of that name in my knees. Aurora.

“I realized it the first day we met,” Rhysand continued. It was him talking this time. I think they took turns. I think I thought that at some point. I lost track of what I believed. “You want to protect my library because you saw Aurora burn and got away.”

Gone. All that knowledge destroyed, and it was me who was supposed to preserve it. Centuries of work, centuries of records, all lost. And I’d fled as it burned. I left them to their fate as he had left me to mine.

“So I know you understand the importance of what I’m asking. How crucial it is to ensure you we don’t lose information by not sharing it.”

A sob fought its way through my chest at the innate cruelty, that I was as important, as precious, as that library and what it held. No, I was just a female from the woods. I was a memory. I’d hit a hole in the world and fall through like everything else forgotten and it wouldn’t matter what I had, what had been in that house, what had happened to it.

“Your secrets are yours I won’t go anywhere besides that night at your home. Helion can be there if you’d like.”

The scent of oatmeal wafted toward the window, crossing my path before running away into the world. I would not eat it as I had not eaten the last bowl. Rhysand could harm me easily and Helion could do nothing about it. That is the order of all things. I was not lamenting over the trivialities of nature. What is in you is as old as pain.

“I want to help.”

Maybe I could go back, maybe I could repair. I swallowed, “Can you put it back?”

Silence. A cloud moved over the sun.

“What?”

I repeated, “What your claws break, can you put the pieces back together?”

It wasn’t secrets I wanted to keep. I’d tell him everything if he asked. If he let me help, I’d tell him what he would never figure out, could never know about that night, about the years after. And I knew they were claws, knew how they felt, the ease with which they shattered. I wanted to preserve something else more fragile than a house, than a life.

“No,” he said.

The cloud passed and from behind me, the bedroom door shut.

***

It was the same dream. A needle pierced the current and caught my legs, I followed the light. There in the thicket, I’m asked for my name. This time I say it. Yet with each letter given voice the dream dissolved. First him, then the birds, then the water, until there was nothing but darkness. I did not try to grab for that world. I knew I could not keep it.

***

I woke with clear eyes. I knew the way well enough. No one was coming for me so I did not wait. Walking as I always had, like I was in a current almost going downstream. There was no stopping, you could only get out, and I didn’t want to get out. I had no reason to believe I should do this really and as I walked I tried to find a why but I had none. Life was different from when I abandoned it and maybe I no longer fit in the space I’d left behind. Maybe not even from a distance. I didn’t know though, and I guess I wanted to know if there was room for me even if I was different from what I’d been. I kept walking. For now, I knew only that I had to keep walking.

Oh.

There was no change in the eyes. Or eye, the other, metal. His full lips unflinching, gaze unending, but as our attentions met, I saw it. I knew what memory looked like and how forgetting affected the face. That thing you can’t place and it's confusion. Or worse, not even confusion, not even the grasping hands for the edges of the mind, those echos of slight recognition. Just blankness.

Helion caught us first.

“We have a guest.”

I didn’t know if it was directed at me or Rhysand who turned to see I was standing there, still in my pajamas, the skin under my eyes purpling despite the long sleep I’d taken since that night in the study. There was no desire, no instinct, to look away from the hard edges of this male that began to soften like the beginning colors of morning. Not before I knew for certain. He stood. A slight bend at his waist settled for manners. I dipped only my head. I didn’t think I could safely manage much else without revealing the intensity with which I felt the need to watch him. Every window was open, the sunlight bled into his skin. He glowed warm, like a field in late afternoon, like a summer’s full moon.

“We just sent someone to get you,” Helion said.

Rhysand stared between us. His gaze sharp, he watched from the middle of our line of sight, our attention passing through him and he seemed to feel it. He introduced us, “This is Lucien, emissary of the Night Court.”

Lucien.

The emissary waited a minute, for my name, but I’d never given it. It was all muscle memory in a way. His own mouth pulled slight and pleasant, glad for something but I didn’t know what. The stare breaking, he turned toward Helion and Rhysand, “We’ve met.”

All at once the world became more solid than it had ever been. As real as the lip print on a glass. I took one long breath and when I exhaled it came as a relief.

“Just once,” I said.

His face relaxed revealing just barely more of his smile, “Yes. Only once.”

Both High Lords had stiffened at the revelation. The inadequacy of my words caught up with me as they never had. Faster than I would’ve guessed if I’d had the chance. If there’d been time.

“When?” Rhysand asked.

“A few years ago.”

The hole in my stomach once gaping began to shrink. I didn’t know anyone could still do that—remember me. Helion stared between us, his brows rising slightly. He turned toward Rhysand and the same thing happened that had occurred those days before, a thought seemed to pass through them. I knew though, or suspected it at the very least, that some communication was happening inside their heads. It was not so figurative, not the work of long-time friendship, it was tangible words being said along some avenue Rhysand managed to speak through.

“Are you hungry at all?” Helion asked, turning his focus back on me.

I nodded. I was starving, I realized. Each step I took into the room seemed to solidify something in me that had become translucent. I couldn’t say what it was. The absence though was filling. Lucien waited to sit until I had. His manners reminded me again to perform my own as Helion pulled out the chair I’d always taken, the one just beside Lucien. Strange how it happens this way. I straightened my shoulders and crossed my legs. I was not in the woods.

Helion and Rhysand resumed the conversation they must have been having when I wasn’t in the room, about someone they both knew, and it was as if nothing had happened. They were not overly cautious, not afraid I’d return to the person I was when we were alone. They would not let me haunt this place. They were not looking, but I bowed my head in thanks and made a plate.

Wordlessly we passed each other dishes. Lucien took only a little food, his plate had been empty, but there was enough to suggest he’d already eaten and was now going for seconds. I chewed even slower than the last time, not wanting him to figure out I was ravenous despite being in such a fine place. I had no explanation, not one at least I wanted to give as to why I was the way I was. The flavors were so rich it became impossible not to eat with some vigor and before long I found myself looking across the table for a glass. Without ceremony, however, Lucien passed a teacup over to me already poured. I took it with sturdy hands, the warmth of him apparent the moment we were a little close, fingers pulling, overlapping. I sipped it gratefully.

“Did you sleep well?”

It always happened the same way with that dream. The dreamland disappears and a sky just close to dawn appears. And then there's no sleeping, no ability to return to the depth of unconsciousness I’d found. But it was a deep sleep, the kind that leaves you groggy.

I opened my mouth but decided instead on shaking my head no. He stared at me, a sense of anticipation on his shoulders, some tension building. The light off the lawn cast his face in kindness, something soft. An old desire formed in my gut, some weightlessness of being that made my hand light enough to rise from its place. I wanted to touch him, his face, run my fingers over his cupid’s bow, feel the dip. But I did not. Instead, I placed my palms flat on the table so he could see them.

“Have you been here long?”

‘I…don’t know.”

Despite the worn look of confusion, the tension in his shoulders settled. He didn’t understand me. This was not so foreign. I wasn’t sure how to describe it, the feeling of time slipping from your hands like water. The inability to track where your disruption had begun, where all that cool clear current had been touched by you. My hands flinched as if to close, but I didn’t let them.

“I’ve lost track of time.”

“The moon is repeating again, since its phase at the start of summer.”

Two weeks then, since I arrived. I took a sip of my tea, staring down the table into something empty. Time again had passed. Perhaps Bryaxis by now had moved on. A library unprotected, a beast in the world. All the while the two High Lords looking for it here with me. I hummed some note by way of reply. It came on instinct rather than on purpose. Some part of my mind paying attention.

“I never caught your name,” he said. The words were quiet enough that no one might hear, as if they’d come from the past. In a way they had. Even so, it drew me back into him, into the present where I was not alone at the table. I was glad for it. There was a time when I’d have given anything for that, someone who could draw my attention.

Yet when I turned to him in answer my thoughts were so blank it was like a name had never been there. My mouth hung open in the silence. His eyes dipping to it forced me to look away. I wanted not to do it, to remove my hands, but I did, balling them into my pajamas. He never knew it, and yet telling him seemed to ensure more readily that I’d be forgotten altogether. That strange fallacy of fate all heroes make in trying to avoid theirs. My throat formed a lump the size of a worry stone. Everything was slipping away like a dream before you woke up. I wanted to ask anyone, anything, for it not to happen, for here of all places to stay. Say it, I thought, or he will think you never will.

Then his voice, delicate like a sunbeam through leaves, interrupted the current of my mind, “Take your time.”

I blinked a few times and released my dress, counting each finger as I did until it lay flat again. Slowly I crept forward, placing those two palms on the cool wood of the table. My eyes found the window and I kept him in my line of sight as the stone I’d swallowed began to vanish, the syllables taking shape, until everything formed perfectly in my mind, every letter, every thought, every good reason I had to share this answer with him.

“Y/N.”

His eyes traced back and forth, dipping then rising with the peaks of my face like one would follow a mountain range.

“Y/N,” he said once to me. Then again after he turned to his plate but more to himself. He held the name in his mouth, rolling it around. I did the same with his as I had since we met. I closed my fist around the fork but kept it on the table. I had a simultaneous urge, like when the sun is too bright but you want to turn your face into its warmth, of something wanting to disappear and something else wishing to get out.

He sipped his own cup. Though his eyes were not on me I could tell I had his attention so fully that nothing would escape him. I’d already done that and I don’t think he planned on letting it happen again. Even downcast, even seeming to be miles away, he was taking great care to see me, to be aware of me, from his place in the world. I wanted to reach out and say that I was going nowhere, but I had no idea if that was even true so I thought of something else to say, slowly, while feeling the weight of his awareness.

“You’re Night Court,” I managed to get out.

He nodded, “Yes.”

“I thought maybe you were something else.”

“I was.”

I bowed, nodding, my chest strained just a bit, but not enough for me to stop the plain words, “I was something else too.”

He placed his hand on the table and my eyes fell to the food he wasn’t eating, though he’d piled such healthy proportions. My every word he hung onto now there was no time left for the things he’d begun.

“What were you before?”

I thought of the ghost, of all the things I might tell him, but it was almost like a mirage, some obscuring that happened by proximity where being further away gives a false clarity. When I tried to reach for her to see her detail I found she was gone.

He must have noticed the conflict in my mind because he spoke again, “You don’t have to say if you don’t wish to.”

“Thank you.”

He gave me a simple smile and we returned to something quiet. I knew he’d listen if I ever had the words. When we met I could see the kindness off him like you see ripples in a pond, the greater Os disappearing into the outer boundary, shy and thin. I felt as if I were a very far away edge touching the lighter rings and now it seemed I was at the center where the kindness was more immediate, more intentional. I don’t know if anyone had ever been so gentle. Not the false gentleness where they believe you will break, but another kind entirely. An understanding that the world was cruel and that he was continuously deciding he wouldn’t be.

I ate my own food in silence, waiting for his attention to diminish, to wink out entirely. Only it didn’t. Only actually, there were things I wanted to say if I could reach them, if only I had access.

“Do you…” I began, “Did you find her?”

His brows rose slightly and his eyes flicked toward the other end of the table for less than a moment, but I’d seen. He cleared his throat, “Yes.”

“Is she…is she well?”

“Very,” he said and though his face didn’t show it, I felt something in his words like relief.

I bit into my bread, chewing, thinking of the next words, “I put something out for her. For the mother.”

Lucien’s face returned to that softness of when we’d found each other in the same place again, when he still didn’t know my name, “Thank you.”

I nodded, content to leave it at that, but found the question rising before I could wonder if I should ask it, “And is it nice where you live? In the Night court?”

His mouth pursed with the question, an answer not so available. It did not seem a coincidence that an emissary arrived just when they were in need of one. However, he did not seem poised to lie, to sell me on anything. If he had the answer would be easy.

“I like to think that I will love it eventually as I have come to love everywhere I’ve lived, but it does not quite feel like home as I know it.”

“You’ve lived many places?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not here to convince me of one.”

His brows rose and he turned down the table to look at the other occupants, “Of Rhysand? No.”

“Why?”

He paused, but not with thought, with something else that maybe if I knew him a little better I could say. His hand flinched forward, but shifted from its unknown trajectory toward a glass.

“Right now, I doubt that is what you most need.”

Death felt close—so to say I forgot again about breathing. Not for very long, but long enough. Everything else, everything I had wanted to say or ask didn’t yet arrive with the same clarity. If he was emissary for the Night Court then all I could hope was that there'd be time to say it. That something somewhere would give me time to get it out. For now, my cup was empty. I stared at the bottom, the tea leaves forming a pattern and maybe if I’d been a scholar of such readings of fate I could use it. Maybe I wouldn’t think it at all a bias that when I looked down I saw stars.

“Have you been back swimming this summer?” He asked.

“Yes. I love swimming.”

His mouth twitched, “You do.”

I don’t know what I’d thought really, that he remembered me and had not remembered anything else, but it surprised me again that even the context for which we met was so available to him. That, on any given day since the first time and now, he could conjure me in that stream swimming. He could picture the scene, imagine the moment, and I would be there as he had been there in my own memory. I was not used to it, to any of what had become of me. Something within, some hidden note, was plucked like a harpstring. It hummed in my inner ear and I sighed.

“I used to go swimming all the time,” He said.

“Not anymore?”

He shook his head, “I’ve been busy.”

“Oh,” I said unsure of what to say next, blindly following the whims of my mind as if a light had been shut off and I needed to find my way through a dark forgotten room. I leaned forward, hoping he’d hear me despite his attention on his food. “Where did you swim before?”

He finished cutting into his bread only to put his hands in his lap, the fork now idle jewelry at his side. “At home, there was a pond we’d go to. Now I suppose the—” He coughed, shifting in his chair uncomfortably. I was too close, I realized. I pulled back resting against the chair. I tried to remember better manners, and space, and those things we learned as children.

His mouth momentarily downturned he continued, leaning towards me, “I’m sure there are a few hidden places. I haven’t looked hard enough yet.”

“Maybe you will like it better, where you are, if you return to something old in a new way,” I said, nodding a moment, collecting the jumble of thoughts that had appeared. He watched my face, knowing there was more and waiting for it. His hand so close to mine I could grab it if I wanted to, let my own drift his way, and check that he was really here. Yes, these were the words. “The way water makes you weightless, that's one of the things I’ve always liked about swimming—that reminder that I’m not so in control as I think. Nature is there and I might get swept some way and find myself in a different and new part of the world, exposed to its beauty even if I don’t know it yet, didn’t know I had wanted to see it until I got there.”

Lucien’s face took on a more refined contentment. I watched it happen as I spoke, the way he listened. My voice seemed to settle on him with a precise weight that relaxed his shoulders, brightened his eyes. I don’t know if I’d ever seen anyone listen to me with such a face, not even surprised that I had so much to say, but as if he were expecting it all along and was glad to finally have it in his presence.

His throat bobbed, “it’s nice—nicer, when you think of it that way.”

I managed a very slight smile, closer to happiness than I could then remember. Larger too, more real than anything since that night where I’d gone and had never quite come back.

We walked as we did but in a different way. The rolling hills, the sea, they were out of sight. Lucien had to go. He’d come to deliver a message, and he’d done that before I arrived. It was all the same as it had been but instead of the great lawn there was the formal patio followed by great grassy paths and the conservatory.

He stayed close to me, not letting me stray as the other two did. Delicately his fingers grabbed for long blades of grass, pulling them from their root as he walked by, dropping them once a few steps had been taken. Everything ran through his fingers, nothing passed his notice without finding first his hands, pressing for the boundaries, the veins, the green, the bloom. All of it was his to touch and he did. The white fabric I wore overlapped with his legs at times. I was aware of it as I was aware of everything—acutely.

“You’ve enlisted to help get Bryaxis I hear.”

“Yes.”

“That’s brave,” he said. “I’m told it’s unbearable up close.”

“It is.”

“So you’ll be joining us.”

I was quiet. There were still things left to do and I didn’t know what would become of me once they’d been done. But at least I got to see him. At least now I knew what I knew, that he was real and he remembered me. I could still do such things and that was a gift. I wouldn’t waste it. The golden gate of the property came into view. Our time was over. My hand at my side it pushed outward for him but I changed its momentum, bringing it into crossed arms. The pair of us stared ahead.

“Are you afraid to see it again?”

Fear was not the word and yet in some sense it was. Because I would feel fear once I said it again, of that I was sure, but I was not afraid at the prospect of being afraid. When it is certain there seems less to worry about. It no longer was difficult to imagine how terrified one could be and so too that prevented any misunderstanding of what I was doing.

“Fear is not quite right.”

“What is?”

“I don’t know.”

Our shoulders brushed and I turned my head up to him, his tall frame. If it were not noon he’d block the sun entirely from me. It cast through his shirt revealing so much of him. There were no secrets, there was nowhere denied besides the places strangers ought to be denied. He and I had skipped that with me I suppose.

“I hope I see you. I’d just begun to think you got away.”

“I did,” I said. “More than once.”

Silence fell between us and I tried to mend what had begun the way I used to. Birds chirped overhead Goshawks, chickadees, sparrows—I rattled each one off as it spoke, taking inventory and filing it all away. First I wanted it in the memory, the one happening where I was walking along the path in Day Court and nothing seemed wrong even though it was. But that seemed a little too flimsy, something easy to slip out of your grasp so instead I put it in an index of what wildlife flew free under Helion’s sun.

“Vassa and Jurian are waiting,” Lucien said giving a glance back before settling his gaze again on me. “Goodbye Y/N.”

I did not say it back. The sentiment expanded the hole in my stomach that had begun to close ever so slightly. Gloom caught the world but I brushed it aside like a cobweb. There he was, going now, the first person in 50 years who had not forgotten me. That was one of those good unexpected things. Life was full of those. It was worth it in a way, to stay alive, to see what found its way down the current onto my side of the creak.

He walked down the grassy path toward the gate. Rhysand behind me didn’t approach, but I’d felt him show up as Lucien was leaving. I waited for the emissary to pass the boundary. I couldn’t see it, but suddenly he felt very far away, small, yet still there in my line of sight. My hair brushed against my shoulders, the lawn flattening giving shape to the breeze that had returned, bringing with it something simple and sure to the world. My life, yes, this was my life.

“I will show you,” I said.

Rhysand approached next to me watching the male too but with different emotion, something unsure. He extended a hand my way. I turned to look at it.

“I don’t do tattoos.”

The High Lord smiled, “Luckily this isn’t a bargain. You can leave at any time. I mean it. Bryaxis is my problem.”

I swallowed, turning to see the glint of the last male in the world who’d known I was there, there in those woods. How small he was. Wind blew through the front lawn relieving the heat.

“There's something you should know before you extend your offer officially. If you wish to withdraw I won’t hold it against you. I don’t want you feeling you’re under any obligation to me.

“It’s my beast.”

“And they were my wards.”

“If it means so much to you we can split the blame.”

I crossed my arms, “You like deals.”

“I’ve had luck with them in the past, yes.” His face once again settled on the horizon. Our peripheral watched as the Emissary finally disappeared, but I knew he’d been there. There was no worry between us, no doubt. Someone had once believed in me this way, but only once. My heart beating with the story I’d told a thousand times, the words rising with ease, a beginning and an end.

“I’m supposed to be dead.”

#lucien x reader #lucien fanfic #lucien vanserra #acotar fanfiction #acotar #lucien acotar #Soooo excited to finally share this #probably should've done another read through but didn't!#simply need to get it into the world and move on with the plot!!!#All the important stuff is there ;-)

34 notes · View notes