#eris fifth house

[sunkissedchld]

𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐒 (𝟏𝟑𝟔𝟏𝟗𝟗) 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍

𝐈. 𝐃𝐄𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐒

asteroid eris is named after the greek goddess of discord and strife. eris is known to be a troublemaker and is often credited with starting and sustaining the trojan war. although eris is often associated with creating problems for people, liana miate asserts that hesiod (an ancient greek poet) splits eris into two: a younger version who aligns with sowing discord for no reason and an older version who intends to bring about competition and push people to go beyond their set limits. 

in astrology, eris follows her mythological roots and represents areas of life where we can encounter disruptions, major losses, and chaos. eris can also tell of where we face injustices and where we need to learn to stand up for ourselves.

asteroid eris mainly makes itself known as it moves and creates transiting aspects, but for this post i will be focusing on how it functions in one’s birth chart. (if you do want me to analyze how it may work as it makes aspects to planets and other object - let me know).

𝐈𝐈. 𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐒𝐈𝐆𝐍𝐒

asteroid eris has an orbital period of about 560 years, so it moves through the signs really slowly. this asteroid has been in the sign of aries since the mid-1920s and won’t be in taurus until 2048 where it will stay until around 2146. with this in mind, i will only explain the way the signs aries and taurus will influence the way asteroid eris can function.

𝗔𝗥𝗜𝗘𝗦

eris in aries could be tumultuous. there could be more of an emphasis on literal war and combat which makes sense in my opinion given the world wars were in and around the time period of this asteroid being in aries. i also see eris in aries being more likely to fight back against the chaos the asteroid can bring; if older eris wants people to learn to stand up for themselves, then aries is the perfect sign for that to occur. again, we can look back in history to see revolutions like the civil rights movement, the vietnam war protests, the breaking up of the british empire and more occur while this asteroid was in aries. of course, these things happen all throughout history, but i want to specify how often this seems to happen while in the specific period of eris in aries. asteroid eris in aries seems to function as dealing with catastrophes head-on with the idea of pushing through the tough times instead of succumbing to them. while discord may hit hard; the collective will rise back with more strength than what was had before.

𝗧𝗔𝗨𝗥𝗨𝗦

eris in taurus could bring about a sort of predictable chaos. build ups to conflict may be obvious, but when it occurs it could destroy people’s comfortability and especially bring havoc to finances. conflicts could last for long periods of time, and people overall could fall into a “woe is me” attitude when it comes to figuring out how to move past catastrophes; instead of figuring out how to advocate for one’s self or the collective when facing injustices - those born under eris in taurus could try to wait things out. the idea of fighting back or advocating for oneself could take a while to be viable, but once it becomes an option i could see people putting up a hard fight.  asteroid eris in taurus could be reluctant to face conflict head on, but once decided to it will be obstinate on its course. i’m reminded of the phrase “when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object”.

𝐈𝐈𝐈. 𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐄𝐒

𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗦𝗧

you could go through drastic physical changes. if you were to get into plastic surgery, fillers, botox, etc. it may not bode well for you; your body could react negatively to the treatments and/or you may not look as well as you wanted to. you could also struggle with your identity or feeling like you don't truly know yourself or what you want to do in life. you could go through "phases" or looking and/or dressing a certain way. you could feel as if no one understands you, or as if the way you view yourself is vastly different from how others see and understand you. people may not be able to come to a consensus about who they think you are as a person. it could take you a while to find out "who you are", and your body may change often throughout your life. those with eris in the first house probably need to come to terms with the way they look instead of trying to constantly change their appearance, and they also likely need to learn how to settle down with one way of living or learn to embrace that vastness of who they want to be instead of trying to put themselves into a box.

𝗦𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗗

money and other financial successes could easily come and go out of your life. you may be the type of person who loses things more easily than the average person, and you may find it hard to retain money and possessions. during tense transits, you could have items repossessed or even stolen from you. your routines could be hard to maintain, or you could find random incidents keep you from being able to have one. it could be easy for you to break bad habits (but again, could be hard for you to maintain good ones). you could find yourself struggling to keep jobs or find that you're drawn to jobs where every day is different and unpredictable. you may need to learn how to stay on top of what it is you want and need to do (ie. writing down a schedule, having someone hold you accountable, etc.). you may need to learn how to say no to yourself when it comes to spending money and work on having a savings account you can't touch at all. it may be better for you to make large purchases with cash instead of setting up payments, so you can keep possessions long-term.

𝗧𝗛𝗜𝗥𝗗

you could find yourself being ghosted often and/or you could have trouble maintaining contact with others. you could be "horrible with communication" or even technology to an extent. you could find that people misunderstand you or they think you're more harsh in your words than you intend to be. you could also have a tumultuous relationship with your siblings - maybe you've always found it hard to connect with them, or you go long periods of time without talking. your early education may have been interrupted in some way (having to move away, change schools, etc.). you could also have issues with transportation more often than others like your car breaking down randomly or always being late to events due to unreliability. learning how to advocate for yourself will be a major key to dealing with this eris placement. there's a need to learn how to "speak up" and deal with confrontation without running away and also without arguing. you may find it better to try leaving early to account for possible transportation issues. there's a need to learn to set boundaries with your siblings also in order to maintain the connection.

𝗙𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗧𝗛

you could have an unstable home life. maybe you had (or you do) change living situations often, or your relationship with your family might not be the best. your childhood might’ve been fractured as a result of family issues. people, areas, or things you find comfort in may seem like they always get “ruined” at some point (ie. if you have a comfort show it gets canceled or the writing starts going downhill, a celebrity you like ends up being very problematic, etc.). you may feel as if you have no control over your emotions, or whenever you try to control your emotions you end up breaking down anyways. you may even find it hard to trust your instincts. you may also find it hard to create and maintain relationships with women - especially your mother. you may need to learn how to come to terms with the fact your childhood wasn’t as good as you wanted (or as good as it should’ve been); you might even have to realize you need to put yourself and your needs above your family due to their issues. you may need to learn to step back when it comes to parasocial relationships; figuring out it’s okay to find comfort in things or people, but not putting them on a pedestal anymore.

𝗙𝗜𝗙𝗧𝗛

eris in the fifth house is also a contender for having an unstable childhood. maybe you weren’t allowed to behave like a child, or your childhood abruptly ended due to unforeseen circumstances. when engaging in creative avenues, you may encounter blocks often - in terms of imagination, originality, or physical blocks. you might even find that the art you create gets messed up in some way (ie. you delete a song or a section of a song you were making, you mix the wrong paints together, etc.). you may spontaneously lose interest in hobbies, or you’re prevented from being able to do them (ie. it rains on a day you planned to golf, you run out of yarn when you were planning to knit, etc.). with this placement, it may also seem like your romantic life is never going anywhere; this is another house that may see people ghosting them, or when you go out on dates they could be horrendous. you may need to learn how to create things out of your messes when it comes to creative endeavors; there’s a need to learn how to “roll with the punches” so to speak. you may find it best to engage in multiple hobbies instead of just one or finding a way to have someone hold you accountable for the creative work you want to create. there’s a need to allow yourself to go back to being the child you never got to be at some points.

𝗦𝗜𝗫𝗧𝗛

you may be the type of person who always has health issues or some sort of injury. when you try to create good health habits you may find it hard to stay on track, and there may even be instances where you unintentionally break your habits (ie. you’re counting calories and want to stay under a certain amount but by day three you’ve forgotten you were dieting this way, you’re forced to work overtime one night and it just happens to be one of the days you’ve set aside for weight training, etc.). you may lose items easily, and when you try to help others you may have a way of making things worse (ie. you tried to help someone cook, but you burned part of the meal). you may need to advocate for and pay attention to your health and your body more than the average person. similar to other placements, having other people hold you accountable may be helpful for you to maintain habits you want to implement.  you may find it best to keep items in the same place each time you don’t have them in your hand, so you don’t lose things as often. when helping others, try to have someone check your work to be sure you’re providing aid the right way.

𝗦𝗘𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗛

you could find yourself entering toxic relationships often or at least relationships that often never go anywhere. you might find yourself being ghosted by people for seemingly no reason or drama arising out of relationships you have from out of nowhere. contracts you write up or engage in could fall apart easily (ie. you receive a job offer, but it’s randomly rescinded for no reason; you have everything in order to move to a new apartment, but you get rejected out of nowhere), or they could cause more headaches than they’re worth. you might find people often don’t give enough in their relationships with you - like you’re the one running the show, making all the plans to be together, spending all the money, and they’re only along for the ride, or they only focus on what they can gain from you. you may need to learn how to have respect for yourself when it comes to relationships of all kinds. learning to not set yourself on fire in order to keep someone else from being cold, demanding equality in partnerships, etc. with this placement in aries i could even see a need to step back from relationships in some way - to allow or force others to pull their weight instead of making everything happen on your own. there’s a need to learn how to advocate for yourself and your needs in partnerships and contracts.

𝗘𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧𝗛

you could feel as if you’re always going through some sort of transformation - almost as if your life itself or life circumstances are always unstable. when you try to share with others you could find your kindness is not appreciated, so you may feel reluctant to give people money or take money from others for seemingly no reason. whenever you try to create deep connections with people it could feel like things never work out or always fall through (ie. you want to have a business partner, but the person backs out at the last minute, you need someone to cosign on a loan for you, but no one is willing). also, with this placement you may feel as if people leave randomly; this could range from being ghosted, them not putting in effort to maintain a relationship with you, conversations going stale to literal death taking people away from you without warning. additionally, your long term assets may be unstable. there could be a need to learn how to let go of things and people once they’ve served their purpose in your life; some people are meant to be present for only moments or periods of time in your life as opposed to throughout the whole journey. there’s also a need to stay on top of contracts and long-term investments; you could find that lower risk investments work best for you. there’s also a need to learn how to share yourself with others and allow others to do the same with you even through times where you may have been betrayed - learning from your mistakes is important in this area.

𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗧𝗛

this is another placement that could encounter issues with transportation since the ninth house deals with travel. going further though, you could often experience disruptions when going on trips or vacations (ie. forgetting your passport, wallet, or other important item; flights being canceled or delayed for no reason, having “bad” experiences when you visit other areas). this could also be an indicator of struggling in areas of higher academia; this could be in regards to the material feeling overwhelming to learn or things always going wrong during the school year (ie. experiencing life changing events that make it hard for you to attend class, having to drop classes or finding it hard to create a schedule that works, etc.). connections to religion could also be unstable; you could feel uncomfortable with the idea of religion because of issues with religious institutions. you may find that people often try to suppress your culture or way of living, or you could find it hard to connect with your culture because people push you away from it in some way. there’s a need to be proactive when it comes to the way you travel – opting to leave too early instead of even on time, checking your luggage twice and three times over, etc. you may need to advocate for yourself more when interacting with higher institutions like college or religious places, and there’s also a need to be proud of your culture and views despite people’s attempts to erase them.

𝗧𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗛

when it comes to receiving recognition for your achievements you could find that you’re often looked over. your career path may be hard for you to narrow down, or you could find you’re let go from jobs without warning when everything seems to be fine from your point of view. you may jump from job to job or be promoted and demoted to certain positions for no reason. you could encounter extreme highs and lows when it comes to your reputation; it might even be possible that your reputation is not consistent amongst people, and it could be hard for you to control it. when you’re in positions of power you may find that people often undermine you or refuse to take you seriously - especially men. on that note, you may find it hard to create and maintain relationships with men (especially your father). you could find people always find a way to criticize you or tell you all the work you do is wrong no matter what you do. there’s a need to possibly embrace whatever reputation people assign to you instead of trying to control the narrative or change who you are to appease everyone. there is also a need to demand recognition and praise when you know you deserve it - possibly even walking away from job opportunities when you know you’re being lowballed. there’s a need to maintain your sense of self trusting that the truth of who you are will guide you towards those who will appreciate you.

𝗘𝗟𝗘𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗛

it could be hard for you to maintain friendships and connections with the collective and other groups in general. you could find yourself being iced out or being the “odd one out” when you try to fit in. technology may fail on your frequently, or you may feel like it doesn’t like you (ie. you find it hard to connect to wifi, you always have phone or computer issues, etc.). you may feel as if (or told) that you’re not as helpful as you think you are when it comes to collective situations (ie. group projects). you could find your ideas and dreams for the future often don’t work out, or you find them hard to maintain. there’s partially a need to embrace your individuality - to come to terms with the fact that you will eventually find a group that aligns with you and won’t push you out or make you feel othered. there’s a need to keep putting yourself out there even when you feel like it never works out. there’s also a need to maintain hope – for the future, for connecting with others, and when it comes to interacting with technology.

𝗧𝗪𝗘𝗟𝗙𝗧𝗛

this is another placement that would indicate feeling as if you’re always going through some sort of transformation or ending in life. you could feel as if your spiritual life is in constant chaos (ie. having times where you’re clear on what your journey is and then suddenly feeling like you have no clue what you’re doing; being able to communicate with your guides clearly and then suddenly hearing radio silence, etc.). you could feel as if you don’t “truly” or “intimately” know yourself. you could find that your subconscious activates at random times and could cause trouble when you least expect it. you could feel as if your fate changes quickly going from having great luck to none at all. when it’s time to end certain cycles in your life you may find it hard to let go, or you may feel as if things end abruptly leaving little space for you to accept these endings. there’s a need to learn to be okay with abrupt endings or the idea of never receiving closure – finding a way to maintain peace even if this doesn’t happen. there’s also a need to take fate into your own hands instead of always being passive (or learning to be passive when it’s necessary). there’s a need to be open to ambiguity as opposed to running away from it.

[thatbloodymuggle]

MASTERMIND (vii)

SEVEN - THE MANUSCRIPT

SUMMARY: A child of light and dark, you are the Night Court’s best kept secret. After decades spent in hiding, you yearn to stretch your wings. But you quickly learn that freedom comes with a price, as you find yourself trying to outfox the fox in his own den.

PAIRING: eris vanserra x reader

WORD COUNT: 9.2k

SERIES MASTERLIST

WARNINGS: language, heavy angst, love confessions, cliff hanger

The afternoon sun filters through the curtains of your new apartment, casting a warm glow over the freshly furnished space. Velaris lays sprawled beneath you, and the fifth story height gives you an incredible view of the Illyrian mountains in the distance. The studio is modest compared to the grandeur of the House of Wind. But despite the downsizing of your bed and the slightly cramped organization of furniture, it holds a certain freedom—one you haven’t known before, one that lets you breathe more clearly.

A soft breeze seeps through the French doors you keep ajar as you settle into a chair by the balcony. You sink into the comfort of the plush seat as you begin sifting through the pile of documents that has accumulated over the past few weeks. Your work as Scholar has become a reprieve during this period of change. The intricacies of ancient texts and political correspondences offer a semblance of normalcy that have kept you grounded since your return to the Night Court. But as enjoyable as your work has been, the golden rays shining through the windows make the pile of parchment in front of you seem like more of a chore than usual. You try to immerse yourself in your work, but you keep finding your gaze being drawn to the city outside. 

“Enjoying the view?” a gruff voice sounds from behind you.

You shriek and jump in your seat, sending papers flying through the air. You whip around, and your frantic heartbeat settles as you lay eyes on the intruder.

Cassian grins back at you with a devilish glint in his hazel eyes. You narrow your own into a menacing glare as you gather the jumbled mess of parchment from the ground.

“Is privacy a foreign concept for Illyrians? Or do you just take pleasure in barging in whenever you see fit?” you grumble.

Cassian chuckles as he leans against the doorframe. His gaze wanders over the mess of documents scattered across the floor, but he makes no move to help you. “Rhys sent me to fetch you. He’s called an urgent meeting about treaty developments.”  

You roll your eyes, “My point still stands. You could’ve knocked.”

The general raises an eyebrow, “Where’s the fun in that?” He pushes off the doorframe and offers you a hand. You reluctantly take it, letting him pull you up from the ground. “I’m just trying to save you from drowning in paperwork. Besides, I heard the new developments are big. Figured you’d want to be there.”

You dust off your hands and meet his gaze, a mischievous smile ghosting over your lips. “How big are we talking? Fate-of-the-world big or just enough to make me question my sanity?”

Cassian’s grin widens, “A little bit of both. It’s not every day we get to negotiate peace treaties with horny high lords with a penchant for trouble.”

You sigh, stretching your limbs, “Fine, I’ll come. But only if you promise to not sneak up on me like that again. I nearly had a heart attack.”

“Deal,” Cassian lies through a toothy grin. “But only if you promise not to screech like that again. I swear you nearly ruptured my ear drums.”

You cross your arms over your chest, “I suggest you keep that in mind next time you decide to barge in unannounced.”

“Noted,” Cassian replies, “Shall we?”

You grab a jacket and head toward the door, with Cassian falling into step beside you. “Lead the way, then. And try to keep your snark to a minimum until after the meeting, okay?”

Cassian chuckles again, his tone light and teasing, “No promises. After all, what’s life without a little mischief?”

As you stroll through the lively streets of Velaris, the conversation flows effortlessly. Cassian’s banter provides a welcome distraction from the glaringly unresolved areas of your life. Most notably, a certain half-sister.

Your return to the Night Court has been smoother than you anticipated. Feyre and Elain have been incredibly kind and courteous, Amren has treated you like you never left, and Azriel and Cassian welcomed you with open arms—literally, they tackled you to the floor. You’ve even found yourself spending more time with Nesta, whom you now regularly exchange books with. All is good—all except Mor.

You know your sister well. You know that she can hold a mean, unrelenting grudge. But you’ve never found yourself on the opposing end, receiving the brunt of her anger. She hasn’t so much as looked at you since your return, evading every attempt you make to talk to her. At first, guilt consumed you. The disdainful look in her eye threw you back into the slew of emotions you felt while you were at Autumn—the feeling that you were committing a grave betrayal to your only family. But as the weeks have passed, guilt has transformed into something more bitter. How are you meant to repair your relationship, when she won’t so much as meet your eye? 

“I can practically hear the gears turning in your head. Penny for a thought?” Cassian’s rumbling voice halts your train of thought.

You tilt your head upwards to meet his gaze. He towers over you, but despite his size, his playful eyes resemble that of a puppy. “Nothing,” you smile softly, “Just thinking about being back here. I missed it a lot.”

His mouth stretches into a toothy grin, “So you missed me?”

You smile turns into a glower, “I didn’t say that.”

“Don’t be embarrassed, Bookworm. I know you’re in love with me,” he drawls, “And although I’m a taken man, I’m sure Nes wouldn’t mind inviting a third into the bedroom.”

Your cheeks flare and you slap him harshly. He doesn’t so much as flinch, but his face pales at your next words.

“Don’t think for a minute that I’m above tattling on you, Batboy. I’m sure Nesta won’t be so amused at your perversion.”

“You wouldn’t.”

You cock a brow, “Don’t test me.”

“Touché,” he relents. 

A proud grin curls onto your lips at the trivial victory. But the smirk is immediately wiped from your face as Cassian lunges towards you. The scream has barely left your lips when he wraps you tightly in his arms and soars into the air. 

“I’m going to kill you!” Your cry is barely audible through the wind whipping around you, but you can feel the rumble of Cassian’s laugh. Despite your anger, you cling to him for dear life. This isn’t your first time flying with him, but the stomach lurching feeling of soaring through the air never ceases to surprise you. You shut your eyes tightly, willing the nausea to stay put in your gut.

The second your feet touch the ground, you lunge at the Illyrian warrior. Much to your displeasure, he expertly avoids your right hook. You send another his way, which he easily catches in his own hand.

“Let me have one,” you grunt, “I deserve it.”

His hazel eyes glisten with amusement. “You’re gonna have to try harder than that, nerd.”

A growl rips through your throat, but before you can throw yourself at him once more, the High Lady’s commanding voice slices through the air.

“Would you two quit bickering for once?”

The stern look on Feyre’s face leaves no room for debate. Reluctantly, you step away from Cassian.

“Sorry, your highness,” he dips his head in apology, but his irksome smirk remains. 

“I’m not,” you glower at him.

Feyre rolls her eyes but doesn’t comment on your obstinance. Instead, she beckons you forward. “Well come on, then. Everyone else is here.”

You fall into step beside her, leaving Cassian trailing behind. As you enter the River House, you run through a million different ways to enact your revenge on him. From the quirk in Feyre’s lips, you know that she is listening to your sadistic thoughts. A delicious smell wafts through the air, eliciting a growl from your stomach. As freeing as living on your own has been, the one pitfall is cooking for yourself—hence, the drool that’s all but dripping from your chin when the doors of the dining room swing open, revealing a full feast of food.

Any lingering bitterness is swept away at the sight. You eagerly take a seat at the table, barely acknowledging the rest of the Inner Circle. Even as the chatter around you dies down, you still can’t take your eyes off the spread before you. You don’t hesitate to pile an assortment of dishes onto your plate: roasted chicken, potatoes, and vegetables galore. But before you can take your first bite, an expectant cough stops you.

“Do you have any manners?” Cassian quips.

You narrow your eyes into a menacing glare. The rest of the Inner Circle watches, eyes wide with surprise at your uncharacteristic behavior.

“I skipped lunch.”

You shove a forkful of chicken into your mouth, nearly moaning at the taste.

“Who the hell thought you living on your own would be a good idea?” Azriel grumbles from beside you, but the playful glint in his eye betrays him.

“Your High Lord,” you mumble through a mouthful of food.

Nesta crinkles her nose in disgust as crumbs fall from your mouth. Regret is painted across Rhys’s face, to which you only shovel another forkful.

“Pig,” Amren chimes in.

You give her a bright, shining middle finger.

You scan the room and frown at the empty spot beside Azriel. “Where’s sister dearest?” you ask after swallowing.

“Not feeling well,” Rhys averts his gaze as he lies through his teeth. Irritation courses through you but you merely roll your eyes, keeping the snide remark to yourself.

“In other news,” Feyre says, “Treaty negotiations have been moving along.”

Rhys nods, grateful for the change in subject. “We’ve made as much progress as possible from afar. It seems that a summit is necessary to solidify tentative agreements and work out the remaining kinks.” 

Although you are still fully engrossed by the food in front of you, your ears perk up at the news. With two years passed since the War on Hybern, it’s about time the High Lords put their egos aside and meet.

“It’s about time,” Amren grumbles, voicing your inner thoughts.

Everyone nods in agreement. Despite the easiness, you can’t help but notice the way Feyre shifts in her seat and Rhys avoids her gaze. You narrow your eyes slightly at their nervous energy and set your fork down in anticipation of what’s to come. 

“In an act of good faith, we’ve offered to host negotiations here in Velaris.”

There it is. A conglomerate of protests immediately erupts. Thanks to the mortal queens, Velaris is no longer a sanctuary hidden from Prythian. But the prospect of inviting a cohort of power-hungry High Lords into it is…daunting, to say the least.

Rhys raises his hand, ceasing everyone’s chattering with the gesture. His gaze sweeps over the gathered members of his Inner Circle with his usual calm authority. “I know it’s less than ideal. But think of it as an olive branch, of sorts. Hosting here in Velaris is not only a display of our transparency, but it also emphasizes the strategic importance of these negotiations.”

The tension in the air is clear. But no one dares to argue, as his commanding tone leaves little room for debate, and much to everyone’s displeasure, Rhys is right. Although the more…disagreeable High Lords were willing to overlook the Night Court’s deceptions during the war, that tolerance can only last so long now that the dust has settled. 

“Who will be attending?” Azriel’s voice is quiet but sharp.

“And each court will be represented?” Amren’s eyes narrow in suspicion.

“Every High Lord and their chosen entourages,” Rhys confirms, his voice steady. “Even Beron has agreed, though I suspect his motives are less than pure.”

You tense at the mention of the High Lord of the Autumn Court. His name leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, and your raging appetite suddenly subsides. You push your plate away with a grimace. A contemplative silence hangs in the air as everyone digests the information, weighing the risks and benefits. Before anyone can voice another concern, Feyre leans forward.

“And to the mark the beginning of these negotiations, we thought it might be good to host a ball.”

The room falls silent again.

“A ball,” Cassian deadpans.

Feyre’s lips twitch in amusement. “A ball, gala, soirée, whatever you’d like to call it. A formal event to welcome the High Lords and their families into the city. It’s more than just a social gathering; it’s a statement. A public display of unity for all of Prythian to see.”

A lump forms in your throat. Not just the High Lords, but their families. Which can only mean one thing…

“A strategic move,” Amren muses, nodding slowly, “It could help set a positive tone for the negotiations.”

“It’s risky,” Azriel murmurs, his shadows swirling restlessly as he considers the implications. “But it could work.”

Cassian leans back in his chair with a groan. Nesta gives him a pointed look, silencing any impending complaints.

“Think of it as more than just a celebration,” Rhys folds his hands over the table in a subtle display of power, “It’s an opportunity to control the narrative. It’s a chance to remind everyone that Velaris is not just a city, but the beating heart of our Court—it’s a reminder of what we could build together.”

Any residual hesitation seems to vanish with his rather convincing argument. But despite the positive shift in energy, your mind is racing. The thought of seeing Eris again—of being in the same room, breathing the same air—sends a wave of conflicting emotions crashing over you: anxiety, panic, and dread, tied together by a small sliver of hope.

“As for logistics, we’ll need everyone’s help for preparation—”

“I’ll handle the décor,” Amren eagerly cuts in. A glint of excitement shines in her cold eyes at the prospect of decorating the place with jewels and gaudy, shiny things alike.

“And I’ll manage security,” Azriel adds, his wings flaring out slightly behind him. “With so many powerful players in one place, we can’t afford to be careless.”

“Good,” Rhys nods before turning to you. You can feel his searing gaze, but you focus your own on the half-finished food on your plate. “And you—your knowledge of the Autumn Court will be invaluable in these negotiations. I’ll need you close at hand.”

Everyone shifts at the indirect mention of your…escapade in Autumn. But you don’t so much as flinch at his words. Instead, you nod, the weight of responsibility settling over you like a cloak. “Understood.”

As discussions of the impending negotiations continue, you find yourself mentally withdrawing. Still, the calm façade you’ve maintained so well doesn’t crack. But your heart pounds with the suspense of what’s to come.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Over the past week, a nervous energy has been humming around Velaris in anticipation of the big day. It’s been chaotic, to say the least, with High Fae and citizens alike running around in preparation of the High Lords’ summit. Despite the severe lack of sleep and constant ache in your feet, event preparations have been a welcome distraction. But the day has finally come, effectively ending your temporary reprieve. And as you rifle through the gowns in Nesta’s closet, reality starts to really settle in.

“What about this one?” Nesta pulls out an emerald, green gown that leaves little to the imagination. You eye the deep cut and skin-tight material with a frown. 

“If I want to look like a child playing dress up, then sure,” you quip. You throw your head back with a groan and sit on the edge of her bed in defeat. “I don’t have the boobs to pull any of this off.”

Nesta rolls her eyes and places yet another dress back on the rack. “I really don’t know what you were expecting. Why don’t you just suck it up and go ask Mor?”

You stare at her in disbelief.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she snips, “You know I’m right.”

You grunt in disapproval, but don’t protest. Picking an argument with Nesta is a losing battle, after all. 

“Why couldn’t I be blessed with tits as big as yours?” you recline on her bed with a sigh.

Nesta shrugs, still sifting through the closet. “You could always ask Rhys to work his magic. Or Feyre. If she can sprout wings, I’m sure she can magically grow you a cup size or two.”

You launch a pillow in her direction which she swiftly dodges. “I am not asking for a magic boob job.”

You can’t help but giggle at the notion and Nesta follows suit. As ridiculous as the thought is, you long to see the look on Feyre or Rhys’s face if you did ask them.

“Maybe I’ll just wear a trash bag,” you muse aloud, “Or my birthday suit.”

“That’ll be sure to catch Eris’s attention.”

You throw another pillow in her direction.

“What about this one?” Nesta dodges your attack.

You sit up on the bed, ready to shoot down yet another dress. But the rejection halts in your throat as you take in the gown before you. Like the others, this one has a deep v-cut. But the bodice cinches at the waist before flowing down in a river of chiffon. The deep, sapphire hue is decorated with silver embroidery, delicate threads winding like constellations across the fabric. Tiny crystals are scattered throughout the design, catching the light and shimmering like stars in the night sky. The elegance is understated: a perfect blend of boldness and grace that leaves you momentarily speechless.

“That could work,” you state lamely.

A proud grin curls onto Nesta’s lips. “I suppose the twentieth try is the charm.” She tosses the dress towards you, and you swiftly catch it. “Now that that’s sorted, I think it’s time we play dress-up, then.”

You and Nesta fall into a comfortable rhythm, pinning your hair and dusting make-up over your cheeks in between bits of chatter. Despite her hard exterior, you’ve taken a liking to the eldest Archeron since your return to the Night Court. She never beats around the bush—a quality you deeply admire. Talking to her doesn’t necessarily take your mind off your worries, but rather makes them seem far less daunting. 

Just as you zip up your gown, a knock sounds on the door of her bedroom. 

“Come in,” Nesta calls from her seat in front of her vanity. You divert your gaze from your reflection in the full-length mirror to find Cassian in the doorway. His wings are tucked tightly behind him to fit through the opening far too small for the likes of a 6-foot-something Illyrian warrior. He’s swapped his typical attire of leathers out in favor of a sleek, black suit. His unruly hair is tied back neatly, save for a few strands of hair.

Despite his intimidating stature, he stares at Nesta like a lovesick puppy. “Wow,” he stumbles breathlessly, “You look beautiful. Both of you.”

He doesn’t so much as glance in your direction, and you roll your eyes.

“You look less slobbish than usual,” you quip. Nesta snickers, but your insult doesn’t register to Cassian, whose eyes remained trained on his mate. You wrinkle your nose in disgust as you can practically smell his arousal permeating the room.

“And that’s my cue,” you sigh. You take one last glance in the mirror before turning on your heels. You send Nesta a soft smile and pat Cassian’s shoulder on your way out. “Try to keep it in your pants ‘till after the ball, okay?”

You don’t stick around to hear his sounds of protest, swiftly slipping out of the room and down the hallway. Your heart skips a beat as you glance up at the grandfather clock down the hall. 8:06 PM. You take a deep breath before squinting your eyes shut and willing the world to twist and fold around you. Cool air envelopes you as you land outside of the River House. The buzz of Night Court citizens filtering through the front doors fills your ears. You wipe your clammy hands along the chiffon fabric of your gown before joining the crowd. You keep your footsteps steady to counter the frantic beat of your heart. You’re nearly at the steps leading to the ballroom when a hand gently grasps your elbow, pulling you aside.

“Can we talk for a moment?” Rhys whispers in your ear. You turn to find him standing in the shadows. 

“Of course,” you reply, following him to a quiet corner on the side of the house.

He produces a small, green vial from within his tailored jacket. The liquid inside shimmers under the soft glow of the crescent moon. “Angel’s Blade,” he says calmly, as if discussing the weather.

Your eyes widen in surprise, and you tentatively take the vial from his hands. You know what it is. You know that a single drop is enough to ensure a slow, painful death. Yet, you still utter the word aloud for confirmation. “Poison?”

“A little something to help Eris with Beron’s assassination.” Rhys speaks lowly, wary of any potential eavesdroppers. “The plan is simple—Beron needs to sign the treaty at the summit. After that, Eris can do as he pleases with him, and our debts to him are paid.”

You’re rendered speechless as you process the implications. There’s been little to no discussion of Rhys’s alliance with Eris since your return to Velaris—probably for your sake. In fact, you’d assumed it had disintegrated entirely once Eris figured out that Rhys had sent you to Autumn to spy on him. And now, here he is, not only acknowledging it, but asking for your involvement. 

“You want me to give this to Eris?” you ask in disbelief.

Rhys nods, his gaze softening as he senses your unease. “Only if you feel comfortable with it. I’m not asking you to do anything you’re not ready for. But I trust you, and I trust your judgment.”

You swallow hard and stare down at the small vial in your palm. “I’ll do it,” you finally reply. Even though it terrifies you, the decision feels right. “I’ll give it to him.”

“Thank you,” Rhys murmurs, squeezing your shoulder gently before releasing you, “Just…be careful.”

You nod, tucking the vial into a hidden pocket of your gown. 

“You look beautiful tonight, by the way,” he smiles down at you. His lips curl into a teasing smirk, “Looks like you didn’t need a magic boob job to fit into Nesta’s dress, after all.”

A flush crawls up your neck, but the embarrassment on your face quickly morphs into irritation. You slap his shoulder, eyes narrowed in a menacing glare as he cackles like a madman. 

“Is Azriel the only male of the house who isn’t a pervert?” you hiss, hitting him again for good measure. 

Rhys reaches forward to tousle your hair, but you swat him away. “Oh, trust me, my little scholar, Az is the most perverted of us all. Don’t let the gentle giant façade fool you.”

You stifle a giggle, refusing to give him the satisfaction of your amusement. You turn on your heel to stroll back towards the crowd. As you part, he calls after you.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

You glance at him over your shoulder, “That’s a pretty short list, oh Mighty High Lord.”

Rhys’s laughter fades into the background as you push through the crowd and make your way towards the ballroom. Your jaw all but drops as you enter the large room.

The grandeur of the scene before you is staggering—chandeliers drip with crystals, the tapestries depicting the history of Velaris adorn the walls, and the dance floor is flooded with Fae in exquisite attire. The sweet scent of jasmine hangs in the air, mingling with the soft melodies that drift from the orchestra at the far end of the room. You catch glimpses of familiar faces—members of the Inner Circle mingling with high-ranking nobles and foreign dignitaries—but you’re too distracted to greet them, your mind occupied by the weight of the vial in your pocket. You help yourself to a glass of wine to settle your unease, but to no avail.

And then, across the sea of dancers and courtiers, you see him.

For a moment, the world narrows to just him, and everything else fades into the background. The sight of him hits you like a physical blow, your heart lurching in your chest. Eris stands with a group of Autumn Court nobles, looking every bit the poised and calculated heir. When his amber eyes lock onto yours, time stops completely. 

They say that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. You haven’t thought much about death, being immortal. But for a split second, you feel yourself teetering on the brink of that quiet unknown. Those amber eyes are like a movie screen, reeling every memory, every fleeting touch, every unspoken confession. Twisted bedsheets in the watermill cottage, healing light engulfing blood-streaked skin, cool silver slipping around your thumb. Looking at him feels like throwing your freshly mended heart into the pits of fire. The alcohol running through your veins suddenly feels scorching, burning every inch of your skin. And for the first time since you fled Autumn, battered and broken, that feeling deep inside your chest transforms from a dull tug into a debilitating yank. Your body moves with a mind of its own. But just as you take a step forward, amber eyes are gone, replaced with the expanse of a broad chest.

The polite smile you force onto your lips immediately falls as you move your gaze upwards. You stifle a gasp at the sight of crimson hair, so similar to that which has plagued your mind over the past three months. But the man before you isn’t him—his face is too narrow, his nose too crooked. 

 “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” his voice is cold, laced with an unmistakable Vanserra edge. His similarity to Eris is striking—but the russet eyes staring down at you hold something more sinister. You involuntarily shiver, but force on a smile which doesn’t quite reach your eyes. 

“I don’t believe we have,” you dip your head into a courteous nod.

His lips stretch into a vicious grin, “Bastion Vanserra. And you are?” The question, seemingly innocent, feels like a calculated move in a chess game. 

You swallow down the lump in your throat, “Y/N.”

He repeats your name, delighting in the way it rolls off his tongue. Your shoulders stiffen as he grabs your hand in his and raises it to his lips. You fight the urge to pull away as he presses a taunting kiss to your knuckles.

“May I steal you for a dance?” he asks.

No.

“Sure,” you nod, the gesture alone feeling heavy. As he leads you to the center of the ballroom, the music swells around you—an intricate waltz that seems to mock your inner chaos. The dancers around you swirl in a graceful blur, but all you can focus on is the scorching touch of Baston’s hand on the small of your back, the way his gaze occasionally flickers to you with a scrutinizing edge.

“Forgive me if I seem forward,” Bastion says, “but you are truly…exquisite. I’ve heard much about you—Rhysand’s new scholar. What a shame he hasn’t graced us with your presence sooner.”

The words are pleasant, but they feel like they’re coming from a distance, muffled by the pounding of your heart. You force another faux smile, “I’m flattered. I’ve heard much about you as well.”

His eyes narrow slightly with hair-raising scrutiny. Although you know the Vanserra family doesn’t possess Daemati powers, you still double check that the cobblestone barriers of your mind are intact.

“And what have you heard?” he replies smoothly as he twirls you around.

The question hangs in the air between you, a challenge disguised as benevolent curiosity. “Only that you’re a man of considerable influence.”

His lips curl into a feline smirk. But just as quickly as the vicious glint in his eyes appears, it vanishes entirely as a rumbling voice cuts in. 

“‘Considerable’ is one way to put it. ‘Inconsequential’ is another.”

The blood rushes from your face, leaving you ashen and awe-struck. You don’t register the scowl on Bastion’s face or the change in tempo of the music; all you can hear is the thundering beat of your heart. Baston’s hands slip from yours, but all you can feel is that golden thread pulling taut in your chest. The younger Vanserra brother retreats, and a pair of familiar hands slip around your waist. His touch is electrifying, giving life to breath. And when he spins you around, the bustling crowd ceases to exist.

Amber captivates you once more. Eris’s eyes are slightly darker than you remember, and the playful smirk that used to make you swoon is gone. Still, the male before you feels like home. There’s a hundred things you want to say, but the syllables catch in your throat. Instead, you let him guide you across the dance floor, resting one hand on his shoulder and placing the other in his. Déjà vu washes over you as you glide together. There is no wreath atop his head and your red silk has been swapped for a deep sapphire, but just like the first night you met, the pull between you is undeniable, magnetic; this time, accompanied by an invisible, golden string. 

“So, your master has finally freed you from your leash, and the first thing you do is run into the arms of a Vanserra?” Venom drips from his lips. “I would say it’s quite unbecoming, darling, but I suppose you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

You take the insult in stride, letting it roll off your shoulders.

“The fox smells his own hole first,” you quip seamlessly despite the storm of emotions brewing just beneath your surface.

He wears a malevolent grin. “I see your sharp tongue is still intact. Nice to know that wasn’t a part of your little act as well.” You suck in a breath as he dips down, his breath tickling your skin as he whispers, “Tell me, Y/N, does Dear Old Dad know yet?”

You nearly lose your footing as your name—not Athena, not Little Bird—rolls off his tongue. You choose to ignore his goading question. Instead, you trail your hand down from his shoulder. The first few buttons of his silk shirt are undone, and you settle your hand on the bare skin of his chest. His eyes are void of emotion, but you can feel the rapid uptick of his heartbeat underneath your palm. 

You dig your nails slightly into his chest, right where you know he can feel the bond. Your lips brush against his ear as you whisper, “You’re so quick to call me on my shortcomings, Fox—so quick to forget that you kept secrets from me too.” The invisible string between you thrums in agreement. “But I digress,” you sink your nails into his skin, relishing in the way he returns the favor around your waist, “It seems we are but two sides of the same coin, after all.”

Ire flashes in his otherwise empty eyes. He tightens his grip around you once before releasing you entirely, just as the song comes to a close. “I’m growing tired of this game. If you’ll excuse me—”

You wrap a hand around his wrist and tug him back towards you, effectively cutting him off. He tries to yank himself away, but your grip is relentless. You stand on your tip toes, and whisper into his ear, “If you want to take care of your Dear Old Dad,” he tenses, eyes widening at your brashness, “You’ll meet me at the close of the night.”

Eris grits his teeth, but doesn’t react for fear of drawing unwanted attention. “Not here,” he mumbles.

“Fine. In the city, then.” You trail your hand over the center of his chest once more, “You’ll know how to find me.” You brush your lips against his cheek in a chaste kiss. While seemingly polite, the gesture only adds flame to his raging fire. “Till we meet again, Eris Vanserra.”

You don’t dare look back as you slip away. You keep your eyes forward and your steps steady to counteract the frantic beat of your heart. The music feels far away as you weave through the crowd, tactfully avoiding all of your friends.  

The moment you step outside the grand ballroom, the cool night air hits you like a wave, washing away remnants of the tension that cling to your skin. The orchestral music fades into a distant hum, leaving only the sound of your own breathing as you make your way down the steps of the side door. You glance back once, but the shadows are empty. Still, you can feel the intensity of Eris’s gaze lingering on you, even from afar.

Your steps quicken as you stroll through the open night towards the Sidra. The sound of the gentle current helps soothe your frayed nerves. You stop at the edge of the water, letting the cool breeze soothe your inner turmoil. 

“Running away, are we?”

You tense at the familiar voice, your skin prickling with surprise. You turn to find Mor leaning against a nearby tree, her expression unreadable. But the tension between you is palpable.

“Just needed some air,” you counter.

She pushes off the tree and approaches. The silky, burgundy fabric of her dress ripples like water with each deliberate step towards you. “I saw you with him,” she deadpans.

You stiffen and rub your clammy hands against the fabric of your own dress. “And?”

“And I’m wondering what the hell you’re doing,” she snaps, her voice low but biting, “Waltzing back into his arms after everything he’s done—after all that you’ve been through.”

The accusation stings, but you refuse to show weakness. “It’s not that simple.”

“Isn’t it?” she steps closer, “Because it looks pretty damn simple to me.”

Your façade of indifference cracks. “You think I wanted this?” you can’t hide the tremble in your voice, “You think I wanted to feel this…this pull, after everything? Do you have any idea what it’s like to fight against something you don’t even understand?”

Her own mask of apathy slips. Her eyes soften slightly, but her lips remain pursed in a tight line. “You don’t need to fight it alone.”

Something inside you snaps. “What the hell do you know about what I need?” The words come out harsher than you intend, but you can’t stop. “You’ve been ignoring me for weeks, Mor. Avoiding me like the plague. So don’t you darestand there and act like you care now.”

Her face pales at the blistering truth of your words. You divert your eyes to the Sidra, unable to hold her gaze. You mean every single word, but this is not how you’d envisioned this conversation going.

“I’m sorry,” you finally whisper. You take a shaky breath, trying to recollect yourself. “I don’t know how to do this anymore. I’m tired, and I’m confused, and I just…I just want my sister back.”

A heavy silence hangs between the two of you. The cool winds lick your skin, but you can’t move, let alone wrap your arms around your shivering body. Mor reaches out to touch your arm, but you instinctively take a step back, not ready to accept her comfort. You’re thankful you can’t see the dejection on her face.

“I know I’ve been distant,” she admits. A scoff bubbles in your throat, but you hold it down. “And that’s on me. I was angry when you pushed me away. And that’s something I’m still getting over. But I do care, Y/N—I never stopped caring. And I’m…I’m scared for you.”

The vulnerability in her voice makes your heart ache. For a moment, the animosity between you dissipates entirely, leaving a mutual understanding in its wake. Your throat tightens, and you force yourself to swallow with a wince. 

“I’m scared too,” you whisper, the words bitter on your tongue. “But I can’t let fear control me anymore.”

Mor reaches her hand out once again. You tense at the feeling of her delicate touch, but this time you don’t pull away. “Just promise me one thing,” she runs her thumb over the bare skin of your shoulder, “Don’t lose yourself in the process.”

You nod, though you’re not entirely sure how you’ll keep that promise. “I’ll try.”

With that, the soft touch on your shoulder disappears as Mor steps back, giving you the space you need. You wait until her soft footsteps are out of earshot to release the breath you’ve been holding in. Your shoulders slump as you exhale, letting the cool air soothe the raw edges of your emotions. The night is still, and for a moment, you allow yourself to breathe, to process all that’s transpired. 

The anticipation of what’s to come gnaws at you, a mix of dread and hope tangled together. Eris will come; you’re certain of that. But what will happen when he does? The question hangs heavy in the air, unanswered. For now, you focus on the steady rhythm of the river, grounding yourself in the present.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Velaris is a city of breathtaking beauty. It is a vibrant mosaic of colors: the lush gardens spilling over with exotic flowers, the elegant, domed buildings. From the air humming with creativity to the labyrinth of winding streets, it is full of hidden gems. But your favorite part of the city is how the stars seem to listen—how the intensity of their shine seems to reflect your inner musings.

Tonight is no exception. The twinkling lights are bright—brighter than you’ve ever seen before. They are captivating, whispering to you to come closer. You know it’s temporary, as the night is far from over—but you can’t help but indulge yourself for a little while as you lean against the rails of your apartment balcony nursing a generous glass of wine.

You’ve swapped out Nesta’s dress for one of Azriel’s old sweaters. The cozy material engulfs you, falling mid-thigh and warming your body against the chilling breeze of the city. The deep, burgundy wine is sweet, effectively numbing you in preparation for Eris’s impending arrival. 

A lump forms in your throat at the thought of him. Seeing him tonight was not something you’d properly prepared yourself for. Every fiber of your being longed to pull him close, to hold him tight and never let go. But that disdainful look in his eyes…If only life was as simple as following your heart. You are no longer in the business of suppressing your emotions. Yet, you still take a large gulp of your wine to alleviate the tightness in your throat.

Something in the air shifts, and you blink back the silver lining your eyes. Every inch of your exposed skin vibrates with anticipation, sensing his arrival.

“Drowning our sorrows, are we?”

Your heart flutters at the sound of his crisp tone slicing through the air. You clutch the glass tightly in your hands, keeping your gaze trained on the stars above.

“Something like that,” you mumble before taking another slow sip.

You can hear his soft footsteps behind you, wandering around the small space of your studio. But you don’t dare turn around, because turning around means looking into his eyes. And looking into his eyes means losing your carefully constructed composure. So, you continue to marvel at the stars, wishing them to sweep you up into their sparkling abyss. 

Eris’s voice cuts through the fragile peace of the night again, sharp and unyielding. “Drowning your sorrows won’t wash away the guilt.”

“Misery loves company,” you speak softly to conceal the waver of your voice. Your fingers tremble around the stem of your glass. The wine no longer tastes sweet—it’s bitter now, tainted by the truth in his words. His cruelty has always been a defense mechanism, but tonight, it feels more personal, like he’s trying to hurt you as much as you’ve hurt him.

“Do you even feel anything anymore, or have you numbed yourself to the point of oblivion?” Each word is a deliberate strike aimed to wound. 

Your silence speaks louder than words.

“Or have you finally become what they always wanted—a docile little pet with nothing left to say?” He slices through the thin veneer of composure you’ve managed to hold onto. 

The stars above blur as your eyes fill with unshed tears. “Eris,” you finally say, your voice barely above a whisper, “Can we just…coexist for a moment? No accusations, no blame. Just…be.”

There’s a long, heavy silence that follows your plea. For a moment, you fear he’ll ignore you, continue his barrage of insults. But then, he sighs. The sound is filled with an exhaustion that mirrors your own. He moves closer until you can see him in your peripheral. He mimics your stance, leaning against the railing of the balcony. The heat radiating from his body is two-fold: a comforting warmth that beckons you closer and a searing intensity that threatens to burn you alive.

“You always did prefer the night,” he rasps, his voice softer now, tinged with a note of something you can’t quite place.

You swallow hard, still not turning to face him. “The night doesn’t judge,” you reply, voice steady despite the storm brewing inside, “It just listens.”

 “The stars are far too forgiving,” Eris murmurs, a bitter edge to his words.

You cup your glass with both hands in a futile attempt to hold it steady. “If only people were as forgiving as the stars.”

You close your eyes, letting a single tear slip down your cheek. And when they open again, you finally turn to face him. There’s a storm behind his amber eyes, a battle between the ruthless mask he wears and the vulnerability he hides. He looks both devastatingly familiar and painfully foreign, like a memory you can't quite grasp. And as you take in the sight of him, the ache in your chest tightens.

“It was all real, you know. Everything I said. Everything I did. Everything I felt.” your bottom lip wobbles as you speak. “It was so real it nearly shattered me.”

His jaw flexes, his knuckles turning white from his tight grip around the railing. The seconds stretch into minutes as you wait for his response. Your eyes desperately search his for some sort of tell, but the walls he has built up are impenetrable. Eris abruptly pushes off the railing.

“I didn’t come here to reminisce,” he snaps. The momentary softness of his voice has disappeared. “Do you have it or not?”

 You blink slowly at him before averting your gaze to the stars one more time. You tip the glass of wine against your lips, swallowing the remaining contents. The burning of the alcohol down your throat mingles with the sting of his rejection. You set the empty glass down and wipe the lone tear from your cheek with the sleeve of your sweater before turning back to him. You don’t meet his eyes as you wrap your arms around your frail body and pad back inside to your apartment. Eris follows silently, keeping his distance—as if the air surrounding you is toxic. 

He watches as you round the oak desk in the corner and slide the first cabinet open. You grab the little green vial inside with a trembling hand. But before you slide the drawer shut, you pause. The completed draft of your manuscript sits inside, bound seamlessly thanks to Clotho’s help. You run your free hand over the leather cover. Its pages seem to whisper to you, beckoning you to grab it. Before you can talk yourself out of it, you listen.

Curiosity flashes through Eris’s eyes as you walk towards him, deadly poison in one hand and an equally lethal paperback in the other. 

“Angel’s Blade,” you hold out the green vial, “One drop should do the trick.”

He cautiously takes it from you, careful not to touch you. But his eyes are trained on the leather-bound book in your other hand.

“What’s that?” he rasps.

Your mouth dries, your nerves running wild. But you muster up the courage to hold it out to him with a steady hand. “Something I’ve been working on,” you croak, “It’s only a first draft, but I’d like you to have it.”

He eyes the book with contempt, “I’m not interested in joining your little book club.”

You reach your arm out further, and he takes a step back. “At least read the forward,” you plead, “You owe me that much.”

Ire returns, this time with a vengeance. “I don’t owe you shit,” he snarls. “Thank you for your hospitality. Let’s never do this again.”

Your heart sinks as he turns on his heel and strides towards the door. In an act of desperation, you flip open the book.

“Confucius once posited that wisdom emerges from experience; a notion echoed throughout the annals of philosophy.”

His footsteps halt.

“For centuries, thinkers have sought to distill the essence of wisdom through the accumulation of experiences and the study of theory. Yet, as we delve deeper into the human condition, it becomes apparent that true introspection does not arise from the mere cataloging of experiences. Instead, it is forged in the crucible of pain, a particular kind of pain that sears the soul and leaves an indelible mark on our being.”

For the first time since he entered your home, your voice is steady, strong.

“It is pain that consumes, that reaches into the depths of our existence, touching the very core of who we are.”

You inhale deeply, preparing yourself for the word that is about to roll off your tongue. The word you’ve been so afraid to utter until now.

“It pain born of love—a love so profound that it defies all reason, a love that transcends the boundaries of rational thought and knowledge, a love that has the power to unravel us completely. When love shatters us, it does so in a way that is both devastating and transformative. It is through this pain that the deepest truths about ourselves are revealed.”

Your vision blurs from the tears now streaming freely down your cheeks. The air is deadly silent, filled only by your soft sniffles and Eris’s staggered breath. You approach him on wobbly legs, positioning yourself in front of the door. An unrecognizable emotion swims in his eyes, but the strain on his face is undeniable. You hold his gaze with your own tear-filled one as you finish reciting the forward, the book forgotten in your limp hand.

“In these pages, I offer not just a recounting of my life but a testament to the truth that has been etched into my soul: that it is love—intense, all-consuming love—that paves the way to introspection. It is a truth forged in the crucible of suffering, illuminated by the dim light that flickers in the wake of love’s destruction. And it is through this lens that I have come to understand myself, not as I once was, but as I am now—a being forever changed, yet made more whole by the very pain that once threatened to break me.

For darkness and all its shining stars,

Avicula.”

Your heart lays bare before him—for him to steal, to cherish, to break. For a moment, you think you see the male you once knew, the one who cherished you with everything he had. But then his jaw tightens, and he diverts his gaze to the manuscript in your hands. Finally, he reaches out, his hand trembling slightly as he takes the leather-bound book from your grasp. When he finally speaks, his voice is rough, barely above a whisper.

“Avicula…” he murmurs, testing the name on his tongue.

“It means Little Bi—”

“I know what it means,” he cuts you off swiftly. 

You want to say something, to reach out and touch him, but you’re frozen in place. He takes a step closer. You’ve never felt more vulnerable as his eyes search yours. But then, just as quickly as it came, the softness in his gaze is gone, replaced by an impenetrable shield. He pulls back and tucks the book into the inside of his coat. 

“This changes nothing.” 

Your heart sinks to the pit of your stomach. But the dejection tearing at your insides quickly transforms into a fiery rage.

“Why won’t you admit it?” you demand, “I know you feel something.” You place your hand on his chest, right where you feel the bond in your own. 

Eris’s eyes snap back to yours, and he wraps his hand around your wrist in a bruising grip. “You don’t know shit,” he snaps, throwing your hand down away from him.

“I know you better than you know yourself,” you retaliate, inching forward, “I know you put on this façade of a cold-blooded, ruthless asshole to detract from the vulnerability that lives within. I know that underneath all that armor, you’re absolutely terrified—afraid of what this means, afraid of what will happen if you’re honest with yourself.”

His jaw clenches so tightly you think it might snap. “You have no idea what’s at stake here.”

“Then tell me!” you yell, hands shaking with desperation. “Stop being so fucking stubborn and tell me!”

He shakes his head vehemently and runs his hands through his hair, pulling tightly at the roots. Your whole body trembles as you watch him pace before you. “What’s it gonna take?” you shout. “Do you want me to fall at your feet? Plead for your forgiveness? Or did I damage your ego beyond repair?” you cry, vision blurry again with tears.

“You can’t fix this!” he explodes. The trees outside cower at the rawness of his rage. “You don’t belong in this madness. And I won’t let you destroy yourself for some lovesick fantasy you have of me.”

Eris turns towards the door, but you throw yourself at him once again, intercepting his path. “You don’t get to make that choice for me,” you stammer through your cries. You reach your quivering hands up, cupping the sides of his face. You pull him down towards you, resting his forehead against yours. “Please, Eris,” your bottom lip wobbles, “I love you.”

Your confession hangs heavy in the air. His eyes flutter shut, and for a split second you can feel him sinking into your hold. But when they open, amber is once again nothing more than a frozen wasteland. 

“I can’t make that choice for you,” the anger in his tone is gone, replaced by an even more deadly finality. “But I can make it for myself.”

Time stops. And that golden string between you splits, hanging precariously by a single thread. 

You stand there, frozen and heartbroken, as he pulls himself away from your touch. Silent sobs wrack your body as his figure disappears through the door. You want to scream, kick, fight, anything. Not nothing comes out. It feels like drowning—like water rushing in, flooding your lungs, and stealing your life away. Watching him walk out that door with the most sacred piece of yourself is a pain like no other, amplified by the shredded bond in your stuttering heart. You can only watch as the world around you spins on its axis before you crumple to the ground, and it goes black entirely.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Throughout his 500 years of existence in an everchanging world, pain has been the only constant for Eris Vanserra. From the relentless beatings by his father to the countless deaths witnessed in not one but two wars, he hasn’t just experienced it; he’s lived it. Yet in those five centuries of misery, none has rivaled the Earth-shattering pain of walking away from the only thing that has brought him pure, unadulterated joy. 

He knows this is the only right decision. He knows that she deserves more than the legacy of violence that taints his bloodline. And he knows that no matter how hard he tries, he can’t rewrite the narrative of his own tragic destiny. But that does nothing to quell the shards of glass digging deeper into his chest with each step away from her. For he is no more than a hollow shell of a male, doomed to an eternity of perpetual darkness

The lively atmosphere of Velaris seems to mock his anguish as he stumbles along the cobblestone streets. Unshed tears blur his vision, and each slow blink to keep them at bay feels like another nail in the coffin. The little, leather-bound book seems to sink further into his pocket with each uneven step, until he can no longer bear the weight of it. He limps into an alley way and sinks to the cold ground in a heap of agony. Shaky hands fumble through his coat in search of the only piece of her he has left. His heart pounds in his ears as he flips the book open.

Avicula.

Eris watches in horror as a single tear splatters onto the page. He runs his trembling thumb over the name, smudging the ink slightly. He does it again, watching as the ink blurs together. And again, and again, until she is no more than a splotch of darkness on the page. Another tear falls, and he slams the book shut—as if doing so will put an end to this chapter of his miserable story. But memories are far too cruel, for blurred ink is replaced with every vestige of her: fleeting touches between rows of books, big, brown eyes sparkling brighter than the light of a thousand stars, and the sweet scent of honeysuckle lingering like a ghost in every corner of his mind. 

He pulls himself from the ground, nearly losing his footing. He tumbles like a drunkard out of the alley, past the lines of shops, and into the grass where the Sidra lies. Eris clutches the book with a white-knuckled grip. He draws his arm back, but before he can launch that last piece of her into the depths of the river, a chilling voice stops him.

“What have we here, brother?”

Bile rises to his throat as he spins around. He catches a fleeting glimpse of Baston’s wicked grin before pain explodes on the back of his head, and the world goes black.

taglist:

@selfishlittlebeing @babypeapoddd @scarsandallaz @fourthwing4ever @raginghellfire

@deepestmentalitypersona @lilah-asteria @goldenmagnolias @myromanempiree @i-know-i-can

@hannzoaks @olive-main @lilylilyyyyyy @stuff-i-found-while-crying @moni-cah

@6000-fandoms @melsunshine @roseodelle @rcarbo1 @paliketerson

@ktz-bb @l-adynesta @asteria33 @ghostslittlegf @taylorgriffin

@the-deeee-blog @aria-chikage @itsagrimm @chaparralcamper @kitsunetori

[ellievickstar]

A Fox's Pain

A/N: I loved this request so much mostly because i have a lot of self induced pain from being clumsy along with the fact i have horrible cramps that make me wanna die for two weeks every month. Can we just agree that protective caring Eris is the best Eris??? Also, I hope your okay slipping on ice sucks and it hurts like a bitch i couldn’t imagine how you feel, remember to take care of yourself!!! (For your info some of the falling is based off my real life cause i thought someone was in my house but i went tumbling to the floor, my foot got caught on the door stop as i was falling and i scratched it and then tripped over it further and died on the floor)

Summary: When you’re clumsy and in pain how will your mate take care of you especially when it pains him to see you this way.

Request: Hi! I was wondering if you could write something about eris taking care of his injured mate or a mate with chronic pain. I fully busted my ass this morning slipping on ice and since I have arthritis, the pain is 10x worse. I can't help but YEARN for the comfort that Eris would bring with his warm hands and reassurance (maybe even a touch of guilt or anger at the gods for bestowing their mate with such pain or even a bonus where the mate gets hurt because of someone else) If this is too specific/complicated, not a problem, but I really love your writing and find so much comfort in it!!

Pairing: Eris Vanserra x reader

Warnings: Chronic pain (reason unspecified), clumsy reader, getting injured, i kinda tried to research a little on arthritis sorry if this is like- wrong. T^T

𓃦°˖➴જ⁀➴

“HELP!” You yelped as you came tumbling to the floor for what might have been the billionth time that day. You had decided to bake so that you could pass time while Eris was in his meeting with the nobles. You were not needed to show up, thankfully, even though you were High Lady most days Eris let you stay in when your body ached and you could not move. Even on days your pain subsided a little and you were able to make public appearances he would hover over you like a really protective cat. You snickered at the idea of Eris almost hissing and clawing at people who got close to you.

Although your earlier bout of tripping oven door had caused you to go crashing, at least the over had cooled down enough that you were not burnt and you had already placed the baked treats safely on the counter. You reached up to maybe take one, a little lazy to stand up from the cool comfortable floor, when a sharp pain stabbed through your arm and you flinched, curling into yourself.

You don’t know how long it took for the pain to start subsiding as you shut your eyes, trying to swallow down the pain. You do not know when your vision started to blur as you stumbled over to the cabinet where the healer had stored the herbs for the pain.

“This hurts like a bitch,” You mumbled to yourself, causing a slight smile to creep over your face before the pain return and you winced. Maybe you should have stayed in bed like Eris said and waited for him to come back. You craved his heated palms soothing your skin and soft whispers as he tried to soothe the ache in your body.

Breathing in, you counted in your head, counting the seconds until you felt okay to move again.

1….

2…..

3……

Breath out.

“You’re okay,” You said firmly. You had grown up with this, you would be fine. You were stronger, you were better than this. You could get through this bout of pain just like very other time. Sighing, you shakily stood up, the dull ache in your joints still present but…better than the stabbing pain you had felt earlier. Wobbling your way to the tray of pastries, you picked up on and just when you were about to put it in your mouth…

You leaned you head back too far and it slammed against the cabinet behind you.

“Shit!” You exclaimed. Cursing out the cabinet, you groaned at the pastry that ended on the floor, bending to pick it up, being careful not to hit anything.

“I think that’s the fourth? Fifth time you’ve done something to hurt yourself?” A cool voiced echoed through the room and as you whipped your head around quickly, too quickly, your foot slipped and you were about to go tumbling again when strong arms shot out and grabbed you by your waist, steadying you. “Clumsy little fox,” He murmured gently lifting you to sit you down on the counter.

“It’s not my fault I wanted to make something nice but the kitchen is so hazerdous,” You shot back. “So hazardous,” He hummed. His warm palms slid over your skin, messaging the ache in your joints with heated skin, the warmth of his magic seeped into your joints and you groaned gratefully, leaning your head into his chest while he worked at your aches.

“You know, you’re helping me but maybe next time keep quiet and just help,” You mumbled. Chuckling, “I don’t remember that complaint last night when I was-,” “Stop, nope, I take back what I said, never mind,” You cut him off quickly. You winced when he touched a particularly painful spot. His eyes softened slightly, and you noticed how his movements slowed and gentled just a tad as he worked on that particular ache, messaging it just like how the healer taught him to.

When he was done, he picked up a pastry from the tray, holding it to your mouth. Your brows quirked as you looked at the pastry to his face, “I can feed myself you know?” “You just hit your head trying to though,” He replied. You rolled your eyes, taking the pastry in your mouth, moaning at the delicious taste as the warm sweetness seeped into you taste buds.

“I’m sorry,” He suddenly said.

“For what?” You asked curiously, reaching to grab another pastry, Eris slid his hands to wrap around your waist again, looking into your eyes.

“I’m sorry that for all the pain that you could feel, I can’t be the one to take away the pain, but I hope that by being here, being with you, I can at least make it bearable. And I’m sorry, that there will never be a day I could truly understand how strong you had to be to survive this illness,” He murmured. Warmth fluttered in your chest and you felt tears well up in your eyes as he pulled you close in an embrace, and as you felt comfort by the warmth of his body against yours, just for a moment, you felt as if everything didn’t matter except the male in front of you.

𓃦°˖➴જ⁀➴

A/N: So I tried my best and this is how it turned out hahha....I hope I didn't disappoint the anon T^T For those who don't know my requests are open for the moment so if you want me to write anything for you guys please let me know. BYEEEE <3

[honeybeefae]

One Night (Eris Vanserra x Reader)

Summary// It was the one night out of the year that Eris seemed to dread most. He hated going to the Night Court and seeing everyone look at him with distrust and disdain, hated the atmosphere, and disliked most of the people there. You, on the other hand, loved going to the celebration and when it’s time to leave, you find yourself leaving alone.

(Starfall week day two, let's get it! Hope you guys enjoy :) @starfallweek) 

Prompt: Character A loves Starfall, Character B hates it but loves making Character A happy.

WARNINGS: Slight angst

“We are going to be late!” You complain while shoving your shoes on your feet, grabbing your favorite pair of sparkly earrings, and fixing up your lipstick in the mirror. “Are you almost done?”

Eris was deep in your closet, going over different outfits in his head as if he didn’t already have something picked out. He was trying to stall as long as possible, dreading the overnight trip to the Night Court that the two of you took every year. 

“Almost.” He replied, looking up when your heels clicked across the floor and stopped in front of him. You had his jacket hanging off two of your fingers, your mouth twisted into a frown as embarrassment and shame had his ears turning the same color as his hair. 

He knew how much you loved Starfall, all the memories you held dear from it and how this was one of the rare opportunities to relax with your friends from other courts. It was just hard for him to be there surrounded by people who looked down on him, even after the air had been cleared.

“You do this every year, Eris.” You sighed. “If you don’t want to come you don’t have to, but I am. I hate that you feel like this is an obligation when it’s supposed to be fun.”

“I know it’s supposed to be fun, mouse but-” He stopped when you held your hand up, not wanting to hear him explain all the things he hated about Starfall for the fifth time this week. 

“Stop. I can’t hear it again. I won’t.” You snapped, tossing his jacket to the side and turning around. He was hot on your heels, calling your name, but you shut him up with a glare. “This is one night, one night, out of the entire year that I love. I put up with a lot from you, Eris, because I love you. Do you think I enjoy some of the things you drag me to? Not particularly but I go because it means something to you. That’s what I want more than anything, to see you happy.”

He stood there like a scolded child, his hair falling into his face when he looked down. You hated arguing with your mate, it pained you, but you wanted him to know how you felt. It wouldn’t get resolved unless you did.

“I’m leaving to go out and have fun. You can stay here and work or read or write, maybe take the time to think about what’s so hard about sacrificing a night for your mate.” 

You waited for a moment, waiting to see if he had anything to say, but when he just stood there staring at you, you left him standing alone in the middle of the bedroom. Tears were threatening to spill down your cheeks but you refused to let this ruin your night, even if deep down you knew that you would be missing him the entire time

It didn’t take long for you to winnow to the outskirts of Velaris, your anger seeming to fuel your magic so that you weren’t as exhausted by the time you arrived. You walked through the streets, enjoying the way the sky was stained with pinks and oranges as the sun was starting to set. 

All of the shops were closing early in preparation for the celebration. People had already started to gather around on the streets, dressed to the nines and passing around drinks to get the party started early. You smiled at them as you passed, weaving through the crowds that were on the stairs of the House of Wind.

By the time you got to the top, the sky was now almost completely dark, stars twinkling to life one by one. Feyre and Rhysand were greeting everyone, the former pulling you into a hug while asking where your mate was.

You gave a small shrug, looking away, and she gave you a knowing look. Rhys rolled his eyes at Eris’s stupidity, telling you that you would probably have more fun without him which made you laugh. 

Nesta appeared by your side suddenly and you guessed overheard your conversation, pulling you away from the hosts and over to the bar. You gave her a thankful smile, took whatever cocktail she handed you, and downed it in one gulp.

“That bad?” She asked, swirling her sparkling drink around in the glass.

“Sometimes I just feel as if I don’t matter to him…” You confess, inspecting the bottom of your dress to avoid her piercing stare. “All I ask is for just one night. I love Starfall, I love being around everyone, and I know it’s hard for him but this is just special to me.”

“But do you truly know how hard it is for him?” She asks, her question making you raise your head to look at her. “Look, the last thing I am doing is sticking up for him. However, I know how he feels in this regard.”

“You do?” Your eyebrows furrow in confusion. “But everyone here likes you? It’s not like you are a stranger.”

“I am a stranger.” She corrected, frowning into her drink. Her tone of voice had taken on an icy edge and although you and she were close, closer than she was with most, you knew you had just unknowingly hit a sore spot. “I was Made, not born a fae. As much as I’ve adapted, this isn’t my home, where I am from. There will always be a part of me that is human and everyone knows that.”

“You can’t understand because this is all you’ve ever been. No matter how hard I try I will always be viewed as different, it’s something that Cassian and I argue about often. He doesn’t understand why I still am apprehensive about these parties or why I feel eyes on me, but it’s because he’s never been the outsider introduced to a world that already had opinions about you.”

Guilt hit you like punch to the gut. You had always thought Eris was just being paranoid when going to these functions with you, pushing aside his feelings as being overdramatic, but Nesta had just proved you wrong.

She seemed to know the exact thoughts that were swimming around in your head because she grabbed your hand and squeezed, giving you a rare, sympathetic smile. 

“Although Eris and Mor have both explained their stories and Mor has forgiven him, there is still a lingering caution. He has a reputation throughout all of Pyrthian, which you know, and although you’ve brought out the best of him, people still see him as the monster he portrayed himself as.”

You looked around at all the faces of everyone in attendance, watching them get ready for the show, and took a shaky breath. “Nesta, I am so sorry if I offended you. I truly did not realize what you, or Eris, felt like and I feel like a fool. A childish, selfish fool.”

“You haven’t let me finish.” She said, looking past you and to Cassian who was laughing with Rhys and Azriel. “Despite everything I’ve said, it comes down to the fact that no one can control what others say or think about them. What we can control is how we respond and let it influence our lives.”

Cassian caught her eyes, smirking in that way that made her knees weak, and she returned his look with a playful one of her own. “I know how important family is to Cassian, how much he loves coming to these things and showing me off. I could dig my heels in and refuse to show my face, or I can face my fears knowing my mate will always be by my side. As he chooses my happiness, I also choose his. It’s all about giving and taking, communicating and understanding.” 

Nesta finally looked back at you and clinked your glass against hers, patting your shoulder affectionately. “Neither of you is wrong for feeling the way you do, but take it from me and try to communicate before it implodes. And as for tonight, just enjoy being here.”

After that speech, she turned and left to go to Cassian’s side, his arm wrapping around her shoulder and pulling her into him. You watched them with a warm smile on your face, happy that she was happy, and then noticed everyone had already gathered on the edge of the balcony as the first souls began to streak across the sky.

It wasn’t the same without Eris beside you to enjoy the shower of dreamers. You were replaying what Nesta had said in your head, a new mindset already replacing your original feelings. She had shown that you truly didn’t know what he went through during these events and that for you to just demand he comes, without thinking of his feelings, was horrible. 

People around you cheered, kissed, and hugged with the souls now painting the sky like brush strokes from a hidden painter. It was beautiful and melancholic at the same time, your heart yearning for your mate. You wrapped your arms around yourself and began to walk towards the stairs, wanting to get home to him, until a warm hand grabbed your wrist and pulled you into their body.

“I don’t think anyone should like this sad during Starfall, especially not someone as beautiful as you.”

You gasped, looking up and into the eyes of your husband. He was dressed in your favorite outfit of his, his hair styled neatly, with a smile that melted your soul. 

“Eris.” You breathed, tears welling up in your eyes that he quickly brushed away. “You came.”

“Anything for you, mouse.” He cooed, tucking a strand of your hair behind your ear. “I’m sorry for the way I acted. I know this is important to you and-”

Your lips pressed against his desperately, shutting down whatever apology he was starting, and pulled him close to you. Eris smiled into the kiss and followed your lead, music starting up behind the two of you as you finally pulled away for air.

However, you kept your faces close, gazing up at him through your lashes. “Don’t apologize. It was me who was being selfish. I didn’t realize how hard this was for you, how much of an outsider you felt, and from now on I will be better about that. I am so sorry for storming out on you.”

His eyebrows shot up in surprise but his heart grew even bigger with his love for you at your words. One of his hands came and cupped your chin, rubbing your soft cheek with the pad of his thumb. “No more apologies tonight. You look too stunning and the music is too lovely to waste it by both of us trying to grovel over the other”

“I love you.” You professed, giving him another kiss that he savored, his face warming at your affections. 

“And I, you.” He replied softly, pulling back and fixing his jacket before extending his hand out to you. “Y/N Vanserra, would you humor me with a dance?”

You beamed up at him and nodded, placing your much smaller hand in his own and letting him whisk you off onto the dance floor. The two of you twirled and swayed effortlessly along with the crowd, catching Nesta’s wink when you were dipped down in his arms. 

Eris pulled you back up and you wrapped your arms around his neck, kissing him underneath the Starfall sky where you wanted to stay forever.

[nestaismommy]

Feyre crying into her scrambled eggs over a bill that constitutes 0.000001% of the total wealth she (*cough* Rhysand) has is so fucking dramatic and for no reason.

Girl, your sister is severely mentally unwell and you’re worried about what this looks like on your family? Maybe if you helped address the root of the problem then it wouldn’t be an issue. But nope, she’s brainwashed by her mate to get Nesta out-of-sight out-of-mind instead. Fuck Feyre and Rhys both so much. Feyre is traumatized from being locked up by Tamlin, Rhys spent 50 years trapped UtM, and Amren won’t even speak of the Prison, yet they all thought it would be a grand idea to imprison a 25 year old in a house she can’t escape from? Get the fuck out of here, SJM, truly.

You’re right. It was so dramatic. That’s something I would do if I was like….12. Crying into my eggs because mama yelled at me. She’s embarrassed her sister spends money on whatever, but isn’t embarrassed about buying a fifth house? Or what about fucking in the sky??? Because that’s so embarrassing, it makes me want to rip my hair out just thinking about it.

Yes. They’ve all went through shit, so locking a traumatized 25 year old is not a solution. But that’s literally because they didn’t want to help in the first place. It’s too obvious that they don’t actually give a shit. Feyre? Brainwashed. Rhysand? Hates Nesta and would’ve probably killed her if she wasn’t Feyre’s sis. Amren? Please. She literally wanted to throw Nesta in the dungeons in hewn city. Mor? Jealous pick me bitch who thinks she owns the bat boys Elain? Like a dog, loyal to whoever master kept her fed and in comfort. Literally helped the inner circle lock Nesta up, told her to not be so miserable about being isolated, and talks about her with the inner circle. Cassian? Thinks Nesta is his property. Can’t handle Eris dancing with her but then goes and buys Mor lingerie. Tells Nesta he doesn’t know how someone could love her. Can’t handle Nesta calling Rhysand an ass but doesn’t mind when Rhysand threatens to kill Nesta. Punishes her for Rhysand’s mistake etc.

[autumnshighlady]

I’ve Always Liked to Play With Fire (part 8)

NESTA ARCHERON X ERIS VANSERRA X FEMALE!READER

summary: you finally meet Emerie and Gwyn, but an argument between Cassian and Nesta spirals out of control and you come head to head with the High Lord

warnings: the usual IC slander

word count: 6k 

DO NOT REPOST ANYWHERE

a/n PLEASE READ: so the vote was almost 50/50 between doing a time jump and not doing a time jump, so I decided to meet y’all in the middle. There will be small time jumps, especially in the next chapter, missing a few important ACOSF moments but they will be mentioned briefly. I hope this is ok! Also this is sort of a filler chapter but I think you guys will like it. I’ve put out like 3 chapters in one week I’m exhausted haha

feedback is appreciated, just no hate pls! these are just my opinions, i’m more curious to see how you all like the writing and characterization and storylines!

part 1

part 2

part 3

part 4

part 5

part 6

part 7

read on ao3

Spotify playlist

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“Are you even listening?”

“No, not really.”

Azriel rolled his eyes at you for what was probably the fifth time that hour. You were sitting in an office area of the House, a map of the Night Court laid out in front of you. Scrolls and manuscript were strewn across the desk messily, as if whoever had been in here last had not bothered to organize it. The soft glow of lanterns illuminated the table in an otherwise dark room, the window nearby facing the mountains rather than the vibrant city below. Azriel had followed through on his promise to teach you about the Night Court before your other training resumed, actually letting you sleep in for once.

Just this one time. He had promised, and you knew he’d meant it.

You had covered Illyria so far, to your distaste as much as Azriel’s. It was interesting how much he loathed his own people, but after delving into their practices you could see why.

“And Rhysand just lets this happen? He allows females be crippled and used for breeding?” You had asked when the spymaster told you about the wing-clipping practice.

“Illyrians are slow to change.” Was all Azriel had said. You pointed out that oh-so powerful Rhysand could simply make them change, or use his mind control abilities to influence the Illyrian leaders. But Azriel had only glared at you, ignoring your comment before moving onto the next subject – the Court of Nightmares.

Which led you to where you were now.

“So let me get this straight,” You said after Azriel rolled his eyes. “The Court of Nightmares is in the Hewn City, and that’s the side of the Night Court that the rest of the world sees and views it to be.”

“Correct.” Azriel huffed, blue siphons reflecting strange casts of light from the lanterns.

You straightened your back. “So my same point as Illyria still stands. Females are suffering there too – you said the Morrigan was rescued from her own family from that very court. But why’s she the only one being saved? What about all the other females in there being sold off into marriage like cattle?”

Azriel’s scarred knuckles tightened in annoyance. His voice was clipped and tense, as you were clearly testing his patience. “Like I said twice already,” He said through gritted teeth. “Change does not come easy. And besides, they have an agreement of sorts. Rhysand lets them do what they please, in exchange for recognizing his authority and providing an army if needed.”

“But you said they have the right to refuse.” You pointed out.

“Yes. The Court of Nightmares has autonomy within the Night Court. It’s the best way to keep the peace.”

“Except for the females.” You muttered, fiddling with a scrap of paper and tearing it up in your fingers. It wasn’t fair how Rhysand and Feyre had the power to help so many people, yet choose to keep things the way they are. Nesta had told you that Feyre often shifted into an Illyrian form – wings unclipped and able to fly her through the sky, above all the female Illyrians down below who were crippled and kept for breeding. The thought of her flaunting those wings when half of the Illyrian population had them taken away simply for being born female made you sick. But it was something to consider for your long-term plan.

“I know it’s hard for you to understand,” Azriel said lowly. “And I know it’s hard for you to hear this as a female. But we help out where we can with the resources we have.”

“No you really don’t.” You scoffed, and then spoke again before the shadowsinger could object. “But if that’s what you have to tell yourself to sleep at night then by all means.”

Azriel huffed, and you felt another twinge of guilt. It wasn’t entirely his fault – he had no authority over the High Lord and Lady, he couldn’t go behind their backs or tell them what to do. You wanted to like Azriel, and a part of you did. But the other part was resentful that like the rest of the Inner Circle, he did nothing to challenge their ways.

“I am trying to help you.” Azriel said slowly, turning his hazel eyes to yours. “I wasn’t lying when I told Rhysand that you had potential. You’re a quick learner, and you’re extremely clever. I want you to succeed and find your place in this court, but I can’t help you do that if you fight back with snarky comments every chance you get.”

“Have you considered that maybe adjusting to your court is difficult for me considering where I came from?” You challenged, meeting his gaze with your own. “Forgive me if it takes some time for me to come to terms that I live in a court where if I had wings or was born in the Hewn City my only purpose would be for breeding.”

“You haven’t been here for long,” Azriel said cooly. “Give it time.”

You sighed, dropping the remains of the paper onto the desk. “If you say so.”

Azriel stared at you for a minute, unblinking. It was impossible to read his expression, as usual. A strand of dark hair fell onto his forehead artfully, contrasting with the golden light and making him look like a painting. “What?” Your tone came out snappier than intended.

“I think you should spend some time with people from this court who aren’t part of the Inner Circle.” He suggested slowly, as if waiting for you to lash out. “Instead of just training with me, you can join the sessions with Cassian and the others. Would that be something you’re interested in?”

You paused, weighing your options before considering his words. Would that be something you’re interested in? He was giving you a choice – your first real choice at the Night Court that wasn’t coerced or scripted. If you wanted to say no, there would be no consequences. But then you thought about Nesta, and the friends she had made. You’d be able to meet them this way and get to know them – spending more time with Nesta was a bonus. You’d have more of an excuse to be around her now, and to coordinate your plan.

The fight. You mentally cursed yourself, remembering last the Inner Circle checked, you and Nesta were on the outs. You didn’t want to have to keep up the argument act, but maybe you could stage something else, something that made it seem like the two of you were on the mend. They’d think it was Nesta ‘healing’ because of them and pat themselves on the back, but you’d have to forgive it and let them have this temporary victory before you pull the rug out from under them.

“I guess I could give it a try.” You said hesitantly, nodding at Azriel.

His lips twitched in a small smile. “Good, be ready at 8 tomorrow.”

*********************

You groaned, rubbing your eyes as you stepped into the training ring. Sleep was scarce for you last night, leaving you groggy and tired as you dressed yourself in the leathers laid out for you. You hadn’t seen Nesta yesterday, but you sent her a mental note about planning for today.

The two of you agreed that you would be distant, but not outright avoiding each other to make it seem more real – Nesta would apologize to you, and you to her, making sure Cassian overheard. Everything was set, now all you had to do was survive the grueling training.

As you entered the ring, your eyes scanned for Nesta. She was sitting down near the corner, stretching alongside a pretty redhead and Illyrnian woman. Her eyes were clear, devoid of the empty hauntedness that had resided in them as she recounted the past few weeks. Hair neatly braided back, she snorted at something the Illyrian female had said.

Taking a breath, you nodded to Cassian and walked over to where Nesta was. The general nodded back, glancing towards Azriel who shrugged his shoulders.

You approached hesitantly, making sure to look nervous. You could practically feel Cassian’s gaze boring into the back of your head, analyzing your every movement like a hawk. “Hey,” You said quietly to Nesta.

“Hi.” Her voice was quipped, yet soft. She looked up at you, expression unreadable. You hated having to play these roles, but you pushed that aside.

“Can I join you?” You asked, fiddling with the loose strap on your leathers.

The other two females glanced at Nesta, one of them raising her eyebrows knowingly. You wondered what Nesta had told them about you, how much they knew.

“Actually,” Nesta cleared her throat and stood up, and you could feel Cassian’s gaze shift to her. “I was hoping I could talk to you. Come grab some water with me.”

You followed her, Azriel’s eyes now on you as well. The two Illyrian males tracked your every movement as you headed over to the water station, grabbing a cup from the table. You stood in silence as you took turns filling it up, waiting for Nesta to speak. Finally, she did.

“I wanted to apologize.” Nesta said, swishing the water in her cup. “For how we left things. You were nothing but kind to me, and I lashed out. You were my only friend, and I was cruel to you. For that, I am sorry.”

You bit your lip, resisting the urge to watch Cassian’s reaction. “I’m sorry too,” You said after a few moments. “For what I said about everyone hating you. It was mean, and I didn’t mean it. I’d like to move past it, if we can.”

“Me too.” Nesta’s lips twitched as she spoke to you mentally. Don’t look, but Cassian just broke out into the biggest grin. He’s watching us.

I bet he’s proud of you for apologizing – thinks it’s all because of him.

Well, it’s not.

I know.

You smiled, following Nesta back over to the group. You glanced at Azriel, who gave you a nod of approval. It was working.

“So why did Azriel drag you here?” Nesta spoke up, interrupting your thoughts.

“He thinks it’ll be good for me,” You said, stopping to pick up a mat from the racks. “To spend time with others from the Court.”

Nesta hummed, sitting back down on her stretching mat as you unrolled yours. “Well, this is Gwyn,” She said, gesturing to the redhead. “And this is Emerie.” The Illyrian female raised her hand in greeting.

“I’m (Y/N).” You said, offering a friendly smile. Gwyn’s large, teal eyes gleamed, the freckles on her pale skin were like stardust in the sunlight. She seemed shy, but courageous. You knew she was a priestess in the library, meaning she had likely been through the unthinkable – the fact Nesta was able to convince her to come out of the library made your heart swell with pride.

Emerie glanced up and down at you, a smirk pulling at her lips. “We know,” She said. “We’ve heard all about you.”

You chuckled as Nesta fixed the Illyrian with a stern glare. You’ve told them about me, now have you? You said to Nesta.

Shut up. Her reply was just as stern as her gaze, but there was some lightness to it. Her cheeks were flushed red with embarrassment – it was adorable.

How much do they know? You quickly asked her.

They know we had a fight. They don’t know it was fake, but I think they suspect something. I trust them though, they won’t say anything unless I tell them first. They’re good people.

Works for me.

“We wondered when you’d be joining us.” Gwyn quipped, extending her other leg and reaching down to touch her toes. Nesta turned the other way, focusing on stretching her hip.

“Yeah, well Azriel knew I’d go crazy only seeing his face for the next while so he decided to chuck me in here with you guys.” You said, making Gwyn giggle. “He needs Cassian’s alliance to deal with me sometimes.”

In the distance, Azriel snorted. He’d clearly been listening, which was good. You wanted him to hear everything. You turned to look at him, and he shook his head and sighed. Emerie laughed, missing nothing. “Mother above, what do you do to him?” She said.

You shrugged, clasping your arms behind your back and stretching them behind you. “I make his life hell pretty much, isn’t that right?” You called out the last part loudly.

The shadowsinger walked a few steps toward you, hauling a large mat across the floor. “You certainly don’t make my job easy.” He muttered, setting it down in the middle of the ring.

You rolled your eyes, turning to ask Gwyn about how her training is going but stopped. Gwyn was watching Azriel, teal blue eyes following the movements of his muscled arms as he shuffled equipment around. She caught your gaze, blushing and quickly looking away.

“So,” You said, turning to Nesta. “What are we learning today?”

“More strength exercises, apparently.” Nesta huffed, groaning and clutching her stomach. “My abs are still killing me from yesterday.”

“Are we ready to go, or just going to sit there complaining all day?” Came Cassian’s loud voice. The four of you exchanged a glance, huffing as you stood up and kicked your mats to the side.

You liked Gwyn and Emerie. You could tell Nesta was relaxed around them in a way she wasn’t with the others in the court. You found no jealousy churning in your gut, only pride. Nesta having friends was a huge step, but then you realized something – eventually, you and Nesta would leave the Night Court. Gwyn and Emerie would have to be left behind, unless somehow they were okay with your plan and snuck away with you. But two females fleeing the Night Court was already risky enough, let alone adding two others to the mix.

We’ll worry about that later. You said to yourself, taking a deep breath and extending into the position Cassian was demonstrating.

*********************

“Nesta,” Cassian said after the four of you collapsed onto the mat, panting from exhaustion. “If you were to name a sword, what would you call it?”

Gwyn answered, though she hadn’t been asked, “Silver Majesty.”

Emerie snorted. “Really?”

Gwyn demanded, “What would you call it?”

Emerie considered. “Foe Slayer, or something. Something intimidating.”

You laughed. “That’s no better!”

Nesta’s mouth tugged upward at their teasing. Gwyn looked to her, teal eyes bright. “Which one is worse: Foe Slayer or Silver Majesty?”

“Silver Majesty,” Nesta said, and Emerie crowed with triumph. Gwyn waved a hand, booing.

“What would you call it?” Cassian asked Nesta again. You paused, confused as to why he was so persistent. Apparently, Nesta was the same because she glanced to you before speaking up.

“Why do you want to know?” She asked.

“Humor me.”

She lifted a brow. But then said with all sincerity. “Killer.”

His brows flattened.

Nesta shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it necessary to name a sword?”

“Just tell me: If you had to name a sword, what would you call it?”

“Are you getting her one as a Winter Solstice present?” You asked.

“No.”

“Then why keep asking?” You pressed, eyes fixed on Cassian suspiciously.

Cassian scowled. “Curiosity.”

But his jaw tightened, but you knew it wasn’t that – there was something else.

Why would he want you to name a sword? You asked Nesta.

No idea. She replied. I went to a blacksmith with him a few days ago and helped forge some blades. But that’s it.

“Back to work,” he said, clapping his hands and interrupting your thoughts. “For all that sass, you’re doing double time on the Valkyrie lunge hold.”

Emerie and Gwyn groaned, but Nesta surveyed Cassian for another moment before following their lead. You glanced at Azriel, puzzled, but he averted his gaze. You immediately grew even more suspicious – normally he’d just stare at you with that blank expression, revealing nothing. But his avoidance made you question what he wasn’t telling you.

Just over an hour later, you were back on your stretching mats cooling down. Legs shaking from the grueling exercises, you took a sip of your water before realizing it was empty.

“Here, give it to me.” Emerie said, extending her hand and taking your cup. “Gwyn and I are going to get more water before we all die of thirst.”

“Thanks!” You called out as the Illyrian female and the priestess headed over to the water station. Nesta glanced towards you, and you heard her voice in your head.

I’m going to talk to Cassian.

Before you could stop her, she stood up and stomped over with her arms crossed. You  glanced at Gwyn and Emerie, who were too deep in their own conversation to notice. Continuing to stretch, you listened in the direction of Nesta and Cassian.

“Why were you pestering me about naming a sword?” You heard her demand.

Cassian’s voice sounded in return, trying to sound nonchalant but failing. “I just wanted to know what you’d name one.”

“That’s not an answer. Why do you want to know?”

He crossed his arms, then uncrossed them. “Do you remember when we went to the blacksmith?”

“Yes. He’s giving me a blade for Winter Solstice?”

“He’s given you three. The ones you touched.”

Silence.

You heard the general tapping his foot on the ground. “When you hammered those blades, you imbued them—the two swords and the dagger—with your power. The Cauldron’s power. They’re now magic blades. And I’m not talking nice, pretty magic. I’m talking big, ancient magic that hasn’t been seen in a long, long time. There are no magic weapons left. None. They were either lost or destroyed or dumped in the sea. But you just Made three of them. You created a new Dread Trove. You could create even more objects, if you wished.”

“I Made three magic weapons?” Disbelief rang in her voice.

“We don’t know yet what manner of magic they have, but yes.” You turned towards the water station to see Emerie and Gwyn halting their chatting, as if they could see or sense the shift in Nesta. You turned towards her and Cassian, and you didn’t have to see her face to know anger was rising in her eyes.

“Who is ‘we’?” Nesta hissed.

“What?” Cassian said.

“You said ‘We don’t know what manner of magic they have.’ Who is ‘we’?”

“Rhys and Feyre and the others.”

“And how long have all of you known about this?”

He winced as he realized his error. “I ... Nesta ...”

“How long?” Her voice became sharp as glass. Everyone was watching now.

“This isn’t the place to talk about it.”

“You’re the one trying to coax a name out of me in the middle of training!” She gestured to the ring.

Cassian’s face grew pained. “This isn’t coming out the way it should. We argued about whether to tell you, but we took a vote and it went in your favor. Because we trust you. I just ... hadn’t gotten a chance to bring it up yet.”

“There was a possibility you wouldn’t even tell me? You all sat around and judged me, and then you voted?” You could feel something deep in Nesta’s chest cracking, to know that every horrible thing about her had been analyzed.

“It ... Fuck.” Cassian reached for her, but she stepped back. Everyone was staring now. “Nesta, this isn’t ...”

“Who. Voted. Against me.”

“Rhys and Amren.”

You sucked in a breath. Rhys was not a surprise – he hated Nesta and everyone knew it. You personally were not surprised by Amren, but could tell by the way Nesta froze that she was hurt. She had told you briefly that she shared a sort of friendship with the female once, before it all went to shit.

Cassian’s eyes widened. “Nesta—”

“I’m fine,” She said coldly. “I don’t care.”

She rolled her shoulders and strolled back to where you all were watching. Gwyn and Emerie looked at her with concern, but she did not acknowledge it. She left the ring without looking back at Cassian, or any of you.

Emerie was on her heels instantly, trailing her down the stairs. “What’s wrong?” You heard her say.

“Nothing,” Nesta’s reply came. “Court business.”

“Are you all right?” Gwyn asked, a step behind Emerie.

“Yes.” Nesta said before vanishing down the hallway. You wanted to go after her, but held back, remembering that Cassian and Azriel had to think you two were still only on your way to making full amends.

Talk to me. You begged, but no response came. You heard nothing but felt the roaring in her head. Nesta had gone silent again.

*********************

It had been hours, despite your searching Nesta was nowhere to be found. You looked in every corner of the House you could think – the library, her room, your reading nook, nothing. Nesta had not reached out to you either, but you hoped once she calmed down she would.

Your mind wheeled from earlier. Nesta had made a new trove, and the Inner Circle didn’t even tell her – Cassian wasn’t even going to tell her, he only did because it slipped out by mistake. It was apparent they felt entitled to not only Nesta’s autonomy, but her powers as well.

Stomach churning, you crawled into bed and tried to sleep.

*********************

The next day came, and nothing was heard from Nesta. Azriel had not come to check on you either. Something was wrong.

*********************

Nothing the next day.

*********************

On the third day, you stood on the balcony. Your eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, hair unkept. You hadn’t slept once since Nesta disappeared, and nobody had told you anything. Training was suspended temporarily with no explanation, and worry nagged away at your gut. You had no idea where Nesta was.

Please, You begged her for the millionth time. Let me know you’re okay. I’ll do anything, Nesta. Just… please tell me you’re ok.

You felt a sudden gust of wind behind you, cooling the sweat on the back of your neck. You turned around, seeing Azriel. A few feet behind him was Rhysand, which filled you with dread. The High Lord looked haggard, his raven-black hair disheveled and his black shirt wrinkled. Azriel didn’t look much better either.

You stormed over. “What the hell is going on?” You demanded, not caring who you were talking to. Rage took over, that familiar sea of anger rose inside of you.

“(Y/N)...” Azriel began, taking a step towards you.

“Where have you been?” You cut him off, glaring. “What the hell happened that everyone disappeared for over two days? Where is Nesta?”

“Let me explain–”

“You…” You hissed at Rhysand, pushing past the spymaster. You stormed to the High Lord, who looked defeated. “This is all your fault.”

“What are you talking about?” Rhys’ voice was flat.

“I heard Nesta and Cassian arguing,” You hissed. “She made some sort of magic weapon accidentally and instead of telling her and letting her help decide what to do, you voted about it without her? What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

The High Lord’s violet eyes sharpened, and he glared at you. You felt his presence surrounding you, pushing you to submit to him, to his power. Instead, you ignored it, staring down the male who you hated so much.

“Nesta is fine.” He said sternly.

“Then where is she?” You demanded, cocking your head. “Why did she just disappear?”

Rhysand growled. “She’s with Cassian, they’ve gone away for a couple of days.”

“Rhys…” Azriel’s deep voice sounded from behind you. The High Lord’s simmering violent gaze went glassy for a split second, but enough for you to know that he was telling his spymaster something.

“No,” Azriel said firmly, striding over to face his High Lord. “She deserves to know.”

You furrowed your brows. “Know what?”

Rhysand hissed. “Quiet.”

“No,” Azriel growled. “You put your trust in me to supervise her, and I say that she deserves to know what’s going on.”

“I’m with the shadowsinger on this one.” You said, folding your arms across your chest. Rhysand had not moved, just continued to glare down at you.

He didn’t trust you, that much was easy enough to detect. He still judged you for being from Tamlin’s court, as if you were responsible for Tamlin’s actions against Feyre. No matter how hard you worked, no matter if 500 years went by of you proving your loyalty over and over again to the High Lord, he would never trust you. He would always watch you from the corner of his eye with doubt.

“Fucking tell me.” You growled, fists curling. A scarred hand clasped your shoulder and squeezed, urging you to calm down.

“Come, I’ll explain.” Azriel said softly before glaring at Rhys. “I’m telling her, Rhysand. And if you want to stop me you’re going to have to use that mind control of yours.”

The High Lord’s jaw clenched, darkness filling the area. “I think you’ve grown too close to the matter, Azriel.” His tone was commanding and lethal. “Let’s go.”

“No.” You interjected, yanking your shoulder out from under Azriel’s hand. “You’re going to tell me what happened, right here, right now. And he’s going to shut up and give answers.”

Azriel bit his lip, possibly worried that Rhysand would strike you down there and then. He placed himself between you two. “Okay.” He said firmly. “You know how Feyre is pregnant, right?”

“Yes.” You said, caught off guard for a moment. Azriel’s voice sounded distorted as you got lost in your own mind, recalling Nesta’s words. That’s when we also found out Feyre was pregnant, although Rhys later told us that the pregnancy would kill her since the baby has wings.

“...so he decided to keep it from her until a solution was found.” Azriel continued, recapturing your attention.

“Let me guess, you haven’t found one and Feyre doesn’t know.” You stated, looking at Rhysand instead of Azriel. The High Lord said nothing, only continued clenching his jaw and glaring at you.

“Not yet,” Azriel said calmly. “But she does know now. In her anger from the vote, Nesta decided to storm into the city and tell Feyre about what everyone else knew – that the baby would kill her.”

“Good.” You shot back, furious – while Feyre was far from your favourite person, she was a female who deserved to be able to make a choice about what to do with her body and the baby that was killing her. “Feyre deserved to know, you idiots. How could you keep this from her?”

“Nesta told Feyre to hurt her and to spite me,” Rhysand growled. “Not because she had her best interest in mind.”

No shit, You thought. Nesta owed you nothing. She had all her choices taken from her, and she wasn’t about to let that happen to her sister.

“Shut up, Rhys.” Azriel growled, causing the High Lord to blink in surprise. “But yes, she told her out of anger. Everyone got mad, and Cassian grabbed her to get her out of Velaris. They’re staying in the mountains for a few days until everything calms down.”

Your blood stilled. Something didn’t make sense – you understood taking a few hours apart, but days? Either Azriel wasn’t telling you something, or Rhysand was withholding information from his shadowsinger. You heard stories of the heightened emotions that went along with having a mate. If Feyre was upset and Nesta had been the cause of that, Rhysand would have been angry as hell. Possibly angry enough to….

“You threatened to kill Nesta, didn’t you?” Your voice was barely above a whisper as your gaze landed on the High Lord.

He didn’t answer, so you spoke again, louder. “Didn’t you? That’s why Cassian had to stay away for a few days with Nesta, because he was worried that you’d kill your mate’s sister.”

Azriel furrowed his brows, the first time you’d ever seen him confused. “That’s not true,” He said, but his voice was flat, as if he was trying to convince himself of it as he turned to his High Lord. “Right Rhys?”

The High Lord of the Night Court gave no answer, darkness curling around his fingertips as he stared you down. You could tell he wanted nothing more than to mist you on sight – you laid him bare and tore him down in front of his most trusted friend, exposing him for what he really was. And he hated it.

“Rhys?” Azriel’s voice lowered.

Rhysand finally spoke after a few seconds. “I’m not going to hurt Nesta.”

“But you threatened to?” You challenged.

“Yes.”

Azriel sighed. “Are you fucking kidding me, Rhys?”

A rage that you hadn’t felt before bubbled up inside you. The High Lord of the Night Court, who let the females in Illyria and the Hewn City suffer and be used as breeding cattle, had threatened to kill Nesta, his mate’s sister. Despite how much he claimed to love Feyre, he still treated her like any female of his court by not giving her a choice – he could offer sanctuary to the females in Illyria or the Hewn City like he had with the priestesses in the library, but he didn’t. This male insisted that the monster facade he put on for other courts was purely for show, but you knew that at his core, that’s just who he really was.

And he chased Nesta out of the city because she did what he was too afraid to do.

“This is all your fault, Rhysand.” Your voice was steady, cold as the edge of the sharpest blade. “You didn’t tell your mate that she was going to die, and you threatened to kill Nesta because she let her sister have a choice. You locked her up here because you couldn’t control her like you do the others, pretending like it was for the sake of helping her. You let two thirds of your court live in suffering, then wonder why they hate you. You’re a terrible ruler and an even worse mate, Rhysand. And you will get what’s coming to you.”

The High Lord said nothing as you turned on your heel and strode back into the House, leaving him and Azriel alone on the balcony.

*********************

The next few hours felt like a blur – part of you expected Rhysand to return and rip you to shreds for threatening him. It was stupid of you, but you didn’t regret it – you could tell by the way Azriel’s demeanor changed as he found out Rhys neglected to mention his threat to Nesta’s life that he was shocked, and mad that he was not informed of it. Maybe seeing you stand up to Rhys would give him a backbone after all.

You drifted into sleep, hoping that you wouldn’t wake up in a cell.

*********************

A gentle hand on your shoulder woke you. Your vision was blurry as you lifted a head from the pillow, the sunlight casting a golden glow on the female sitting on your bed.

Nesta.

All sleepiness was gone and you bolted upright, not caring that it made your head spin. Before you could say anything, her arms wrapped around you and held you tight. In your grogginess, you yelped and fell back, head hitting the pillow once again. Nesta followed, still clinging to you as her weight landed on top of you but you didn’t care. The hole in your chest from the past few days swelled as you held the eldest Archeron in your arms again, clutching her as if she would float away.

Tears flowed down your cheeks as Nesta nuzzled her head into your neck, her shoulders shaking, indicating she was crying too. The two of you laid there, Nesta laying on top of you and clutching onto your frame as if you were her lifeline. A white, soft glow began to shine from your sternums, merging into one beautiful light. It filled the room as you held each other in the embrace – life and death entwined into one beautiful force.

“Nesta…” You sobbed, bringing a hand up to cradle her head.

“I’m here.” Her voice was shaky as she spoke into your neck. “I’m here, darling.”

“Azriel told me everything,” You choked out between sobs. “About Feyre and the fight. And the mountains. And Rhys… he threatened to kill you….”

“I’m so sorry…” Nesta’s voice was muffled. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Shh.. It’s not your fault.”

“I wanted to reach out, I really did. But I couldn’t. I just broke out there, I wanted to die. I couldn’t do it.”

Fresh tears washed out the dried ones, and you held her closer. You wanted to burn Rhysand and his inner circle to the ground for this, for breaking Nesta down until she truly believed she was unworthy of life and love.

“It’s okay,” You said quietly. “You’re here now. You’re safe.”

Nesta took a deep breath, but didn’t lift her head from your neck. She just kept holding you. “We hiked through those mountains for two days.” She whispered, voice hoarse. “Cassian was so mad at me. He had me haul the backpacks, he didn’t notice when I fainted. He didn’t speak to me unless it was to order me to eat or drink. Then when I broke, he held me. I thought he was going to stand up for me, say what Rhys did was wrong, that all of this was wrong. But then he wanted to fuck me just a few hours later. That’s all I am to him, isn’t it? Something to fuck but not enough to love?”

“Did you…?” Your voice trailed off, embarrassed for asking. You felt bad, regretting the question even though it had not fully formed.

“No.” She said quietly. “He was surprised. He tried a few times, but didn’t push it. He respected my decision, but I think he could tell something had changed.”

You inhaled deeply, letting her scent fill your nose. You missed it, craved it while she was gone in a way you couldn’t quite understand. Everything you did, every move and plan you made to escape the Night Court at its core was for Nesta. The female who laid on top of you, curled into your arms, had fought so hard and been through so much. She had been forced into a life she didn’t want, and would have to live in it for the rest of her immortal life. You wanted to get out of the Night Court not just for yourself, but so Nesta could have a chance to truly live.

“Besides,” Nesta said, lifting her head and staring down at you with grey eyes glistening with tears. “Cassian isn’t the one I wanted to do this to.”

Nesta leaned town and pressed her lips against yours. Your eyes fluttered shut as you melted into the kiss, grabbing the back of her neck and pulling her closer. Her soft lips tasted as sweet as you remembered, but this kiss was different than the last one. Last time, it was all fire and desperation, but this one was sure and intimate. Nesta’s weight on top of you was comforting, her legs tangled with yours as she tried to get as close to you as possible. Your lips broke apart for air. Your heart fluttered as she tilted her head and kissed you again, stroking your tear stained cheek with her hand. It was passionate, but not rough or overly sexual like you were pretty sure she was used to with Cassian – it was a kiss that came from the heart, just sexual desire.

The drums of time slowed down as your lips melted together. The glow between your chests continued to shine like starlight, shutting off the outside world. There was no Rhysand to threaten you, no Troves or death gods – it was just you two.

Needing air again, your lips broke apart. Nesta took a shaky breath, pressing her forehead into yours.

“It’s you.” She said breathlessly. “It’s always been you.”

taglist (comment if you want to be added): @queercontrarian @kitkat-writes-stuff @moonfawnx @sevikas-whore @weird-and-wise @jemandderkeinenusernamenfindet @kingshitonly @ladyofcherries @eerievixen @readingwritingwatching @peacecoffeeandflowers @a-frog-with-a-laptop @shadowqueen25 @lana08 @highladyofillyria @rachelnicolee @ladespedidas @little-darlingo @manonblackbeakquidditchteam13 @demirunner @terorovaerangi @hauntedandhopeful  @younxii @microwaveallthedemons @fanfictioniseverything @lovra974 @maddietheshoe @peaceandcrackers @emy1-9 @lostinfantasyworldsbi @issybee0611 @thoughtfulshepherdmongerkid @belledawnidk @whhyyynottt​ @dream-alittlebiggerdarling

[lovelykei]

Haikyuu fanfic will include some smau probably but mostly written.

Synopsis:

Ever since middle school Eri and Rio have been best friends with Tobio, having all shared the same cold shoulder from their volleyball teams they all decide that they will not continue onto the high school connected to kitagawa daichi and instead they choose to start together somewhere new. Now they have just started their first day in Karasuno and Eri is determined to not let things be like before. But while working hard at volleyball and maintaining the house is hard it seems she just can’t stop thinking about the blonde in her class.

(Tsukishima x oc) (Tsukishima x reader)

First chapter

Second chapter

Third chapter

Fourth chapter

Fifth chapter

Sixth chapter

[fimproda]

ACOTAR tag game

Thanks for the tag, @teddyhoneybear 🥰

Answer the questions below & tag whoever you want, or make it an open tag!

Who's your favorite ACOTAR character?

Nesta. If she has one fan, then it's me; if she has no fans, then I'm dead. I'm so, so ashamed that I didn't like her at first, for she has never been the heartless bitch some people in the fandom (and even some characters in the books) made her to be. Silver Flames and, later, House of Flame and Shadow only cemented my love, admiration and respect for her.

Who's your least favorite character?

Amren. Sometimes you just need to slap a bitch in the face.

Say something nice about your least favourite character.

She did sacrifice herself at the end of Wings and Ruin.

Who's your favorite High Lord? (If you picked one for your fav character, then who's your second fav!)

Thesan, my STEM king ❤️

Favorite MINOR character?

I agree with @teddyhoneybear on this one: Nuan, my STEM queen ❤️

Favorite ship? (Crackships included!)

Nessian, always and forever. Elucien and Gwynriel are close seconds.

Favorite court and why?

Day, because I headcanon it as being similar to Ancient Greece/Ancient Rome and, as a born and bred Italian who studied ancient Greek and Latin in high school for five years, I can't help but want to live in such an environment.

Make up a brand new court RIGHT NOW, NO PREP JUST VIBES.

The Future Court, based on the planet Magix from Winx Club. I just love the concept of technomagic so much.

What relationship would you have wanted to see more of in the books?

This will sound weird, but: Eris and his dogs. This, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that I have a dog myself and I find people who care about dogs to be incredibly hot.

What's your unpopular opinion?

Boy, do I have more than one. - Amren should've stayed dead. - Feyre was right in wanting to have a baby so soon. People can, and will, change their minds about anything. - Speaking of babies, Madja is at least partly to blame for the whole pregnancy debacle, and her medical license should be revoked. - Mor has smelled fishy to me ever since the very first moment, and her power of truth is scary as fuck. - Rhysand is a shitty High Lord. Feyre being crowned High Lady with absolutely zero experience is just yet another of Rhys's shitty decisions as a shitty High Lord. - What happened in the Ember and Randall bonus chapter from House of Flame and Shadow is not as controversial as anyone makes it to be. Both Nesta and Rhysand were right and wrong in their actions and decisions in that particular context, and Cassian made the smartest choice by pleading the fifth and not intervening.

What's your favourite headcanon/fan canon?

Everything related to the restoration of the Dusk Court, minus the Elriel implications.

If you were swept away to Prythian, what's ONE thing you would want to do?

Visiting at least three of the Day Court libraries.

If you could have ONE faerie ability seen in the books, which would it be?

Honestly, I would be content with a bit of "domestic" magic, like the one Rhysand displays at times in the books (washing one's body, cleaning one's clothes, make something appear or disappear, et cetera).

I'm tagging @zoyalannister and @panaryn 👀

[foxcort]

acotar & asoiaf au collection || The Autumn Court as House Baratheon.

"Ours Is The Fury." // Beron Baratheon of Storm's End, Lord of Storm’s End and Lord Paramount of the Stormlands.

ft. Rhea Baratheon née Estermont of Storm’s End, Lady of Storm’s End.

ft. Eris Baratheon, firstborn son and Heir of House Baratheon.

ft. 3 Unnamed Baratheon Brothers, the Second, Third and Fourth sons of House Baratheon.

ft. 2 Unnamed Baratheon Brothers (deceased), the Fifth and Sixth sons of House Baratheon, both killed by Tamlin Lannister.

ft. Jesminda Storm, a bastard born in the Stormlands and later executed for treason (unrightfully) when her tryst with Lucien Baratheon became evident.

[evansblues]

Scott and Chris

I’ll start with just Scott. There's the T-square. It's got the moon in the fifth house of creativity, so the emotions, in Pisces, meaning very deep creative emotions.The water signs all feel very deeply. He’s got the Sun and mercury together in the eleventh house of hopes and dreams in Virgo. Virgo is a perfectionist. So he’s going to have very high standards for his dream life. Neptune is in Sagittarius, wisdom and knowledge in the third house of communication and siblings. Now the thing that I wanted to mention is there's a particular relationship that happens between the moon being the emotions, the ego being the sun, communication as mercury, and Neptune as the imagination. Particularly when it's in a hard aspect like this, meaning these things are in conflict. What it means is when he's triggered about his ego or who he'd like to be, the way he communicates is imaginative. When there is a relationship between emotions, communication and imagination in this way, it means that the person lies. That’s before you add in the ego to the equation with the Sun. This is someone who is very comfortable telling tall tales. It's someone who uses dishonesty to alleviate emotional triggers and to get what they want.

In this configuration, it has to do specifically with the ego because the Sun is involved and the eleventh house is your peers. His Sun also rules his MC which is his public image. The Moon in the fifth house relates to the fact he's an actor because it's Pisces, Pisces and Neptune rule the film industry. Those beautiful imaginary pictures. This again ties back into his brother because the third house where Neptune is represents siblings and, as an actor, Chris is part of his 11th house peer group also. Scott is triggered by his brother or things to do with his brother, especially by the perception of his brother both in his home community and among his peers, because both the third and eleventh houses are involved. And when he’s triggered he tells lies about it -either to his brother or about his brother.

Even without seeing Chris's chart, just looking at Scott's chart, there's so much here to do with Scott's ego and Scott's emotions and Scott being triggered in this big red T-square to tell untruths to the people around him. Any people. It could be the people close to him, because the third house is your local community, or the people he knows socially in the eleventh house, because both are involved. The sixth house is your co-workers, which is ruled by Ares for him and it has Eris in there. So he's very competitive if not combative with his co-workers, I would believe. He’s got nothing in the seventh house of partnerships, except Juno. That means he’s different with his romantic partner. So one of the things that I didn't want to put before was that Scott's probably a dishonest person, and I believe it’s to his brother's detriment to boost up his own feelings of inadequacy. But this is relevant to what I'm going to say, and what we've been seeing. So I wanted to bring that up.

Scott has a couple of other interesting things going on here. He's a Virgo Sun with his Mercury in Virgo in the 11th house. Sun in the 11th house is an extrovert placement. He's also got a Leo midheaven, and his Venus and Mars are conjunct in Leo, so this is someone who likes to be out in public with other people, who's very social, who loves to be seen, and who will pick a job that is social and public. So it's not surprising that he chose to be an actor. His moon is in Pisces in his 5th house. He could struggle with his feelings. He could also have extremely creative feelings. The 5th house is about creativity and performance and casual sex. I don't know that he has as much casual sex because the Moon’s there which infuses emotions into that area of life, but I think he's a dreamer because Pisces is very whimsical. There’s a good chance he has some sort of abstract art form that’s largely expressionist that he likes to do when stressed or sad that makes him happy. Something frivolous but ostentatious. I keep picturing finger painting because it’s messy and showy but more for enjoyment than presentation. He can also be very moved by performance art in a way many aren’t. Like maybe he goes to an installation and balls his eyes out for three days because of how it touched him.

His Moon is in opposition to Mercury retrograde in Virgo. Mercury is at home in Virgo. It's a very thoughtful, communicative planet. In The 11th house, it's very, very social. I think he likes to be out and about with people but at the same time he likes to have his downtime where he's thinking his unique thoughts. I think he creates when he's alone. I would be very surprised if he didn't have some sort of artsy hobby that nobody knows about. Virgo Sun and Mercury in the 11th can also be someone who likes to tell others how to do things. It’s one of the negative traits of Virgos. They are perfectionists who know how to do everything the right way and will let people know how they’re doing things wrong. I see that in him. Especially since they both square down to Neptune in Sag and oppose the Moon. His creative side doesn’t play well with his perfectionism. You can’t have both chaos and order at the same time. He struggles with this. I think his friends get after him too for being such a know it all but so messy himself. The ruler of his 12th house of undoing is Venus in Leo. His ambitions are his downfall, specifically his self image, his need to be liked and admired. It’s in his career but it will play out socially for him.

He’s very emotional. The Sun and the Moon both square Neptune, the ruler of his 5th house, and the ruler of his Moon in his 5th house. The Moon squares both nodes. His emotions create difficulty for him to flow into the cycle of his nodes. Which is furthermore aggravated by Neptune's conjunction to his South node. Normally the South node is something that you're very proficient at but I think he has a lot of trouble remembering what he's proficient at because Neptune dissolves boundaries. He doesn’t give himself credit. It's in Sagittarius, so it's very lucky and expansive, and Jupiter is at home with it, conjunct Uranus. There's a definite oddness to him. He values that oddness and thinks it’s an asset of his. They're both 5 degrees. Five is chaos and conflict or competition. He values being different for the sake of being different. Second house is your values. He likes the conflict it creates. Second house is also your money, he gets money from being different and confrontational.

There’s another triangle in his chart, the blue one. There’s not a name for this triangle but it’s important nonetheless. Aspects between Venus and Pluto can often mean jealousy. Add Mars, the planet of aggression, and Neptune, the planet of fantasy, and you get a very particular type of self image. Pluto conjunct the ascendant is someone who wants to change things around them but they want to be the vehicle of that change. Pluto is transformative but it’s also controlling. People with strong Pluto will be very good at taking charge but they will always face a struggle later in life when they have to surrender that control to transform themselves. They often hang on for dear life. Saturn conjunct his Pluto will make that even harder for him. He will have to suffer and learn lessons. Saturn will make him put in the work. Venus, in Leo, rules his Libra ascendant. Image is everything to him. His Leo placements are strong, Venus rules his chart and Mars weaponizes her. I think he likes to do drag. A lot. I think he gets mean when he does, too.

His fame asteroid is also in his second house. He has a lot of luck with his skill set. He's meant to move away from it up into Gemini though, in his 8th house. Gemini North node is hard to have. It can only be reached once you’re fractured a bit because Gemini is the Twins and to be a twin and to meet your North node you have to pick a side. It's interesting. It's also by Vesta. This is very transformative for him. A lot of the things that I see in his chart I already see are related to his brother, sometimes that's common. Much of what his struggles are and what he's meant to do ties into his relationship with his brother. Let’s look at that.

Chris's Sun falls directly between Scott’s North node and Vesta. Chris’s Mars is conjunct Scott’s inverted Chiron. This is Chris’s 7th house of partnerships. So he feels very comfortable with his brother. He feels like his brother’s a really good advocate and asset. For him, it's a really good partnership. Scott's Chiron conjunct his Mars actually soothes Chris’s anxiety and ambition. This Mars is in opposition to Scott’s Jupiter and Uranus. Chris hinders him from being his full self and from expressing his values properly, particularly on the Internet and from having luck in money affairs. Scott is triggered by his second tier status to his brother, but he loves his brother. It's hard for Scott because there's this big T square between his North node vesta conjunction with Chris's Sun, Chris is who he wants to be and he outshines him all the time. Scott’s Neptune conjunction with Chris's Neptune and his own South Node Means it’s Scott doesn’t feel adequate because the south node is what he’s good at and he already has trouble seeing it with his own in there. He doesn’t see that he has any value to add. He has Venus and Mars Sextile Chris’s Sun, which makes him admire Chris a lot, and it means that he has no struggles with Chris’s ego. It means that Chris is very comfortable with who Scott is and how he expressed himself. The trine from his Venus and Mars down to Neptune means that he idolizes his brother. Most things I see in the synastry chart are more beneficial to Chris. I’ll be honest. The apex of the T square is his moon. Seen a big red triangle pointing at the moon? Yeah that’s how this relationship hurts Scott’s emotions.

It looks like Chris kind of forces him to be a better person. Chris has his Neptune conjunct Scott’s South node further blurring Scott’s ability to see his skillset, and he's got his Sun on Scott’s North node, so it really pulls him. This isn’t comfortable for Scott, it’s like an iron grip on his neck. It creates a lot of emotional turmoil. It’s always overwhelming when someone else has such an effect on your life like that. But he loves his brother. His brother is very soothing to him. It’s kind of like Chris makes him a better person but it’s a really painful process so he doesn’t really see how to feel about it. Because he can see that it’s helping him get where he wants to go but it also really sucks. It’s a hard one to wrap your head around. The way he rectifies this is the T square lets out at his Sun and Chris's career placements. It's Scott's 11th house. So when his North node cycle is too much, of being a partner in crime and a brother and learning service and love through this relationship, his outlet is being seen in public and being around his people. The 11th is also hopes and dreams, I imagine he takes time out to be selfish and do those things he wanted to do but put off for his brother. I think he is very dedicated at times and then retreats into moments of extreme self care and attention.

Chris has Neptune in Scott’s first house meaning Chris affects his self image and people's perceptions of him. This is a karmic cycle between Chris and Scott. They both have North node activations. Scott’s are activated by Chris's Sun and Neptune, which is who his brother is and what people perceive his brother to be. Chris's nodes are activated by Scott MC/IC. Scott anchors him and reminds him of who he is versus who people see him as. His Venus and Mars trine Scotts Saturn in the first. Scorpio and Cancer. Scott calms him but restricts how he expresses himself and certain thoughts. This is because it’s Chris’s eighth house and Scott’s first, Scott tells him not to overshare. It’s both protective but limiting. I don’t think Scott likes how emotional Chris gets and he doesn’t like Chris’s interest in the esoteric. Scott cares a lot about image and he is much more practically minded with the Libra and Virgo placements. That Pisces moon all by itself tells me he thinks emotions and alternative ideas are meant to be had in privacy. There’s a direct line from his controlling placements in his first house of image to Chris’s eighth house of occult and other people’s money. It will be both helpful and limiting for Chris, the way his brother tempers this house. Speaking of money, his second house of money has his fame astroid conjunct Chris’s Uranus and AC, meaning his bother is the source of his fame through the internet. He has a lot of luck with money and the internet having his own Jupiter and Uranus there however they oppose Chris’s Mars which means Chris also negatively affects Scott’s money with his ambitions. This could look like people, in an interview with Scott, being more interested in talking about what Chris is doing.

This is a really fascinating synastry. The weird thing is that Chris's Moon is not aspected. To get a bit technical, Chris has a 12 Scorpio Moon and Scott’s is 19 Pisces. This is an elemental trine with a 7 degree orb. In synastry, the orb for a trine is 5 degrees so they’re not aspecting. They do both have water moons which means they both feel deeply and value their emotions, they will both make decisions based on their emotions and they will have a routine for self soothing to honor string phases of emotionality. Water moon are the deepest. In my opioid it’s water moons, earth moons, fire moons, and then the air moons are emotionless robots. The moons are like their elements; water in stillness is deep and life giving, in turbulence it is the storm that rages. Earth is stable and accepting, it holds life; in turbulence it crumbles. Fire is warming and life sustaining, in adversity it consumes and then snuffs out. Air is gentle and the breath it gives is calming, life lengthening, in trouble it destroys. Think tornadoes, the air is ever present but the tornado will destroy and pull everything with it. Moons like their own polarity and even more their own element. Chris and Scottt have water moons, so they will feel comfortable in each other’s presence. They will be able to soothe each other with what soothes themselves. However, Chris’s moon is in detriment in Scorpio, it needs a connection, and it doesn’t make a connection to anything in Scott’s chart.

[usagirln120]

Shota Aizawa: Hogwarts AU

Shota Aizawa is a pureblood wizard that was born on the 8th of November 1964 and started attending Hogwarts on the 1st of September 1976, being sorted into Gryffindor house.

During his Hogwarts years, he mostly hung out with his best friends Hizashi and Oboro, occasionally hanging out with his friend Nemuri as well.

In his fifth year, his friend Oboro was believed to have been killed in an accident but many years later it was revealed that he was kidnapped and put under the Imperius Curse to work for the Death Eaters.

After graduating, he worked as an auror for a while before he started working as Hogwarts Transfiguration teacher after his friend Nemuri appointed him due to his suicidal tendencies during Auror missions.

After the start of the second Wizarding War, he became a member of the Order of the Phoenix and participated in the Battle of Hogwarts which he survived but with great injuries.

He got a scar under his eyes and lost both his eye and his right left, which eventually forces him to retire as a Hogwarts professor all together.

After retiring, he married his close friend Emi and had a son with her which he raised alongside his foster daughter Eri.

He has a fir wand with a dragon heartstring core.

His Patronus is a weasel.

His favorite subjects were Transfiguration and Defense Against the Dark Arts.

His least favorite subjects were Herbology and Astronomy.

[bloomingjarofhoney]

Greek Mythology in Twisted Wonderland: Book 6 Part 1

greetings fellow travelers! book 6 has officially dropped and i am here to info dump with greek mythology stuff that i have retained over the years. some of the information comes from reputable sites like britanica (which i will source) and other greek mythos. book 6 is interesting because it contains a lot of greek myths and references than any other book. and while the movie hercules does mention some of it, i will be doing a deep dive for those who are interested. i'm sure there are plenty of people who are more coherent than i am, but imma do my best. i will post part 2 in another post once that book is dropped as well so stay tuned once that happens.

everything will be under the read more because i know for a fact that it's gonna be long. so. let's get started.

aight so just to get it out of the way, the numbers that the guards are using (hepta, hexa, penta, etc.) are numbers in greek. it's not mythology, but i find that part fascinating to read.

these are references to charon, who is the ferryman of the dead who leads the souls, or shades as they are called, into the underworld by using the river styx or river acheron depending on myth. charon is also the son of erebus, the god and personification of darkness, and nyx, the goddess and personification of night.

source

more references to charon and references to the river styx. fun fact, while styx is one of the main rivers and is considered one of the great rivers, there are actually five rivers in total.

the first river is the river styx, which means hatred and is one of the rivers that the gods swear on and is named after a nymph. also used in many greek tales such as achilles becoming immortal by his mother thetis dipping him in the river. styx and acheron often interchange which river charon ferries over depending on the story and myth, such as dante's inferno.

the second river called the lethe river, which means forgetfulness. before the souls enter the underworld, they are told to drink the water so they forget their earthly existence. it is also named after a minor goddess who is the daughter of eris.

the third river is called acheron river, which means woe or misery. it is also often called the green river because of the hue it gives off. in some stories, it is considered the principal river of the underworld, replacing the river styx instead. it is also considered the entrance to the underworld. according to myth, during the titanomachy (titan war), the titans would use the river to drink from and when zeus found out, he cursed the river in revenge.

the fourth river is the river phlegethon, which means river of fire. the reason it's called that is because it is said to travel to the depths of the underworld where the land is filled with fire. more specifically, the flames of the funeral pyres. this river actually leads to tartarus, which is where the dead are judged and where it holds the titans and its supporters as prisoners.

the fifth and last river is the river cocytus, which is also called the river of wailing. it is also considered to be a river of cries and lamentation. this river actually houses shades that have not received a proper burial and is one of the rivers that charon refuses to ferry over. the river banks of cocytus would have shades wandering the grounds in search of payment so they may go to their final resting place.

source

this one is a fun little tidbit about the shroud family. jupiter is actually the roman version of zeus, the god of the sky and thunder. he also has fathered many children such as athena, the goddess of wisdom and war strategy, artemis, the goddess of the hunt, apollo, god of medicine, arts, etc., and many heroes such as perseus, who is known for slaying medusa, helen of troy, who is known as being one of the reasons why the trojan war was started, and, most notably, heracles. also known as the roman name hercules. zeus, or jupiter, was also the king of the gods. olympos (also known as olympus but just a different spelling) is the home of the gods.

this one is just fun! hecate is the goddess of witchcraft and has been known to be associated with the spiritual world and the dead. she also helped assist in finding demeter's daughter, persephone, and when it was revealed she would spend a third of the year in the underworld, hecate became persephone's companion. in some myths, hecate was also known for assisting hades.

source

oceanus is a titan god of the ocean. in some versions, he was born from the union of gaea and chaos, while in other myths he was born from the union of gaea and uranus. oceanus was one of the titans that did not participate in the titanomachy against the gods, thus sparing him from imprisonment. there are stories where he either did not participate, or he sent his daughter styx to help fight in the war, along with styx's own children.

source

this part takes an interesting take on what happened to the titans. in the original myth, the titans were the predecessors to the olympian gods. in the myth, cronus, the father of zeus, hades, poseidon, hera, demeter, and hestia, learned about a prophecy about how he was about to be overthrown by one of his children and, terrified of it becoming true, would summon rhea, his sister-wife, to bring forth their newly birthed child and would eat them. the only one that was saved was zeus because rhea tricked cronus into eating a rock instead of a baby. when zeus made his return, he but open his father's stomach and out came his five siblings. thus, the titanomachy was formed, which was a battle between the titans and the olympian gods. the war ended ten years later with the titans' defeat and thus were sealed in tartarus.

tartarus is actually part of the underworld. it's a primordial deity that predates the olympian gods. not only are the titans sealed up in tartarus, but also various different types of monsters and creatures and villains that wish to break free from its hold. fun fact, cronus actually used tartarus before zeus did, where cronus imprisoned the cyclopes and the hecatonchires, who was a creature with a thousand arms and faces. the two groups also sided with the olympian gods during the titanomachy.

source

i mean, yes but also no. in some versions of myth, it was said that the three brothers - zeus, poseidon, and hades - drew lots to see who would reign over what region. zeus was lucky and would rule over the sky, poseidon would rule over the ocean, and hades would rule over the underworld. hades, obviously, would not be happy with his pick but he diligently did his best with ruling over the underworld. no one really made him do it, but he knows that no one else is going to so he stepped up and ruled the underworld. as for tartarus, i believe that the distance between the two wasn't that significant, but hades will know if someone broke free from the prison.

like hecate and oceanus, these are just fun little flavor points. elysium is the afterlife for those who were either born from a god or were heroes, like achilles for example. eventually, it would expand to whomever the gods deemed worthy and were righteous and heroic. in some myths, elysium was either already in the underworld or was created when persephone arrived to the underworld.

cerberus is the three headed dog that guards the underworld and the child of typhon and echidna, as well as being the siblings of the sphynx, the nemean lion, and other creatures. fun fact, cerberus actually doesn't have three heads. it depends on how he's depicted in art and story, but he mostly either has one head and many tales, multiple heads, or having the heads of snakes from his back. since a lot of urns would depict cerberus with three heads, it stuck that he became the three headed hound of the underworld.

i've mentioned tartarus before so i won't get into too much detail with it, but it is interesting how twisted wonderland takes the concept and creates a new narrative to help fit into the story.

and that's it so far! this took a really long time and was interesting to go back on my notes to see how much greek myths were mentioned. there are other parts where certain characters make an appearance, but i feel like it will be good to be in another part because it was very brief or it would be part of a bigger picture than what was mentioned. if you have any questions, concerns, or you want me to expand on something, let me know and i'll try and answer as best as i can. otherwise, enjoy book six and more to come!

[dashreads]

Finished reading the ACOTAR series and I just... my heart... but like...

First off I feel like I'm a total Nessian fan and I need more books on this couple than Rhysand and Feyre. Like I love these two way too much. Nesta's story is just *chef's kiss* and Cassian (don't get me started)

Second off, Tamlin. I wouldn't say I'd like a redemption story but I also believe he needs to be kicked out of his fit and he needs to learn and grow from it. Like idk someone needs to just kick his ass and not in a way that it would develop into a love story but like found family? Like his family was bad and he learned from bad even though he tried to be good? Like he's not 100% but he's not 100% good, he's a petulant child who needs to be taught a lesson and given some tough love.

Third off, Eris. Just like Tamlin, not 100% good or bad. He's got his motives and he wears his mask and as Cassian said he's probably a decent male deep down he's just too much of a coward to actually be it. He's a fun character, I like him but he also annoys me. He went after his men, in what we can only guess was a desperate bid to save them but slipped and got caught. I'd like to see more on him if Maas writes more for this series.

Forth, Azriel. I just want to give this man a hug.

Fifth, The House. I love places as characters and The House was probably one of my top five side characters in the series. I just love them.

Sixth, Helion. He's just a sheer delight and I just love him. I wish there was more of him in the books.

There's a lot more points I'd make if give the time but as of right now, this is as far as I can think...

OH WAIT!

LUCIEN AND ELAIN! I'd like to see at least a friendship between them. Like them talking to each other or trying to be nice. Like Elain teaching Lucien what a real friend is and not whatever he and Tamlin had.

[aurixeris]

headcanons (aurigen) ✧ headcanons (eris)

Aurigen: - Vanessa Kirby 

Affectionate, Optimistic, Creative

Naive, Materialistic, Dependent

Eris: - Elizabeth Debicki  

Adaptable, Resilient, Protective

Reckless, Unforgiving, Distrustful

Biography Triggers: Child Neglect Her parents had hoped that their child would be loved—at least by the family they chose for her, as they realized they could not raise the child they so desperately wanted. They carefully studied the family they would entrust their child to, noting their love for their children, kindness to their animals, and their good reputation in the community. The father even played the fiddle so his family could sing and laugh. They thought that if they couldn't give their child the love she deserved, at least she would be cherished by those who resembled them in values and warmth. Heartbroken that they would not be able to name her, see her grow, or have her with them, they placed the infant in the crib next to the infant savior and, with a kiss to each child's forehead, disappeared.

Lieselotte, as she was baptized, was the fifth and last child of Conrad and Augusta Auwaerter. She had been the family's greatest blessing. 

Growing up with four older brothers, Lieselotte was doted on, loved, and even spoiled a little. She would chase after her brothers when they went into the fields, only to be swept into a pair of arms and carried on their shoulders. They called her Aurigen—golden child—for the color of her hair. The name stuck, and she was rarely called Lieselotte except by priests. Her brothers, raised in the image of their father, grandfather, and uncles, were boisterous and loud. Yet, when their little sister became tearful, they were the first to kneel and comfort her.

Aurigen was blessed.

However, her family was unaware of the girl who lived in her dreams. This girl knew her completely—her best friend, the moon to her sun. Aurigen was the only child who willingly wanted to take naps just to talk to her sister-in-self. When she was five years old and peering into the water bucket, she was carrying to add to the water trough, she saw her sister-in-self for the first time. Giddy, she dropped the bucket and ran to tell her mother, but when she peered into the now empty bucket, there was no other image. She tried to explain the girl in the water, but her mother only laughed and told her to go on and play.

At nine, her dream-mate manifested in front of others. There, the nameless child stood before her parents, and the truth came out. Her parents recoiled in horror. Her brothers called her a blighted bitch, and the child was terrified. Her parents demanded that she give them back their Aurigen, and she had to explain that she didn't know how—that she was also part of Aurigen and that they were together.

Not wishing to physically harm a child—even one who had replaced their own—Conrad brought her to the barn and sent her up into the hayloft. There, he said, she would stay until she allowed Aurigen to come back. She pleaded to be allowed to stay in the house, in her bed with her dolls, but Conrad refused. Her first dream was a nightmare, and Aurigen could only comfort her.

This started a routine. Aurigen would be in control, and the family would adore and love her—she became more spoiled and looked after. She was not allowed to look into still bodies of water, and all mirrors were covered. Her family did not allow her to discuss her dreams; Conrad would grow stern, Augusta would cry, and her brothers would try to tell her that she was just a silly little girl dreaming of silly things. The family thought if they ignored the creature inside their daughter, it would go away.

But the other child would not go away. They named her Erisalia—a child of terror and calamity. She was a mistake, a source of misfortune. If the town found out, they might kill Aurigen and the entire family.

So, when the other child manifested, Conrad would take her to the barn and put her in the hayloft, where she would try to keep herself warm by lying under the hay. If she went down to sleep with the horses or cows, Conrad would tie her like a dog and keep her at the doghouse at the far back of the property by the woods. If Aurigen didn't manifest within a few days, her portions would be cut; she was treated worse than their livestock in the hopes that she would stop coming forth.

When Aurigen and Eris were twenty, Aurigen decided to run away. She would pick Eris over her entire life and the life that she had dreamed of. She got them as far as two towns over when her brothers found them and brought her back. They blamed the other child and refused to listen to Aurigen when she said it was her idea. The control they held over her only increased—they agreed that she would never marry, would stay under their care, and later her brothers’ care. The risk the other woman presented was too great.

So, Aurigen plotted with the Eris... and Eris learned to wait. They waited long enough for the parents to lower their guard and for the brothers to agree to take Aurigen to the town festival. There, Aurigen ran, and this time, the other woman took control.

Eris knew that this would be her last chance. Instead of relying on the kindness of others, she stole. She kept to the shadows and found that she was good at taking trivial things. Being good with trivial things led to being good at taking important things... and important meant expensive. Expensive meant coin. Food. A bed.

The family continued to look for Aurigen and Eris, but now, it has been over ten years since they last saw her. Eris is the predominant one now, as she knows how to survive best. Aurigen is a woman who wants the finer things in life; she is easily overwhelmed and startled, and she is not ready to face the terrors of life—so Eris protects her. When Aurigen can enjoy something—when life is calm and beautiful again—then she takes control.

[whileiamdying]

Toni Morrison and the Ghosts in the House

“Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place to write from,” Morrison says. “It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.”Photograph by Richard Avedon for The New Yorker / © The Richard Avedon Foundation

From 2003: As an editor, author, and professor, Morrison has fostered a generation of black writers.

By Hilton Als October 19, 2003

No. 2245 Elyria Avenue in Lorain, Ohio, is a two-story frame house surrounded by look-alikes. Its small front porch is littered with the discards of former tenants: a banged-up bicycle wheel, a plastic patio chair, a garden hose. Most of its windows are boarded up. Behind the house, which is painted lettuce green, there’s a patch of weedy earth and a heap of rusting car parts. Seventy-two years ago, the novelist Toni Morrison was born here, in this small industrial town twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, which most citydwellers would consider “out there.” The air is redolent of nearby Lake Erie and new-mown grass.

From Morrison’s birthplace it’s a couple of miles to Broadway, where there’s a pizzeria, a bar with sagging seats, and a brown building that sells dingy and dilapidated secondhand furniture. This is the building Morrison imagined when she described the house of the doomed Breedlove family in her first novel, “The Bluest Eye”: “There is an abandoned store on the southeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street in Lorain, Ohio,” she wrote. “It does not recede into its background of leaden sky, nor harmonize with the gray frame houses and black telephone poles around it. Rather, it foists itself on the eye of the passerby in a manner that is both irritating and melancholy. Visitors who drive to this tiny town wonder why it has not been torn down, while pedestrians, who are residents of the neighborhood, simply look away when they pass it.”

Love and disaster and all the other forms of human incident accumulate in Morrison’s fictional houses. In the boarding house where the heroine of Morrison’s second novel, “Sula,” lives, “there were rooms that had three doors, others that opened on the porch only and were inaccessible from any other part of the house; others that you could get to only by going through somebody’s bedroom.” This is the gothic, dreamlike structure in whose front yard Sula’s mother burns to death, “gesturing and bobbing like a sprung jack-in-the-box,” while Sula stands by watching, “not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested.”

Morrison’s houses don’t just shelter human dramas; they have dramas of their own. “124 was spiteful,” she writes in the opening lines of “Beloved” (1987). “Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way.” Living and dead ghosts ramble through No. 124, chained to a history that claims its inhabitants. At the center of Morrison’s new novel, “Love,” is a deserted seaside hotel—a resort where, in happier times, blacks danced and socialized and swam without any white people complaining that they would contaminate the water—built by Bill Cosey, a legendary black entrepreneur, and haunted by his memory.

Morrison spends about half her time in a converted boathouse that overlooks the Hudson in Rockland County. The boathouse is a long, narrow, blue structure with white trim and large windows. A decade ago, when Morrison was in Princeton, where she teaches, it burned to the ground. Because it was a very cold winter, the water the firefighters used froze several important artifacts, including Morrison’s manuscripts. “But what they can’t save are little things that mean a lot, like your children’s report cards,” she told me, her eyes filling with tears. She shook her head and said, “Let’s not go there.”

We were in the third-floor parlor, furnished with overstuffed chairs covered in crisp gray linen, where we talked over the course of two days last summer. Sun streamed through the windows and a beautiful blue-toned abstract painting by the younger of her two sons, Slade, hung on the wall. As we chatted, Morrison wasn’t in the least distracted by the telephone ringing or the activities of her housekeeper or her secretary. She is known for her powers of concentration. When she is not writing or teaching, she likes to watch “Law & Order” and “Waking the Dead”—crime shows that offer what she described as “mild engagement with a satisfying structure of redemption.” She reads and rereads novels by Ruth Rendell and Martha Grimes.

Morrison had on a white shirt over a black leotard, black trousers, and a pair of high-heeled alligator sandals. Her long silver dreadlocks cascaded down her back and were gathered at the end by a silver clip. When she was mock-amazed by an insight, she flushed. Her light-brown eyes, with their perpetually listening or amused expression, are the eyes of a watcher—and of someone who is used to being watched. But if she is asked a question she doesn’t appreciate, a veil descends over her eyes, discontinuing the conversation. (When I tried to elicit her opinion about the novels of one of her contemporaries, she said, “I hear the movie is fab,” and turned away.) Morrison’s conversation, like her fiction, is conducted in high style. She underlines important points by making showy arabesques with her fingers in the air, and when she is amused she lets out a cry that’s followed by a fusillade of laughter.

“You know, my sister Lois was just here taking care of me,” she said. “I had a cataract removed in one eye. Suddenly, the world was so bright. And I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered, Who is that woman? When did she get to be that age? My doctor said, ‘You have been looking at yourself through the lens that they shoot Elizabeth Taylor through.’ I couldn’t stop wondering how I got to be this age.”

When “The Bluest Eye” was published, in 1970, Morrison was unknown and thirty-nine years old. The initial print run was modest: two thousand copies in hardcover. Now a first edition can fetch upward of six thousand dollars. In 2000, when “The Bluest Eye” became a selection for Oprah’s Book Club, Plume sold more than eight hundred thousand paperback copies. By then, Toni Morrison had become Toni Morrison—the first African-American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993. Following “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison published seven more novels: “Sula” (1973), “Song of Solomon” (1977), “Tar Baby” (1981), “Beloved” (1987), “Jazz” (1992), “Paradise” (1998), and now “Love.” Morrison also wrote a critical study, “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992), which, like all her novels since “Song of Solomon,” became a best-seller. She has edited several anthologies—about O.J., about the Clarence Thomas hearings—as well as collections of the writings of Huey P. Newton and James Baldwin. With her son Slade, she has co-authored a number of books for children. She wrote the book for a musical, “New Orleans” (1983); a play, “Dreaming Emmett” (1986), which reimagined the life and death of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black boy who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955; a song cycle with the composer André Previn; and, most recently, an opera based on the life of Margaret Garner, the slave whose story inspired “Beloved.” She was an editor at Random House for nineteen years—she still reads the Times with pencil in hand, copy-editing as she goes—and has been the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton since 1989.

“I know it seems like a lot,” Morrison said. “But I really only do one thing. I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.” What Morrison has managed to do with that job—and the criticism, pro and con, she has received for doing it—has made her one of the most widely written-about American authors of the past fifty years. (The latest study of her work, she told me, is a comparison of the vernacular in her novels and William Faulkner’s. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “Believe it,” she said, emphatically.) Morrison—required reading in high schools across the country—is almost always treated as a spokeswoman for her gender and her race. In a review of “Paradise,” Patricia Storace wrote, “Toni Morrison is relighting the angles from which we view American history, changing the very color of its shadows, showing whites what they look like in black mirrors. To read her work is to witness something unprecedented, an invitation to a literature to become what it has claimed to be, a truly American literature.” It’s a claim that her detractors would also make, to opposite effect.

“I’m already discredited, I’m already politicized, before I get out of the gate,” Morrison said. “I can accept the labels”—the adjectives like “black” and “female” that are often attached to her work—“because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.”

Morrison also owns a home in Princeton, where nine years ago she founded the Princeton Atelier, a program that invites writers and performing artists to workshop student plays, stories, and music. (Last year, she brought in the poet Paul Muldoon as a co-director.) “I don’t write when I’m teaching,” she said. “Teaching is about taking things apart; writing is about putting things together.” She and her sons own an apartment building farther up the Hudson, which houses artists, and another building across the street from it, which her elder son Ford, an architect, is helping her remodel into a study and performance center. “My sister Lois said that the reason I buy all these houses is because we had to move so often as children,” Morrison said, laughing.

Morrison’s family—the Woffords—lived in at least six different apartments over the course of her childhood. One of them was set on fire by the landlord when the Woffords couldn’t pay the rent—four dollars a month. In those days, Toni, the second of four children (she had two brothers, now dead), was called Chloe Ardelia. Her parents, George and Ramah, like the Breedloves, were originally from the South (Ramah was born in Greenville, Alabama; George in Cartersville, Georgia). Like many transplanted Southerners, George worked at U.S. Steel, which was particularly active during the Second World War and attracted not only American blacks but also displaced Europeans: Poles, Greeks, and Italians.

Morrison describes her father as a perfectionist, someone who was proud of his work. “I remember my daddy taking me aside—this was when he worked as a welder—and telling me that he welded a perfect seam that day, and that after welding the perfect seam he put his initials on it,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy, no one will ever see that.’ Sheets and sheets of siding would go over that, you know? And he said, ‘Yes, but I’ll know it’s there.’ ” George also worked odd jobs, washing cars and the like, after hours at U.S. Steel. Morrison remembers that he always had at least two other jobs.

Ramah, a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was a homemaker. From the first, it was clear that Morrison was not made to follow in her footsteps. “I remember going outside to hang some clothes on the line,” she said. “And I held the pants up, I hooked them by the inside pockets. And whatever else I was doing, it was completely wrong. Then my mother or my grandmother came out and they just started to laugh, because I didn’t know how to hang up clothes.” Her parents seemed to have different expectations for her, anyway. “I developed a kind of individualism—apart from the family—that was very much involved in my own daydreaming, my own creativity, and my own reading. But primarily—and this has been true all my life—not really minding what other people said, just not minding.”

The Woffords told their children stories and sang songs. After dinner, their grandfather would sometimes take out his violin and everyone would dance. And no matter how many times Ramah told the ghost stories she had learned from her mother and her Auntie Bell in Alabama, Chloe always wanted to hear more. She used to say, “Mama, please tell the story about this or that,” her mother recalled in a 1982 interview with the Lorain Journal. “Finally I’d get tired of telling the stories over and over again. So I made up a new story.” Ramah’s stories sparked Morrison’s imagination. She fell in love with spoken language.

Morrison always lived, she said, “below or next to white people,” and the schools were integrated—stratification in Lorain was more economic than racial—but in the Wofford house there was an intense suspicion of white people. In a 1976 essay, Morrison recalled watching her father attack a white man he’d discovered lurking in their apartment building. “My father, distrusting every word and every gesture of every white man on earth, assumed that the white man who crept up the stairs one afternoon had come to molest his daughters and threw him down the stairs and then our tricycle after him. (I think my father was wrong, but considering what I have seen since, it may have been very healthy for me to have witnessed that as my first black-white encounter.)” I asked her about the story. “The man was a threat to us, we thought,” Morrison replied. “He scared us. I’m sure that man was drunk, you know, but the important thing was the notion that my father was a protector, and particularly against the white man. Seeing that physical confrontation with a white man and knowing that my father could win thrilled, excited, and pleased me. It made me know that it was possible to win.”

Morrison’s family was spread along a color spectrum. “My great-grandmother was very black, and because we were light-skinned blacks, she thought that we had been ‘tampered with,’ ” she said. “She found lighter-skinned blacks to be impure—which was the opposite of what the world was saying about skin color and the hierarchy of skin color. My father, who was light-skinned, also preferred darker-skinned blacks.” Morrison, who didn’t absorb her father’s racism, continues to grapple with these ideas and argue against their implications. In a television interview some years ago, she said that in art “there should be everything from Hasidic Jews to Walter Lippmann. Or, as I was telling a friend, there should be everything from reggae hair to Ralph Bunche. There should be an effort to strengthen the differences and keep them, so long as no one is punished for them.” Morrison addressed her great-grandmother’s notion of racial purity in “Paradise,” where it is the oppressive basis for a Utopian community formed by a group of dark blacks from the South.

As a child, Morrison read virtually everything, from drawing-room comedies to Theodore Dreiser, from Jane Austen to Richard Wright. She was compiling, in her head, a reading list to mine for inspiration. At Hawthorne Junior High School, she read “Huckleberry Finn” for the second time. “Fear and alarm are what I remember most about my first encounter” with it, she wrote several years ago. “My second reading of it, under the supervision of an English teacher in junior high school, was no less uncomfortable—rather more. It provoked a feeling I can only describe now as muffled rage, as though appreciation of the work required my complicity in and sanction of something shaming. Yet the satisfactions were great: riveting episodes of flight, of cunning; the convincing commentary on adult behavior, watchful and insouciant; the authority of a child’s voice in language cut for its renegade tongue and sharp intelligence. Nevertheless, for the second time, curling through the pleasure, clouding the narrative reward, was my original alarm, coupled now with a profoundly distasteful complicity.”

When she was twelve years old, Morrison converted to Catholicism, taking Anthony as her baptismal name, after St. Anthony. Her friends shortened it to Toni. In junior high, one of her teachers sent a note home to her mother: “You and your husband would be remiss in your duties if you do not see to it that this child goes to college.” Shortly before graduating from Lorain High School—where she was on the debating team, on the yearbook staff, and in the drama club (“I wanted to be a dancer, like Maria Tallchief”)—Morrison told her parents that she’d like to go to college. “I want to be surrounded by black intellectuals,” she said, and chose Howard University, in Washington, D.C. In support of her decision, George Wofford took a second union job, which was against the rules of U.S. Steel. In the Lorain Journal article, Ramah Wofford remembered that his supervisors found out and called him on it. “ ‘Well, you folks got me,’ ” Ramah recalled George’s telling them. “ ‘I am doing another job, but I’m doing it to send my daughter to college. I’m determined to send her and if I lose my job here, I’ll get another job and do the same.’ It was so quiet after George was done talking, you could have heard a pin drop. . . . And they let him stay and let him do both jobs.” To give her daughter pocket money, Ramah Wofford worked in the rest room of an amusement park, handing out towels. She sent the tips to her daughter with care packages of canned tuna, crackers, and sardines.

Morrison loved her classes at Howard, but she found the social climate stifling. In Washington in the late forties, the buses were still segregated and the black high schools were divided by skin tone, as in the Deep South. The system was replicated at Howard. “On campus itself, the students were very much involved in that ranking, and your skin gave you access to certain things,” Morrison said. “There was something called ‘the paper-bag test’—darker than the paper bag put you in one category, similar to the bag put you in another, and lighter was yet another and the most privileged category. I thought them to be idiotic preferences.” She was drawn to the drama department, which she felt was more interested in talent than in skin color, and toured the South with the Howard University Players. The itineraries were planned very carefully, but once in a while, because of inclement weather or a flat tire, the troupe would arrive in a town too late to check in to the “colored” motel. Then one of the professors would open the Yellow Pages and call the minister of the local Zion or Baptist church, and the players would be put up by members of the congregation. “There was something not just endearing but welcoming and restorative in the lives of those people,” she said. “I think the exchange between Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison is along those lines: Ralph Ellison said something nice about living in the South, and Irving Howe said, ‘Why would you want to live in such an evil place?’ Because all he was thinking about was rednecks. And Ralph Ellison said, ‘Black people live there.’ ”

After graduating from Howard, in 1953, she went on to Cornell, where she earned a master’s degree in American literature, writing a thesis titled “Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’s Treatment of the Alienated.” What she saw in their work—“an effort to discover what pattern of existence is most conducive to honesty and self-knowledge, the prime requisites for living a significant life”—she emulated in her own life. She went back to Howard to teach, and Stokely Carmichael was one of her students. Around this time, she met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican-born architect. She joined a writing group, where the one rule was that you had to bring something to read every week. Among the writers in that group were the playwright and director Owen Dodson and his companion the painter Charles Sebree. At first, Morrison said, she brought in “all that old junk from high school.” Then she began writing a story about a little black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wanted blue eyes.

“I wanted to take the name of Peola”—the “tragic mulatto” character from the 1934 movie “Imitation of Life”—“and play with it, turn it around,” Morrison said. When she was young, she said, “another little black girl and I were discussing whether there was a real God or not. I said there was, and she said there wasn’t and she had proof: she had prayed for, and not been given, blue eyes. I just remember listening to her and imagining her with blue eyes, and it was a grotesque thing. She had these high cheekbones and these great big slanted dark eyes, and all I remember thinking was that if she had blue eyes she would be horrible.”

When Morrison read the story to the writing group, Sebree turned to her and said, “You are a writer.”

In 1964, Morrison returned to Lorain. Her marriage had fallen apart and she had to determine how she was going to take care of her family—her son Ford was three years old and Slade was on the way. An ad in The New York Review of Books listed a position with L. W. Singer, a textbook division of Random House that was based in Syracuse. Morrison applied for and got the job. She took her babies (Slade was born in 1965) and moved East. She was thirty-four years old. In Syracuse, she didn’t care to socialize; instead, she returned to the story about the girl who wanted blue eyes and began to expand it. She wrote when she could—usually after the children went to sleep. And since she was the sole support for her children, she couldn’t sacrifice the real world for her art. “I stole time to write,” she said. “Writing was my other job—I always kept it over there, away from my ‘real’ work as an editor or teacher.” It took her five years to complete the book, because she enjoyed the process so much.

Holt, Rinehart & Winston published “The Bluest Eye” in 1970, with a picture of Morrison lying on her side against a white backdrop, her hair cut in an Afro. Taken at the moment when fashion met the counterculture—when Black was coöpted as Beautiful and soul-food recipes ran in fashion magazines next to images of Black Panther wives tying their heads up in bright fabric—the picture was the visual equivalent of the book: black, female, individualistic.

Set in Lorain at the end of the Depression, “The Bluest Eye” remains the most autobiographical of Morrison’s novels. In it, she focusses on the lives of little black girls—perhaps the least likely, least commercially viable story one could tell at the time. Morrison positioned the white world at the periphery; black life was at the center, and black females were at the center of that. Morrison wasn’t sentimental about the black community. Cholly Breedlove rapes his daughter Pecola because it is one of the few forms of power he has (“How dare she love him?” he thinks. “Hadn’t she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make her smile?”); a group of children scapegoat her as her misfortune worsens (“All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness”); and three whores are her only source of tenderness (“Pecola loved them, visited them, and ran their errands. They, in turn, did not despise her”).

The writing, on the other hand, was lush, sensible-minded, and often hilarious. If Morrison had a distinctive style, it was in her rhythms: the leisurely pace of her storytelling. Clearly her writing had grown out of an oral tradition. Rather than confirm the reader’s sense of alienation by employing distancing techniques, Morrison coaxed the reader into believing the tale. She rooted her characters’ lives in something real—certainly in the minds of black readers.

This came at a time when the prevailing sensibility in most American novels was urban and male, an outgrowth of the political and personal concerns that Ellison and Bellow, Baldwin and Roth had developed living in predominantly black or Jewish neighborhoods. Morrison was different. She grew up in an integrated town in the heart of America. “The point was to really open a book that’s about black people, or by a black person, me or anybody,” she said. “In the sixties, most of the literature was understood by the critics as something sociological, a kind of revelation of the lives of these people. So there was a little apprehension, you know—Is it going to make me feel bad, is it going to make me feel good? I said, I’m going to make it as readable as I can, but I’m not going to pull any punches. I don’t have an agenda here.”

One of the few critics to embrace Morrison’s work was John Leonard, who wrote in the Times, “Miss Morrison exposes the negative of the Dick-and-Jane-and-Mother-and-Father-and-Dog-and-Cat photograph that appears in our reading primers and she does it with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry. . . . ‘The Bluest Eye’ is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music.”

The poet Sonia Sanchez, who taught “The Bluest Eye” in her classroom at Temple University, saw the book as an indictment of American culture. For Pecola, the descendant of slaves, to want the master’s blue eyes represents the “second generation of damage in America,” Sanchez told me. “For this woman, Toni Morrison, to write this, to show this to us—it was the possible death of a people right there, the death of a younger generation that had been so abused that there was really no hope. What Toni has done with her literature is that she has made us look up and see ourselves. She has authenticated us, and she has also said to America, in a sense, ‘Do you know what you did? But, in spite of what you did, here we is. We exist. Look at us.’ ”

“What was driving me to write was the silence—so many stories untold and unexamined. There was a wide vacuum in the literature,” Morrison said. “I was inspired by the silence and absences in the literature.” The story she told was a distinctly American one: complicated, crowded, eventful, told from the perspective of innocents. “I think of the voice of the novel as a kind of Greek chorus, one that comments on the action,” she once said. She was a social realist, like Dreiser, with the lyricism and storytelling genius of someone like Isak Dinesen.

In 1968, Morrison was transferred to New York to work in Random House’s scholastic division. She moved to Queens. (“I never lived in Manhattan,” she said. “I always wanted a garden.”) A couple of years later, Robert Bernstein, who was then the president of Random House, came across “The Bluest Eye” in a bookstore. “Is this the same woman who works in the scholastic division?” he asked Jason Epstein, then the editorial director of Random House. Morrison had been wanting to move into trade publishing, and went to see Robert Gottlieb, the editor-in-chief of Knopf, an imprint of Random House. Gottlieb recalled the interview: “I said, ‘I like you too much to hire you, because in order to hire you I have to feel free to fire you. But I’d love to publish your books.’ ” He became her editor, and Morrison got a job under Epstein as a trade editor at Random House.

At Random House, Morrison published Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis, among others. She was responsible for “The Myth of Lesbianism,” one of the first studies of the subject from a major publisher, and “Giant Talk,” Quincy Troupe and Rainer Schulte’s anthology of Third World writing. Morrison gave me a copy of one of the first books she worked on, “Contemporary African Literature,” published in 1972, a groundbreaking collection that included work by Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Léopold-Sédar Senghor, and Athol Fugard. (For some of them, it was their first publication in America.) The book is lavishly illustrated, with many color photographs of African tribesmen and African landscapes. Showing me the table of contents, Morrison said, “What was I thinking? I thought if it was beautiful, people would buy it.” (Not many did.)

The women she worked with, in particular, became some of her closest friends. “Single women with children,” she said, when I asked her about that era. “If you had to finish writing something, they’d take your kids, or you’d sit with theirs. This was a network of women. They lived in Queens, in Harlem and Brooklyn, and you could rely on one another. If I made a little extra money on something—writing freelance—I’d send a check to Toni Cade with a note that said, ‘You have won the so-and-so grant,’ and so on. I remember Toni Cade coming to my house with groceries and cooking dinner. I hadn’t asked her.” The support was intellectual as well as practical. Sonia Sanchez told me, “I think we all looked up and saw that we were writing in different genres, but we were experiencing the same kinds of things, and saying similar kinds of things.” Their books formed a critical core that people began to see as the rebirth of black women’s fiction.

Before the late sixties, there was no real Black Studies curriculum in the academy—let alone a post-colonial-studies program or a feminist one. As an editor and author, Morrison, backed by the institutional power of Random House, provided the material for those discussions to begin. The advent of Black Studies undoubtedly helped Morrison, too: “It was the academic community that gave ‘The Bluest Eye’ its life,” she said. “People assigned it in class. Students bought the paperback.”

In order to get attention for her authors—publishers still thought that the ideal book buyer was a thirty-year-old Long Island woman, and reviewers would lump together books by Ishmael Reed and Angela Davis, along with children’s books, in a single article—Morrison decided to concentrate on one African-American text each season. She worked diligently. “I wanted to give back something,” she said. “I wasn’t marching. I didn’t go to anything. I didn’t join anything. But I could make sure there was a published record of those who did march and did put themselves on the line. And I didn’t want to fail my grandmother. I didn’t want to hear her say, ‘You went to college and this is all you thought up?’ ” She laughed. “Compared to what my family had gone through and what I felt was my responsibility, the corporation’s interest was way down on the list. I was not going to do anything that I thought was nutty or disrupt anything. I thought it was beneficial generally, just like I thought that the books were going to make them a lot of money!”

Morrison’s view of contemporary black literature transcended the limitations of the “down with honky” school of black nationalism popularized by writers like Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson. She preferred to publish writers who had something to say about black American life that reflected its rich experience. In 1974, she put together “The Black Book,” a compendium of photographs, drawings, songs, letters, and other documents that charts black American history from slavery through Reconstruction to modern times. The book exercised a great influence over the way black anthropology was viewed.

At first, Random House resisted the idea of “The Black Book.” “It just looked to them like a disaster,” Morrison said. “Not so much in the way it was being put together, but because they didn’t know how to sell it. ‘Who is going to buy something called “The Black Book”?’ I had my mother on the cover—what were they talking about?” She wrote about the project in the February 2, 1974, issue of Black World: “So what was Black life like before it went on TV? . . . I spent the last 18 months trying to do a book that would show some of that. A genuine Black history book—one that simply recollected Black Life as lived. It has no ‘order,’ no chapters, no major themes. But it does have coherence and sinew. . . . I don’t know if it’s beautiful or not (it is elegant, however), but it is intelligent, it is profound, it is alive, it is visual, it is creative, it is complex, and it is ours.”

Despite all misgivings, the book garnered extraordinary reviews. Writing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Alvin Beam said, “Editors, like novelists, have brain children—books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes.”

Morrison got a letter from a man in prison who had read the book. “Somebody had given him a copy, and he wrote to say thank you,” Morrison told me. “And then he said, ‘I need two more copies, because I need one to pass out to other people, and I need another one to throw up against the wall. And I need the one I have to hold close.’ So there were readers on, quote, ‘both sides of the street,’ which is the way they put it.” I recall buying “The Black Book” as a teen-ager and feeling as if I had been given a road map of the Brooklyn community where I lived at the time.

“Toni became not a black editor but the black editor,” a friend of hers told me. In 1975, D. Keith Mano, the “Book Watch” columnist for Esquire, devoted an entire article to Gayl Jones and her new book, “Corregidora,” but the piece was as much about Morrison as about Jones. “Toni Morrison is Gayl’s Svengali editor at Random House,” Mano wrote. “Toni is dynamic, witty, even boisterous in a good-humored way. And sharp. Very sharp. She often uses the pronoun I. She’ll say, ‘I published “Corregidora.” ’ . . . I suspect the title page of ‘Corregidora’ should read, ‘by Gayl Jones, as told to Toni Morrison.’ ” If Morrison had been a man or white, it seems unlikely that Mano would have noticed her championing of an author. Jones was uncommunicative and Morrison had books to sell. If a writer needed fussing, she fussed, and if not, not.

Morrison was a canny and tireless editor. “You can’t be a slouch in Toni’s presence,” the scholar Eugene Redmond told me. “Her favorite word is ‘wakeful.’ ” (She still gets up at 4 a.m. to work.) When she published the books of Henry Dumas—a little-known novelist and poet whose work was left fragmentary when he was murdered by a transit officer in the New York City subway in 1968, in a case of mistaken identity—she sent copies to Bill Cosby, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and all the major movie executives and television hosts. In a letter inviting people to read at a tribute to Dumas, she wrote, “He was brilliant. He was magnetic and he was an incredible artist. . . . We are determined to bring to the large community of Black artists and Black people in general this man’s work.”

The racial climate in the mid-seventies made it especially hard for Morrison to promote certain books—books that might be taken as too radical. Morrison remembered that the marketing department balked when she wanted to have a publication party in a club on 125th Street. No one from Random House came—it was rumored that someone in management had cautioned the staff about the danger—except the publicist and her assistant, who said it was the best party they’d ever been to. A couple of news crews showed up, however, and the party was on the evening news, giving the book hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of free publicity, by Morrison’s reckoning. Similarly, Morrison said, when she brought out Muhammad Ali’s autobiography, “The Greatest,” in 1976, all the department stores that were approached about hosting the book signing backed out, fearing riots and looting. When E. J. Korvette’s, the now defunct department store, agreed to host the signing, Morrison brought in members of the Nation of Islam, who came with their families, as peacekeepers. She also installed a white friend, a woman who worked in the sales department, to guard Ali. “You stand right next to Ali,” she said. “And when people come up and punch him—‘Hey, Champ!’—you stop them. Because he’s not going to say it ever, that it hurts when you get a thousand little taps. And when you think Ali is tired give him a baby to play with. He likes babies.” Two thousand people came to E. J. Korvette’s, on a rainy night, and, with the Brothers of the Nation of Islam milling around in the crowd, everything was serene and orderly.

Throughout the seventies, Morrison worked as a teacher at Yale, sunyPurchase, Bard, Rutgers, and suny Albany. “Random paid about ten cents, so Toni took on teaching jobs,” Jason Epstein recalled. In a 1998 interview, she said, “When I wanted a raise, in my employment world, they would give me a little woman’s raise and I would say, ‘No. This is really low.’ And they would say, ‘But,’ and I would say, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re the head of the household. You know what you want. That’s what I want. I want that. I am on serious business now. This is not girl playing. This is not wife playing. This is serious business. I am the head of a household, and I must work to pay for my children.’ ”

“The Bluest Eye” had made the literary establishment take notice. In “Sula,” which was published three years later, Morrison’s little colored girls grew up and occupied a more completely rendered world. “The Bluest Eye” was divided by seasons; “Sula” was divided into years, stretching from 1919 to 1965. Again, the story is set in a small Ohio town, in a neighborhood called the Bottom. (“A joke. A nigger joke. That’s the way it got started.”) Sula Mae Peace, Morrison’s heroine, is the progeny of an eccentric household run by formidable women. She leaves the Bottom in order to reinvent herself. Morrison does not relay what Sula does when she ventures into the world, but her return is catastrophic. (The first sign of impending disaster is a plague of robins.) Her return also brings about a confrontation with her grandmother Eva—a parable of the New Negro Woman confronting the Old World.

At Eva’s house there were four dead robins on the walk. Sula stopped and with her toe pushed them into the bordering grass. . . . When Sula opened the door [Eva] raised her eyes and said, “I might have knowed them birds meant something. Where’s your coat?”  Sula threw herself on Eva’s bed. “The rest of my stuff will be on later.”  “I should hope so. Them little old furry tails ain’t going to do you no more good than they did the fox that was wearing them.”  “Don’t you say hello to nobody when you ain’t seen them for ten years?”  “If folks let somebody know where they is and when they coming, then other folks can get ready for them. If they don’t—if they just pop in all sudden like—then they got to take whatever mood they find.”  “How you been doing, Big Mamma?”  “Gettin’ by. Sweet of you to ask. You was quick enough when you wanted something. When you needed a little change or . . .”  “Don’t talk to me about how much you gave me, Big Mamma, and how much I owe you or none of that.”  “Oh? I ain’t supposed to mention it?”  “OK. Mention it.” Sula shrugged and turned over on her stomach, her buttocks toward Eva.  “You ain’t been in this house ten seconds and already you starting something.”  “Takes two, Big Mamma.”  “Well, don’t let your mouth start nothing that your ass can’t stand. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.”  “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” . . .  “Pus mouth! God’s going to strike you!”  “Which God? The one watched you burn Plum [Eva’s son]?”  “Don’t talk to me about no burning. You watched your own mamma. You crazy roach! You the one should have been burnt!”  “But I ain’t. Got that? I ain’t. Any more fires in this house, I’m lighting them!”

Where I come from, this dialogue doesn’t sound so much fictional as documentary; it could be about the women—sisters and cousins—who passed Morrison’s books on to me when I was growing up, women who didn’t know they were “marginal.”

Morrison’s interest was in spoken language, heightened and dramatized. (Bob Gottlieb told me that he was always inserting commas into Morrison’s sentences and she was always taking them out.) In describing her style, Morrison said, “I thought, Well, I’m going to drop ‘g’s where the black people dropped ‘g’s, and the white people on the same street in the same part of the state don’t. But there was a distinction in the language and it wasn’t in the spelling. It was someplace else.” Morrison went on, “Maybe it’s because African languages are so tonal, so that with the little shifts in pronunciation, the little shifts in placement, something else happens.

“I was just determined to take the language that for me was so powerfully metaphoric, economical, lunatic, and intelligent at the same time—just these short sentences or these developments of ideas that was the language of my family and neighbors and so on—and not make it exotic or comic or slumming.” Zora Neale Hurston, the nineteen-thirties novelist and folklorist, was an example, Morrison said, of a black writer who treated dialogue as a transcript to show white people how it really was in the Florida swamps. Morrison’s aim was different. “Street language is lyrical, plus it has this blend of the standard English and the sermonic, as well as the colloquial, you know—that is what I wanted to polish and show, and make it a literary vehicle,” Morrison said. (She has succeeded in this to the point of irritating some readers. James Wood, in a review of “Paradise” titled “The Color Purple,” wrote, “Morrison is so besotted with making poetry, with the lyrical dyeing of every moment, that she cannot grant characters their own words. . . . She seems to view her people as mere spokes of style, who exist to keep her lyricism in motion.”)

Situating herself inside the black world, Morrison undermined the myth of black cohesiveness. With whiteness offstage, or certainly right of center, she showed black people fighting with each other—murdering, raping, breaking up marriages, burning down houses. She also showed nurturing fathers who abide and the matriarchs who love them. Morrison revelled in the complications. “I didn’t want it to be a teaching tool for white people. I wanted it to be true—not from outside the culture, as a writer looking back at it,” she said. “I wanted it to come from inside the culture, and speak to people inside the culture. It was about a refusal to pander or distort or gain political points. I wanted to reveal and raise questions.” She is still raising questions: Bill Cosey, the deceased patriarch in “Love,” is both beneficent and evil, a guardian and a predator.

Doing so, Morrison broke ranks—particularly with black male writers such as Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka, who were taking an increasingly militant stance against racism. Their attitude descended from the realistic portraits of black resistance in the novels of Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison—who, Morrison believed, were writing for a white audience. “The title of Ralph Ellison’s book was ‘Invisible Man,’ ” Morrison said. “And the question for me was ‘Invisible to whom?’ Not to me.” Morrison refused to present an ideal or speak in unison, even if it meant she was perceived as a traitor. “There is that sense of firm loyalty for black people,” she said. “The question is always, Is this going to be useful for the race?”

“I really liked that book,” one black woman told Morrison after reading “The Bluest Eye.” “But I was frustrated and angry, because I didn’t want you to expose us in our lives.” Morrison replied, “Well, how can I reach you if I don’t expose it to the world?” Others, myself included, accused her of perpetuating rather than dismantling the myth of the indomitable black woman, long-suffering and oversexed. In a book about real and fictional black women, I wrote that the obsessive “man love” of Hannah, Sula’s mother, was a stereotype. (At the time, I didn’t see that Morrison’s decision to burn her to death was a moral condemnation, not a melodrama.) Morrison is used to being challenged and isn’t afraid to confront her critics. “I didn’t like what you wrote,” she said to me a few years ago. I was caught off guard, but she steered the conversation to another topic.

The reviews of “Sula”—like those of “The Bluest Eye”—were mixed. Writing in The Nation, the critic Jerry H. Bryant came closest to identifying the confusion: “Most of us have been conditioned to expect something else in black characters, especially black female characters—guiltless victims of brutal white men, yearning for a respectable life of middle-class security; whores driven to their profession by impossible conditions; housekeepers exhausted by their work for lazy white women. We do not expect to see a fierceness bordering on the demonic.”

After “Sula,” Bob Gottlieb advised Morrison to move on. “ ‘O.K.,’ I told her, ‘that’s perfect. As perfect as a sonnet,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘You’ve done that, you don’t have to do it again. Now you’re free to open up more.’ ” She followed his advice with “Song of Solomon,” a sprawling epic about a prosperous but tortured black family that drew comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” As she turned her attention to history—taking on, in years to come, slavery, Reconstruction, the great migration, the Harlem Renaissance—writing began to occupy more of her time. “I went to Bob Bernstein twice,” she told me. “Once, when I saw a house I wanted to buy. I didn’t want to go through the whole black-woman thing—no man, no credit—and so I asked the company to get the mortgage for me. The second time was after ‘Tar Baby’ was published. I knew it was unorthodox, but I wanted to come into the office less. I was doing what the editors did—line editing—at home. It was such a waste of time to come in and drink coffee and gossip. So I started working one day a week. I’d get eighty letters done, stay until eight o’clock, but get my work done.”

Eventually, she resigned. “The job at Random House was a life raft for her,” Gottlieb recalled. “She had two sons and she was worried about losing that life preserver. After she published ‘Tar Baby,’ I said, ‘Toni, you can depend on your writing to support you.’ ”

Morrison remembered Gottlieb’s telling her, “O.K. You can write ‘writer’ on your tax returns.”

Morrison provokes complicated responses from her literary progeny. She is routinely placed on a pedestal and just as frequently knocked off it. Black writers alternately praise her and castigate her for not being everything at once. With the deaths of Wright and Baldwin, Morrison became both mother and father to black writers of my generation—a delicate situation. (It’s similar to the phenomenon James Baldwin noted in his essay on Richard Wright: “His work was an immense liberation and revelation for me. He became my ally and my witness, and alas! my father.”) She spoke through her characters when we wanted her to speak to us. With every book, she loomed larger, and gave us more opportunities to define ourselves against her. In 1978, “Song of Solomon” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, beating out Joan Didion’s “A Book of Common Prayer” and John Cheever’s “Falconer.” It was chosen as a main selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club—the first by a black since Wright’s “Native Son.” When “Tar Baby” came out, three years later, Morrison was on the cover of Newsweek, one of the first black women to appear on the cover of a national magazine since Zora Neale Hurston in 1943.

“Beloved,” too, was an instant sensation in 1987. It told the story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who murders her child rather than allow it to be captured. When “Beloved” failed to be nominated for a National Book Award (Pete Dexter’s “Paris Trout” won that year), forty-eight prominent black intellectuals and writers, including Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alice Walker, and Quincy Troupe, protested “against such oversight and harmful whimsy” in a statement that was printed in the Times Book Review. “Alive, we write this testament of thanks to you, dear Toni: alive, beloved and persevering, magical. . . . For all America, for all of American letters, you have advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as a people.” They contested the fact that Morrison had yet to be considered for a Pulitzer Prize. Later that year, “Beloved” did win a Pulitzer. Ralph Ellison, for one, disapproved of the special pleading. “Toni doesn’t need that kind of support, even though it was well intentioned,” he said.

“Beloved” ’s profile only got higher as time went by. The contrarian critic Stanley Crouch called it “protest pulp fiction” and complained that it idealized black behavior “to placate sentimental feminist ideology, and to make sure that the vision of black woman as the most scorned and rebuked of the victims doesn’t weaken.” He objected to its commerciality. “Were ‘Beloved’ adapted for television (which would suit the crass obviousness that wins out over Morrison’s literary gift at every significant turn) the trailer might go like this: ‘Meet Sethe, an ex-slave woman who harbors a deep and terrible secret that has brought terror into her home.’ ” (As it happened, it was adapted for film, with Oprah in the role of Sethe.)

Best-selling books, film adaptations, television talk-show appearances all increased Morrison’s celebrity and drew other famous people into her life. The actor Marlon Brando would phone to read her passages from her novels that he found particularly humorous. Oprah had her to dinner—on TV. By the time the film of “Beloved” was released, Morrison’s fame was inescapable. I recall walking along the West Side piers in Manhattan and hearing a Puerto Rican queen, defending one of her “children,” say to an opponent, “You want me to go ‘Beloved’ on your ass?”

Morrison’s critics reached their loudest pitch when she was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1993, a year that Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates had been favored to win. “I hope this prize inspires her to write better books,” Crouch said. Charles Johnson, a black novelist, called her writing “often offensive, harsh. Whites are portrayed badly. Men are. Black men are.” He said that she had been “the beneficiary of good will” and that her award was “a triumph of political correctness.” A piece in the Washington Post asked well-known American writers whom they would like to see receive the award. Erica Jong (whose choice, Doris Lessing, Jong described as “the wrong kind of African: white”) wrote, “I wish that Toni Morrison, a bedazzling writer and a great human being, had won her prize only for her excellence at stringing words together. But I am nevertheless delighted at her choice. . . . I suspect, however, that her prize was not motivated solely by artistic considerations. Why can’t art in itself be enough? Must we also use the artist as a token of progressivism?” The Nobel Committee said that Morrison “delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race.” To this, one critic retorted that she has “erected an insistent awareness of race (and gender and whatever else may be the ‘identity’-defining trait du jour) as the defining feature of the self.”

“I have never competed with other people,” Morrison told me. “It just never occurred to me. I have to sort of work it up to understand what people are talking about when they complain about what this person did or that person shouldn’t do. There were several contenders from the U.S. that year, and my wish was that they would’ve all gotten it, so that I could be left alone. I only compete with myself, with my standards. How to do better the next time, how to work well.”

Near the end of one of our interviews last summer, Morrison took me on a tour of the house. Descending the staircase off the sitting room, we had a look at her office, with its two big desks stacked with paper and correspondence. Behind one desk was her assistant, John Hoppenthaler, a poet. Windows surrounded the room. “I don’t really write that much in here,” Morrison said. “Don’t look at it—it’s a mess.” She decided that she would pick some tomatoes for lunch. She is what she calls a “pot” gardener—she enjoys gardening on a small scale. The room below the office is where Morrison does her writing. It has a slate floor, a big wooden table—“It’s from Norway, not that I got it in Norway, and I’m sure the man who imported it overcharged for it, but I love all the grooves and cracks in it”—and a fully equipped kitchen. Sometimes she cooks Thanksgiving dinner for her family there (both sons are married, with children), but it’s a room meant for work. French doors lead out to a stretch of grass and the river beyond. Morrison got to work picking tomatoes off a small vine trained against a stone wall. Two tomatoes that did not meet her standards she chucked into the river. Then she led me inside to get back to work.

A previous version of this article misstated the length of time between Morrison winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and the publication of “Tar Baby,” and misstated the number of black women who appeared on the covers of national magazines between 1943 and 1981.

Published in the print edition of the October 27, 2003, issue, with the headline “Ghosts in the House.”

[aclslibrarian]

A MAN OF IRON: THE TURBULENT LIFE AND IMPROBABLE PRESIDENCY OF GROVER CLEVELAND

unCovered review by Frank Tomasello, ACLS Mays Landing Branch

Grover Cleveland served as the 22nd and 24th President of the United States and today is generally remembered for that fact alone. Yet, sadly, there is much to the life and career of this remarkable man.

Grover Cleveland was born the fifth of nine children, in Caldwell, New Jersey, to a Congregationalist Minister. He dropped out of school at age 16 when his father died and he needed to support his family. Through family connections, he worked as a clerk in a law office and became a lawyer through a sort of apprenticeship. As a lawyer, Cleveland developed a reputation for unscrupulous honesty and 18-to 20-hour workdays. Most of his earnings went to support his family (including funding the college education denied him for one of his sisters). As one can imagine, this left no time for social life (not to mention the development of social skills), and Cleveland remained a bachelor until age 49 when he became the first President to be married in the White House. Difficult to believe is the fact that Cleveland’s political career, before being elected President, spanned a mere three years (Sheriff of Erie County, Mayor of Buffalo, and Governor of New York). The fact that Cleveland served non-consecutive terms is due to the inherent quirks of the Electoral College as he won the popular vote in three consecutive elections. The debate over the shortcomings of the Electoral College is still hotly debated today.

Elected as President based upon his reputation for honesty, he found that same quality and a strict constructionist policy towards the Constitution (along with the aforementioned lack of social skills), as a constant source of friction with Congress and his own political party. Fortunately, his marriage to Frances Folsom seemed to have mellowed him and his second term was marked by a somewhat more willingness to compromise. Despite the fact of severe economic depression and a growing trend away from conservatism and towards progressivism in his second term, Cleveland’s legacy has been consigned to the dustbin of history. He surely deserves better and there are lessons for the present in the life and Presidency of Grover Cleveland as well.

This book, by Troy Senik, was interesting and readable. My only criticism is the author’s overuse of obscure vocabulary as though his target audience is a Ph.D. committee on the English language and not the average historian.