#the hot pronged while: Aelin & Celaena (flame and Endovier’s pain) the words he should have said “what did you do to deserve it?

[acourtofquestions]

There was only darkness, and pain.

He roared against it, distantly aware of the bit in his mouth, the rawness of his throat.

Burned alive burned alive burned alive

The void showed him fire. A woman with golden-brown hair and matching skin screaming in agony toward the heavens.

It showed him a broken body on a bloody bed.

A head rolling across a marble floor.

You did this you did this you did this

It showed a woman with eyes of blue flame and hair of pure gold poised above him, dagger raised and angling to plunge into his heart.

He wished. He sometimes wished that she hadn't been stopped.

The scar on his face--from the nails she'd gouged into it when she first struck him ... It was that hateful wish he thought of when he looked in the mirror. The body on the bed and that cold room and that scream.

The collar on a tan throat and a smile that did not belong to a beloved face. The heart he'd offered and had been left to drop on the wooden planks of the river docks. An assassin who had sailed away and a queen who had returned. A row of fine men hanging from the castle gates.

All held within that slim scar. What he could not forgive or forget.

The void showed it to him, again and again.

It lashed his body with red-hot, pronged whips.

And showed him those things, over and over.

It showed him his mother. And his brother. And his father.

Everything he had left. What he'd failed. What he'd hated and what he'd become.

The lines between the last two had blurred.

And he had tried. He had tried these weeks, these months.

The void did not want to hear of that.

Black fire raced down his blood, his veins, trying to drown out those thoughts.

The burning rose left on a nightstand. The final embrace of his king. He had tried. Tried to hope, and yet--

Women little more than children hauling him off a horse. Poking and prodding at him.

Pain struck, low and deep in his spine, and he couldn't breathe around it, couldn't out-scream it- White light flared. A flutter. Far in the distance.

Not the gold or red or blue of flame. But white like sunlight, clear and clean.

A flicker through the dark, arcing like lightning riding through the night ...

And then the pain converged again.

His father's eyes--his father's raging eyes when he announced he was leaving to join the guard.

The fists. His mother's pleading. The anguish on her face the last time he'd seen her, as he'd ridden away from Anielle. The last time he’d seen his city, his home. His brother, small and cowering in their father's long shadow.

A brother he had traded for another. A brother he had left behind.

The darkness squeezed, crushing his bones to dust.

It would kill him.

It would kill him, this pain, this ... this endless, churning pit of nothing.

Perhaps it would be a mercy. He wasn't entirely certain his presence-- his presence beyond made any sort of difference. Not enough to warrant trying. Coming back at all.

The darkness liked that. Seemed to thrive on that.

Even as it tightened the vise around his bones.

Even as it boiled the blood in his veins and he bellowed and bellowed-- White light slammed into him. Blinding him.

Filling that void.

The darkness shrieked, surging back, then rising like a tidal wave around him--

Only to bounce off a shell of that white light, wrapped around him, a rock against which the blackness broke. A light in the abyss.

It was warm, and quiet, and kind. It did not balk at the dark. As if it had dwelled in such darkness for a long, long time--and understood how it worked. Chaol opened his eyes. Yrene's hand had slipped from his spine.