#tmft fanfic

[lordoftermites]

NO GRAVE CAN HOLD MY BODY DOWN

been a while, eh? sooo i've been off-and-on working on this for uhhh... way too long. it was SUPPOSED to be a small drabble prompt, but it turned into, well, this. i probably could've even kept going, but i needed it to be finished. ANYWHO, I always wanted to know what happened with Talathain after the events of Ironside, so I decided to flesh it out myself. I hope you enjoy it (and as always, if you don't, I don't care ┐(ﾟ ～ﾟ )┌).

also i need to apologize: i had meant to start a taglist for you guys and add the people that requested, but i can't find the people that wanted to be notified ;-;. hopefully this still finds its way to whoever wanted to read my shit.

Summary: a Roiben WHUMP prompt involving Talathain's return. Big emotional ouchies. Rating: M for unhinged fae violence, blood, etc.

How long has the battle been raging around him? How many times has he slaked his blade with the blood of the enemy, and how much of his own blood have they taken with them as they fall, one by one, onto the frozen ground at his feet? Roiben is sure the skirmish has lasted longer than a fortnight. His body, stiff and aching and already crusted over in tides of garnet certainly feels as though it hasn't stopped moving for that length of time.

In truth, their engagement with the Seelie Court of Thistles had begun only hours ago, when the latter had attempted to ambush them in the night, midway through their journey back from the Kinnelon ruins in some impolitic coup to claim Roiben's kingdom. Their overconfidence and underestimating of the Court of Termites—and, perhaps more grievously, its lord—would ultimately bring about their undoing.

The shadows are his domain. He rules in the damp dark, thrives in the dreadful twilight; the enemy believed they had the upper hand in the absence of light, and they had fatally miscalculated their opposition. 

They were immediately made aware of this error when they entered the camp to find the company waiting, blades polished and ready, glinting silver in their ink-black eyes. Roiben had stood at the head of the terrible company, while his two best knights flanked him on either side: Dulcamara, who had been sent word of the oncoming ambuscade from a crow enlisted as a spy for the court; Ellebere, who had gathered their army in such short order that Roiben had teased him for being much too earnest to arrange his lord a tryst with Death, and perhaps he had developed his own taste for rule should things go badly. 

Ellebere, in his dour fashion, had over-fretted Roiben’s jest. He swore his oaths remained steadfast until his face very nearly matched the deep red of his hair. Roiben had to halt the entire procession to explain humor was meant to pacify unease, and advised the knight ought to learn some for himself. Ellebere had spent the duration of their journey in embarrassed silence. When the Court of Thistles arrived, however, Roiben caught sight of the feral smile that flickered across the other man’s face.

His court had long hungered for violence. Too long, perhaps, they had been denied and starved. But tonight, they had been prepared a fortuitous banquet, and they were at last permitted to feast. They would ravage and gorge, until naught was left but the indistinct memory of a court too foolhardy to value the gruesome truth from which so many stories are birthed.

With one nod from their king they had descended upon the enemy court. Like rabid animals they swarmed them, steel and teeth and claws. They gnashed, gouged, sliced, and tore their way through the enemy host—their awful, howling laughter carrying over the clash of swords and commingling with the terrified screams of their prey. Some scrambled back in retreat, fell and clambered over one another as they sought haven from the wave of savagery they’d been so ill-prepared for. They were cut down without mercy.

It is here among the fray that Roiben allows himself to be swept up in it. He permits his hands to embrace the familiarity of driving a blade into an advancing foe, submits to the terrible rush of adrenaline in his veins. He channels it into his movements, each swing, slash, and lunge; this dance of death he has studied and memorized, knows more intimately than he would ever dare to admit, step by bloody step.

As often as he rebukes the hellish nature fighting for dominance within him, tonight he concedes to embodying every bit of the dark, bloodthirsty beast all those ballads paint him to be.

Roiben loses count of how many fall on his blade, of how many times he narrowly misses a blow or jab or loosed arrow. Action blurs about him, and he is swept along with it. The dirt and carnage and thick night air cling to his skin and sting his eyes. He takes a moment to wipe the spattered gore from his face, to catch his breath. That would prove his first mistake of the night.

There is a sickening sound of steel penetrating armor and bone. A shocking pain in his back, tearing through him, stealing his breath. His startled cry is lodged in his throat. He looks down, incredulous to find the gleam of a blade protruding from his side, slick with crimson. Someone is speaking against his ear, low and venomous. Roiben thinks the voice is familiar, but the words are distant and distorted and he cannot untangle them. Time itself seems to unravel and stand still. He cannot think, he cannot breathe around the pain. Each attempt to inhale is thwarted, every shallow gasp obstructed by the metal gouging his gut.

A heavy boot presses into his back, leveraging the blade and wrenching it from his insides with excruciating force. And then, Roiben is falling.

The ground is cold and unyielding as he crashes into it, face first. Soil and blood fill his mouth. He sputters and chokes, clutching at the blooming excruciation in his abdomen, and though he has known pain aplenty, this is an altogether incomparable magnitude of sensation. It is an unrelenting deluge of white-hot agony, burning through his body like pitch, thick and scorching, blinding his senses, until he is suffocating with it. And on its heels is something else, entirely foreign and unsettling. Of all the battles he has fought, of all the dangers he has faced and the hairbreadth escapes he has made, he has not known this feeling.

For the first time in his war-wearied existence, Rath Roiben Rye is afraid.

His mortality has never meant much to him. As any warrior, he has known always that his end would not be with a gentle exhale and the closing of aged eyes, but by the brutal edge of a blade. It was never to be kind or warm, but cold steel and isolated darkness—a deserving retribution for the multitude of sins he has committed. 

There had been a time, moons ago, when Roiben had welcomed that inevitability. With little to fight for and less to live for, he had simply endured. He had become reconciled to the possibility, the enticement of death. Back then, he would tempt it nearly every time he left the brugh. Like a hand reaching into the mouth of a beast, daring it to close around him. Every moment in Nicnevin’s servitude he had wished for release, and had it been destined he would have held his arms out and embraced it as he would have a lover.

But then Kaye had found him, and everything Roiben knew or thought he wanted had been turned entirely on its head.

She had stirred within him something latent, something long buried in unfathomable depths, sealed away with all the other parts of himself he had neglected or that could be used against him. It had been as though in an instant, his heart had remembered what it felt like to beat. Roiben found himself wanting to claw his way out of that frozen tomb and into the shell of the man he had been. Wanting to fight again. Wanting to live—and if not for himself, then for Kaye alone.

Every moment since, he has been her barrier, the shield to keep the volatile machinations of his people from reaching her. If he dies tonight, all he has done will unravel. She will be alone, unprotected. If the enemy claims victory here, her blood will spill before the sun rises. Kaye will die, and he will have failed her.

His lungs are scorched and aching, begging for reprieve from the lashing flames each inhale brings. The black leather of his armor glistens in the pearlescence of the moon, wet with his own heartsblood; a river of deep garnet flows from the gaping wound below his ribs and runs over his thigh to pool on the ground at his knees. Creeping shadows blur the edge of his vision. None of this matters: Roiben's resolve is uncompromising. He cannot fall here. He cannot—he will not leave her. 

With gasping effort, Roiben pushes himself to his knees. He buries the point of his blade into the damp earth and clutches the hilt to steady himself. The field before him wavers and slants up to meet him; he sways as he kneels, nearly pitching forward again into the dirt. He grips the handle tighter still and sets his jaw, defiant. He will not cosign Kaye to the cruelty from which he has fought so desperately to spare her.

No grave can hold his body down; he will crawl home to her if he must.

There is movement behind him—the rushing sound of a sword slicing through the air. Then the pause before the strike. With as deep an inhale as he can manage, fingers tightening around the helve of his blade, Roiben hurls himself into a dizzying spin. He throws his weight, every remaining ounce of force into swinging his sword up and out, lurching blindly for the coward that had thought to fell him without facing him. It is not at all a graceful move; his shoulders jar upon impact and it's no small miracle he remains upright and conscious through the but the recognizable sounds of rending leather, yielding of flesh and the splintering of bone tells him he has hit his mark.

As Roiben sways on his knees and wills the world to slowly right itself, the image of his foe before him begins to solidify; a terrible, stricken cry rings in his ears, splitting the air through the violence still roiling around him. He registers only a moment late that the sound has come unbidden from his own mouth.

Standing in the cold gleam of the moon, his golden sword raised for the deathblow and still dripping with Roiben’s blood, is Talathain. The glinting silver of Roiben's blade obtrudes grotesquely from the Seelie knight’s chest, just under his sternum. Roiben does not need to see what he already knows by the lightened weight of his weapon—he has run the other knight clean through.

Pale green eyes are blown wide, locked with Roiben's. Mouth agape, his expression is contorted in a coalescence of incredulity and unhinged fury. How long he must have bided, how careful and dedicated his scheming must have been, to finally cut down the one he believed unworthy of the Seelie crown. To at last avenge his beloved, pitiless queen. How devastating his disappointment must be now, knowing he will not live to see one more deserving take the blood-won throne.

Talathain's gaze drops to the sword impaling his chest as that realization crosses his face, as his own weapon falls from his still-raised hands into the dirt. Roiben withdraws the curved blade, knowing that it would do no good even if he left it there; just as he'd meant to, he has dealt the finishing stroke, and now there is nothing for it. Better Talathain die now, as honorably as any knight should hope to, than to suffer slowly with some illusion of recovery.

Roiben catches Talathain’s arm as he staggers forward, lowering both of them to the ground as gently as he can through the piercing pain of his own wound. The act surprises even himself; all those years ago, Roiben had assumed the role of villain, bearing the weight of his sister’s killing of Silarial, so that she might not be driven to madness by it. Talathain had spat and cursed him rather than Ethine, though she still had not been fully spared from his ire. Roiben had accepted the knight’s scorn, had simply made it an addendum to the overlong chronicle of his transgressions against those he had loved.

Yet, even now, as he lays the man back against the damp earth, that love he had once held comes to the surface in one sorrowful wave.

Talathain’s grasp is desperate, white-knuckled on Roiben’s shoulder. There is something other than rage forming on his face, until it is the only thing left: it is the same sadness aching in Roiben’s chest reflecting through his old companion’s eyes. For a fleeting moment, there on the field of battle, they are brothers again.

The green knight opens his mouth to speak, but only coughs—a wet, gurgling noise, indicative of fluid filling the lungs. Blood spatters Roiben's cheek, and a runnel of ruby flows down the side of Talathain’s mouth to drip onto the dark ground. Roiben reaches up to close his hand around the one still clinging to his shoulder and nods, his jaw set tight enough to hurt. He swallows against the constriction in his throat—he does not trust his voice to speak.

I forgive you, the small squeeze of his hand says instead.

As I hope you will forgive me.

Talathain does not answer.

The grip on Roiben's shoulder goes slack, and there is no more rage, no more hatred or sadness—nothing at all left to gleam in Talathain's eyes. His last breath drifts out of pale parted lips, into the bitter air on a cloud of white vapor. With delicate care, Roiben lowers Talathain's arm, resting it over his chest and crossing it with the other, before closing the man's eyes with a trembling hand.

The moonlight casting across his still face should make him appear peaceful, perhaps as if he is simply asleep. Instead, it only serves as a further, haunting illumination of what has just transpired. It is enough to cause Roiben to shiver and tear his gaze away, but the effect has already been made. He knows, with bitter certitude, that if he does not succumb to his own wounds, this vision will join the multitude of other wraiths that so often saturate his nightmares.

For one, still moment in the midst of the waning onslaught, as profound and painful as the hole in his side, Roiben allows himself to grieve: for the friend he had known, for the knight he had admired—for the brother he had loved and lost. 

As the sky begins to lighten and the first signs of morning crest the ensanguined dale, Roiben sees naught but the wretched darkness closing in about him. Weary with sorrow and loss of blood, he can fight against it no longer. Closing his eyes in exhausted surrender, the Lord of the Court of Termites plunges into the yawning void. 

Through mounting despair his fingers claw through the void. Panic grips his throat in the dark. It coils around him like a serpent constricting its prey and he thrashes violently in its grasp, wild with fear and indignation. Resigned as he has been to the whims of fate in the past, that holds true no longer. He does not want to die. He is not willing to die.

Amidst the struggling, out of the black expanse of his mind there comes a soft rush of air, carrying with it a familiar redolence of blooming honeysuckle and crushed clover. Roiben goes still as it wraps around his senses; it is strange and out of place here, he thinks—too warm and gentle in this lightless wasteland. Yet it is there all the same, tempering his fear, willing him calm. And then, as if heralded by the anomalous breeze, a phantasm begins to take form. 

It is an insubstantial figure, never quite manifesting beyond a silhouetted likeness, but it does not need to: even trapped within a bastille of unreality, Roiben would know her.   

The form wavers as it draws closer, hues of green blending and shifting, from soft moss and bold verdelite to the rich viridity of a forest after rainfall. Warmth emanates from the center of the figure, reaching out to him in the void. Soft light splits the immeasurable tenebrosity until not a single shadow remains untouched, until every inch of cavernous is bathed in the pale glow. Roiben has seen nothing of such transcendent beauty; he is struck by it, wholly overcome with wonderment.

The verdant, smoke-like hand brushes across his cheek, brushes away tears he hadn’t known he shed. A voice calls his name, melodic and warm as the light around him:

“Rath Roiben Rye, I command you to wake up.”  

There is a sharp gasp when Roiben’s eyes open, though he can’t be sure where the sound has come from. As his vision adjusts the apparition fades, and he cannot help lamenting its departure. The warm glow follows after, replaced by the cool, familiar glim indicative of underground illumination: he is back in his chambers, in the Palace of Termites. Somehow, Roiben has made it home. Tangled roots hang in tendrils from the hollow ceiling above. Roiben blinks up at them, willing them into focus with tired effort. Though the blazing pain he felt when Talathain ran him through has been reduced to a mitigated smolder, the rest of his body is stiff with bruising and sorely overtaxed. His fingers cramp at the slightest testing. His lungs tremble with each breath and do not yet feel able to withstand much more than small, calculated inhales. Still, after what had very nearly come to pass, he is grateful for feeling at all.

While he is attempting to solidify his surroundings, the same comforting fragrance that had come to him in the darkness—that soft sweetness of spring in bloom, manifests once more, here in the realm of waking. It is stronger than before, and much closer. Roiben lurches forward suddenly, fully roused from all previous inanition. His heart hammers wildly against his aching chest while renewed pain blossoms just below his ribcage; doubtless the abrupt movement has done no service to his healing, but he is spurred by some apprehensive hope and pays it little mind. 

That hope is rewarded tenfold when he is met with the startled countenance of his consort. His Kaye.

She is there on the edge of their bed, in the same place she had sat the last time Roiben had been wounded. Tidelines of grief and distress streak her face. Her black eyes are swollen, rimmed with mingling red and deep greens, while new tears begin to well and spill down her cheeks. Roiben wonders how long he has been asleep; how long it has been since she slept. He reaches for her with a trembling hand, breath hitching as he cups her face. His thumbs sweep away the forlorn remnants staining her cheeks, exhales in audible relief that she is not the wavering, incorporeal visage from his dark delusion.

"You're real," he whispers. His voice is rough from disuse. Kaye covers his hand with her own. The slightest smile wavers at the corner of her mouth—to comfort him or herself, Roiben isn’t certain. “Yeah, I’m real.” she replies, in that deliberately even voice Roiben has heard so many times before: the one she employs to cloak the storm of emotions just beneath the surface. Only her eyes betray the containment of that tempest. 

Roiben draws their joined hands to his chest. He takes a breath to allow the warmth of her touch to spread through him; to chase away the perpetual, aching chill in his bones only she ever had the power to.

Kaye breaks the momentary silence. “They told me they found you next to Talathain. That he—'' She swallows, as if to brace herself against her own words. “That he brought an army to kill you.” It’s his turn to smile, but it sours at the edges of his mouth as memory returns, unbidden; his boyhood friend, staring with spiritless eyes at a frigid, black sky. “Indeed,” Roiben confirms bitterly, “and he failed.” His gaze drops to their still-joined hands, to the chipped black varnish of Kaye’s fingernails. “Would that his aim had been a hairsbreadth truer—” “Don’t.” Kaye interrupts him with a crushing of her lips against his, and Roiben falls obediently silent. Sore arms wrap around her, holding her slight frame to him with all the diminutive strength he can rally. They are few and far between, the occasions he allows himself to feel such vulnerability, but he allows this singular self-indulgence—if only for a breath.

Kaye draws back momentarily, her forehead resting gingerly against his own. “I don’t ever want to know what it would be like.” she whispers, the gravity in her voice heavy as any stone. This time, Roiben’s smile is unsullied. “As if any grave could keep me from you.”  

[fangirlinghard-spoilerson]

Faerie Love and Faerie Truth

This post is based on the reading of the books TCP, TWK, TDPOTF, TLS and AVTTIL.

It contains spoilers for TDPOTF, TLS and AVTTIL, which is kind of a TMFT’s spoiler.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW...

TFOTA - The Folk of The Air TCP - The Cruel Prince AVTTIL -  A Visit to the Impossible Lands (The TCP’s extra scene of the B&N) TLS - The Lost Sisters TWK - The Wicked King TDPOTF - The Darkest Part of The Forest TMFT - The Morden Fairy Tales

Faerie Truth

Before we talk about love, we have to talk about truth because almost everything we know about Faerie Love was said by Faeries.

Fairies can only speak the truth. What can this mean?

First approach: ABSOLUTE TRUTH

If something is a lie, a fairy will be unable to say even if she believes it to be true.

Second approach:  INTERPRETIVE TRUTH

Fairies speak what they believe to be true even when they are wrong - and they don’t know about it.

I don’t believe in the first approach. I do not believe in absolute truths and my analysis of the events point to the second approach.

The subject will be best exemplified next.

Faerie Love

Let's start with Locke so we can forget about him soon.

In TLS, after Taryn forces Locke to promise to marry her, when they are still hitting the details of their agreement, Locke tells Taryn:

“Remember, we don’t love the way that you do.” 

It's Absolute Truth? If 'we' meant 'Faries' and 'you' meant 'humans', then no, this is not. If it was, another fairy in TDPOTF would not be able to say something that goes against it. (I'll show it later).

This is true for Locke and that is enough.

Faeries probably love different humans, but he made it seem like his species loves differently from hers. How to love is a biological component rather than social, cultural and individual.

Again If it were the truth, another fairy in TDPOTF would not be able to say something that goes against it. (I'll show it to you next).

I think the most famous interpretation of Faerie Love in the Holly Black fairy universe is Severin's words from TDPOTF chapter 15:

"We do not love as you do—once won, our love can be terrifyingly constant." [..] “We love until we do not. For us, love doesn’t fade gradually. It snaps like a branch bent too far.” 

These words do not only mean that fairies love different from humans, but that fairies love in the same way as other fairies.

But, a little further on, Severin contradicts those words. He changes his perspective. The species no longer guarantee that love will be different or equal. What he said before is now referred to like the opinion of the father who sees humans as inferior. These are presumptions.

We don’t know how a person loves just because he is a human. Our love varies both on a Macro scale (cultural definitions of love) and on a Micho scale (individual interpretation).

What Severin says next is that fairies might be like that too.

"Maybe we don’t love any differently than you do; maybe everyone loves until they don’t—or maybe everyone loves differently, humans and faeries alike. Forgive me. I grew up on my father’s boasting about the superiority of my people, and although I have listened to your kind for decades upon decades, it still hasn’t chased out all my worst habits of presumption.” 

Severin can’t say anything but the truth. But when he changes his mind, the truth changes. What would never happen if what he said was an absolute truth.

‘We do not love as you do’ This phrase has the full weight of an absolute idea. 

‘Maybe we don’t love any differently than you do;’ That phrase is more uncertain. That couldn’t be said if Severin absolutely believed that Faeries DO NOT, in any occasion, loves as humans do. It is here also that Severin's words contradict Locke's.

Fairies have prejudices against humans. The reasons they point to being inferior to them are pretty silly in my opinion.

We live less. And?

Are we liars? So much as they are misleading.

Their love disappears suddenly like a branch breaking, and ours, in contrast, disappears gradually? Besides being just a theory, it is crazy to assume that love disappears suddenly is a superior feature.

Fairies are so prejudiced that perhaps we should forget their opinion of (1) us and (2) themselves.

Maybe we should pay attention to what is observable.

TDPOTF, chap 16

Jack kissed her as though he could reassure himself she was awake and okay only so long as they were touching. He kissed her as though he thought she’d turn to smoke the moment he stopped.

A Visit to the Impossible Lands (Kaye POV) when Kaye is observing Cardan to get away from Jude.

What do these passages tell me?

That fairies feel love as we feel about magic. It is something wonderful and not very tangible. That it's hard to believe that it's happening, that it's something real. It's too good to be true, it seems like an illusion. (If you read my Fanfic MAGIC, and wondered where I got the idea, it was 60% of this belief).

I would really enjoy seeing other interpretations. And if anyone has another passage - in TFOTA ou TDPOTF - about a fairy interacting with her beloved as if they were smoke, glamour ou mist, I would enjoy seeing. Please send me!

Which reminds me, I have not read TMFT yet. Please, no spoilers.

And PLEASE, Tell me YOUR opinion about Faerie love and truth.

[lordoftermites]

OF CLOVER & IRON

Part Two

Pairing: Roiben x Kaye

Summary: continued from here, but this one hurts more and I'm barely sorry.

Rating: T? it's just fuckin sad ok

Each breath I left behind Each breath you take is mine Walking on a line ten stories high Fear a fall, you're asking why Leaving the things we lost, oh Leaving the ones we've crossed I have to make an end so we begin To save my soul at any cost

Roiben was almost confident he had solved the first act of Kaye’s query long before this. At least, in part he had. And she hadn’t quite so much voiced the question as her face had expressed it plainly. It was a simple thing then, to speak without needing to flex the truth, because she had asked so simply. She had not yet won the faculty with which to confine him—her very own blackbird that came when she called—whether he wanted to or not.

It's your shirt, back from the dead.

A lament that had been, because he hadn’t truthfully wanted to return it: he liked the scent that lingered in the black, machine-woven fabric he had carefully stitched back together during the sparse moments in the solitude of his quarters— the very same fragrance that had drifted from the blonde tangles of her hair and caught his inhale when she clutched the possession between her fingers. It had been so pleasant it set his mouth to water. And it had been that which had him smiling down at her— a genuine reaction, something he hadn’t done in so long, neither before nor since the night in the woods—she had drawn that one from him then just as easily—that he had almost reserved himself to simply being incapable of it.

Like you.

He remembered the cool, wavering indifference of Kaye’s response, a betraying contrast to the gentle pink that bloomed over her cheeks, until she finally awarded him a grin in return. Perhaps it had been nothing to Kaye, but for Roiben, it was a delicate spell that charmed him, wholly and throughout.

He had had a revelation in that moment, had made to himself an ardent vow: he would have done anything for her to smile at him again. For that to be his smile alone.

He would have killed for it then—and he had done, more than once. Resolutely, he would again.

Roiben was bound, as was she—as the entirety of the Host was, by that imperceptible governance that dispossessed him of his ability to lie. But that same authority did not demand he renounce the overabundance of whys he clutched to him like a precious thing—not those Kaye would have him hand over now, not those she hadn’t known to ask for. Like why those days following their first meeting had been fraught with fitful, broken sleep, while the nights were a fruitless pursuit of a mortal girl, to return something as insignificant as an article of clothing. Why he had repaired the thing in the first place, fingertips raw from the needle scraping and pricking ad nauseum.

Why, even after she had prized the true name from his throat in some form of vengeance for the death of her friend. Ignorant of that insuperable, concrete power she balanced like a blade on her tongue. Much may the knowledge please you, he had said then.

Yet, even through his seething, Roiben still had wanted only to be near her. And when she had unwittingly given her first command and his mouth had immediately and dutifully obeyed its new mistress, he’d hated himself for how much he enjoyed it. Hated that he’d yearned to touch her again in spite of himself.

That tempestuous conflict between his longing and the conflagrant fury at relinquishing his name had curdled his insides there in the diner; he’d barely made three strides from the door when he’d retched, involuntarily and violently, emptying the asetose contents of his stomach behind the parked car he would watch her climb into moments later.

There was nothing that compelled him to confess that night he had followed her home, had waited in the cold shadows beneath the clouded window of her bedroom, heart clambering against the cage of his bruised ribs as he savored the ghost of her skin brushing his mouth, praying for just a glimpse of her through the glass.

This multitude of questions and reasons had never been spoken aloud, not even as a whisper to the shadows to abate Roiben's torment.

He knew, reprehensibly, that he had not given her the answer she sought—never, not in any measure at all.

Perhaps, in their tangled past, if she had waited only moments more, she would never have anguished in her own wonder as she did now. She could have instructed him to spill his insides onto the checkered linoleum before her, in naught but a whisper, and Roiben would have only been able to marvel at the ruby candor of his own lifes’ blood pooling at the soles of her favorite boots. Perhaps after, she would have been able to go back to the blissful, ignorant mortality she knew better than this one, free of the duplicitous whims of the twilight creatures she tangled with now; she would be free of him, as he from his subjugation.

But that had not been the design of whatever power held their fates.

Roiben drew a weary breath, scrubbed a hand over his face and closed his eyes; he couldn’t meet the untamed, sable intensity of that stare. The pattern was not lost on him, as it was very rarely that he found he could hold her gaze, such was his repugnant cowardice.

What seemed a century ago, Kaye had been in this very room, in the exact spot Roiben lay now, though the occasion had been something quite entirely life and death in contrast. Even then, befuddled with magic that aimed to keep her compliant to her death, that same vehement look on the stolen face she masked her own truth with bored into him, as he felt it knifing into him now.

The past was crumbling, upending itself, it seemed, and Roiben was loath to discover himself, yet again, the recreant.

Pulling himself out of his own memories, he tentatively reached out to take Kaye's hand. She didn't protest, but her fingers were stiff as Roiben laced them between his own. "I will explain, as thoroughly as I am able." he finally said, thumbing small, idle circles over the top of her hand while Kaye watched him in attentive silence.

"In truth... I didn’t know why, at first. Or, more like, I disallowed myself to know. As a knight, I thought I had trained myself to the virtues that title holds, that I had sworn myself to. I’d vowed, if only to myself, to use my station for righteous things. Good things.”

He took another breath, bemused by how much he was allowing himself to say. He had grown so used to his measured responses, only speaking when he was compelled to—a habit born out of clarified spite. Just as well, he never much liked the sound of his own voice. Even now, with no master or mistress to twist his words like a knife in his gut—save for Kaye, who was markedly his chief possessor, body, soul, and whatever lay between. ”In my servitude to Nicnevin," he continued, "I felt those virtues... slipping—no, tearing away from me, as the claws of a beast tear at the flesh of its prey. The…The things she commanded of me, Kaye—"

Shame seized his throat and strangled him silent. Nightmarish visions of blank death-stares turned whatever he might have said to rotten ash on his tongue, made him choke. His own blood thundered tumultuously in his ears.

The small body of a fae trampled beneath the hooves of his steed. A goblet sloshing with fresh crimson gore, coating the inside of his mouth in warm metal.

The terrified, pleading scream of the one he loved as his blade bit into her skin.

He mashed his eyes shut and gripped Kaye's hand tightly, desperately, in some hope that the action would wash away the horror of his own memory.

A feeble hope it was, because he knew the absolute, incontrovertible truth: those images would remain carved stone upon his mind's eye, tormenting him until he met his own inevitable end.

It took some time for him to pull himself out of the waking nightmare of his mind, but after forcing himself to swallow the bile searing the back of his throat, he went on; for Kaye's sake, because she deserved to know the truth, definitively.

And for his own, because he feared that now he had begun to syphon the poison, he could no longer keep it from devouring his soul.

"I… I believed that my time in the Night Court, carrying out whatever new task its queen dreamt up for me, each one more abhorrent than the last, had soured my nature. What I had convinced myself was a meticulously cultivated, unsulliable rectitude, Nicnevin befouled in less time than the blink of an eye.

"When you stumbled into those woods…" He leaned forward, the sudden, acute need to be closer to her driving him to shake, rattling his very bones. He let his forehead fall against hers; he was overwarm, and the comforting coolness of her skin calmed him. He closed his eyes again.

"I had been courting Death." Roiben avowed. "I pined for it, as one would pine for a soft bed at the end of a long journey. But you—" he paused, conjuring the memory of her kneeling before him, the trembling timidity in her hands as she grasped the branch jutting from his chest, "with your kindness, kindness I had not earned nor held any claim to, awakened something in me that I feared long dead."

He felt the gentle stroke of Kaye's fingers against his cheek. He opened his eyes to be met by her own, their depths no longer aflame with the unhinged ferocity he had seen in them previously. In its place was the same tender, empathetic gaze from that night in the woods—the one that had burrowed itself deep into the glacial prison encasing his heart.

"That is why I chose you." He brought her hand to his scarred chest, held it there against the reverberant palpitation beneath his sternum. "Because you have shown me that perhaps I am not as monstrous and irredeemable as I believed myself to be—that my soul is not the blackened, twisted thing I was convinced it had become.

"You have brought me back from the dead, Kaye Fierch, and never again shall I let a moment pass that would leave you to wonder anything different."

[fangirlinghard-spoilerson]

After reading TCP, TLS and TWK, I spent a large part of my 2019 year thinking about TFOTA, participating in Fandom, creating theories about the characters, writing fanfics and even poetry. I also investigated more about Faerie through TMFT and TDPOTF. I can't help feeling that my time was better spent than now.