#welcome to the inciting incident that will lead to Nesta cutting off hyberns head

[flowerflamestars]

Effloresce snippet

Battle far off sounded like so much noise. A low, chaotic, roar, but through it all- bells.   Like the town square of Nesta’s village, the huge walls that lined the sea shore, arches across the land, holding bronze monstrosities.   Ever ring had an unnatural echo, carrying on the wind. A relay, Cassian realized, hands full of the torn fabric Nesta just kept shoving into his hands, binding up the wound on her leg too tight and then again with foul curse, hissing in pain.   She looked up.   And there, in her eyes, Cassian could see what he could already smell, fire painted so bright across the horizon Nesta’s stricken face threw it back at him.   “That’s not Archeron land,” she said, the closest Cassian had ever heard to Nesta pleading, desperate. “That’s not”-   Cassian knelt in the surf, irregardless of human modesty or anything but the fact that Nesta’s hands were covered in her own blood. Sea water had to hurt like absolute hell, but Nesta endured it silent. Seething. He did not need to ask to know that those tears were not for pain- not for her own.   Dripping down her jaw like liquid light, trees catching and catching, no natural fire-   The bells only grew louder.   “They’re not trying to reach the sea,” Cassian sounded about as helpless as he felt, struck in sheer horror.   Horrible beyond measure, Nesta sucked in a breath. The facsimile of a laugh- half a choking cry. “They won’t. There’s nowhere for humans to run when faeries come to kill them. All we have are warnings.”

Just a warning, just a sound, just a plea- Cassian could hear the dying, all through, a single song.   “They don’t know,” Nesta sobbed, fury a weight pulling at the wind- the ocean lashed around them, current frothing over Cassian, pulling at his wings, his hair. Even under the salt spray, every inhale was a growing horror: burning flesh. Pitch and poison. Hybern had started the fire, and fed it, too. “That where the message reaches there will just be more soldiers.”   She shook off his hands.   Dragged herself out of the water and back across the sand.   Cassian had lived more than five hundred years. If he lived five thousand, if he lived at all, past the weight of this failure, he would never forget. Nesta, facing the fire, sky bleeding red as magic kindled a thousand human homes in an effortless instant.   The boom- trees buckling and glass shattering, not loud enough, not to Cassian’s ears, to block out the screaming.   Nesta, screaming, just once.   Nesta, turning, all tears wiped away. She could barely walk and still did not seem to falter, back set to her burning homeland.   “We have to go.”   Still, at least one bell rang out.