Chapter Text
I was pulled from sleep by something tugging at my middle, a thread deep inside.
I left Tamlin sleeping in the bed, his body heavy with exhaustion. In a few hours, we would be leaving Under the Mountain and returning home, and I didn’t want to wake him sooner than I had to. I prayed I would ever get to sleep that peacefully again.
I knew who summoned me long before I opened the door to the hall and padded down it, stumbling and teetering every now and then as I adjusted to my new body, its new balance and rhythms. I carefully, slowly took a narrow set of stairs upward, up and up, until, to my shock, a trickle of sunlight poured into the stairwell and I found myself on a small balcony jutting out of the side of the mountain.
I hissed against the brightness, shielding my eyes. I’d thought it was the middle of the night—I’d completely lost all sense of time in the darkness of the mountain.
Rhysand chuckled softly from where I could vaguely make him out standing along the stone rail. “I forgot that it’s been a while for you.”
My eyes stung from the light, and I remained silent until I could look at the view without a shooting pain going through my head. A land of violet snowcapped mountains greeted me, but the rock of this mountain was brown and bare—not even a blade of grass or a crystal of ice gleamed on it.
“What do you want?” It didn’t come out with the snap I’d intended. Not as I remembered how he’d fought, again and again, to attack Amarantha, to save me.
“Just to say good-bye.” A warm breeze ruffled his hair, brushing tendrils of darkness off his shoulders. “Before your beloved whisks you away forever.”
“Not forever,” I said, wiggling my tattooed fingers for him to see. “Don’t you get a week every month?” Those words, thankfully, came out frosty.
Rhys smiled slightly, his wings rustling and then settling. “How could I forget?”
I stared at the nose I’d seen bleeding only hours before, the violet eyes that had been so filled with pain. “Why?” I asked.
He knew what I meant, and shrugged. “Because when the legends get written, I didn’t want to be remembered for standing on the sidelines. I want my future offspring to know that I was there, and that I fought against her at the end, even if I couldn’t do anything useful.”
I blinked, this time not at the brightness of the sun.
“Because,” he went on, his eyes locked with mine, “I didn’t want you to fight alone. Or die alone.”
And for a moment, I remembered that faerie who had died in our foyer, and how I’d told Tamlin the same thing. “Thank you,” I said, my throat tight.
Rhys flashed a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I doubt you’ll be saying that when I take you to the Night Court.”
I didn’t bother to reply as I turned toward the view. The mountains went on and on, gleaming and shadowed and vast under the open, clear sky.
But nothing in me stirred—nothing cataloged the light and colors.
“Are you going to fly home?” I said.
A soft laugh. “Unfortunately, it would take longer than I can afford. Another day, I’ll taste the skies again.”
I glanced at the wings tucked into his powerful body, and my voice was hoarse as I spoke. “You never told me you loved the wings—or the flying.” No, he’d made his shape-shifting seem... base, useless, boring.
He shrugged. “Everything I love has always had a tendency to be taken from me. I tell very few about the wings. Or the flying.”
Some color had already come into that moon-white face—and I wondered whether he might once have been tan before Amarantha had kept him belowground for so long. A High Lord who loved to fly—trapped under a mountain. Shadows not of his own making still haunted those violet eyes. I wondered if they would ever fade.
“How does it feel to be a High Fae?” he asked—a quiet, curious question.
I looked out toward the mountains again, considering. And maybe it was because there was no one else to hear, maybe it was because the shadows in his eyes would also forever be in mine, but I said, “I’m an immortal—who has been mortal. This body ...” I looked down at my hand, so clean and shining—a mockery of what I’d done. “This body is different, but this”—I put my hand on my chest, my heart—“this is still human. Maybe it always will be. But it would have been easier to live with it...” My throat welled. “Easier to live with what I did if my heart had changed, too. Maybe I wouldn’t care so much; maybe I could convince myself their deaths weren’t in vain. Maybe immortality will take that away. I can’t tell whether I want it to.”
Rhysand stared at me for long enough that I faced him. “Be glad of your human heart, Feyre. Pity those who don’t feel anything at all.”
I couldn’t explain about the hole that had already formed in my soul—didn’t want to, so I just nodded.
“Well, good-bye for now,” he said, rolling his neck as if we hadn’t been talking about anything important at all. He bowed at the waist, those wings vanishing entirely, and had begun to fade into the nearest shadow when he went rigid.
Rhys’s nostrils flared, and something flickered behind his eyes as they locked onto me, wide and wild. Shock—pure shock flashed across his features, and whatever he saw made him stumble back a step. Actually stumble.
Quickly, I reached out a hand to steady him—I might have survived the mountain, but I didn't think I would survive accusations of pushing a High Lord to his death from a balcony. He didn't take it, though his gaze fixed on it.
"...Rhys?"
The fresh color drained from his skin as his eyes rose from my hand to my face.
His shoulder jerked, and then his hand clasped my outstretched wrist. The movement was stiff, reluctant, as if he were a marionette controlled by threads strung through his joints and manipulated into movement by some unseen force.
“What are you—” I started, scrambling backward. I yanked at my arm, trying and failing to wrench my arm out of his unbreakable grasp. “Cut it out!”
My hip hit the stone rail of the balcony, barking with pain, as his other hand came down on my shoulder.
“Feyre.” His voice was frantic, his eyes wild. "Feyre."
Reverent.
I gaped up at him. He’d breathed my name like it was the answer to some desperate prayer.
He was so close now that I could see the individual pinpoints of light in his violet eyes, shining like stars on a clear night. The hand around my shoulder loosened—only enough so he could slide that arm around my back instead. I pushed against his chest, arcing backward over his arm as if I might somehow somersault away, but he held me too tightly. Too closely.
“Let me go!” Panic surged, and for a moment, I choked on it, feeling phantom walls pressing in, caging me. “Rhys, let go!”
Something pained and apologetic gleamed in his eyes.
And then we disappeared—simply disappeared—into a dark tear in the fabric of the world.