A Court of Shadows and Lies / ACOTAR FF

Chapter 1

Ow.

My entire body was screaming at me in the deafening silence and darkness, as if this was the first time I had done it a disservice. I had been in some battles in my lifetime, borderline died a handful of times, but, fuck, the agony I was in right now couldn't compare and I didn't understand why. I had been tortured, mentally ripped apart, my body had been desecrated by Fae and non-Fae alike – but this...this foreign pain was ripping through me, tearing apart the sheer base as to who I was. It was beyond the broken bones. It was beyond the hollow shell in my chest. It was ripping apart something inside of me that I had never touched, never ventured to seek out in fear of awakening something.

I had barely used my magic in over 400 years as I sat on top of that mountain day after day, punishing myself for breaking promise after promise, mourning preventable deaths. I let my magic wrap itself around me, shielding me from Mother and my sisters prying eyes, and thoughts. I glamoured myself in case any of them decided to come and find me, using old as time magic to conceal myself from the world. Magic that would require you to be born from the Mother – this was a natural knowledge that hadn't, or couldn't, been written down by the Fae. As far as I was told, all those who were born from Mother lived up in the skies and stars.

I had come to find out that was wrong on so many levels.

One minute I was sat on top of the mountain in the dead of the night, the next I was flying through the starlit sky trying to evade magic that felt older than Mother. I hadn't even had a chance to look at whatever was attacking me, all I could feel was dread and darkness. It was beyond the shadows and the blackness of night, they felt like shade from a time beyond this realm.

Every inch I flew, I grew increasingly drained. My magic began to ball up, as if it was anticipating being ripped away from me, thinking that I needed to preserve it in case I needed a quick way out. I apologised quietly in my thoughts before forcing my magic to unwind itself from its tightknit ball.

I reached out my mental claws to one of the things chasing me and faltered my flying – a stupid mistake. An ungodly shriek left my throat as that dark magic hit my white, feathered wings, and my thoughts were engulfed with darkness. It ran through my body, through my veins, penetrating my brain and heart. That was when I saw how black it was. This was a darkness that was beyond looking down a well at 2AM, but at your impending doom, a darkness that would follow you wherever you went and hunt you down to engulf you. It didn't search for light, it wasn't searching for me to reach out, it was looking to swallow my magic whole, not caring for the life it sustained and had looked after for over 200,000 years.

A cry left my throat as I tried to expense the energy, trying to get rid of the darkness in my body. My magic throbbed in my veins quietly, apologising that it wasn't the right time or place for me to use it. I begged at it. Begged my magic to help me one last time, so that I could keep it and myself safe. Time felt as if it stopped while I waited for my essence to acknowledge my pleads. Trust me. So I did.

And blacked out.

Now here I was. A silent mess in darkness, so broken that my throbbing magic laid dormant. I tried to nudge it to no avail. It just stayed quiet as the darkness continued to envelope me. There were no stars.

Please let there be stars.

I had studied stars for thousands of years. It gave me something to do while I was in my room, waiting for Mother to decide if I was stable enough to join my older sisters in the world. The stars represented more than just lights in the sky to me, they represented a world beyond the house in the clouds. They represented Mothers in other realms. They represented every other person who was locked up in a room when they were a child, looking out into the world imagining being bigger than life.