Healer

Chapter 36

      Azriel had raised up and kissed her after that, his wings rustling behind him as she turned over and nestled herself against his chest. She went back to sleep quickly, her mind tired from working and worrying, but he stayed awake. The pressure, the anticipation was familiar. And he had been with his family a long time. He had always dreaded their peril and pain and exhaustion. He had buried people he loved and many he didn't. But it was all different now, a thought he couldn't get out of his mind. That now, she was a part of him. Not his life. Him. That if he lost her, it wouldn't just be burying someone he loved, it would be burying a part of himself. And she.....she was so determined. Not to prove herself, not to gain something, but to take others' pain, to save lives other than her own, to give every ounce of her strength to preserve the strength of her court. The speed at which she had come into her own proved that it was where she was supposed to be. Her destiny. Her love for him was some kind of wildly fantastic bonus.

She hadn't asked for this to be thrust upon her, but she had taken it anyway and without complaint. He wouldn't have been able to say the same about himself. He nearly laughed at the thought of discovering that he had some ancient, unheard of power that could end dark magic even as it sought to destroy his home, and that the purest evil wanted the power for itself. He had power and desirable skills, sure. Many had sought him for his shadowsinging ability, but he had never carried it as a responsibility to the rest of the fae world. He felt a burning start in his chest. This young female, whom the world had tried to destroy from the moment she was conceived, who had been raped and sold and broken on her way to him, was still unfazed. She wasn't too young, too naïve to understand what she was facing, she simply wasn't afraid. Not of the threat anyway, but of the consequences. He trusted that she would be smart, that she would do what she felt was right, and that's what worried him most. What she had said in those spring court hills. Her life was no more valuable than anyone else's. He understood where it came from for her, but he couldn't find it in himself to agree. And he knew she was afraid of loss, too. She had experienced plenty already, having lost the only family she knew to death and her first love to his own lies. He absentmindedly pulled her closer. She smelled sweet and warm and it calmed him. He fell asleep.

     Talia sat on the forest path for the first time in so long that she wasn't sure it was the same one at all. The trees looked old, like they had bent under some great weight, and it was darker than she had remembered. Colder. But it smelled the same and that pressing weight, that heavy black sadness still weighed on her the same as before. She looked down. She wore the same white nightgown she had worn when Azriel found her on Hybern's shores and it was ripped and bloody, just as it had been that night. She stood, her feet sore from the rough ground and began walking. She wanted to get it over with. The path seemed to grow longer and more confusing the further she went but eventually, she saw the end. The opening. Someone else stood before it. Someone dark and tall and winged. She began to run, because it looked like someone she knew. Someone that could help her. She tried to call for him but her voice did not come. He bent and exited the forest into what she knew the horror was before him.

Azriel didn't understand where he was. If he had dreamt of this place before, he couldn't recall it. He looked over his shoulder at the path behind him. It stretched into an unnatural darkness but it ended at his feet, and he could see something beyond the brambles before him. Somehow it seemed darker, but he pushed through anyway and into an open field. As if moved by something other than his mind, he began walking. He walked and walked and slowly, it became familiar. The path, he had never seen, but this place.....it even smelled familiar and it turned his stomach. The sky was so dark, so lacking in light, but he could see it clear as day. For the weeks the hex had tortured his mind into submission, he had looked at this view. And day after day, he had watched death here on this soil. Even after he was healed, he dreamt of this place, often watching himself in a scene unfolding, often with his hand wrapped around a delicate neck.