The Prophecy - ACOTAR

Chapter 17

Astrid could feel the rage pulsing through her body, it had slowly been building up from the moment the Attor shoved Feyre in front of the dais. She wanted to say she couldn't believe her sister would be this self-destructive, but Astrid knew it was in Feyre's bones to protect her loved ones. But it didn't make her any less frustrated about the situation. She said nothing as Amarantha tortured Clare, watched as the girl begged Astrid to help her. Begged her to let the 'evil lady' know she wasn't who she was looking for, to let her know she's never been here.

She let Clare suffer so she could keep her family safe, but Feyre was throwing that all away. By the grace of the cauldron, Amarantha never questioned the human girls claims, she never questioned Astrid about the girl. Amarantha never questioned Astrid's loyalty, as long as she let herself slide into her past persona. A side she never wanted her sister to fully see.

Astrid saw the way Feyre reacted to the glimpses she got of the former general. The way her sister looked at her made her heart plummet every time she slid back. It made her feel like a monster.

Astrid never would have thought of herself as a monster, not before she was sent to live with the humans. Not before she spent time in Prythian, where she befriended Wren and Lucien. She never second guessed her actions; she was raised to believe the world was her battlefield. To believe that she was meant to avenge what was taken from Hybern. To believe that humans were below even the lesser faeries. Astrid was doing them a favor by working to bring them back under control of the high fae, to bring the world back to what it was.

Then she spent nineteen years as a human, lived two different lives as a human. Eleven years she sent growing up in luxury, never wanting for a thing. The next eight she spent descending into poverty, wondering if she would go to sleep hungry that night. She learned the difficulties of being a human, how resourceful they are without magic. How much they work to do the same things the High Fae and even the lesser faeries, could do in half the time or with half the effort.

As a human, she was taught to hate the fae. As a fae, she was taught to hate the humans. But now, she had no idea what to think. She was still piecing everything together, figuring out what morality lessons she wanted to keep and what she wanted to toss into the dark abyss of her mind. It could take her years to sort through everything, decades even. Some things she wouldn't even consider until a situation came up. It was enough to make her head pound.

Amarantha seemed to assume that because she had centuries as a High Fae and only a couple decades as a human, she would just go right on back to how she was. Feyre seemed to think that she wasn't going to change at all, she would still be the same Astrid she grew up with. Astrid wanted to figure it all out, she didn't want to jump one way or another. She wanted to take it day by day, re-learn herself.

For her, taking a few decades and figuring out the jumbled mess that was her memories, it was nothing. But for her mortal family, it would feel like forever. They could never understand what five hundred years of memories felt like, how it would feel to sift through them and piece yourself back together from it.

Amarantha, her Hybern cousins and her aunt Camryn would never understand the impact that her time in the mortal realm held. Two decades was nothing, not in comparison to everything they lived. Nothing compared to what Astrid had lived, so how could it have any lasting impact on her?

But it was two decades of thinking like a human, thinking you only had so much time to experience the world around you. Knowing you likely wouldn't get to experience everything you wanted to, go everywhere you wanted. It was entirely new outlook on life for her, a new way to process the world.

She couldn't figure out how to translate those years into fae years, to help everyone understand what she was struggling with. She couldn't explain to Feyre how five hundred years of memories felt. She had stayed awake at night trying to find ways to explain it and the best explanation she could concoct was that it felt like she was wading through quicksand. The more she moved, the more she got pulled under, the more memories that surfaced. It felt as if the memories would never stop coming, there was no end.