𝒜 𝒞𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓉 𝑜𝒻 𝑅𝑒𝓈𝒾𝓈𝓉𝒶𝓃𝒸𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒮𝒸𝒶𝓇𝓈 | ᴀᴢʀɪᴇʟ

Chapter 48

Chapter 48

Arwen didn't remember waking, only that her first memories of consciousness were strange. Something glowed underneath her skin, running through her like veins. It was soft, almost unnoticeable, a washed-out blue. But it seeped from her skin and cuffed her wrist in a swirling of light then reached out beyond her like a rope, softly lapping at the air.

Something else pulled her away, and it swathed her in some odd sense of longing and ease. Arwen knew she was supposed to follow it, knew that turning and letting it guide her would flush away everything else. Yet she watched the strange, shadowed form before her and the other across the room. The longer she stayed there, standing, feeling, the more unclear the world became. Detailed forms lost their sharpness, colours became blurs of light and shadow. Like a hand swiped down a still-wet painting. And soon, she went along with it.

It pulled at her again, and like her body was a cloud, only stitched together by air, Arwen began to fade.

"No. N-no no."

She fought it. The peace it had been moments ago turned to agony, the delicate hands of Death turning to claws as she denied Death's claim. The blue mist that seeped from her started to whip through the clouds of the realm around her, flicking and reaching. Arwen battled against the fading, pulled herself away from Death as the rope kept searching through the haze.

Until finally, it latched onto something. Like a whip finding its mark, the rope wound itself around something no wider than her fist and pulled taut. Its colour deepened like blood pumped through it, making its way down to her. The cuff around her wrist pulsated and Arwen stopped fading.

The mist and fog dissipated, the blurs turned back to shapes and the shadows back into the forms of people. She knelt before one—the one that her rope latched itself onto. Chained her to. The shape of the face became clear; strong and honed like her father's once was. Arwen had tethered herself to Rhysand.

~

It started with screaming.

She would scream and scream and scream.

First it was out of anger—how he couldn't see her and wouldn't listen to what she was telling him. That he didn't try and find her even though she was right there. She screamed at him for hurting her, then for burying her body in the forest just outside of the city. She screamed at him because he wouldn't say her name. She screamed at Cassian too. Sometimes Azriel or even Mor and Amren. When Rhysand slept and she was forbidden to, she would stand over his bed, wondering if she screamed loud enough that she might startle him awake. He did awaken most nights, but not because of her.

Then it was out of desperation. Please. Oh, how many times she had said that word. Begged. Pleaded. When he sat in his bedroom at the foot of his bed, hands clawing through his hair as tears streamlined down his face, she begged him to see her, to know that she just wanted to hold him. To know she was right there, sitting the same as he was, hands tearing through her own hair and her cheeks drowning in her own tears. Then when they sat at the dinner table and like they always did, they laughed and they smiled and they drank. Even Azriel. She stood at the end of the table and screamed at them in hope that her voice would rattle the mountain.

Next came the whispers.

She would sit with them, any of them if her tether to Rhysand allowed the distance. And she would talk, tell them what she was thinking or if she saw something interesting as she was forced to follow where Rhysand went. Most often it was with Azriel, on this seat by the Sidra. She could almost pretend there. He went alone and just sat, watching the river. He always left a space on the bench for her. But her voice would never rise beyond a soft murmur as if the decades of screaming had finally caught up and she lost her voice. That never happened though.

She never slept, never ate, never felt the cold or sun. The only tire she ever felt was the exertion on her mind—and it was fucking exhausting. Every single day.

After one hundred years, she stopped talking altogether. Never again parted her lips. She waited until the tether forced her to move. After two hundred years she began contemplating her ways out. Trying everything from travelling as far as she could in an attempt to break the tether, to letting herself fall off the cliffside of the mountains at the House of Wind, to spending nights loathing herself for wanting her brother's death just to end her own torment.

What had become the worst part, was watching their lives without her continue. To know and accept that just because her world ended, theirs hadn't. She watched Rhysand grow as a High Lord and forget about her, and realise that she truly had been a burden to him. He never said her name, wiped her life from existence as though she had never been alive at all.

But then the truly cruel part day when she was pulled Under the Mountain with him. She saw everything. Trapped there with him. Watched him shatter piece by piece. She couldn't pick up the pieces and shattered right next to him. 

Then the war came and that was the first time Arwen had screamed in over one hundred years. The first time she had let her lips part in decades. Then Rhysand died and she was finally free. The tether faded from her wrist and she felt the pull again. Death's claim on her returned. This time, she had no intention of ignoring it.