A COURT OF DARK SHADOWS AND LIQUID GOLD (AZRIEL X OC)

1.2: Azriel - The Doom.

❝Good luck tryna manage it

If a God is a dog, and a man is a fraud

Then I'm a lost cause❞ 

— Devil's Advocate by The Neighbourhood.

Amren was not very happy. The shadows were uneasy. Ellaria was still unconscious. And Azriel's day couldn't have started any worse.

He hadn't slept in forty-eight hours. It wasn't that much, he had spent more time without sleep, although sleep had always been a very relative term for him. Because, in one way or another, his consciousness was awake in the shadows, listening and observing.

"How long until she wakes up?" Amren asked, staring at him.

"It was a couple of hours when I gave it to her" he replied, because Nuan herself had told him that there was no way to predict how the woman's body would process the antidote. So there was no way to know how long she might be asleep. "So anytime now" he said and looked up the stairs unconsciously, waiting for her to appear. The shadows whispered to him, telling him that she was still sleeping, safe and sound in the bed.

"Did she say anything?" Amren asked again, in the same tone as before, as she peered at the top of the stairs too, hastily.

"She managed to tell me her name. Ellaria." he lied, as the shadows turned away from him to watch Ellaria sleep, but he threw them back to their place. Don't harass her, he scolded them, and they approached him again grudgingly.

For a moment, Amren looked at him as if trying to see through him. But if she caught the lie in his words, she didn't say anything and simply headed for the door to prepare to welcome Ellaria to Windhaven.

Rhysand, Feyre, and Cassian were with Morrigan in the Court of Nightmares, only returning at nightfall the next day. So, until then, he and Amren decided that Ellaria should stay in the camp, a controlled ground where. A place guarded enough to her in case of hostility. Contain, don't stop. Those were the words Amren had chosen, and that stuck with Azriel. It would be safer there than in that cabin they were in, where the wards might prevent them from defending themselves properly if necessary.

Azriel did not ask what she was, he just took the little that Armen said and did not ask for more. But he knew when Amren saw her, by the way her power (or what was left of it) spread out around her protectively, that Ellaria was something. Something that even Amren was worried about.

The shadows began to try to sneak away, again.

The truth was that Ellaria hadn't said anything to him when he'd found her lying in the mud in the rain last night. The truth was that she just whispered incoherently while burning for the fever, all in a language he didn't understand or recognise at all. She had dragged herself out of the hunt. He didn't know how she had done it with her fever so high, but he had found her there. He covered her with his wings to keep out the rain, and then helped her take the antidote. Azriel held her until she was totally unconscious again, because when he tried to move her back in while conscious, she groaned louder, tried weakly to pull away from him and go back through the mud towards the woods. The truth was that she had managed to say a name, but it was not her own. Mathias, she whispered desperately as she fell unconscious again.

The shadows were the ones that told him her name, they whispered it to him as he flew towards the cabin with her in his arms, after catching her in her free fall. When he had asked how they were so sure of it, they had told him that the wind had whispered it to them. They began to repeat it from that first moment, as if it were a catchy song. They also whispered to her what he already knew, that he had felt when they looked at each other when he caught her in the air.