Wind Wielder

Chapter 48 - Ruined Restraint and Revenge

Azriel had been dreaming of finding his mate his entire life. Five hundred long years of waiting, of yearning, of hoping, of imagining.

When he was a child he would dream of touches full of love. Someone holding his hand. A gentle touch. Someone smiling at him like he was worth seeing. He dreamed of giving a girl a rose. His mother told him she liked receiving flowers. So didn't every girl?

When he was a youth he dreamed of desire. Love was out of the question. With what he was, with what the High Lord was shaping him into, he knew he would never deserve it. But passion.

Azriel was good at passion.

Sometimes it frightened him how well he separated lust from love. How he separated cruelty from duty.

War was excellent for stripping people down into their rawest essence. Their most basic form.

Azriel was bloodlust and precision and passion. He was fire so hot it burned blue.

Some clung to him because of it, others avoided it entirely. Others couldn't handle his intensity, and were swallowed whole.

Azriel dreamed of someone who burned just as bright.

After his third century he let that fury and passion and bloodlust cool into molten rock. Then, into solid stone. He told himself love was for people better than him. People who didn't carve and cheat and kill for a living. He didn't deserve a mate, he deserved suffering. And Mor, sweet bright Mor, was everything he wanted but could never have.

And Azriel thought perhaps it seemed a little unfair for Mor, to be pined after like a starved dog. 

But for him, for Azriel, it seemed rather fitting.

Now Azriel had finally met his mate, and realized just how wrong he was.

The point was never about him. Or whether he deserved it. What he was owed or not owed, or how undeserving he was. The point was the Mother had decided to bless him with the greatest gift he had ever received.

The chance to love someone. To love Zara. And to love her well.

Azriel vowed to every mountain, every shadow, every morsel of everything he was and everything he had ever been; he would love Zara Aphelion well. He would adore her, revere her, very, very well for the rest of his immortal life.

Even if it meant putting himself and his own needs last. Even if it meant choosing to trudge through the Winter Court for days on end to spy someplace cold and wet and dreary enough to quench the fires of lust and passion and craving in his soul.

Mother above, how had it only been two days since she had left? He was going fucking insane.

Kallias would probably go insane too, if he knew Azriel had been conducting biweekly scouting sessions of the Winter Court ever since he had received reports of Autumn court spies infiltrating Winter.

He still did not know what they were looking for, much to his dismay.

Much of spying was sitting in "deeply uncomfortable positions", and waiting for "something exciting" to happen, as Cassian would say.

Azriel called it having patience.

It was perhaps why Cassian fucking hated spying so much.

Azriel smirked, despite the shivering of his limbs.

Hopefully his brother was having more luck in Illyria than Azriel was having in Winter right now.

He shook the icicles off his wings again, trudging through hip height snow.