you're horrible at laughing, love

The sound of wings in the dark night doesn't scare Dorian as much as it should. Wings don't just start flapping at random hours in the night outside the window of Adarlan's king. King. He's not king, not yet.

And what's the worst that could happen, he finds himself wondering as he steps out on his balcony in the stone castle.

"Hello, witchling."

It doesn't even surprise him that she's casually dangling her legs from the ledge.

"Hello, princeling."

"Not for long," he sighs.

She raises a white eyebrow.

...

Manon has no idea why she's here.

An old, buried part of her tries to reason, to find some form of rational explanation as to why she hauled ass and flew Abraxos for miles and miles, wandering around. And then ended up here.
But sense has left her quite some time ago, it would seem.

Morath was stifling. It was rutting impossible to keep a clear head in that hellhole. Demons and humans and witches should never be thrown together in such intimately close quarters. Not if anyone wanted to emerge with all limbs intact.

And at some point, it was just too much. The goddamned worms were a few steps short of crawling into her very throat, and she was this close to snapping.

So she took the liberty of leaving for the night. If any of those swarming shit-faces had the slightest issue, they could kiss her arse.

At first, she had flown around the mountains, thrilling in the cold wind and soothing darkness, Abraxos humming in delight beneath her. Then, she felt this thing - Manon still couldn't quite grasp the concept of feeling, ugh - and it made her choke and Darkness take it all if she could stand another mountain top.

Another barren prison.

So she flew.

It wasn't yet midnight when she glimpsed the glass wall.

...

Dorian didn't feel like the king he ought to have been.

He didn't have the faintest as to how to be a king. Damn that. He didn't have the faintest as to how to be normal human being anymore. So he did the only thing he knew.

He read.

He burrowed himself so thoroughly in books, that he barely felt the days passing. He dug up books about magic from the library in the catacombs, books about Adarlan, about Gavin and Elena, about myths and legends and stories long-forgotten, about whatever it was that Aelin Galathynius had set free in the world, thanking whatever deities had been bothered to save that library.