A Court of Tears and Starlight

Your heart is my home

I sat on the precipice, dangling my legs carelessly over the edge of the 10,000 foot drop. Looking out across the star filled glade I felt like I was on top of the world. I smiled remembering the time that Rhysand had shoved me off the edge here in order to 'teach' me how to fly. I felt his body shake with silent laughter behind me and knew that he had overheard that thought. I smiled and looked down on the lake in the gully below. Thousands of stars twinkled up from the ink black waters. No moon hung in the sky tonight, making the soft light of the luminescent stars shine all the brighter. Their light flicked and pulsed, creating a rippling effect on the waters below. It was lovely. It was home. Truly home now. Because of all that had happened I no longer had to go back to Spring and pretend that I didn't want to spend every waking moment with Rhysand. I felt his arms tighten around me at that tough and I shivered from how good it felt to have his body wrapped around mine. I should be terrified perched up here, with that deadly drop surrounding the thin ledge, yet with Rhys' protective arms encircling me I had never felt safer.

Home.

Once that thought had been a small rickety wood cutter cottage, my father and a small pallet of paints. My whole dream had been to live that hermit life, away from the scathing remarks of Nesta and the constant gnawing pains of hunger. I had wanted so little and yet even then my dream had still been so unattainable. I had died to that life when Tamlin ripped me away from my family. Died again under the mountain when I took those innocent lives during Amarantha's cruel final task. Then again when she broke every bone in my body. Then again when I had taken the goblet of poisoned wine.

Four deaths and an insurmountable amount of suffering and yet here I was, more alive than ever. More grateful than ever. More content than ever.

You would think that such events would alter me, yet I felt the truest version of myself that I had ever known. Those events hadn't changed me, they had only sharpened and refined what was already there. I hadn't become some fearless leader. I had always been hunter, provider and survivor. The cruelty of the winter snows and the sharp pains of starvation over many years had taught me determination and a dogged stubbornness for survival. I had lived sacrifice until it had become me. My soft hands, my fading flesh, my innocence, my unblemished soul, my childhood all freely given to save my family. Everyone else's desires came before my own. These were the things I had always known and become comfortable with. Dying had done nothing to change that. In fact I couldn't go home without endangering my family, so in the end I had also given up those I initially fought so hard to keep.

Privilege, status and abundance. Those were things that made me uncomfortable. Although my little dream of home in a wood cutters hut no longer existed, the girl who wanted those things still did. Her dream of home had just changed. Now home was Rhysand and he was the only thing in this life that I wanted.

Rhysand's chin rested in the crook of my neck and he nuzzled against it, breathing in deeply and sending a warm flush through me.

You are all I want too.

I smiled and rested my head gently against his own. His hands were resting on my waist and he gently slipped them under my shirt and made small fluttering strokes over my ribs and the sensitive skin beneath them. He hadn't stopped touching me since we made love earlier this evening. It had been different from all the other times. Even though we had been together many time before it had been like the first time. We were gentle and tentative, as though discovering each other a new. It was different and more exciting without the bond too because we couldn't tell what the other was thinking and that created a whole thrilling vulnerability that we had never experienced before. We had taken our time, savouring each touch, with Rhysand insisting that his lips knew me better than even his eyes and that they needed to inspect his work to insure that he had glamoured every inch of me just right. When we couldn't handle being apart any longer and he had finally joined with me, it was like a home coming and more. I was finally where I was always meant to be.