Lonesome (Feysand One Shot)

Lonesome

This was originally published on my blog: booksbandspizza.tumblr.com

(The characters and the world in general belong to Sarah J Maas. I'm just borrowing)

- Tris

~~~~~~~~~~~

The first night I spend in Velaris is torturous.

Rhys had flown us back to the townhouse from the House of Wind. I bid him goodnight in the foyer and went upstairs to the room that had been prepared for me. I slipped into a more comfortable pair of pajamas and slipped into the bed so as to slip into another night of nightmarish dreams.

Except that I couldn't.

I waited and waited for sleep to come but it evaded me. I had never felt more awake. There was the lingering ache Tamlin had carved in me by locking me up and shutting me out, but that wasn't the reason I couldn't sleep.

It was that dreadful feeling of paranoia creeping along my skin. Anxiety twisted my insides, tightly winding them up so that every small sound, every shift in the shadows, made my eyes dart around the room, expecting to see my nightmares come to life before me.

The room was dark, since I'd blown out the candles but a bit of light from the moon managed to shine through the windows so that everything was basked in an eerie, soupy sort of gray.

I kept seeing them. Amarantha. The Middengard Wyrm. The Attor. Amarantha's other dark, terrifying beasts. The deathlike faces of the faeries I'd killed. They all met me every time I closed my eyes.

So I kept them open but that did little to help the fear eating away at my bones. The darkness of the room reminded me of my lonely cell and everywhere I looked, I expected to see one of my nightmare horrors waiting for me in the shadows.

When I had shared a bed with Tamlin, I didn't feel this anxious or this afraid. Although he had never shown a sign that he had known of the nightmares that plagued my sleep, his warmth and the mere presence of his body was a comfort to me.

And when I spent all those weeks at Rhys' mountain home, I'd been occupied by the task of learning to read and write and shield my mind to feel too paranoid at night.

But now I had none of those comforts. Tamlin had locked me up. Something I wasn't yet willing to think about so I shut him out as well. I shoved the thought and memory of him into some other part of mind and locked the door.

And without the comfort of Tamlin, without lessons to occupy my mind, the darker, uglier thoughts crept forward and began ebbing and poking.

The darkness. It was getting too much. Every shadow reminded me of that cursed mountain. I needed light. The moonlight wasn't enough. I needed warm, bright light. Something I'd been deprived off all those months rotting away in Amarantha's cell.

Perhaps it was my body reacting for me and taking control but I got what I wanted.

Light, warm, yellow daylight, filled the room. The suddenness of it jarred my sensed and I squinted until my eyes could adjust properly to it.

When it did, I looked around the room. At the no-longer shadowy corners that seemed to frightening to me. Well they weren't frightening now. Just normal corners. A normal room filled with normal furniture.

A laugh, half relief, half amusement at myself escaped from me and it felt good to hear the sound of it.

The light was coming from me, I realized. I'd conjured it up. Rhys had told me that when the High Lords gave me bits of their power, they unwittingly gave me some of their individual magical qualities too. This ability was probably from the Day Court.