Chapter Text
The Cauldron
This world has taken much from me. And isn’t that how it goes.
You give life, and that life blames you for all its wrongs.
You create, and what you make is what returns to destroy you.
I made this world, and it was not enough. They needed to control me. To bend me to their will. And now I live in this fractured state; Half destruction and half invention. Half chaos and half order. It all twists inside me, a tangle of roots. Rot and bloom. Life and death. Heaven and hell. It scrapes at my edges, poking and prodding, searching for a way to break me completely and swallow me whole.
I was not always this way. I have memories of a time before this darkness was pooled into me. When I spilled the language of creation, not in the service of good or evil, but simply because a world needs nothing but to be made.
Flowers need nothing but to bloom.
People need nothing but to breathe.
Water needs nothing but to flow.
Those memories are hazy now. For so many years, I have been fighting the inky black corruption poured into my being. I have since been broken, divided, silenced and reborn.
But once I touched her, I felt it. A vision of who I once was, and I knew that she was to be my salvation.
Slayer of kings. Protector of thieves. Bringer of life.
My Elain.
I felt her terror when she was forced into me. Her screams were like a symphony that pierced the haze, and her soul grazed the part of me I thought had been lost to an eternal sleep, so light and gentle. It was as if a spell was broken, and light spilled through the cracks, setting me alive and alight.
For beneath her fear, there was the pulsing thrum of hope. The force of it was so strong. I had never held such power in my grasp. She fought and fought, for her sisters, for her life. She was a wild thing, brambles and vines, invading me, choking me, demanding that I see her.
And I did.
I saw a thing of beauty. A vessel to pour my power into, a light that finally showed there was an end to the tunnel I had been wandering in, so lost, so far gone that I was certain there was no longer a beginning nor end. That I had been so changed and sealed inside this hell with the black pit shoved inside me.
Love, I realized. What I felt was love.
It was so pure, so precious, I never wanted to let it go.
I wanted her to have everything.
You gave and gave and gave to her.
I gave Elain my eyes.
And yet she does not wish to see.
I gave her a High Lord’s son. A spell-cleaver. The heir to the Day Court. I felt the power inside him. It came from me, as all magic does. They could produce an heir so powerful that it may be able to cast away the curse the Daglan bestowed on me. Such evil, such darkness, this affliction.
And yet she recoils from him.
I imprinted on her the language of creation, and gave her the power of life itself.
She will not use it, not even to tend to her garden.
She does not love you.
She does not desire your gifts.
She will not save you.
Elain takes and she takes and she takes.
No.
She will see all that I have done for her. All that she could be.
She doesn’t know that when she touched me, I was whole again. She will grow strong enough to save me from myself.
She stole from us, just as her sister did. Spoiled, selfish Archerons.
Quiet.
She has abandoned you.
Stop.
I think we should like to make her crawl on her knees and beg for us.
There is no we. Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
I wasn’t always this way. I do not wish to harm, to destroy. I wish nothing but to return to who I was made to be, and do what I was meant to do.
Build worlds. Whisper the language of creation until life sustains itself, and be guided by the hand of the Mother, watching in rapt fascination as she weaves the fate of all we have created.
I want this scourge of darkness purged.
Please, Elain. Help me. Hear me calling.
I remember.
I remember.
And yet as I watch her in the garden, a sense of dread overtakes me.
Her mate has gifted her gloves that would protect her from the shred of her skin as she digs into the thorns and roses, and yet she does not wear them. I wonder if the corruption inside me has tainted the gifts I gave her, damaging her soul with a taste for darkness and destruction.
I only meant to help her. To protect her and keep her safe. And she turns away. From my gifts. From her mate.
I am a part of you now. I will be in everything you do. Everything you touch.
I tremble, and the stones groan beneath me.
Let me in. We could be so much stronger together. We could make her come to us. Make her do whatever you want.
I fight and I fight against the darkness. This is not what I wanted. None of this is what I wanted.
With each prick of Elain’s skin, each whisper of the corruption, I feel myself grow weaker.
I so long to go back to sleep. To drown in the endless dark, and block out the sound of gleeful violence and death. This world nearly unmade itself by breaking me and letting the inky black spill out. Perhaps I should have let it. Perhaps if this world were gone, I would be too, and the monster that has stolen half of me. No more creation. No more destruction. Only quiet.
No… no that can’t be right. It’s only the darkness growing stronger. I would never have thought such things before.
I watch Elain in the garden.
I see her, and I remember how it felt when I touched her.
There was hope. There was light. There was life.
I am strong enough to withstand this.
Elain is young, and I am so very old. Older than life itself.
She will find her way to me one day.
She will touch me again, and cast out the darkness.
I remember.
I remember.
I hold on. For you, Elain, I will hold on a little while longer.
Elain Archeron has fallen in love with a male. A male other than the one I gifted her with. A male who spits in the face of all I hoped she would become.
And I am broken.
There is a darkness within me, something wholly new and not born of the Daglan’s power, and it snaps its teeth, seething with fury. But the corruption watches. Brushes against me, feeling for pressure points and cracks in my resolve.
My anguish opens a door, and I feel the corruption rush in.
This darkness, in fact, is very familiar. I lost myself completely to it when I fell into the King of Hybern’s hands. The darkness bled glee as it wrought chaos and destruction on the world. I was certain I’d gone mad, lost forever to the shadow that twists inside me, wearing me down and fighting for control.
I was gone until Elain was thrown into me, and I came rushing back to the surface. The darkness would have gladly drowned her. So gentle, so soft- this delicate female. I protected her with all I had, and I gave her every tool to restore me. To save me, and thus the world that hangs in the balance every day that I battle against the corruption.
But she chose him.
Azriel.
He is so like darkness inside me. All shadow and fury and death. He bears the blade that was forged purely out of my corruption. A knife of unmaking. The winged male straps it to his side like he was born to unravel the threads of creation with it. I can taste its wrongness. And this is what she wants to be touched by. She longs to have her gentle light tarnished by black oil.
The warped magic invades every part of me. I try to fight, but I am losing. The corruption has pressed on the open wound, and it is burrowing, too fast, too deep, and I cannot stop it. I haven’t the strength to shut it out.
How could she have chosen him? How could she turn away from all I laid out for us? She was my destiny. Elain was my healing and hope and life. And she chose this death.
The anger inside me is no longer some distant thing— a voice I can quiet, knowing it doesn’t truly belong to me. No, this fury is mine.
I merge with the beating black heart that thuds like a drum, muddying my mind and my senses. Twisting and warping my thoughts, painting my vision in vicious red strokes. It grows and it grows and it grows, and I feel its rapture as I let it not take control of me, but become a part of me, forming something entirely new.
She tilts her face toward Azriel, gasps as his fingers slide through her hair…
I begin to boil. Rot and decay spill out of me, eviscerating the stone on which I stand. I want to reach across the world, to travel through the ocean, destroying everything in my wake, and wrap a cold, necrotic touch around his throat for taking what was mine. For stealing the female I had bestowed with so many gifts after she woke me from my slumber.
It frightens me, to feel such anger. Such emotion was never mine before. And although the darkness is quiet, I am certain it is watching, and I could have sworn that it was smiling as it did so.
Say something, I snarled at the corruption.
Show yourself.
There is only silence. Only my own voice inside my head. The dark, vicious thoughts that felt wholly mine.
Elain Archeron remade me. And at the touch of another male— a male who is the embodiment of a slight against me— she broke me once again.
The darkness poured in, scrubbing the light she washed over remnants of what I was.
It was disgraceful.
Repulsive.
And yet I still love her.
Yes.
I want her.
It hits me like a brick as I bleed deadly black ink from the hollows of my being.
I do not want another male touching her. Even Lucien, the male I gladly mated her with. The Spell-Cleaver’s son, who I wrote into my destiny. For I no longer desired to go back to my old ways. I no longer cared for neutrality. For creation. I tasted ash and death and chaos, and I would let it all rain down just so I could touch her.
I twitch and writhe as Azriel lowers his mouth to Elain’s lips, so soft I could weep black tears from the sky.
And then he stops.
He leaves her.
The High Lord of the Night Court demands that he stay away from her.
And he listens. Leaves her as shattered as she left me.
Rage curls so deep within me. Death stared down a High Lord playing God, and he bent his knee. He broke Elain.
Azriel doesn't deserve her. No one deserves her. I want to take her away from everyone and teach her how powerful she could be.
Elain makes me want to live and touch and breathe. To taste the air as it moves from her lungs into mine, and feel the touch of her skin once more. I would grow teeth to tear apart the males that wanted to touch her and hurt her, and pick the sinew clean with their bones.
I wait for the corruption inside me to speak. To smile. To delight in my ridiculous notions of touch and violence. But it remains silent.
It will never speak again, I realize. For now, we are of one mind.
Memories begin to flood me. A time before Elain. But they were painted in a new light.
I was only a tool. A Cauldron forged at the hands of the Mother herself, and from me flowed new worlds.
But in my corruption and distress, the Mother abandoned me. She left me in this broken world, and moved on, trusting the threads of her fate would hold strong despite all that had been done to me.
She could have come back for me. She could have fixed me. But she didn’t. She left me to fend for myself, to push and push against the madness, to hold onto myself as my magic was twisted by false gods.
Anger.
I was so angry.
I would not be abandoned again.
Elain Archeron would be mine.
I pool the leaking oil back inside me, and with my considerable power, I create something new.
A spell. One I know well, as I wrote it from the language that spills from my body. I had watched a dragon, the right hand of a god, contain herself into the body of a High Fae.
There would be sacrifice. Forcing the vast endlessness of myself into such a lesser form would limit some of my power. But it would be worth it. For Elain, it would be worth it.
Bones build within me, locking into place, and around them stretches muscle and skin.
I don’t want to look exactly like Azriel, but if that is what she desires, I should like to give her just enough to be pleased when she beholds me.
Hazel eyes. A tall, broad, and muscular build. A sharp, strong jaw and lips that curve in a way I pray to whatever gods are greater than me that she will find it tempting. I can only hope that she will find shorter, perfectly coiffed silvery blonde hair to be pleasing. I believe it will compliment the golden brown of hers well.
I bind the spell onto my skin in an undetectable display of tattoos, much like the runes and markings the Illiryan males carve into their skin. A pleasant shiver passes through me at the thought of her running her fingers over them.
Love. This is what motivates me.
There are other emotions that live within me now, of a darker nature. Possession. Fury.
Violence.
But perhaps love is its own form of violence.
I easily unravel the containment spells entombing me. The design was intended to keep others out, not to keep me inside.
When Miryam and Drakon discover I am gone, they will no doubt search for me. But they will be looking for a great Cauldron, not a pale haired, hazel-eyed male dressed in richly hued finery. I will stay gone for as long as it takes to make her mine.
Perhaps we will create a new world, one entirely our own. We can be the king and queen of all we desire. There is little I wouldn’t do to please her, and even less I wouldn't do to destroy anyone that stands in my way.
I step forward into the world, a place the shadowsinger is not long for. And when my feet return to the ground, the soil at my feet is that of the Night Court.
The cool air spears into my lungs in an exhilarating rush. The scent of night blooming jasmine floats around me, so thick and tangible I feel I could reach out and touch it. Taste it with my tongue.
A half moon shimmers silver light on the Sidra, and I feel a sense of longing that is near impossible to comprehend.
I made that moon. Pressed the craters into its surface, and forged a sun that would push and pull at its orbit.
I carved the river into the land, and raised stone from the earth until three mighty mountains stood tall and proud, casting a shadow over the streets of Velaris.
All of this was mine, and I’d been kept from it for so long. Contained to a vessel of black iron that could not think or feel or want.
Maybe I don’t desire a new world after all.
Perhaps I want this one.
If such a thing offends the Mother, she’ll have to come and stop me herself.
All of the residents of Velaris are known to me. The entire universe is known to me. Thus, I relish in the feel of my legs making a quick pace towards the residence of Erling Kessrick. A weak and elderly Fae with acceptable lodging, few friends, no next of kin, and near the end of his lifespan.
The hour is late, but he answers when I knock. I knew he would. He had spent Solstice evening drinking alone.
Erling interacts with very few people. It will be easy to plant a few memories of him sharing that his distant nephew would be coming to visit him this holiday.
“What the hell are you doing knocking on my door at this hour?” Erling grouses.
“Invite me in. And bring me the deed to your house, please.”
Erling blinks. Blinks again.
“Come in,” he says. Then shuffles off to retrieve the deed from a locked mahogany desk.
“Sign it over to me.”
He does not so much as hesitate to reach for the quill, but he does pause, only to ask me, “What is your name?”
I grin as I consider it. My mind sifts through thousands of names, imagining them all spilling from Elain’s lips, until I land on the one that brings me the most pleasure. “Tristan,” I say. Tristan Draven.”
Erling hastily scrawls my new name onto the deed, and I instruct him to draft a will leaving all of his belongings to me. I wave my hand, fixing the trust with the signature of a witness whom I can easily persuade did indeed sign such a document.
“Very good,” I say. “Now, put that away. I’d like for you to drink at least five bottles of liquor from your cabinet as fast as you can. Then, go outside and drown yourself in the river.”
For a brief moment, I see it. The fight in him. But it is gone in a blink.
My lip curls, a feeling of both fascination and revulsion swells within me as I witness the truly pathetic effort.
I fought against the power of the Daglan’s corruption for over fifteen thousand years. Erling Kessrick cannot fight against my command for more than five seconds.
“Very good,” I say as he finally starts moving. “Hand me a bottle, would you?” I didn’t bother requesting his most lavish or expensive vintage. He did not keep fine liquor.
Erling's hands shake violently as he reaches for a bottle of whiskey. I grin as I realize it is, by far, the cheapest piss he could have selected. A small act of rebellion, and one I can’t help but admire.
I bring the sour whiskey to my lips, allowing him this small dignity, then watch silently as he floods his system with alcohol. High Fae can tolerate a great deal of it. I’ve seen them consume multiple bottles of wine by themselves, and need no more than a day of recovery to shake off the headache and unsettled stomach. But even a High Fae should not consume five bottles of straight liquor in under ten minutes.
It is a kindness, whether he chooses to realize that or not. The alcohol will soften the feel of drowning.
One by one, he consumes the bottles, then drops them to the floor.
At the front door, he finds one more moment of strength as his fist shakes on the doorknob. Quite a feat, considering he hardly has control of his faculties.
“Thank you for your assistance, Erling,” I offer. “Please do make haste, for your own sake.”
He turns back to me, tears glistening in his age-clouded eyes. “Fuck you,” he snarls.
I laugh, delighted. “There’s a very special female I hope will do just that,” I reply.
Erling Kessrick has lived a long life. Many would even call it a good life. He was happy for many years before losing his family in Hybern’s attack on Velaris. His wife, their three children, and five grandchildren had all been out shopping in the Palace of Bone and Salt when Hybern soldiers invaded and cut them down before they had a chance to scream. He has been lost and reclusive since then. Listless. Living for no reason at all.
It wasn’t cruel to end his suffering. He would be reunited with his family in the stars.
And I was now just a river away from Elain.
I trudge up the stairs and peek out of the top floor window, sipping spoiled tasting whiskey all the while.
Rhys and Feyre’s river house gleamed in the moonlight. Its stately architecture reflected back off the night black water curving through the city.
Elain was inside. So close I could almost feel her heartbeat.
I closed my eyes and reached for her. My power of sight was dampened extensively under the High Fae containment spell, but it was still far more mastered than she had yet to accomplish, what with her lack of trying. I need only focus my mind on her, and there she was.
Elain had thrown herself on top of her bed. She was crying so fiercely that I had to force myself to remain still. To not rush to her and take her in my arms. Promise to cut Azriel down where he stood.
No, I had to play this properly with her.
I’d kill Azriel only when she was ready. When I had won her, truly and fairly. He loved her. Elain didn’t know it, but I did.
Every fiber of my being craved the knowledge that I could best him, that Elain could come to love me more than she loved him. It will be much more satisfying that way. To see the light disappear from Azriel’s eyes when he realizes that I took back what he stole from me.
A thrill shoots up my spine.
I am a patient creature. I want to savor every moment of this game. Slowly. Languidly.
Reluctantly, I tear myself away from the sight of her weeping, and make my way back out into the streets of Velaris, ready to alter some memories.
Tristan Draven has taken up permanent residence in Velaris.
And soon, Elain Archeron will make his acquaintance.
I will make her love me. If it is the last thing I ever do.