Azriel x Reader
Angst, Slow Burn, Psychological, Unreliable Narrator
The truth will set you free — or so Azriel thought.
The necklace was small enough to disappear entirely inside Azriel's closed fist.
A simple thing. A thin silver chain, a single moonstone pendant, nothing grand or ceremonial about it at all, the kind of gift a male gives when he's still working up the nerve to give something bigger. He'd found it in a market stall in Velaris years ago, drawn to it before he'd even fully understood why, and he could still remember, with a clarity that felt almost cruel now, the exact look on your face when he'd fastened it around your neck for the first time.
You'd worn it every day since. Every single day, for years, until the day you hadn't come home at all, and it had turned up instead in the grass outside a house that should never have let anything happen to you, clasp broken, chain slightly bent, as if it had been torn free in whatever had taken you.
He hadn't let it out of his hand since.
Mor found him like that, sitting on the floor of his bedroom with his back against the foot of the bed, the necklace clenched so tight in his fist that the chain had left thin, pale marks pressed into his palm.
"Az." Her voice was gentle in a way it rarely was, careful, the tone she reserved for things that could actually break. She crossed the room slowly and lowered herself down beside him without asking permission, close enough that her shoulder brushed his. "How long have you been in here?"
He didn't answer right away.
He didn't fully know the answer himself. Hours, at least. Possibly longer. Time had stopped meaning very much to him somewhere around the fourth sleepless night, blurring into one long, unbroken stretch of searching and failing and searching again.
"I can't find her." His voice cracked on it, raw and unraveling, nothing composed left in it at all. "I've searched everywhere, Mor, every court, every contact, every favor I've ever called in, and I have nothing. Four days, and I have nothing."
His hands had started to shake around the necklace, knuckles white.
"I'm supposed to be good at this. Finding things. Finding people. It's the one thing I've ever actually been good for, and I can't even do that when it's her, when it matters more than it has ever mattered, I am useless, Mor, completely useless, and she is out there somewhere because of it—"
"Az. You can't blame yourself."
"I don't know how to stop."
Mor didn't offer him easy comfort. She never had, not really, not the kind that smoothed things over instead of sitting inside them, and he was grateful for that now more than he could have said, because easy comfort would have shattered whatever thin, fragile thread was currently holding him upright.
"You need to eat something," she said instead, quiet. "And sleep, even an hour. I know you don't want to hear that."
His head came up, something sharp and exhausted in his eyes. "I can't."
"I know." Her gaze softened, taking in the hollows under his eyes, the state of him, unwashed, unslept, barely holding together. "I'm not asking because I think you'll listen. I'm asking because someone has to keep saying it, so that when you finally do collapse, it isn't from no one having tried."
He closed his fist back around the necklace, slow, deliberate, and let out a breath that shook more than he wanted it to.
"I don't have room left in me to be careful, Mor."
"I know." She reached over and covered his closed hand with both of hers, not prying it open, just holding it, holding him, the way she had a thousand times over five hundred years of watching each other through worse than this. "That's exactly why the rest of us are going to have to be careful for you."
Azriel said nothing. He simply sat there, the necklace warm now from the heat of his own hand, and let himself, for one more minute, be held together by someone else before he had to be the one holding everything together again.
Rhys found them there a while later, and one look at his face was enough to tell Azriel this wasn't another dead end.
"Something happened at the Prison," Rhys said, no preamble at all, his voice tight with a kind of controlled urgency Azriel hadn't heard from him in years. "Four days ago. The night she vanished. One of the old wards deep in the Prison tripped, something that hasn't stirred since Amren was held there, and it's taken me until now to trace it back and understand what it meant."
Azriel was on his feet instantly. "Understand what?"
Rhys hesitated, and that hesitation, more than anything he'd said so far, sent something cold straight through Azriel's chest.
"She went there," Rhys said finally, quiet. "Alone. Without me. Which means she didn't want me to find out."
"Why would she go to the Prison?" Azriel's voice had gone low, dangerous, the words coming out clipped and precise, like he was holding something enormous together by sheer force of grammar. "She's never had reason to go anywhere near that place in her life."
"I don't know." Rhys shook his head, something genuinely lost in his expression, no answer to offer at all. "I don't have a reason for you, Az. I only know she went, alone, and never came back."
Azriel's jaw tightened, the not-knowing worse, somehow, than any answer could have been.
"We'll find out why when we get there," Rhys said, already moving toward the door. "Right now, we go get her back. That's the only part of this that matters."
Azriel didn't trust his own voice enough to answer. He simply nodded, once, sharp, and let his brother pull him toward the door, toward the Prison, toward whatever answers waited on the other side of a question neither of them yet knew to ask.
The Prison rose out of the sea like something the world had tried, and failed, to forget, a mountain of black stone riddled with tunnels older than the courts themselves, silent in the particular way that only truly ancient places managed to be silent.
Rhys opened the gate with a shallow cut across his own palm, blood sizzling faintly against stone that had waited, patient, for exactly this kind of key for longer than either of them could imagine. The doors groaned inward, and the dark beyond swallowed the last of the daylight whole.
"Stay close," Rhys said, low. "Nothing that lives down here deserves your trust, least of all him."
They found the Bone Carver's cell deep in the mountain's heart, the air around it thick and cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature at all. Azriel had heard the stories, of course, an ancient god fallen from some other world entirely, hiding here on purpose from siblings far more dangerous than himself, showing each visitor a different face depending on what lay closest to their heart.
The shape that met Azriel's eyes when he stepped into the cell stole the breath clean out of his lungs.
Not quite. Some echo of you, golden-lit and wrong in the same subtle way the entity's illusion had been wrong. Azriel understood immediately: this was simply the shape the Carver had chosen for him. A cruelty disguised as courtesy.
"Shadowsinger," it said, in your voice, and the sound of it very nearly brought him to his knees. "I wondered when you'd come looking."
"Don't." The word tore out of him like a blade, shadows snapping tight and violent around his shoulders, every trace of composure gone in an instant. "Don't wear her voice while you speak to me."
The Carver tilted your borrowed head, considering, taking its time, clearly enjoying the effect it had already managed to have. Then, slowly, the shape shifted, not to the dark-haired boy Rhys had murmured about under his breath, but to something else entirely.
Small, no older than five or six, with your exact mouth, your exact chin, a face so precisely, achingly familiar that Azriel's knees very nearly did give out this time. But the eyes staring up at him weren't yours at all.
Azriel made a sound he didn't recognize as his own.
"Enough," Rhys snapped, stepping half in front of his brother, voice gone hard. "That's enough."
The Carver only smiled, in no rush at all to let the moment pass. "Interesting, isn't it," it mused, in the child's small, lilting voice, "how easily I can give a male a face he might never know, and mourn anyway."
Azriel said nothing. The shape didn't change again. It simply stood there, small and impossible and watching him with those borrowed, familiar eyes, and he understood, with a fresh wave of nausea, that this was the face it had decided to keep for the rest of the conversation. Not out of mercy. Out of cruelty precise enough to look, almost, like a gift.
"You know why we're here," Rhys said, stepping forward, jaw tight, refusing to look at the small, wrong shape any longer than he had to. "Just tell us why she came to see you."
The Carver considered them both a long moment, savoring the wait the way it seemed to savor everything, something old and patient and entirely without mercy moving behind its borrowed eyes.
"Ohhh." The sound came out of it slow, savoring, delight blooming plain across that small, borrowed face. "She came to me like a trembling fawn."
It stopped there. Simply stopped, letting the silence stretch, watching Azriel's face with open, cruel interest as the not-knowing visibly tore at him.
"And?" Azriel's voice had gone thin with the effort of holding steady.
"And she was frightened," the Carver continued, unbothered, taking its time with every word like it had all the centuries in the world to spend, which, Azriel supposed, it did. "Frightened of the question she carried more than she was frightened of this place, which tells you something about the size of what she was carrying, doesn't it?" It tilted its head, watching him squirm. "Would you like to know what the question was, Shadowsinger? Or should I make you ask for that too."
Azriel's jaw worked, every instinct in him screaming to demand it outright, and some older, wearier instinct warning him that giving this thing exactly what it wanted would only cost him more. He said nothing. He simply held its gaze and waited.
The Carver seemed to enjoy that too.
"Did you bring me a bone?" it asked instead, tilting its small, borrowed head, something eager and childlike sliding into the question despite the ancient thing wearing it. "You know my price, Shadowsinger. I do so love a good bone."
Azriel didn't hesitate. His shadows lashed out, fast and vicious, and a moment later something enormous cracked against the stone floor of the cell, a bone larger than anything that should have belonged to the fae world at all, dragged from some kill in his past the Carver would no doubt recognize the instant it saw it.
"There's your bone," Azriel said, voice flat, lethal. "Now talk."
The Carver's borrowed eyes went wide with delight, small hands reaching for the offering with open, gleeful reverence.
"Tell me." The words came out cracked, barely more than a breath.
"She wanted to know if the bond she felt was real." The Carver let that settle a moment before continuing, unhurried, clearly relishing the way Azriel's whole body had gone rigid.
Azriel's breath punched out of him like he'd been struck. His hand shot out, gripping the cell's threshold hard enough that the ancient stone bit into his palm, the only thing keeping him upright at all. "Say that again," he managed, barely audible.
The Carver did not oblige him. It simply continued, taking its time, savoring every second of his unraveling.
"If it ran both ways, or only through her." Another pause, longer this time, deliberately cruel in its patience. "I told her the truth. I always tell the truth, whatever else people believe of me."
Something in Azriel's chest gave way entirely, a slow, silent collapse he felt happen in real time, like a wall he'd spent five hundred years building had finally, all at once, run out of reasons to keep standing. "What did you tell her." His voice barely made it past a whisper, wrecked, desperate, everything he'd never let anyone see laid bare in four small words.
"That's a second question," the Carver said, almost gently. "You'll owe me for it."
"I don't care what I owe you." Azriel's voice cracked entirely, nothing left to hide behind at all. "Tell me what you told her."
The Carver studied him a moment longer, weighing something Azriel couldn't guess at, and then, slow and deliberate, it smiled.
"I told her yes," it said. "I told her the bond ran both ways, long before either of you had the courage to say so out loud. She left this cell believing, for the first time, that she might actually be loved the way she loved. And on her way back through the tunnels, something that has been sleeping in the deepest part of this mountain for longer than even I have existed felt that hope moving through her, bright and warm and entirely unguarded, and decided it wanted to keep it for itself."
The silence that followed was total.
Azriel didn't move. Couldn't. Mate. He had loved you in secret for years, careful and quiet, certain that whatever he felt toward you was simply his own to carry and no one else's burden. He had felt something else too, sometimes, a pull he couldn't quite name, a thread tugging at his chest whenever you were near, but he had never let himself trust it enough to call it what it was. He'd told himself feelings that large could deceive a person. That wanting something didn't make it real. He had never, not once, let himself believe the pull might run both ways, that you might have felt it too and carried the same fear he had, the same silence.
He hadn't known. That was the truth of it, raw and humiliating now that it stood in front of him. He hadn't known, and he'd let that uncertainty cost you four days alone in the dark, punished for finally daring to ask the question he'd never once found the courage to ask himself.
His hands had curled into fists at his sides, shaking. Rhys's hand found his shoulder, steady, silent, and Azriel let it hold him there a moment, because if he let go of that single point of contact, he wasn't certain what was left of him would stay standing at all.
"Where," he said finally, when he could trust his voice again. "Where is she now."
The Carver tilted its small, borrowed head, something almost pitying in the gesture. "Oh," it said, mild, "I don't think that's quite the right question, Shadowsinger."
Something in Azriel snapped.
"Don't play games with me." The words tore out of him in something closer to a snarl than speech, shadows exploding off his shoulders in every direction, filling the cell with restless, furious dark. He was on his feet without remembering standing, every trace of composure gone, something wild and half-mad blazing behind his eyes. "Tell me where she is, or I swear to every god still listening I will tear this mountain apart stone by stone until I find her myself."
The Carver didn't flinch. It simply watched him, patient, entirely unbothered by the threat, and let the silence stretch until even Rhys's grip on Azriel's arm had tightened in warning.
"Very well." It sighed, put-upon, like a tutor indulging a slow student. "There is a cave, hidden deep, older than even this Prison, sealed off from every map your kind has ever drawn of this place. That is where you will find her. There. Wrong question answered, since you insist on asking it badly." Its ancient eyes, wrong and unblinking in that small borrowed face, held Azriel's without mercy. "The better question, Shadowsinger, is not where."
Azriel went very, very still.
"What do you mean," he said, low, "who."
The Carver said nothing further. It simply watched him, small and patient and cruel, letting the question hang unanswered in the cold air of the cell, savoring, one last time, exactly how much that silence cost him.
Rhys's hand tightened hard on Azriel's arm, pulling him back from wherever the silence had taken him. "Az. Every second we stand here is a second she doesn't have. We need the rest of it. Ask him properly."
Azriel didn't move. He couldn't stop staring at that small, borrowed, impossible face, at the question it had left hanging in the air like a blade not yet dropped.
"Who," he said again, barely a whisper this time. "Who is she with?"
The Carver's small, borrowed face went, for the first time since they'd entered the cell, genuinely still.
"A creature older than your courts," it said, quiet now, none of its earlier relish left in its voice at all. "It is feeding on her, slowly. It has made her wildest dream into an illusion to keep her content, docile, unaware. She lives inside that dream even now. And with every day that passes inside it, it steals a little more of her power, so quietly she will not even notice the theft until there is nothing left to steal."
"How do we find it." Azriel's voice had gone rough, worn thin, exhaustion bleeding through every word despite the urgency underneath it, his heart hammering hard enough against his ribs that he was certain the Carver could hear it too.
The Carver tilted its small, borrowed head, something almost amused threading through its ancient stillness.
"You already have the answer," it said, delight curling soft and awful through every word. "Written in your chest, Shadowsinger, in that thread you were too much of a coward to follow while she was still safe enough to wait for you." A small, cruel smile. "How poetic, that it takes losing her to make you finally look. Go on, then. Try not to be too late."
Azriel didn't answer it. He didn't give it the satisfaction of a single word more.
He simply turned and walked out of the cell without looking back. Rhys followed a beat behind, pausing just long enough at the threshold to glance back once, and found the Carver still smiling, small and delighted and entirely without conscience, watching them go like the whole encounter had been nothing more than a pleasant diversion.
Rhys didn't waste breath on it. He turned and followed his brother into the dark.
Azriel made it perhaps twenty steps beyond the Prison's outer gate before his legs simply stopped working.
He caught himself hard against the black stone wall, one hand braced flat against it, the other pressed to his own chest like he could physically hold together whatever had just come apart inside him.
His breath was coming too fast, too shallow. Shadows lashed wild and directionless off his shoulders, and for one terrible moment Rhys thought he might actually go down.
"She's mine." The words tore out of him, raw, furious, aimed at nothing and everything at once. "She has been mine to protect since before either of us understood what that meant, and I failed her. I failed her, Rhys. She went looking for an answer I should have given her myself, years ago, and instead she got dragged into the dark by something that's been picking her apart while I searched every wrong place in Prythian for her."
"Don't." He rounded on his brother, eyes wild, shadows boiling thick enough to swallow the space between them. "Don't tell me this isn't my fault. Don't you dare stand there and tell me that."
"I wasn't going to say that." Rhys's voice stayed level, deliberately so, refusing to match the fire in his brother's. "I was going to tell you to breathe, because you are no use to her collapsed against a wall, and we are wasting time you don't have arguing about blame instead of moving."
Azriel's chest heaved, the fight in him not quite draining but redirecting, sharpening back into something usable.
"I can't—" he said, quieter now, wrecked, and stopped, started again. "I can't lose her, Rhys. She is everything to me."
Rhys gripped his shoulder, hard, grounding. "Then follow the bond. You said you could feel it. So stop standing here proving him right about how long you waited, and go."
They looked at each other a long moment, something unspoken passing between five hundred years of brothers who had never needed many words to understand one another.
"You go find your mate," Rhys said, quiet now, steady. "And you bring her home."
Azriel didn't need telling twice.
a/n : First time having Azriel POV !! Did you think it would turn into this ?
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