#ecrit.pdf

     Strange, she thinks, that such a storied blade would be wielded by someone so unstoried such as herself. Truth-Teller likes to hum its secrets; she can hear it try to sing its exploits to her. The stamped runes on the blade make no literary sense to her, yet she knows what they say anyways.

     The morning is chill, misted over, and the pale stone pathways she traces ignorantly of any direction. The brambles are in bloom, strange silvery flowers dotting their vines. If she looks hard enough she can see veins running through the delicate petals crowing the dark centres.

     She abandoned her shoes long ago, wanting to feel everything she could, down to the slightest of ridges of grey slate stone underfoot.

     The soft slap of bare feet, the sound of her thoughts, are muffled by a mist crawling between new morning light and night-chilled stone. Elain lightly presses a finger, then two to the edge of the star-bright blade. She ponders the Illyrian steel, wondering how old the blade is, wondering if it minds being held by someone other than its owner. How strange it feels, to hold something so deathly delicate.

     It almost makes Elain want to imitate it, the slender beauty of a blade sharper than hunger, than winter winds. Better. Stronger.

     Her brow furrows. Her gaze narrows onto the runes tamped onto the blade, their intricate curves so much like Feyre’s tattoo lacing up and down her arm.

     Truth-Teller, she muses. Strange, when the male wielding it is notorious for keeping secrets.

     Her steps halt, head perking up when she hears something. Some deeper, baser sound than the hush of plants blooming and the thrum of life throughout the overgrown brambles.

     Nothing is just plain something anymore, there’s always something else, something behind it, something in it. She’s not sure how she knows but there is something more to this forgotten garden in this grey morning.

     But she is not afraid. Not at all. Instead she watches, blinking, at the tall, bramble-shrouded trees, and there— there they were, those shapes shifting between light and dark.

     The shapes coalesce, like everything falling into place, like blowing out a candle in reverse, into one figure: mighty and quiet.

     Azriel.

     Truth-Teller goes silent.

     Elain smiles at him, wandering thoughts lost to the winds and breezes. There he is. She’s been looking for him.

     One corner of his mouth quirks up, so unlike the sombre self he is around others. She’s realized that he’s more at home when he’s drawn deep into himself, left alone with his thoughts. She hates to break this silence that feels like a deep lungful of fresh air, but she does it anyways.

     “Hello, Azriel.”

     He blinks and dips his head at her as she paces softly towards him. As is become their habit, he offers her his arm; she takes it without ceremony. Her eyes are drawn downwards again, to his Siphons, drowning in blue, and the scarred hands they rest on. She smiles; a thought brushes past and says beautiful. They trace the paths of the thorn garden for a few minutes more, neither speaking nor looking at the other, yet still listening. Listening to their steps, feeling the warmth of the other underhand. Elain enjoys it for the next few moments, the singular feeling of the solitude that he insulates her against.

     “Azriel?” she begins again.

     He picks up his head, which had been ducked in thought; eyes that had been unfocused now focus so sharply on her that if it were anyone else, Elain might cringe away. But this is Azriel, her Azriel. So much goes unspoken in that sentiment.

     She gets lost in those deep, shadowed eyes of his, trying to pull sense of the shade swirling between the greens and browns in them, before shaking herself, reminding herself.

     She lifts Truth-Teller, putting it in the space she cleaves between their bodies yet refusing to let go of Azriel entirely. She instinctually spins the knife so that the blade rests in her palm, so that she may present his dagger to him, hilt-first.

     His hands are far to scarred and beautiful for her to take the chance of nicking him with his own blade.

     “Truth-Teller,” she begins, then panics as she wonders what to say next. Pontification has never been her strong suit. She needn’t have worried, though, as Azriel’s free hand clasps the hilt and tugs it free, gently, carefully, as if he is afraid to nick her.

     It seems they are both unwilling for the other to be hurt.

     They start walking again, arm-in-arm. Elain’s fingers patter out a tiny beat against Azriel’s arm, then the heather holding the siphon into place, then his hand.

     Heat rips through her, scalding, boiling heat. She screams and yanks her hands close to her chest, cradling them there. She’s inadvertently dragged Azriel’s arm towards herself as well, and as she keeps screaming—

     Her hands—

     No. Not her hands. Azriel’s hands. Azriel’s panic, his horror, his helplessness, centuries past. Buried wrist-deep in vats of roiling, popping oil.

     Feeling rush through her of the assault’s aftermath: despair, shame, disgust, and it only makes her scream harder, this time in frustration. Cassian had told her the story buried in Azriel’s scars; even then, it made her rage.

     A cool touch to the centre of her palm brings her back: first the right, then the left. Kisses with all the gentility of butterflies. She is sobbing now, but now she sees silvers and pale greens of a garden, not the harsh browns and dull greys of an Illyrian war-camp. Sharp gravel digs into her backside and strong, stubborn arms band around her. She sits on the ground, Azriel holds her.

     He hold her through the aftermath, as she drags herself through the secondhand recovery. Everything catches up to her in a single sharp second and she scrabbles away to retch in the bushes.

     Azriel follows silently, pulling her hair back. The hand he wraps around her shoulders is soothing and yet—

     And yet—

     Elain stands. This is— that was—

     Something she was not meant to see.

     She can only imagine what Azriel sees in her eyes as he stands with her, as she looks back at him, truly looks back at him.

     But he flinches. And she sees that he knows.

     With the back of her hand pressed against her lips, Elain sees Azriel open his mouth to say something before she winnows away.

     Before the Cauldron, before the endless darkness that swallowed her whole and shoved its magic down her nose and throat, through her veins...there were no dreams. Even in the deep heat of summer in the hut they called home, when Feyre would sometimes sleep on the floor because it would be too hot for all three sisters to sleep on the wrought-iron bed, there would be no dreams. No wild thrashing, no screaming terrors of silent drowning to pull her as a hook through her navel from sleep.

     She dozes, the window before her bolted shut. She knows why. She may not be as brilliantly burning as Nesta, or like Feyre, enduring as sure as the stars, but Elain’s head is not stuffed full of flowers and a simple future.

     It is not remembering, and it is not dreaming. Not quite. It is something that sucks her away into deep memory, something buried not in her mind, but in her heart, her gut. A sleepy, faraway pull inside herself that does not care for the panic she feels at the tug.

     She dozes away, and for the first time, she begins to understand the concept of a dream.

                                        — Prythian, Human Realms, 20 years ago. 

     Her new sister’s tiny fists bump up and down into the air as Elain watches with childlike fascination. This baby, hardly a month old and already sporting a headful of golden brown hair, suddenly shrieks and yanks on one of Elain’s pigtails.

     The pinch at her scalp surprises her; Elain shrieks in reply, nudging away from her baby sister, but still keeping eye contact with her. She feels outnumbered; both Nesta and Feyre have those blue-grey eyes. Elain whines about how unfair it is to Feyre’s wet nurse, who smiles indulgently and placates her with something that the child Elain doesn’t bother to listen to; she goes back to frowning at Feyre, who solemnly looks her sister in the eye and burbles quietly.

     Elain frowns again. Feyre’s even more like Nesta, her quiet and weighty stare the same in Feyre’s soft face as it is in Nesta’s.

     But Elain watching, Elain dreaming, is distantly startled by how fat and healthy her baby sister’s face looks, a disrupting image contrary to the harsh lines that had become— that will become— Feyre’s face in all the years to come. She hears the wet nurse as she says something about how every good thing comes in threes.

     She feels another tug in her gut as she is sped away.

                                        — Prythian, House of Wind.

     She hears footsteps and tenses, unable to discern their origin. For all she knows, Elain could be hearing the steps of someone floors above her, or those just outside the hallway and this is all too much, she thinks, still curled into the nook at the window. Panic, and a small prayer that whoever paces so softly avoids this room.

     She is given no such leniency, yet who slips in the doors is not a stranger.

     His name is Azriel, she recalls, and he looks... harried. He does not acknowledge her. There are tells written all over his body that there’s so much more tension he’s feeling than showing— the precise, clipped steps; the jaw loose, intentionally not clenched; the way his exhales sound more like pants through his nose— she begins to panic. This kind of person, the kind that bottles everything deep inside, is so likely to explode. Nesta has all the same tells, though Nesta is better at hiding them.

     But where is Nesta?

     Was she not sitting there, in that sun-lit spot before Elain dozed off, pretending to calmly flipping through pages?

     Elain already knew the answer, deep in her gut; no, this was not the same late afternoon she had dozed off into.

     Her curiosity is a distant feeling, detached from herself, like a child tugging on its mother’s hem. She remains coiled into her seat, yet continues to watch.

     She isn’t here, not in this moment that she is witnessing, she realizes.

     Azriel continues to pad over to her window. Through this dream-memory, she sees everything, even the shadows that crowd his face. She feels herself reaching out to him across a divide she doesn’t know how to name, wanting— wanting something, perhaps to soothe, the way she soothed the constant tensions between Nesta and Feyre lifetimes ago. Her hands seem so thin, so intangible, she starts to choke on a distinct frustrated anger, that she cannot reach out into this, her surroundings, that now she may be stronger in body yet carry shattered and twisted pieces of a soul. She feels incapable of doing anything except listening.

     Elain sees the way her hands shake as she pulls them back towards her body but does not feel the bite of her nails as she digs them into her palms.

     She looks back to Azriel, who now has an arm braced on the window panes so that he may cast an equally frustrated glare out onto the reddish mountains ringing Velaris. He does not look, he does not see, his thoughts have turned inwards, and she cannot reach him.

     Not only herself, but Elain feels that he has locked himself in, away from the world, into a coldness so deep it will never melt.

     Some days, Elain wishes for the same, so that she may have Nesta’s same fortitude against the world that seems so determined to tear her apart in ways deliberately meant for her.

     But Azriel draws Elain’s gaze again, a dark spot against the sunlight afternoon streaming in through the window they are both bracketed against.

     The contrast: a scarred, devastating shadowsinger, darkness walking, sunlight through wings flecked with scars, and— she is startled to see— mottled skin, warped with burns, wrapping around every inch of his hands, disappearing under the gauntlets holding deep blue stones.

     She imagines the picture this must make, so vividly that it’s almost vulgarly impossible against the haze that seems to constantly drag around her these days.

     There it is, her crystal-clear picture: a window, tall and airy, bracketed by heavy curtains. Tucked to one side, a hazy figure, feet tucked underneath herself as she nestles into a warm chair, almost sinking into it. Golden, almost hazy in view, like the sun itself almost forgot to line this creature in its light.

     The figure’s face is turned sideways and tipped upwards to look at another, starkly; the sun shies away from this one. All solid lines, deep and dark, and finer, whiter ones in the wings. A grounding focal point. Constantly, those shadows, his shadows, moving, curling close like the word intimacy is not enough for them. Stark, classical planes of the face, creased into pain, an agony so simple and stark that Elain— the dreaming Elain, the waking Elain, not the picture-Elain— feels a biting need to reach out. Fists simply clenched. Conflict has never sat well with her. And conflict is running her ragged fingers over him.

     What had happened, she wonders, to make his knuckles bone-white in their clenching? What did he see, what has he heard? Is he hurting for himself or for someone else?

     The poignant picture dreaming-Elain is concocting blows away like dandelion fluff when Azriel’s forehead thumps against the forearm braced on the glass and his pained gaze slides her way. For the first time, the rapid thud of Elain’s heart is not painful or panic-induced.

     It feels as if Azriel is looking at her directly. Surely he isn’t, surely he can’t see her, yet the sorrow in his eyes feels as if it reflects her own.

     Two mirrors, positioned to reflect each other, will create an infinite corridor. Or an infinite reflector. This is how their pain is echoed, though the sources of their burdens are unknown to each other.

     Elain tells herself that this is impossible, that there is no way some memory from the past can see a watcher from the future, or the in-between, or wherever this dream-vision is coming in from. The tension in Azriel’s shoulders seem to lessen as a look of hopelessness sets in.

    She knows so little about this man, this male, yet out of all three of his brothers it seems like his are the shoulders that carry the weight of the worlds, both human and fae. A hand drifts toward his shoulder, his face, him, but before she can do anything, Azriel breaks eye contact and turns his face away, face carefully blanked of any signal of pain.

     The loss feels more weighty than it should.

     Elain feels a breeze through the detached feeling clouding her mind. The window in her waking world was shut.

                                        — Prythian, House of Wind, the Present.

     Elain blinks back into the waking world, head still clouded over— yet something feels different. She feels...different.

     There’s Nesta again— when Elain looks over she only sees the tail end of Nesta’s gaze as it darts away from her and back to the book on Nesta’s lap.

     And something else...heavy shadows. Heavy like Azriel’s shadows. She doesn’t know how she knows, that these shadows are his, or that he’s even watching. Somewhere, he is healing from a bolt through his chest; this she knows; she saw the pale bolt through his chest on Hybern. Morrigan had told her when she had asked. Yet Elain has an indiscriminate, imprecise feeling that somehow, he is still watching.

     Elain’s newly-passed visions are settling dervishes, once making a scene, such a scene; now, they retreat into memory. She’s just not sure that it’s her memory. She’s not even sure that it is, in fact, memory. Everything seems either too precise, too sharp, or not being able to comprehend what precision means.

     She saw— in dreaming, these new dreams, what she calls dreams— she recalls seeing gold, and soot, and pain, and weighty secrets hiding in shadowed wings, shadowed eyes, yearning to be told. And Azriel. And such yearning. Not only of secrets longing for freedom, but for one soul to meet another, even through blind fumbling in the dark, just to truly know another.

     Elain’s wrenching ponderings are disrupted. Something stirs silently in the corner of her sight. She turns in her seat.

     Nothing, save a silent, heavy shadow.

But it was hard, so hard, to see her baby sister, draped in sliver and white, lips painted red, while the only red Gevherhan bore was the red rimming her eyes from crying.

And they both wore wedding dresses; they were both glinting in the candlelight. 

And then Gevherhan had put a blade through her heart.

Gevherhan feels as though she is drowning, set adrift in the sea of despair she died in. She does not know how they buried her — what kind of funeral did Murad give her? Did her mother, the effervescently regal Valide, forgive her? She knew the moment she heard her mother’s screams that she had made a mistake, that she would be full of regret and carry those screams in her soul until the end of her days.

A hand wraps around her bicep, tugging her upwards. Water still grabs greedily at her gown, her heavy jewels and veil, but it is no match for the dark hand on her arm, dragging her up, up, and up.

She breaks the surface, gasping mightily, and when she can breathe again, she sees the stars. Bright and bold and dripping with enough light it seems that they are weeping. She forgets the presence beside her and revels in their tears.

Tears for her, she thinks, with a rough, wet laugh escaping her.

A hand tugs on her arm again, this time leading her away from the reverie of the stars. She looks — to her left is a woman, dark skin turned blue by the light of the moon. She’s leading Gevherhan towards a small boat, where a man holds a lantern, swaying gently in the current.

She’s not quite sure where she is now, for though the can pick out the constellations that she could have seen from her bedroom window, she can see no shore, neither city lights nor lights of Topkapi Palace. And it is silent. Utterly silent.

They reach the boat, the woman and she, with both strangers helping to haul a sodden Gevherhan into the boat. The man, she can see, is dressed much like her own brothers, though the fashion is decades out of date. She sees that the hunch of his back is not an intentional one, not a slump, but rather the kind a person is born with. But what strikes Gevherhan is how kind his face looks, how intelligent. Pale eyes glint under candlelight and Gevherhan shivers.

The woman is in the boat now, taking up oars to propel them in a direction that Gevherhan can’t distinguish.

“Are you an angel?” she blurts, reverting to a childhood habit. She looks over her shoulder, towards the woman. “Are you both angels?”

The woman smiles and shakes her head, a tinge of sadness to her expression. Somehow, Gevherhan can see more clearly — there are now more lanterns than the solitary one the man had been holding.

“Her name is Gölge,” the man says. The woman nods in deference, still paddling onwards.

“Thank you, Gölge Hatun,” Gevherhan says, first by rote, then more sincerely, “Thank you.”

Gögle nods again, smiles, then jerks her chin forwards, indicating that Gevherhan should listen to the man sitting in the bow of the boat.

Gevherhan turns forward again, tugging at the tiara still pinned to her hair. She doesn’t care what she rips out; she simply wants the damned thing off.

Her mother’s screams echo again. The stars twinkle brighter.

“Strange, to think that Gölge Hatun saved your mother in much the same way that she just saved you.” The man squints at her and Gevherhan shifts in her seat. “Though it was under quite different circumstances,” he continues. “She was still Mahpeyker, the cariye. Not quite such the formidable Valide she’s grown to be.”

Gevherhan shifts again, this time to lean forward. “You knew my mother?” she pesters, for she is quite sure that this man, and Gölge behind her, are like her —  past the land of the living.

“I did not,” he confesses, “But she wore my mother’s ring and crown.”

Gevherhan’s mind works fast, wheeling away. “You are a şehzade,” she says, “One of Hürrem’s sons.” Only one of them was a hunckback. “ Şehzade Cihangir.” He nods. They watch each other, Gevherhan holding the wedding tiara and veil in her lap now.

“I asked to come back for you,” Cihangir says.

Gevherhan blinks and cannot explain why her eyes grow glassy.

The only sound for a while is Gölge at the oars. Gevherhan looks up, blinking hard.

“Why,” she questions flatly, voice wobbling.

It’s another long stretch of silence before Cihangir answers. “We both died of a broken heart,” he says wistfully, looking upwards, like Gevherhan.

She fancies she can see Silatar’s face traced out in starlight. Then Atike’s, then Murad’s, her mother’s, Ibrahim, Bayezid, Kasim, then her Ayşe and Fatma, who had long married over and over again. Even faces that had long since faded from childhood: Hümaşah, her father, Osman and Mehmed.

The oars have stopped. Gögle is following her lead, searching the starlight. Gevherhan wonders who she is seeing, then turns and sees her great-uncle of so many generations passed doing the same.

Gevherhan looks up again once more. Now, there are only the pinpricks of stars and the darkness between them.

She stands suddenly, rocking the boat. “Where are we?” she asks sharply. She looks to Gölge, who shrugs, then Cihangir, who stand with her, and suddenly the hunch in his back is no more. Gevherhan wonders if she was imagining it — but no, history tells the story of Kanuni’s beloved, sickly son.

She wonders how much perfection there is in the afterlife, and the hands that hold her wedding tiara shake.

In answer to her question, the boat bumps up against a dock that had not been there a moment before. Cihangir throws a rope around a mooring point, tying the boat off, then steps onto the dock and holds a hand out to Gevherhan. There are people waiting on the shore, faces that could be familiar in the light but are cast in mystery in the dark. She takes Cihangir’s hand, then takes her hand back as she goes back to Gölge.

She presents the wedding tiara and veil to Gölge. “Will you throw this in the river for me?” A request, one that will do more for Gevherhan in death than it would have ever done in life.

Gölge nods, letting go of the oars to retrieve the sparkling tiara and pale veil from Gevherhan’s now-steady hands. She lets go.

Gevherhan leans over and wraps her arms around Gölge. “Thank you, Gölge Hatun. Look after my mother.”

It is a final goodbye. She watches them on the dock, until the sound of oars and the blinking lanterns fade away into nothing more than pinpricks of starlight on the Bosporus.