LADY DOE

There was little light within the cavern of their bedchamber of the moonstone palace.

There was the low burn of the lanterns with their stained glass projections across the tiles, and the lingering presence of the will o’ the wisps that hovered over the long line of his body.

Lingering ghosts of the dead that were too heavy with grief and memory to pass over during Starfall. That was what the fae of Night thought of those haunting little lights.

Whether that be a comfort or a fright, that was dependent on the individual. Nesta, even after her two centuries amongst the people, she’d yet to determine that.

She only knew that Rhysand thought them as what they were: dead.

“Nesta,” he managed; claret smearing the ridge of his lip, ignorant to the continuing drip of blood from his nostril.

He himself had very nearly become a wisp on Nesta’s shoulder only an hour ago.

He was laid on his non-dominant side, the muscle groups either side the column of his spine spasming, the tissue of the branching scars stark against the pallid complexion of his back.

Those proud wings of his people were limp against the linen of the sable sheets, one broad wing curled over the injured and marred joint of his shoulder, their daughter asleep under the shadow of his glory.

"Nes,” she asserted with little conflict, curling the linen between delicate fingers to wring the cloth, offering her husband a small comfort. His answering reticence was enough to keep her from allowing him any further diminutive of her brief name.

Eleri had taken to her bed beside her father; her brow pressing to Rhysand’s collarbone, and sable hair a cowl over her lovely features to match her beloved doll she held to her chest.

Not a sound left the child as she slept, though her brow was a furrowed line.

Her father’s hand of scars and scrapes cradled the back of her head, deft fingers caught in the tousled whisps, thumb drifting over her scalp.

They’d named her after the mother river that ran through the Illyrian territories, a broad water that carried and provided life more so than any market could in the privileged sanctuary that was Velaris.

Rhysand was a creature that excelled in the nature of violence, that had a crude understanding that once enacted there was no return; his father had sold his sons’ childhood to the Illyrian life, which now walked in each step he took beside the grace of the High Fae blood of the Hewn.

And yet, the hand that dripped with death and infamous for its acts of consorting the dying, soothed a child of her visions.

Nesta eased the wrung cloth from her whitening fingers to press the soft edge to her husband’s mouth, sweeping it over the ridge of his bottom lip where it was cut and already scabbing.

“Do not slip into your head, Rhysand,” she managed, noting the lack of presence in that stare. “I cannot reach you there.”

“I am simply fortifying the space, I do not care for a repeat of an intrusion.” His timbre was a low breath, barely there.

His arm curled further around the slight body of their daughter, nose pressed to the sable muss of her hair.

And his temple was pressed against the line of Nesta’s thigh, a mimicry of Nesta’s posture when she took a book to their bed on a eve and drifted against him in place of a pillow.

Nesta understood the unwanting of another waltzing into the sacred space of her mind and prowling with claws of intention. It had taken the finer part of a decade as to not flinch or let her kept magic flare whenever his mind broached her own to knock gently.

And so, with her regal grace, she slipped from her seated position to lay beside the long line of her husband, a discarded sheet caught between her legs from being curled around her bare body.

His wing rose a select few inches, only enough for the edge to skim her shoulder.

Nesta’s careful fingers found the shift of her daughter, tucking the linen and her freckled arm under the fold of Eleri’s bedding fur when Rhysand’s wing settled over her.

She brushed her thumb over the line of Rhysand’s tense brow, easing the stroke of stress there; her free hand lifting his hand to press two of his fingers to her temple, permitting him the one thing she’d allow no other in this life or the next.

Offering him a sacred space beyond the restricted cavern of his own mind: a fortified expanse of quiet to settle that restless stirring that would not condone him rest.

She let the heavy weight of her eyes close, lashes settling over the plane of her cheek, her nose too pressed to the hair of Eleri.

You may seek solace in my space, Rhys. Rest.

Those were the words she let remain in that fortress of her mind, the sole ones, as she curled further along the back of her daughter and into the sacred space under the expanse of the wide spread of his wing.

Sleep took Nesta, despite her reluctance, her husband’s fingers through her hair, and his thumb at her temple moving in strokes she knew as well as she did Eleri’s features.

a part two, maybe?? lemme know what you think, lowkey fucking terrified, but i enjoyed writing this. 🤲🏽.