A Court of Wind and Song

93: Nothing

Azriel

The mountaintop was the same as I remembered it.

I could still remember how strong the wind was, the ache in my bones as I drug myself up the last stretch to the top. I had been barely able to walk, with my brothers faring worse than I was. I could still hear the echo of my mate's name on my lips as I touched the monolith.

A sentiment that Leur and I no doubt shared, now.

Everything was nearly the same, even 500 years later. Only now, there was far more blood and death on these mountains than there had been when my brothers and I were the only ones to reach the top. Bodies marred the side of the mountain, almost all the way down. Most of them were torn to pieces by claws that I was certain belonged to Bryaxis. The Pass of Enalius looked the same, though there were smears of blood on the stone archway. The mountaintop would have been the same-

If it weren't for the black mark and the pile of ashes on the ground.

All that was left of Briallyn.

And perhaps the fact that the black monolith had a golden handprint stamped into the surface of its smooth black surface. As if it was a spear of pure sunlight shining in the evening light, a beacon stretching out across the earth below. My mate's power, burned into the side of it, the light of creation come to banish the darkness.

The light of a shadowsinger.

And if someone would have told me 500 years ago, when I first stood on these rocks, that I would be happy to see my mate standing here on this godforsaken mountain, that she would be a Carynthian, as strong as Enalius himself as she stood in front of that monolith- I would have never believed it.

Not because I ever thought that she wouldn't be able to do so.

No.

It would have been my own fear that held me back.

My whole life, I had been afraid. Afraid of the dark, afraid of the light, afraid of my stepmother and my half-brothers. Afraid of losing the good that had been bestowed upon me on the day that Hashna took me in, afraid of losing my brothers, afraid of losing Leur.

Darkness had been nothing but a shield against that fear, a safe haven to fall back on. Believing that I was undeserving because I was inherently lesser, because I was a bastard, because all I could do correctly was hurt and maim and kill- it had always been easier than facing reality. It had always been easier than facing that I had never deserved all of the horrible things that had happened to me. And while dark places tend to breed dark things, I was not one of them.

Not anymore.

For now, I was the light.

And if I had learned anything in my life, through all of the cycles of heartbreak and happiness, it was that light could be just as cruel as the dark. Crueler, even.

Light fought for love's sake, for the people that mattered most to me. My mate. My son. My brothers. My family. Darkness was all revenge and cruelty, but the light- the light was rage.

It was the look on Leur's face when she stumbled into the Cave 500 years ago after they took our son. The gleam in Rhys's eye when he looked at Acantha on the Prison Island, echoed nearly exactly in Ruhn's eyes as he watched the memories of Leur's torture. It was the look on Cassian's face when he watched Bryaxis attack Leur when she was under the Crown's control. The devious smile on Nesta's face when she used Adoraxia to take Acantha's hand.

Light was using what the dark taught me to make this woman pay- for no one would threaten my wife or my son and live to see another day.

And the first lesson I learned in the darkness, above all the others, was that to gain control, you must be willing to lose it first.