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.
![Betrayed [Lucien x OC] by par13ker](https://img.wattpad.com/cover/320479894-80-k262715.jpg)
And I did.
I already had Acantha where I wanted her. Each kick and punch on that rooftop, every last movement had been precisely designed to feed her as much power as possible, to let her think that she was gaining on me. I drug her here through the first gate I could find, whichever one lay in the center of the Old Square. And when I landed here, when I saw everything in place, I gritted my teeth and let go.
The sky grew dark, black shadows billowing up behind me like a cloud of ash. As much starlight as I could gather from both stars that lived inside of me, every last drop of power that I could funnel through my siphons. I gave everything I was, everything I had to give.
Clouds that had been white and pure turned into hurricanes, lightning cracking down on the forest below, beams of deepest navy and violet. My chest burned, burned with the force of the sun and moon as one, and yet I did not stop. I did not take a breath. I simply forced every last drop of power that I could to well at my hands, the true force of night flowing through my veins, and condensed it all into one beam that struck Acantha right in the chest. One beam that did exactly what I needed it to do. A rainbow of colors, of darkness and light all at once, of powers from every cell that made up my body. Both the endless and the end, the made and the unmade
Acantha screamed, a horrid sound that I could barely hear over all the thunder. Her knees hit the rocks where we stood, her body convulsing and shaking. She should have been nothing in the face of all of this power. One drop of any of it would have killed any normal fae, but that blood in her veins, tainted by whatever the hell the Asteri were- it made her absorb every last bit of it.
And when the power finally ceased, she took one breath.
One breath, and then all I could see was green.
I'd always fucking hated green.
The sky, the lightning, the power, all of it looked like the leaves on a blooming tree, fields of freshly cut grass, the sky before a tornado. And Acantha laughed, power rippling off of her in an otherworldly way. It didn't swirl around her like shadows, didn't appear as a glow on her scarred skin. No, I could have sworn that it flushed under her skin, radiated across her entire body.
What was the limit? How much was too much?
"You may be pretty, but you are weak." She snarled at me, "You lowborns are always so predictable, always letting emotions get the best of you."
I was panting, staring at Leur with wide eyes. Acantha tracked my movements, following my eyesight to the shocked form of my mate standing in front of the monolith. She was off guard, too off guard to make a counter-attack, the Starsword in a loose grip on her hand.
"Awe." Acantha stuck out her bottom lip, a feral gleam of satisfaction in her eye, "Was that your big plan? You know, I would have thought that you would have come up with something better than that, Runa." She laughed, "The infamous General of Adhira, the master manipulator- how our enemies used to tremble when you stepped foot on the battlefields. Look how far you have fallen now. Has all that time on the throne rotted your pretty little brain away?"
Leur just kept staring at me.
"I love you." I said to her, nothing but acceptance in my every move, a vow, "Even in death."
"So, so sweet." Acantha put her hand over her heart, looking between us, "Is that what you have chosen as your last words?"
Leur blinked a few times, the Starsword gripped tight in her hand. She spared Acantha one last glance, as if she was trying to come up with any way out of this, as if she was trying to think. Her hands shook, fear written clear as day in her eyes. I didn't dare move, didn't take my eyes off of her.
