Work Text:
Things fall apart.
It’s a truth of nature—the first one Azriel can remember learning. Peace is temporary. Every calm gives way to another storm.
Grip tight, jaw clenched, Azriel’s resolve is slipping away, drowning in the ever-widening gyre of the dark force now awakened within him.
The clamor of howling drunkards and dissonant music rings through his ears as the oppressive scent of warm, cheap ale stifles the air. The tavern lights are bright—too bright. But for once, the sensory cacophony is preferable—a necessary distraction to numb the senses.
It is not enough. Nothing has been enough lately.
“Az—Hey, you all good?”
Across the table, Cassian’s smile wavers.
Azriel blinks. “All good.”
Cassian's eyebrows knit together as he leans forward. Fuck. “What’s wrong?”
That question again. He’s been asking all night, ever since they left Thesan’s palace. “You sure you’re okay?” and “Anything you want to talk about?” Azriel dismissed each, in turn, with a blank stare and single-syllable response.
What’s wrong?
Mother help him, where to begin?
“Nothing.” A splinter digs into his hand, dislodged from the rough edge of the table by his tightening grasp.
“Hey, don’t be like that. I know today didn’t go exactly as planned—”
“Cass,” he says, his voice solid ice. “Leave it.”
Cassian’s hazel eyes meet his with concern. His mouth twists and frowns, then sighs. “Sure,” he says. “But I’m here, you know. Any time you want to talk. Brothers, right?”
Azriel nods. Brothers.
Mercifully, Cassian accepts it. “Want to go over the plan for tomorrow again?”
Azriel grunts his response. Soon, Cassian is prattling on about the wall, and Hybern, and battle strategy. He’s optimistic—if they can convince Tamlin to join his forces with Tarquin’s, then they can hold the front line, and…
The words wash over Azriel. Here and there, he throws out a hum or acquiescent nod. Cassian has always been good at carrying on a conversation single-handedly.
Cassian has always been the best of them.
And Azriel—
His skin is too tight again. The rough beast is back, clawing against his aching chest, its hour come round at last.
He can’t eat; he can’t think. He hasn’t slept properly in nearly a fortnight.
There’s only one solution—no longer a choice, but an inevitable need. He knows—he’s known for some time now—what he has to do next.
Idly, Azriel wonders if all sense has left him. He shouldn’t. He can’t. He—
“Sorry, Cass,” Azriel interrupts. A chair screeches against the floor—his. He turns. “I have to go.”
The shadows force a glimpse of Cassian’s bewildered face into his mind as he bolts out the door.
A breath, then another. The night air presses in, damp and heavy, and sinks into his lungs. It clings to his skin, warm. The sounds of the tavern echo through his ears. Ringing.
Through the fogged tavern window, Cassian’s blurred outline remains hunched in his chair. Azriel exhales. He’s not coming after him.
Something between relief and disappointment drops like lead into the pit of his stomach. There’s nothing left to stop him from what he’s about to do. This is happening.
Darkness drops around him, familiar. Azriel isn’t sure how the shadows know where to take him, but they do. Of course they do.
He emerges to the sound of wind-shaken trees and the scent of burning wood. Wards prickle in the air. Before him stands a cabin built with timber. He’s never seen it before, but at the sight—or maybe it’s the proximity—something shudders in his chest.
The wind stills as if it’s noticed his arrival, and the world holds its breath. For a moment, Azriel hangs in the balance, on the precipice. This is the point of no return.
He can still turn back. Demand his shadows return him to Dawn. Forget about this place.
A better male would. Cassian would. Restraint, he hears in his brother's voice. Self-control. These are the traits that make a good Illyrian.
But Azriel has never been much of an Illyrian.
His shadows tug and pull, along with something else—golden, freshly forged. In concert, with clamant demands, they drown out the feeble remnants of his will.
The center cannot hold.
The world unravels. Back in that place in the darkness in between, the wards are quick work to bypass. Cool air becomes warm and loses its motion. Scents change and narrow in scope: petrichor and leaf detritus are supplanted by chopped firewood and spiced wine. Boxed away, shadows cradle Azriel in the unlit corner of a room, safe from the low glow cast by a dying fire.
A power, ancient and burning, radiates throughout the room. It sings to Azriel, and the thing in his chest that has been wound so tight starts to loosen, to unravel, to pull toward—
“I’ll admit, I thought your threat was empty,” a voice greets him with uncanny familiarity. “Yet here you are.”
The flames jump with a hiss, and as the shadows retreat, Azriel releases himself from their hold.
Eris Vanserra lounges before him upon a velvet settee—still as death, save for a finger that absently traces the rim of a wine glass gripped in his other hand. “Here to kill me, shadowsinger?”
Eris lifts the glass. He throws it back, drains it.
Purple bruises encircle his brandished neck like the perversion of a necklace—Azriel’s handiwork.
Left unhealed to taunt him, surely.
Azriel snarls.
An eyebrow lifts, unimpressed. Eris stands. “Then let me make it easy for you.”
With vulpine grace, he stalks toward Azriel. He moves like the forest: with long, willowing motions that bend but don’t break. His is a form imbued with the power to raze all of Autumn, then rebuild it anew from the ashes.
But his silk shirt is half-unbuttoned, the waist haphazardly tucked. The sleeves, rolled at the elbows to expose densely freckled forearms, look as if they were absentmindedly shoved up.
And while, as always, his pointed ears glitter with gold, his copper-bright hair is mussed.
Even on the battlefield, Azriel has never seen him less than put together.
As he slinks forward, Eris’s eyes flit down to where Truth-Teller remains undrawn, tucked safely against Azriel’s thigh. “Or” — something dangerous glimmers in his eye — “is there some other reason you came here tonight?”
The gap between them is narrowing fast, but Eris shows no signs of halting his approach.
Azriel’s instincts are frozen in place, locked in silent battle. A civil war wages in his mind concerning the matter of contact. Eris is dangerously close now—close enough to touch. Azriel’s fingertips twitch.
Touch—touch is not safe. Not now.
“Stand down, Vanserra,” Azriel warns. They are the only words he can manage.
Mother save him. How has Azriel let things come to this?
“Oh, now he speaks?” Eris drawls, and his bored tone lapses briefly into a hiss. Azriel glances at the end table next to the settee. Two wine bottles—one of them empty. “Are you ready to discuss this, then?” The sharp tips of Eris’s canines gleam. “Like civilized males?”
Eris leans in. Truth-Teller is at Eris’s throat faster than Azriel’s mind registers the words.
“Evidently not.” Eris glances down, unimpressed. “Kill me, then—if that’s what you want,” he says coolly. “You’ll never know another moment’s peace if you do.”
Blind with fury, Azriel’s hand jerks. A dark line of crimson forms along Eris’s still-bruised neck, then thickens.
Eris looks at him with disgust. “Pathetic.”
“Maybe I’ll wrap my hands around your throat again,” Azriel growls. “Then we can see which one of us is pathetic.”
Angry flames spring to life in the amber of Eris’s eyes. “You know as well as I do that there was no helping that…unfortunate reaction,” he hisses. “Where was your restraint? You tackled me like a common brute.”
“And thanks to my shields, no one else knows just how much you liked it.”
Eris pales. “You’re here to mock me, is that it?”
Azriel shifts. Truth-Teller’s blade shines silver, still angled against Eris’s neck. He draws the knife back. “I—”
He can’t bring himself to say it.
Eris sneers. “It’s intolerable, isn’t it? Haunting your every waking moment. Kill me, reject me—either way, it will only get worse. Your little display proved one thing loud and clear: you have no self-control.”
“I want nothing to do with you,” Azriel scowls.
“Trust me, the feeling is mutual,” Eris says. “And yet, here you are.”
Azriel’s throat is dry. He swallows.
Eris traces the fresh wound at his neck with two long, slender fingers. “Look what you did,” he says contemptuously, then raises his hand. The blood coats the tips of his fingers, a glossy film that glistens near-black in the low light.
Azriel can’t look away as Eris’s hand draws closer, brandishing the stain of his shameful impulsion.
And when those bloodied fingers push, light against Azriel’s lips as they demand entry, they are not met with resistance.
The cold, metallic taste of Eris’s blood fills Azriel’s mouth as he sucks Eris’s fingers clean. He runs his tongue over them as they roam, held spellbound by that amber gaze. When Eris begins to pull his fingers out with sinful slowness, Azriel moans.
Truth-Teller falls to the floor with a clatter. Azriel breaks away.
Eris’s laugh is a blood-curdling sound—unpleasant, a bit deranged.
Azriel calls on his shadows to obfuscate the night-chilled scent of his arousal, already filling the air. In moments like these, the shadows are a refuge—a veil between him and the world.
But they have abandoned him. Instead, they twine around Eris in a curious rush. They sing to Azriel of skin warm as summer and hair soft as silk.
“Have you no control over these?” Eris wrinkles his nose, and disgust warps his elegant features.
None at all. Azriel is barely able to keep himself rooted in place.
His instincts have grown untamable. Why should his shadows be any different? It’s a miracle this didn’t happen at the Winter border or—worse—during the meeting in Dawn.
“I have never known a madness like this one,” Azriel says—and it’s true. His will is no longer his own—his thoughts, incapable of veering too far from the steady chant of mine, mine, mine. “I know you feel it too.”
Eris draws in on himself. One arm folds over the other—a shield.
“And just what,” Eris drawls, “do you propose we do about it?”
His words are calculated: cold, but deliberate. Azriel recognizes the mask instantly; his own is well-worn.
“We have to sate it,” Azriel grits out, forcing the words into the open. “We can’t go on like this.”
A log pops in the fire. The room flares brighter.
“We don’t have to do anything,” Eris says petulantly. But his breaths grow heavy. His eyes are dark. The tension that’s been building since the moment the—since it snapped into place mid-skirmish atop the ice plains of Winter has grown unbearable.
“Tell me you’re not losing your mind, Vanserra, and I’ll go. Tell me your thoughts aren’t flooded with nightmarish desires; that your body doesn’t demand it.”
Eris looks at him with silent challenge, expectant. It is infuriating as ever: this male’s unwillingness to bend, to give.
But Azriel is in too deep to go back now. This close to Eris, his blood sings—like to like. The golden tether in his chest pulls.
“I don’t want this any more than you do,” Azriel says. “But I can think of no other way to make it fucking stop.”
The set of Eris’s jaw is tight. A vein pulses in his temple. But he remains silent, and for a moment, Azriel wonders if it’s not because he’s carefully calculating his next move, but because he doesn’t know what to say.
If perhaps Eris Vanserra is inexperienced in the art of speaking plainly.
But no, to think that this unflappable male might lack such a skill is unfathomable.
Something in Eris’s face changes. His features even out—neutral, blank. He steps away.
Eris lifts the half-empty bottle from the end table next to the settee and takes a long swig. He stretches his hand out, offering the bottle toward Azriel. His arm freezes mid-motion, and his eyes widen.
With a rueful laugh, he sets the bottle back down. “So be it,” Eris says. He walks toward a door. Pushes it open. His head lolls to the side as he beckons to Azriel, hand outstretched to motion him inside.
As if in a trance, Azriel follows him across the threshold.
It’s the scent that hits Azriel first.
The aroma Azriel has come to recognize as Eris’s permeates this room more densely than anywhere Azriel has been before.
There is something of the forest in it—a scent like the resinous sap that leaks from old pine trees buried deep in the heart of the woods. There is something else, too, that brings to mind the oud incense the priestesses burn in their temples, tinged with woodsmoke. A scent like divinity.
Its essence hangs most heavily around the bed—large and centered in the room, with plush pillows and silk fabrics piled high within its ornately carved frame.
It is all Azriel can do to stop himself from inhaling a long, drawn breath.
There’s something else. A scent that is distinctly not Eris lingers here. As soon as the thought breaches his mind, his shadows impress images of Eris with some other male splayed across his bed.
Azriel’s teeth grind against each other. When his blood rushes, red and angry, he looks away.
The only thing modest about the bedroom Eris has lured him into is its size. Matching furniture, embossed with intricate oak-and-acorn details from a lightly knotted wood stained a shade between rust and cinnamon. Cedar, the shadows inform him. A bookshelf spans the entirety of one of the walls. Yellowed scrolls and worn volumes are interrupted by the occasional trinket: sealed clay vials, wood carvings of dogs, a jeweled hunting dagger.
Azriel’s eyes flit to where Eris has remained unmoving as a statue by the entryway. “Spend a lot of time here?”
Eris shrugs, apathetic. “When it pleases me.”
“How often does it please you?” Azriel can’t break his eyes from Eris. “To be away from the Forest House?”
Eris’s gaze is steel. “I did not think,” he says, “that we were here to talk.”
“Rare to see you pass up an opportunity.”
Eris’s mouth twitches, the firm line of it disrupted. Uneven. “Is this the technique you use on your detainees? I would have thought your interrogation skills better honed than this. Or” — a hand grazes his neck — “perhaps the rumors are true: you’re just the knife in Rhysand’s hold. Deadly sharp, but only with a master’s hand to guide you."
Azriel has stood tall for centuries in the face of worse insults than this. He is more than well-acquainted with the rumors; at the previous High Lord’s instruction, he planted many of them himself. A reputation for him to grow into: the monster lurking in the shadows, the Night Court’s bloody torturer.
What were a few carefully chosen words to one well-versed in their power? His is the business of secrets, and he has made an art of collecting and harnessing them.
There is a difference between wounds inflicted on the mind and those inflicted on the body. Azriel has known true, absolute hell—he was born into it. And in that darkness, he learned that fury is best held close and fashioned into a weapon, poised to yield when one has need of it. Better to hold fast than play into the stereotype of the hot-blooded Illyrian male.
But somehow, with Eris Vanserra, he is a tinderbox, and even the laziest insults spilled from his serpent’s tongue are a spark.
Azriel drags Eris forward by the collar.
“Utterly predictable,” Eris jeers. His breaths run hot as they tumble through his lips—rounded, smooth, a light cherry shade brought out by the flush rising on his neck. “Nothing more than a common brute."
Azriel’s veins are pounding, pounding. “I thought you didn’t want to talk.”
The last time they were this close, mere hours earlier and surrounded by the highest-ranking members of all seven courts, Azriel threatened to kill him.
The urge to kill is still there, but with it, there is an insatiable hunger.
This time, the hunger prevails.
Tonight, he will revel in pleasure. If he is in hell, then he may as well enjoy it.
When Eris opens his mouth to speak, Azriel cuts him off. He yanks him forward and drinks him in.
With bruising force, Eris meets him. A strangled sound escapes him, but he does not pull away.
Azriel smirks against his mouth and deepens his kiss. Eris can posture all he wants, but in the end, he’s just as fucked as Azriel.
The mouth moving harshly against him tastes of wine and ash. Their nose collide, pressed against each other in the rush of movement. Brusque hands pull at his hair. Each sensation, each discovery, is, in turn, the genesis of a jolt of electricity that thrums with wild fervor through Azriel’s body.
Eyes closed, Azriel tells himself this could be anyone—a bedmate in a foreign court's pleasure hall. A stranger. And for a moment, he thinks, maybe it is. The body pressed against his is just a body. No one’s in particular.
And the ecstasy of it, gods, it draws out something deep within him: feral and possessive and demanding. He needs more. He needs so much more.
When his eyes pry themselves open against his will, it is a shock, almost, to see Eris Vanserra still there, his furious features undone, his mouth still locked in battle with Azriel’s own.
It is not—
It is not what Azriel would have guessed.
Heat builds within him. More, his blood begs. His hands act of their own accord, pushing Eris down against the bed in a seated position. His legs pull him down to kneel on the floor.
Puppeteered by feral urge, he unlaces Eris’s trousers. Azriel grins. “Hardly modest of you.”
“Don’t,” Eris says, “toy with me.”
But Azriel, already salivating, is a man possessed. He removes the trousers unceremoniously.
His eyes dart up to Eris, whose expression is impassive once again: a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. A bead of sweat forms, glistening, on the exposed section of his upper chest, then vanishes. Then another, along Eris’s brow. There, then gone. Again and again, the perspiry evidence of Eris’s lust disappears. Each one like a drop of water in the heated sands of the desert: evaporated to nothing.
Stubborn fucking male. As if the velvet-pink head sprung free between Eris’s legs isn’t proof that he’s enjoying this.
It is then that Azriel decides he will see this male taken apart. He will draw Eris’s pleasure out of him—break that sneering, distant mask.
He yanks Eris’s legs—divinely muscled, exquisitely contoured—over his shoulders. They are perfect—too perfect, perhaps, as the skin covering the corded muscles is without blemish, save for the light dotting of copper freckles.
It is a marvel that Eris could have lived for so many centuries without acquiring a single scar. But he has more urgent aims than unraveling the mysteries that enshroud this male.
Azriel takes Eris’s cock, tip to base, down his throat. A groan—Azriel isn’t sure whose. He moves his head in a steady rhythm, at first a few slow bobs, then faster as he feels Eris swell in his mouth. He loses himself in the bliss of it: the motion, the salt-sweet taste filling his mouth, the smooth skin of Eris’s cock against the insides of his hollowed cheeks.
His hands are greedy along Eris’s thighs, exploring and steadying himself in equal measure. He squeezes the divots of the muscle lines. Temporarily, he removes his mouth to trace his lips along the crease where hip meets thigh. Eris is drenched in that holy scent—like the heart of the forest, like a temple for Azriel to desecrate.
A sharp inhale sounds from above, and Azriel’s wings flare behind him with delight. A practiced hand grazes along the perineum, applying pressure. And, ah—there’s the telltale twitch.
He’s close, he can feel it—so incredibly close to sending this male tumbling over the edge into oblivion. He’s—
A shove.
Azriel falls back.
His heart is still thundering. His body still demanding what’s his.
Eris stares. His chest rises. Falls. “That was quite the display,” he drawls, tone bored.
Azriel draws back, remembering himself.
This is Eris Vanserra. A male Azriel has spent centuries fantasizing about killing: slowly, by way of a nail through the stomach.
“It looked like you were enjoying it,” Azriel says, as much a retort as a reminder to himself as doubt creeps in. It was real; Azriel witnessed it—even if it seemed a reluctant thing.
His cock twitches against the leather of his pants. It still aches, even if the heat pooled in his chest is now accompanied by shame.
Eris flexes his hand. Open, closed. Four white dots along the knuckles. He looks at Azriel. Looks and looks. The seconds tick by.
“Take off your clothes,” Eris snaps. As if it is Azriel he’s waiting for. “I’ll not have you rutting into me in those dirty leathers.”
“As you wish, my lord,” he snarls, then leers as heat paints Eris’s cheeks bright red.
The victory is pyrrhic; his will is not strong enough to resist Eris’s command. The sheer power of it, given as heir, alights that galling fae urge to submit.
With help from the shadows, Azriel unfastens the buttons that hold together the back of his leather doublet. He holds Eris’s gaze as he kicks off his boots, then pulls the first string to unlace his leather pants.
Eris’s eyes bulge. His tongue wets his lips. He makes no other acknowledgement, but it is enough for Azriel.
He flexes his left wing behind him and savors the anticipatory chill that travels down it.
Lounged across the bed, Eris has finished undressing himself. When Azriel nears him, Eris tenses.
“Go on then,” Eris says.
Azriel shifts.
“What’s this? Here I thought you were set on claiming what’s yours.”
“Fuck you,” Azriel says.
“Well? Are you going to?” he demands.
Azriel hesitates—just for a moment, but it’s enough. Eris’s eyes widen gleefully.
“Or,” Eris says, “is there something else you want?” He’s delighting in this. There is a cruel satisfaction alight in his amber eyes, that wicked smirk.
“I…”
What he wants? What he wants—the only thing he wants—is to be free of the wretched need that courses through his veins. The need that begs for Eris to bend him over and—
Eris inhales sharply.
Fuck. Had he sent that down the bond?
Eris rises. He runs a hand over Azriel’s chest, tracing along a tattooed whorl. “You greedy little thing,” he chides, and shoves Azriel back on the bed, wings pressed down behind him.
Eris towers above him, all long limbs and sculpted torso. “Look at you,” he says, derision in his voice. His eyes travel down the length of Azriel’s body until his gaze rests between Azriel’s legs. He runs a hand down Azriel’s chest, and when Azriel’s cock twitches, he croons, “So eager for me.”
Azriel can feel his cheeks burning.
In a fluid motion, Eris is atop him, straddling him. He looks down, imperious, a depraved grin gracing his cruel features.
It is awful to be here, helpless to Eris’s whims—but the most horrifying part is how much he wants it.
Eris spreads Azriel’s legs apart. A finger circles his entrance, sending chills traveling the length of his spine.
"Do you want this?” Eris asks, leering down from above.
Eris’s fingers traverse the sensitive skin, again and again, graceful and adept and unbelievably stimulating. Ravenous heat flares low in Azriel’s abdomen. He gasps. “No.”
Eris draws his hand back.
The separation is torture. His skin aches from the lack of contact with his—with Eris.
“Don’t,” Azriel rasps. “Don’t stop.”
“I thought you didn’t want this.”
I don’t, he thinks. But he can’t say it. He can’t say it because…
“I need it,” he says. And gods, that’s the shameful truth—that this is a hunger he can never sate. Not without supplicating himself before Eris Vanserra.
“You need it,” Eris repeats. “What, exactly, is it that you need?” His words are slow, exacting, tipped in poison.
It is like a sick game to him: to draw this out, to see Azriel declawed. But Azriel can’t find it in himself to resist.
“I have never wanted someone less,” Azriel says, “just as I have never needed anyone more.”
Eris’s expression goes sour. But Azriel—he cannot lose this. Not now.
“You, Eris,” Azriel exclaims, throwing whatever remains of his pride to the wind with reckless abandon. “I need you.”
“That’s right,” Eris smiles, pleased. He slides a finger into Azriel’s entrance. “You need me.”
Azriel trembles.
Eris’s movements are rough, but unhurried—it is hardly a surprise, at this point, that he enjoys taking his time. Soon, another finger slips in, and the louche glide of them inside him is enough that it isn’t long—isn’t much time at all—before Azriel can think of nothing but the lack of Eris’s cock filling him.
Azriel turns over and angles his back toward Eris.
“No.” Eris grabs his shoulder. With a twist and a surprising show of strength, he pushes Azriel back so that he is again supine beneath him. “I want you like this.”
And then, in a glorious thrust, Eris is inside him.
It is like lightning has been bottled up within Azriel—waiting, dormant, for this very moment to break free and explode through every inch of his body. The heat of Eris against him is a shock to his system. His shadows dart about the room like a scattered flock of birds, echoing the frenzied need that has overtaken him.
Eris fucks into him in a steady rhythm. When his thighs move slowly against Azriel, a searing pleasure rises to the places where their skin makes contact.
For as long as Azriel can remember, he’s felt incomplete. Lacking. Like some fundamental part of him is missing, the gap craving to be made whole. And he has found it—here, in Eris’s bed, Eris filling him completely as their bodies slot perfectly together. As if they were made for each other.
He’d fantasized it would feel this good with Mor once, dreamed he’d find salvation with her. With closed eyes, he tries to picture that it is her atop him, all red lips and satiny blonde waves.
But the image is no good.
Desperate, he reaches for Elain next. Those luminous fawn-brown eyes; that innocent, upturned nose smattered with freckles.
Freckles.
There is nothing like the horror of seeing her face morph to Eris’s in his mind’s eye.
His eyes are useless closed, so he opens them again. It comes as a surprise to see Eris watching him with intent.
A curious hand touches the talon tipping Azriel’s right wing, then runs along the membrane. Azriel whines at the sensation.
“Look at you now,” Eris says between labored breaths. “Beneath all that aggression, you’re nothing but another dog to bring to heel.”
A thrust. A gasp.
“And what does that make you,” Azriel snarls back, “that you would lie with me?”
Eris fucks into him, hard. The speed picks up; the intensity deepens. Azriel is left shuddering, gasping for air.
“You know what it means." A slap along his thigh—for insolence.“You’re mine now, shadowsinger,” Eris gasps, the possession thick in his voice. “All mine.”
Eris ruts into him, hurried and panting. Determined. And Azriel wants it, then. To be his. For a moment.
Azriel’s hands are all over him, clawing, grasping. They find their way along Eris’s shoulders, then down his chest. A frame built with the strength of a general. A body smoldering with the unequivocal power of a future high lord.
When Azriel’s hand reaches his abdomen, Eris winces at the touch. There is no wound to see, but Azriel remembers the spot. This was the entrance point at which Cassian’s sword plunged into his body—the moment that spurred the bond to announce itself.
Even now, a growl is ready on his tongue. Even now, he feels…protective. It is strange for that old feeling to announce itself in this context.
But Eris is gone, lost in the frenzy, a blissed out expression creeping onto his face. A drop of sweat falls from his dampened brow onto Azriel. It plants itself on his chin, and Azriel licks it away—another piece of Eris he now possesses.
“Gods, you feel” — sparks fall from Eris’s hair — “better than I ever im—” His face twists. The mask lifts. “Oh, fuck.”
Pleasure paints Eris’s face and etches itself into his features. His eyebrows rise, his mouth softens and parts. Desire, greed, unadulterated want—it is all there. For him—for Azriel. The tight control is gone: Eris is laid bare before Azriel.
His. All his.
Desire’s blood-dimmed tide is loosed within him, and there is nothing else now but the two of them, bodies and souls joined as one.
When Eris moans, Azriel hears it in his bones. He feels the euphoric pleasure that surges through Eris beneath his skin. The tether between them flows free, open, and he sees himself through Eris’s eyes, with boundless, all-consuming want.
When his climax shatters through him, full of passionate intensity, it is cataclysmic. Reality blurs, his vision darkens.
Anarchy is loosed upon the world.
It is like the sun rising in the west and setting in the east. This—this is the nightmare. Now that he’s had this, Azriel knows, nothing will ever compare. Nothing will hold a flame to this.
There can be no one else for him.
In the aftermath of the destruction, Azriel slouches toward Eris. With newfound tenderness, he grasps the sweat-slicked skin of his neck, strands of flaming copper hair stuck against it. He rests his forehead against Eris’s chest and listens to the thundering evidence of what they’ve done.
When Eris’s magic sanitizes them, Azriel lets go. This is not his to keep.
He feels Eris’s eyes on him as he rises from the bed and gathers his clothes.
Azriel pulls on his pants. He fiddles with the laces. “What were you going to say?”
Eris frowns. “What?”
“Better than you…” He waits for Eris to fill in the rest.
A moment passes, then Eris stands. “I can’t recall,” he says. His features, once again, are drawn tight. “Something trivial, no doubt, in the heat of the moment.”
Eris withdraws a robe from the wardrobe and tucks himself away inside it.
Azriel runs scarred fingers along a crack in the leather of his doublet. Well-worn lines mar it; scuffs and scrapes warp the material like blemishes. The markings of use. “Why isn’t your wound healed?”
“What are you talking about?” Eris's voice is flat, his apathetic tone bordering on acrid.
“On your side. The one from—” he pauses. “From the ice.”
Before a rounded mirror that hangs on the wall to the side, Eris smooths his hair and tucks stray strands neatly around his ears. The bruises are still there, around his neck—the ones Azriel gave him.
Azriel's stomach folds over itself, sour. He meets Eris's gaze in the reflection. “You’ve glamoured it. But it’s still there. I want to know why.”
The reflection looks away. He straightens an earring, knocked askew, and restores symmetry. “Preserving my magic for the war to come.”
Lie. “So you take the war seriously.”
“You know I do. It’s my father who doesn’t—”
Azriel growls. "Your father."
Eris stills. His nostrils flare. “Do not forget what this is, shadowsinger,” he says. “And perhaps more importantly—do not forget what this is not.”
“Strange words from the male who sought an alliance with the Night Court after—”
"Do not presume to comment on matters beyond your comprehension," Eris snaps. "My alliance is with your High Lord, not you. I do not involve lowly bastards in my plans."
A calculated blow. The rhythms of this male grow predictable. The words are not without their sting, of course, but there's something there—something rare and precious in that hate pointed at him.
“I’ve seen you, Eris Vanserra,” Azriel says. “I’ve known you. You can't hide yourself so easily from me now."
“Get out,” Eris hisses. This time, it is with intention that Eris laces his voice with the authority of a high lord’s heir.
Azriel cannot resist. He takes one final look at Eris’s face—livid, wreathed in fire—then wraps himself into the darkness of night and slips away.
But not before he smiles.
He has lost himself, but the sacrifice is not without its reward. He has seen the unshakeable shaken. He has glimpsed inside an impenetrable fortress. He knows, finally, how to best this male.
His.