Chapter Text
The Autumn Court breeze smelled of sap and copper. That sweet scent of the syrup couldn’t mask the pools of blood that surrounded your battalion even as you hid behind a tree.
Over one thousand of your people were blinded by an attack led by only a dozen winged Faeries and were dead within minutes. Rapid-moving shadows with wings scattered throughout the forest floor. Some wings were bat-like and some were white and feathered - the flashes of white taunting you with the false image of peace for eternity. It wouldn’t matter if the Fae dumped all mortals on one side of the island segregated by a wall, or with nothing but the blood-crusted leathers on your backs and a stale piece of the end-part of a loaf to fight over within the Courts. You would accept anything if it meant mortals would no longer kneel to Fae.
Pacifism would not work with the Fae and you would rather be burned at the stake than to beg for freedom. You’ve watched the bravest captains and even generals cry pathetically at the feet of the High King, only to be turned to ashes before one could blink. You would not be one of them. An uprising was the only answer, however foolish it sounded, and no matter how long the war went on.
All mortals had the same thought - freedom, whether you died for it or your life was holding on to a single thread, was worth fighting for until the last Human stood.
The war has been long. You were only a teenager when whispers of an uprising spread through the kitchen help to the teachers at school, only to be heard by nosy kids who spread the rumors like wildfire. In a matter of months, all the mortal slaves within Fae territories were ready to prepare to fight.
Training took place after hours when the High Fae were drunk on wine or in bed with their Mates for days, weeks even, depending on the season. You remembered how hard it was for you to adjust your sleeping schedule and getting used to three hours of sleep a night. You remembered how your muscles ached carrying newly-smithed swords and how your fingers calloused from plucking the strings of a bow. You remembered children as young as six learning how to chip obsidian into arrowheads and lace them with Faebane, the drug that omitted the powers of all Fae once it broke skin. You mostly remembered them crying and wetting themselves instead, fearful of getting caught and reprimanded, but even they ended up being honorable soldiers.
Now, you and those same kids were in your twenties. It felt like you spent your whole life preparing for this war, like you were born to be a Fae slayer. On your twenty-fifth birthday was when you made your first kill. She was beautiful, as all Fae were, but she was loud and thirsty for mortal blood. Not for the sport of killing, but for consumption, something mortals considered more sinful than enslavement or murder. She believed that mortal blood tasted sweeter and loved to drink in volumes by goblets like the juiciest red wine and believed that it made her the most youthful Fae in all the Courts.
So while she talked of drinking a babe’s blood from her crystal goblet in front of a captured squad, you shot the perfect arrow dipped in Faebane through her throat as your brother led the rescue battalion.
You were honored that night returning to camp. A small victory for mortals, even if it was just one Fae. How many humans can say they killed a Fae in one shot? Such a victory raised human morale throughout all of the island, but it was short lived when her Mate sought revenge and killed your brother and his battalion while you were away with the hunting squad.
Guilt and grief flowed beneath your skin. You’d never forget his empty eye sockets as you performed a short memorial service for the battalion once the coast was clear.
That should have been you hung high in the trees, lifeless and rotting for the crows to pick at your soft flesh like a ripened peach. To this day, that night haunts your dreams, and so did the evening after when the general named you the captain of your new battalion. Your people cheered loudly that night, singing a song of your victory that played in an endless loop in your nightmares.
You would never live up to your brother’s legacy as a captain, even if you were to live and fight the same fight for decades. Not as the screams of your men and women, with spirits as bright as the sun in the Summer Court, deafened your ears in the thick forests of the Autumn Court. You had only been captain for three months when a group of winged-Fae found you. Every hit you blocked with your mortal-crafted shield felt like the killing blow, if not for the Faebane arrows crossing their paths. Steel clashing with steel, with sparks blinding your vision, you thought maybe your endless training and sleepless nights managed to do some good. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to save even one person from the unpredictable magic of Fae.
Feeling defeated and humiliated, you ran behind a large tree and breathed, running from the shame, the failure, as a captain. The evidence of it stained the tree bark, the river, and the air.
You failed.
Soon, it was quiet. The autumnal breeze between the lush, untouched grass at your feet was the only sound you could hear as you hid cowardly behind an aging maple.
All you could do was hope you’d survive long enough to warn the other battalions.
A loud thud vibrated through the forest floor as one of the bat-winged Fae landed in front of you, untouched and holding a lazy grin on his perfect lips. A quick body scan and you knew that, Fae or mortal, he was unlike any man – or male – you’ve ever seen. Perfection was threaded through every black hair on his body, through every pore on his skin. Nothing, not even a loose eyelash or a papercut wound, was visible. You froze before him, cold breath hitched in your parched throat, as if the slightest movement would piss him off and he’d behead you just for that. But he didn’t so much as care to unsheathe the sword that laid over his spine.
No, why would he? To expend such energy, even if it was as simple as wielding his sword, was not worth such effort on a mere mortal.
“I found one,” he said boredly into the sky.
“Kill it,” another drawled in the distance from above.
Humans weren’t even worth the respect of being called something remotely close to such. You were an ‘it’, like an annoying fruit fly buzzing near their berries on a warm day. Hot blood boiled beneath your tight leathers, your face unable to stop itself from furrowing your brows and tightening your lips.
If the Fae male felt threatened by your pathetic excuse for a scowl, he didn’t let on.
The raven-haired bat-winged Fae took his sweet time as his bored eyes glazed over your body, covered in dirt and all your soldiers’ blood. Not even Fae blood, as the one in front of you didn’t have a single black hair out of place and you were sure the other Fae looked the same. His eyes were thankfully not hungry of appetite or lust, as you’ve witnessed time and time again with his kind. They were bored, like he’d want to have some fun before killing you, like when a cat played with a mouse.
“Now now, didn’t your mother ever tell you not to play with your food?” he taunted, lips curling playfully. Surely, it was a coincidence that his features were feline. “You know The King wants all notable humans back at his compound. Whatever that means…”
“Ugh, who cares? It’s just one girl. I mean look at her - hiding behind the oldest tree in the Autumn Court.”
Another bat-winged Fae hovered above, lacing his clean fingers through your sap-sticky hair that clumped together in places you knew would take hours to clean. He smelled of rosemary and oud and his bronze hair contrasted his partner’s, though you didn’t dare to compare more than what you saw from your peripherals. You were too terrified to break the gaze from the male in front of you.
A smirk laced the bronze Fae’s lips as he floated above. “If she were a real captain, she would have died first.”
“I can only imagine what He has in store.”
“I didn’t care to listen. He only wants the captains or something? Not even a few lackeys?”
“Whether He did or didn’t, it’s not like we have any to bring back.”
The bronze one nodded thoughtfully. “Let’s hurry, then. I’m starving.”
You’ve seen Fae drinking mortal blood from goblets and knitting scarves from hair, but you never heard of them dining on flesh. Perhaps you’d be the first. Would you be roasted? Grilled? Peppered with capers and oranges or doused in a dry wine and herbed potatoes? How starved you must have been to earn a grumble from your stomach at the very thought of your presentation.
The midnight-colored bat raised a brow at your fear-plastered face. “Humans are such silly creatures,” he tisked. “Why would we dine on the decaying when we can feast on fresh veal? I don’t think humans pair well with red wine.”
Within two swift movements, he had you kneeling on the ground as he towered over you. The lush grass beneath your knees was the only sense of relief as cold metal clicked tightly around your wrists before he pulled you by your hair to your feet. Your scalped stung with pressure, but not enough to wring tears from your eyes. That was all you could do to show your unwavering spirit. Disappointed by your lack of pain, the High Fae gripped you by the waist.
“Hold on tight, darling.”
His honeyed voice took a second too long to process before vertigo whipped you around between the pockets of spacetime. You saw nothing, and yet you saw everything, as the world cleaved between where you were in the Autumn Court and your destination as the two Fae males stepped through the magic-laced window into a wet, stone-cold cell. You’ve heard and seen of the ability to winnow between lands but never had the pleasure of experiencing it until today, as you hurled your rabbit lunch into the dark void.
You waited for your eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they wouldn’t. Like you were looking into the abyss.
The Fae males didn’t bother to bid you a farewell before winnowing away.
–
Time was not real while you were in the cell. The darkness surrounding swallowed everything - your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams, and what seemed like time itself.
Eventually, though, your eyes managed to adjust to the darkness if only a little bit. Enough that you could make out the outlines of the bars of the cell and whenever a lesser Fae visited you with the same pathetic piece of bread and the wingtip of a chicken wing, or at least you thought it was that. It could have been the pinky of a human child for all you cared, but your hunger did not as you cleaned it to the bone.
To recognize even a semblance of time or a day, you tried to count the hours in between your meals, but it was too inconsistent. Sometimes you counted what felt like the standard four hours in between, sometimes they felt like six hours, and sometimes even twelve hours. It was like a pathetic form of entertainment for their kind to see you crawl towards your plate of food you inhaled and chug your mug of water like a starving and parched wild boar, patiently waiting for the next meal to be dropped off at the trough.
You would mentally thank them though when they finally cleaned up your puke days later. Eating next to bile was a challenge to keep your food down, if not for you fighting your body to keep down any form of nutrients in order to build up your energy when the time came to meet The King.
The bars of the cell were great for all sorts of enrichment. As you ran your fingers over each bar, you counted all the bumps from the sealant that prevented rust, but lost count by the time you reached the seventh bar quite consistently. They were useful for exercising, too. Pull ups and sit ups occupied the unspent energy and counting them deafened the screams of your comrades and blurred the vision of your brother’s carcass that played throughout your waking hours.
You felt what could be considered ‘sane’ for the first few days. Fine with counting sealant bubbles, doing your little work outs, and sleeping the hunger away like the wild boar they treated you as. Then one night while the dripping ceiling lulled you to sleep, a switch felt like it turned on your nightmares. Like The King himself saw that you weren’t suffering enough and decided to tickle the little corner in your brain where you hid all your biggest fears. Colorful images of severed limbs and spilling guts of unknown soldiers projected into the darkness before you in short bursts, like your subconscious was reminding you of your failures as a captain. You saw tongues hanging out of your friends’ mouths in frozen screams, individual fingers scattered the grassy plains like sprinkles on cookies, but the worst was seeing eyeballs crushed or popped like a fallen, juicy grape that was stepped on. Your favorite was the images of maggots that crawled through your brother’s eye sockets, making your dinner resurface to the corner of your cell.
Some days you were aware of the tears rolling onto the stone beneath you. Some days the tears on your cheeks were crusted over in several layers that you couldn’t feel them tickle your lashes. Some days you felt nothing, and others you felt everything - felt it so vividly that you’d start screaming as you woke from your nightmares. Whether it was The King or your Fae captors that gave you a break on some nights from the horrors out of mercy or pity, you almost admitted you were thankful, if not for reminding yourself they were the ones who put you in here in the first place.
“The High King,” you muttered, reciting your kill list like a little prayer that helped you fall into a deep sleep. “High Lord of the Spring Court. High Lord of the Autumn Court, High Lord of the Summer Court…”
Even though you puked your guts up in the middle of almost every night, you noticed the puddle would disappear moments later. There were some moments you thought you saw a shape of a winged Fae standing deep in the shadows of the dungeon, looking into your cell between the bars, pitying you and your kind so much that the least they could do was not make your cell smell like acid. You couldn’t remember if you saw the shape of wings on their back or could distinguish any feathers because by the time you noticed they were there, they had slipped between the shadows to travel between the pockets of spacetime.
Every night you slept through the guilt that ate at your heart as you managed to live another day, if you would call this living at all. Every night, you wondered what would happen if the long chain, whose one end was attached to your cuffs and the other to the floor, wrapped around your neck several times a little too tightly.
You finished your latest meal with a clean wingtip bone in between your fingers. You had saved every single wingtip after realizing counting the time in between meals was useless and counting the number of meals somehow made more sense. The Fae let you keep them as the plates vanished from your cell, perhaps, again, out of pity and wanting your sanity to be discernible when the time came. Now, you counted one hundred and thirty-nine bones. If the math was correct, you would have been in your cell between fifty and one hundred days, depending on if they were generous enough to give you more than one meal a day.
The math didn’t matter so much when the hinges on your cell door screeched open. No Fae was in sight, though, even as the twinkle of light in the hallway led the way.
Skepticism creeped under your old leathers. Was this the light that all dying soldiers talked about? Would you see your brother again? Relief and terror were indistinguishable in this moment as you crawled your way across the threshold into whiteness. Only the view of an unrecognizable Fae male broke the blindness as he pulled you to your feet just before walking into another pocket of space. Your body felt like it was separating from your spirit with a centrifugal-like force as you felt the same vertigo whip you through the darkness in between universes. Bare soles touched cold stone, the only sense of relief before puking up bread and chicken. The light was difficult to adjust to, even though the dim moonlight that glittered the room made it evident the sun had set long ago.
Your double vision finally settled into one horrifying picture in front of you - The King at his throne at the opposite side of the room and a large, boiling cauldron the size of a clawfoot tub in front of him. Next to him on the dais, seven Fae males with crowns atop their heads watched the cauldron with stoic expressions. One of them you recognized as the one with bat wings that locked you up in your cell. You could only assume they were the High Fae Lords of the seven Courts.
You’ve heard stories of a cauldron in childrens’ books. Some books with magic were banned from the curriculum due to Pro-Fae or Loyalist propaganda, but that didn’t stop children from seeking them in the private libraries of the High Fae they served, yourself included. You remembered reading about how the Cauldron was life and death itself. Without it, there would be no humans or Fae, there would be no lands, Fae or mortal. There would be no magic, no immortality or mortality. There would be nothing. It was as old as the world was. It must have been sleeping this whole time or hiding below the depths of the world or in between some crevice in the universe.
Surrounding the Cauldron were indistinguishable bodies boiled down to their very bones, tossed to the floor. With your experience in the kitchen, you knew the bodies were boiled for too hot or too long to the point where the tender meat melted off its bones. You lost body count around the eighties.
You fell to your knees as someone - a human you recognized as a lieutenant that resided in the Spring Court - was forced in front of the Cauldron facing a bored King.
“Do you swear an oath of fealty to serve any and all Fae in all the lands?” One of the High Lords questioned formally. Despite him asking hundreds, perhaps thousands before you, the High Lord kept the elegance in his tone, refusing to show any sign of weakness in front of a lowly human.
“Yes,” the lieutenant answered so pathetically that you’re surprised he didn’t kill himself within the cell before facing this unfortunate choice of fate. “I swear, to the Mother, the Cauldron, and all the Gods!”
The same High Lord simply nodded to the High Faes that held the human before them. Without hesitation, they forced the lieutenant into the cauldron.
“No, please!” he begged. “I swear to you, My King! The one true High King of the Lands!”
But The King said nothing as the human drowned in the black tub. The cauldron didn’t look deep enough to drown in, but you saw no limbs or hairs peeking above the surface, only small bubbles. It must have been fifteen minutes before the bubbles stopped. There was no way an ordinary human could have survived that long underwater… Something was happening, something that only Fae magic could explain.
What emerged after was another body, browned and crisped with splotches of bone peeking from under scorched skin. It was tossed aside to an undocumented pile of other bones as carelessly as a fleck of lint on a suit. You’d puke again if it wasn’t for the Fae that was holding you pushing you next in line, tired of having to pull humans from different prison cells that scattered the entire King’s land.
You eyed every High Fae male that sat upon the dais and met their bored gazes with your own. You imagined using Fae magic to fill their heartless chests with molten alloy. You took extra time to attempt burning holes into the High Lord that brought you to your cell. Something sparkled in his pitless eyes, as if understanding should you somehow survive your death sentence, you’d release unholy power to all Fae across the world.
The Cauldron’s cast iron body was hot like a soup pot as you approached it, but no smoke or embers were visible to your human eyes. Perhaps the Fae had no use for real fire if they could just boil soup with their magic. With a force strong enough to make you gasp, the Fae male pushed your upper body to bow, nose millimeters above the Cauldron’s surface.
“Do you swear an oath of fealty to serve any and all Fae in all the lands?” repeated the High Lord.
The male’s fingers that weaved through your hair squeezed so tight you thought your scalp would bleed, adding flavor to the human soup below you. Your breath felt short as you seethed your first words in what felt like months.
“Fuck you.”
All the Fae Lords looked bored, whether you were the second human, or the second thousandth did not matter to them. The same one who recited the question that determined your death waved a hand flippantly, signaling for the Fae to hurry along so the next human could burn.
Cold water rushed through your nostrils before you could object. Cold… So cold, even as you felt the warmth of the cast iron just seconds before. You tried to fight your way through the Fae hands that kept you under water. Such strong hands and forcefulness. Even if he wasn’t a High Lord, you knew how much power those hands beheld. The view of The King and High Lords blurred even as you broke the surface of the Cauldron, oxygen levels deathly low. When the Fae male above you found your struggling bothersome, one hand pressed against your face, forcing you fully underwater, each orifice now filled with the ice-cold cauldron water. There was a tickle of something dark, something made of true evil, near the bottom of the Cauldron. Something warm that caressed the delicate skin of your shins, itching for you to fall deeper before it took its chance to envelop you.
It angered you to your core that Fae could simply kill humans with something as pathetic as drowning in bath water. So, with the Fae male’s hand still pushing on your face, using the despair that bled through your mind, you bit the closest finger so hard you felt the bones crunch like a baby carrot.
One finger was your battalion; then another for the humans who melted in the Cauldron; and the pinky was for your brother.
You managed to find your footing at the bottom of the Cauldron as you emerged, breathing heavily and coughing up water. This time, The King and the High Lords’ eyes widened. Even the one you recognized, who tried to keep his stoicism, looked surprised.
You were the first human to survive the Cauldron.
In your moment of basking in absolute power, you slowly raised a middle finger to all who sat at the dais.
The raven-haired High Lord’s laugh, soft and light, rang through the room before you were knocked out cold and submerged beneath the surface for the last time.
–
The water breathed life into your body for you to witness your last moments as a humbled human. A short moment of mercy, if you’d call it that. Somehow, there was no bottom of the Cauldron like before. It felt like you were in a cavern in the deep sea, seeing nothing but vast darkness around you, waiting for some sleeping beast hidden in the deep end to awaken and devour you whole. No matter how far you felt like you were reaching, no walls surrounded you, either, and there was no surface to swim to.
You were floating next to nothing. You were floating in nothing - like you had become nothing.
The sleeping beast made of true evil took the form of a hot, thick ink swimming in the cold water. It was so cold that you thought your blood had frozen and stopped its flow of what little oxygen you had left. This evil something, this black blood that inked your bloodstream, must have been the essence of the Cauldron itself. It was what burned all other humans who swam in its body. Its judgment upon you was… different. Like it knew you were different. Good, perhaps, or rather brave.
An otherworldly power threaded itself in between the walls of your cells, between sequences of your DNA, and wherever the ink touched your skin as it crawled its way up and into your body. You felt the ocean-cold temperature of the water warm itself like a blanket around you. All the cuts and bruises that once stung your skin were replaced with relief. The stickiness of your hair and chin from all the tree sap and vomit were as clean as if you had bathed in the tub in your home.
The Cauldron was cleaning you.
Strings of yellow gold and starlight wiggled beneath your nails, through your eyelashes, and through your hair. Warmth of the sun covered and tickled your skin, glittering it with color and health. The starlight glow of the Cauldron ink outlined parts of your body that you could now see in the abyss. Your nail beds were clean of dirt, fingers longer and slender than you remembered. You felt… taller. Your entire body was rid of scum and grime and had a glow that you only saw on Fae skin.
Fae… When you touched your ears, the distinguishable points on the upper shell shocked your fingertips.
The Cauldron turned you Fae.
Something deep in this bowl of cast iron, deeper than where the floor of the Cauldron hid, kept its distance from you. It felt like a neutral spirit that watched you float, watched you turn into Fae. It felt familiar, like something your soul recognized but couldn’t identify.
It kept watching you, and you felt it in your new body that it would always be watching you.
Terror ignited the flow of your blood. Your body remembered you were submerged under water when you gasped for air, panicking as the abyss felt deeper and colder than when you first sunk in. As if answering your plea, you found the bottom, or rather it found you, and you pushed your legs up to break the surface. Over the edge of the hot Cauldron, you spit out water that you swallowed in your lungs.
The brisk air of the room inflated your newly-engineered lungs. Even something as natural as breathing felt easier in the skin of Fae. Cold, clean water dripped from your now-naked body, as if your human-made leathers burned from the magic that snaked between your cells as it turned you. Despite the room being cold prior to your swim and drenched in a human soup, your body temperature adapted accordingly. Your skin in the moonlight glowed with health. There was no evidence of the war, your captivity, or the blood of a Fae’s fingers, even as his cries reminded you of what you’d done not ten minutes before.
White hot anger and grief flowed from you, rumbling reverberated through the cobblestones that the feet of the Cauldron stood on. The Cauldron Made you into the beings that owned you. It Made you the very thing that you were trained - born - to kill. It Made you one of Them - a Being who would live through hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. A Thing who would see wars begin and end with humans who were the grandchildren of the grandchildren of your comrades buried beneath the fertile soils of Fae lands next to their ancestors’ ancestors.
You turned to face the High Fae males. The King’s eyes were wide. Perhaps it was amusement or anger, but you hoped it was in terror. Yes, The King should fear you – you, the only human who survived the dip of the Cauldron. You watched his hands grip the gold knobs on his throne, knuckles turning white.
The High Lords next to him showed a mixture of feelings. Some faces were written with terror, some with lust as they glazed from your naked body, and one was rather indifferent. But the bat-winged High Lord, the one who threw you into the cell, who had killed your battalion with ease, was rather surprised. Pleasantly surprised, like he was glad that you managed to survive, if that’s what you called it. Perhaps he would be clapping his hands if it wasn’t for the angry King.
For what you hoped would be your last living gesture, you held both middle fingers to the High Lords upon the dais.
The bat-winged High Lord suppressed a scoff as two Fae males dragged you from the Cauldron to kneel in front of the dais, in front of The King, still dripping with water. Your knees bruised as they dug into the jagged cobblestones.
“Well, then. Wasn’t that fun?” You recognized the voice of the bat.
The heels of his shoes clicked on the stone, walking achingly slow to where you kneeled with your head down. His shoes were black to match his outfit, shiny and buffed to perfection even as they creased with the way he bent in front of you. Warm fingers grabbed your chin and forced you to look up. His face was stomach-twistingly close enough to smell the menthol and elderberry breath that kissed your nose. Strong brows flattened boredly, though his lips curled with amusement. His wings gave no hint as to any other emotions their master felt. His thumb grazed the bottom of your lip, daring you to bite it the same way you did the other Fae male. But even you weren’t dumb enough to try something like that to a High Lord.
“You know the deal, King,” he said, eyes still locked with your dull ones. “One and done, and she’s mine.”
The King tapped his foot thoughtfully. “She has been Made.”
“And she will reside in the Night Court with me.”
“To do what, exactly? Be your whore?”
“Perhaps.” Your skin flecked with goosebumps. To lie with a Fae male would be the ultimate betrayal. “Or I’ll dissect her. I haven’t decided yet.”
“What is your purpose.”
The High Lord of the Night Court extended his bejeweled hands to all Fae in the room. “History is being written as we speak, my King!” he said incredulously. “There are so many possibilities. What if we could do this to all humans? Let me study to what extent this body has become Fae. Let us use her as our war machine, if anything.”
The King studied the High Lord as a chorus of approvals echoed through the room. A human turned Fae performing mass genocide across all the lands… It was nothing short of a genius masterplan of torture. The animosity and the history between Fae and humans ran deep since the beginning of the enslavement decree. What better way to punish humans for rebellion than to turn them into their enemy and enslave them that way? Hot, burning tears slipped through as you didn’t dare to break your gaze on The King.
The King waved his hand lazily, silencing the room. “Very well, High Lord Bang Chan. Take her to your Court of Nightmares.”
“Much appreciated.”
Your bundle of hair was handed over to the High Lord that now stood behind you. A gentle tug was the only warning before the view of the dais warped. Your naked body receded into another hole in space until the dais was replaced with obsidian floors and onyx sculptures of scaled and taloned beasts. Just by looking at the room, one would think it’d be cold and too sanitary like an infirmary, but the flames in the fireplace scented the room with mahogany and spices, and even the floor was warmed to a lovely temperature.
This was your bedroom.
All you could do to prevent yourself from puking again was curl up on the tile floors and watch the crackling fire as the click of heels receded behind you.