A COURT OF DARK SHADOWS AND LIQUID GOLD (AZRIEL X OC)

1.5: Nesta - It That Betrays.

❝ I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream

I know you, that look in your eyes is so familiar a gleam

And I know it's true that visions are seldom all they seem

But if I know you, I know what you'll do

You'll love me at once, the way you did once upon a dream.❞

— Once Upon a Dream by Lana Del Rey.

Something was wrong with her. Nesta herself knew it perfectly.

There was something in her head that wasn't working right, that didn't work the way it did for other people. Something that was not in the normal way. The things that should give her happiness, sadness, or empathy didn't feel right. Of course, she felt the anger very well. Too well. It was as if when she was angry, the rage bubbled heavily through her veins, like thick oil that consumed her.

She had tried. When she found herself cornered all those years ago, isolated in the House of Wind, she had genuinely tried.

Not from the start, of course, and not for the right reasons, mind you. She just wanted to go downstairs to go to the nearest bar, and for that she had to have the physical strength to go down all those ten thousand steps.

But she had found peace in the whole thing, in the training, in Emerie, in Gwyn, the priestesses, and the library.

In Cassian.

But that had been a bubble. One that had been broken in the Illyrian mountains during the blood rite. When she had moved as if she were out of his body, seeing herself mercilessly smash the Illyrian males who dared try to cross the line she had marked with her sword, grinning like mad and covered in blood.

They had looked at each other that day. Her soul and her physical body. They had looked directly at each other, and she had noted their delight in their actions. She had heard that macabre laugh. She felt the way the anger pushed through her to consume her. But she didn't let that happen. And she came to herself to make the rest of the way up the mountain, knowing what she had to do.

That, what was wrong with her, had always been with her. It had taken until that day on the mountain for her to realize it. It had been weeks after she returned to the Wind House, lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, looking back as far as she could go, desperate to see that it hadn't been like that, but it was. The further back she looked, the more obvious it was that this had been a part of her since she was born. But she stayed there anyway, searching her own memories, hoping for a better answer to her dilemma.

Catatonic, Madja told Feyre and Elain, she assumed it was from all that she had lived through in the mountains. Which was not a lie, but not the complete truth. Thus, Cassian was the first to receive his younger sister's wrath. Followed by Rhysand. Azriel had been wisely silent, but he had received his own dose as well.

¿How did it occur to them that only about a year of training could be enough to send her to be subjected to such a situation? — ¿Had they bothered to mentally prepare her as well, after all Nesta had been through in the war?

Every question Feyre asked was done with fury, but was never answered. Or at least Nesta didn't listen to them if there were, she just went back into her memories, looking more aggressively for answers to be able to get out of that state and appease her sister's concern.