A Court of Fate and Failure | Azriel

17: Warm and Wicked

They thought it was a glamor, what she had done. What she could do. 

Naoise didn't bother correcting them, not allowing them to believe otherwise. For glamor did play a part in changing her from the Guardian of the Night Court to an unrecognizable Illyrian female. But only on her wings, and very little else. From her back where she still felt their wondrous weight, to the common eye, those wings were not her own. Strong and ever so dark was now tucked close to her, scarred and disfigured along the central tendons in the clearest most known sign of a female having been clipped.

Even though she had been the one to weave such a dastardly lie, panic and bile still clawed at her the instant Naoise lay eye upon her handiwork. A reality of many that would shatter her if it were to become hers. Threatening to shatter her right then for the threat of something she'd once escaped but could very well still occur. 

A threat on her entire being.

The rest of herself was something much easier to stomach, something she could do with an easy breath. Gone were her pointed ears, her bargains, the tattoos that marked her, unknowing to many, as a Carynthian warrior of their precious blood rite. Her skin was darker, her eyes a muted hazel she tried her best not to mirror after the wondrous eyes of a certain shadowsinger, her leathers and her siphons, too, were glamored out of sight and into a traditional Illyrian dress, nearly rags though of better quality than most. 

All she had worked to become was hidden away from the world in an instant. Or, at least, this cruel hive that would tear her apart in moments.

Among that hive, she now walked. With a hand in a river of hate, she adopted it as her own for the time being. This was something she found she could do not long ago, let the emotions of another envelop her as she stood in the current, and become that person in everything but soul and body. Her thoughts remained her own for the most part, but everything she did not control acted of pure instinct and pattern. 

It saved her a lot of energy, actually. Naoise needn't think about this camp's etiquette when it came to females when her body did it all for her. So, like this in this body and with these rotten emotions, she was one with the enemy. And not a male second-guessed her presence as she passed them by, muscles lax, wings pulled in tight, and head down.

She was in.

Among tents and training rings squeezed between the trees, all hastily and improperly put into place during whatever panic had ensued in the fall of Amarantha, Naoise navigated her way to the heart. To where no female walked willingly. She could feel it in her bones, in the tensing of this body that did not feel like her own as she got closer, that this was a place of suffering for the females of this camp. 

Pain. 

Fear. 

Suffering and knowledge of the kind all must know to survive. 

It all threatened to tear her apart under memories she did not own. Could not see but feel.

As soon as she stepped from a grouping of trees where nothing more than a small rack of weapons could be placed, Naoise knew she found the heart of this camp. If it wasn't for the sudden paralyzing dread and fear that shot through her veins, making it so as she had to back off from the river of this other female's emotions even just to retain thought, then it was the males. Every single one gathered here was worn from battles long ago, scarred horrendously and massive in their each overwhelming presences. 

Even if they weren't quite as large as Cassian or her father, they made up for it in the threat that saturated their very scents. The danger she knew they could pose to her or another female was so different to the two hulking males she knew.