Unseelie Court, Veilside
The Unseelie Court lay beneath the world like a cathedral carved from midnight.
No sun ever touched its stones. Light here bloomed faintly from lichen and soulglass, shimmering in muted indigos and greys. It was not dark—not entirely—but what illumination remained moved like memory: soft, flickering, and always on the verge of fading.
Alaric stepped through Veil past the last gate in silence, his boots echoing against the long hall. The wardstone doors closed behind him with a hush, sealing him once again in the stillness he had known for centuries.
The Court was quiet. As always. A hush of corridors, a murmur of unseen wings. The scent of parchment, frost, and old grief.
At the far end of the atrium, where a throne was carved into the root of a petrified yew, sat the Queen.
She wore mourning like a second skin—layers of veils that drifted around her like paint spilled in water, heavy sleeves sewn with silver-thread glyphs that whispered in silence. Her crown was made not of gold, but memory: pale bones from forgotten birds, stars that had fallen once and cracked. Alaric did not understand what grief she bore, only that she had borne it for longer than he'd had breath—long before she was Queen, long before his eyes had ever slid her way. The weight of it clung to her not as tragedy, but as ritual, a permanence shaped in silence and the ache of years unspoken.
She had once been Isolde to him. Not the Queen, not a symbol, but a woman with sharp eyes and unflinching hands, who braided her hair before battle and whispered to the dying as if they were old friends. Before all the veils and the veiled meanings, there had been a bond—a kind of quiet alignment, forged not from declarations, but from standing side by side in the slow work of keeping chaos at bay. He had once loved her in the way soldiers love their standard: fiercely, wordlessly, knowing it can never fully love back.
Her eyes were dark, and old, and watching. She did not rise when he approached.
He did not bow.
They had passed the need for that long ago.
"We found proof," Alaric said. "The Seelie are interfering with soul passage."
The Queen tilted her head. "You are certain?"
"The memory the soul carried was not its own. It was implanted. Purposefully. So that it would choose rebirth."
The Queen did not blink. "You've seen such a thing before."
"Aye. But not like this. Not in the open. Not this precise. They've refined it."
She said nothing.
He stepped closer. "The Harrowers saw it, too. They're willing to work with us—"
"That," the Queen interrupted, "is unprecedented."
"They're desperate. So are we."
Her hands curled slightly on the throne's arms. "You forget," she murmured, "this court was not built to conquer. It was built to hold stillness in the wind."
Alaric's jaw tightened. "We don't need conquest. We need action."
"Action," she said softly, "against whom? The Seelie Court has the blessing of mortal dreamers. Caderyn whispers of golden light and second chances. We speak of silence and rest. Tell me, Alaric—who do you think the world believes?"
He said nothing for a time. Then,
"Times have changed. Mortals want to remember."
"I remember," the Queen said, "when the Seelie were as we were. When they tended the boundaries, not broke them. But the King you once called brother has grown bold."
Alaric's nostrils flared slightly at the word brother. "So we do nothing?"
"We wait. We endure."
"We die."
Silken words and solemn eyes, the eternal portrait of restraint. As if civility could unmake a slaughter. As if diplomacy could undo the rot gnawing at the roots of everything they once swore to protect.
Her eyes flicked to his. Something old, and exhausted, and infinitely sad passed across her face. "Then we die as we were meant to."
The silence stretched between them. Alaric stared at her. Isolde spoke in seasons and sighs, as though waiting long enough might make justice bloom on its own. But while she wove her caution into coronets and council notes, the Seelie twisted fate into cages and called it 'mercy'.
He'd had his fill of it.
Slowly, he reached behind his back and undid the clasp of his cloak. The Captain's mantle of the Hunt fell away—dark velvet streaked with silver, its clasp bearing the sigil of the crescent yew. He set it on the steps of the throne, its feather trim glinting in the light.
The sound it made as it landed was barely a whisper, but it echoed in the utter silence.
"I cannot serve a stillness that forgets how to stand," he said.
The Queen looked down at the mantle. For a moment, her expression was unreadable. Then a flicker crossed her face—grief and banked pride, chased swiftly by weary acceptance. "I knew you would do this again," she said, as if saying it aloud made it no less bitter.
"I didn't," he said.
A faint smile tugged at her mouth, disbelief flickering like a shadow behind her veil. Of all her loyal courtiers, he was the only one who still managed to surprise her—and now, perhaps, the only one who still dared. When life stretches eternally, surprise was like the finest nectar: too rare, too bittersweet, and always a little painful to swallow.
She rose—slowly, elegantly. Her presence never filled the room; it emptied it. Quieted it. Made everything feel one breath away from ending.
She walked down the steps, robes trailing behind like a twilight river.
Standing before him, she reached beneath her sleeve and withdrew a ring: a simple band of soulsteel set with a tear-shaped opal, flickering between dusk and dawn.
"Take this," she said, handing him a ring she had removed from one long-fingered hand.
He did.
"It will answer only to you. My gift. My farewell."
Alaric studied it for a long moment. The soulsteel shimmered faintly in his palm, cool and weightless, but humming with restrained potential. This was no ornament. The opal at its center—shifting subtly between dusk blue and pale dawn—was a reservoir, a key, and a blade all at once. With it, he could seal waypoints, speak directly to certain threads of fate, or summon the Queen's final command if ever she issued one. It was legacy in mineral form, and a tether he hadn't expected.
"You don't give power lightly, Isolde," he murmured, half in awe, half in warning. He was unexpectedly touched by the gesture, confused about how it made him feel.
"No. Nor do I give it without warning."
Her gaze sharpened. "You follow your heart, Alaric Fen. But do not follow it blindly."
He said nothing. His heart had very little to do with any of this, as far as he was concerned. It felt like a deadweight in his chest even now.
She lifted her hand—barely—and touched his chest, over the place where his heart still beat, slow and ancient.
"There is no cruelty in endings," she said. "Only reverence."
He bowed his head. And for just a breath, she let her hand linger—not as Queen to Captain, but as Isolde to the only man who had never flinched from her grief. And when he turned to go, she did not call him back.
A Queen, after all, never pleads.
Seelie Court, Veilside
A moonlit salon deep within the Court of Bloom and Dream. The air glows gold, heavy with the scent of honeyed nectar and smoke. Voices spill from the velvet alcoves and balconies, where no one ever speaks plainly and the walls have ears.
A woman's voice, light and silken:
"Did you hear? The dark hound has finally slipped his leash. Left her there—cloak folded like yesterday's vow."
A second voice, male, velvet with amusement:
"After all these centuries? How dreadfully overdue. Loyalty ages like milk in the cold, it seems."
Another, lilting with cruelty:
"I always said he stayed out of pity. Poor thing—so gaunt with grief, so draped in dusk. Hardly a courtier. Barely a shadow."
A deeper female voice, lazy and purring:
"She clung to him, you know. All those long glances, like she could will him back into wanting. But you can't stitch a man to your side with silence and sighs."
A sharp male voice, nasal and giddy:
"And the way he looked at her! Like he'd seen the end of time and it wore her face. Oh, I swooned. That sort of devotion must rot eventually."
The first woman again, mock-thoughtful:
"Do you think he's found a new Queen? Something young and soft, I hope. Maybe one that speaks above a whisper?"
A tinkling female voice, edged like frost over petals: "No, no. Word is he's sniffing around mortals. One in particular. A Changeling, I hear. How quaint. Must be exhausting, all that human sincerity."
A sigh, from someone unseen:
"He was never really ours, was he? Just a guest at a funeral that never ended."
Laughter. Icy, airy, scattered like broken crystal.
In the background, the Seelie King stood at the edge of a sunlit archway, not speaking. A golden goblet untouched, watching the court ripple with delight at its own cleverness.
Caderyn's smile did not reach his eyes. And he just listened.