The aggression of the knock has startled even Aeyliv.

There has only been three beats, maybe four, yet the sound resounds a hundred more times in the hollow of the Queen's chest. Sets something ablaze that she has to extinguish before she causes more harm than good.

Surprise is not an expression his features mold into to easily, quite the contrast of the careful mask he's thus far shown her. 

In that moment he looks younger than she'd have expected of him.

But it falls back into the uniformity of the features that were slowly becoming familiar quickly enough. Like the water returns to calmness once the storm has blown over.

His stone maintains that stone-like appearance when his lips part and he calls. "Who is it?" A very well-crafted medley of calm and frustration.

Disappointment at being interrupted? She wouldn't be sure, and she didn't have much chance to ponder it further when a voice on the other side of thick oak sounds.

"Your mother is calling for you, Sir," Elodie doesn't miss the way his features soften so slightly at that. "She's requested you return to her chambers." 

Aeyliv collects himself, draws himself together and steps away from her, like he's not quite certain they wont come charging through the door regardless of what he has to say. 

Like he needs that space between their bodies, though she can't be sure why. 

"Thank you," the Prince's voice is kindly enough despite the frustration that had splintered through him, leaving as swiftly as lightning from the sky. "I'll come to her shortly." 

The poet was a mama's boy it seemed. 

Unsurprising and sweet both.

Elodie has to fight against the smile that flickers across her features, it comes unbeckoned and unwelcomed after several days of cruelty. 

Cruelty that is at her door. 

"We've come to bring you to her, Sir," the voice repeats again. "Now, sir." 

Impatience. 

In her court it would have been read as insolence, her jaw tenses at the very sound of it. 

"I'll come to her shortly," Aeyliv repeats, says it  fiercer the second time, more like an order. 

But they don't take it like one. 

"Now," the voice comes again. "Sir," comes as a half croaked afterthought. Like the word rips and tears through something in its way out.

Elodie can hear more than one person beyond the door, the squeak of boots on old wood. Can almost see the glint of metal that is the swords at their belts. 

Her grip tightens again, fractionally on the wire.

Surprise again, but of a different sort. 

Something made more of steel than stone.

"Go," Elodie murmurs before she realises she's even opened her lips to speak. 

The Prince sets a look upon her, eyebrow cocked toward his hairline again. 

"Best not put the in-laws in a bad mood by turning their son insolent," is her reasoning. 

There's logic to her words, but also the room seems narrow, tight around her. And the space is only drawing smaller until even the breath in her chest feels claustrophobic.

That and it will prove easier to defend herself alone than this soft creature who's hands seem better used to quills and tomes than blades and arrows.

For a moment he looks like he's going to fight it, to protest. 

"Now, Sir," the tone implies suggestion. 

The scuffing of boots on old wood implies something quite different. 

Pointed ears twitch, he heard it too. 

Aeyliv's next movement is so swift it might have made her jump, when a blade is in his palm. 

Pitifully small compared to the blades the Queen was used to, far sharper than the wire currently coiled within her fingertips. 

Had she reacted to her first instinct, she'd have broken the other man's fingers.

Worked that coil around his neck, pulled taut until he turned purple.

She hadn't - mostly because for the first time in a rather long time, she'd been caught off guard.

"A little more effective than your wire, I'd think," he murmurs, the words as quiet as a promise and as solemn as an oath, pressing it into her hand before she can spit so much as a word out.

Then he's turning, a flurry of dark colours and making for the door again. Calling a short "Coming," to prevent them losing their patience entirely and tearing the door down.

The door creaks open to reveal that Elodie's suspicions had been correct. 

Half a dozen soldiers, armed and armoured both are revealed as it swings open. 

She half expects them to move for her, but they don't. Only welcoming Aeyliv into their ranks. 

Like he doesn't look like quite the sore thumb, a poet's features among scarred creatures. 

But the door swings shut before she can catch much more of the world beyond her bedroom. The room that feels more like a prison the longer she's confined to its fineries. 

Elodie doesn't miss the sound of the door locking behind him. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Aeyliv's gift feels wrong in her palm.

Like left to linger too long it might begin burning her, or the skin where it clutches the plain hilt might begin to slough away if she allows her touch to linger. 

There's nothing untoward to it, nothing obviously wrong.

Yet she despises it.

But she keeps her grip on it, steal tight and hidden from sight. 

Trying to convince herself to be grateful for the kindness he had offered her, especially as she hadn't very proven deserving of it. 

Elodie forces herself to sit still - something that had never been among her talents, tries to force her mind anywhere beyond the confines of these four walls.

But nor can she allow it to wander back to the battlefield a few days prior, so it leaves the Queen Feeling restless, stuck and frustrated.

So her eyes narrow upon a bookcase that lines the opposite wall of this room. 

She slips toward it on lazy feet, the floor beneath her creaking beneath her slight weight. She grazes a finger across the options. Leather-bound novels rough beneath the callouses of her fingertips.

All of them are thicker than the breadth of her palm, smelling musty with age and non-fiction in type. Nothing that overly reignites the love of reading a series of stuffy teachers during her youth had rather effectively slaughtered.

The Queen had hoped to distract her brain, not remind herself of the failures of the thrones before her or all the ways one could be poisoned using her country's native flowers. 

She ends up selecting the thinner of the books she can find, it doesn't seem thrilling but anything that will act as a distraction is better than the lonely, emptiness of the room before her right now.

She settles herself, as comfortably and naturally as she can force her bones to settle, into the mattress again. 

And allows the world around her to fade away as much as she can make it.

Either the histories of the lesser fae's deity worship was more interesting than elodie had ever thought to give it credit, or her brain truly needed a break from the world of pain it had witnessed in the last few days. Whatever the reason, Elodie would prove almost too distracted to realise she was being watched.

But as she leafs to the next page, head nestled in the crook of her arm as she reads, the realisation strikes her like something cold nestling against her skin unexpectedly.

She stiffens, casting her gaze across the room.

She'd almost forgotten where she was.

Elodie casts a gaze toward the door, wondering if movement beyond the oak had been what caught her attention.

She hears nothing. Every bone in her body, every muscle, every fibre on edge, like concentrating hard enough might beckon more of it to life.

But her body won't let her think nothing of it.

Her gaze pulls toward the window, where a slither of the dying sun pools through the glass, basking the world in a fading golden. Scattering dapples across the thick carpet underfoot, chasing shadows to the corners of the room.

Unless she'd really been pulled into the world of her book - it couldn't already be nearly sunset.

Elodie is standing before she realises she's given her body the order to begin moving, making for the window like the metres between her and it are littered with land mines. 

And finds a monster devouring the sun in the courtyard beyond the confines of her room.

It might have been mistaken for smoke, for mist, for her own imagination crumbling to pieces around her.

The matter might have been the kinder of the options at this point. 

But that pounding of her heart, that burning through her veins promises her it's real.

It's movements are boneless, more seamless than the flow of water, as easy as a shadow pouring across the ground.

A black that's as dark as the spaces between stars, it writhes and crackles. The kind of dark that dims the light around it, extinguishes any hint of it.

Half-formed yet tangible.

The Queen's first thought is of the staff in the courtyard, the courtiers, the children. Her eyes tear across what she can see of the gardens below, finds a scattering of people.

All cartoonish, heads tilted toward the skies, jaws agape.

That at least scratches out the notion that she might be hallucinating any of this.

Her lips part around the warning shout, "Run," is a word that tears from her lips raw and bloody, till her lungs hurt around the weight of it.

The window muffles the sound, but the world beyond had heard her, reacted.

What remained of the fae outside setting off at a run, and the vice that had taken a grip on Elodie's heart finally loosens somewhat.

But they weren't the only ones who'd heard her.

For it turns toward her window, swaying like an unsure breeze. 

Like a hound on the hunt, she can't say how she knows it, those movements should have been wrong, unfamiliar.

But she knows, in some very deep part of her bones, that it's searching.

And finally when it turns toward her, she knows it's found what it was looking for.

She might have screamed for help had it not been for the fear that stole the sound from her lungs before it could even properly form.

Guards. She has to swallow the sound before it lurches unbidden from her chest.

The Queen had been promised two would be posted at the door, but a flare of her nostrils tells her there's no one within a hundred feet,

It might have been enough time to get to her still.

But part of her already knows they won't be coming.

The thing doesn't have a face, yet it seems to bear fangs.

It doesn't have eyes, yet they set directly on her, seem to alight at the very sight of her.

And suddenly it is lunging for her.