Hidden Wings

Chapter 6: The Court of Glass and Ash

The heavy, rhythmic thud of boots against stone stopped just outside the chamber doors. The air in the room grew instantly brittle, dropping in temperature until my breath plumed into a faint white mist. Beside me, Elaris stood rigid, his hand dropping away from my shoulder as he adjusted his posture into something fiercely formal.

The double doors didn’t just open; they unlatched with a sharp, synchronized c***k that echoed like a whip.

Three figures glided into the room. They didn’t walk so much as float with a terrifying, predatory grace, their long, ceremonial robes of midnight blue dragging silently across the polished floorboards. Like the monsters in the alleyway, their skin carried a faint, cool hue, but these weren’t wild beasts. Their faces were devastatingly beautiful, sharp-angled, and completely devoid of human emotion.

“So,” the central figure murmured. His voice sounded like grinding tectonic plates, deep and resonant enough to make my teeth ache. “The hidden ember of Ivearona is finally uncovered. You took a grand gamble, Elaris, keeping her among the mortals.”

“A gamble that kept the bloodline intact, Councilor Vane,” Elaris replied, his voice carrying a steady, royal weight I was still trying to reconcile with the brother who used to drive me to school in a beat-up truck.

I instinctively tried to pull the silk sheets over my bare shoulders, but a sudden, sharp rustle reminded me of the weight on my back. My wings—those impossible, shimmering structures of green and purple starlight—flared outward defensively. The sudden motion caused a ripple of iridescent light to wash across the stone walls.

Councilor Vane’s eyes tracked the light, narrowing slightly. “The wings are undeniable. The signature of the true lineage remains. But she is raw. Unrefined. She smells of mortal dirt and fear.”

“She has suppressed her nature for seventeen years to survive,” Elaris shot back, stepping slightly in front of my bed to block their view. “Her power is volatile, but it is hers.”

The female councilor to Vane’s left took a slow step forward, her gaze sliding past Elaris to lock onto my trembling hands. “And what of the boy?” she asked, her voice like cracking ice. “He carries the mark of the Winter Vanguard, Elaris. We all know he didn’t follow her for any other reason but to catch her before we could have her back.”

My chest tightened, a suffocating weight pressing down on my lungs. *Ashton.* Hearing them call him a spy, a calculated weapon—it felt like a physical blow. I thought of the golden fire he had thrown to protect me, the desperate urgency in his voice when he told me I wasn’t human. Was it all a performance?

“He remains in the lower cells,” Elaris said coldly. “He will be interrogated under the unsealed decree. If he is a spy, his mind will be stripped.”

“No!” The word burst from my throat before I could stop it.

The three councilors froze, their heads snapping toward me in unison. The sheer intensity of their collective gaze made me want to shrink back, but a strange, hot pulse of adrenaline flared in my veins, answering the fear.

“Ah,” Vane purred, a slow, humorless smile touching his lips. “The little bird finds her voice. Do you defend the predator that tracked you to our gates, princess?”

“I don’t know about that,” I stammered, my voice shaking but holding its ground. “But he… he saved my life. If he wanted to kill me, he could have done it on Earth. He fought those things for me.”

“He kept you alive because a living prize is worth far more to the Unseelie King than a corpse,” the female councilor countered smoothly. “You are the key to the their end, child. To them, you are in the way. To us, you are survival.”

With a final, lingering look at my glowing wings, the three councilors turned and swept out of the room, the heavy doors thudding shut behind them.

The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by my ragged breathing. I looked up at Elaris, the betrayal and confusion finally bubbling over.

“You’re going to let them torture him?” I whispered. “After everything?”

Elaris let out a long, exhausted sigh, his regal posture slumping just enough for me to see a glimpse of the brother I knew. “Ivy… Ashton isn’t who you think he is. In this world, trust is a lethal currency. You need to rest. Tomorrow, everything changes.”

He didn’t wait for my response. He turned and walked out, leaving me alone in the dim, unfamiliar room.

I sat there for a long time, staring at my hands as the faint, golden magic sparked across my knuckles. The castle was dead quiet, but deep beneath the floorboards, in the dark stone belly of the eastern tower, I could feel a faint, magnetic pull. A matching frequency, humming through the rock.

Ashton was down there. And despite the terror, the doubt, and the warning of the council, the invisible rope in my chest was still pulling me straight toward him.

The councilors’ footsteps faded into the stone-hollowed silence of the palace, but the hum in my chest didn’t vanish. It sharpened. It was a physical ache, an invisible, rhythmic tugging against my ribs that drew me out of the guest chamber and into the throat of the palace. I didn’t know the layout, but my blood did. I moved through the shadows, my new wings folded tight against my back, until I reached the descent.

The air in the eastern tower grew stagnant and cold, smelling of crushed slate and ozone. As I reached the lowest level, the grand, opulent architecture of the upper floors gave way to something older—rough-hewn, living stone that seemed to pulse in sympathy with my own heartbeat.

I stopped before a heavy door of reinforced iron and cold-pressed silver. The room beyond wasn’t a filthy hole; it was a sterile, unsettling box of gray stone. It looked less like a dungeon and more like a laboratory cage.

Ashton sat on the floor, his back against the wall, his gaze fixed on a point in the distance. A single, jagged streak of dried blood marred his jawline—a testament to the brutality of his capture—but his posture remained infuriatingly calm.

The silence of the cell was thick, almost suffocating, yet as Ashton spoke, his voice shed its sharpness, smoothing into something rich and hypnotic—like velvet dragged over broken glass. He didn’t look like a prisoner; he looked like a prince in exile, his posture relaxed, his gaze fixed on me with a terrifying, intimate intensity.

“You look exhausted, Ivy,” he murmured, his voice dipping into a lower, soothing register that seemed to pull the tension directly from my shoulders. “ I didn’t think I would be able to see you, did you ask them about your life?” I nod slowing my steps to him. “What did they tell you?” When I don’t answer he sighs and asks, “They’ve been keeping you in that gilded guest wing, haven’t they? Giving you just enough truth to keep you compliant, while they keep the real horrors tucked away in the places you aren’t ‘supposed’ to go.”

I gripped the cold silver bars, my knuckles turning white. “They said you were the one who brought horrors to my doorstep, Ashton. You tracked me. You led them to me, those things.” I cut myself off, my hands shaking against the cold iron. My anger was a living thing now, pulsing in time with that cursed hum under my skin. Everyone around me was a wall of silence and secrets. No one let me think; they only let me obey

He laughed, a soft, musical sound that lacked any malice. He glided closer to the bars, his movements fluid, alien, and utterly captivating. “I followed the pull, just like you are doing right now. Yes, I’m a changeling, Ivy—we are built to navigate the spaces between worlds, to see the patterns that everyone else is too blind to notice. So, when I saw you for what you truly are months ago. I didn’t come to destroy you. I came to wake you up.”

He leaned in, his eyes shimmering with a faint, iridescent light that made my vision swim. “Do you want to know why your brother was so desperate to keep you on Earth? Why the potion tasted so bitter every single morning?” He tilted his head, his expression shifting into one of gentle, devastating honesty. “It’s because they’re terrified of your memories. They’ve spent centuries resetting your core every time you get close to the truth. You’ve died more times than there are stars in the sky, all because you were fighting for a realm that treats you like a battery, not a princess.”

My breath hitched. “That’s a lie. Elaris wouldn’t—”

“Elaris is a jailer who has learned to love his own prisoner,” Ashton interrupted, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, laced with a pity so authentic it made my skin crawl. “He knows everything. He has the files in his study, buried under a glamour that he thinks is impenetrable. If you want the truth—the real truth about who you were before they stole your identity—go to his study. Look for the leather-bound records behind the portrait of your grandmother. Once you see the cycle, you’ll realize that I’m the only one who isn’t trying to keep you asleep.”

The air in the room felt thin, pulled taut by the silence that hung between us. Ashton reached out, his hand brushing against mine—a touch that felt like cool, refreshing rain on a fevered brow.

I flinched, not just from the contact, but from the sudden, sharp spike in the “hum” beneath my skin. It started as a low, mournful vibration near my collarbone, a subtle reminder of the Fae blood I was trying so hard to ignore. As he pulled back, the sound in my ears rose in pitch, shifting from a soothing melody into a discordant, frantic whine.

“They don’t love you, Ivy,” he said, his voice quiet, pressing into the space I was trying to keep between us.

The hum surged, a sudden pressure behind my eyes that made my head spin. I grit my teeth, trying to force the sound down, to clamp it into the box I kept for my “human” life. Be normal. Just be a girl. But the harder I tried to suppress it, the more the hum pulsed in time with my hammering heart, vibrating violently against the bones of my chest.

“They fear you,” he continued, watching me with that knowing, maddening gaze.

I took a sharp breath, the sound of the hum now a jagged, electric static that drowned out the room’s ambient noise. It was a suffocating pressure, a rising tide of energy that made the very air feel thick, as if the room itself were reacting to the dangerous frequency of my anxiety.

“And when you finally realize that they’re the ones who have been killing you,” he leaned in closer, his voice low, like the promise of a storm, “you’ll come looking for the only person who can actually help you survive.