AZALIYAH RISE OF THE FAE

THE SOUND OF DOORS SHUTTING (PT.3) COMING OUT

The very first thing that returned to her was the heavy, brutal reality of her own body pressing against the cold ground. It was followed closely, almost mockingly, by the hollow, scraping sound of something rolling a short distance across the hard-packed dirt before finally clicking to a rest against a stone step.

It took a agonizingly long moment for Azaliyah’s lagging brain to realize it was the wooden bowl she had dropped just before the ink took her. Now it lay somewhere just out of reach in the shadows, its faint, rhythmic scrape against the earth the only sound cutting through an otherwise absolute, suffocating silence.

Her eyes opened slowly. She didn't open them all the way at first, mostly because the physical world refused to come back to her in one clean, coherent motion. Instead, the village dragged itself back together piece by agonizing piece, assembling in her blurred vision as though reality had been violently torn apart by a careless hand and was now being forced back into place with little to no care for how the edges actually fit.

The tight, compressed layout of the buildings came back into view around her. They were still there. Still standing, untouched by physical fire or structural ruin, but they felt infinitely quieter than they had before the tide rolled through. It wasn't an empty kind of quiet—it was a heavy, breathless state of waiting.

Down the lane, the massive stone doors of the central stronghold remained completely shut, the iron bolts locked tight from the inside. No one rushed out into the square with lanterns. No one came sprinting to check on what had just happened to the two strangers left exposed to the dark, as though whatever malevolent force had just rolled through the streets had already been fully accounted for in a grim ledger she did not understand.

Azaliyah gritted her teeth and pushed herself up onto her hands, her hair falling over her face. Her head felt exponentially heavier than it had a right to be, her thoughts lagging just enough behind her physical movements to make the entire environment feel slightly wrong. The lingering, icy sensation of whatever she had just witnessed on that phantom ridge had not fully vacated her system. It sat directly behind her eyes—a dull, throbbing ache that refused to dissipate, as though something ancient had casually brushed through the private corridors of her mind and decided not to bother cleaning up its tracks afterward.

She sat back on her heels for a moment, dragging a dirt-smudged palm aggressively across her face as she exhaled a slow, shuddering breath through her nose.

“...Yeah,” she muttered to the empty air, her voice a rough whisper. “I’m definitely done with today.”

A few feet away, Camron was already upright, though only barely.

He was down on one knee, one white-knuckled hand braced heavily against his joints for balance, while the other arm hung loosely at his side. His posture was typically steady, but he was not exactly composed. His dark hair was disheveled, and his sweeping antlers cast an erratic, uneasy shadow against the stone wall behind him. He looked as though he had been hit by the exact same unseen carriage that had just run her over, and he was deeply, profoundly unimpressed by the experience.

He flicked his gaze over to her, his dark eyes narrowing slightly as he studied the erratic rise and fall of her shoulders, as though he were confirming she was actually still sitting there in the flesh and wasn't just another leftover, glitching piece of whatever that vision had been.

“You good, Tinker Bell?” he asked. There was no grand display of concern in his gravelly voice—he was simply checking to see if his only ticket out of this realm had broken.

Azaliyah let out a short, humorless laugh that tasted like copper and ash. She reached down, aggressively grabbed the empty wooden bowl from the dirt, and set it aside on a nearby bench like the object had personally insulted her family lineage.

“Define good,” she said, planting her flats firmly against the earth and pushing herself fully to her feet. Her wings gave a sharp, defensive twitch behind her. “Because if good means getting dragged face-first through whatever the hell that psychological horror show was and coming out on the other side with my head still attached to my neck, then yeah... I guess I’m doing absolutely fantastic.”

Camron straightened his massive frame a little more, a sickening pop echoing from his spine as he rolled one broad shoulder back, trying to shake loose an invisible weight that was entirely non-physical.

“That wasn’t a normal localized rot,” he said, his voice dropping low as he looked toward the horizon.

She gave him a look sharp enough to draw blood.

“No s**t, antler head.”

The charged air around them had completely settled again, but the baseline frequency of the village did not feel the same as before. It was no longer heavy or suffocating—it was just… off. It was as though the entire town had already rapidly adjusted its internal clock back to a normal routine that neither of them had caught up to yet.

Azaliyah turned her glare toward the silent stone stronghold, then back to his unreadable face, her expression flattening into a cold, hard line as the realization of their isolation settled into her chest all over again.

“They didn’t even bother to open a window,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. “Not one person came out to see if we were dead in the dirt.”

Camron followed her gaze, his dark eyes fixed on the reinforced iron locks of the stronghold. “They didn’t need to. They knew exactly what it was. And they knew it wouldn't waste time trying to chew through stone.”

She let out a slow, furious breath and shook her head once, folding her arms tightly across her chest to stop her hands from shaking.

“...So let me get this completely straight,” she said, her tone dripping with a dry, dangerous edge. “We walk into this fortress, I give them what should’ve been a decent, highly motivating speech about realm coordination, completely eat s**t in front of an entire marketplace, get handed a bowl of sympathy soup like I’m some lost child who wandered away from her mother, and then whatever that darkness was rolls through the streets like it’s a scheduled rainstorm...”

She paused just long enough to look around the empty, pristine square again, desperately hoping the architecture would make a shred more sense the second time around. It didn't.

“...And they just stay tucked inside, waiting for the weather to clear.”

Camron did not answer right away, which was honestly a wise tactical decision on his part. He simply stood there, an imposing silhouette of obsidian scales and silver fur, watching her navigate the absolute wreckage of her own pride.

Azaliyah ran a hand aggressively through her dark hair, exhaling through her nose again as the boiling frustration in her veins finally sharpened into something far more controlled, far more lethal.

“Great,” she said, her voice a mask of pure sarcasm. “That’s just great. Love that for me. Excellent start to the rebellion.”

She snapped her head back toward him, her violet irises settling into a hyper-focused glare, even if the defensive edge remained prominent.

“Alright,” she continued, adjusting her stance and rolling her ankles in her flats as though she had already decided to ruthlessly move past the embarrassment whether she liked it or not. “New plan. From this moment on, I don’t talk first anymore.”

Camron raised a dark brow, a faint trace of his usual mocking amusement hovering at the corner of his lips. “That bad, huh?”

She gave him a look that could have halted a rampaging beast in its tracks. “If I open my mouth to rally an alliance again and some old lady hands me another bowl of broth to shut me up, I am actually going to lose my mind and burn a realm down.”

That comment almost got a genuine reaction out of him. Almost. A microscopic twitch of his jaw suggested he was fighting back a real laugh.

Azaliyah glanced back toward the silent stronghold one final time, her eyes tracking the cold stone, before she slowly turned her gaze toward the northern edge of the village—the exact perimeter where the consuming dark had first spilled out from the trees. Her expression sharpened just enough to show that while she was moving past the humiliation, she had absolutely not let the core of the problem go.

“Whatever that tide was,” she said, her voice dropping to a quiet, intense rumble that carried no less firmness than her earlier declaration, “that is not a phenomenon people just get used to unless it’s been happening to their borders for a very long time.”

Camron nodded once, his antlers cutting through the dim twilight as he stepped up to her side, his gaze mirroring hers. “Yeah. It’s a routine for them now.”

She shifted her weight slightly, her flats gripping the earth, her eyes still fixed unblinkingly outward on the dark, whispering woods beyond the gates.

“Good,” she muttered, a dangerous spark of violet finally flaring to life in the depths of her violet irises.

He looked down at her profile, his brow furrowing slightly. “Good? That’s what you want?”

Azaliyah did not look back at him this time. She kept her eyes locked on the horizon, her fingers resting lightly on the hilts of her dual daggers.

“I want something that actually needs fixing,” she said flatly. “And clearly, this place is already broken exactly the way I need it to be.”