Chapter Text
In the years that followed the defeat of Erawan and Maeve, Valg King and Dark Queen, would-be-conquerors of Erelia, and the destruction of Morath, the hunting down of Erawan’s willing followers, who had fled when their brothers and sisters in collars fell.
Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius and Lady Lysandra of Carraverre stalked those who had bowed to Erawan without a collar or ring, had sworn to the Valg King of their own volition. They died in forgotten shadows, from tooth and claw of a snarling ghost leopard, to the flames and swinging blade wielded by a grinning golden queen, a red gem glimmering in its hilt.
They all died the same, screaming as they begged for mercy that would never come. Their blood spilled red, but in the shadows, it might as well have been black to Aelin and Lysandra, who wiped their blades and claws clean before resuming the hunt south of Terrasen, where their hunt had begun weeks earlier. They were nearly to the border of Adarlan.
Aelin panted, kneeling over as a flash of light shone from her left, and clothed in a tunic covered in red blood was the stunning shapeshifter, who swayed from the rapid transformations, taking her from human to ghost leopard then briefly to wyvern as she soared over the tops of the buildings and swept an archer assassin screaming to the street below. His body cracked loudly as it hit the ground below, a three story drop. Lysandra smiled at Aelin, who had caught her breath and emptied a water skein by the time she stumbled back into human form.
“Good work,” Aelin praised, her eyes shining with an inner fire. Lysandra started slightly at her young Queen’s words, the first they’d spoke to each other in days. They’d be too busy stalking their prey, then slaughtering them. Not leaving much time for idle praise or chatter. And Lysandra seemed to favor her ghost leopard form even over her human one, much to Aedion’s dismay.
Aelin had noticed the tension between her General-Prince and the shapeshifter, how they looked at each other from the corners of their eyes, how their hands brushed under tables, but they refused to speak to each other. They had spoken after the battle, their confessions before Erawan’s defeat still echoing, but there was pain there too. Pain in Aedion’s eyes, from the loss of his father, the loss of so many of his brothers in the Bane, brothers he would never again feast with or fight with.
However, Lysandra too was too haunted by ghosts, of memory rather than brothers-in-arms, although they also featured General Aedion. She recalled the General throwing her into the snow, the fires of his rage like nothing she’d felt before, the red-hot of his rage along her skin. But she’d been frozen into an iciness that was protective after Erawan had been defeated by the Torre Cesme healer, by Chaol Westfall’s wife, pregnant yet glowing like a newborn star amidst that horrid battlefield of horrors bred in the bowels of Morath.
She recalled how he’d hated her right up to the moment she almost died, and then his love felt rather like pity, turning sour in her mouth. His apologies fell upon her twitching ghost leopard ears, those emerald green eyes glowing as she listened in silence, then padded off into the hallways towards Aelin’s room, where she still slept outside of. Her paws were silent on the stone of Orynth Castle, her tail brushing ever so softly behind her.
Aelin gestured for her to come in before she’d settled down, the window behind her open and Prince Rowan lost to the skies and wind, gesturing Lysandra up onto the massive bed with her. Lysandra curled around the Queen, who sobbed quietly into the white soft fur of her friend, mourning all that they had lost together, all without uttering a single word. And the next morning, when Aelin had invited Lysandra on a hunt, just the two of them, Lysandra gleefully accepted some time away from the Court of Terrasen, or notably, the Prince that wasn’t Aelin’s mate. The male that looked at Lysandra like he wanted her to be his mate. Lysandra groaned and Aelin put her hand on the flank of the ghost leopard, both in comfort and to wordlessly say “I am here, I am with you.”
Even now, as they traveled throughout Terrasen, the two were inseparable. They hunted together, cooked their meals over Aelin’s flame, and slept curled up under the stars. They cleansed the realm slowly of monsters who had escaped Morath, had escaped justice, but not for long. They died as they had lived, as pathetic cowards who begged until they no longer could, sightless eyes staring up to a heaven that contained no gods, going to a hell without a king. Not with Erawan gone. So they hunted onwards.