valamerys

[valamerys]

Mask of Shadows chapter 1: the meeting

orignal villain x heroine story

TWs: grief, fantasy violence, sleep drugging, genre-typical leering and dubcon-ey implications (tame for now)

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The soldiers deposit you inelegantly on the throne room floor. Just hours ago you walked here arm-in-arm with Lysander, heads high, crowns glittering. Now the carpet is blackened with bootprints, the room dark and reeking of ash, the screams of your people ringing in the distance.

“Your grace,” a cool, masculine voice announceds. “Welcome. I apologize for the crudeness of the circumstances, but I’m afraid I couldn’t wait for an audience.”

On the throne — your father-by-law’s throne, one day to be your husband’s — lounges a tall, lithe figure, cloaked in darkness. You can’t make out his face.

It doesn’t matter. You pull yourself up from the floor with as much authority as you can muster. “Call off your army at once. Whatever your demands, we can come to an agreement without this— this atrocity.”

He laughs, high and clear and ringing off the stone walls. Tears fill your eyes. You glimpsed the devastation yourself, as they dragged you across the courtyard: the smoke rising from the city, the wailing children and bloody cobblestones.

“Please,” you say, quietly. 

The laughter stops.

“Do you know who I am, princess?” The figure asks, cold and imperious.

You do know. Or at least, there’s only one person he could be. “The Lord of Shadows.”

He rises from the throne, and it’s clear, now, how the shadows move around him unnaturally, almost like smoke, obscuring the details of his figure in the dark room. The rumors of his power are true, then. He’s haunted every report from the front for years, the subject of a gruesome children’s rhymes and hushed old soldiers’ tales alike. He summoned an army of demons out of the pits and bound them to his will, or so the stories say.

It’s no wonder the city garrison was no match for them. Men against monsters.

“Please,” you say again, trying to stay steady, “Where is my husband? And the king? They’re the ones you seek an audience with, not me.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible. They’re dead, you see.”

Your breath freezes in your chest. “Dead.”

“My men slayed the king in his sleep,” he croons, descending the dias towards you. “A pity, really, that he missed all the excitement. Your prince performed quite admirably, rallying his guardsmen, leading the efforts to keep us from breaching the palace walls.” 

“No,” You murmur, horror threatening to overwhelm you.

“But he was no match for my shadows.” The man lifts a hand and the shadows swirl around it, almost affectionate.

“No,” you repeat, your vision blurring, your pulse rushing in your ears. Your knees buckle and you fall again, crumpling to the carpet.

Dead. Lysander couldn’t be dead, he was so lovely, so strong and bright and full of life, already a king in the eyes of his people. You picture his gleaming gold hair, his brilliant smile, and a sob threatens to break you in half. “You’re lying!”

“Why would I?” He retorts coldly. “If he wasn’t dead, he soon would be. The city has fallen and the kingdom with it.”

“Why are you doing this?” You cry, caught between hate and sorrow. “What you do you want?” 

The shadows obscure his face, masklike, as he comes to stand before you. “I want what all men want. A kingdom. Wrongs righted. A pretty little wife. I’ve worked very hard, for many years, to take what’s mine.”

You barely hear his last sentence, your mind halting at the list. Surely he couldn’t mean— 

“What do you want,” You say slowly, trembling. “With me.”

The grief is too crushing to feel anything else, but you are aware, suddenly, acutely, that you’re alone with him and his armored men. There is no one who could help you, no matter how loudly you screamed.

“You’re a smart girl. I know you were listening,” he says. There’s a smirk in his voice. “Now, tell me —” He kneels, lowering himself to where you’ve collapsed on the carpet. “Which of the things I want have I not yet acquired?”

A pretty little wife. Loathing so hot it burns courses through you.

“My people are dying, my city is burning, and my king is dead.” you glare at him through tears. “You’ll have to spell it out for me, my lord.”

“How right you are,” he says, slick and pitying. “Thoughtless of me to not consider what a difficult time you’re going through. Let me be quite clear, then.” He leans further in, and takes your chin in his hand, wrenching your face up towards his where you both kneel. His fingers are pale and slim, deceptively strong. “I want you to marry me.”

“Never,” you spit, more on instinct than anything, wrenching yourself from his grip. It’s too much. You can feel yourself verging on hysteria, dizzy with shock. The palace taken, the king dead, Lysander gone. You so vividly recall the last thing he said to you: I’ll be to bed soon, Cressida darling. I just want to make a round with the patrols. There’s been unrest at the north gate.

Perhaps if you’d begged him to stay with you, he’s still be alive.

“You—” It’s a struggle to speak at all around the emotions choking you. “You wage war on my kingdom, you kill my husband, and you expect me to marry you?”

Though you can’t make out any of his features through the writhing mask of shadows, you can somehow see his grin.

“You monster,” you hiss, hands fisting in your nightgown.

He laughs again, low and harsh. “Coming from your lovely mouth, I’m afraid the insult doesn’t have much bite, my dear.”

“I’d rather die than marry you.”

That, finally, raises his ire. His shadows flicker dangerously. “I’m afraid that’s not an option, my dear.”

A commotion sounds from the door far behind you: a sword colliding with shields, a grunted curse that makes your heart clench dangerously. You know that voice. Alayne.

One of the lord’s shadow guards staggers towards you, haggard from battle. “My Lord, a woman— was in the palace— broke through our ranks—”

The Lord of Shadows rises with the grace of a cat and holds up a hand to silence him. The scuffle at the door grows louder.

“Cressida!” Alayne yells, just before you can make her out— pale, bloodstreaked face, dark hair that matches yours, sword in her hand. A soldier brings the pommel of his sword down on her back hard, and you shriek, unable to stop yourself. She goes limp, falling to the floor. Her sword clatters on the stone.

“Alayne!” You cry helplessly.

With the tiniest nod of the Lord’s head, guards move to pluck her unconscious body from the ground. Tears escape your eyes freely, now, and you can’t stop them, even as his attention turns back to you.

“Your sister.” He’s detached once again as he considers you, still on the floor, helpless.

“Yes,” You manage. Your strength fails you in the face of your terror— Alayne, still alive. You had barely dared hope. How hard she must have fought to find you only to fall now.

He makes another motion, and the two guards who tore you from your bed and brought you here step forward.

“You’ve had a trying day,” he says, too patiently, “And I have much to attend to. Spend some time resting, and we’ll speak again after.” Addressing the guards now, he adds, “Take her to the tower.”

“No,” You object, not thinking clearly. “No, my sister—”

“Will be quite safe in my care, I assure you, so long as you don’t do anything foolish.”

The guards close in on you, one reaching for your arms, and you try to shove them away. “Let me go—Alayne!—”

You manage to hurt one, clawing at his unarmored joints, and he grunts. “Bitch.” He aims a kick at your side, his armored foot sending a sear of pain through your ribs, and you cry out.

Suddenly, the man emits a strangled sound. You look up, and shadows wreathe him like vines, circling his neck. The lord of shadows has a hand extended, controlling them.

“I thought I was clear,” he snarls, and the shadows tighten. There’s a cold depth to his voice that isn’t human. “That she was not to be harmed.” The man chokes, clawing at his neck, but it’s a useless effort. His hands pass through the shadows.

You scramble backwards on your hands as the man drops to his knees, the other guard backing away. The one who kicked you lets out a final sputter and goes limp, his armor clanking where he falls.

For a moment, silence envelops the cavernous room. The Lord lets out a breath, tension slowly leaving his form. The shadows on the guard dissipate, though the ones near their Lord remain, restless.

“My apologies, princess,” he says at last, seemingly composing himself. He looks to a man in leather armor near the throne. “Find a healer for her. Have them sent up.”

Your head swims. You realize that there’s a sticky heat blooming at your side where you were kicked— blood seeping through your nightgown. 

The pain setting in, your terror and shock drowning you, you feel only numbness as he crosses to you and bends down. His shadows brush against you, cold and vaporous. They almost seem to make a sound, like a distant whisper.

He pulls you upright, gentle but firm, and you can do nothing but comply. For a moment you’re afraid you’ll fall again, but he circumvents the worry by hooking his arm beneath your knees and sweeping you into an effortless carry. As if you truly were his bride.

“Have that one put in a holding cell. See that she wakes.” He’s talking about—

“Alayne,” you croak, and he hushes you gently. His closeness is wrong, strange, nauseating, and he bears your weight entirely too easy for someone so thin, his strength unnatural.

He carries you through the dark palace. Screams and shouts echo in the distance. “Stop this,” you beg. “You’ve won. Stop them.”

“I have. It’s over, I promise you. Merely the dying embers of a flame. You slept through the worst of it. I had your maid slip you something.”

“You—” You want to scream. You want to sob. You want to tear at his eyes and run a sword through his heart. You can’t breathe. The tower, he said to take you to. That’s not where your rooms are. How did he have you drugged? How does he know his way around the palace?

You can’t think any further before you realize you’re shaking uncontrollably, your ribs on fire. You must let out a whimper, because he responds: “Just a bit further, darling.”

“How dare you call me that,” you get out through chattering teeth.

The shadows must open the door for him, because there’s no interruption in his pace at the top of the stairs. He places you on a large, unfamiliar bed.

“I don’t understand,” You mutter, feeling delirium tug at you. “Any of this.”

“You will. In time.” Something cool touches your cheek. A shadow. As if it were caressing you. “Cressida.”

Something about the way he says your name is familiar. The sobs you’ve held back threaten to break free. “Who are you?”

The shadows still cloak his face and cling to his frame. He reaches out and touches a finger to your temple. “In time.”

You can taste the cold of his shadows, and everything goes black.

[valamerys]

If you liked my vampire D&D game rambling, i also post fanfic of our campaign on ao3, and the strahd/ teddy date is up in its entirety! just some good ‘big bad vampire lord trying to woo the latest reincarnation of his extremely neurotic wife’ content

Dinner, dancing, uncovering your date’s deepest traumas. the usual.

[valamerys]

i’ve been out of this fandom for four goddam years but if we get some truly juicy lucien/ elain canon content i will come back and that is a Threat

[valamerys]

💛

🥺💙

[valamerys]

wait i could post snippets of my horny vampire fic here couldn’t i

[valamerys]

hi hi hi hi!!! I saw your post about not writing for Maas’ universes anymore BUT i needed to come her and CRY AND SCREAM bc your writing is phenomenal and no one writes elucien better than you (ever ever lol) and i’m so incredibly grateful you were a part of the fandom a few years back and shared your works. You are a gem, and an icon. You truly are the moment. Lyyyy

🥺🥺🥺💙💙💙 thank you so much for this, I’ve been out of the fandom for a long time but I’m always floored by the fact that people are still discovering and liking my fics! I have no idea what’s going on with the series these days but elucien 5ever

[valamerys]

look I have no clue where you currently stand with the acotar fandom and how long ago you wrote for it especially elucien, but I just now found it and want to say THANK YOU for providing such incredible, soft, beautiful content for those babies🥺 if you are still writing for them, I can’t wait to read it and rave, and if you’re not, then just know that if you ever got back to them you’d have some very enthusiastic readers!! you have a gift for words! much love💕

Omg i’m late on this response but THANK YOU SO MUCH, it’s been so so long since I was active in the fandom unfortunately but this note means the world <3 also saw your notes on my individual fics and they MADE MY DAY EVERY TIME-- it can’t be overstated how much writers love getting thoughtful comments, even on super old work! I’m not currently writing any elucien sadly but i am writing fic for my D&D campaign if you’re interested, lol <3

[valamerys]

whispers follow me on twitter where i’m actually active

[valamerys]

read my dumb d&d fanfic

so i haven’t posted here in ten thousand years and the world is ending, but if you want to know what i’ve been up to since ghosting the world of SJM, the answer is: getting wildly into dungeons and dragons, and writing about it sometimes. And the fic for one of my campaigns is up on a03 now! 

i recommend the most recent wherein Marin, my storm sorcerer tiefling, slaps the shit out of the cranky dark elf wizard pictured with her above. Are they gonna bone? Maybe. He’s got a lot of angst. it’s complicated.

[valamerys]

acotar reread notes, ch 1

- This is like, what, 500 words of nothing but internalization before the wolf shows up and she kills it? and it goes down like butter. Easy and engaging, and since we don’t yet know anything else about the world, we have to take Feyre’s thoughts at face value. The sheer digestibility of her style has always been a pillar of what I’ve assumed makes Maas’s writing Work so I’m really trying to be mindful of how its constructed.

- she sets up here that there have been sightings of multiple wolves in the forest, and lone faeries-- that doesn’t jive with what I remember going on across the border, so that’s either something Maas sets up only to forget about (which i know happens in other places) or is explained away in a fashion I forgot about. We’ll see which.

- Knowing on a reread that part of the curse was the stipulation that Feyre had “hate in her heart” when she killed the wolf, the fulfillment of that reads as a little contrived.

And if it was indeed a faerie’s heart pounding under that fur, then good riddance. Good riddance, after all their kind had done to us. I wouldn’t risk this one later creeping into our village to slaughter and maim and torment. Let him die here and now. I’d be glad to end him.

It’s fine out of context, but from everything in the rest of the chapter, we get no indication that Feyre has ever seen faeries wreak any sort of havoc or been personally affected by them in any way-- she says outright that all she knows of them are legends and vague rumors. The anger here seems out of place and excessively vitriolic, and I can’t remember her being as inherently hateful towards them at any later point in the book. She (and most of the other humans) are generally painted as afraid of the fae, but in the same breath, any humans taking concrete action to protect themselves are framed as ridiculous, even well into books 2 and 3, during which faeries absolutely do pose a concrete threat to humans.

The paragraph jumps out at me primarily as a lost opportunity to raise Feyre’s characterization overall to match that instance of anger, actually. If the rumors established in this chapter are true, it would be incredibly easy to move some of that distant mischief and torment to her backstory and give her a very personal reason to hate faeries: maybe they killed her mother, or burned down her childhood home. And her therefore maintaining that level of true hatred towards Tamlin for Existing could have presented both the opportunity for character growth and an interesting layer for the romance to dissolve.

But, of course, that would have required consistent and thoughtful characterization, not the ambling noncommittal heroine i remember from the majority of this book.

- “But this was the forest, and it was winter” is a great line, actually. It’s hard to stomach when Maas does nail a bleak, magical tone knowing what...... this whole trilogy devolves into.

[valamerys]

❌ KOA SPOILER ❌

this has to be rhys and feyre right ???

[valamerys]

It’s actually quite admirable how sjm wrote 3 books about Rhysand and fooled us into thinking it was Feyre’s story all along.

[valamerys]

Eris is a set piece used to forward the plot and add drama with Mor and Azriel. When he is not in use he is wheeled off stage and forgotten about until the plot needs some thickening with pasty ass flour. You're right, he has no character. He's a blunt tool SJM used that honestly didn't even need a name. The main thing he has done canonically is nothing as if he is a passive object--not a character

oh my god when I opened an ask that started with “eris” my blood pressure went through the ROOF but you’re 100% right and i’m so relieved! “set piece” is an excellent phrase for it.

[valamerys]

i CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD to say that I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE HAVING ERIS DISCOURSE in THIS FUCKING DAY AND AGE Eris is NOT A CHARACTER he is a couple of QUESTIONABLE NARRATIVE DECISIONS and PLOT CONTRIVANCES MEANT TO DRIVE OTHER CHARACTERS loosely stapled together IN THE FORM OF A MILQUETOAST DOUCHEBAG who appears for ROUGHLY FOUR PAGES. there is NOTHING TO DEBATE because he IS COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SUBSTANCE.

THAT WE ARE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION AT ALL is a testament to FANDOM’S ABILITY TO PUT BOWS ON PILES OF SHIT as long as they are SHAPED LIKE ATTRACTIVE WHITE MEN.

[valamerys]

I wish there was a way to throw a literary coup, and just have you write the ACOTAR series from now on. I really enjoy your voice (both humor and serious!), and I'd be so interested to read what worldbuilding ideas you have. I mean, there are entire things that are swept under the rug (to begin with, is no one going to mention Rhys' rape trauma? Is no one going to mention Lucien's? wtf is this), and I think you'd give clarity to a lot of questions I still have.

Thank you for the compliment! I’ve previously proposed that I think literally everyone involved-- SJM, the readers/fandom, her publisher, and the YA community at large-- would benefit from turning the ACOTAR series into a james-patterson-esque Brand putting out one or two books a year with SJM’s name and general approval on them, but actually written by a different handpicked (and credited, obviously) author.

It’s overwhelmingly clear when Maas has written a book she didn’t feel enthusiastic about (acowar and acofas are about as passionless, forced endeavors as I can possibly imagine); why not just literally let her opt out of those and pass it off to a fresh voice that is willing to run with a sketch of a storyline and infuse it with fresh worldbuilding and new perspectives? What is the downside? It’s more books to sell, better books, forever, a system that lends itself to infinite perpetuity in a way Maas’ overreliance on the same damn 8 tropes does not. If they’re gonna shamelessly milk ACOTAR for a cash cow, well shit, go all in. Comics has done serial universes passed between writers forever and nobody has a problem with it; stuff like star wars does IP books. there’s absolutely precedence to navigate a happy medium between a “brand” and author-specific writing style that keeps a fictional universe fresh but coherent.

Anyway, i should run publishing thanks for coming to my ted talk.

[valamerys]

Tbh, I can imagine Mor coming out to acomaf Feyre. Acowar Feyre? Never. But honestly, I can see why she'd prefer Feyre over Rhys or Azriel and maybe Cassian (if the wings and ember story is to be taken into consideration). Idk about Amren, but personally, it's very easily to come out as lesbian to someone you've barely known for a few months as compared to people you've known for 500 years. It's a lot less intimidating. (I'm sorry if this seems random I just wanted to put this across)

It is random, but I generally agree. Too bad ACOWAR was a trash fire, huh.