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temperedink · 3 days ago

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Bread & Broth

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Summary: Amarantha is dead and Prythian is free. But it will take more than that for everyone's souls to escape that prison. Nuala watches as her sister, Rhysand, and Feyre all struggle with their grief. Can a half-wraith help bring them back from the dark shadows?

Written for @fuckyesfeysand's July 2025 prompt: Through Other's Eyes.

Thank you to @climbthemountain2020 and @witch-and-her-witcher for the beta reads!

This is not at all what I first set out to write but it took hold of me and I am quite pleased!! I've always loved Nuala and Cerridwen and want to know everything about them...

Read on AO3 or under the cut.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

-Feyre is here.

It was deep into the twilight of a winter’s night when the High Lord’s voice echoed in our heads.

Looking into the dark pools of my sister’s eyes, I didn’t need to say a word. Just as Rhysand need give us no instruction.

It had been the work of centuries to become so perfectly attuned. Ever since he sent the Shadowsinger to catch us, two cursed children. Starving, flickering shadows supping at the altars of Velaris’s graveyard, the offerings to keep us from entering the city. They left bowls of broth and stale loaves of bread; a beggar’s diet, meant only to sustain.

Bad omens, they had called us. Tokens of death.

Wraiths.

When the Shadowsinger brought us to the townhouse, Cerridwen had been too consumed by hunger, scarfing down the warm pastries and meat pies placed in front of us with a singular focus. But I had watched him - the High Lord’s face, handsome and sharp, as he watched us. He did not flinch.

“I don’t believe you are cursed,” he said, after the first platter had been cleared.

I looked to my sister, my mirror - half-starved, thin knobbed fingers, the whites of her eyes glowing against her face, sunken and skeletal.

I could hardly blame him if he thought otherwise.

We were orphans, caught between worlds. A wraith is not a creature with any motherly instincts, and whoever our father was he had left long ago. We daughters had no true home, longing to fold into shadows but with the very real hungry bellies of neglected children to keep us tethered to our mortal bodies.

Now, lying in bed next to me, Cerridwen was beautiful - fed and warm. There was a light in her rich brown eyes I had not seen in many years. “The Cursebreaker,” she whispered, a small smile on her lips. She reached over, pressed her palm into mine. “Now we can take care of her properly.”

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

For many centuries I served, I observed, I learned. I knew how the High Lord took his tea, which rings he wore on each finger, his favorite weave of silk.

Many years later I would learn what blood looked like on those same hands.

Fifty years was a long time to be stuck in the dark, even for a pair of half-wraiths.

This was one of many things that binds us to Rhysand. The understanding of the darkness. Knowing that the stinking, stale prison Under the Mountain was the worst of it - so different from a moonless night in Velaris or a quiet solstice settling into the snowbound mountains.

There are many different kinds of darkness.

In that place, as always, he did not have to explain.

Cerridwen and I knew him through and through, enough by then not to need any words. I knew his brilliant smile when his friends made merry. The kind, quiet Lord who walked the cobblestones of Velaris unencumbered by any crown. The powerful ruler who pinned the Hewn City under his thumb.

As Amarantha’s poison took hold, we watched those parts of him sink deep down into his soul, locked away under stone.

My sister and I held each other tightly in the deep shadows as Amarantha slaughtered legions of fae that first night. The blood dried into the dirt, so many souls skittering past that our hair blew in their wake.

A new graveyard for us to haunt.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

After everything, the return from the Mountain was strange, without fanfare. We traveled through shadow and stepped, blinking, into the light of Velaris, as quiet and as unknown as ever.

Rhysand had disappeared. When we saw him again in the townhouse, days later, haggard and pale, we understood then as well.

We spoke no words. I made him nettle tea with clover honey. Cerridwen baked him a steak and kidney pie. He took his dinner in the sitting room, in front of a banked fire, staring at it without moving.

He forbade the Shadowsinger to use us to spy again so soon. Told us to do what we wanted, to take as much time as we needed.

When Cerridwen wasn’t filling the kitchen with bread, she disappeared entirely, where even I could not sense her.

Later she told me she walked the shadow realm - the darkness between worlds.

“I’m looking for the fae she killed,” she told me. I knew who she meant, without a name. The one who set us free. “She’ll feel better if she knows they’ve crossed over, that they’re at peace.”

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Under the Mountain, I only spoke of her to Rhysand once, after the first night he bade us to strip and paint her.

“Perhaps -”

“Do as I say.” His words were not harsh, but they were final. Not for me to question.

After a moment he softened. Put a hand upon my shoulder. I saw a bit of his old self return to his eyes, warm and weary. “We all suffer down here, every one of us. I mean for our suffering to have meaning. Even hers.” His eyes grew distant. “Especially hers.”

My sister and I had loved her from the moment we saw her. Much, as I suspected, had Rhysand.

Some fae are as beasts in their hearts, vicious and without mercy.

Those who first met us might think we were the same. Haunting, hungry, insatiable and cruel. Monsters to snatch their children to their graves.

The little human girl freezing in her dungeon was perhaps as close to death as one could be. I could see it out of the corners of my eyes - the way the darkness rippled at the edges, the other side hungry for a soul.

But her heart beat so strong and fast, even buried deep underground.

Impossible not to love this little bright star, burning to the very end.

Rhysand knew, and we did as well.

We dressed her in armor of ink and gauze. Crowned her Queen every night.

Something new was in Rhysand’s eyes as well. Something that burned like hope. Without the night sky overhead, she became his guiding star.

And if two wraiths who lived between worlds saw the glowing thread between them…they were wise enough to keep it to themselves.

He only asked us one thing after her first night in the throne room.

“Watch her, Nuala. Please.”

I nodded. Cerridwen was already in her dungeon cell, invisible to her eyes.

“If anything happens -”

I saw her then, another little girl, wandering a graveyard, balancing the line between life and death.

“Of course. We will let you know.”

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

On Feyre’s first morning at the Moonstone Palace, we went to meet the High Lord.

Cerridwen hadn’t slept a wink. Although Rhysand had never asked, she had assembled Feyre’s trousseau the first week we had returned from the mountain.

We were spies, but she far preferred dough under her nails to blood.

“No more bare feet and chilled skin,” she told me as I braided my sister’s hair before breakfast. “We can give her all she deserves.”

Rhysand had not called for us nor did we need his council. I knew even outside of the mountain that Feyre Archeron would be simple to care for, even balking at the attention.

The High Lord sat on the upper balcony, his eyes cast far away over the snowy mountains.

We bowed, a formality, as he drew himself back to the room.

“She -” he stopped here, losing the words. The quiet stretched out. Finally he ran a hand across his face, worn and tired.

“Make sure she has anything she could desire.”

“Of course, High Lord.”

The Cursebreaker was a ghost.

It did not frighten me. I watched Cerridwen brush her hair with extra care, working out the snarls.

She was different than she was Under the Mountain, her soul flickering but her heart strong. Now she was faded, a shadow herself, the fires inside banked low.

All of us were ghosts, after the mountain. Perhaps our souls were still trapped, wandering there. Sometimes things get lost in the shadows and cannot find their way out. The fae think that wraiths drag them there but, often as ever, it is fate that pulls their hands.

We never speak of it - the other side, the blurring of the lines between the living and the dead. Half-wraiths, we barely belong there, and what we find is not for the fae to hear.

Still, Rhysand had asked me once, Under the Mountain. His bathwater was steaming and pink with blood. It glistened in his black hair. He did not speak for many hours, until the water had gone cold.

“Do you feel them, when they pass? Do they fall deeper under the earth, under our feet?”

But that is not the way. The mountain was a prison, but it was still of this earth. “It is not like that,” I conceded, careful with my words. “They go somewhere else, far beyond this place.”

He was quiet for many minutes more. “Good for them,” he finally said.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

In the Palace, he called for us the next morning, while Feyre slept through the day.

“How is she?”

His eyes had the same hollow look as hers.

Cerridwen remained quiet. Few knew she was the brighter one of us both - leaping between them, the highs and the lows. Whereas I was the steady one, the head firmly planted on my shoulders. Still, she preferred to whisper her wishes and fears to me alone.

There was not much I can say that he did not know. “She sleeps.” I shrugged my shoulder. “She suffers.”

Rhysand nodded sagely, as if I had given him valuable information. “Whatever she needs, it will be hers. See to it.”

My sister kept her thoughts to herself until we were in bed.

“Do you think if she knew she was beloved, she would be happy again?”

I pictured a rumpled wedding dress in a closet. I remembered the sound of her neck snapping, echoing through that ornate mausoleum under the earth.

Love had brought her back, but also led her to that place. Rhysand was loved, but suffered still.

Even as a half-wraith, I did not know what dragged our souls back from the brink. I held my sister’s hand, warm and solid.

“I don’t know.”

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

When Feyre arrived in Velaris, Cerridwen shone as bright as a star.

“She is here to stay. Now she is ours to care for.”

I was not so certain. But it did calm me to have her near.

Feyre Archeron had become a mirror to us both. I remembered two girls in a graveyard, skeletons themselves, the divide between worlds flickering.

Cerridwen’s fingers gently braided her hair. I washed her feet, her hands, and helped her into soft white silk. Her cheeks were hollow. The spark in her eyes was gone. I prayed to the nameless gods that we were not dressing her for her tomb.

But when I went to close the curtains, she cried out.

“Leave them open,” she said in a whisper, but I saw it then.

The desperation for the sun. The will to live. To not close her eyes and be lost to the shadows.

Perhaps her soul was still stuck Under the Mountain, but inch by inch it clawed its way back.

I nodded, letting her sink into slumber.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Back in our rooms, my sister laid out an outfit. A soft sweater the color of fresh cream, warm corduroy pants, a peacoat in robin’s egg blue. Soft clothes, warm clothes, to keep the chill from her bones. Not paint or gauze, not armor or leathers.

There were no crowns in her closet. But I knew Rhysand kept them close.

Cerridwen smiled at me. She was returning as well - slowly as the rest of us, because even wraiths could get lost in the shadows. But always, she was with me, and I with her.

If she knew she was beloved, would she be happy again?

Satisfied with Feyre’s clothing, my sister disappeared off to the kitchens, to fill it with bread and broth.

Just what a lost soul needed.

#this is so good (duh it's holly of course it is)#i never thought of nuala and cerridwen thinking of feyre as this child that they want to take care of #fic rec

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