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“Eris is in danger,” Rhysand tells her, pushing his dark hair away from his forehead. “The ship that he is battling is beating him down. Can you help him? For me?”
Mor frowns, and turns to blast one of Hybern’s soldiers away. “I need to defend this area.”
Hurriedly, Rhysand glances around. “I can handle these guys for a moment. You leave and help Eris. I’ll still be here when you get back.”
Though something in her stomach lurches dangerously, she nods, and rushes from the battlefield towards the front lines. The scent of blood fills her nostrils, dark and ugly and utterly nauseating. Mor forces herself to ignore it as she heads closer to where Hybern’s navy and the forces that Rhysand has rallied battle it out, bitter and full of sweaty, useless duelling.
At first, she wonders where Eris is, but then she sees him. Red hair flaming in the wind as he battles Hybern’s soldiers, staggering, failing his strikes. Then Mor sees Eris falling, his legs losing grip on the ground.
She gets there too late to help him. Or maybe, she gets there just at the right time.
Eris plummets down the side of the cliff, his body contorted like a fallen puppet’s with all its strings cut, like he is already dead.
Mor rushes to the cliff, shoving aside Hybern’s soldiers with her hands and magic. Her blood sings with victory, light with joy where sadness should be settling in. Perhaps Mor is wrong, to delight in Eris’s impending death; but if it is wrong, then why does it feel so right to watch his body sink into the unforgiving waves?
When he disappears completely under the endless wash of the blue-white-laced tide, none of the red of the Autumn Court remains. Eris is only a dark shadow, reduced into nothingness — from the bold, brass warrior of moments ago to such a lowly shade in death.
She spits into the ocean, watches it falling downwards, onto the pale froths of the tide to break apart in the water and on the cliffs. Eris’s body will be broken on the cliffs she stands on, if it is not retrieved, his body turning into a bleached mass of white bone and skeleton in time.
And Mor has seen centuries before, and will see centuries afterwards. She will be alive to watch Eris’s slow decay.
Mor wishes that she felt sad about his death — so sudden, and he was so young for a High Fae — but instead she feels victorious.
Though she will never get her virginity back, never be able to completely heal the scars on her stomach, in the end Eris is lying dead under her and Mor has survived, bloody and difficult though it had been at times.
“Fuck you,” she whispers, staring downwards at where Eris’s presence is already fading. “I won.”
She turns around and eviscerates the Hybern soldier behind her to pieces, watches him turn from a man into nothing but blood and flesh and bone, and smiles as his body crumples to the ground. Yes, Mor won over Eris, and this soldier as well, and she will never lose again.