#forbidden secrets

Forbidden secrets

This theory was written in honor of @elriel-month and combines prompts from weeks 1-3. Okay, so week 3 might be a stretch but gardening on a grander scale is proposed and I think it counts. Spoilers for other Sarah J. Maas series, including TOG and CC.

Two Secret-Keepers

Sarah has talked about planting secrets for the next ACOTAR book, so naturally my mind turns to our notorious secret-keepers: Azriel, the spymaster, and Elain, the seer. Both are, as Sarah explicitly points out for us, skilled in the art of uncovering and keeping secrets.

Feyre smiled. “Elain was the only one who guessed. She caught me vomiting two mornings in a row.” She nodded toward Azriel. “I think she’s got you beat for secret-keeping.”

Azriel’s got no shortage of lovers, though, don’t worry. He’s better at keeping them secret than we are, but … he has them.”

On a Forbidden Adventure

Not only are both matched in secrecy, but they are also forbidden from doing what they want.

“Then go off on adventures,” Nesta said. “Go drink and fuck strangers. Butstay away from the Cauldron.”

Rhys bared his teeth. “So you will leave Elain alone. If you need to fuck someone, go to the pleasure hall and pay for it, butstay away from her.”

But, you see, they have a tendency to challenge commands (even if that is a more recent development for Elain, I think it’s here to stay):

Elain remained in the doorway, her face pale but her expression harder than Nesta had ever seen it. “You do notdecide what I can and cannot do, Nesta.”

“Youcan’torderme to do that.”

I believe these parallels are designed to set up an adventure for Azriel and Elain that involve the sacred sister peaks. Both Feyre and Nesta have overcome challenges in these mountains, so it would make sense for our spymaster and seer to continue this trend with a different kind of mission that suits their powers: together, they can explore and unearth the forbiddensecretsthat lie beneath the sacred peaks.

Mapping the Secrets of the Sister Peaks

In ACOSF, Sarah refers to the sacred mountains—barrensisterpeaks, at odds with those around them—in a way that reminds us of the Archerons and sacred trio (Mother, Fate, and Cauldron, or Urd as I have theorized elsewhere).

Eris was waiting for Nesta and Cassian when they arrived in a forest clearing nestled in the Middle. But Nesta didn’t bother to do more than glance at the High Lord’s son—not with the sight rising above the trees.The sacred mountain—the mountain under which Feyre, Rhys, and all the other High Lords had been trapped by Amarantha. Itrose like a wave on the horizon, bleak and barren and somehow thrumming with presence.

Sound familiar? It should. Sarah has been planting this water imagery since at least ACOMAF, starting with Elain’s emergence from the Cauldron:

And as if it had been tipped by invisible hands, the Cauldron turned on its side. More water than seemed possible dumped out in a cascade. Black, smoke-coated water.And Elain, as if she’d been thrown by a wave,washed onto the stones facedown. Her legs were so pale—so delicate. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them bare. […] Elain sucked in a breath,her fine-boned back rising, her wet nightgown nearly sheer. And as she rose from the ground onto her elbows, the gag in place, as she twisted to look at me—Nesta began roaring again. Pale skin started to glow.Her face had somehow become more beautiful—infinitely beautiful, and her ears … Elain’s ears were now pointed beneath her sodden hair.

And then when Nesta makes her bargain with the Cauldron:

And as it faded, dark ink splashed upon Nesta’s back, visible through her half-shredded shirt, as if it were a wave crashing upon the shore.A bargain.With the Cauldron itself. Yet Cassian could have sworn a luminescent, gentle hand prevented the light from leaving her body altogether.

To Cassian’s chagrin, we learn more about these sacred peaks from Eris:

Eris shrugged, and Nesta knew Cassian monitored his every breath. “There are three of them, you know. Sister peaks.This one, the mountain called the Prison, and the one the Illyrian brutes call Ramiel. All bald, barrenmountainsat odds with those around them.”

“We don’t know why they exist, but do you not find it strange that two out of the three have underground palaces carved into them?” […] Eris gave him a mocking smile, but continued, “Unsurprisingly, the Illyrians were never curious enough to see what secrets lie beneathRamiel. If it, too, was carved up like the others by ancient hands.”

“I thought Amarantha made the court Under the Mountain herself,” Nesta said. “Oh, she decorated it and made us act like a sorry imitation of your Court of Nightmares, but the tunnels and halls were carved long before.By who, we don’t know.”

There are palaces buried deep under these sacred mountains, or at least two out of three that have been confirmed. Ramiel remains a mystery. These underground palaces seem to be linked in unexpected ways, and lead all the way back to the Middle—a place with its own forbidden secrets.

The Middle

“Oorid was once a sacred place,” Amren said. “Warriors were laid to rest in its night-black waters. But Ooridchanged to a place of darkness—don’t give me that look, Rhysand, you know what I mean—a long time ago. Filled with such evil that no one will venture there, and only the worst of the faeries are drawn to it. They say the water there flows to Under the Mountain, and the creatures who live in the bog have long used its underground waterways to travel through the Middle,eveninto the mountains of the surrounding courts.”

Feyre frowned. “It can’t be more specific, though?” She asked Rhys, “Do we have a detailed map of the Middle?”

Rhys shook his head. “It’s forbidden to map the Middlebeyond vague landmarks.” He pointed to the sacred mountain in its center, where he’d been held for nearly fifty years. “The Mountain, the woods, the bog … All can be seen from land and air. But itssecrets,those discovered on foot—those are forbidden.”

Feyre’s frown didn’t lighten. “By whom?”

“An ancient council of the High Lords. The Middle is a place wherewild magic still dwells and thrives and feeds. We respect it as its own entity, and do not wish to provoke its wrath by revealing its mysteries.”

When they travel to Oorid in the Middle, the darkness Amren spoke of is readily apparent. It seems to be in a death-like slumber, and evokes imagery connected to the sacred trio and Elain in surprising ways:

But then gray, watery light hit her. And the air—the air was heavy,full of slow-running water and mold and loamy earth. No wind moved around them; not even a breeze. […] Oorid stretched before them. She had never seen a place so dead.

The oppressive air muffled even the sound of their wings, like Oorid would abide no sound disturbing its ancient slumber. […] Islands of grass dotted the expanse, some so crowded with brambles that he could find no safe place to land. Thetangles of thorns were a mockery of what might have been—as if Oorid had ever produced roses.Not a single flower bloomed.

He screamed, but it was soundless. Just as the dead were soundless, surging from the murkybottom, some in marching formation, and converging on him. […] “Mother save us,” Azriel whispered, and it was undiluted terror, not awe, hushing his voice as the dead rose from Oorid’s depths.

As an aside, we know that Nesta raised the dead in Oorid with the Mask. And it’s likely that she will, indeed, need to call upon thousands to help defeat an ancient enemy in the future:

Thousands and thousands of bodies. But she would not call thousands.Not yet. Her blood was a cold song, the Mask a slithering echo to it, whispering of all she might do. Home, it seemed to sigh. Home.

From the information we are given in the text, it seems like Oorid—which is corrupted and lacks life—is the source of the water flowing deep within the earth, into the sacred peaks, and even other courts. Is it possible that, if the Daglan were indeed related to the Asteri, they used this source as a way to drink power from the land like wine? And did they take too much, causing its most sacred places to become bleak and barren? Did the land fall into a deep, death-like sleep to protect itself?

Rhys lifted a hand, and a book of legends from a shelf behind him floated to his fingers. He laid it upon the desk. He flipped it open to a page, revealing an image of a group of tall, strange-looking beings with crowns atop their heads. “The Fae were not the first masters of this world. According to our oldest legends, most now forgotten, we were created by beings who were near-gods—andmonsters. The Daglan. They ruled for millennia, and enslaved us and the humans. They were petty and cruel and drank the magic of the land like wine.”

Ramiel and the Illyrian Mountains

The Illyrian Mountains surrounding Ramiel are described similarly: ancient,slumbering,secret…and connected by water-carvedcaves,like the Middle.

It was all so still,yet watchful, somehow. As if she were surrounded by something ancientandhalf-awake. As if each peak had its own moods and preferences, like whether the clouds clung to or avoided them, or trees lined their sides or left them bare. Their shapes were so odd and long that they looked as if behemoths had once lain down beside the rivers, pulled a rumpled blanket over themselves, andfallen asleep forever.

The full moon had shown her face, so bright the mountains, the rivers, the valley were illuminated enough that even the leaves on the trees far below were visible. She’d never seen such a view. It seemed like a secret,slumbering land that time had forgotten.

But Cassian paused before a landscape painting of a towering,barrenmountain,void of life yet somehow thrumming with presence. Snow and pines crusted the smaller peaks around it, but this strange,bald mountain…Only a black stone jutted from its top. A monolith, Nesta realized, stepping closer. […] The sacred mountain from the Blood Rite. Indeed, three stars faintly glowed in the twilight skies above the peak. It was a near-perfect, real-life rendering of the Night Court’s insignia.

Like the sacred mountain in the Middle, Ramiel is also surrounded by water imagery:

Ramiel might as well have been across an ocean. It loomed straight ahead, with two mountains and asea of forest andthe gods knew what else between her and its barren slopes. It looked identical to Feyre’s painting.

Around a river, she’d learned on her hike with Cassian, cave systems were often carved out by the water.

Even before the spin-offs, Elain stared at the barren ground when they entered the Illyrian war camp for the first time. I can’t help but wonder if the sight of it made her hands itch to make something—anything—grow there. If she looked at it and saw its potential, like she did with her family’s cottage.

Warriors and females laboring around the fires silently monitored us. Nesta stared them all down. Elain kept her focus on the dry,rocky ground.

But Elain wrapped her own blue cloak around herself, averting her eyes from all of those towering, muscled warriors, the army camp bustling toward the horizon … She was a rose bloom in a mud field. Filled with galloping horses. […] If Elain was a blooming flower in this army camp, then Nesta … she was a freshly forged sword, waiting to draw blood.

The language Sarah uses in this scene has already proven to be foreshadowing for Nesta (who is compared to a freshly forged sword; she then forges swords in ACOSF with her magic). Elain is a rose bloomin a mud field, a place that is bleak and barren, preparing for death. Is it possible she might map the secrets of the land with her powers, and help it bloom in earnest again?Her powers—which seem to involve tracking and mapping like the mystics in CC—may allow her to uncover secrets that were either lost or forbidden before even setting foot in these places. This would provide a significant advantage to missions that require any recovery of important objects on foot. And the mysteries buried within the earth may lead her to those above:

Emerie’s eyes shone. “Long ago—so long ago they don’t even have a precise date for it—a great war was fought between the Fae and the ancient beings who oppressed them. One of its key battles was here, in these mountains. Our forces were battered and outnumbered, and for some reason,the enemy was desperate to reach the stone at the top of Ramiel. We were never taught the reason why; I think it’s been forgotten. […] This Rite is all to honor him. So much of the history has been lost, but the memory of his bravery remains.”

Why, exactly, were the ancient enemies (who I believe were the Daglan and related to the Asteri in CC) so desperate to get to the top of the mountain? Is it possible the obsidian stone—that heals and transports—is one of the Made items that was forgotten after this epic battle?

Amren’s eyes glowed with a remnant of her power. “The Cauldron Made many objects of power, long ago, forging weapons of unrivaled might.Most were lost to history and war, and when I went into the Prison, only three remained. At the time, some claimed there were four, or that the fourth had been Unmade, but today’s legends only tell of three.”

Rhys threw her a frown. “Those who possessed them grew careless. They were lost in ancient wars,or to treachery,orsimply because they were misplaced and forgotten.”

“Made objects tend to not wish to be found by just anyone,” Amren cautioned. “That they have faded from memory, that even I didn’t think of them immediately in the fight against Hybern, suggests that perhapsthey willed it that way.Wanted to stay hidden.True things of power have such gifts.” […] “They were Made in a time whenwild magic still roamed the earth, and the Fae were not masters of all. Made objects back then tended to gain their own self-awareness and desires. It was not a good thing.” Amren’s face clouded with memory, and a chill whispered over Nesta’s spine.

Rhys mused, “Just as I’m able to alter a mind to forget, perhaps they have a similar gift.”

“When Briallyn was Made, it likely removed from her the Dread Trove’s glamour, for lack of a better term. Recognized her as kin. Where she might have glanced over a mention of the items before and never thought twice, now it stuck. Or perhaps called to her,presented itself in a dream.” All of them, all at once, looked at Nesta. “You,” Amren said quietly, “are the same.So is Elain.”

Is it possible that the Illyrians can’t remember why they enemy was desperate to reach the top of Ramiel, where the stone remains, because it is Made and willed it that way? True things of power have such gifts.Is that why Elain has already been forgotten in the narrative of the most recent war?

“I …” Nesta blinked. “Do you not know who I am?”

“I know you are the High Lady’s sister. That you slew the King of Hybern.” Gwyn’s face grew solemn, haunted. “That you,like Lady Feyre,were once mortal. Human.”

Nesta sank into the chair beside Gwyn’s. “I’m not a warrior.”

“You slew the King of Hybern,” Gwyn repeated. “With the shadowsinger’s knife.”

“Luck and rage,” Nesta admitted. “And I had made a promise to kill him for what he did to me and my sister.”

Did she, like Rhysand and Made objects, will it that way?

Elain fell into step beside me, peering at Lucien. He noticed it. “I heard you made the killing blow,” he said.

Elain studied the trees ahead. “Nesta did.I just stabbed him.”

Would the stone recognize Elain as kin, like the Trove objects’ response to Nesta? What might she be able to heal, or explore, with that stone? This special kinship may be one reason why Elain, with her sisters, is Starborn. It allows her to find and wield Made objects unlike other fae. It sets them apart—at odds with those around them like the sister peaks. And as @offtorivendell,@silverlinedeyes, and I have discussed before, if others use these objects without that connection, there are consequences. Helion’s reaction to the Mask is a stark contrast to Nesta’s kinship and use of it; he is repelled by it, and wonders if the consequences of its past use were written in his very blood. Could those consequences involve the betrayal and death of Fionn? Did he ultimately become corrupted by the power of the Trove because he was not kin, not protected from its influence like those who are Made?

Helion whirled to Nesta, all sensuality vanished. “You truly wore this and lived?” It wasn’t a question meant to be answered. “Cover it again, please. I can’t stand it.” […] “Doesn’t it rake its cold claws down your senses?” Helion asked.

Helion shuddered, and Nesta threw the cloth over the Mask. As if the cloth somehow blinded it to their presence. “Perhapsan ancestor of mine once used it, and the warning of its cost is imprinted upon my blood.”

Rhys’s eyes flicked to Ataraxia, then to Cassian. “Some strains of the mythology claim that one of the Fae heroes who rose up to overthrow them was Fionn,whowasgiven the great sword Gwydion by the High Priestess Oleanna, who had dipped it into the Cauldron itself. Fionn and Gwydion overthrew the Daglan. A millennium of peace followed, and the lands were divided into rough territories that were the precursors to the courts—but at the end of those thousand years, they were at each other’s throats, on the brink of war.” His face tightened. “Fionn unified them and set himself above them as High King. The first and only High King this land has ever had.”

The Prison

The sacred mountain on the prison island has also been changed, and it can no longer sustain the wild creatures that once lived there.

Helion’s most beloved pair—this black stallion, Meallan, and his mate—hadn’t produced offspring in three hundred years, and that last foal hadn’t made it out of weaning before he’d succumbed to an illness no healer could remedy. According to legend, the pegasuses had come from the island the Prison sat upon—had once fed in fair meadows that had long given way to moss and mist. Perhaps that was part of the decline:their homeland had vanished,and whatever had sustained them there was no longer.

We are told that Clotho discovered ancient songs in the lower levels of the cavernousNight Court library. These songs are a wave of sound and function like a dream that transports Nesta to the Prison. She even flows into the mountain, like she might if she were traveling through an underground waterway.

“Some of the songs you’ll hear are soancient they predate the written word. Some of them are so old we didn’t even have them in Sangravah. Clotho found them in books shelved below Level Seven. Hana—she’ll be the one who plays the lute—figured out how to read the music.”

As that seventh bell finished pealing, music erupted. Not from any instruments, but from all around. As if they were one voice,the priestesses began to sing,a wave of sparkling sound. […] It was like a braid, the song—a plait of seven voices, weaving in and out, individual strands that together formed a pattern. […] She’d never heard such music. Like a spell, a dream given form. The entire room sang, each voice resonating through the stone.

Themusic took form behind Nesta’s eyes as the priestesses sang lyrics in languages so old,no one voiced themanymore. She saw what the song spoke of: mossy earth and golden sun, clear rivers and the deep shadows of an ancient forest. The harp strummed, and mountains rolled ahead, as if a veil had been cleared with the stroke of those strings, and she was flying toward it—toward a massive,mist-veiled mountain, the land barren save for moss and stones and a gray, stormy sea around it. The mountain itself held two peaks at its very top, and the stones jutting from its sides were carved in strange,ancientsymbols,as old as the songitself.

Nesta’s body melted away, her bones and the stones of the cavern a distant memory as she flowed into the mountain, beheld towering, carved gates, and passed through them into a darkness so complete it was primordial; darkness that was full of living things, terrible things.

SoNesta drifted down and down,the harp and the voices pulsing and guiding, until she stopped before a rock. She laid a hand on it to find it was only an illusion, and she passed through it, down another long hall, beneath the mountain itself,and then she stood in a cavern, almost the twin to the one the priestesses sang in,as if they were linked in song and dreaming.

Is it possible that these mountains are not only linked physically, but magically? If so, this makes it even more likely that Elain might use her murky realm of dreams, which I believe is connected to the sacred trio and the waters of the Cauldron, to navigate the magical waterways that may exist between the peaks. And who knows what she might find…or even wake in the womb of these sacred mountains?

Healing the Womb of the Earth

The language Sarah uses to describe the sacred sister peaks and their cavernous depths is not exclusive to Prythian. Healers in TOG use a sacred underground cave called Silba’s Womb. Silba was believed to be the goddess of healing and she was associated with owls,purple, and water.

Candles had been tucked into natural alcoves, or had been clumped at either end of each sunken tub, gilding the sulfurous steam and setting the owls carved into every wall and slick pillar in flickering relief.

A plush cloth cushioning her head against the unforgiving stone lip of the tub, Yrene breathed in the Womb’s thick air, watching it rise and vanish into the clear, crisp darkness squatting far overhead.

Some ancient architect had discovered the hot springs far beneath the Torre and constructed a network of tubs built into the floor so that the water flowed between them, a constant stream of warmth and movement. Yrene held her hand against one of the vents in the side of the tub, letting the water ripple through her fingers on its way to the vent on the other end, to pass back into the stream itself—andinto the slumbering heart of the earth.

An acolyte had been waiting with a lightweightrobe of lavender—Silba’s color—for Yrene to wear into the Womb proper, where she’d discarded it beside the pool and stepped in, naked save for her mother’s ring.

Water—Silba’s element. To bathe in the sacred waters here, untouched by the world above, was to enter Silba’s very lifeblood. Yrene knew she was not the only healer who had taken the waters and felt as if she were indeed nestled in the warmth of Silba’s womb. As if this space had been made for them alone.

Thedarkness above her was that of creation, of rest, of unformed thought. […] Yrene stared into it, into the womb of Silba herself. And could have sworn she felt something staring back.Listening, while she thought through all Lord Westfall had told her.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Elain is inspired by Blodeuwedd, who was transformed into an owl, and has begun to glow with health while wearing the color…purple. Her emergence from the Cauldron even evoked the water imagery most associated with the power of the sacred trio, which includes the Mother. Silba’s healing waters are compared to a womb. And like a womb, it is calming and creative, and allows the healer to emerge renewed. We learn of another dark womb from Nesta in ACOTAR:

There was night, and there was the darkness of extinguishing a candle, and then there was this. Not only the true absence of light, but … a womb.The womb from which all life had come and would return,neither good nor evil, only dark, dark, dark. […] Her name drifted to her as if rising from the depths of some black ocean. […] The darkness pulsed, beckoning.

This language reminds me again of the sacred trio, especially the Mother, who is believed to be a primal goddess associated with creation and wild magic:

Her gaze shifted to the carved wooden rose she’d placed upon the mantel, half-hidden in the shadows beside a figurine of a supple-bodied female,her upraised arms clasping a full moon between them.Some sort of primal goddess—perhaps even the Motherherself.Nesta hadn’t let herself dwell on why she’d felt the need to set the rose there. Why she hadn’t just thrown it in a drawer.

For whatever reason, Nesta placed Elain’s carved rose—a symbol of love and beauty and color in the bleakness of winter—next to the Mother. It is half-hidden in shadows, like Elain herself. There are many symbolic meanings for roses, including (1) love and beauty, (2) strength through silence, (3) healing, and (4) divination and secrecy (more on how those apply to Elain here). Like the Mother, Elain is also elusive and associated with symbols of rest and renewal.

The Faelights gilded Elain’s unbound hair, making her glow like the sun at dawn.

Her sister’s delicate scent of jasmine and honey lingered in the red-stoned hall like a promise of spring,asparkling river that she followed to the open doors of the chamber. Elain stood at the wall of windows, clad in a lilacgownwhose close-fitting bodice showed how well her sister had filled out since those initial days in the Night Court. Gone were the sharp angles, replaced by softness and elegant curves. […] Her sister turned toward her, glowing with health. Elain’s smile was as bright as the setting sun beyond the windows.

And as though the Mother is indeed next to her, Azriel mentions her as a witness to their secret, forbidden encounter:

But he could have this. The one moment, and maybe a taste, and that would be it. “Yes,” Elain breathed, like she read the decision. Just this taste in the dead of the longest night of the year,where only the Mother might witness them.

Could these two secret, forbidden lovers merge their powers of sight and sound to find the source of the corruption in the Middle? It will likely involve unearthing events of the past that were lost, including—potentially—the actions of Theia’s forgotten daughter. And the secrets they uncover as they navigate time and space might help Elain, like a rose bloom in the mud, clear the corruption at the root and heal the wild magic that once bloomed and thrived throughout the land. Together, Azriel and Elain could create a thing of secret,lovely beauty, showing the Spymaster that he can help heal rather than torture, and finally—finally—feel hopeful about his future with Elain at his side.