The Ring of Shattered Courts

They gathered at dusk, when the forest’s shadows lengthened into mirrors of themselves. Nothing about the assembly was celebratory. The two courts, long opposed, met in a glade stripped of joy. A truce demanded a union, and so a wedding was declared. There was no laughter, no music. Only the hush of the forest, broken by the tremor of unseen wings.   The bride stood still as a carved idol. Pale skin veined with green, her hair trailing like willow branches, heavy with dew. She wore no crown, for no crown could rest on a head that bent always toward the earth. She was of the Court of Root and Soil, the deep places where seeds broke open. Her eyes were darkened hollows, yet soft with waiting.   The groom opposite her shimmered like heat over water. He belonged to the Court of Flame and Ash. His body was a shifting blaze hidden beneath translucent skin. The air warped around him, and every breath he exhaled smelled of burnt cedar. He stood tall, but not steady. Fire was never steady.   Between them, a ring rested upon a pedestal of stone.   It did not glitter like gold. It pulsed. Made not of metal, but of something older. A band woven of light and shadow both, endless strands braided in a knot too fine to unravel. To look at it too long was to feel pulled into its circle.   The officiant spoke without voice.   It was not a priest, nor any creature of the courts. It was the forest itself. The trees leaned forward, their bark cracking. The wind paused, the earth groaned, the river in the distance stopped mid-rush. Nature itself forced stillness upon the world, and in that silence the ritual began.   The bride lifted her hand. Roots coiled up her wrist, spiraling around her fingers until they reached her nail beds. They stopped there, waiting.   The groom extended his own. Flame licked up his palm and fingers, blistering flesh that healed before it could scar. His hand trembled, whether from eagerness or dread, no one could tell.   Both reached for the ring.   They should not have touched it together.   When root met flame upon that endless band, the forest shuddered.   The trees groaned as though pulled in two directions. The sky tore faintly, light spilling through cracks where stars should not yet be. The ground beneath their feet bled sap, thick and amber, seeping upward instead of down.   And the ring sighed.   It was not a sound, not exactly. More the expulsion of centuries of waiting, breathed out into the world.   The bride flinched. She felt the sigh enter her bones. Her chest ached, ribs straining as if something inside longed to get out. Her dark eyes widened. For a moment she thought she glimpsed another figure standing in her shadow, tall and white-faced, featureless except for a mouth opening too wide.   The groom felt it differently. The sigh drew his flame inward. For once in his life, fire dimmed. He shivered at the cold that entered him, yet found it intoxicating. His breath stuttered, a cinder caught in a throat too narrow. He too saw something—fingers, long and pale, reaching through his fire to caress his spine.   Still they placed the ring between them.   The officiant—the forest—did not object. It had waited too long for this moment.   The bride slid the ring onto the groom’s hand.   His skin did not blister the woven band. Instead, the ring drank his flame. It pulled it into itself, until his hand dimmed to a dull red. He gasped but could not let go.   The groom pushed the ring onto the bride’s hand.   Her roots tried to resist, twisting back into her flesh, but the band forced itself onto her finger. Her veins darkened, green fading into shadow, and she trembled as though pierced through the marrow.   The courts held their breath.   A union sealed. Root and flame, soil and ash.   But what had been bound was not bride to groom.   The ring had not been idle.   In the silence after their vows, the trees began to whisper. Not words. Names. Names of things long forgotten. The river resumed its flow, but backward, its waters running upstream. Flowers bloomed, then rotted in the same breath.   The bride looked at the groom, but his eyes were gone. Where once flame danced, now only black orbs stretched wide, swallowing what little light lingered. His skin tightened across his bones, as though his fire had fled inward, leaving husk behind. He opened his mouth, and what came out was not breath but cawing. Harsh, broken, like a raven choking on its own voice.   The groom looked at the bride, but she had changed too. Her willow hair writhed, twisting into feathers, black as pitch. Her lips cracked, and sap bled down her chin. Her hands had lengthened into claws, bark splitting to reveal pale, fleshy bone beneath. She opened her mouth, and soil poured out, filling the space between them with the scent of grave dirt.   The ring pulsed again.   The courts stepped back, fey lords and ladies of both sides quivering in fear. None dared interfere. None dared touch the band that had bound their rulers.   The officiant spoke once more, though no voice accompanied it. The forest moaned, trees bending low, roots tearing themselves from the ground in supplication. The earth seemed to confess: This was not your wedding. It was mine.   The bride and groom convulsed.   Bound together now, their forms fused. Root entangled flame, bark fused with ash. Their bodies leaned into one another until they could not be separated. She bled soil into his mouth, and he exhaled smoke into her lungs. Together they coughed, gagged, clutched at one another, and could not release.   The ring seared black into their skin.   Where their hands joined, flesh melted. The circle completed itself, fusing them wrist to wrist, bone to bone. Their screams echoed like wedding bells, hollow and triumphant, ringing through the forest canopy.   And above, something stirred.   From the cracks in the sky, wings stretched wide. Black feathers descended, falling like snow. A head without a face leaned down, watching its children. The thing that had been called by the ring’s sigh smiled without a mouth.   The courts fell to their knees, unwilling, unable.   The bride tried to speak. No words came, only the sound of soil sifting through roots.   The groom tried to speak. His voice broke into embers, sparks swallowed by the blackness of his throat.   Together, though, the fused thing whispered. Its voice was raw, trilling, broken—but whole.   “You… called us… back.”   The ring pulsed once more, sealing its claim.   The wedding was over.   No union had been forged between courts. Instead, they had married something else. Something older than fey, older than forest, older even than the laws that bound heaven to earth.   The courts did not celebrate. They did not mourn. They only trembled as the fused bride-and-groom turned their black eyes upon them, their clawed hands dripping sap and ember both.   The officiant—the forest—sighed once more, satisfied.