The Autumn Court · Lucien's First Love · The Wound He Carries
Jesminda
The lesser faerie Lucien loved — and lost to his own blood.
A lowborn girl beneath the notice of an Autumn Court House. Lucien gave her his heart anyway. His brothers killed her, and that grief is what drove the youngest Vanserra out of his father's court and into the Spring Court for good.
At a glance
The girl behind Lucien's grief.
The girl beneath their notice
A love no House would bless.
Jesminda was a lesser faerie of the Autumn Court — lowborn, far beneath the notice a High Lord's youngest son was ever meant to spare her. Lucien Vanserra loved her anyway. In a court ruled by Beron's pride and cruelty, where station is everything and tenderness is a weakness to be punished, that love was forbidden. His family would not bless it. Lucien tried to run with her rather than give her up.
What his family did
A mercy they would not grant.
They were caught. Lucien's brothers hunted the lovers down and killed her — Jesminda slaughtered for the crime of being loved by the wrong man in the wrong court. In his grief and fury Lucien turned on his own family, was struck down, and fled the Autumn Court entirely, finding refuge with Tamlin in the Spring Court — the friend who took the broken, exiled son in.
The wound he still carries
Why he never went home.
Jesminda never crosses the page alive; she exists only in the story Lucien tells, and in the silence around everything he refuses to say about his father's house. Her death is the hinge of his whole life — it explains his exile, his loyalty to Tamlin, and the particular sorrow that lives beneath his easy charm. She is the love Beron's Autumn Court could not abide, and the proof of exactly what that court will do to anything soft.
Bound to
The threads that knot around her grave.
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Lucien Vanserra →The youngest Vanserra son who loved a lesser faerie, watched his family kill her, and never went home again.
The Autumn Court → Beron → Eris Vanserra →