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Fate had a great deal to answer for, as far as Nesta was concerned.
It was fate that had left her a woman with a scar on her thumb, at an age when her sisters were still children, and permitted to be as children were. Nesta could not remember being a child. She had been short once, and had to deliver withering looks of contempt on her tip toes to be seen, but she had not been a child. She had been her mother’s image in miniature, and if she had ever begrudged what was robbed of her, she was consoled that it was all in the name of fate, and the glorious marriage that was sure to be her own.
Fate robbed Nesta of that marriage, just as it had robbed her of her childhood, and Fate would have meant for her to become a mother and father both, but at fourteen Nesta was ready to meet Fate in its game and she proved no unworthy opponent. She would not play parent to sisters barely two and three years her junior, and she would certainly not take the role of little wife for her father, tending him and coddling as he sat by the fire, whittling overwrought trinkets no one would spare coin to buy, when he could have been making no poor living with spoons and bowls. No, Fate might have intended it to be so, but Fate would have no easy wins over Nesta.
Fate then thought it had struck a winning blow, when it sentenced her to a body that was not her own, and to live among a people who were not her own. No, they were her sister’s creatures, and Feyre had, with that simpering smile, been all too keen to “welcome” Nesta into a circle of those people who would punish Nesta for every failure Feyre saw fit to speak of, and then some, all the while her halo shone pure and bright, the magnanimous sister, too good and pure to punish her sister. (Too good and pure to need to punish her sister).
Fate thought its victory doubled when it decided, in this world where its people had one True Mate, and that True Mate would love and defend and desire their beloveds with all they possessed, that Nesta’s Mate would be more in love with High Lord than himself, and who never wavered in his desire for her body, seemed undecided yet it if he liked her character.
And then Fate flipped, for Nesta now discovered herself to be Fate, Fate for a people she would never know, Fate for a people who were nothing to her, and yet, no more nothing than the people of Velaris were to her, for though she dwelled in that city it was not her own, and though there were people within the city she loved, she did not love them for being of that city.
A small gesture, the passing of the Mask, and yet worlds trembled, and when the Mask was returned, Nesta found herself having been saviour of a world, all the while she sat home with two house guests, one very pleasant, and ate chocolate cake. And true, she had been scolded and chastised and slapped with all the usual threats; threats which Fate had no doubt banked on having broken her by now (instead of bending her just the little), but she received a sword for her troubles, and friends across worlds, and while there was no doubt Fate was even now regrouping, she had little fear for it, for she had been Fate, and done a much smarter job of it.