Kingdom of Ash
She only tightened her fist. More and more.
Until he was nothing but a dark flame within it.
Until she squeezed her fist, one final time, and that dark flame snuffed out.
Yrene had the feeling of falling, of tumbling back into herself. And she was indeed falling, rocking back into Lysandra’s furry body, her hand slipping from Dorian’s.
Dorian lunged for her hand to renew contact, but there was no need.
No need for his power, or Yrene’s.
Not as Erawan, golden eyes open and unseeing as they gazed at the night sky above, sagged to the stones of the balcony.
Not as his skin turned gray, then began to wither, to decay.
A life rotting away from within.
“Burn it,” Yrene rasped, a hand going to her belly. A pulse of joy, a spark of light, answered back.
Dorian didn’t hesitate. Flames leaped out, devouring the decaying body before them.
They were unnecessary.
Before they’d even begun to turn his clothing to ash, Erawan dissolved. A sagging bit of flesh and brittle bones.
Dorian burned him anyway.
They watched in silence as the Valg king turned to ashes.
As a winter wind swept over the tower balcony, and carried them far, far away.
CHAPTER 114
She was dead.
Aelin was dead.
Her lifeless body had been spiked to the gates of Orynth, her hair shorn to her scalp.
Rowan knelt before the gates, the armies of Morath streaming past him. It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. Yet the sun warmed his face. The reek of death filled his nose.
He gritted his teeth, willing himself out, away from this place. This waking nightmare.
It didn’t falter.
A hand brushed his shoulder, gentle and small.
“You brought this upon yourself, you know,” said a lilting female voice.
He knew that voice. Would never forget it.
Lyria.
She stood behind him, peering up at Aelin. Clad in Maeve’s dark armor, her brown hair braided back from her delicate, lovely face. “You brought it upon her, too, I suppose,” his mate—his lie of a mate—mused.
Dead. Lyria was dead, and Aelin was the one meant to survive—
“You would pick her over me?” Lyria demanded, her chestnut eyes filling. “Is that the sort of male you have become?”
He couldn’t find any words, anything to explain, to apologize.
Aelin was dead.
He couldn’t breathe. Didn’t want to.
Connall was smirking at him. “Everything that happened to me is because of you.”
Kneeling on that veranda in Doranelle, in a palace he’d hoped to never see again, Fenrys fought the bile that rose in his throat. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry, but would you change it? Was I the sacrifice you were willing to make in order to get what you wanted?”
Fenrys shook his head, but it was suddenly that of a wolf—the body he had once loved with such pride and fierceness. A wolf’s form—with no ability to speak.
“You took everything I ever wanted,” his twin went on. “Everything. Did you even mourn me? Did it even matter?”
He needed to tell him—tell his twin everything he’d meant to say, wished he’d been able to convey. But that wolf’s tongue did not voice the language of men and Fae. No voice. He had no voice.
“I am dead because of you,” Connall breathed. “I suffered because of you. And I will never forget it.”
Please. The word burned on his tongue. Please—
She couldn’t endure it.
Rowan kneeling there, screaming.
Fenrys sobbing toward the darkened skies.
And Lorcan—Lorcan in utter silence, eyes unseeing as some untold horror played out.
Maeve hummed to herself. “Do you see what I can do? What they are powerless against?”
Rowan screamed louder, the tendons in his neck bulging. Fighting Maeve with all he had.
She couldn’t endure it. Couldn’t stand it.
This was no illusion, no spun dream. This, their pain—this was real.
Maeve’s Valg powers, at last revealed. The same hellish power that the Valg princes possessed. The same power she’d endured. Defeated with flame.
But she had no flame to help them. Nothing at all.
“There’s indeed nothing left for you to bargain with,” Maeve said simply. “But yourself.”
Anything but this. Anything but this—
“You are nothing.”
Elide stood before him, the lofty towers of a city Lorcan had never seen, the city that should have been his home, beckoning on the horizon. The wind whipped her dark hair, as cold as the light in her eyes.
“A bastard-born nobody,” she went on. “Did you think I’d sully myself with you?”
“I think you might be my mate,” he rasped.
Elide snickered. “Mate? Why would you ever think you were entitled to such a thing after all you have done?”
It couldn’t be real—it wasn’t real. And yet that coldness in her face, the distance …
He’d earned it. Deserved it.
Maeve surveyed them, the three males who had been her slaves, lost to her dark power as it ripped through their minds, their memories, and laughed. “Pity about Gavriel. At least he fell nobly.”
Gavriel—
Maeve turned to her. “You didn’t know, did you?” A click of her tongue. “The Lion will roar no longer, his life the asking price for defending his cub.”
Gavriel was dead. She felt the truth in Maeve’s words. Let them punch a hole through her heart.
“You could not save him, it seems,” Maeve went on. “But you can save them.”
Fenrys screamed now. Rowan had fallen silent, his green eyes vacant. Whatever he beheld had drawn him past screaming, beyond weeping.
Pain. Unspeakable, unimaginable pain. As she had endured—perhaps worse.
And yet …
Aelin didn’t give Maeve time to react. Time to even turn her head as she grabbed Goldryn where it lay beside her and hurled it at the queen.
It missed Maeve by an inch, the Valg queen twisting aside before the blade buried itself deep in the snow, steaming where it landed. Still burning.
It was all Aelin needed.
She lashed out, flame spearing into the world.
But not for Maeve.
It slammed into Rowan, into Fenrys and Lorcan. Struck their shoulders, hard and deep.
Burning them. Branding them.
Aelin was dead. She was dead, and he had failed her.
“You are a lesser male,” Lyria said, still studying the gate where Aelin’s body swayed. “You deserved this. After what was done to me, you deserved this.”
Aelin was dead.
He did not wish to live in this world. Not for a heartbeat longer.
Aelin was dead. And he—
His shoulder twinged. And then it burned.
As if someone had pressed a brand to it. A red-hot poker.
A flame.
He looked down, but beheld no wound.
Lyria continued on, “You bring only suffering to those you love.”
The words were distant. Secondary to that burning wound.
It singed him again, a phantom wound, a memory—
Not a memory. Not a memory, but a lifeline thrown into the dark. Into an illusion.