Disclaimer: I don't own anything at all. Not the characters, not the world, not the extracts from Heir of Fire at the start and end. Nothing.
"Because she is dead!" She screamed the last word so loudly it burned her throat. "Because she is dead, and I am left with my worthless life!"
He merely stared at her with that animal stillness. When she walked away, he didn't come after her.
Celaena had failed Nehemia in every way it was possible to fail her.
As she walked away, leaving Rowan standing silent and solemn behind her, she forced herself to keep her eyes open, even as they began to water, because she knew that the moment they slid shut she would be once again back in that bedroom, her nails grazing Dorian's throat, her dearest friend prone and dismembered on the bed several feet away, dead from an attack Celaena should have protected her from.
An attack Chaol should have warned her was coming.
The amethyst ring on her finger was suddenly a dead weight.
But he hadn't. And she was such a coward, she was so worthless, that the last words she'd spat at Nehemia reflected her stance on the subject of their continent as it went to Hell: "When your people are lying dead around you, don't come crying to me."
You are a coward.
And the reason it had hit so hard. . . It was true.
Coward.
It was completely and utterly, undeniably true.
Coward.
She had run from her crown, and run from her country, and run from the assassin, for so, so long. She had run away from her name, and left her people to suffer in her wake. She had run, and run, and run, and even when she was suddenly the King's Champion, and caught in the thick midst of the politics of kingdoms, she had never stopped running, not really.
Coward.
It figured that despite her aptitude for running away from things, despite generally being fast enough to evade damnation, the one night those skills had failed her was the one night she had needed them. It figured that after all her running, she hadn't been able to run fast enough to save her friend.
Coward.
She left the word settle into her soul, into the cracks that had formed so long ago, and where the darkness lurked, ready to devour her. The abyss below the ravine that featured in the dream she had every year the night before the anniversary of her parents' death. The abyss that she knew, if she fell into it deep and far enough, led to the burning realm of Hellas that was waiting for her after death.
If she stopped running long enough to die, that is.
It hadn't happened yet.
Apparently the gods thought her an amusing toy to inflict pain on. Those benevolent deities that her parents had prayed to, that she had prayed to, so long ago. . . No better that Rourke Farran and his ilk, keeping their quarry alive throughout the torture, so they can savour the exquisite pain they inflict.
That was the only other time she'd stopped running away, and started running towards something. The night Sam had died, and revenge had shone before her for a second, so bright and wickedly enticing, like a pixie luring her into a trap.
Running towards things had never really worked out for her.
Running away, on the other hand, always seemed to keep her alive.
Maybe that was why she was running away now.
Rowan tried not to acknowledge how deep the princess's words had cut him.
My worthless life.
He couldn't put it better himself.
He, in all his glory mongering, had left his mate alone. Hadn't even scented on her that she was pregnant.
He had never heard the screams as the soldiers butchered her mercilessly. He had never learned why the soldiers were there to begin with. Only that when a troop of Fae warriors had traipsed through the footpaths of his mountain home, they had passed by his small cottage, with the butter gold stone walls, and the emerald shingle roof, and the curling smoke rising from the small chimney, and barged in.
He didn't know what had happened, besides the fact that they had slaughtered her.
Slaughtered-
Lyria.
He had not thought that name in. . . decades. Since before the fall of Terrasen, and Aelin's family were murdered.
He had not let himself. He had buried her memory, the way she smelt, the way her voice had curled round her consonants, deep in the bottomless chasm her loss had ripped in his heart. He'd then let himself freefall into it himself.
Lyria.
That voice whispered his name at the back of his head. Rowan.
No. Lyria was dead.
Rowan.
He refused to look, and see. Because then he might convince himself that Lyria was alive and well, and then he would let go of his guilt, and his would be living a lie, but happy.
No.
He refused.
He had not yet atoned for his sins. Hadn't collected enough scars as payment to the dark god.
And despite the numerous war brigades he'd been on, despite all the battles he'd fought and won and lost, despite the injuries he'd bestowed and inflicted and taken, he didn't think he ever would.
So he shifted, rather than continue to watch the princess storm off, and flew away. Yielding to his baser instinct felt. . . better, somehow, like there was no longer a hole in a place of him that he usually forgot he had.
Perhaps because now, he didn't have it.
On those windiest of nights in the war camps in the depths of the Staghorn Mountains, Aedion had always sat up until well after the moon had reached its zenith, and listened to the wind sing its song.
Sometimes, it sounded like the screams of the men he'd murdered that day. Because he always killed, every single day. Whether it was a rebel who'd been caught, and who he was forced to put down to prove his loyalty, or an Adarlanian soldier gone rogue who he'd even taken pleasure in killing, or even the game he hunted daily, there was always death, and there were always voices.
And other times, he would sit there on the edge of a ravine, and look down at the frozen river below. Would finger the handle to his sword - no, not his sword, The Sword of Orynth, Aelin's sword - and speak to his cousin, wondering if she could hear him in the afterlife. Wondered if she was happy where she was now.
Wondered if she looked down at him from the paradise she was sure to have gone to - she had to have gone to; she had suffered too much in her nine years for her power and position - and cried. Cried for what that tyrant had done to her country, cried for what her cousin, her protector, had become, cried for the cruelty of the world.
Or maybe she looked down, and spat on his name, spat on his memory, even as he treasured hers.
He would deserve it.
He had failed her.
He had failed Terrasen.
That dream of the mighty warrior queen her court had been training her to be. . . That dream was shattered, along with the hearts of the dreamers. And his dream of being her fiercest, most trusted general. . . That was shattered too.
He hated it.
He hated the King of Adarlan.
He hated the world.
He hated the gods.
He hated himself.
So much it was painful.
And he hated even as he bowed and scraped to the King of Adarlan, to the man who had ordered the slaughter of his queen, and the sacking of his country. He hated even as he staged battles and fought battles, and then exaggerated the body count, as he watched the dead rise to return home to the warm hearth, and the families that awaited them there. He hated as he watched the numbers of the Bane dwindle, and the men he had fought beside and loved like the brothers he'd never had fall in battle.
But this was the truth of the world.
This was bloodshed.
This was pain.
This was death.
This was life.
This was existence as he knew it, and as he suspected he would always know it.
So he kept on hating himself, and hating the world, even as he kept fighting, and kept dreaming about that shining Afterworld, where his queen dwelled, and where he would someday go, and finally, finally, give her the sword that was hers by blood and right and honour.
And so Aedion would watch the crimson sun bleed into dawn, and watch the clouds and earth become soaked with the blood of friends and enemies alike, as he walked onto that battlefield again.
And again.
And again.
Her people, waiting for ten years, but no longer.
She could see the snow-capped Staghorns, the wild tangle of Oakwald at their feet, and. . . and Orynth, that city of light and learning, once a pillar of strength - and her home.
It would be both again.
She would not let that light go out.
She would fill the world with it, with her light - her gift. She would light up the darkness, so brightly that all those who were lost or wounded or broken would find their way to it, a beacon for all those who still dwelled in that abyss. It would not take a monster to destroy a monster - but light, light to drive out darkness.
She was not afraid.
She would remake the world - remake it for them, those she had loved with this glorious, burning heart; a world so brilliant and prosperous that when she saw them again in the Afterworld, she would not be ashamed. She would build it for her people, who had survived this long, and whom she would not abandon. She would make for them a kingdom such as there had never been, even if it took until her last breath.
She was their queen, and she could offer them nothing less.
Aelin Galathynius smiled at her, hand still outreached. "Get up," the princess said.
Celaena reached across the earth between them and brushed her fingers against Aelin's.
And arose.