Kingdom of Ash
Page 177

But Dorian said, “My father’s name.” His voice did not waver. “You took it.”
He hadn’t realized that he wanted it. Needed it, so badly.
A pathetic, spineless man, Erawan seethed. As you are—
“Tell me his name. Give it back.”
Erawan laughed through his screaming. No.
“Give it back.”
Yrene looked to him now, doubt in her eyes. Her magic paused—just for a heartbeat.
Erawan leapt, his power erupting.
Dorian blasted it back, and lunged for the demon king. For Damaris.
Erawan’s shriek threatened to crack the castle stones as Dorian shoved the blade deeper. Twisted it. Sent their power funneling down through it.
“Tell me his name,” he panted through his teeth. Yrene, clinging to his other hand, murmured her warning. Dorian barely heard it.
Erawan only laughed again, choking as their power seared him.
“Does it matter?” Yrene asked softly.
Yes. He didn’t know why, but it did.
His father had been wiped from the Afterworld, from every realm of existence, but he could still have his name given back to him.
If only to repay the debt. If only so Dorian might grant the man some shred of peace.
Erawan’s power surged for them again. Dorian and Yrene shoved it back.
Now. It had to be now.
“Tell me his name,” Dorian snarled.
Erawan smiled up at him. No.
“Dorian,” Yrene warned. Sweat slid down her face. She couldn’t hold him for much longer. And to risk her—
Dorian sent their power rippling down the blade. Damaris’s hilt glowed.
“Tell me—”
It is your own.
Erawan’s eyes widened as the words came out of him.
As Damaris drew it from him. But Dorian did not marvel at the sword’s power.
His father’s name …
Dorian.
I took his name, Erawan spat, writhing as the words flowed from his tongue under Damaris’s power. I wiped it away from existence. Yet he only remembered it once. Only once. The first time he beheld you.
Tears slid down Dorian’s face at that unbearable truth.
Perhaps his father had unknowingly hidden his name within him, a final kernel of defiance against Erawan. And had named his son for that defiance, a secret marker that the man within still fought. Had never stopped fighting.
Dorian. His father’s name.
Dorian let go of Damaris’s hilt.
Yrene’s breathing turned ragged. Now—it had to be now.
Even with the Valg king before him, something in Dorian’s chest eased. Healed over.
So Dorian said to Erawan, his tears burning away beneath the warmth of their magic. “I brought down your keep.” He smiled savagely. “And now we’ll bring you down as well.”
Then he nodded to Yrene.
Erawan’s eyes flared like hot coals. And Yrene unleashed their power once more.
Erawan could do nothing. Nothing against that raw magic, joining with Yrene’s, weaving into that world-making power.
The entire city, the plain, became blindingly bright. So bright that Elide and Lysandra shielded their eyes. Even Dorian shut his.
But Yrene saw it then. What lay at Erawan’s core.
The twisted, hateful creature inside. Old and seething, pale as death. Pale, from an eternity in darkness so complete it had never seen sunlight.
Had never seen her light, which now scalded his moon-white, ancient flesh.
Erawan writhed, contorting on the ground of whatever this place was inside him.
Pathetic, Yrene simply said.
Golden eyes flared, full of rage and hate.
But Yrene only smiled, summoning her mother’s lovely face to her heart. Showing it to him.
Wishing she knew what Elide’s mother had looked like so she might show him Marion Lochan, too.
The two women he had killed, directly or indirectly, and never thought twice about it.
Two mothers, whose love for their daughters and hope for a better world was greater than any power Erawan might wield. Greater than any Wyrdkey.
And it was with the image of her mother still shining before him, showing him that mistake he’d never known he made, that Yrene clenched her fingers into a fist.
Erawan screamed.
Yrene’s fingers clenched tighter, and distantly, she felt her physical hand doing the same. Felt the sting of her nails cutting into her palms.
She did not listen to Erawan’s pleas. His threats.
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.