Chapter Text
A blast of dark power, like a gentle summer night, slammed into her.
Not to attack–but to slow her down.
A wall, a shield, that she tore and plunged through.
But it slowed her. That winged male’s power slowed her,
But not enough.
As she vanished from their world, Aelin caught fleeting glimpses of her own. She felt as though she was barreling through time. She didn’t know how to stop her fall, if you could even call it that. She tried to pull herself into Erilea, to her home. Flashes of her world passed her by and she tried to understand what she was seeing.
Raging blue waves.
A baby crying in his mother’s arms.
Dusty sand dunes.
An explosion of white light accompanied by a cacophony of sound.
A man kissing his love.
Images and more images.
And just then another flash of life in Erelia passed by. One Aelin knew.
A beautiful, pale dark haired Valg queen. The man she was speaking to, Aelin didn’t recognize, but every fiber of her being rejected the dark stench of him.
Erawan.
Aelin acted on instinct.
She dipped into that terrible power once more. Aelin pulled both Maeve and Erawan with her as the Wyrdgate closed forever, sealing the tear she made and trapping both them and herself in the hell-realm.
Aelin was comforted by her loved ones at her last minute.
She hardly heard the screams of Maeve and Erawan as monstrous creatures descended on them.
Even now, she wished she’d had more time.
But she would not regret a second of it. Even if another path might’ve guaranteed her ten, twenty, a hundred more years, not an ounce of her regretted walking the one that led her here. The one that had taken her to Rowan, to Aedion, to Lysandra, to Elide, to her home.
Because Terrasen had never been her home because it was the stretch of land she had spent her first years residing in. No, it had been her home because it was where she’d heard her mother's laugh, where she’d felt the warm sun on her face playing in her uncle’s garden with her cousin, where she had felt unbridled joy. So Aelin would be grateful for the piece of Terrasen she was given.
She would not regret that she would never see Rowan’s smile again, never get to see him sit beside her on a throne, never get to see their children grow into kind and gentle rulers. She would not regret her actions if it meant Rowan got to live, to smile, even if she would never get to see it.
So when tears ran down her face as she thought of her parents, of Sam, of Nehemia welcoming her home, they were tears of happiness.
And even as she was ripped to shreds, for once in her life, Aelin Ashryver Whitethorne Galathynius did not have to remind herself to be unafraid.