Page 334 of Kingdom of Ash

The new tattoo, of spread wings, the story of her and Rowan written in the Old Language amongst the feathers.

A flick of Mala’s fingers and symbols rose from it. Hidden within the words, the feathers.

Wyrdmarks.

Rowan had hidden Wyrdmarks in her tattoo.

Had inked Wyrdmarks all over it.

“A map home,” Mala said, the image fading. “To him.”

He’d suspected, somehow. That it might come to this. Had asked her to teach him so he might make this gamble.

And when Aelin looked behind her, to the archway into her own world, she indeed could …feelthem. As if the Wyrdmarks he’d secretly inked onto her were a rope. A tether home.

A lifeline into eternity.

One last deceit.

Another voice whispered past then, a fragment of memory, spoken on a rooftop in Rifthold.What if we go on, only to more pain and despair?

Then it is not the end.

That power flowed and flowed into Aelin. Her lips curved upward.

It was not the end. And she was not finished.

But they were.

“To a better world,” Mala said, and walked through the doorway into her own.

A better world.

A world with no gods. No masters of fate.

A world of freedom.

Aelin approached the archway to the gods’ realm. To where Mala now walked across the shimmering grass, little more than a shaft of sunlight herself.

The Lady of Light halted—and lifted an arm in farewell.

Aelin smiled and bowed.

Far out, striding over the hills, the gods paused.

Aelin’s smile turned into a grin. Wicked and raging.

It did not falter as she found the world she sought. As she dipped into that eternal, terrible power.

She had been a slave and a pawn once before. She would never be so again.

Not for them. Never for them.

The gods began shouting, running toward her, as Aelin ripped open a hole in their sky.

Right into a world she had seen only once. Had accidentally opened a portal into one night in a stone castle. Distant, baying howls cracked from the bleak gray expanse.

A portal into a hell-realm. A door now thrown open.

---