A Court in Flames

Chapter 37

Aelin's POV

I had been running. Running away from him. Rowan. Cauldron, why do you have to be so cruel? I halted as flashes of light and huge gusts of wind reached me. Elentiya! No!

He wanted me. Well, he would get me. I stalked back through the trees and as she collapsed I threw a wall of flames around. Too far. He'd gone too far.

I roared at him, baring my elongated canines at him. I felt the pain as I burned him, my anger covering his pain that shot down the mating bond. The rutting mating bond. I wanted to snap it for what he did to me. To Elentiya.

I doused my flames and he said, "Fireheart."

No, he didn't! "My. Name. Is. Aelin!" I roared back, over pronouncing the syllables that made up my name. Sadness flashed in his eyes but I didn't back down an inch. I had moved in between him and Elentiya. He would never lay another hand on my daughter.

"Aelin-" I cut him off.

"Leave." My eyes flashed in ire. The golden rim was definitely glowing with the flames that burned below the surface.

"I'm-" He started.

"Now!" I didn't want an apology. I didn't want an explanation. He hurt my daughter and I didn't care if he was my mate he would pay if he didn't leave.

"I don't know how." I drew the symbols on the cliff wall beside him. I pointed as the portal formed. "Aelin... please..." He begged me. I sneered at him. "I'm not leaving without you," he told me as he walked closer.

"Yes. You are," I responded. I didn't dare look back at Elentiya. I didn't want him to know how much pain he'd caused me by hurting her. 'The people you love are just weapons to be used against you,' he'd once told me.

He had gone too far in hurting her.

"Please, Fireheart," he said as he dared another step closer. I let him. Damn me. Don't. I wanted to stay mad, but as I saw the burns I had caused him my anger flickered. That was until a girl shouted his name and waved to him. My anger came rushing back. It was her. The girl that he loves more than me and it snapped loose the dam that had held my anger in check.

"No." My voice was cold and distant. I reached with burning hands deep into myself. I reach for the spot where the bond lay and with a mighty stroke, struck it.

He staggered back into the portal as the bond snapped under the hit I used to cleave it. Pain flashed in his eyes.

"I want nothing to do with you. And since you've so clearly moved on you're free of me." I wrote over top of the symbol that opened the portal. It snapped shut and as I went to check on Elentiya I collapsed and gave into the darkness.

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I woke up to someone shaking me. "Mom?" "Aelin?" The shouts came at me as I cracked an eye open.

"What happened?" I asked. My voice felt rough and my throat felt dry.

"I don't know," Feyre responded. "One minute you were making the firey things in the sky and the next someone was singing and you ran away, Elentiya following you in dragon form." I remembered that much and then... I shook my head.

"Mom? What happened?" Elentiya asked me as the tears rolled down my face. I curled up in a ball as I remembered snapping the mating bond. That feeling of... wrongness. I had done it willfully and I was probably only feeling a fraction of the pain he felt because I had snapped it.

I never answered her question.

Rowan's POV

Nothing. That's what I felt as the portal closed. As my mate shredded the bond between us. As I returned to Terrasen. As I lost her.

Somehow I had gone too far. Too far when I made the child pass out. My Fireheart in so much pain, pain I had caused, that she had shoved me out. Out of her life and soul and heart. Her last words to me still ringing in my ears. 'You've so clearly moved on.' She believed I had. But I hadn't. I couldn't. Not in a thousand years could I move on from her. Words I would never be able to tell her. 

Not as she left me alone. And the light, that had flared in my chest when she'd shown up alive, died. No. There was no light left in my life as I keeled over my knees, clutching my chest in pain, I realized that that was how she felt when I had shouted at her that one night in Mistward so long ago. Her light had gone out and she had nothing to live for. Just like I now had nothing to live for.

Maybe I could exist, though. That existing was what I had fallen back on, so many years ago when Lyria died.

I shifted and started the long flight back to Orynth, a hollow look in my eyes as I flew to the place that was only my home if Aelin was there.

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As the towering Staghorns appeared on the horizon I felt a part of myself break further. Orynth came into view soon after and I watched as Elide waved at me with Cal in her arms. Right. Beltane and his birthday was the day I had left.

I landed in mid-stride. Fleetfoot walked slowly up to me. Her tail wagged slightly as she came closer. I bent down and pet the dog before she walked back to her sun-warmed spot on the steps.

"Where did you go? We thought you'd been hurt," Elide said as she held Cal in her arms. I looked away from her. There was no life in my eyes as I walked past her into the castle behind.

I passed Lorcan, Aedion and Fenrys as I walked towards the kitchen and sat there for the rest of the day.

A/N

This chapter made me so sad while writing it. But it just felt like the kind of thing that would happen if Aelin saw some random girl kissing Rowan. Anyway... I ship Rowaelin and just, please, keep reading.