Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7)

by Sarah J. Maas

Slowly, she turned to him. It was her face—or it would be in a few years. When she Settled. But it wasn’t the slightly older features that knocked the breath from him. It was the hand on her rounded belly. She stared toward him, hair still flowing. Behind her, four small figures emerged. Rowan fell to his knees. The tallest: a girl with golden hair and pine-green eyes, solemn-faced and as proud as her mother. The boy beside her, nearly her height, smiled at him, warm and bright, his Ashryver eyes near-glowing beneath his cap of silver hair. The boy next to him, silver-haired and green-eyed, might as well have been Rowan’s twin. And the smallest girl, clinging to her mother’s legs … A fine-boned, silver-haired child, little more than a babe, her blue eyes harking back to a lineage he did not know. Children. His children. Their children. With another mere weeks from being born. His family. The family he might have, the future he might have. The most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Aelin. Their children pressed closer to her, the eldest girl peering up to Aelin in warning. Rowan felt it then. A lethal, mighty black wind sweeping for them. He tried to scream. Tried to get off his knees, to find some way to them. But the black wind roared in, ripping and tearing everything in its path. They were still staring at him as it swept them away, too. Until only dust and shadow remained.