Finally, he came to me and offered me a part of the plate. I swallowed my disgust and took the plate by the ends of my fingertips where no blood nor flesh could reach. Together, we dumped Lydian’s heart into the coals and watched as it crackled and blistered as the flames took over.

The lump in my throat was now gone, and a weight lifted off my chest and shoulders like thousands of boulders rising up and away from my body. There was a soreness in my heart, a bruising where I’d been forced to carry that weight—forcing myself to carry it for my own undeserved penance.

It all rose up into smoke as the heart burned to ashes and finally, finally, standing by Soren’s side, despite what was coming for us, I was completely, fully safe.

Epilogue

THE NAIL SHIP

SOMEWHERE IN THE deep bowels of Hel, there was a deafening crack of iron and rust and a chain unrooted from the earth. Thousands upon thousands of men, corpses filled with holes and half-eaten bodies and maggot-covered faces, those made up solely of bone and those so new that the skin had barely broken, they all pushed the sharp ship made from their nails into the sea of the dead. A serpent’s head rose up to meet them, before moving on through the waters of life and shaking every world above him as he did.

The ship floated in the water as corpses rushed inside, and it held together despite the capacity of dead compared to its size. Because what was size when it came to the wicked, and what could they do other than sail for days and nights on end without tiring.

The Naglafar was coming and spreading its oily darkness into the water and sky where it passed. For every world, every realm, it would spread darkness like an endless night until they were all full of coldness and despair.

Acknowledgments

There are so many people to thank for getting this book out. First, I wanted to thank the lovely Caitlin and equally loved Kat, who really helped when I was approaching the deadline and having problems with the writing. You guys helped save this book.

Obviously, Eileen, my editor, deserves a huge thank-you as well for all she does and how hard she works. I wouldn’t be here without her.

I’d like to thank the other important staff at Wattpad and Wednesday Books who’ve helped so far, Aron and Tiffany and many others whose names I can’t recall because my memory is worse than Soren’s ego. But just know, you all rock and I’m so very grateful.