Goldryn · The full story

A dead man's sword comes home

The queen who tortured Rowan for five hundred years was finally killed with a sword — her own dead lover's, the one she could never find.

Athril's sword

Goldryn belonged to Athril, the Fae warrior who was Brannon Galathynius's closest friend, and it was blessed by the sun goddess Mala Fire-Bringer — an egg-sized ruby set in the pommel that smolders like a live coal. With it Athril once carved out the eye of the Lake God, which is why that eyeless creature still drags anyone who trains at the lake below Mistward under the ice. In the Valg War Athril used Goldryn to hold Maeve off long enough for Brannon to flee with the Wyrdkeys — and Maeve, who loved him, killed him for it.

The ring in the scabbard

When Athril died, Brannon pulled a ring from his body — Silba's ring, a protection against the Valg, which Athril had meant as a love-token for Maeve — and hid it inside Goldryn's scabbard before stashing the whole thing in a cave above the lake. Maeve spent a thousand years unable to find either the sword or the ring. That is the quiet cruelty of Goldryn: the one weapon the immortal queen most wanted to lose track of, sitting in a mountain cave with her lost lover's ring sealed inside it, waiting for the right hand to come and pick it up.

Thrown across the ice

Rowan Whitethorn goes and retrieves Goldryn from that cave on purpose, knowing exactly what it is and what is hidden in it, meaning it as the one protection he can give Aelin against Maeve. He hands it to her the hard way: when the eyeless Lake Creature drags her and a boy under during training, Rowan hurls Goldryn across the frozen lake, and Aelin catches it and fights the thing off. After that she pours her own fire into the blade until the ruby burns with her flame — a habit that will matter far more than anyone yet knows.

The blade that outlasted her magic

After Aelin burns her whole gift down to an ember forging the Lock, Goldryn is what she fights with — the ruby still smoldering like a small sun with the fire she stored in it, carving through Morath's ranks at Orynth when she has almost nothing left. And it is Goldryn that ends Maeve: Fenrys drives it into her from behind, Aelin forces Silba's ring onto the queen's finger to burn her, then takes the sword and takes her head. The immortal queen, killed by Athril's blade and Athril's ring in the same breath.