Chapter 10 begins with Merry continuing to push her hand of blood powers onto Onilwyn. He falls to the ground, so he starts crawling towards Merry.

I wasn’t even frightened anymore. All the emotion that was in me was concentrated in my left hand. Concentrated into one thought: die. I could pretend that all I wanted was his blood, but that wasn’t enough. I needed death. I needed Onilwyn’s death.
He was close enough that I could see the sheen of sweat on his face, even by moonlight. I kept my hand pointed at him, and I cried out, “Die! Die for me!”

I just can’t take LKH’s action seriously when she always has her characters screaming such cheesy lines. DIE FOR ME. Come on.

So Onilwyn somehow manages to pull himself up so he’s on his knees, rising above Mistral’s body. He raises his sword, and you’d think he’d kill Mistral, but nope, he tries for Merry. She backs out of his reach at the last second, and Onilwyn ends up thrusting the sword into the ground.

Onilwyn starts begging for his life in his typical smug, misogynistic manner. He asks for her to spare him “for pity”, and let me tell you if someone pulled that on me and I were Merry, I would kill them even harder. Instead, the Goddess starts speaking through Merry, because she always does to prove a point.

Realizing this, Onilwyn starts fawning over Merry, reaching out to her tenderly. He asks again for his forgiveness, but nope. The Goddess is not in a forgiving mood.

He stared at me with unfocused eyes. He reached out toward me, not with magic, but as if he would touch me, or was trying to touch something. I wasn’t certain he was reaching for me, but he saw something in that movement. He saw something that made him reach for it.
“Forgive me,” he whispered.
“I am the face of the goddess that you called into being this night, Ash Lord. Is there forgiveness in the face you see?”
“No,” he whispered.

And the chapter ends with Onilwyn falling face first over Mistral and dying.

This chapter was yet again another short moment that easily could have been combined with the previous chapter. It was two freaking pages in my kindle version. TWO. Chapters should never be that short! Poor Onilwyn. He deserved a better death scene.

IMPORTANT

In August 2019, 23 year old Elijah McClain was killed by police in Aurora, CO during a police escalation. The officers involved were never charged of anything. Please sign the Justice for Elijah petition on change.org to force an in-depth investigation into his death.