Kingdom of Ash

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