Kingdom of Ash
Kingdom of Ash
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Sarah J. Maas on Kingdom of Ash
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
Sixteen years toward a single bookshelfMaas began posting the earliest chapters of Throne of Glass on FictionPress at sixteen, and the series never stopped being the reason she pursued publication at all. By the time she sat down to write the finale, the weight of that original ambition was impossible to separate from the work itself.
I knew from a young age that I loved to write, but it wasn’t until I began working on Throne of Glass that I realized how much I wanted to be published and that I wanted to one day be able to see Throne of Glass sitting on a bookshelf. That dream was my guiding star—the goal I was willing to work toward no matter how long it took, no matter how impossible the odds. So I did—through high school and college and the years afterward, I worked on these books. Without that dream and drive to see it come true, I don’t know where I’d be. Which made writing Kingdom of Ash all the more emotional and overwhelming. I can’t tell you how many times I cried while writing this book!
That emotional accumulation shaped the book in ways she had not fully anticipated. What she expected to be a triumphant final push turned into something more like sustained grief at the keyboard.
The ending she finally committed to was not the first she had imagined, nor the second. Several candidate endings rose and fell over the years before one locked into place. What anchored it permanently was a specific moment in Costa Rica: riding in the back of a tour van through a cloud forest, listening to the John Carter film score, when the sun broke through the mountains and deposited a single line in her head.
as we were rounding this curve on the mountain, the music began playing, the sun broke through the cloud cover and lit up all these mountains around me. And I just heard in my head the kings Flame was blooming
readingbystarlightblog.wordpress.com, “Kingdom of Ash World Tour – An Afternoon with Sarah J. Maas”She wrote the rest of the book toward that image, knowing exactly where she was going.
Two other endpoints had been in place for years before she reached them. Maas had known from Manon Blackbeak’s first appearance that her arc would close with the sacrifice of the Thirteen, a battle unit of iron-teethed Ironteeth witches loyal to Manon, and she had known from writing The Assassin’s Blade, the prequel novella collection, that Yrene Towers would eventually turn the tide of the war. Her reason for engineering that outcome was deliberate.
I love the idea of ladies being the ones to take down the dark lord and save everyone in the end
readingbystarlightblog.wordpress.com, “Kingdom of Ash World Tour – An Afternoon with Sarah J. Maas”How she wrote it
Eight years of plans, eight hours of weepingMusic is where her structural thinking begins, and the Costa Rica moment was the most concentrated instance of a process that operates throughout her work. She has described the mechanism in general terms, but it applies with particular force to Kingdom of Ash, where music supplied both the final image and the emotional register she wrote toward.
Music inspires pretty much everything that I write, and I have no idea why. It’s just the way my brain works: I hear a piece of music (usually movie scores or classical music) and I just see a scene, or a character, or an entire book.
The scenes she had been carrying in her head for eight years were the hardest to execute, not because they were unclear but because they required her to feel them at full force while also remaining functional enough to keep writing. The emotional cost on ordinary working days was not metaphorical.
you’re emotionally, you’re basically weeping for like, eight hours a day, and then you’re like, ‘Okay, I need to keep doing this.’ [paraphrased from audio]
The Thirteen’s sacrifice was the scene whose origins she traced most directly to her own biography. At the Melbourne stop of the Kingdom of Ash World Tour, she said it grew from growing up without seeing enough stories in which women sacrificed to save the world. The version that made it into print was unmediated in a way earlier drafts were not.
what you read in the last version is almost like a pure, unfiltered version of what pored from my heart
readingbystarlightblog.wordpress.com, “Kingdom of Ash World Tour – An Afternoon with Sarah J. Maas”Maas normally lets characters override her plans when they resist, and forcing them into preplanned paths tends to produce material she cuts. Kingdom of Ash was the exception that surprised her most.
I’ve been working on these books for so many years at this point that I’ve had several different endings in mind that have come and gone. But several years ago, I finally stumbled across the ending—which was what I worked toward for all of these books. Thankfully, my characters decided to cooperate—which was probably the biggest surprise while working on Kingdom of Ash: they wound up doing exactly what I had planned for them, right until the very last line.
The cooperation mattered practically: it meant the years of planning paid off on the page rather than generating detours she had to undo in revision.
When the first draft was finally done, after years of accumulation and months of sustained emotional labor, her reaction was not relief or elation but something closer to shock.
When I finished the first draft and finally wrote ‘The End’ on the final page, I just had this moment where I gaped at my screen. And then burst into ugly tears and had to curl up on the couch for a good while.
The personal thread
The character who made her braverAelin Galathynius, the assassin-turned-queen at the center of the series, accumulated meaning for Maas that went beyond the page. By the time she was writing the finale, Aelin’s refusal to surrender had become something she reached for in her own life.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wound up saying to myself, ‘My name is Sarah Maas, and I will not be afraid’ and instantly felt braver.
When asked what she would say to Aelin directly, she did not reach for craft language or authorial distance. She answered as someone who felt she had been chosen by the character rather than the other way around.
Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for all the good you’ve brought into my life and for choosing me to tell your story.
What she wants us to sit with
Nothing ends, and that’s the pointWhen asked whether it was hard not to give her characters fully happy endings, she did not defend the choice as a craft decision or a nod to realism. She reached instead for a philosophical frame borrowed from another fantasy, locating her own storytelling inside a much older argument about what endings can and cannot do.
Life rarely has 100% happy endings. You know, being asked this question really reminds me of that quote from The Last Unicorn: ‘There is never a happy ending because nothing ends.’ We just drift in and out of each other’s narratives, our arcs overlapping, our histories bleeding together in one ancient, ongoing tale. That’s how I ultimately want my stories to feel. Like they’re just one part in a greater, endless tale of that world.
Finishing the series left her holding contradictory feelings at the same time, and she did not try to resolve them into a single register. The emotional inventory she gave Booktopia months before publication captures what she expected the release to feel like, and what it cost to get there.
So many things! Too many things! It’s all a bit overwhelming, to be honest. I’m feeling everything from pride that I accomplished this crazy dream of mine to total devastation that this series is coming to an end to just… pure joy.