Chapter 50
Chapter Fifty
Thyra
Icome back to myself with a scream. “Darkness!”
I’m certain the blade vision only consumed me for a few seconds, but I struggle to focus on my surroundings, aware only of the clamp of Antony’s hands around my shoulders, anchoring me as I sway toward him, my heart pounding.
Desperately, I try to hold on to the image of the place I saw in the vision.
The book’s pages had vanished, and instead, I was standing in the same field of ash where I encountered the False Queen, and she told me I would be her vengeance.
She wasn’t there this time. Instead, the field stretched out around me, empty and dark, but in the background, I heard shrieking.
Not voices.
More like…the boughs of a tree scraping…or groaning under a terrible weight…
The shriek of wood before it snaps.
As the sound shot through my hearing, terrible pain stabbed my heart, and I wanted to make it stop. All of it…
Trying desperately to focus on Antony now, I swallow hard and whisper, “My heart… It hurts…”
“Thyra?”
My surroundings finally settle back into view.
I find myself pressed up against Antony’s chest, dread swirling in my stomach. “What did I do?”
“You closed the Chronicle.”
My focus flies to it. “Oh, no.” I try to step toward it, but he doesn’t let me go. “Why would I—?”
His response is hard. Tense. “You saw something in it. I need you to tell me what you saw.”
I force myself to mentally wade past the image of the dark field and the shrieks of pain, and to return to what I glimpsed right before the blade vision struck.
The astonishing image on the Chronicle’s pages.
Can I be sure of what it means?
With my heart now in my throat, I ask, “Will you let me go?”
“No.”
“You’re hurting my shoulders.”
His hands ease, but he doesn’t remove them. “Tell me what you saw.”
“Will you answer a question for me first?”
His eyes narrow at me, and I wish I could see if his brow is furrowed. Damn helmet.
“Have the images in the Chronicle ever…moved…when you looked at them?”
He tilts his head. “They haven’t.”
“What about for Emiliana? Has she ever mentioned the images coming alive?”
“No, but she could have kept that from me.”
True.
I ask again, “Will you let me go?”
He takes a moment. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to open that book myself.”
His arms circle me before I can blink, clamping around me, and then he’s dragging me away from the table. “We’re leaving.”
I dig in my heels. “We are not leaving.”
Without stopping, he snarls, “That book will kill you, Thyra.”
He’s far stronger than me, and my attempt at slowing him down is unsuccessful, but I’m not about to give up.
“If I can open it myself, then we don’t need Emiliana.
We don’t have to endanger her again.” I’m certain Antony isn’t listening, but I’m only more determined.
“If she’s caught, what secrets will she be forced to tell?
Will she be forced to reveal she’s been seeing Victor in the forges?
Will she be put to death? Will it break his heart? ”
Antony’s footsteps finally slow.
It’s cruel of me to use his love for his family against him. He can claim to be a monster as often as he wants, but he cares for them.
“My hands are covered in Lethian armor,” I continue.
“My right hand is protected by the Dragonstone Blade. I may not be able to survive a knife to my face, or walk safely into a place protected by blood magic, but I’m certain I can touch that book with this hand and not succumb to whatever magic protects it. ”
He draws to a stop. “You don’t know that.”
“Antony… Before the blade vision struck, I saw something I can’t explain, and I don’t know what it means. I need clarity, or I could send us both down a dangerous path based on bad information.”
“What if the blade won’t let you see more?” he asks. “What if your other self—your blade self—simply closes the book again?”
My other self.
To think of myself as a different person during those moments makes my head spin, but I run with it.
“Fuck my other self,” I snap. “Let me try.”
Without warning, he scoops up my right hand, making the chain clank between us. Even with his helmet on, his glare burns.
“This hand,” he says, his voice grating as if his teeth are clenching. “You always risk this hand.”
I don’t know what to say to that, but when I attempt to slip my hand from his, I’m gratified that he lets me go.
Step by step, I back toward the table until the chain pulls taut, and unsure if he’ll let me continue.
Finally, he moves forward, allowing me to step all the way back to the table, although the tension in his shoulders is severe.
The Chronicle rests benignly on the glass tabletop. It looks harmless. Despite my insistence that I’ll be okay, now that I’m reaching for it, my heart thumps.
I extend a single finger, holding my breath as I carefully lower it to the book’s leathery cover.
A jolt of energy passes through my hand, a shock of pain that makes me gasp, my instincts telling me to pull back.
To my relief, the shooting pain stops at the base of my fingers. Right at the top of the Dragonstone Blade’s hilt, leaving me in no doubt that it’s only because of the blade that I’m not either dead or in terrible agony right now.
I force myself to relax, keeping every other part of my body away from the Chronicle as I run my finger to its fore-edge, slip my hand between the pages, and begin the slow process of opening the book.
“It hates me,” I say, Antony’s tension radiating across me like a physical force.
The energy rising from the parchment tells me it considers me an invader, and it will strike me down at the first chance it gets.
“But,” I continue, “the blade is protecting me.”
Finally, easing the book all the way open, a feat that requires me to use multiple fingers of my right hand, I prepare for what I’ll see.
It isn’t the page I was looking at before.
“Darkness!” I nearly let go of the book, keeping the tip of my finger on the parchment in the nick of time.
The same swirling field of ash that I saw in my blade vision spreads across the open pages in front of me, the image moving as if it’s real.
Dust rises from the ground, lifting into a sky covered in clouds, reminding me of the bloodlands, but this field is flat and void of inky rivers.
The same awful shrieking sound I heard in the blade vision rises around me, making me wince, so painful that tears spring to my eyes.
My heart… Oh… It feels like someone’s tearing strips off it.
“Antony, please, will you tell me what you see on these pages?”
“That’s the far east.” He jabs his finger in the direction of the page while keeping his distance.
“There’s nothing but miles of barren land out there.
It’s polluted with dust storms. See the text there?
It describes how the land changed when the curse struck.
But, Thyra—” His focus rises from the page to my face, his scrutiny even more intense than when I declared I wanted to open the book by myself. “What’s wrong?”
Taking a shaky breath, I follow his pointed finger to the side of the page, but there’s no text there for me. The image fills both pages all the way to their edges.
My voice is a whisper as I ask, “Can you hear that sound?”
“What sound?”
I struggle to describe it. “Have you ever grabbed hold of the bough of a tree—a slim one—and forced it to bend until it splits?”
“Have you?”
“The villagers would sometimes split boughs that way, to separate the strands…”
“Thyra?”
“This landscape is what I saw in my vision just now. I can hear screaming, but I don’t know what it is or where it’s coming from.”
Antony takes a step toward me, his arms raised, but he stops. Even if he was about to touch me, he can’t right now.
Exhaling slowly through my pursed lips, focusing on my breathing, I push myself to move past the upsetting image.
“I’m turning to the page of the blade’s forging now.”
It’s an awkward task, one-handed. Made harder by the jagged interior edges of a torn-out page.
I’m wary of taking my eyes off the Chronicle to ask Antony about the missing page, but he offers, “That page has been missing for as long as I can remember. Nobody knows what was on it.”
Moving past it, I finally part the pages at the image of the blade’s forging, pressing the book open with multiple fingers.
I brace for another blade vision to strike, glancing up at Antony, making him my focal point.
When everything stays the same, I exhale with relief. “Okay. I’m still here.”
Some of the tension finally drains from his shoulders, and he steps closer.
Now, to understand what I saw…
The moment I give the pages my full attention, the text around the image pulls inward, swirling as if it’s becoming liquid.
Then the image comes alive.
A hooded figure standing at the forge, hammer raised, begins to move, striking the hammer down toward the Dragonstone Blade, where it glints on the anvil.
The figure’s movement is slow, becoming slightly faster as I watch.
Fire bursts behind them, an open flame that lights up their silhouette without revealing their identity.
I’m about to describe what I’m looking at when my heart sinks.
A thread of molten gold energy bursts to life across my right palm, flowing beneath the Lethian armor, and I dread the resurgence of a blade vision.
My jaw drops when the energy courses, not up my arm, but toward the page, streaming onto the parchment, where it coils into text, overlaying the image of the hooded figure whose hammer is still slowly striking downward.
I read aloud as the golden words form, each sentence appearing and then disappearing. “What was done must be undone… Unmade as it was made… To break the curse, break the—”
Within the image, the hammer catches the light, glistening as if on fire, intricate runes becoming visible on its handle.
A heartbeat later, it finally hits the blade, but it’s a sudden, savage movement, a destructive blow.
Clang!
Flames explode around the figure, scorching, deadly, and the blade shatters.
Shards of gold—real shards!—blast upward, flying from the page, shooting toward my arms and chest.
I don’t have time to scream before glinting fragments strike my unprotected face.