Chapter Sixty-Five Thyra
Chapter Sixty-Five
Thyra
The bloodlands encase me in shadows.
A deathly chill settles at the base of my spine as I cling to Azul, leaning low over his neck, trusting him to carry me safely across this deadly landscape.
“Straight ahead,” I whisper, barely able to speak past my dread as he beats his wings, his speed increasing.
The hammer presses to my chest, wedged between him and me, but nothing seems to constrain the dark light pulsing from it.
Far behind me, I imagine the starlight finally beginning to twinkle in the sky over the Iron Kingdom as I carry the hammer away from it.
A steady stream of starlight pours upward and, where the previous attempts have faltered and died, this one holds.
Stars brighten in the distance, and finally, I know I’ve carried the hammer far enough away.
The Iron Kingdom is safe now.
But I am not.
I’m not sure exactly when we crossed the border of the bloodlands. It was hard to tell with the darkness we carried with us. But the black peaks and shadowed valleys now below us are unmistakable.
Desperately, I seek the rivers of black liquid twisting along deep ravines, searching for the one we passed through when we first flew across the bloodlands.
The one with a bright light at the end of it. The only place it might be safe enough for me to land so I can test the hammer on the blade.
I battle tears of fright as I struggle to recognize the landscape now that we’re flying from the opposite direction.
The unbroken ink of this place makes it nearly impossible to tell one jagged peak from the next, and now the mounds of wrathful creatures are beginning to stir.
Shrieks rise up around me.
A growing whisper turns to a scream. “Blood.”
From nowhere, a form whips past me from my left, much closer than I was expecting, and then another from my right, their treacherous voices screeching across me. “We can drink her now. No stars to stop us.”
“Nothing to stop us!” comes the next shriek directly from above me.
“Azul!” I cry, and he tips to the side, an evasive maneuver.
I catch sight of the vampyr’s discolored fangs, fleshy white face, scaly scalp, and mangled, pointed ears before Azul increases his speed.
Far below us, more mounds of writhing bodies lift up from the ground, peeling into the air, and the sky now fills with blood-chilling screams.
My hand tightens on the hammer. My only weapon. Even if it only worsens the darkness, it’s solid, and I can swing it.
Just as the swarm edges up behind us, I recognize the sloping mountain up ahead on our right.
“There!” I cry. “Azul, to the right!”
He responds immediately, shooting in that direction so fast that I fear I’ll be ripped from his back, clinging as hard as I can.
He soars toward the mountainside while the screeching vampyrs clamber to catch up, their pale faces stretched thin, black robes billowing.
A second later, the mountain looms, and we soar into the tunnel where a silvery light glows ahead of us.
I close my eyes for a moment, trying to calm my hammering heart, tears dripping down my cheeks as the screaming vampyrs fall back, none of them entering the tunnel with us.
Azul slows his flight, gliding toward the white light that rests far ahead of us and glows like a little sun.
But the closer we get, the more the light falters.
I gasp as I realize that the hammer’s darkness is fighting the light, inky streaks of energy spearing ahead of us.
No.
I can’t let the hammer smother this light, or I have no hope of survival.
No hope of using the hammer on the blade.
“Azul,” I whisper, urgently. “Stop here.”
He glides to a stop, landing near a jutting outcrop on the tunnel wall that sits halfway between his height and the tunnel floor. A clever place to stop because it lets me step off his back onto the ledge and then to the ground.
And now I’m caught in indecision.
I could use the hammer right here.
Or I could leave the hammer and investigate the light source—
Azul suddenly jolts, his head snapping up, but I have no idea why. “Azul? What is it?”
He shakes his head, wide-eyed, twisting within the tunnel, turning back the way we came.
“Azul—?”
In a flurry of feathers, he lifts into the air, easily rising within the wide and high tunnel.
“No!” I reach for him, but I’m forced back when he beats his wings, a near-panicked flapping, before he shoots away from me, disappearing along the tunnel within seconds.
Moments later, he’s gone. Flown away.
Pressing against the tunnel wall, the hammer gripped in my hand, I try to see through the darkness. The hammer spills around me, desperate to know what spooked Azul, to find a reason why he left me so suddenly, but I have no way of knowing if it was something within this tunnel or outside of it.
It must have been from outside.
Azul Blue would never leave me to face an immediate threat. He would never leave me in this darkness…
A darkness I willingly brought with me.
I’m gripping the hammer in my right hand. The hand that holds the Dragonstone Blade. My cursed hand. Which is now flooded with inky light.
It only now dawns on me that somewhere along the flight, I stopped being blinded by this darkness. When I first seized the hammer, darkness had flooded my vision. I could barely see Azul—wouldn’t have been able to see him if not for his glowing eyes.
Now, I can see through the dark.
What’s more, the edge of the darkness is not so clearly visible, somehow more transparent. Disappearing with every heartbeat longer that I hold the hammer.
A new chill settles at the base of my spine. A horrifying possibility…
Extending my hand toward the nearby ledge, I press the hammer to the stone and then, just as I once tried with the Dragonstone Blade, I attempt to open my hand and leave the hammer behind.
Relief floods me when my fingers easily unfurl.
Oh, these awful fears…
I shake myself.
The only thing I need to focus on now is figuring out how to get the Dragonstone Blade out of my arm so I can smash it with the hammer.
But as I lift my hand upward, preparing to fully let go of the hammer for the first time since I picked it up, dark light flashes from it.
Defying gravity, the light splashes upward, splattering across the underside of my right arm, a ragged wave of energy coursing from the hammer’s head to the end of its rune-covered handle and reaching up as far as the inside of my elbow.
The moment this new darkness touches the sleeve of my Lethian armor, the silver threads shriek.
A thousand voices cry out at once, a scream that sends me recoiling backward, striking fear through my heart as I wrench myself away from the hammer, leaving it on the ledge.
The darkness stops, but the screams don’t, driving my hands to my ears, a futile attempt to silence this horrible terror…
Until I realize that I’ve brought the dark energy with me.
Inky black shapes form across the inside of my arm outside my armor.
Shapes that, horrifyingly, are beginning to resemble exactly the intricate runes that were carved into the hammer’s handle.
A cry rises to my throat as my focus flashes to the white hammer now resting on the ledge only two paces away.
Its handle is bare.
The runes are gone.
Black liquid now rages across my palm and forearm, swirling furiously, attempting to form those same runes, except that they break apart, reform, and break again, continuing to defy gravity no matter which way I turn my arm, no matter how hard I try to shake them off…
this darkness that smells as coppery as blood.
Suddenly, it seems to abandon shaping itself into runes, forming needles instead, its sharp edges striking down at the Lethian silver, a cascading barrage, as if the black blood is trying to find the smallest cracks between the threads.
Trying to get to my forearm.
My armor fights back, the threads screaming into the darkness around me, every cry pulsing out around me so that even the silvery light in the distance begins rippling in time with this agonizingly fearful music.
Even as I fight confusion…because if this darkness were trying to get to my skin, or even to the Dragonstone Blade, it could simply pool in my palm where both my skin and the blade’s image are exposed…I allow a new fury to fill me.
A determination.
I will not accept this darkness.
I will fight as hard against it as the silver threads are fighting to protect me.
Unable to use my left hand for fear the black liquid will adhere to my left palm, I hurl myself at the rock wall and smack my arm against it as hard as I can.
Again and again. My arm bent at the elbow as I beat the underside of my forearm against the jagged rock, determined to dislodge this coppery-black blood.
Screaming with effort, my voice cuts through the shrieking melody rising from my armor. “Get the fuck off me! I won’t accept this!”
I’m afraid you will.
“No—”
Barely, there is a flash of golden light, molten energy streaming up my right arm, flashing into my mind, capturing my consciousness before the tunnel vanishes—
I’m standing in a bed of white rose petals, a field of flowers so beautiful, I imagine that my mother once created such perfection.
Ivory petals fall about me while white ribbons slither around my waist and chest, but this time, shade settles across my back, as if from a tree whose branches I can’t see.
A cool breeze touches my cheeks, oncoming winter.
The False Queen wades through the petals toward me, her black dress catching and tugging while her hair blows across her face, revealing only her lips.
“Well, this is a nice touch,” she says, gesturing to the bed of rose petals. “But rather typical of the illusions you live under, no?”
I’m confused by the way she speaks, as if I am responsible for the rose petals—as if I have some control over this environment when I don’t.
Which she demonstrates when, with another sweep of her hand, a vicious, hot wind rushes across the landscape, turning the petals to ashes that settle across a now-barren field.