Chapter Sixty-Five Thyra #2
Dust swirls around my legs, plucking at my white dress, replacing the cool breeze with the scent of death.
Although… A moment later, new rose petals float down around me. Only a few. Crumbling to ash when they touch the ground, but still, they fall.
Even if I don’t know where they’re coming from, I pluck one from the air, holding it carefully in my palm.
“Thyra.” The False Queen sighs as she reaches my side. “Why do you—”
She flinches as a shriek fills the air, the same awful splintering of screaming wood that I experienced when I read the Chronicle.
“What is that?” I ask, my heart hurting as I attempt to turn and see what’s causing the sound, but a force I can’t see stops me.
The False Queen’s lips press into a thin line, her shoulders hunching. “A necessary evil.”
“Evil is never necessary.”
I sense the rebuke on her lips, but before she can utter it, pain strikes through my arm, and I groan at its sharpness.
Her lips soften. “Oh, Thyra. Don’t reject the hammer’s power. Accept the gifts I’m giving you. Take the darkness. You’ll need it.”
“Darkness and evil.” I shake my head, gasping against the tearing sensation in my arm. “I don’t want anything you could give me.”
She laughs. “And yet, you desire impossible things. Peace. Safety. Love. Do you truly believe you’ll get what you want?”
I want to say yes.
Maybe, for a few heady hours in the catacombs with Antony, I felt all of those things, but they seem far away now.
Impossible, like she said.
When I remain silent, she plucks an ivory petal from the air just like I did.
Her hand closes around it, her knuckles squeezing white before she lets the petal fall.
“Kindness will always be crushed,” she says. “Hope will always die.”
As the bruised petal hits the ground, it turns to ash.
I shake my head. Resolute. “I refuse to believe that.”
The press of her lips hardens again. “Too soon, you will know it. Now, accept the hammer’s darkness, Thyra, and prepare to fight for your life—”
I’m jolted abruptly back to the tunnel, my heart sinking at the awful silence.
No more crying voices.
No more fighting the hammer’s darkness.
My right arm is raised, elbow bent, an inch away from the rock wall.
The Lethian armor has retracted all the way up to my biceps, exposing the Dragonstone Blade’s image.
It looks no different until I focus on the image of the ivory ribbon twirling around my arm, the Lethian silk the blade was wrapped in.
Charcoal runes have settled all along the length of the ribbon.
I press my arm one last time against the wall. A slow, helpless motion as my shoulders slump.
The dark runes were trying to get to the ribbon. This ribbon was wholly concealed beneath my long sleeve. It, too, was sung by Lethians.
I don’t know what darkness this will bring to me now.
Turning my back to the wall, I lean against it, wrapping my left arm around myself, keeping my right arm away from my body, closing my eyes against all of the unknowns. The barrage of dangers I can’t seem to escape, no matter how hard I try.
I tell myself, I still have the hammer.
I can break the blade.
Forcing myself to move, to focus on what I need to do, I step back toward the ledge and reach for the bony-white hammer.
The moment my fingers brush its surface, it crumbles into dust.
A gasp strangles in my throat, my heart plummeting as my fingers pass through white dust, spreading it softly across the stone.
My left arm tightens across my stomach.
This can’t be happening…
All my hope… All the faith I promised Antony I would carry…
It can’t be for nothing.
A low keening cry sounds from the far end of the tunnel—back from the way I came—before the air fills with the frantic flapping of wings, and a moment later, Azul reappears.
My heart leaps, a balm on my frayed hopes as I make out the figure on his back.
Antony.
He jumps from Azul’s back, still fifty paces away, and races toward me, muscles tensed, his arms and legs pumping.
But—oh! He’s covered in blood. Welts across his chest. His armor is gone. His weapons are nowhere in sight. His form is hunched. And his breathing…
I was about to launch myself toward him, but now I hesitate, my skin prickling at the seething sound of his inhalations.
Shaking myself, I quickly push past my fear.
He has proven to me that he won’t hurt me. It doesn’t matter how much blood he’s shed or what he’s done to get to me.
I need to reach him. I need to tell him about the runes and the hammer.
I need to ask for help. Just as he commanded me. A command that became an offer and then, like the first rays of a new day, a promise.
But as I run toward him, he slows, coming to an abrupt halt ten paces away from me.
His hand shoots up like a warning. “Stop, Thyra.”
My forehead creases as I dig in my heels, not wanting to obey him. “Antony?”
“It’s too late.” His voice is strained, his breathing harsher. “I thought I could get here in time. I really did.” Then quietly, “Fuck.”
He backs away, deeper into the shadows, but he stumbles, planting his hand on the tunnel wall to steady himself.
I immediately move toward him again. “You’re hurt!”
“Stay where you are,” he roars, his rebuke shocking me to another standstill.
He staggers backward, deeper again into the darkness, his voice lowering. “Stay… back…”
One careful step in front of the other, I disobey him, trying to see past the blood splatter across his face and his chest to the wounds beneath, to listen past the hiss of breath between his teeth for his words, torn from his chest.
“You were my hope.”
Firmly, I shake my head. “I only carry your hope. It was always yours.”
He pauses, hunching against the wall. “Then I give my hope to you, Thyra. To carry with you. To keep you safe.”
I don’t understand why he’s talking this way. “Antony—”
“I need you to stay alive,” he says, his hand dragging down the tunnel wall, scraping before he straightens. “I’m going to give you an order now, and you will obey me.”
Desperately, I try to make out his expression behind the sweaty strands of his hair, my focus sliding to Azul in the background, startled at the way Azul trembles every time Antony speaks.
This monstrous bird flew me through the bloodlands, and now he’s afraid…
“Azul will fly you back to the Iron Kingdom,” Antony says, fingers clawed against the tunnel wall. “I will stop the vampyrs from following you. You will find Victor—”
“What about you?”
“I’m not coming with you.”
As I take another step toward him, Antony moves another step back.
“Antony—”
“Do not call me that.”
I shudder to a stop, right at the furthest reaches of the silvery light that continues to glow from far behind me.
When Antony spoke just now, his voice…
Nothing like his own. Deeper, guttural… Feral.
“Your time is almost up, Thyra,” he growls, low and soft. Dangerous. “You have one chance to escape me. Take it. Now.”
What reckless fury carries me beyond the light, compelling me to close the gap between us, to defy the danger and reach up to him, press my palm to his cheek, urge him down to me so I can finally see his eyes.
My heart stops in my chest, my hands shaking where I press them, one to his bloodied heart, one to his cheek, while he closes his eyes at my touch, as if he’s memorizing this moment, trying to hold on to it.
“I didn’t choose this, Thyra,” he whispers. “It was done to me.”
A sob rises to my throat. I should run while I can, fight while I can, but I need one more moment of hope.
One more heartbeat of belief.
A hope crushed as easily as an ivory rose petal when he whispers, “Too late,” and his arms snake around me, hard as iron, an unbreakable grip, his voice becoming a hungry snarl. “Ask me again what you should call me.”
That elusive question that echoed within my Oracle vision. A question that had no context or meaning until now.
I try to speak past the anguish shattering my heart. “What should I call you?”
As his fangs graze my neck, he whispers, “Call me Vampyr.”