Chapter 10 Thyra
Chapter Ten
Thyra
The darkness deepens.
Further, I sink into an icy oblivion, trapped and powerless to claw my way to the surface. Unable…
Unwilling.
Within my mind, memories reverberate around and around, splintered but soft, chaotic but insidiously gentle.
The False Queen’s voice echoes back to me, our last interaction through a blade vision in which she had snatched a white rose petal from the air, closed her fist around it, and told me…
Kindness will always be crushed. Hope will always die.
She told me to accept the darkness and prepare to fight for my life. I didn’t know what she meant until Antony revealed his true nature.
Now the battle for my life has hollowed me out, draining me of all love, all joy, all hope.
I have nothing left to fight with.
What am I even fighting for?
I lost Antony.
Not to the Frost King’s blade. Stellen may have struck the final physical blow, but Antony didn’t die because of him. He died because of what was done to him years ago, a monstrous act that left him with no recourse but constant pain and a series of lies.
I battled for Antony’s soul and I…
Failed.
I lost my father, too.
His final words whisper through the void, a glimmer of his last moments when his Oracle power sustained his speech, even though his body had already given in to death.
Unwrap the blade, and your path will be clear.
He told me to beware, for he didn’t know what the blade’s curse would do to my Oracle visions or what manipulations I might experience once I unwrapped it.
I’m sorry, Thyra, for the pain you must now endure…
The pain…
You must now endure.
The disintegrating shards of my heart and mind separate.
Slowly, lightly, every fissure spirals outward.
As the memory of my father’s final words fades, I accept that it’s time to let go, to relinquish my power to the next Oracle and—
Another voice cracks across me, uttering a sharp, cruel command. “You will endure.”
A heartbeat later, crushing agony clamps around my body. A vise closes in on my mind, squeezing every broken piece of me, forcing the shards back together into jagged, unmatched sections.
Each one pierces me like blades.
Extreme pain cuts across my mind, so unbearable that a scream rises to my throat, growing louder in the darkness.
“You do not get to choose death,” the icy whisper continues. “I will not allow it.”
Within the icy whisper is a melody, a harmony that stabs at my body with such punishing clarity that each stab slices deep into my consciousness, hooks around my fading life, and drags me—
Back to consciousness.
My eyes fly open, and my scream pierces the air, pealing out into the snowstorm raging around me.
Excruciating pain shoots through every part of my body, through fingers and toes completely frozen, through lips that crack as I move them, through flesh that no longer lives, and across a heart that breaks with every deep thump it’s being forced to make.
Forced. Because I’m certain I was dying. I’m certain my heart was about to stop. And now, somehow, I’m awake. Conscious. Alive.
I can’t form words, can only scream through the agony, wishing for oblivion as that harmony, that melody, continues to fall from the Frost King’s lips.
His face tilts to mine, his stony eyes consuming my view, unearthly and unsettling, as his lips brush my cheek and the power in his voice traps me more securely than any chains ever could.
His touch is soft, near gentle, but his song…
Too cruel.
Within those moments of agony, I take in every detail around me. The snowflakes whipping at us, the wolf at my back, its body barely a shield against the wind, its fur as icy cold as the swirling snow.
The king’s hard arms are clamped around me, but my right arm pushes upward. A move I’m not consciously trying to make.
That’s when I see the three threads gripped in the Frost King’s hand, each thread tugging in the wind, trying to pull free. I know these threads. They formed when I first met the kings.
But now…
There is a black thread I’ve never seen before.
That dark rope is wrapped around my forearm, pulling on me, as if it would drag me away.
But to where?
My focus flashes back to the Frost King, my cry pealing out around me, rising above the wind, nowhere near as powerful as the dark melody he continues to savagely hum.
His face is empty of emotion, unchanging. Hard. Beyond cruel.
Then, his brow draws down and his lips, now moving toward mine, twist.
The next note he sings is like a chime. A pure chime as clear as the tap of a hammer on steel.
A nail that pins me to this life.
With that, all four threads retract and disappear. Vanishing again.
I should be relieved that the black thread disappears too, but I’m in too much pain to feel anything but desperation.
Somehow, I manage to cry, “Stop. Please.”
“No.” His reply comes with another note, sung low, and the clamp chaining my life to my dying body only tightens. “Your body has given up. If I stop, your body will relinquish your soul, and you will die.”
I search his eyes as I sob. “You would keep me in this agony?”
His icy countenance crumbles. But only for a moment. Quickly hardening again. “For as long as it takes me to carry you through the snow.”
Suddenly, I’m consumed by another spark of memory.
A single, clear thought rises: I foresaw this moment.
Before I summoned the kings, one of my blade visions showed me a time when I would be immersed in snow, chilled to the bone, pushing against a weight of nothingness, just as I am now.
That same cluster of blade visions showed me the dangers waiting for me in the Iron Kingdom, too.
I foresaw iron dust and chains and a need that couldn’t be satisfied—except it wasn’t my need, it was Antony’s.
That vision was about him; the iron dust he didn’t know his brother was making, the chains I latched around him when I challenged him not to hurt me, and his thirst for fae blood that he fought against quenching.
That vision had too many fractured parts for me to make sense of them, but not this vision.
It repeats on me now, an echo from the past.
I’m immersed in snow, chilled to the bone, pushing against the weight of an emptiness that has drained my heart of all love and all hope, and yet…I feel everything. Every part of my body is awake and yearning for the stroking touch of heated hands…
Heated hands.
Hands that stroke me, warm me, and bring life back to every inch of my body.
I don’t know how far the heat in the vision was going to take me because the vision ended before the yearning was quenched. I don’t know if it means I need him to hold me, or…
I don’t know.
But he’s right.
My body was ready to die. My mind was ready to die.
I’m only alive because of the punishing song he continues to sing. A song that is undoubtedly driven by his Lethian Voice and has somehow forced my soul back into my body—a body that is frozen and empty of blood…a body that can’t sustain life unless I can somehow get warm.
Heated hands.
I need heat to live.
“Save my body,” I snarl with all my might, compelling my next scream to form a command so full of fury that I don’t recognize my own voice. “Make me warm.”
Somehow. I don’t care how.
The only way my body will survive is with warmth, and I will accept any means of making that happen.
At my cry, the Frost King’s startled eyes snap to mine, his irises nightmarishly pale.
The note he was humming dies in his throat, the punishing song fading, but his sudden pause only brings a different pain.
Without his song, I feel death creeping back into my limbs.
I’ve clearly startled him, but I don’t have time to wait for his response.
Wrenching my now-free upper arm forward, I slap my frozen hand against his chest, my palm to his heart, my hand too numb to feel his clothing or skin.
At the same time, I push myself closer to him, drawing on my dwindling reserves of strength to force myself upright and to slide my legs to either side of his hips. Trying to get as close to him as I can. For he is alive, and a living body is a source of warmth.
He’s frozen where he kneels, his arms tight at my back while the wind plucks at us.
In that moment of stillness, snowflakes gather on his shoulders.
Not a single, gorgeous crystal of ice melts against his skin.
Oh, but I was wrong.
He has no warmth.
He is as cold as the snowstorm swirling around us.
My hope for salvation vanishes and a whimper passes my lips. “Please. Give me warmth.”
His head lowers to mine, and his voice carries none of the punishing melody that brought me back to myself.
Instead, he sounds hollow. “I have no warmth to give.”
My cracked lips turn down in despair, but I can’t give up.
Maybe the wolf, with her icy fur… Maybe she can give me enough body heat to keep me alive—
The Frost King’s arms tighten around me before I can make a move toward the animal, but now I’m desperate and panicked. With every passing heartbeat, more of my legs and arms becomes numb. The agonizing pain I felt when the Frost King was singing has been replaced with a terrifying nothingness.
My upper hand was already planted on his chest, and with frantic strength, hardly any at all, I attempt to shove at him. I know I won’t make it even a few steps before the cold claims me, but my thoughts are no longer rational.
Panic consumes me.
He wrenches me closer still, his cold chest pressed to mine.
Frantic for warmth, I claw at his chest and side, tearing so fiercely that my fingernails break through his cloak and his tunic and my palms find bare skin.
Cruel air is trapped in my throat, another scream rising, dragged from the depths of my heart. “Make me warm.”
The Frost King draws a sharp breath, his pupils dilating.
His head swoops to mine, stopping an inch away, his gaze tearing me apart so intently that my cry becomes a soft moan.
Frozen breaths of air waft between us.
My heart pounds when a slow, unearthly smile breaks across his lips.
“I will make you warm.”