Taking a shaky breath, I follow his pointed finger to theside 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 hisshoulders, 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!
