Now, I’m faced with voicing another hope aloud. An even harder one. But it’s a weight I’m willing to carry.
“What if the hammer is all we need?”
Antony’s gaze flies to me.
I swallow hard, speaking carefully. “What I saw in the Chronicle was the hammer hitting the blade and smashing it. When I read the words ‘Unmade as it was made’, I assumed that encompassed all the instruments, but what if everything else is unnecessary?”
When his hands twitch, I hurry on, “I could be wrong. I don’t know for certain. But all of this pain…” I gesture to the sky. “I have to try.”
I can’t speak another word because his eyes are suddenly dark, suddenly as savage as if he had peeled off every piece of armor and now stands, seething and naked, in front of me.
When he finally speaks, my heart hammers in my chest.
“I will do anything,” he says. “Anythingto make sure we get that hammer.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Thyra
The wind whips around us, and a new dread builds as we soar toward Mount Vividari.
It isn’t the majestic, gray mountain that chills my blood, but the darkness looming so close behind it.
The bloodlands.
That boiling mass of dark clouds, black mountains, and impenetrably inky air.
Even now, the hungry screams of vampyrs echo sharply in my memory, the way they’d begged to drink my blood. The burning scent when Antony harnessed his starlight power to keep them at bay.
When we started flying west from the temple and then veered north around the Starlit City, I assumed Mount Vividari would be located near the city.
Instead, we flew on, and now I judge that our destination is only a few minutes’ flight from the edge of the bloodlands, while a single guard tower sits between the two.
I twist to Antony, and I don’t doubt for a second that he reads my apprehension because his arms tighten around me.
“When the curse first struck, the Vividari moved their homes from the east to this mountain in the west,” he says, his steel-covered cheek pressing to mine while he briefly lifts his hand from my waist to gesture at the highest peak ahead of us. “The Vividari chose to become a first line of defense between the vampyrs and the main population. Unfortunately, it now puts us closer to the bloodlands than I would want us to be.”
Far to my right, if I squint hard enough, I imagine I can make out the icy border between the Iron and Frost Kingdoms.
As well as being closer to the bloodlands, we’re also much closer to Frost than I’ve ever been before.
“Don’t the Frost Fae fear the vampyrs?” I ask, suppressing a shiver.
“They don’t need to,” Antony replies. “The darkness that washes over my kingdom never extends north. It is a blight only upon my territory. If we were near the border, we could escape it simply by stepping across a few feet of marshy earth. Only for the Frost Fae to strike us down. But they have their own challenges.”
“What kinds of challenges?”
“Aside from the threat of starvation, there are whispers of malevolent creatures living in the northern wilds who are as feral as beasts but have the intelligence of fae.” He shrugs against my back. “Possibly only rumors.”
In the distance, the sun sinks toward the horizon. We’re flying straight toward it, but the bloodlands block its rays, and, as we approach, Mount Vividari is finally cast into shadows.
Lights immediately twinkle to life across the mountain’s top, but they’re too small for Galla to have ignited them, and, in any event, the sun is still shining to our left and right. I doubt she’ll harness her power until her full might is required.
As we draw closer, I make out an immense, white structure, five times the size of the temple in the east, consistingof four walls in a rectangular shape but without a roof. It appears like a series of battalions positioned around an inner platform, while one wall, on the side facing the bloodlands, is only partly closed in.
On both sides of the structure, platforms containing perches stretch left and right, nearly every perch appearing already occupied by an eagle.
We’ve timed our approach to ensure we’ll arrive last.
