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 thehammer 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.
