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, youwill 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.
