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 evenfighting 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.
