Thorgrim Frostborne's Arc

Chapter 4 of 11

The keeper paced the stair above them, a shape of old frost trapped by the fire's light. Thorgrim turned his back on it. He walked the forge floor and searched the benches for some record of the sword's making. He found tools, cold anvils, and dead stone. No book. No mark that said how the blade was born or what slept inside it. Elara ran her hands along the walls beside him. She was the exiled witch whose own people had forged this blade, and even she looked lost. "There's nothing written here," Thorgrim said. "No maker's mark. Nothing." His grip tightened on the sword. It hummed against his palm, warm and awake. Elara stopped at the far wall. A frozen bush grew from a crack in the stone. Its crystal vines spread wide, blue and violet, tangled like frozen roots. "My people didn't write," she said. "They grew." She touched a vine, and it rang like glass. "This drank from the same magic as the sword. If it grew beside the forge, it remembers the forge." Thorgrim did not understand. Elara pressed his sword hand toward the crystal bush. "Speak its name," she said. "Not to fight. To ask." He hesitated. The last time he spoke the name, the blade tore stone apart. But he had no other path. He laid the crystal blade against the frozen vines and spoke the name of the river that froze a village. The bush lit from within. Light climbed the vines and poured into the blade. The forge shook. Images broke open behind his eyes, sharp and cold. He saw the forge alive, fires roaring, smiths pouring frost into a mold shaped like his sword. He saw them weep as they worked. He saw them bind something living into the crystal, a storm caught and folded small. And he saw one thing more. The storm was not finished. The sword held only half its power. The rest waited, sealed, for a wielder whose blood matched the makers'. The light died. Thorgrim staggered back, chest heaving. The frozen bush went dark and still. "You saw it," Elara said. It was not a question. Her face had gone pale. "A storm," he said. "They put a storm inside it. But only part woke." He looked at his hand, welded to the hilt. "It needs blood like the makers to finish. Your blood, Elara." Her hand dropped from the wall. She stepped back from him, the same way she'd stepped back from the tomb's keeper. "No," she whispered. "That was never meant to wake again." Above them, the keeper stopped pacing. It went still at the stair's mouth, listening. Thorgrim now knew what slept in the blade. He also knew the one person who could unlock it feared it more than the thing hunting them.