She watched as Victor opened a secret panel in one of his cabinets, pulling out a locked box that the axe was hidden within. “No one else knows of that hiding spot.”

“Well, now someone else knows,” Vhalla remarked smartly, earning herself a chuckle. “Victor, the crystal weapons, each nation had one, didn’t they?”

“So the stories and evidence indicates,” Victor affirmed with a nod.

“Shaldan had Achel.” Vhalla motioned to the axe. “Mhashan had the Sword of Jadar. And Cyven had a scythe.”

“How did you come across that information?” He sounded impressed.

“I went to the library this morning,” Vhalla explained. “I was reading some old Eastern books in the archives and noticed every story held mention of a scythe of great power. Now that I know about the weapons, I didn’t think it could be chance.”

“It’s not.” The minister preempted her next question. “Though if it still exists, it’s not been mentioned in hundreds of years.”

“Did Lyndum have a weapon?”

“Lyndum was rumored to not have a weapon, but a crown.” Victor pressed his fingertips together in thought.

“A crown?” It made no sense.

“In some lore, the weapons were wielded by the Goddess herself as she forged and cultivated the earth and life. The crown was the symbol of her dominance over all things.” The minister paused to sip his tea, collecting his thoughts. “But if it’s true, the crown has been lost to time as well.”

“What about the sword? The Knights of Jadar said it was stolen by a Minister of Sorcery.”

“Egmun got his hands on it,” Victor affirmed, confirming her worst fears.

“He took it to the caves,” she continued. Something began to creep on the edge of her memory. Something about this story was familiar, despite having never heard it before.

“He did.” Victor watched her carefully.

“And then he . . .” Vhalla placed a palm on her forehead. A sword. A crystal sword. The axe glowed faintly before her, as though the whole universe was contained within it and all she had to do was discover its secrets.

“He tried to unlock the caverns. But he miscalculated, and the fool started the War of the Crystal Caverns,” Victor finished bitterly.

The knowledge was distracting enough that Vhalla ignored the feeling that it wasn’t what she had been about to put together.

“How is he the Head of Senate if he caused the war?” Vhalla frowned. It sounded like he should’ve been long dead.

“Because Egmun craved knowledge in all its forms; he collected it, hoarded it. And some of that knowledge was inevitably the sort that other people didn’t want to be made public.” Victor sighed and stood. “His foolishness cost him his magic. But it did yield information that we will be able to use.”

“How?”

“Egmun needed the sword because he needed it to access the heart of the caverns. The crystals have a single heart from which their power stems.” Victor was back to rummaging. “Every other crystal’s power comes from being spawned by this center, like tiny looking glasses into the caverns themselves. Hence the channels they build in search of that magic, which taint sorcerers and commons alike.”

Vhalla was reminded of the Northern ruins where she’d procured the axe. The moment she freed the weapon from amid the crystals, the others had darkened into dormancy and fractured. “The crystal weapons are like smaller hearts, aren’t they?”

Victor turned and gave her an approving look. He rested a box with Western writing on its lock on the desk between them. “Exactly so. Because of that, they are the only thing that can access the true power of the caverns—which is one reason why they’ve been so sought after. But I also theorize that they would be the only thing that can destroy that power as well.”

“An axe that is legendary for cutting anything, even a soul.” Vhalla stared at Achel.

“Perhaps, the soul of the caverns, if you will.” Victor sat, opening the box of crystals he’d used on her after her fall. “You’ll need to cleanse it, sharpen it.” He motioned to the axe. “Look at it with magic sight.”

Vhalla obliged. The axe was a tangled mess. Dark colors overlay lighter ones, a swirling mass of lingering traces of magic.

“Those are remnants, like a vessel; the axe has been dirtied with the leftovers of things it’s been used for.”

“Like magic blood,” Vhalla reasoned.

“That’s certainly a way to think of it,” the minister agreed. “We will have one chance at this, Vhalla, and I want to set us up for success by removing all the possible variables that could get in our way. I want no magic reacting in ways we don’t expect.”

The minister spent the rest of the afternoon going back and forth with Vhalla on the properties of vessels and how they were created. He educated her on how a Waterrunner could draw out the magic from a person by tapping into their Channels.

The theory was the same for what they were seeking to accomplish, but the execution was completely different. Victor tried to help as best he could, though there were some things that were left to trial and error. Vhalla ran her fingers through the magic that hovered around the axe, imagining them to be threads fluttering on the wind.

With this imagery, she pushed them upward, focusing on one at a time. It was wind without wind, a level of magic that she had never tried to tap into before, and it was utterly exhausting. Once she had a thread free, the minister provided her a crystal to store it within. That was much easier than the brow-dampening process of untangling the magic from the axe.