Page 20 of The Guardians of Dreamdark (Windwitch #1)
The sound he made was something like a sigh. A little of the tension that held Magpie rigid eased from her limbs and she rose again to her feet. “My lord...is it...all right?”
“Imperfect,” he said, spitting. The acorn shot from his mouth and pinged into the smoke, setting off a loud cascade of hidden treasures, and Magpie tensed, ready to spring aside should he come at her again.
“There’s no thousand years in that nut,” the Magruwen said, flaring high.
Then he diminished, thinned, and said quietly, “But it was not...badly done.”
Relief flooded Magpie, and she found she could look at him now, if she squinted.
He had made himself into a spindle of flame that still bore within it the impression of a figure rising to taper into tremendous curving horns.
And there were eyes. Once Magpie found them, she felt locked onto them and couldn’t look away.
They were vertical, windows through fire into the infinite. They were dizzying.
“Why have you woken me?” he asked, and Magpie blinked and was able to break her gaze from his.
“T-there’s...” she stammered. “There’s a devil, escaped from its bottle. A devil you saw fit once, yourself, to imprison.”
“And how do you know this?”
“I found the bottle and your seal. I never knew you snared any devils yourself, so it...it flummoxed me.”
“There is but one bottle that bears my seal.”
“Not anymore, then, Lord. If there was just the one, then it’s sure. He’s got out.”
“I know.”
“Oh.” Magpie hesitated. “Did you also know, Lord, that he’s killed the Vritra?”
The fire wavered and a hiss issued from him. “Aye, I felt it,” he muttered to himself. “A rending such as this the Tapestry cannot withstand. The threads fall slack and will not sing true.”
“Tapestry?” Magpie asked.
At first the Magruwen didn’t answer. Magpie felt he was staring at her, weighing her worth and finding her lacking. “The Tapestry is unknown to you?” he asked.
Magpie nodded slowly. A dreamlike image floated in her mind, but like the traceries of light, it flitted away when she tried to look at it.
“Get you gone, faerie.” The Magruwen’s voice snapped in mirthless laughter.
“Gather up the folk that remain, and go you all to the Moonlit Gardens. Feel blessed there’s such a place for you to go.
..for now. Even it won’t hold forever.
When the last threads snap, it, too, will sink into the darkness, a soft echo of greater doom. ”
“What?” Magpie asked, bewildered. “Darkness? Doom? What do you mean, Lord, please! Sure you can’t be meaning the snag! What is he?”
“Who are you , that you should peer behind a veil of mysteries that has been in place for years beyond counting?”
“I’m a hunter. He’s come to Dreamdark! I just want to catch him, before he hurts any more faeries and before he hurts... you .”
Again the Magruwen laughed. It was a terrible sound. “Faerie, this foe won’t be caught, not by you or anyone. He is a contagion of darkness. There’s poetry in his return, though a faerie wouldn’t see it.”
“Poetry! He said there was poetry in the Vritra’s death. I don’t see poetry in any of it!”
“He said? How do you know what he said?”
“I touched the Vritra’s last memory. The devil called him a traitor!”
“A traitor...” the Djinn hissed. “Aye. We are all traitors. For what is living but a chain of impossible choices? Every choice casts a shadow, and sometimes those shadows stalk your dreams. But what do faeries know of shame? You’ll be blind to your own until the end!”
“What? Lord, please. It’s true faeries are less than they were. I know how much has been lost. But the end? It’s just one devil. However bad he is, he can’t be the end of the world!”
“The world has long been ending. Everything ends. It builds, then it is, then it slides down the far slope of nothing, back into the nothing that was before.”
“Then we have to stop it!” Magpie cried in desperation. “Sure you can’t just see all your beautiful dreams vanish like that!”
“I’ll dream more dreams.”
“Oh, aye, will you, then? Feed us to the devil, then go make yourself another world to play with? Is that what you dream about? How you’ll make it better next time? What about us ?”
“What about you? Live with what you wrought and die from it!”
“What we’ve wrought? Faeries didn’t make devils!”
“Nay. And yet the seals are broken.”
“Humans break the seals!”
“Aye, so they do.”
“What have humans to do with us?” Magpie demanded in a fury.
The Magruwen just looked at her, and then he did the one thing, perhaps, that could have made Magpie’s fury flare beyond the power of her small body to contain it.
He yawned.
Magpie sputtered, reddened. A tingling built to bursting in her fingers, then ten whorls of light surged from them and danced in the air, spinning round the Djinn King before exploding like fireworks against his fiery essence. “Wake up!” Magpie cried. “This is the world! This is important!”
And to her surprise, and his, he did wake up.
The sparking of fireworks around him touched off a kindred explosion within, and he was stunned by a surge of vitality.
It wavered out of his control, and in an instant the spindle of fire standing before Magpie bloomed into a dazzle that knocked her to the ground and blinded her.
She slipped beyond her senses and lay still in a world of hot white light and knew no more.