Page 34 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
“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 foryou 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 areyou, 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!Hesaid 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 aboutus?”
“Whataboutyou? 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!”
