Page 7 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
The Moonlit Gardens were the faeries’ next world, a calm, silvered land they traveled to on a day of their own choosing—unless some violence chose the day for them—and from which there was no return. This old warrior—for such he surely was, of the legendary Shadowsharp clan who had guarded the Vritra in ancient days—had long outlasted his life. Faeries could live a thousand years, more if they were stubborn, but never this much more. Magpie had thought the Shadowsharp clan long dead. She couldn’t even guess what will had enabled this one to hold on for centuries past his time. He must have been the last of his clan, unwilling to leave his master alone in the world. What a cruel fate then to fail and live on, all those tired, lonely centuries for naught.
This was a new kind of wickedness in a devil, to recognize a fate worse than death and inflict it. But now the old warrior had let go, and so died the last of another great clan. So many bloodlines had ended without heirs—like Bellatrix’s, to the world’s lasting sorrow. Many others might as well have. With the sad state of magic in this age, faeries bore little resemblance to their glorious forebears. Magpie mourned for bygone days more than most of her folk because she knew better than they what had been lost.Muchhad been lost, was being lost every day. That loss was the shape of her life: the struggle against it, the hunt, the unending journey, the hollowness of suspecting that ultimately her family’s work wasin vain. That they were as ants trying to stop a landslide by catching one pebble at a time.
The greatness of her folk was past.
Magpie laid her hand over the wizened fingers of the old warrior, closed her eyes, and blessed him in silence. But she cursed him, too.A few more moments, she thought.If he had only waited, he could have told her what manner of devil this hungry one was!Whom could she ask now? She could track the invisible trail of death memories until she added her own to it. Or...
She began to chew her lip, and a sharp focus gradually came back into her eyes.
“What ye pond’rin’, ’Pie?” asked Calypso, who knew her looks.
“Whatever this snag is,” she said, “it’s like nothing we’ve fought before.”
“Nothing in the world,” he agreed.
“Nor nothing we’ve heard or read of.”
“Neh.”
“And the only soul we’ve found that’s seen him just took himself where we can’t follow.”
“Aye, and hasty.”
“So there’s only one thing to do.”
“Aye...eh?” He squinted at her. “What?”
“We got to find the Magruwen, neh? Ask him about it.”
Calypso gaped, his feathers instantly puffing up. “Find the Magruwen? Jacksmoke, ’Pie! Ye tetched?”
“Neh, feather, listen. Now we know we been right about the Djinn—they’re alive, and they’re in the world! My parents have been hunting this proof all my life!”
“Let’s tell them, then! Let them decide what to do!”
“There’s no time for that! They’re halfway round the world, and there’s a devil on the loose—a bad, strange beast that’s eating every low snag in its path and sure every faerie, too. How many more will he get whilst I ask my parents’ permission? I’m not a sprout anymore!”
“Ye’ll be a sprout till I say ye’re not!” Calypso cried. “Look at ye, twig of a lass! Scarce gone a hundred and jaunting off to find the Djinn King? Tetched, I tell ye!”
The other crows had gathered round. “The Djinn King?” repeated Pup in an excited chirp. “Mags, ye going to find the Djinn King? Eh, Mags?”
“I’m going to try,” she said defiantly, her eyes not leaving Calypso’s.
“But Mags,” worried Pigeon, who had a glorious imagination for doom. “En’t he a fierce old scorch, though? He’ll toast ye up like a dragon’s hankie!”
“That’s if ye can even find him,” added Calypso.
“Aye,” said Bertram, blinking at her through the thick eyeglasses perched on his beak. “And sure he don’t want to be found! Maybe ye don’t remember it—ye were just a babe then, but we seen his temple at Issrin Ev, neh? What he left of it, anywhich, and that weren’t much. Even Bellatrix’s statue got its head knocked clean off, and weren’t she his own champion?”
“Aye,” said Calypso. “Whatever made him leave his temple, it weren’t a happy business. And he’s stayed gone all these years, ’Pie. He’s through with the world!”
“You don’t know that!” she protested. “No one knows what happened then! Ach...Don’t you see, birds?” She gestured toward the Vritra’s cave. “Suppose this is only the start! Suppose he goes after all the Djinn?” The crows blinked at her. She added, “Who knows whether the world could survive that?”
The crows closed their beaks and shuffled their feet and considered. At last, reluctantly, Calypso said, “Put it like that, maybe we ought to try to warn him,” and the other crows agreed one by one.
Magpie nodded. “Right. To Dreamdark, then.”
“Dreamdark...” they murmured. “Been a long old time.”
