Page 90 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
She would have to be!
Gathering all her will, she summoned the champion’s glyph forth in her mind, and it bloomed there great and shining and spun beside the smaller spell. She felt the strain of it at once, as if an hourglass had been turned and her strength was beginning to slip away. How long could she hold it? She little knew.
In her fierce concentration, she didn’t see the tongue coming. Straight at her it struck. But before she could even gasp, a flare of light exploded, and the slithering gray thing was slapped aside with a sizzle. It fell limp to the ground.
The champion’s glyph had protected her.
The Blackbringer reeled his tongue back, dragging it through the strewn spiders. Magpie felt his surprise. He released the absurd shape he had been affecting and became again a loose clot of deepest dark.
“Who—?” he started to hiss.
Then Magpie sprang. Holding the two spells side by side in her mind, she dove into the darkness of the Blackbringer and disappeared.
Talon saw her leap and gave her tether slack. He tried to catch a glimmer of her inside the beast but saw only blackness. He shivered, and hoped. He felt a slow tug at the silk line. Magpie had gone into a deep and endless place, and she was moving away from him. He slowly fed the slack to her, kept his eyes on his foe, and waited.
The Blackbringer paused in shock. He’d reached for the faerie, tasting her power on the air, eager to unskin her spark and drink her light and surge with stolen strength as she ebbed into the emptiness.
Instead he was stung, stunned. It had been thousands and thousands of years since last he’d felt it, but instantly he knew the force that thwarted him. The Magruwen.Traitor. And this lass with Skuldraig in her grasp—she was the Djinn King’s champion. A new champion!
Yanking back his stunned tongue, the Blackbringer remembered the other, the huntress who had undone his armies and finally himself. His bane, Bellatrix. He had believed the world fallen and all such power with it, but he’d been wrong. He experienced a pang of fear as he looked at the small, fierce lass.
And then she stunned him again. She dove into him.
Her power didn’t surge instantly into his own as with all the other, weaker faeries, but he knew it wouldn’t. She wielded the champion’s glyph, and as long as she could vision it, she would be whole. The Ithuriel’s champion, that Ifrit warrior with coffee-black skin who’d been his final victim in the Dawn Days, had held himself whole far longer than the Blackbringer would have thought possible. Into the bottle and into the ocean, Kipepeo had clung to that glyph inside the Blackbringer, adrift in the emptiness and not knowing he had already gone beyond all rescue. He had held on fiercely to life, some power beyond magic feeding him strength. But it was useless. He was a prisoner within a prisoner within a prison. When he had at last faltered and failed, the Blackbringer had tasted his power and raged inside his bottle, frenzied with strength and unable to spend it.
This new champion, too, would fail. It was only a matter of when.
Magpie struggled to hold the glyphs bright in her mind and peered around. Darkness without end. It was like falling outside of time, outside the world. As in her memory and in her dream, dim lights flickered in the black. She groped for the bundle the Magruwen had given her and with utmost care unwrapped it. Heat pulsed within, and bright traceries spun from its folds. She pulled away the tatter and unveiled it.
The pomegranate seed. A single star plucked from an ancient sky. Its brilliance pierced the darkness, and Magpie had to shut her eyes. But even behind closed eyelids she saw something washappening. Traceries exploded like fireworks! A feeling swelled in her, not of hollowness or warp or absence butlife. And all around her the dying lights began to flicker and flare.
In her wonder she felt the glyphs begin to slip in her mind, and she quickly thrust all her energy back to maintaining them. The effort left her numb, and tendrils of exhaustion began to steal into the core of her being. With great care, and taking comfort in the tug of the tether around her waist, she began to move deeper into the darkness, holding aloft the blazing star.
In her wake the sparks shifted...and followed.
In the Spiderdowns a fierce, swooping battle was under way. The spiders still lay scattered, but the Blackbringer raged. His essence oozed and pooled from one hideous shape to the next as he chased the whooping warriors. They were fleet and evasive, but it didn’t matter. They were tiring, and he was not. He grabbed one by the beard and sucked him in. He caught a lad by the ankle, but another, a lass, slashed clean through the end of his tongue, and the lad leapt free while the severed tongue tip twitched and oozed into the black ground.
Talon’s heart pounded. The Blackbringer had almost had him. Nettle and Hiss had kept close ever since they set foot in the Downs, guarding him and the thread in his hands. He’d been uncoiling the thread steadily since Magpie disappeared, and he had now come to its end. He wrapped it several times around his fist and clenched it tightly. He hoped he’d made it long enough. He’d made it as long as one night’sknitting permitted. Magpie could go no farther. He gave it a tug and waited, hoping he would feel it slacken. Hoping she would soon emerge.
A very long time seemed to pass.
His old uncle Caelum, who’d drawn his tattoos, was seized, along with Hesperus, whose first babe had been born this year. The warriors were falling.
The darkness was winning.
The Blackbringer bucked and bellowed. Talon felt the tether pull taut and tug him forward. He planted his feet and strained against it, feeling his heels skid over the dead ground. He strained with all his strength, and the tether cinched tightly around his fist, biting into his flesh and drawing blood. Slowly, grimacing, Talon was drawn toward the beast.
“Nettle!” he hollered, trying to dig in his heels.
His sister dashed to his side, sheathing her knives so she could grip the silk string with both hands. Side by side, they struggled against the pull of Magpie’s tether, but the Blackbringer seemed to have gone wild, swirling like storm clouds, morphing into crazed shapes, spinning, hissing. The silk bit through Talon’s palm. He’d spelled the thing himself and knew it was strong enough to slice right through his hand.
His blood was making it slick and hard to hold.
Nettle stumbled and dropped the cord, and without her added strength resisting its pull, Talon was yanked right off his feet. He fell to his chest and was dragged through fetid spider bodies as the tether bit tighter and deeper into his hand.
The Blackbringer was only a few yards away.
“Talon!” Nettle screamed, lunging to grab his feet and trying to wrestle him back from that yawning darkness. “Let go of it!” He knew if he did, Magpie would be lost, but if he didn’t, he’d be lost with her.
