Page 43 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
The beast—the Blackbringer—was pooling in the courtyard below. Magpie saw a white arm reach out of the dark fume of him. A faerie’s arm. The fingers grasped and clawed at nothing, then the arm disappeared back into the darkness. “Poppy!” gasped Magpie. The devil had her.How?It took a split second for Magpie’s body to respond to the sight of that reaching arm and then she found herself in motion, streaking toward the beast. “Blackbringer!” she screamed.
It came at her then—the tongue—and she saw how the devil had plucked Poppy from the sky. Fury flared in her; the imp might have mentioned this! Huge and livid, the Blackbringer’s tongue came at her fast as a hurled harpoon. Even inher surprise she dodged it easily, and before she could really think what she was doing, she was diving into the void of the Blackbringer, arms outstretched, hoping to find Poppy within, hoping to come out on the other side.
Thinking about it later, over and over, Magpie would know she couldn’t have been inside that darkness more than a second. Her speed must have carried her through him in an instant. But that instant would always after live in her mind as a journey.
“The darkness will rush in like a tide and sweep everything back into the endless ocean,”the Magruwen had said.
Magpie saw the endless ocean. More than seeing it, she was plunged into it and felt it begin to devour her. There was no breathing here, and no seeing. In the darkness of the end there was no sensation except a desperate fading, the feeling of being a small shadow subsumed by the immensity of night.
Dimming and ebbing and melting.
More than death, and less.
Unmaking.
As the edges of her self began to blur, she saw—she thought she saw—lights throughout the darkness, dull as strewn embers, dim as stars in fog.
Then she was through it, tumbling to the ground. Her brow met rock, and an explosion of pain left her limp.
Vision swimming. The horrible squall of birds. Magpie struggled to revive, felt blood hot on her face, stinging her eyes. She was stunned, couldn’t feel her arms and legs, and for a moment she had the strangest feeling that she’d fallen outside ofher own body. Then, vaguely, she sensed tangled limbs. Poppy! Poppy was in her arms.
But where was the Blackbringer?
“Magpie?” whispered Poppy, her voice weak.
“It’s okay—” Magpie started to say.
Then Poppy screamed, and her body lurched in Magpie’s arms. Panicked, Magpie held on and was dragged along with her. The Blackbringer loomed. The long tongue was coiled around Poppy’s ankle, and he was reeling her back inside him.
With one arm still wrapped around Poppy, Magpie groped for a handhold with the other. She found one and held tight, straining. Through the haze of blood obscuring her vision, she could see Poppy’s white face, and their eyes met and held. “I’ve got you!” Magpie said. Her feet were braced against a broken statue, and one hand clung to a coiled tree root, but she could feel herself begin to tremble. She was weak, but more than that, she felt...insubstantial, like she might dissolve into the air.
And the Blackbringer kept coming. A tide of darkness swallowed Poppy’s feet and then her legs. Her eyes pleaded. Magpie tried with all her strength to haul her away, but the tongue, withdrawn back into the dark now, held fast. And Magpie could only watch and hold her as Poppy began to dim.
“Poppy!” she screamed.
But Poppy no longer saw her. Though still half in the world, she was already lost in the dark. She faded. The color drained from her flesh, and, with horror, Magpie realized she could see through her to the ground beneath. Then she couldn’t hold heranymore. There was nothing to hold. With a final shimmer, the faint ghost-image of Poppy opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out and she disappeared, leaving only her shadow behind where she had lain.
Magpie lay bleeding on the stone with her arm curled round Poppy’s shadow. Then even that was wrenched from her as the Blackbringer dragged it, too, into the darkness.
There would be no diving in this time to pull Poppy out. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. She had been unmade. She had ceased to be.
The sound inside Magpie’s head was terrible. It was the Blackbringer’s whisper. “Aye, the old wine,” it said. “How wonderful...”
And it seemed as if the clot of darkness grew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Across the mouth of the Deeps and up the slope of Dreamdark Crag, the Rathersting warriors on the castle walls heard the chaos of birds and took flight. The pale moon glittered on their cool knives and bared teeth as they raced toward Issrin Ev, whooping their bloodcurdling battle cries.
Talon was not with them.
Nor was he back at the castle, cursing his wings and his weakness. If he had been, the sun would have risen the next morning on a doomed world. Because if he hadn’t already been out stalking vultures, his own two blades wicked in his fists and his eyes ferocious in the gloom, Magpie would not have survived.
And without Magpie Windwitch, neither would the world, for long.
In that dreadful instant when Magpie realized she’d been clinging to a shadow and that Poppy was gone, she leapt away from the Blackbringer and flicked open her wings to flee. But as she struggled skyward, the tongue was suddenly on her, cold and clammy. It whipped round her wings and jerked her back, helpless as a bug.
Her fierce crow brother Maniac descended like a fury and seized the stretched tongue with his talons. It released Magpie atonce and snapped back into the darkness quickly...so quickly Maniac didn’t have time to release it. His feathers riffled, and there was a sound like an intake of breath as he was sucked backward and engulfed in the darkness.
