Page 88 of Dragon Cursed
He kissed her forehead and stepped back.
He stripped his shirt over his head and dropped it on the stone.
She moved to the wall.Pressed her back to the cold stone where the carvings were.She stayed there because the book had said the bearer must witness — and she was going towitness.
Alsander walked to the center of the chamber.He turned.He gave her one long last look she knew she would carry with her wherever she went next.
He let the dragon up out of him.
It was the cleanest shift she had ever seen him do.
The dragon rose up out of Alsander in a single smooth uncoiling and the chamber was suddenly full of him — his great black bulk filling the space, his head lowered, his wings half-spread and brushing the carved walls.He turned his great slitted golden eye on her once.
She lifted her chin to him.
"Do it," she mouthed.
He turned to the altar.
He raised his right foreclaw.
It was the size of her ribcage.The black scales caught the dim green light and threw it back in flat hard glints.He paused for one half-breath — the dragon's long head bent toward the pendant in its hollow — and she understood that the pause was him saying goodbye to his sister.To the small last piece of Mairin that lived in the stone.To the magic she had spent herself to make.
His claw came down.
It wasn’t loud.
The book had been right.The breaking was the breaking.There was no thunder.There was a single hard precise impact — the dragon's claw against the altar — and the altar cracked through its center with a sound like a held breath finally let go.
The pendant in the hollow shattered.
The chain went to dust.
The stone of the altar broke into three large pieces and a great deal of finer rubble, and where the dragon's claw had struck the stone, the stone was no longer stone.
It was sand.
It was the gray dust of something that had decided to stop being itself.
And then the chamber filled with light.
It came out of where the pendant had been.
Green.The green of every spring she had ever lived through.Of moss and leaf and new-cut grass and the deep dim green of the wood at noon in summer.It rose up out of the dust of the altar in a slow blooming sphere — and then it wasn’t a sphere at all.
It was sparks.
A thousand small bright points of green light hung in the air of the chamber as if gravity had forgotten they existed.They moved.They drifted.They coalesced and re-scattered.They made shapes that were almost shapes and were not.The air smelled suddenly of green growing things and damp earth and something Poppy had never smelled before — something she understood, immediately and without any frame of reference at all, was her foremother.
Mairin.
The Lady.
The green of the world, present in this chamber for the first time in three hundred years.
Poppy made a small sound.
The dragon drew back.He was watching the lights.His wings had folded against his sides and his great head was still and his eyes had gone wide and almost soft, and Poppy understood that he was seeing his sister for the first time in three hundred years.
