Page 89 of Dragon Cursed
"Oh," she whispered."Oh, Mairin.Hello."
The lights drifted toward her.
Not all of them.Some.A small bright cluster moved across the chamber in the slow purposeful way of somethingdeciding, and they came to rest in a small bright halo around her head, and she felt them touch her hair.
They were warm.
They weregentle.
Her foremother — who had been waiting three hundred years to leave — was saying hello before she went.
"Thank you," Poppy whispered.She didn’t know what she was thanking the lights for.For everything."Thank you.Go gently."
And then the cold came.
The drip of water from the seam in the stone didn’t stop this time.There was no warning.
The cold simply came up out of the broken altar like steam off a pond at first light.The green sparks bent away from it.The chamber filled with a second light that wasn’t light at all but its absence —
And suddenly Laoch stood at the back of the chamber where the seam had been.
Not a shadow this time.Not a half-formed thing.He was as much himself as he could be — a tall dark figure in the shape of a man, eyes that were not eyes — and he looked first at the broken altar and then at the dragon and then at the green sparks and at last at Poppy.
His not-face seemed almostrelieved.
His voice was different now.Soft."Thank you."
She hadn’t, in any of her imagining of this moment, expected gratitude.
"Thank you."Laoch said it again."Oh, little daughter,thank you.I have been waiting so long.I didn’t think one of you would come."
The dragon snarled.
The dragon's great body shifted, putting itself between Poppy and Laoch.The lights that had been around her head rose and scattered and re-formed in front of her in a thicker, brighter cluster.Laoch raised what would have been his hands and shook what would have been his head.
"No," he said."No, dragon,no.You do not understand.I have not come to take her.The breaking is happening.The breaking is the breaking.I have come because I have been called."
Laoch turned.
The whole of him turned, slowly, until he faced the green lights at the center of the chamber.
The green lights had drawn together into a denser cloud that had begun, very slowly, tospin.
Laoch stepped forward.He lifted his arms.The dark of him peeled away from him in long ribbons, and the ribbons rose and joined the spin around the green —
And the chamber filled with the slow grand music of two opposing things finally being allowed to meet.
It was beautiful.
Poppy hadn’t expected that.She had expected horror.The dark and the green didn’t fight.Theywove.Lifted and lowered around one another in a slow elegant spiral, and where they touched, they didn’t annihilate — they balanced, they completed.
The green needed the dark to be green.
The dark needed the green to be dark.
They had been waiting three hundred years to do this.
A small laugh came up out of her.She pressed her hand to her mouth.The cycle wasn’t war between the dark and the green.The cycle was theirdance.Mairin had stopped the dance because she had loved the green too much to let the dark have it.Laoch had stopped the dance because he had loved the dark too much to let the green hold.
