Page 76 of Dragon Cursed
He stood very still.
Poppy could see, in the angle of his shoulders, the precise effort it was costing him not to leave the room.He stayed.He stayed because he was a man who had decided three hundred years ago that he would fully understand the thing that had killed his sister no matter what it cost him to learn it.
Tonight it was costing him this.
"Go on."Alsander said, his jaw clenched.“Finish it.”
"He killed her," Niamh said simply."Which was an act of murder, regardless of his reason.The cycle does not require the keeper to die.The keeper is meant to release the relic and let the forest take its natural course.He didn’t give her the chance."
"He didn’t give her thechance," Alsander repeated.His voice had gone strange.
"He came up out of the dark and he killed her before she could choose.And in so doing, he became the thing he had set out to oppose.He stopped being a corrective and became acurse.He locked himself into the woods as surely as your sister had locked the forest into life.He has been there ever since."
"Three hundred years."Alsander's voice was a whisper.
"Yes.The forest cannot die because your sister bound it.Your sister cannot leave because her work was unfinished.He cannot withdraw because he is locked into the wound he made.You fight the curse, bleeding into the roots to keep something half-alive that was meant to be wholly something else."
She drew a breath.
"And your sister's spirit, dear — your sister's spirit has been waiting three hundred years to be allowed toleave."
His hand tightened around Poppy's.
"How is it ended?"
Niamh turned the book so they could both see.There was a drawing on the page she had stopped at — a small careful diagram of the pendant, and above it, a small careful diagram of a stone altar.
The shrine.
The carvings.
The chamber behind the falls.
"You take the pendant to the shrine.You take it to the altar where she fell.You destroy them both at once — the pendant and the relic at the heart of it.The book describes the working.It is not complicated."
She paused.
"The breaking is the breaking.The magic in the pendant unmakes the magic in the relic.The magic in the relic releases your sister.Her release breaks the binding on the wood."
"And the wood."
"The wood does what the wood was always meant to do.Some of it dies.Some of it sleeps.Some of it returns.The cycle resumes.The corrective unbinds and goes back to wherever correctives go.Your sister isfree."
She looked at Alsander.
"You are free.Of all of it."
He didn’t answer at once.
His hand was very tight in Poppy's.
"When?"
"Tomorrow, if you can stand it.The sooner the better.The book is clear — the longer the binding holds, the worse the unmaking when it comes."
"We drive at first light."
"Good."
