“What? Lord, please. It’s true faeries are less than they were. I know how much has been lost. But the end? It’s just one devil. However bad he is, he can’t be the end of the world!”
“The world has long been ending. Everything ends. It builds, then it is, then it slides down the far slope of nothing, back into the nothing that was before.”
“Then we have to stop it!” Magpie cried in desperation.
“Sure you can’t just see all your beautiful dreams vanish like that!”
“I’ll dream more dreams.”
“Oh, aye, will you then? Feed us to the devil then go make yourself another world to play with? Is that what you dream about? How you’ll make it better next time? What about us?”
“What about you? Live with what you wrought and die from it!”
“What we’ve wrought? Faeries didn’t make devils!”
“Nay. And yet the seals are broken.”
“Humans break the seals!”
“Aye, so they do.”
“What have humans to do with us?” Magpie demanded in a fury.
The Magruwen just looked at her, and then he did the one thing, perhaps, that could have made Magpie’s fury flare beyond the power of her small body to contain it.
He yawned.
Magpie sputtered, reddened. A tingling built to bursting in her fingers, then ten whorls of light surged from them and danced in the air, spinning round the Djinn King before exploding like fireworks against his fiery essence. “Wake up!” Magpie cried. “This is the world! This is important!”
And to her surprise, and his, he did wake up. The sparking of fireworks around him touched off a kindred explosion within, and he was stunned by a surge of vitality. It wavered out of his control and in an instant the spindle of fire standing before Magpie bloomed into a dazzle that knocked her to the ground and blinded her. She slipped beyond her senses and lay still in a world of hot white light and knew no more.
SIXTEEN
The Magruwen gradually, with effort, gathered himself back in. He was in shock. He felt new, as when he had first danced off flint to bring light to the beginning. He reared his head, felt power flow through him, and looked down at the smoke where the faerie had stood. She was gone. He waved his hand and chased back the smoke to reveal where she lay senseless on the cavern floor.
He became aware of a ruckus then, a crow, squawking a riot at him. It landed beside the faerie and the Magruwen waved his hand once more so that the crow fell still, frozen in place with his wings arched protectively over the lass.
The Djinn needed quiet.
What he had just seen was impossible. What he now felt was inexplicable. He looked hard at the faerie. Just a lass, and yet, with his sluggishness banished—what had she done to him?—his senses felt cleansed, and there was something familiar in her, some hint, some wisp that sang to him.
He needed to look at the Tapestry.
For millennia he had resisted looking at it. His dreams had been haunted by its unweaving and he couldn’t bear to see it in life, its ragged runs and ruined glyphs, its faded threads. Now he wrenched opened his long-blind inner eyes and waited for his mystical vision to clear.
The Tapestry was the very fabric of existence, woven long ago by seven fire elementals spinning in an eternity of nothing. They spun the threads of living light as a net to catch their dreams and keep them from dissolving into the blackness. Fever-bright they burned, fed unwaveringly by their one ally, the Astaroth, an elemental of the air, the world-shaping wind.
And the Tapestry grew.
It was simple in the beginning, a latticework of light, but the dreamers honed their craft, and the dream grew great. When at last it was ready they grasped its edges and shaped it into a sphere, its seams sewn tight, and within it bloomed a world. When they stitched closed the seams they did so from within. They sealed it around themselves and they knew they could never leave, not without letting the blackness in and annihilating everything the Tapestry sheltered.
They dreamed water and earth and populated them with fanciful creatures. The Magruwen dreamed dragons first and he doted on them, Fade most of all, the truest thing he ever fashioned. The great dragon lay curled round the Djinn while they wove and wove.
They dreamed faeries later and gave to them, as to dragons and to a lesser extent imps, something other creatures didn’t have, a sensitivity to the Tapestry. They couldn’t see it or alter it. Simply, they felt it. It was the pulse and vibration of their world and, like harpists plucking strings, they could make it sing.
This was magic.
What the Magruwen thought he had witnessed when the lass stung him awake—the impossible thing—was a faerie spinning a new glyph into the Tapestry. Not just playing upon it, not plucking a thread, but creating one.
Weaving.
The glowing skeins of the Tapestry began to grow clear in his vision, starting out as traceries, curls, ribbons, and streamers of light and settling into their intricate patterns, moving and living and connecting all things. For a long time he held the crow immobile with one small finger of his mind and studied the Tapestry with the rest of it. It was much as he feared from his nightmares. There were ragged shreds and tatters held together by the thinnest of filaments. With the death of the Vritra many threads had dissolved altogether and the fabric was slack as old skin. Blackness peeked through the threadbare patches, taunting. The Tapestry was falling apart.
And then, among the dimming strings and patterns of the failing weave, the Magruwen’s eyes detected bright points, and he looked closer. He saw new glyphs. From one to the next, skipping over the vast fabric, he followed them. Messy they were and clumsy, brilliant and shining, childlike, impatient, artless, ingenious, and impossible. Some small fingers had been plying new threads through the old. Short and tangled though they were, in places these new stitches were all that held great gaps from yawning open.
While he slept, someone had been reweaving the Tapestry.
Magpie awakened with a groan, still blind, seeing only white. She smelled sulfur and knew she was still in the Magruwen’s cave. She smelled stale cigar smoke and knew Calypso was near. “Feather?” she said feebly.
“I’m here, ’Pie” came his soothing singsong voice, and she felt his feathertips caress her face.
“What did I do?” she whispered, remembering nothing but the light pouring from her fingertips.
“I don’t know, ’Pie,” the crow whispered back. She heard fear in his voice and struggled to sit up, tried to blink her vision into focus.