Birthnight Read Free Page A

softly.
“Can you not feel it?”
    No other creature would have dared to correct
the Queen of Faerie, and no other creature would have survived it
unmarred. But the unicorn was special, dear to the queen, and
earned only a dark frown in return for her question.
    “Indeed, dear one, we feel it. But now that
we know the cause, we know well what we must do. There is a godling
being birthed even now.
    “I call for that godling’s death.” So saying,
she raised a second hand, a darkness limned with eerie light also
joined her flare in the sky. “This is my curse as Queen
undying.”
    As her words echoed and faded in the near
scentless wind, the dragon felt something he had never known
before: fear.
    * * *
    They left the three princes—or kings, as the
Queen had called them—to the shadows of the mortal realm, with its
hot sun, its icy nights, and its endless, barren desert. The star
burned brightly, ever brightly, as it laced the sky with shards of
cast-off light, and the dragon flew when it was at the height of
its brilliance.
    He saw the mortal villages pass beneath the
shadow of his mighty body, covered now in sleep and silence, now in
merriment and celebration, now in mourning and wailing. He saw
lives turn beneath him, impossibly fragile, impossibly tiny. He
yearned for the breath of fire, for the sounds of their fear and
falling bodies—but he knew that until the death of the godling,
this grandeur was denied him.
    Watching was not.
    The phoenix flew beside him in the air, and
as the days passed, he grew a little less brilliant, a little less
radiant. “The time is coming,” he said softly, for the dragon’s ear
alone, “when the fires will die.”
    “I will breath upon you again, little
fledgling,” the dragon replied, “and you will know new life. You
are almost a worthy child to a dragon.” It was a lie, of course—no
creature would be worthy of that—but he felt compelled to offer it
anyway; he did not know why.
    “Your fires, I fear,” the phoenix replied,
all song stilled, “will never again be hot enough to kindle
life.”
    Angered, the dragon roared, startling those
below who were in the habit of being taken unaware. He drew a great
breath; the wind sailed into his mighty lungs like a storm upon the
open sea. His jaws opened wide, and his teeth glittered in the
light from the solitary star. Wings flashed black against the sky
with so much power the phoenix was driven off course.
    The dragon breathed
fire
.
    Fire of the first born; fire to melt and
cinder the very bones of the earth. An endless stream of blue light
and heat surged through the air, wilting treetop and grass alike.
And when the roaring of voice and fire combined had stilled, the
dragon searched the sky for a sign of the phoenix.
    It seemed brighter and perhaps just a little
renewed.
    “That is my fire,” the dragon said, with more
than a little pride.
    “Almost, you give me hope, brother,” the
magical creature replied.
    Satisfied, the black dragon continued to
glide, but he roared no more that eve, and although he would not
admit it, not even to the gentle one, he was suddenly very
weary.
    * * *
    “I have never killed a child before,” the
unicorn said quietly, as the road stretched on beneath her delicate
hooves.
    “All mortal men are children,” the black
dragon replied, equally quietly. “If we sleep, they turn in their
season, and wither as trees do. But they emerge into no spring.
They are born, they age, they die.”
    “True,” she agreed, but her tone was
hesitant.
    “What worries you?” The dragon ducked under a
playful plume of phoenix fire. He inhaled and returned the volley
without changing the nature of the game.

    “I remember,” she said at last, “When the
world was a forest. There were men then, yes, but they were few—and
we ruled and played as we desired, teasing their dreams and
creating new ones.
    “The world is no forest now. Men are harder
to reach, harder to touch; instead of seeking us,