Vultures and crows wheeled and clashed, and Magpie halted her spin to find herself alone in the sky. Poppy was gone.

Magpie looked wildly around but saw no sign of her friend. “Poppy!” she screamed.

The beast—the Blackbringer—was pooling in the courtyard below. Magpie saw a white arm reach out of the dark fume of him. A faerie’s arm. The fingers grasped and clawed at nothing, then the arm disappeared back into the darkness. “Poppy!” gasped Magpie. The devil had her. How? It took a split second for Magpie’s body to respond to the sight of that reaching arm and then she found herself in motion, streaking toward the beast. “Blackbringer!” she screamed.

It came at her then—the tongue—and she saw how the devil had plucked Poppy from the sky. Fury flared in her; the imp might have mentioned this! Huge and livid, the Blackbringer’s tongue came at her fast as a hurled harpoon. Even in her surprise she dodged it easily, and before she could really think what she was doing, she was diving into the void of the Blackbringer, arms outstretched, hoping to find Poppy within, hoping to come out on the other side.

Thinking about it later, over and over, Magpie would know she couldn’t have been inside that darkness more than a second. Her speed must have carried her through him in an instant. But that instant would always after live in her mind as a journey.

“The darkness will rush in like a tide and sweep everything back into the endless ocean,” the Magruwen had said.

Magpie saw the endless ocean. More than seeing it, she was plunged into it and felt it begin to devour her. There was no breathing here, and no seeing. In the darkness of the end there was no sensation except a desperate fading, the feeling of being a small shadow subsumed by the immensity of night.

Dimming and ebbing and melting.

More than death, and less.

Unmaking.

As the edges of her self began to blur, she saw—she thought she saw—lights throughout the darkness, dull as strewn embers, dim as stars in fog.

Then she was through it, tumbling to the ground. Her brow met rock and an explosion of pain left her limp.

Vision swimming. The horrible squall of birds. Magpie struggled to revive, felt blood hot on her face, stinging her eyes. She was stunned, couldn’t feel her arms and legs, and for a moment she had the strangest feeling that she’d fallen outside of her own body. Then, vaguely, she sensed tangled limbs. Poppy! Poppy was in her arms.

But where was the Blackbringer?

“Magpie?” whispered Poppy, her voice weak.

“It’s okay—” Magpie started to say.