The Door Into Shadow by Diane Duane
It’s so simple. Since the Fire feels like loving, allow yourself only sharings that can’t work, or won’t last. Reject those who love you, pursue the uninterested. That way you’ll never have to do much of what feels like the Fire, but isn’t. And let that furious, hating part of your mind betray your Fire every time it’s close to focus, forcing it to starve away to nothing, so you won’t have to spend the rest of your life with that inside you—what feels like loving, and isn’t.
She could just hear the Shadow laughing.
Slowly Segnbora lifted her gemmed head, and sang relief and grief and weary regret at the walls. From the shadows her mdeihei took up the dark melody and shared it with her in compassionate plainsong. “Oh Immanence,” she sang, “I’m full of Power, and in danger of running forever dry; I’ve shared a hundred times, and I’m virgin still; I walk on water, and yet thirst…” She brought her wings down against the floor in a gesture of bitterness.
“And the nightmare was right, too. I’m a killer. The Shadow has merely to touch that memory ever so lightly, and I kill yet again. Is this my destiny, then? To be a clockwork toy that can be set to killing by anyone who happens to find the key?”
In ruthless but regretful honesty her mdeihei answered her in one long note that shook the cave. “Yes!”
“Or so it seems...” Hasai said.
She looked over at her mdaha, catching for the first time the unease that had always been in his voice. Segnbora had never before been Dracon enough to hear it. He gazed back, gentle-eyed, huge, terrible as a thundercloud with wings. And yet, to Dracon eyes, he too was frightened, crippled, shadowed. Looking at him now, a question Segnbora had idly toyed with once or twice before suddenly changed its shape and became essential.
“Mdaha,” she said, bending her head down close to his. “Hasai sithesssch—what were you doing at the Morrowfane?”
He made as if to back away and then stopped, apparently unwilling to disturb the tiny human figure that rested against his right forelimb, watching them. “Going rdahaih, I thought. Until you came along—”
“But a Dragon always knows the details of when he’ll go mdahaih. It’s the first scene one sees when one becomes able to remember ahead.” She leaned closer still, curled her tail around to pinion the other’s and stop its unnerved lashing. Whose body was this she was wearing, scaled in star-emeralds fiery green as new spring growth, spined in yellow diamond? And why did the sight of it make Hasai so nervous? “Mdaha,” she sang, staring at him golden eyes to silver ones, “your becoming mdahaih in me, it was no accident! You knew! You always knew, from when you were a Dragoncel.” She looked at him more closely. “And Dragon or human,” Segnbora said, “those who climb the Fane are given what they need…”
Hasai turned his head away. Segnbora arched her neck around, not allowing him the evasion. “‘Share our memories,’ you’re always saying. But even for you, there are memories that are only words: no images. Ihr’Hhaossia,” she said. The Worldwinning—
Hasai winced, negation again. The mdeihei were as still as a held breath.
“You knew this would come,” she said. “Now you have no choice either. You strove for us to be one, Hasai, and now we are. You are me, and at Bluepeak the Shadow will strike at you too. If you succumb, so do I. Then Lorn dies, and the Kingdoms founder, and I’m forsworn. And far worse than that will follow. The green place you fought for, the world you treasure so, will fall under the Shadow’s domination, and not even Dragons will be safe. We must settle what’s under your stone, now, or the Shadow will settle it for us!”
He started to draw downward, away from her touch. “There’s yet time—”
“No there’s not!”
Hasai lashed free of her tail, began to rise slowly from his crouch, wings lifting, the diamond sabers of the forefingers coming around to threaten her.
Segnbora gazing up, unmoved. “I am you, sithesssch,” she said. Beloved.
Hasai moved not a muscle. As the momentary anger slowly ran out of him, his eyes changed. They were no less afraid, but room was growing in them for something else.
“Now,” Segnbora whispered. “Quickly.”
The fluid, black-glittering splendor of him made itself into a curve, a pounce, a terrible striking downward, a living knife. She arched herself, struck downward with him. Stone sliced open like parting flesh, the blood was memory, it leaped—
***
Their Sun ate their world. They saw it happen. They had had warning—both ahead-memory of the actual incident, and years of wild starstorms, during which the Sun’s light was too intense to drink without dying, and every Dragon had to leave the Homeworld for a time, waiting far out in the cold for the Sun’s fire to die down.
Shell-parents grew infertile, and eggs that should have hatched roasted in the stone instead. At last came the final storm they had dreaded. In haste, all of Dragonkind streamed off their red-brown world and hung helpless in space, watching their star swell to a hundred times its size and devour their Homeworld. They were orphans.
But they weren’t homeless. Wisely, the older Dragons had looked to the youngest Dragoncels to see what they ahead-remembered of their own going-mdahaih. What they had found was the place they would later know as mdeihei—an odd, cool little world, greener than theirs, covered with a strangeness called water and inhabited by life of bizarre and fascinating kinds.
One Dragoncel, however, remembered more than the others. He knew the way, and would die upon reaching their goal. His name was Dahiric. The Dragons gave him another name: Worldfinder. They put him at their head and he led them out into the Great Dark.
How long they travelled there, none of the Dragons were ever sure. Many died along the way—starved for Sunfire in the empty wastes—but Dahiric, a doomed and purposeful green-golden glimmer at the head of ten thousand others, never veered from the memory he followed. Born only to die, and to make this journey, he was determined to succeed.
Finally, after what might have been ages as humans reckon time, they found the place. It was all that the mdeihei-to-be had seen: strange-colored, but alive; a home at last; stone to sink their claws into. They dropped down toward it—
—and found what Dahiric, and many more, were to die of. From the dark side of the world, where it had been hiding, what seemed like a dark foul air came boiling out toward them. It was blacker than the space in which they hung, and it was alive. It hated thought and light and any kind of life but its own. It was also vast enough to swallow the bright little planet whole—a project on which it had been working for eons. It didn’t relish the Dragons’ interruption.
Dahiric knew his duty. Gripping a double wingful of the little planet’s field of forces, he dove down into the roiling blackness, flaming. The Dark drew back, and the Dragons saw Dahiric drive a long tunnel down into it. At the tunnel’s bottom his light blazed like a falling star. But Dahiric was young, his fire limited by his immaturity. His flame went out, and the Dark closed behind him. After a little while he came floating out of the boiling blackness, dead.
Had there been air to carry the battlecry the Dragons raised, stone would have shattered across the world. Ten thousand strong, they dove at the Dark from every angle, flaming as best they could. Their fire was in short supply, however, since they had been out in the night so long, and ten thousand Dragons were not enough. The Dark opened before them, swallowed them, spat back the dead.
Soon there were nine thousand, seven thousand, fewer.
Many had no offspring yet and went rdahaih in a second, without time to make their peace with the Universe from which they were departing. Some went mad from the strain of having so many relatives become mdahaih in them in so short a time. Others so afflicted flung themselves into the Dark and were lost too.
A few simply fled, and lived.
One of these was the youngest of the Homeworld’s Dragoncels. He had never been quite normal. When he had become fully sdahaih at last, and his shell-parents and relatives had asked him when and wher
He grew, and the vision did not change. Slowly he became resigned to being a curiosity among his own kind. As befitted a Dragon, he came to make light of the difference, submerging it in placidity. But he did not realize that the way he did this—by learning to stand a little aloof, even from his mdeihei—also encouraged other Dragons to stand aloof from him as well.
Hasai became estranged from his own kind. He took no mate. He held his peace. He flew alone. And when he finally found himself facing that same awful blackness that in minutes had killed half his race, with no comrade who would admit to fear, and so support him toward courage, terror blinded Hasai and he fled.
The rest of Dragonkind, fortunately, had not exhausted their options. There in empty space they convened in body and mind, and held Assemblage—the last full Assemblage that would be held for a generation or two, until the Advocate summoned them again two thousand years later. They paid the price of Assemblage—the lives of the DragonChief and the Eldest—and then all those left alive turned their hearts inward and gave their Will and power over to the Immanence.
None of them saw where the Messenger came from. She was a Dragon in shape, but even the webs of Her wings burned intolerably bright. Her every scale was a star, a point of power so terrible it could be felt through Dragonhide. The Messenger wheeled and dropped through the massed Dragons, scattering them—then halted above the raging, boiling immensity of the Dark. Through their othersenses, the Dragons could feel the Dark’s alarm as it reached up to snuff out this troublesome intruder. And then they heard its silent scream of pain as the Messenger flamed, letting loose a torrent of Dragonfire as potent as a star’s breathing.
The Dark writhed convulsively, ripped away from the world with a jerk and a soundless howl of rage. It streamed toward the Messenger to engulf Her utterly, but the Messenger only spread wings and claws and seized it. Working at the forces in space with fiery wings, She drew the Dark away from the world, screaming and struggling. Together they dwindled, drawing farther away from the little blue world, until all that could be seen of them was a light like a dwindling star. Those who dared to follow came back and reported that the Messenger had plunged, together with the Dark, into the heart of the nearby yellow Sun. Neither came out again.
Later, the survivors found Dahiric’s body among those of the slain. The others they burned in Dragonfire, as was the custom on the old Homeworld, but Dahiric they bore down to the surface of the new world. There they found a fair place at the endpoint of a great spur of land, where water washed it. They uprooted a mountain, as had been done on the Homeworld for Phyiril and Saen and others of the Parents, and they laid it over him, melted it around him, and made a dwelling there for the new DragonChief. Thereafter the Dragons began settling into their new young world, and watched humankind come slowly out of the caves into which the baleful influence of the Dark had driven them…
…and behind the rest of the Dragons, a silver-and-black Dragoncel drifted to earth like the last leaf of autumn. His shame at his cowardice gripped him like the pain of giving-up-the-body, and would not leave. True, no other Dragon accused him of fear, but no one comforted him, either. He was alone, as always—alone with a new shame, and with his old deep-hidden terror of the day he would finally go mdahaih in a human.
All these burdens he buried under layers of Dracon placidity. The centuries went by. He maintained his dignity, flew alone, kept silent. Finally his life became reduced to a weary waiting for the stars to assume the proper configurations. This they did. At last, his luster dimming, Hasai spiraled down to the Morrowfane by night and crept into a cave there, to wait for the seizures, and for the one who would come…
He looked across the cavern at her now, head held high, waiting for her to disapprove of him and pronounce a sentence worse than death: eternal imprisonment with a sdaha whose opinion of him was not passive placidity, but active scorn. Behind him, the mdeihei were silent.
“You ran,” Segnbora sang.
He said nothing.
“And you’re of value nonetheless,” she said, weaving around the words such melody as meant she was not speaking lightly. “You did what you did, and here you are. And here am I, too…or should I say, here are we.”
Hasai looked at her in amazement. She sighed a little fire and unfolded one emerald-strutted wing, laying it over his back in a gesture of affection.
“So where do we go from here?” she asked.
He opened his mouth, and nothing came out for a moment. “‘Sithesssch,’ you said,” he sang, sounding dubious.
She flipped her tail in agreement.
“Then only one matter still troubles me…”
“What?”
“The mdeihei, and their opinion...”
Segnbora considered the matter, listening to the utter silence which for the moment reigned in the background where the mdeihei usually sang. “Their opinion of you... of us? Mdaha, don’t worry about them. If they’re truly of the Immanence, as they claim, they’ll understand. And if they don’t...” She gazed into the darkness and saw many glowing eyes avert themselves, unnerved. “Then they’d best hold their peace until they learn better.”
Hasai looked at her strangely. “You’re truly sdahaih at last,” he said, the doubt finally fading out of his voice. “It’s very odd.”
“How so? You knew how it would be.”
He dropped his jaw, smiling. “Sometimes, for the sake of surprise, we forget a little.”
Segnbora spread both wings high and curved her neck around to look at them. “Well, I certainly feel sdahaih. Shall we go test it?”
“There’s more to being sdahaih, and Dracon, than flight,” Hasai said and his song trembled with the joy of one who’s found something long lost. “Memory. And its transformation.”
She shook too, thinking of all the painful experiences she could accept, or remake if she wished. Now that she was sdahaih, the ever-living past was as malleable as the present.
There were some things she wouldn’t change, experiences that had made her what she was now. Balen, she thought. He stays. There’s unfinished business there, somehow. But as for other matters—
For the first time since that afternoon under the willow, her love was clean—and now more than ever before she wanted to give away. “I remember a place,” she sang quietly looking at Hasai, “where stars swirl in the sky like a frozen whirlpool, and the Sun is red, and the stone is as warm as your eyes—“
He met her glance with eyes that blazed. “I’ae mnek-é,” he sang. We remember.
Wings lifted and beat downward, and the cave was empty.
***
The soaring began at the Homeworld, and never quite ended. They made the Crossing all over again, together this time. Other Dragons looked curiously at the one who in fore-memories had been alone, but who now went companioned by some child of the Worldfinder’s line, green-scaled and golden-spined, with eyes the fiery yellow of the little star to which they journeyed.
They saw the Winning again, not with guilt this time, but simply as one of the events that would eventually bring them together. Afterwards, they fell to earth like bright leaves drifting, and lay basking in the Sun. They glided together through long afternoons, taking their time so that the people below would have something to marvel at. They matched speed for speed in the high air, and tore it to tatters of thunder. They went bathing in the valleys of the Sun, and on their return chased the twilight around the world for sport. He made her a present of the sunset, and she made him one of the dawn, and they both drank them to the dregs until the fire of their throats was stained the red of the vintage.
They lived in fledgling and Dragoncel and Dragon, in child and girl and woman—found memories that were lost, discovered past an
For that, even in Dracon, there were no words.
***
Eventually they remembered the way home, and—living in it—were there. Segnbora, leaning back against the immense forelimb from which she had not moved all night, looked up at her mdaha’s silver eyes.
“I have to be getting back,” she said. “They’ll be wondering where I am.”
“Best hurry and tell them. Sehé’rae, sdaha.”
“Sehé…”
Halfway out the entrance to the cave, she paused, touching her breast in confusion. In the place where the nightmare had bitten her, there was nothing but a pale, crescent-shaped scar.
“Dragons heal fast,” Hasai said from behind her.
A quiet joy like nothing she had ever heard sang around his words. She knew how he felt.
“Sehé’rae, mdaha,” she said, and went out.
***
She opened her eyes on a dawn she could taste as well as see. When she stood up to stretch, she saw the Moon, three days past third quarter, the phase under which she had been born, hanging halfway up the water-blue sky like a smile with a secret behind it.
Picking her way back toward the camp, she came across someone waiting for her with his back to the rising Sun. His long black shadow stretched out toward her, the stones within it outlined brightly by the Fire of the sword he leaned upon.
“Welcome back,” Herewiss said as she approached.
Skádhwë was struck into a nearby rock: not the one where she had left it. Segnbora raised a questioning eyebrow at Herewiss as she plucked it out and resheathed it.