I.
The Cocoon Breaks
It began with a sound like ice on a lake in the first warm week of spring.
A small sound.
A single high clear tick, very quiet, at the bottom of the Starwell.
In all that enormous silence after the roar, every one of them heard it.
On the black skin of the cocoon, just below the eight-pointed star, a line of light appeared.
It was thinner than a hair.
Silver.
It ran down the dark curve of the cocoon from the star toward the water, slowly, the way a crack runs across a pane of frosted glass, and from it, halfway down, a second line branched away, and from that a third.
Tick.
Tick.
Silver lines, and then violet ones among them, spreading over the whole black surface of the cocoon in a fine bright net, like frost-ferns growing on a window in the night, until the whole tall drop of darkness at the bottom of the Starwell was covered in them, glowing.
The being in the ninth pool stopped circling.
It hung in the water round the foot of the cocoon, still, with its two star-eyes lifted.
“Is it…” Cedric’s voice cracked.
He was in the sixth terrace, standing, with the water to his chest and his father’s hand back on the scruff of his robe, as though the Archduke had decided some time ago that he was never letting go of it again.
“Is it breaking?
Father, is that bad?
Is it supposed to…”
“Hush,” said Lady Seraphina, from the lip of the seventh terrace, without turning her head.
Cedric hushed.
The cocoon broke.
Not like glass.
Glass shatters.
It came apart the way a dandelion clock comes apart in a breath of wind: all at once, gently, into a thousand drifting pieces.
Every little shard of black between the silver lines lifted away from the shape inside it and floated upward, turning slowly, and as each one turned, it caught the light and was not black any more but clear, and then not clear but bright, a tiny flake of starlight, rising.
A thousand of them.
Ten thousand.
Rising up out of the ninth pool in a slow shining cloud, up past the eighth terrace and the seventh, past the Matriarch and the Archduke, past the hundred upturned faces in the water, up and up through the great dark height of the cavern toward the round coin of night at the top of the dome, like sparks going up a chimney, like the stars going home.
And then the water went.
The ninth pool drew back.
All of it.
It did not drain, and it did not fall.
It withdrew, the way the sea draws back from a beach before a great wave: sliding away from the place where the cocoon had stood, outward, in a smooth widening ring, down the curved white sides of the basin, and away into the stone.
Into the stone itself.
The rock at the bottom of the Starwell drank it, quietly, and was dry.
And in the middle of the bare white floor of the ninth pool, for the first time since the Starwell was made, there was no water at all.
Only a girl.
II.
What Came Out of the Water
She was standing.
Not on the stone.
A hand’s breadth above it, on nothing, with her bare feet pointed down toward the floor of the pool and not quite touching, as though the air beneath her were a step she had not yet decided to come down from.
Her eyes were closed.
Her hands hung loose at her sides.
Her dark bathing robe, the slate-blue robe they had all put on behind the carved screens two hours and a lifetime ago, hung straight and still round her, perfectly dry.
And she was burning.
That was the only word for it.
The light was still on her: the bright restless light that had wrapped her in the water, that had circled her and circled her without rest since the moment the ninth pool closed over her head.
It was still going round her now, in loose wide bands of white and silver, round and round her standing figure like rings round a planet.
But it was slowing.
They watched it slow.
Round, and round, and round, more lazily each time, the bands loosening, drifting apart, fraying at their edges into soft threads of light that wandered away from her into the air like mist leaving a lake in the morning.
Fainter, and fainter.
Until the last thread of it unwound from round her, and floated up, and was gone.
And they could see her.
* * *
The first thing they saw was the star.
It was on her brow.
Between her eyes, a little above, exactly where it had burned on the skin of the cocoon.
A small eight-pointed star, silver and violet, no bigger than a fingertip.
Not painted.
Not scarred.
It was simply there, part of her, a soft steady light set into her skin, the way the evening star is set into the sky.
They had seen it twice now: once as a glow under the water, once burning on the black cocoon.
But on her face, clear, they understood for the first time that it was not going to fade.
That it had always belonged there, and simply been waiting.
The second thing they saw was her hair.
Lyra Eisenhardt’s hair had been black.
The ink-black of the North, the raven-black of every Eisenhardt for twelve hundred years: long, heavy, straight, falling past her waist when she let it down, so dark that in candlelight it had no colour at all.
They had all seen it.
Cedric had pulled it, when they were small.
Isolde had braided it, in Room Nine, when Lyra’s hands were too cold.
It was not black now.
It was night.
That was the nearest any of them could come to it, afterwards.
At the crown of her head it was still the deep black of the North, the black of the sky above the Wall at midnight.
But as it fell, it changed.
It deepened, the way the sky deepens after the sun has gone: into the darkest violet, into the violet of the hour when the first stars come out.
And through it, all the way down, ran threads of silver.
Not grey, not white.
Silver, bright and fine, like the frost-mithril in their robes, like starlight caught in deep water, so that when she breathed and the hair stirred, the threads moved, and shimmered, and caught the light, and it seemed as if there were stars in it.
Tiny drifting points of light, going slowly down the long dark river of it, the way they had drifted in the hair of the woman among the travelling worlds.
And at the very ends, it had paled to silver-violet altogether, like the last light at the edge of the sky.
And it was long.
It had been at her waist.
Now it fell past her waist, past her knees, past the hem of her robe, down and down until the silver-violet ends of it hung a hand’s breadth from her ankles, just above the dry white stone.
And it was not hanging.
It flowed: lifting and settling round her, slow as weed in a current, though there was no water left in the pool and no wind in the cavern, moving gently all on its own, as though it were alive.
Glowing, very faintly, from somewhere inside itself.
Shining.
Her lashes were silver.
That was the detail that Isolde Frostmere would remember for the rest of her life.
Not the star.
Not the hair.
The lashes.
Lyra’s closed eyes, and the long lashes lying on her cheeks, that had been as black as her hair since the day she was born, gone pure bright silver, every one, like frost on a dark branch.
Against all that night-dark hair, they were so bright they almost hurt to look at.
And she was changed.
None of them could have said how.
She was the same height, or near it.
The same face: the high Eisenhardt cheekbones, the straight brows, the stubborn chin she had from her father.
But something had come into it that had not been there before, or had been there all along, asleep, and was not asleep any more.
Her skin had a light in it: a soft, even radiance, like snow under a full moon, as though she were lit very gently from the inside.
Every small mark of the Frozen Land was gone from her: the frost-nip on her cheekbones, the healing scrape along her jaw from the Hollowmere, the shadows the long winter had pressed under her eyes.
And she held herself the way the woman among the travelling worlds had held herself.
Not the way a girl stands.
The way a mountain stands.
With a stillness that had lasted a very long time.
She was the most beautiful thing any of them had ever seen.
Not beautiful the way people were beautiful.
Not the way the Archduchess was beautiful at a Midwinter ball, or the Lotus Salon ladies were beautiful in silk.
It was the beauty of the aurora over the Kharn, the beauty of a glacier at dawn, the beauty of the first stars over the Wall on a clear night.
The kind of beauty that does not want anything from you.
The kind you cannot look at for very long without feeling small.
And, one by one, without the weight, without any pressure at all, the young soldiers of the North began to kneel.
Nobody told them to.
Nobody pressed them down.
It was simply that they looked at her, standing in the dry ninth pool in her dark robe with the star on her brow and the night flowing round her, and their knees bent, on their own, into the water of the terraces, the way your head bows on its own when you walk into the Grand Cathedral, the way a soldier’s hand goes to his brow on its own when the banner goes by.
Sigurd went down.
The twins went down, side by side.
Arne Stenvik went down on one knee like a felled oak, slowly, with his mouth open.
All across the stair of cracked pools, the hundred of the North went down into the shining water, and lowered their heads, and did not know why, and did not mind.
On the lip of the uppermost pool, with both hands on her ebony cane, Madame Odile de Varenne, who had curtseyed to three emperors and knelt to none of them, found that her knees were bending, and was so astonished that she let them.
III.
The Golden Mark
Then Lyra’s back began to burn.
It began between her shoulder blades: a warmth, a glow, gold, coming up through the dark linen of her robe the way the sun comes up through a curtain drawn across a window at dawn.
Brighter.
And brighter.
Until the gold was shining straight through the slate-blue cloth, so clearly that every person on the great stair of mirrors could see its shape, as if it had been drawn on the robe itself in a pen of fire.
It was a mark.
A great sweeping mark, as wide as her shoulders and as long as her spine, drawn in lines of burning gold.
At its heart, between her shoulder blades, an eight-pointed star: the same star as the one on her brow.
And round the star, coiled about it, wrapped round and round it in long graceful loops, its head laid down above the topmost point and its tail curling away down the length of her back, a dragon.
Long-bodied, serpentine.
A crown of horns.
Four clawed feet gripping the points of the star as a beast grips the stone of its own nest.
Every scale drawn in fine gold, every claw, every curl of its mane.
It was not ink.
It was not a scar.
It was light, laid into her the way the star was laid into her brow, and it burned there, on her back, under the dark robe, for everyone to see.
On the lip of the seventh terrace, Lady Seraphina drew a breath.
Not a gasp.
The Matriarch of House Eisenhardt did not gasp.
But it was the breath of someone who has read about a thing all her life in old books in a language nobody else speaks, and has never once expected to see it.
“The Beast-Bond,” she said quietly.
The Archduke looked at her.
“Mother?”
“The mark of the master.” Her voice was very low.
“When a Divine Beast is born, Alaric, it is not born alone.
It is born to someone.
Bound to them, soul to soul, from its first breath to its last.
And the one it is bound to carries its mark.” She did not take her eyes off the burning gold on her granddaughter’s back.
“There has not been one in the world since before the Empire.
Not one.
They are in the oldest songs.
And the songs say the mark is gold.”
Not dimming, the way a lamp dims.
Sinking.
The lines of light grew softer, and softer, and seemed to draw down into her, out of the robe, under the skin, the way a sunset sinks into the sea.
The dragon.
The star.
The long sweeping curve of the tail.
Fainter, and fainter, until the slate-blue linen of Lyra’s robe was only slate-blue linen again, dark and plain, with nothing shining through it at all.
Gone.
“It’s gone,” whispered Hilde Aarn, in the third terrace.
“Where did it go?
It’s gone…”
“No,” said Lady Seraphina.
“It is not gone.” She folded her hands.
“It has gone in.
Where no one can see it, and no one can take it.” Her eyes moved, at last, from her granddaughter’s back to the bottom of the dry ninth pool.
To the thing that lay there, round Lyra’s feet.
“And now, I think, we shall see what it belongs to.”
IV.
The Shape in the Dark
The being had not moved.
When the water withdrew, it had stayed.
It lay on the bare white stone of the ninth pool, coiled round and round the place where Lyra stood, in loops of dim shifting light, and it was still not finished.
Still changing.
Still the shape that every one of them saw differently: scales one moment, feathers the next, mist the next, as though it had been waiting, the whole time, for something.
For the mark, perhaps.
For the gold to go in.
Because now, at last, it began to settle.
The eyes came first.
They had been there all along, two eight-pointed stars at one end of the coiled light, silver and violet.
But now they sharpened.
They grew clear and hard and bright, and round them, slowly, a head began to come out of the dark: drawn out of the shifting light the way a shape is drawn out of fog as you walk toward it.
A long head.
A long, narrow, elegant head, like a wolf’s and like a serpent’s and like neither.
A brow.
A jaw.
And behind the head, the rest of it.
All at once, as if a veil had been pulled away.
It was dark.
That was the first thing.
It was the darkest thing in the Starwell, darker than the cocoon had been.
Its scales were black: the deepest, purest black any of them had ever seen, not the black of coal or of ink, but the black of the sky between the stars.
And yet they shone.
Every scale was polished like a mirror of black glass, catching the light of the waterfalls and the ice-chandeliers and throwing it back, so that the whole long coiling body of it gleamed.
And across that gleaming black, over every scale, moving, there were stars.
Tiny points of silver and white and violet, scattered over its body as thick as the stars over the Frozen Land on a clear night, and they were not still.
They rippled.
Whenever the great body shifted, a ripple of starlight ran down it from head to tail, the way wind runs over a field of wheat, the way the aurora runs across the sky.
It was long.
Impossibly long.
It coiled round and round the floor of the ninth pool, loop on loop, and still there was more of it, its tail curling away up over the cracked lip of the pool and into the eighth.
Like a serpent.
But it was not a serpent.
A serpent does not have legs: and this had four, short and powerful, set along the great length of its body, ending in claws.
Black claws, long and curved and edged with gold, gripping the white stone of the Starwell.
Each one of them, any soldier in that cavern could see, could have opened a frost-bear from throat to tail in a single stroke.
Could have split the shell of a glacier warden like a nut.
And it was crowned.
Two horns swept back from its brow, long and branching, like the antlers of the mirror stags, and they were gold.
Pure bright burnished gold, the gold of the mark that had burned on Lyra’s back.
And from the base of the horns, running all the way down the length of its body, coiling with it loop by loop to the very tip of its tail, ran a single line of the same gold: a fine bright golden thread, circling its body like a ribbon round a spear, like the gilded edge on the pages of an ancient book.
A mane of dark mist flowed from its head and down its neck, and in the mist were more stars.
On the lip of the seventh terrace, Lord Roderick of House Eisenhardt, who had wrestled six-winged frost tigers bare-handed and been afraid of nothing that walked or flew for three hundred years, said, very softly, “Gods.”
And in the air above them all, the Sword Emperor of Aethoria, who had seen the old dragons fly in the age before the Wall, and had not said one word since he came out of the broken sky, said one now.
“Yes,” said Kaelen Eisenhardt.
Very quietly.
As though he were answering a question nobody else had heard.
“Yes.
That is what they looked like.”
The Oblivion Black Dragon lifted its head from the stone.
It rose up, slowly, out of its own coils, uncoiling itself loop by gleaming loop, until its great crowned head was level with the face of the girl standing in the air above the pool.
And then it began to circle her.
Round and round.
Its long starry body gliding through the empty air of the cavern as if the air were water, round her, close, closer, enclosing her in loop after loop of black and gold and drifting stars, the way it had circled the cocoon.
The way a guardian circles the one thing in the whole world it was made to guard.
It brought its head round, at last, in front of her.
Close.
Its long dark muzzle an arm’s length from her face, its golden horns sweeping back above her.
Its two star-eyes looking into her closed ones.
Waiting.
And Lyra Eisenhardt opened her eyes.
V.
Grandpa!
They were the same eyes.
Violet-frost, with the silver rings round the pupils, her grandmother’s eyes.
But brighter now, so bright that the silver rings shone like the rims of two small moons.
They opened, slowly, under the silver lashes, and looked out at the world for the first time since the water closed over her.
And the first thing in the world they saw was the dragon.
An arm’s length away.
No.
Less.
Much less: because at the very moment she opened her eyes, the dragon, in what was perhaps the most important moment of its entire newly begun existence, leaned in.
Close.
Very close.
Its enormous dark muzzle a hand’s breadth from her nose.
Its two enormous eight-pointed star-eyes, each one as big as her head, filling her whole sight.
Its great black nostrils flaring, very gently, as it breathed in her scent for the first time.
Lyra looked at the dragon.
The dragon looked at Lyra.
One heartbeat.
Two.
The dragon opened its mouth, a little, slowly, as if to speak, and showed a great many very long, very white, very sharp teeth.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!”
Lyra kicked it.
She did not decide to.
Nobody who saw it ever believed she decided to.
It was not a technique.
It was not the Thousand Steps, or the Eisenhardt sword-forms, or anything Madame Odile had ever taught her.
It was the kick of a girl who has opened her eyes to find a monster’s face a hand’s breadth from her nose: one bare foot coming up from nowhere, straight, with her whole body behind it, and every ounce of the power that had just poured into her from the Gate With No Name behind that, and landing square on the end of the dragon’s long dark muzzle.
BOOM.
The Oblivion Black Dragon left.
It went up the Starwell like a stone out of a sling.
Backward.
Head first.
All of it: the whole impossible length of it unspooling after its head like a ribbon after a thrown spool, black and gold and stars, up out of the ninth pool, over the eighth terrace, over the seventh, over the Archduke’s head, so close that the wind of it blew his hair flat, up past the sixth and the fifth and the fourth, while a hundred young soldiers in the terraces flattened themselves in the water and stared straight up at the long starry belly going over them like a comet.
A hundred yards.
More.
Clean up the whole great stair of mirrors.
It hit the ice wall of the cavern just below the uppermost pool, with a sound like a cannon fired into a glacier.
And stuck there.
Embedded.
Its head and the front half of it buried in the ancient blue ice, in a great starburst of cracks, with its long body hanging down the wall below it in loose limp loops, swaying very gently, and its tail dangling over the lip of the uppermost pool, its golden tip trailing in the water about a foot from Madame Odile de Varenne.
Madame Odile looked at the tail.
The tail twitched.
Madame Odile, very slowly, moved her cane six inches to the left.
* * *
At the bottom of the Starwell, Lyra Eisenhardt was panicking.
She was standing in the air above a dry pool she did not recognise, in a cavern that seemed to be cracked all over, with her heart going like a war drum and her hair (what was wrong with her hair?) floating round her in a great dark shining cloud that went all the way down past her knees.
The last thing in the world she remembered was water, and stars, and a woman with her own face saying we were never three.
And then she had opened her eyes and there had been a face.
A huge, dark, scaly face, full of teeth.
And she had kicked it.
And it had gone up the wall.
She had seen frost-drakes.
She had seen the great ice drakes of the aerie, wheeling round the peak above Frost-Crest, from a very long way below.
But never in her life (never in this life) had she seen a dragon.
Not a real one.
Not one with its nose a hand’s breadth from hers.
She looked round wildly.
Water.
Cracked stone.
Ice.
Faces.
A hundred faces, all of them staring at her, white, open-mouthed.
She couldn’t find anyone.
She couldn’t find anyone…
And then she looked up, and there in the air above her, standing on nothing, with his white hair and his plain dark coat and his old, calm, familiar face, was her grandfather.
She did not decide to do that, either.
One moment she was standing in the air above the ninth pool.
The next, without any sense of having moved at all, without a flicker or a flash or a sound, she was not.
There was simply a small soft pop of displaced air above the pool, and a scatter of silver light where she had been, and Lyra Eisenhardt was forty feet up in the empty air of the Starwell with both arms locked round the Sword Emperor of Aethoria’s neck, clinging to him like a kitten up a tree.
“GRANDPA!”
Kaelen Eisenhardt, who had held the North alone for seven hundred years and been struck by the full crushing weight of a newly born law of the cosmos not half an hour ago, and rocked, rocked again.
Very slightly.
Mostly from surprise.
“GRANDPA!
GRANDPA, IT’S A DRAGON!
THERE’S A DRAGON!
Her voice rang off every wall of the cavern.
It was not the voice of the woman among the travelling worlds.
It was not the voice of a Divine Beast’s master, or of the bearer of the Oblivion, or of anything at all from the oldest songs.
It was the voice of a small girl who has woken up from a nightmare and found the nightmare still in the room.
Half the people in the Starwell had heard that voice before.
They had heard it in the nursery corridors of Frost-Crest, ten years ago, at three in the morning, when Lady Lyra had seen a shadow on the wall.
The Sword Emperor of Aethoria looked down at his granddaughter, clinging to his neck in mid-air with her face pressed into his coat and several yards of starry violet hair wrapped round both of them like a cloak.
He looked up the long cracked stair of the Starwell, at the dragon hanging out of the ice wall at the top of it.
He looked back down at his granddaughter.
“Yes,” said Kaelen Eisenhardt gravely.
“I had noticed.”
“Why is there a DRAGON?”
“That,” said her grandfather, “is a long story.” He put one hand, very gently, on the back of her head, on the flowing dark hair with the stars in it, the way he had done when she was four years old and had fallen off a pony.
“And I suspect you will not enjoy it.
Shall we go down first?”
Lyra lifted her face from his coat.
She looked down.
At the floor of the Starwell, forty feet below her bare dangling feet.
At nothing, under her, at all.
“…Grandpa.
Why are we in the air?”
“We are in the air,” said the Sword Emperor, “because you put us here.”
Lyra’s arms tightened round his neck so hard that a lesser man would have choked.
* * *
Somewhere in the third terrace, someone laughed.
It was a small laugh.
Shaky.
Half a sob.
Nobody knew afterward who it had been.
Rowan always said it was Hakon, and Hakon always said it was Finn, and Finn always said nothing and looked at the ceiling.
But it broke something.
All across the stair of cracked pools, a hundred young soldiers who had been crushed under the water by the weight of the cosmos, and heard the sky roar, and watched their friend come out of a cocoon of darkness looking like a goddess out of the oldest songs, and then watched her kick a dragon a hundred yards up a wall and vanish into her grandfather’s arms screaming Grandpa like a five-year-old, looked at each other.
And broke.
It went across the Starwell like a wave: laughing, crying, gasping, half of them doing all three at once, clutching at each other in the water.
Arne Stenvik sat down in the third terrace with a splash and laughed so hard he slid under.
Sigurd had his face in his hands.
On the lip of the seventh terrace, the Archduke of the North let go of his son’s robe at last, and put the heel of his hand over his eyes, and his great shoulders were shaking, and nobody could tell which way.
And then they were moving.
Kaelen came down through the air, slowly, with his granddaughter still clinging to him, and set his feet on the cracked white lip of the eighth terrace.
And before Lyra could even unlock her arms from round his neck, they hit her like a wave.
Cedric first.
Of course Cedric first.
He came down the last two terraces in a single flying leap that ended in an unbalanced belly-flop into the eighth pool, and came up out of it already shouting.
“Lyra!
Lyra!
Are you all right, are you hurt, does anything hurt, what happened to your hair, why is it purple, why are your eyelashes…”
“It’s not purple,” said Isolde, arriving.
“It’s violet.” And then Isolde Frostmere, who never ran, who had never once in her life been seen with a single silver hair out of place, was at the lip of the pool with her braids coming down and her hands on Lyra’s face, turning it to the light.
“Look at me.
Look at me.
Lyra.
Do you know me?”
“Of course I know you,” said Lyra, bewildered, from her grandfather’s shoulder.
“You’re Isolde.
Isolde, there’s a dragon…”
“We saw the dragon.
Everyone in the North saw the dragon.
Hold still.”
And then everyone.
Senna, white-faced and soaked, shoving her way through to the front with Finn half a step behind her and not a word out of either of them, and grabbing Lyra’s wrist as if to make sure it was real.
Rowan with his new green-gold temples and his mouth still open.
Mira and Sigurd.
The twins, both talking at once.
Arne, dripping, looming over everyone at the back like a friendly cliff.
Hands on her shoulders.
Hands on her arms.
Someone holding the end of her hair and staring at the stars drifting down it.
Someone else holding up one of her hands to the light as though checking it still had five fingers.
Her mother, coming down the terraces in the Archduke’s coat with her hand over her mouth.
Her father behind her.
And at the very back, last, unhurried, Lady Seraphina, coming down the stair of mirrors with her hands folded and the faintest, faintest shadow of a smile on her serene face.
“I’m fine,” Lyra kept saying, from the middle of it all.
“I’m fine.
I’m fine.
I think.
Why is everyone looking at me like that?
Is it the hair?
What’s wrong with my face?”
Nobody quite knew how to tell her.
VI.
The Mighty Divine Dragon
At the top of the Starwell, there was a sound like a cork coming out of a bottle.
Pok.
The Oblivion Black Dragon came out of the ice wall.
It did not come out gracefully.
Its head came free all at once in a burst of blue ice chips, and the rest of it, with nothing left to hang from, slid down the wall in a long loose rattling heap and landed in the uppermost pool with an enormous splash that soaked Madame Odile de Varenne to the knees.
And from the end of its long dark muzzle, where a bare foot had landed square, rose a small, thin, wavering curl of grey smoke.
It lay there in the pool in a tangle of black and gold.
Its star-eyes rolled, slowly, in two different directions.
Then they found each other again, and focused, and found the bottom of the Starwell.
And found her.
It rose up out of the uppermost pool.
All of it: its whole vast gleaming starry length, lifting into the air with its golden horns flashing and its mane of dark mist streaming and the ripples of starlight racing down its scales, until it filled the whole upper height of the cavern from wall to wall, and every young soldier in the Starwell, laughing a moment ago, froze in the water.
It drew a breath.
“*OW!!!*”
The voice was enormous.
It shook the ice-chandeliers.
It was deep and vast and terrible and old, the voice of the roar that had gone out over the world and made the Beast Kings kneel.
And it was outraged.
“HOW DARE YOU!” roared the Oblivion Black Dragon.
“HOW DARE YOU, YOU, YOU MERE HUMAN, YOU TINY, TINY, *KICK ME!
KICK ME IN THE FACE!
DO YOU KNOW WHAT I AM?
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHO I AM?
I AM…*”
It reared up, to its full and terrible height, golden horns raking the roof of the dome.
“*I AM…*”
Its voice wobbled.
“I am…
I’m…”
At the bottom of the Starwell, in the middle of the crowd of her friends, with her arms still locked round her grandfather’s neck, Lyra Eisenhardt stared up at it with her silver-ringed eyes as round as two coins.
The dragon looked down at her.
The great star-eyes, each one as big as her head, began, very slowly, to fill.
“I’m the mighty…
the mighty Divine Dragon…” said the Oblivion Black Dragon, in a voice that had gone very small and very high and very shaky.
“I just got born.
I’ve been waiting forever and ever and ever for you to wake up.
I went round and round and round you the whole time, I didn’t stop once, I was being so *good, and I was going to say hello, I was going to say something really majestic, I practised it, and you…
you…*”
Its lower jaw trembled.
“You *kicked me.*”
And the Oblivion Black Dragon, terror of the oldest songs, at whose birth every Beast King in Aethoria had knelt, threw back its golden-horned head and burst into tears.
“*HUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!*”
And as it wailed, it shrank.
With the first great sob, it was suddenly no bigger than a warhorse: still long, still black and gold and starry, but small enough that the cavern seemed to grow around it.
With the second, it was the size of a frost-wolf.
With the third, a hound.
And it kept going, getting smaller with every hiccupping wail, its long body drawing in, its legs getting stubbier, its head getting rounder, its star-eyes staying exactly the same size, which meant that as the rest of it shrank they got bigger and bigger in its face, until…
Poof.
A puff of starry silver smoke.
And floating in the air above the uppermost pool, where the vast dark terror of the oldest songs had been, there was a dragon the size of a house cat.
It was round.
That was the first thing.
Round, and soft-looking, in a way that no dragon in any song had ever been.
Its scales were still the deepest gleaming black, with the stars still rippling over them, but on something this size they looked less like the void between the worlds and more like a very expensive velvet cushion that someone had sprinkled with glitter.
Its golden horns had become two stubby golden nubs, with one small branch each.
The fine golden line still ran round and round its body, but there was not very much body for it to run round, so it went round only three times, like a ribbon on a parcel.
Its four legs were short and fat.
Its claws, still black, still gold-edged, were very tiny.
Its mane of starry mist had become a little fluffy tuft on top of its head, like a dandelion.
And its eyes.
Its eyes were still two eight-pointed stars, silver and violet, and they were now very nearly half the size of its entire face, and they were overflowing with tears.
Big, round, shining tears, each with a tiny star in it, rolling down its round velvety cheeks and dripping off its chin into the water of the uppermost pool with small sad plinks.
“Hic,” said the mighty Divine Dragon.
“Hic.
Huaaa…
she *kicked me…*”
It drifted slowly down through the air of the Starwell, hiccupping, sniffling, crying in great gulping wails, its stubby little legs dangling, its long tail curled round underneath it like a cat’s, past every terrace and every staring face, all the way down the stair of cracked mirrors, until it came to hover, very sadly, in the air just in front of the crowd at the bottom.
In front of Lyra.
It looked at her with its enormous, brimming star-eyes.
“Huaaa…” said the dragon.
Nobody in the Starwell moved.
Nobody breathed.
A hundred young soldiers of the North, the Archduke and the Archduchess, the four elders, the Matriarch of House Eisenhardt, Madame Odile de Varenne, soaked to the knees, and the Sword Emperor of Aethoria, all stood absolutely still, staring at the tiny, round, sobbing, starry black dragon in the air.
And from behind her grandfather’s shoulder, very slowly, with a great deal of glowing violet hair still wrapped round both of them, Lyra Eisenhardt peeked out.
* * *
End of Chapter 25.