The First Dragon(73)
“I recall it taking far longer to get to the last time,” said Charles. “Is the airship just faster, or did the Archipelago shrink?”
“Probably both,” said Jack. “I think the Archipelago grew in accordance with how many lands were added, or discovered, or invented, or even imagined. And,” he said, surveying the bleak, open ocean, “with no lands to fill it up, it simply got . . . smaller.”
♦ ♦ ♦
It took considerably less time for them to arrive at the only other island that couldn’t be removed by Samaranth, because it was the very island that marked the edge of the original Archipelago.
“Terminus,” Madoc said as he leaned heavily against the railing. “I never expected to see it again.”
“Father, are you all right?” Rose asked.
“I am . . . remembering,” Madoc answered slowly. “The last time I went over the side of this waterfall, it wasn’t in a ship.”
“Wait!” Charles exclaimed. “What about the different gates, below,” he said as the ship flew down the face of the waterfall. “Aren’t there dangers abounding here?”
“I don’t think we’ll find any,” said Jack. “It’s been twenty years since you restored the keep, so we’ve had a little time to look around. As far as we could tell, when the Echthroi occupied the whole of the region, they completely absorbed or destroyed all the gates. It’s all free passage to the end now.”
“That’s sort of a good-news, bad-news scenario,” said Charles. “It’s the first thing that the Echthroi have ever done that I was actually happy to hear about.”
It was dark by the time the ship reached the bottom of the waterfall and began sailing over open ocean again.
“When we came this way before, there were thousands of lights above,” Rose said wonderingly, “and the Professor said they were Dragons. I wonder where they’ve gone?”
“I thought you had, ah, released all the Dragons with the sword,” said Edmund, “and that there weren’t any left.”
“Those were all who descended from angel to Dragon at Samaranth’s urging, when the City of Jade fell,” said Madoc, “but they were not all the Dragons there are, nor were they the first Dragons of creation.”
“Where have they gone?” asked Rose. “What’s happened to all of them?”
Madoc shrugged. “I can’t say for certain. Samaranth taught me that this plane borders heaven itself, and so that may be where they have returned to. Why, I have no idea.”
“It was the Echthroi,” said Fred. “The entire Archipelago was lost to shadow. I don’t think any Dragon would stick around to watch over a world that we screwed up that badly.”
“Maybe when we put everything right,” said Rose, “the Dragons will return again.” She looked up into the darkness and sighed. “Maybe.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“It shouldn’t be too long now,” Madoc said as he and Rose consulted the Imaginarium Geographica. “We’re almost there, at the End of the World.”
“There was a time not long ago,” said Uncas, “that we believed Terminus and th’ waterfalls was the End of the World, but then we found out it went beyond that. And now, we’re finding out that the boundary is even farther away. I’m starting to think there’s no end to anything!”
“There was also a time,” Jack said wryly, “when you would have taken my shadow for the chance to have that book, Madoc. And done many other terrible things besides.”
“Jack!” Rose exclaimed. “I can’t believe you said that!”
“It’s all right,” Madoc said, shushing her. “It’s better that I know these things, if he feels they are worth saying.”
“This will be difficult to hear,” Jack said. “You are not the man now that you were then.”
Madoc considered Jack’s words, then slowly nodded his head. “True,” he said at last, “I am not. I have been several men since that time, and a Dragon besides. But I think I am better than I was. I hope I am. And if that is true, I should be able to bear an accounting of my own darker choices.”
“Fair enough,” Jack said, turning to the others. “During our first great conflict with, ah, the Winter King, we discovered something that chilled us all to the core. We were focused on safeguarding the Imaginarium Geographica and by extension the Archipelago, but Mordred knew how connected this world was to our own. And he knew that as devoted as we had become to seeing through what we had promised Bert and Professor Sigurdsson we would do, we might abandon our responsibilities as Caretakers if something we cared for more was threatened.”