01_-_The_Alchemyst

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Shadowrealm was breaking down.
In the west, the clouds had vanished and huge patches of the sky had
already disappeared, leaving only the blinking stars and the overlarge moon
in the black sky. One by one the stars were winking out of existence, and the
moon was beginning to fray at the edges.
“We don’t have much time,” the Morrigan said, watching the sky.
Dee, who was crouching on the ground, gathering as many icy fragments
of Hekate as he could find, thought he could hear a note of fear in the
Morrigan’s voice. “We have time,” he said evenly.
“We can’t afford to be here when the Shadowrealm disappears,” she
continued, looking down at him, her face expressionless. But he knew by the
way she hugged the cloak of crow feathers about her shoulders that she was
nervous.
“What would happen?” Dee wondered aloud. He’d never seen the
Crow Goddess like this before, and he took pleasure in her discomfiture.
The Morrigan raised her head to look at the encroaching darkness, her
black eyes reflecting the tiny spots of stars. “Why, we’d disappear also.
Sucked away into the nothingness,” she added softly, watching the mountains
in the distance turn to something like dust. The dust then spiraled up into the
black sky and vanished. “A true death,” the Morrigan murmured.
Dee was crouched among the melting remains of the Yggdrasill, while
all around him Hekate’s elegant and beautiful world was turning to dust and
blowing away on invisible winds. The goddess had created her
Shadowrealm out of nothingness, and now, without her presence to hold it
together, it was returning to that once more. The mountains had vanished,
blown away like grains of sand, whole swathes of the forest were slowly