A single petal flutters and falls on his hand and dissolves like a snowflake on his skin.
As Dorian walks on the blossoms continue to fall, a few petals at a time, but then they begin to accumulate, drifting over the path.
He cannot pinpoint the moment when they turn from cherry blossoms to snow.
His boots leave prints as he walks farther. There are fewer lights marking the path. The blossom snow falls heavier, taking the candle flames away. It is colder now, each blossom that strikes Dorian’s exposed skin feels like ice.
The darkness comes quick and heavy. Dorian cannot see.
He takes one step forward and then another, his boots sinking deep into the snow.
There is a sound. At first he thinks it is wind but it is steadier, like breathing. There is something moving beside him, then in front of him. He cannot see anything, the darkness is absolute.
He stops. Carefully he feels his way into his knapsack, his hands closing over the box of matches.
Blindly, Dorian attempts to light a match. The first falls from his shivering fingers. He takes a breath and steadies himself and tries another.
The match catches, casting a single trembling flame’s worth of light.
A man stands in the snow in front of Dorian. Taller than him, thinner but with broader shoulders. Atop the broad shoulders is the head of an owl, staring down at him with large, round eyes.
The owl head tilts, considering him.
The large round eyes blink.
The flame reaches the end of the match. The light flickers and fades.
The darkness envelops Dorian again.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS has pictured many a character from a book never dreaming he would end up face-to-face with one of them, and even though he knew that Simon Keating was an actual person and not a book character he’d had a character pictured in his head anyway who was not at all the person he is currently looking at.
This man is older than the eighteen-year-old that Zachary had imagined, though what is age for someone lost in time? He looks thirtyish, with dark eyes and long dirty-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail with several feathers tied into it. A ruffled shirt that might once have been white is now grey but his waistcoat has fared better, missing several buttons that have been replaced by knotted strings. He wears a strip of leather looped twice around his waist like a doubled belt, from it hang several items, including a knife and a coil of rope. More strips of leather and cloth are wrapped around his knees and elbows and his right hand.
His left hand is missing, cut off above the wrist. The end of this arm is also wrapped and protected, and both the skin visible above it and part of his neck have clearly been very badly burned at some point in the past.
“Can you still hear them?” Simon asks.
Zachary shakes his head, as much to get the memory of the voices out as to answer the question. He dropped his torch at some point though now he doesn’t remember if he actually had a torch at all. He tries to remember and recalls statues and darkness and a giant bunny.
He looks up at effigies who for centuries stared out at festivals and worshippers and then at emptiness and after the emptiness their sight was claimed by the honeyed sea and when the tides receded and the light returned they stared first at a single man and now at two.
“They told you lies,” Simon assures Zachary, nodding back at the door. “It is fortunate that I heard you.”
“Thank you,” Zachary says.
“Move through this,” Simon advises him. “Let it move through you and then let it go.”
Simon turns away, leaving Zachary to collect himself. He is shaking but starting to calm, trying to take in everything in front of him and around him and above him.
There are dozens of giant statues. Some figures have animal heads and others have lost their heads entirely. They are posed throughout the space in a way that looks so organic that Zachary would not be surprised if they moved, or perhaps they are moving, very, very slowly.
Hung between the outstretched limbs and crowns and antlers there are ropes and ribbons and threads tying the statues to the balconies and the doors and strung with book pages and keys and feathers and bones. A long sequence of brass moons hangs down the center of the atrium. Some of the ropes are strung on gears and pulleys.
Two of the statues are so large that the balconies are built around them, one on either side. They face each other, over all the other dramas unfolding in stone and on paper and in person.
The nearest one has such detail in its form and likeness that Zachary recognizes the Keeper even though part of his face is obscured by fluttering paper and the curve of a crescent moon. His hands are held out in a familiar-looking gesture, raised as though he is expecting a very large book to be placed in his open palms but instead there are red ribbons, long strips of blood-colored silk, draped across his fingers and around his wrists and then stretching outward, binding him to the balconies and the doors and to the other statue that he faces.
The figure opposite doesn’t look like Mirabel but it’s clearly meant to be her, or someone she used to be. Red ribbons are tied around her wrists and looped around her neck, trailing down to the ground and pooling around her feet like blood. Hey, Max, Zachary thinks, and the statue turns its head ever so slightly to stare at him with empty stone eyes.
“Are you injured?” Simon asks as Zachary stumbles backward, catching his balance on an altar behind him. Its surface is soft beneath his hand, the stone covered in layers upon layers of dripped wax. Zachary shakes his head in response to the question, though he isn’t certain. He can still feel the heaviness of the darkness in his lungs and in his shoes. Maybe he should sit down. He tries to remember how. The ribbons fluttering nearby have words written on them that Zachary cannot read, prayers or pleas or myths. Wishes or warnings.
“I’m…” Zachary starts but he does not know how to complete the statement. He does not know what he is. Not right now.
“Which one are you?” Simon asks, scrutinizing him. “The heart or the feather? You carry the sword but you do not wear the stars. This is confusing. You should not be here. You were meant to be somewhere else.”
Zachary opens his mouth to ask what Simon is talking about, exactly, but instead he says the only thing that his thoughts keep returning to: “I saw a bunny.”
“You saw…” Simon looks at him quizzically and Zachary is unsure he spoke properly, his thoughts feel so separate from his body.
“A bunny,” he repeats, slowly enough that the word sounds wrong again. “A big one. Like an elephant only…bunny.”
“The celestial hare is not a bunny,” Simon corrects him before turning his attention to the ropes and gears above their heads. “If you saw the hare that means the moon is here,” he says. “It is later than I had thought. The Owl King is coming.”
“Wait…” Zachary starts, grounding himself unsteadily with a question he has asked before. “Who is the Owl King?”
“The crown passes from one to another,” Simon answers, preoccupied with adjusting ropes with well-practiced single-handed motions. “The crown passes from story to story. There have been many owl kings with their crowns and their claws.”
“Who’s the Owl King now?” Zachary asks.
“The Owl King is not a who. Not always. Not in this story. You confuse what was with what is.” Simon sighs, pausing his tinkering and returning his attention to Zachary. He explains haltingly, searching for the right words. “The Owl King is a…phenomenon. The future crashing into the present like a wave. Its wings beat in the spaces between choices and before decisions, heralding change…change of the long-awaited sort, the change foretold by prophecies and warned of by omens, written in the stars.”
“Who are the stars?” It is a question Zachary has thought before but not yet asked aloud, though he remains confused as to whether the Owl Ki
ng is a person or a bird or a type of weather.
Simon stares at him and blinks.
“We are the stars,” he answers, as though it is the most obvious of facts afloat in a sea of metaphors and misdirections. “We are all stardust and stories.”
Simon turns away and unties a rope from one of the hooks near the wall. He tugs it and far above the gears and pulleys swing into motion. A crescent shape turns in on itself and disappears. “This is not right,” he says, pulling a different rope that shifts the fluttering pages. “Doors are closing, taking possibilities with them. The story is recorded even when she is unsure of how it goes and now someone else follows after her, reading. Looking for the ending.”
“What?” Zachary asks though maybe he means who and he can’t remember the difference.
“The story,” Simon repeats as though it answers the question instead of creating new ones. “I was in the story and then wandered outside of it and I found this place where I could listen instead of being read. Everything whispers the story here, the sea and the bees whisper and I listen and I try to find the shape of it all. Where it has been and where it is going. New stories wrap themselves around the old ones. The ancient stories that flames whisper to moths. This one wears thin in the places it has been told and retold. There are holes to fall into. I have tried to record it and I have failed.”
Simon gestures up at the statues, at the ribbons and ropes and papers and keys.
“This is…” Zachary begins.
“This is the story,” Simon finishes his thought for him. “If you remain down here long enough you will hear it buzzing. I capture as much as I can. It eases the sound.”
Zachary looks closer. Within the ribbons and ropes and gears and keys there is more, shifting and glimmering and changing in the firelight:
A sword and a crown surrounded by a swarm of paper bees.
A ship without a sea. A library. A city. A fire. A chasm filled with bones and dreams. A figure in a fur coat on a beach. A shape like a cloud or a small blue car. A cherry tree with book-page blossoms.
The keys and the ribbons shift and the images within them grow clearer, too clear to be woven from paper and thread.
Vines climb through windows to curl around a ginger cat asleep in the Keeper’s office. Two women sit on a picnic table beneath the stars, drinking and talking. Behind them a boy stands in front of a painted door that will never open.
Zachary looks from another angle and for a moment the entire ephemeral structure appears to be an enormous owl encompassing the room and then in a fluttering of pages it fragments into bits of story again. The changed viewpoint brings both more and less. Figures that were entwined are now separate. Somewhere it is snowing. There is an inn at a crossroads and someone is walking toward it.
There is a door in the moon.
“The story is changing.” Simon’s voice comes as a surprise beside him, Zachary is so absorbed in the shifting images, though when he looks again there is only a tangle of paper and metal and cloth. “It moves too quickly. Events are overlapping.”
“I thought time wasn’t…” Zachary starts but stops again, unsure of what time wasn’t or won’t be or is. “I thought time was different here.”
“We proceed at different rates but we are all moving into the future,” Simon tells him. “She was holding it in like a breath and now she is gone. I did not think that would happen.”
“Who?” Zachary asks but Simon does not answer, switching more ropes with his one hand.
“The egg is cracking,” he says. “Has cracked. Will crack.”
Above them a series of keys fall, clattering against one another like chimes.
“Soon the dragon will come to eat the world.” Simon turns back to Zachary. “You should not be here. The story followed you here. This is where they want you to be.”
“Who?” Zachary asks again and this time it seems like Simon hears the question. He leans in and whispers, as though he fears someone else might hear.
“They are gods with lost myths, writing themselves new ones. Can you hear the buzzing yet?”
At his words the air changes. A curling breeze moves through the room, sending book pages and ribbons fluttering and extinguishing a number of candles. Simon moves quickly to relight them as the space sinks into shadow.
Zachary takes a few steps to stay out of Simon’s way and backs into a statue of a helmeted warrior mounted on a gryphon, frozen mid-pounce on an unseen enemy, sword drawn and wings spread.
Perched on the statue’s sword is a small owl, staring down at him.
Zachary jumps back in surprise and reaches to draw his own sword but he has left it on the ground some distance away. The owl continues to stare. It is very small, mostly fluff and eyes. There is an object clutched in its talons.
“Why would you fear that which guides you?” Simon asks calmly without turning to look at him, preoccupied with candle lighting. The room grows brighter. “The owls have only ever propelled the story forward. It is their purpose. This one has been waiting for someone to arrive. I should have known.” He moves off, muttering to himself.
The small owl drops the object it carries at Zachary’s feet.
Zachary looks down.
On the stone by his shoe is a folded-paper star.
The owl flies upward and perches on a balcony rail, continuing to stare down at Zachary. When Zachary does nothing the owl gives an impatient hoot of encouragement.
Zachary picks up the paper star. There is text printed on it. It looks familiar. He wonders how far the cats batted it through hallways before it fell all the way down here to wherever the owl fetched it from. Before it found its way to here and now.
Zachary unfolds the star and reads.
The son of the fortune-teller stands before six doorways,
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS looks down at words he has been longing to read, near delirious to have finally found another sentence that starts with the son of the fortune-teller in a familiar serifed typeface on a piece of paper removed from a book before being turned into a star and then gifted to him by a small owl and then he stops.
The owl hoots at him from the balcony.
He is not ready. He doesn’t want to know.
Not yet.
He folds the page back into a star and puts it in his pocket without reading more than the first few words.
Three things lost in time. All right here. Sweet Sorrows in his bag, the sword at his feet, and Simon across the room.
Zachary feels something should happen now that all of them are together but nothing has. Not here, at least. Maybe they’re all still lost and now he’s just lost along with them.
Find man.
Found him. Now what?
Zachary turns his attention back to Simon who is still lighting candles on altars and staircases. The ground is covered in beeswax. Stretches of it look like honeycomb, though any perfect hexagons have been undone by footsteps and time.
As the light increases Zachary can see the other layers that have been built over this temple. An alcove for offerings now holds a pile of blankets. There are stacks of jars placed on the floor, removed from a less wax-covered place and brought here. This is where the man lost in time has been, hidden away for weeks or months or centuries.
Zachary walks over to Simon, following in his steps as he lights his candles.
“You are words on paper,” Simon whispers, to himself or to Zachary or to the words above them clinging to their respective papers. “Be careful what stories you tell yourself.”
“What do you mean?” Zachary asks, recalling the voices in the dark and wondering if they were such a story. Simon starts at the sound of his voice, turning toward him in surprise.
“Hello,” Simon greets him anew. “Are you here to read? I believed once that I was here to read and not be read but the story h
as changed.”
“Changed how?” Zachary says. Simon looks at him blankly. “How has the story changed?” he clarifies, gesturing upward at the pages and the statues, worried by Simon’s behavior and even more concerned about the way everything keeps repeating and becoming more confusing when it should be getting clearer.
“It is broken,” Simon answers, without elaborating as to how one goes about breaking a story. Perhaps it is like breaking a promise. “Its edges are sharp.”
“How do I fix it?” Zachary asks.
“There is no fixing. There is only moving forward in the brokenness. Look, there,” Simon indicates something within the story that Zachary cannot see. “You with your beloved and your blade. The tides will rise. There is a cat looking for you.”
“A cat?” Zachary looks up at the owl and if owls could shrug the owl would shrug but they cannot, not distinctly, and so the owl ruffles its feathers instead.
“So many symbols when at the end and in the beginning there are only ever bees,” Simon remarks.
Zachary sighs and picks up the sword. So many symbols. Symbols are for interpretation, not definition, he reminds himself. The sword feels lighter now, or perhaps he is growing accustomed to the weight of it. He puts it back in the scabbard.
“I have to find Mirabel,” he tells Simon.
Simon stares at him blankly.
“Her,” Zachary says, pointing up at the statue. “Your…” he stops himself, worried that if Simon doesn’t already know Mirabel is his daughter that the revelation might be too much so he starts again. “Mirabel…Fate, whoever she is. This incarnation has pink hair and she’s usually up in the higher Harbor. I don’t know if you can see her in the story but she’s my friend and she’s down here somewhere and I have to find her.”
Zachary thinks that now he has more than one person to find but does not want to get into that. Doesn’t want to think about it. About him. Even though the name that is probably not his real name repeats like a mantra in the back of his mind. Dorian Dorian Dorian.
The Starless Sea Page 37
