The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  I registered with a fake e-mail and joined and posted this:

  Looking for info:

  Bee

  Key

  Sword

  I forgot to screen cap, bad me. But I got three replies within ten minutes, one calling me a troll, one that was just seven question marks, and the third was a shrug emoji.

  Five minutes later the post was removed and I had two messages in my board inbox.

  The first was from one of the admins and just said “Don’t.”

  I replied and said it wasn’t spam, just a question.

  The admin replied again and said: “I know. Don’t. You don’t want to get into that.”

  The second message, from an account with no posts and an alphanumeric nonsense username was this:

  Crown

  Heart

  Feather

  The Owl King is coming.

  THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER walks through the snow, talking to the moon.

  He asks her to show him which way to go or to give him a sign or to let him know, somehow, that everything will be fine even if it is a lie but the moon says nothing and Zachary trudges on, the snow clinging to the legs of his pajamas and falling into his shoes.

  He complains that she should be doing something instead of just glowing there and then apologizes, for who is he to question the actions or inactions of the moon?

  The woods do not seem to be getting any closer no matter how far he walks. He should have reached them by now.

  Zachary knows, despite the presence of the stars and the moon, that he is still far below the surface of the earth. He can feel the heaviness looming above him.

  After what seems like a very long time with no progress he pauses to sort through his bag for anything that might be useful. His fingers close around a book and he stops searching.

  He takes out Sweet Sorrows. He doesn’t open it, he only holds it for a moment and then places it in the pocket of his coat, to keep it closer.

  The bag free of all of its books suddenly feels heavy. The remainder of its contents seem unnecessary.

  None of these objects are going to help him. Not here.

  Zachary drops the bag on the ground, abandoning it to the snow.

  He loops his fingers through the chains around his neck, with their key and sword and a compass currently incapable of pointing him in any direction.

  He holds on to them as he continues walking. Lighter now with only his book and his sword to carry.

  He wishes Dorian were actually here. He wishes it almost more than he wishes he knew what to do next.

  “If Dorian is down here somewhere I want to see him,” Zachary says to the moon. “Right now.”

  The moon does not reply.

  (She has not replied to any of his requests.)

  As Zachary walks his thoughts keep returning to the place he left behind and the imaginary party within it and the way it felt to see this story he has found himself in seep into his normal life and fill the empty spaces.

  There are footsteps approaching. Someone running, the sound muffled by the snow. Zachary freezes. A hand grabs his arm.

  Zachary rounds on the person behind him, pulling the sword from the scabbard to keep this new delusion at bay.

  “Zachary, it’s me,” Dorian says, holding his hands up defensively. He looks just as Zachary remembers, from the longer hair to the star-buttoned coat, except moonlit and covered in snow.

  “Where does the moon go when she’s not in the sky?” Zachary asks without lowering the sword and he knows from the smile that he gets in response that this is not a fantasy, this is the real person. Here but not here. Standing with him in the moonlit snow and also somewhere else but actually Dorian. He knows it down to his nearly frozen toes.

  “An inn that once rested at one crossroads that is now down here with the rest of whatever this is,” Dorian says, waving a hand around at the snow and the stars. “I’m there now. I think I might be asleep. I was looking out the window at the snow thinking about you and then I saw you and then I was out here. I don’t recall leaving the building.”

  Zachary lowers the sword.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” he says.

  Dorian takes his arm again, pulling him closer, leaning his forehead against Zachary’s. He feels warm yet cold and real yet not real, all at once.

  This person is a place Zachary could lose himself in, and never wish to be found.

  It starts to snow again.

  “You’re down here too now, aren’t you?” Dorian asks. “The world beneath the world beneath the world?”

  “I took the elevator with Max—Mirabel, I mean—after you fell. I’m farther down than that now, somewhere past a lost city of honey and bone. I went through a door. I should stop doing that. I lost my owl.”

  “Do you think you could find the inn from where you are?”

  “I don’t know,” Zachary says. “I must be getting close to the Starless Sea. You and I might not even be in the same time anymore. If…if anything happens—”

  “Don’t you dare,” Dorian interrupts him. “Don’t you dare make this goodbye. I am going to find you. We are going to find each other and we are going to figure this out together. You may be by yourself but you are not alone.”

  “It’s dangerous to go alone,” Zachary says, almost automatically and at least partly to stop the tears that are stinging his eyes along with the snow. He replaces the sword in its scabbard and removes it from his back. “Take this,” he says, offering the sword to Dorian. It feels like the thing to do. Dorian probably knows how to use it.

  Dorian accepts the sword and starts to say something else but then he vanishes, quicker than a blink. He is there and then he is not. There aren’t even footprints left in the snow. No indication that he was ever there.

  Except the sword is gone. Along with the moon who has vanished behind the clouds.

  The snow is lighter now, the flakes almost floating. Snow-globe snow.

  Zachary reaches out just to be certain there is nothing to touch. The snow wraps around his outstretched hand and slips under the cuff of his inherited coat.

  Dorian was here, he thinks to himself in an affirmation. He’s down here somewhere and he’s alive and I am not alone.

  Zachary takes a deep breath. The air is not so cold anymore.

  There is a soft noise nearby. Zachary turns and here is the stag, staring at him. Close enough to see its breath clouding in the air.

  The stag’s antlers are gold and covered with candles, twisting and burning like a crown of flame and wax.

  Zachary stares at the stag and the stag stares back, its eyes like dark glass.

  For a moment neither of them moves.

  Then the stag turns and walks toward the trees.

  Zachary follows.

  They reach the edge of the woods sooner than he expects. Moonlight or starlight or imaginary artificial light filters in through the trees though most of the space stays in shadow. The snow looks more blue than white and the trees themselves are gold. Zachary pauses to inspect the trunk of one more closely and finds its bark covered in delicate gold leaf.

  Zachary follows the stag through the trees as closely as he can though sometimes it is no more than a light guiding him onward. He loses sight of the field quickly, consumed by this gilded forest that is both deep and dark.

  The trees grow larger and taller. The ground feels uneven and Zachary brushes the snow away with his shoe to find it is not earth but keys, piles of them shifting beneath his feet.

  The stag guides Zachary to a clearing. The trees here part, revealing a stretch of star-filled sky above. The moon is gone and when Zachary returns his attention to the ground the stag has abandoned him as well.

  The trees surrounding the clearing are draped wit
h ribbons. Black and white and gold, wound around branches and trunks and tangled in the snow.

  The ribbons are strung with keys.

  Small keys and long keys and large heavy keys. Ornate keys and plain keys and broken keys. They rest in piles in boughs and swing freely from branches, their ribbons crossing and tangling, binding them to one another.

  In the center of the clearing is a figure seated in a chair, facing away from him. Looking off into the woods. It is difficult to see in the light but Zachary catches the barest hint of pink.

  “Max,” Zachary calls but she does not turn. He moves toward her but the snow slows his progress, allowing only single steps at a time. It seems like an eternity before he reaches her.

  “Max,” he calls again but still the figure in the chair does not turn. She does not even move as he gets closer. The hope he had not realized he was clinging to so tightly dissolves beneath his fingers along with her shoulder as he reaches to touch her.

  The figure in the chair is carved from snow and ice.

  As her gown cascades around the chair the ripples in the fabric become waves, and within the waves there are ships and sailors and sea monsters and then the sea within her gown is lost in the drifting snow.

  Her face is empty and icy but it is not merely a resemblance like the statues from before, this is as precise a likeness as could be captured in frozen water, as though it has been molded from the flesh-and-blood version. It is Mirabel down to its snow-flecked eyelashes, perfect save for the now broken shoulder.

  Within her chest there is a light. It glows red underneath the snow, creating the soft illusion of pink that he had seen from afar.

  Her hands rest in her lap. He expects them to be held out and waiting for a book like the statue of the Queen of the Bees but instead they hold a length of torn ribbon, like the ribbons in the trees, only if this one once had a key strung on it the key has been removed.

  Zachary can see now that she is not looking out into the trees. She is looking at the other chair in front of her.

  This chair is empty.

  It is as though she has been here, always, waiting for him.

  The keys hanging from the trees sway and clatter against one another, chiming like bells.

  Zachary sits down in the chair.

  He looks at the figure facing him.

  He listens to the keys as they dance on their ribbons, striking against one another around them.

  He closes his eyes.

  He takes a deep breath. The air is cool and crisp and star-bright.

  Zachary opens his eyes again and looks at the figure of Mirabel in front of him. Frozen and waiting, her gown weighed down by old tales and former lifetimes.

  He can almost hear her voice.

  Tell me a story, she says.

  It is what she has been waiting for.

  Zachary obliges her.

  DORIAN WAKES IN an unfamiliar room. He can still feel the snow against his skin and the sword in his hand but no snow could survive here in this warmth and his fingers are clutched around the blankets piled on the bed and nothing more.

  Outside the inn the wind howls, confused by this turn of events.

  (The wind does not like to be confused. Confusion ruins its sense of direction and direction is everything to the wind.)

  Dorian pulls on his boots and his coat and abandons the comfort of his room. As he fastens the star-shaped buttons the carved bone against his fingertips feels no more or less real than the sword had felt in his hand moments before, or the memory of Zachary’s chilled skin against his.

  The lanterns in the main hall have been dimmed but the fire still burns in the expansive stone fireplace. Candles increase the spread of the light over the tables and chairs.

  “Did the wind wake you?” the innkeeper asks, rising from one of the chairs by the fire, an open book in his hand. “I can get you something to help you sleep if you’d like.”

  “No, thank you,” Dorian says, staring at this man who has been plucked from his head, in a hall he has longed to visit a thousand times. If Dorian could conjure a place to forget where he had come from or where he was going it would be this.

  “I have to leave,” he says to the innkeeper.

  Dorian goes to the door of the inn and opens it. He expects the snow and the forest but he looks instead at a shadowed, snowless cavern. In the distance there is a shape like a mountain that could be a castle. It is very, very far away.

  “Close it,” the innkeeper says behind him. “Please.”

  Dorian hesitates but then he closes the door.

  “The inn can only send you where you are meant to go,” the innkeeper tells him. “But that,” he points at the door, “is a depth where only the owls dare to fly, waiting for their king. You cannot go there unprepared.”

  He crosses back to the fire and Dorian follows him.

  “What do I need?” Dorian asks.

  Before the innkeeper can answer the door opens, its hinges flung wide. The wind enters first, bringing a gust of snow along with it, and after the snow comes a traveler wearing a long hooded cloak the color of the night sky embroidered with constellations in silver thread. Even after the traveler pulls back her hood snowflakes continue to cling to her dark hair and remain sparkling over her skin.

  The door slams itself shut behind her.

  The moon goes directly to Dorian, taking a long parcel wrapped in midnight-blue silk from her cloak as she approaches.

  “This is yours,” she says as she hands it to him, forgoing the unnecessary introductions. “Are you ready? There is not much time.”

  Dorian knows what the parcel contains before he unwraps the silk, the weight of it familiar in his hand though he has held it only once before in a dream.

  (If the sword could sigh with relief as it is taken from its scabbard it would, for it has been lost and found so many times before and it knows this time will be the last.)

  “We cannot send him out there,” the innkeeper says to his wife. “It’s…” He cannot bring himself to articulate what it is and danger beyond articulation is worse than anything Dorian can imagine.

  “It is where he wishes to go,” the moon insists.

  “I’ll find Zachary there, won’t I?” Dorian asks.

  The moon nods.

  “Then that is where I’m going.”

  (There is a pause here, filled only by the wind and the crackling of the fire and the hum of the story impatient to continue, purring like a cat.)

  “I’ll get his bag,” the innkeeper says, leaving Dorian alone with the moon.

  “This inn is a tethered space,” she tells him. “It remains the same no matter how the tides change. Once you leave here you will be untethered again and you will not be able to trust anything you encounter. There are things in the shadows, whether they were god or mortal or story once, they are something else now. They will tailor themselves to suit you so they might pull you from your path.”

  “To suit me?”

  “To frighten or confuse or seduce. They will use your thoughts to ensnare you. We exist at the edges here, of what you might call story or myth. It can be difficult to navigate. Hold tightly to what you believe.”

  “What if I don’t know what I believe?” Dorian asks.

  The moon looks at him with night-dark eyes and for a moment it seems as though she might give him something, perhaps a warning or a wish, but instead she takes Dorian’s hand in hers and lifts it to her lips and then she lets him go. The gesture is simple and profound and within it he finds the answer to his question.

  The innkeeper returns with Dorian’s bag. It is heavier now, Dorian can feel the weight of the heart-filled box that has been placed inside. He should probably return the heart to Fate but he decides to concern himself with finishing one story at time.

  Dorian opens the
door of the inn, revealing the same dark vista as before. It looks more like a castle than a mountain now. There might even be a light in one of the windows, but it is too far away to be certain.

  “May the gods bless and keep you,” the innkeeper says. He places the lightest of kisses on Dorian’s lips.

  Armed with a sword and a heart, Dorian steps into the unknown and leaves the inn behind.

  The wind howls after him as he leaves in fear of what is to come, but a mortal cannot understand the wishes of the wind no matter how loud it cries and so these final warnings go unheeded.

  excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins

  I feel like I’ve heard of the Owl King before but I don’t know where.

  * * *

  —

  I asked Elena what she’d wanted to talk to Z about after class that night and she said he’d been in the library checking out some weird book that wasn’t in the system and then he came back after to track down other books from the same donation, total library-detective mode (her words) but she didn’t know why and he hadn’t said. She did mention a couple of the books (including the first one) were still missing, so maybe he has them.

  She gave me the name she gave him from the book donation. J. S. Keating, so I did some digging. A lot of digging.

  * * *

  —

  Jocelyn Simone Keating, born 1812. Not a lot on her, no marriage records or subsequent kids or anything. Sounds like she was disowned. Other Keatings: brother, married, no kids, just a “ward” without a name recorded dead as a teen. Brother’s wife died, he remarried, wife number two died and later the brother died ancient and alone I guess. There were two other Keating cousins who didn’t make it out of their twenties. Then that’s, like, the end of the Keatings, or at least that branch since it’s a common enough name.

  No death record for Jocelyn. Not that I can find.

  But the books were donated in her name, like, less than thirty years ago? Elena let me dig through the library files when her supervisor was on his lunch break and I found the full record, though it wasn’t digital at the time because they were still transferring and it’s a low-res scan of a handwritten paper and half of it is illegible.