The Starless Sea

…catalogued doors in three additional cities. A. has not yet reported back from Edo. Awaiting response. Missed contact with…

…suspects we are between incarnations. We exercise patience as our predecessors have before us and as we fear many of our successors will continue to. We shall do what we can to progress what has been put in motion.

…spent more time below. The room is complete and believed to be functional. All now rests on faith. There has been discussion of scattering the archives for safety, J. has moved many of the papers to the cottage…

That’s it. The rest is too faded to read or just partial numbers. I don’t know what it means. This would be easier if secret societies weren’t so secretive. There’s something else that’s all fragments about six doors and a place in some other place existing “out of time” and “the final incarnation” and I don’t know, it’s a little Gozer worshippy.

Then there are the photographs.

One photo has a blond lady sitting at a desk, not looking at the camera. Head down, hair swept up, reading a book. She’s wearing a necklace that might be heart-shaped, I can’t tell. Can’t tell how old she is, either.

The back says Simone K. There’s a date but it’s so faded I can barely make out the 1 and the 8 that might be followed by a 6 or a 5, I can’t tell. Preeti said they didn’t have any other labels but guessed they might be 1860s. The journal pieces can’t be much later than that or they would have called it Tokyo instead of Edo.

There’s a group shot, too. Thirteen people in front of the bookshelves, some standing and others sitting, all kind of looking like they’d rather be reading. It’s super blurry. I know people had to stand still for an absurdly long time for old-school photos but this looks like a particularly restless bunch. One of the ladies is smoking a pipe. Nobody’s in focus, plus the photo has water damage along the top and one side.

But one of the names handwritten on the back says J. S. Keating. Well, you can read the J and the S and it’s either a K or an

H and an ing.

If the names are in order she’s the blond lady standing second from the right, turned to say something or listen to the guy at the end who’s almost vanished with the water damage. Can’t make out his whole name on the back but it starts with an A. The lady is the same one from the Simone photo.

Below the list of names it says: meeting of the owls.

THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER rows a boat across an ocean made of paper.

The structure on the shore behind him looks like a proper castle now. A light glows in an upper window. The shadow of a dragon curls around the highest tower.

The oars dip into confetti and streamers, stirring them up in aquatic shimmers of blue and green though there is no sky here to reflect such colors.

Zachary looks at the space where the sky should be, wondering if somewhere up there someone is making changes to this universe.

Moving a small boat across an ocean. It must seem like nothing from such a distance. A tiny motion in a much larger tableau.

It feels a lot bigger from down here in the center of the ocean.

It takes a lot longer than he expects to reach the city across the sea.

There are many lights along the skyline but Zachary rows toward the brightest one.

As he gets closer he can see that it is a lighthouse.

As he gets closer still he can tell the lighthouse has been imagined from a wine bottle with a candle burning in its neck.

It is the opposite of the castle and its dragon, watching the shape of the city settle into buildings and towers surrounded by painted mountains and then resolve further into the objects they have been constructed from.

The paper confetti around the boat ushers him onto the shore.

Zachary pulls the boat up on the beach so the sea cannot take it away again.

This shore is covered in sand, each grain enormous. But there is only a dusting of it. Beneath it there is a solid surface. Zachary brushes the sand away from a section of it near the boat and uncovers the polished mahogany of the desk this part of the world rests upon, its varnish scratched by sand and time.

He walks from the beach onto green paper grass. He knows now where he is, even if he does not understand why he is here. He walks farther into the doll universe he had longed to see, though he never imagined viewing it from this perspective.

Along the beach there are cliffs and caves and treasure chests and much more to explore but Zachary knows where he is going. He walks inland, the paper grass crunching beneath his bare feet.

He walks past a toppled ruin of a temple and a snow-covered inn, the paper snowflakes scattered over the green of the grass.

He crosses a bridge made of keys and a meadow filled with paper book-page flowers. He does not stop to read them.