The Starless Sea
Zachary remembers the man lost in time wandering cities of honey and bone in Sweet Sorrows and the mention of the Starless Sea in Fortunes and Fables and wonders if all of these stories are somehow the same story. Wonders where Simon could be now and how to go about finding him. Wonders about the burned place and the broom in the Keeper’s office. Wonders what, precisely, happens to the son of the fortune-teller.
On the corner of the desk is an origami star that he had pocketed. He picks it up and looks closer. There is writing on it.
Zachary unfolds the star. It stretches out into a long strip of paper.
It contains words so tiny they seem whispered:
Nightmare number 83: I am walking in a dark dark place and something big and slithery is slithering in the dark so close I could reach and touch it but if I touch the slithery thing it will know I am here and it will eat me very slowly.
Zachary lets the nightmare flutter onto the desk and picks up the book again. He turns to the last written page and rereads it, pausing at the final word in the unfinished book.
Zachary gently removes the cat from his lap. He puts the cat on the floor and the book in his bag along with a cigarette lighter so he doesn’t end up stuck in the dark again and he slips on his shoes. He pulls a maroon sweater on over his pajamas and goes to look for Mirabel.
Once in a long while an acolyte chooses to give up something other than their tongue as they take their vows.
Such acolytes are rare. One will not remember the last exception that came before. They will not serve long enough to meet the one who follows.
The painter has lost her way.
She thinks (she is wrong) that choosing this path (a path, any path) will bring her closer to this place she once loved, this place that has changed around her as time changes all things.
She wishes to rekindle flames long extinguished.
To find something she has lost that she cannot name but feels the absence of within her like a hunger.
The painter makes her decision without telling anyone. Only her single student notices her absence but thinks little of it having learned long ago that sometimes people disappear like rabbits into hats and sometimes they return and other times they do not.
The acolytes allow for this rare concession, as their numbers are dwindling.
The painter spends her time in solitude and contemplation categorizing losses and regrets trying to determine if there was ever anything she could have done to prevent any of them or if they simply passed through her life and out again like waves upon a shore.
She thinks if she has an idea for a new painting at any point during her time locked away she will refuse this path and return to her paints and let the bees find someone else to serve them.
But there are no new ideas. Only old ones, turned over and over again in her mind. Only the safe and the familiar, things she has captured and recaptured in brushstrokes so many times that she finds nothing but emptiness within them.
She considers trying to write but has always felt more comfortable with images than with words.
When the door opens long before the painter expects it to she accepts her bee without hesitation.
The acolyte and the painter walk down empty halls toward an unmarked door. Only a single cat notices them in this moment and though the cat recognizes this mistake for what it is he does not interfere. It is not the way of cats to interfere with fate.
The painter expects to sacrifice both eyes but only one is taken.
One will be more than enough.
As the images flood the painter’s sight, as she is bombarded by so many pictures unfolding in such detail that she cannot separate one from the other, cannot dream of capturing even fractions of them in oils on canvas even as her fingers itch for her brushes, she realizes this path was not meant for her.
But it is too late now to choose another.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS walks the halls of the Harbor, realizing that he doesn’t actually know where Mirabel’s room is, he had not thought to ask. He loops down through the cavernous ballroom to where he last saw her but the wine cellar is unoccupied. The painting of the lady with her bee-covered face looms over the racks of wine and before Zachary leaves again he picks an interesting-looking bottle to put in his bag, an unnamed red marked with a lantern and crossed keys.
Zachary takes a different flight of stairs up from the ballroom and doesn’t know where he is. He has wandered from familiar to un- again.
He pauses, trying to get his bearings, by a reading nook lined with books with a single armchair and a small table formed from a broken column. There’s a teacup on it, with a lit candle burning where the tea should be.
Between the bookshelves is a small brass plate with a button, like an old-fashioned light switch. Zachary presses it.
The bookshelf slides back, opening into a hidden room.