“I would think the child of a fortune-teller would not need to ask.”

“But…” Zachary stops, his head more drowning than swimming. “My mom doesn’t…” He stops again. Maybe his mother does see this clearly but doesn’t paint. He’s never asked.

This is stranger than reading about himself in Sweet Sorrows. Maybe because he can only assume that he is the boy in the book when he is absolutely, unquestionably the man in the painting.

“You knew who we were,” he says, looking again at the painting version of Dorian, remembering the way the Keeper had scrutinized him when they brought him down.

“I knew your faces,” the Keeper says. “I have looked at that painting every day for years. I knew you might arrive someday but I did not know if someday was months or decades or centuries away.”

“You would have been here even if it was centuries, right?” Zachary asks.

“I may only depart when this place is gone, Mister Rawlins,” he says. “May we both outlive it.”

“What happens now?”

“I wish I could say. I do not know.”

Zachary looks back at the painting, at the bees and the sword and the keys and the golden heart, his gaze first avoiding and then inevitably finding its way back to Dorian.

“He tried to kill me once,” Zachary says, remembering Mirabel on a snow-covered sidewalk a lifetime ago and what she’d said later when he’d asked about it.

It didn’t work.

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” the Keeper says.

“I think something changed,” Zachary says, trying to tie his bubbling thoughts together.

There is a sound in the doorway and the Keeper looks up. His eyes widen. A wordless gasp escapes his lips and his ring-covered hand rises to cover it.

Zachary turns, expecting what he sees but Mirabel is still a surprise, standing in the doorway covered in dust and holding the ginger cat in her arms.

“Change is what a story is, Ezra,” Mirabel says. “I thought I already told you that.”

DORIAN IS FALLING.

He has been falling for some time, long past the duration suitable for any calculable distance.

He has lost sight of Allegra. She was a weight on his coat and then a blur of white and then gone in a shower of stone and tile and gilded metal. A passing ring that might have been lost by a planet hit his shoulder with such force he is certain it is broken but after that there was only darkness and rushing air and now he is alone and somehow still falling.

Dorian doesn’t recall exactly what happened. He remembers the floor cracking and then there was no floor, only crashing chaos.

He remembers the look on Zachary’s face which was likely mirrored on his own. A mixture of surprise and confusion and horror. Then it was gone, in an instant. Less.

Dorian thinks this would all feel stranger were it not an almost familiar feeling, as he has been falling for more than a year now and it only just became literal.

Or maybe he has always been falling.

He does not know which direction is up any longer. The free-fall is dizzying and his chest feels as though it might burst if he does not remember how to breathe but breathing feels so complicated. Must be getting somewhere near the center of the earth, he Alice-thinks.

Then there is light in a direction that is likely below. It is dim but approaching at a faster rate than he thought possible.

Thoughts clutter his mind, too many to focus on one, as though they are all vying to be final. He thinks that if he is about to die he should have begun collecting his final thoughts earlier. He thinks about Zachary and regrets a lot of things he didn’t say and didn’t do. Books he didn’t read. Stories he didn’t tell. Decisions he didn’t make.

He thinks about the night with Mirabel that changed everything but he’s not certain he regrets that, even now.

He thought he would have figured out what he believes before it all came to an end but he has not.

The light below grows closer. He is falling through a cavern. Its floor is glowing. Dorian’s thoughts become flashes. Images and sensations. Crowded sidewalks and yellow taxis. Books that felt truer than people. Hotel rooms and airports and the Rose Room at the New York Public Library. Standing in the snow looking at his future through the window of a bar. An owl wearing a crown. A gilded ballroom. An almost kiss.

Tags: Erin Morgenstern Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net