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shirt that might once have been white is now grey but his waistcoat has fared better, missing several buttons that have been replaced by knotted strings.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.