“What?” Zachary asks, still not certain the man is talking to him.
“You’re not now,” the ginger-haired man remarks, lifting a golden hand to Zachary’s face and gently brushing his cheek with his fingers and Zachary feels it, really feels it this time, and he is so surprised he cannot answer. The ginger-haired man moves to draw him onto the dance floor but the crowd shifts around them, pulling them apart and then the man is gone again.
Zachary tries to find the edge of the room, away from the crowd. He’d thought the musicians were behind him but now the flute is in front of him and there are drums somewhere to his left. The lights are lower, maybe the balloons are sinking, the space getting smaller as he moves toward the periphery. He passes a golden dress abandoned on an armchair, shed like a snakeskin.
When Zachary reaches the wall he finds it covered in text, written in brushstrokes of gold on the dark stone. The words are difficult to read, the metallic pigment catching too much or too little of the light. Zachary follows the story as it unfolds along the wall.
The moon spoke with Time.
(They had not spoken in a great while.)
The moon asked Time to leave a space and a soul untouched.
Time made the moon wait for an answer. When she received it there was a condition.
Time agreed to help the moon only if the moon in turn aided Time in finding a way to hold on to Fate.
The moon made this promise, though she did not yet know how to unbreak that which had been broken.
And so Time consented to keep a place hidden away, far from the stars.
Now in this space the days and nights pass differently. Strangely, slowly. Languid and luscious.
Here the words on the wall cease. Zachary looks out at the party, watching balloons drift past the chandeliers and dancers spinning and a girl nearby painting lines of prose onto another girl’s bare skin in gold paint likely borrowed previously to inscribe the wall. A man passes by with a tray full of small cakes, frosted with poems. Someone hands Zachary a glass of wine and then it is gone and he does not recall where it went.
Zachary scans the crowd, searching for Dorian, wondering if somehow he’s managed to get himself lost in time that is currently passing strangely and slowly and how he should go about getting unlost and then his gaze falls on a man across the room, also leaning against the wall, a man with elaborate pale braids that have been dipped in gold but otherwise the Keeper looks exactly the same. Not a day younger or older. He is watching someone in the crowd but Zachary cannot see who. He looks for clues as to what year this might be but the fashions are so varied it is difficult to guess. Twenties? Thirties? He wonders if the Keeper would be able to see him, wonders how old the Keeper is, anyway, and who he is staring at so intently.
He tries to follow the direction of the Keeper’s stare, walking through an archway that leads to a stairway covered in candles and lanterns that cast shimmering, shifting golden light over the waves that stretch out into darkness.
Zachary stops and stares at the glimmering surf of the Starless Sea. He takes a step toward it and then another and then someone pulls him back. An arm reaches around his chest and a hand closes over his eyes, calming the swirling movement and dimming the golden firelight.
A voice he would know anywhere whispers in his ear.
“And so the moon found a way to keep her love.”
Dorian leads him backward, onto the dance floor. Zachary can feel the sea of revelers around them even though he cannot see them, truly feel them with no delays of sensation though at the moment his senses are completely attuned to the voice in his ear and the breath against his neck, letting Dorian take him and the story wherever he wishes to go.
&nb
sp; “An inn that once sat at one crossroads now rests at another,” Dorian continues, “somewhere deeper and darker where few will ever find it, by the shores of the Starless Sea.”
Dorian removes his hand from Zachary’s eyes and turns him now, almost a spin, so they stand face-to-face, dancing in the center of the crowd. Dorian’s hair is streaked with gold that trails down his neck and over the shoulder of his coat.
“It is there, still,” he says and pauses for so long that Zachary thinks perhaps the story has concluded but then he leans closer. “This is where the moon goes when she cannot be seen in the sky,” Dorian slowly breathes each word against Zachary’s lips.
Zachary moves to close the fraction of distance left between them but before he can there is a cracking noise like thunder. The floor beneath their feet shakes. Dorian loses his balance and Zachary grabs his arm to steady him, to prevent him from crashing into any of the other dancers but there are no other dancers. There is no one. No balloons, no party, no ballroom.
They stand together in an empty room with a carved door that has fallen from its hinges, the celebration depicted upon it frozen and broken.
Before Zachary can ask what happened another explosion follows the first, sending a shower of rock over their heads.
The Starless Sea is rising.
The owls watch as the tides shift, slowly at first.
They fly over waves that break upon long-abandoned shores.
They call out warnings and exaltations.