If he thought he was dreaming such shocking cold might wake him up, but Dorian knows he isn’t dreaming. Knows it down to his toes.
After he removes as much honey as he can he puts his clothes back on, leaving his star-buttoned coat hanging open. Fortunes and Fables rests in the inside pocket, having somehow survived its travels unharmed and un-honeyed.
Dorian runs a hand through his still-sticky, greying hair, feeling too old for all of these marvels and wondering when he went from young and faithful and obedient to confused and adrift and middle-aged but he knows exactly when it was because that moment haunts him, still.
Dorian returns to the deck. The boat has sailed into a different system of caverns now, the stone threaded with crystal that looks like quartz or citrine. The stalactites have been carved with patterns: vines and stars and diamonds. The whole space is lit by the lights from the boat and the soft luminescence of the sea.
As the ship drifts along he can see through to other caverns, glimpses of connected spaces. Stairways and tall crumbling arches. Broken statues and elaborate sculptures. Underground ruins gently illuminated by honey. In the distance a waterfall (honeyfall) foams and spills over the rocks. There is a world beneath the world beneath the world. Or at least there used to be.
Eleanor is on the quarterdeck, adjusting a series of instruments that Dorian doesn’t recognize but navigating such a vessel likely takes some creativity. One looks like a string of hourglasses. Another a compass shaped like a globe, indicating up and down as well as the standard directions.
“Better?” she asks, glancing up at his wet hair as he approaches.
“Much, thank you,” Dorian answers. “May I ask you a question?”
“You may, but I might not have an answer, or if I have an answer it might not be the right one or a good one. Questions and answers don’t always fit together like puzzle pieces.”
“I didn’t have this, up there,” Dorian says, indicating the sword tattooed on his chest.
“That’s not a question.”
“How do I have it now?”
“Did you think that you did?” Eleanor asks. “Those things can get confused down here. You probably believed it should be there so now it’s there. You must be a good storyteller, usually it takes a while. But you did spend a fair amount of time in the sea, that will do it, too.”
“It was only an idea,” Dorian says, remembering how he felt reading Zachary’s book, reading about what guardians once were, trying to guess what his sword would have looked like if he were a real guardian and not a poor imitation of one.
“It’s a story you told yourself,” Eleanor says. “The sea heard you telling it so now it’s there. That’s how it works. It usually has to be personal, a story you wear against your skin, but I can manage it with the ship now. It took a lot of practice.”
“You willed this ship into existence?”
“I found parts of it and told myself the story of the rest of it and eventually they were the same, the found parts and the story parts. It can steer itself but I have to tell it where to go and nudge it back in the right direction sometimes. I can change the sails but they like being this color. Do you like them?”
Dorian looks up at the deep red sails and for a moment they brighten and then settle back into burgundy.
“I do like them,” Dorian says.
“Thank you. Did you have the tattoo on your back up there?”
“Yes.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Very much,” Dorian says, recalling session after session spent in a tattoo parlor that smelled of coffee and Nag Champa incense and played classic rock at volumes high enough to cover the buzzing of needles. He had copied the single-page illustration on a photocopier years earlier to hang on a wall, never thinking that he would lose the book and during the time when it was all he had left of Fortunes and Fables he wanted it closer than the wall, where no one could take it from him.
“It’s important to you, isn’t it?” Eleanor asks.
“Yes, it is.”
“Important things hurt sometimes.”
Dorian smiles at the statement, despite the truth of it or because of it.
“It’ll take us a while to get there,” Eleanor says, adjusting the compass globe and looping a rope over the ship’s wheel.
“I don’t think I understand where we’re going,” Dorian admits.
“Oh,” Eleanor says. “I can show you.”