This is what it is to be a man lost in time. To have lost one’s self to the ages. To see but in the seeing to not remember, not even one’s own name.
Not without being reminded.
“Here,” Zachary says, fumbling around in his bag. “You should have this.”
He holds out The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor.
Simon stares at the book, hesitating, as though a story still neatly fitted in its binding is an unusual object to encounter, but then he accepts the offering.
“We are words on paper,” he says softly, turning the book over in his hands. “We are coming to the end.”
“Reading it might help you remember,” Zachary suggests.
Simon opens the book and quickly closes it again.
“We do not have time for this. I am going up, it will be safer to be higher once it starts.” Simon moves to one of the other looming doors and pulls it open. The path beyond is lit but he returns to take a torch from the hand of a statue anyway. “Will you come with me?” he asks, turning back to Zachary.
The owl digs its tiny talons into Zachary’s shoulder and Zachary cannot tell if the gesture is meant to encourage or discourage.
Zachary looks up at the story he has found himself in with the moon missing at its center. He looks at the statues of Mirabel and the Keeper and at many other figures that he does not have names for that must have played their roles in this tale at some point or another. He wonders how many people have passed through this space before, how many people breathed in this air that smells of smoke and honey and if any of them felt the way he feels now: unsure and afraid and unable to know which decision is the right one, if there is a right decision at all.
Zachary turns back to Simon.
The only answer he has is a question of his own.
“Which way is the Starless Sea?”
DORIAN STANDS IN the darkness in the snow, shivering due to more than the cold.
He has dropped his matches.
He can see nothing and he can still see the owl eyes looking at him. He did not know it was possible to feel so naked when fully dressed in the dark.
Dorian takes a breath and closes his eyes and holds out his empty trembling hand, palm up. An offering. An introduction.
He waits, listening to the steady breathing sound. He keeps his hand extended.
A hand takes his in the darkness. Long fingers curl over his, gripping him gently but firmly.
The hand leads him onward.
They walk for some time, Dorian taking each snow-slowed step one after another, following where the owl-headed man leads, trusting that this is the way forward. The darkness seems endless.
Then there is a light.
It is so soft that Dorian thinks he might be imagining it, but as he walks on the light grows brighter.
The steady sound of breathing near him stops, taken by the wind.
The fingers clutched in his vanish. One moment there is a hand holding his and then nothing.
Dorian tries to articulate his gratitude but his lips refuse to form words in the cold. He thinks it, as loudly as he can, and hopes that someone will hear.
He walks toward the light. As he gets closer he can tell there are two.
Lanterns glowing on either side of a door.
He cannot see the rest of the building but there is a door knocker in the shape of a crescent moon in the center of the night-blue door. Dorian lifts it with a nearly frozen hand and knocks.