Zachary pushes it open and climbs out to the top of the dollhouse. He stands on the widow’s walk, staring out at the sea. Honey bubbles up through the paper confetti, turning the blue sea golden.
The bees are swarming over the roof below him. They buzz at him as they begin to fly up and away.
Goodbye Mister Rawlins thank you for being the key you were a good key and a nice person we wish you well in your future endeavors.
“What future endeavors?” Zachary yells at the bees but the bees do not answer. They fly off into the darkness, past models of planets and stars, leaving Zachary alone with only the sound of the sea. He misses the buzzing as soon as it is gone.
And now the sea is rising.
The honey sweeps over the paper grass and mixes with the sea. The lighthouse falls, its light extinguished. The honey steals the shore away and pulls the buildings down, insistent and impatient.
There is only one sea now, consuming the universe.
The sea has reached the house. The lock on the dollhouse breaks as the waves sweep through the open door and up the stairs. The facade falls, cracking open the honeycomb interior.
The rowboat is floating, not near enough to reach easily but Zachary is out of options. The world is sinking.
Being dead should not feel this perilous.
The honey is up to his knees.
This is really the end, he thinks. There is no world beneath this world.
There is nothing that comes after this.
The reality of it all is setting in as the dollhouse sinks below him.
The end is here and Zachary fights it.
He pulls himself up on the guardrail and dives for the boat. He slips, falling into the honey sea and the honey embraces him like a long-lost love.
He grabs for the edge of the boat but his honey-coated hands are too slippery to hold on.
The boat capsizes.
This Starless Sea claims Zachary Ezra Rawlins for its own.
It pulls him under and refuses to let him surface.
He gasps for a breath his lungs do not require and around him the world breaks.
Open.
Like an egg.
RHYME STANDS ON the highest step on a flight of stairs that once led down to the ballroom and currently descend into an ocean of honey.
She knows this story. She knows it by heart. Every word, every character, every change. This tale has buzzed in her ears for years but it is one thing to hear and quite another to see the sinking.
She has pictured it in her mind a thousand and one times but this is different. The sea is darker, the surf rougher and foaming as it clings to the stone and pulls books and candles and furniture down in its wake, stray pages and bottles of wine finding their way to the surface again before succumbing to their fate.
The honey always moved more slowly in Rhyme’s imagination.
It is time to go. It is past time, but Rhyme remains standing and watching the tide ebb and rise until the honey reaches her feet and only then does she turn, the hem of her robes sticky and heavy as she walks away from the sea.
The Starless Sea follows Rhyme as she winds her way through rooms and halls, creeping at her heels as she takes these last steps, bearing final witness to this place.
Rhyme hums to herself as she walks and the sea listens. She pauses at a wall carved with vines and flowers and bees that does not appear to contain a door but Rhyme takes a coin-size disk of metal from her pocket and places the bee on it into the bee-shaped carving and the gateway into the Archive opens for her.