truth it takes only a moment.
Allegra slips, the floor crumbling beneath her heels as the edge of the opening finds her feet and she reaches out for something, anything, to grasp as she falls.
Her fingers settle on the midnight blue wool of Dorian’s star-buttoned coat and she pulls both the coat and the man within it backward and they tumble together into the chasm.
For a split second as they fall Zachary’s eyes meet Dorian’s and he remembers what Dorian said minutes, seconds, moments before.
I don’t want to lose this.
Then Dorian is gone and the Keeper is holding Zachary back from the edge as he screams into the darkness below.
The son of the fortune-teller walks through the snow.
He carries a sword that was crafted by the finest of sword smiths, long before he was born.
(The sword’s sisters are both lost, one destroyed in fire in order to become something new and the other sunken in the seas and forgotten.)
The sword now rests in a scabbard once worn by an adventurer who perished in an attempt to protect one she loved. Both her sword and her love were lost along with the rest of her story.
(For a time songs were sung about this adventurer, but little truth remained within the verses.)
So clothed in history and myth the son of the fortune-teller looks toward a light in the distance.
He thinks he is almost there but he has so far to go.
en route to (and in) Sardinia, Italy, twenty years ago
It is a Tuesday when the painter packs her bags and leaves, intending never to return. No one remembers afterward that it was a Tuesday, and few remember the departure at all. It is one of many that occur in the years surrounding that Tuesday. They begin to blend together long before anyone dares use the word exodus.
The painter herself is only vaguely aware of the day or the month or the year. For her this day is marked by its meaning and not its details, the culmination of months (years) of watching and painting and trying to understand and now that she understands she can no longer simply watch and paint.
No one looks up as she passes by in her coat with her bag. She makes a single stop at a particular door where she leaves her paints and brushes. She puts the case down quietly. She does not knock upon the door. A small grey cat watches.
“Make sure that she gets that,” the painter says to the cat and the cat obediently sits on the case in a protective yet nap-like manner.
The painter will regret this action later, but it is not one of the things she has foreseen.
The painter takes a winding route to the Heart. She knows shorter ones, she would know them blindfolded. She could find her way around this space by touch or scent or something deeper that guides her feet. She takes final walks through favored rooms. She straightens skewed picture frames and neatens piles of books. She finds a box of matches laid out next to a candelabra and puts the matches in her pocket. She takes a last turn through the whispering hallway and it tells her a story about two sisters on separate quests and a lost ring and a found love and it does not resolve itself completely but whispered hallway stories rarely do.
When the painter reaches the Heart she can see the Keeper at his desk in his office but his attention remains on his writing. She considers asking him to find an appropriate place to hang the painting she has left in her studio, recently completed, but she does not. She knows someone will find it and hang it. She can see it already, on a wall surrounded by books.
She does not know who the figures in the painting are, though she has seen them many times in fractured images and half-formed visions. There is a part of her that hopes they do not exist, and another part that knows they do or they will. They are there in the story of the place, for now.
The painter glances up at the gently shifting clockwork universe. Through one eye she sees it shimmering and perfect, each piece moving as it should. Through the other eye it is burning and broken.
A golden hand points her toward the exit.
If she is going to change the story, this is where she starts.
(The Keeper will look up at the sound of the door as