dotting the canopy like stars. They sway though there is no breeze.
As Dorian walks into the forest there are occasional stumps between the trees. Some are covered in burning candles, dripping over the sides and onto the ground. Others are stacked with books and Dorian reaches to pick one up only to find that the books themselves are solid wood, part of the former tree, carved and painted.
Blossoms drift down around him. A trail has been cleared and defined by markers on the trees, flat stones set into their roots with single candles burning on them. Dorian follows this path, quickly losing sight of the Starless Sea. He can no longer hear the sound of the waves against the shore.
A single petal flutters and falls on his hand and dissolves like a snowflake on his skin.
As Dorian walks on the blossoms continue to fall, a few petals at a time, but then they begin to accumulate, drifting over the path.
He cannot pinpoint the moment when they turn from cherry blossoms to snow.
His boots leave prints as he walks farther. There are fewer lights marking the path. The blossom snow falls heavier, taking the candle flames away. It is colder now, each blossom that strikes Dorian’s exposed skin feels like ice.
The darkness comes quick and heavy. Dorian cannot see.
He takes one step forward and then another, his boots sinking deep into the snow.
There is a sound. At first he thinks it is wind but it is steadier, like breathing. There is something moving beside him, then in front of him. He cannot see anything, the darkness is absolute.
He stops. Carefully he feels his way into his knapsack, his hands closing over the box of matches.
Blindly, Dorian attempts to light a match. The first falls from his shivering fingers. He takes a breath and steadies himself and tries another.
The match catches, casting a single trembling flame’s worth of light.
A man stands in the snow in front of Dorian. Taller than him, thinner but with broader shoulders. Atop the broad shoulders is the head of an owl, staring down at him with large, round eyes.
The owl head tilts, considering him.
The large round eyes blink.
The flame reaches the end of the match. The light flickers and fades.
The darkness envelops Dorian again.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS has pictured many a character from a book never dreaming he would end up face-to-face with one of them, and even though he knew that Simon Keating was an actual person and not a book character he’d had a character pictured in his head anyway who was not at all the person he is currently looking at.
This man is older than the eighteen-year-old that Zachary had imagined, though what is age for someone lost in time? He looks thirtyish, with dark eyes and long dirty-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail with several feathers tied into it. A ruffled shirt that might once have been white is now grey but his waistcoat has fared better, missing several buttons that have been replaced by knotted strings. He wears a strip of leather looped twice around his waist like a doubled belt, from it hang several items, including a knife and a coil of rope. More strips of leather and cloth are wrapped around his knees and elbows and his right hand.
His left hand is missing, cut off above the wrist. The end of this arm is also wrapped and protected, and both the skin visible above it and part of his neck have clearly been very badly burned at some point in the past.
“Can you still hear them?” Simon asks.
Zachary shakes his head, as much to get the memory of the voices out as to answer the question. He dropped his torch at some point though now he doesn’t remember if he actually had a torch at all. He tries to remember and recalls statues and darkness and a giant bunny.
He looks up at effigies who for centuries stared out at festivals and worshippers and then at emptiness and after the emptiness their sight was claimed by the honeyed sea and when the tides receded and the light returned they stared first at a single man and now at two.
“They told you lies,” Simon assures Zachary, nodding back at the door. “It is fortunate that I heard you.”
“Thank you,” Zachary says.
“Move through this,” Simon advises him. “Let it move through you and then let it go.”
Simon turns away, leaving Zachary to collect himself. He is shaking but