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.
The honey follows at her feet, pooling into the room, stretching through the hidden stacks and shelves.
Rhyme passes the empty spot on the shelf where Sweet Sorrows would have been were it not stolen by a rabbit a long time ago and another vacancy where she pulled The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor from its place in the Archive, not so very long ago at all, comparatively.
Rhyme considers whether giving people pieces of their own stories is somehow cheating Fate or not and decides that Fate probably doesn’t mind one way or another.
Two volumes misplaced over so much time is not that bad, Rhyme thinks, looking up at the shelves. There are thousands of them, the stories of this place. Translated and transcribed by every acolyte who walked these halls before her. Bound together in volumes of single narratives or combined in overlapping pieces.
The stories of a place are not easily contained.
It sounds strange and empty now, in her head. Rhyme can hear the hum of past stories though they are low and quiet, the stories always calm once they have been written down whether they are past stories or present stories or future stories.
It is the absence of the high-pitched stories of the future that is the most strange. There is the thrum of what will pass in the next few minutes buzzing in her ears—so faint compared to the tales layered upon tales that she once heard—and then nothing. Then this place will have no more tales to tell. It took her so long to learn to decipher them and write them down so that they bore any resemblance to the way they unfolded in her ears and in her mind and now they’re almost gone. She hopes whoever wrote these last moments did them justice, she did not write them herself but she can tell from the way that they buzz in her ears they have already been recorded.
Rhyme takes one last walk through the Archive, saying her silent goodbyes and letting the stories hum around her before she continues upward.
She leaves the door to the Archive open, to let the sea inside.
The Starless Sea follows Rhyme up stairways and through halls and gardens, claiming statues and memories and oh so many books.
The electric lights flicker and die, plunging the space into darkness, but there are enough candles for Rhyme to see by. She lit her path earlier, knowing she would need the flames to guide her way.
The scent of burning hair greets Rhyme as she reaches the Heart. She does not knock on the door to the Keeper’s office as she enters, nor does she comment on his clipped-short hair or the tangle of braids burning in the fireplace, their strung pearls charring and falling into the ashes.
One pearl for each year he has spent in this space.
He never told her that, but he did not have to. Rhyme knows his story. The bees have whispered it to