losing his mind and then decides that if he is able to wonder about it he probably isn’t, which isn’t particularly comforting.
He looks down at the last two words on the page.
Not yet.
Those two words swim through a thousand questions flooding his mind.
Then one of those questions floats to the surface of his thoughts, prompted by the repeated bee motif and his remembered door.
Is this book from that place?
He inspects the book again, pausing at the barcode stuck to the back cover.
Zachary looks closer, and sees that the sticker is obscuring something written or printed there. A spot of black ink peeks out from the bottom of the sticker.
He feels mildly guilty about prying it off. The barcode was faulty, anyway, and likely needs to be replaced. Not that he has any intention of returning the book, not now. He peels the sticker off slowly and carefully, trying to remove it in one piece and attempting not to rip the paper below it. It comes off easily and he sticks it to the edge of his desk before turning back to what is written below it.
There are no words, only a string of symbols that have been stamped or otherwise inscribed onto the back cover, faded and smudged but easily identifiable.
The exposed dot of ink is the hilt of a sword.
Above it is a key.
Above the key is a bee.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins stares at the miniature versions of the same symbols he once contemplated in an alleyway behind his mother’s store and wonders how, exactly, he is supposed to continue a story he didn’t know he was in.
It began as a dollhouse.
A miniature habitat carefully constructed from wood and glue and paint. Meticulously crafted to re-create a full-size dwelling in the most exquisite level of detail. When it was built it was gifted to and played with by children, illustrating daily happenings in simplified exaggerations.
There are dolls. A family with a mother and father and son and daughter and small dog. They wear delicate cloth replicas of suits and dresses. The dog has real fur.
There is a kitchen and a parlor and a sunroom. Bedrooms and stairs and an attic. Each room is filled with furniture and decorated with miniature paintings and minuscule vases of flowers. The wallpaper is printed with intricate patterns. The tiny books can be removed from the shelves.
It has a roof with wooden shingles each no bigger than a fingernail. Diminutive doors that close and latch. The house opens with a lock and key and expands, though most often it is kept closed. The doll life inside visible only through the windows.
The dollhouse sits in a room in this Harbor on the Starless Sea. The history of it is missing. The children who once played with it long grown and gone. The tale of how it came to be placed in an obscure room in an obscure place is forgotten.
It is not remarkable.
What is remarkable is what has evolved around it.
What is a single house, after all, with nothing surrounding it? Without a yard for the dog. Without a complaining neighbor across the street, without a street to have neighbors on at all? Without trees and horses and stores. Without a harbor. A boat. A city across the sea.
All this has built up around it. One child’s invented world has become another’s, and another’s, and so on until it is everyone’s world. Embellished and expanded with metal and paper and glue. Gears and found objects and clay. More houses have been constructed. More dolls have been added. Stacks of books arranged by color serve as landscape. Folded-paper birds fly overhead. Hot air balloons descend from above.
There are mountains and villages and cities, castles and dragons and floating ballrooms. Farms with barns and fluffy cotton sheep. A working clock of a reincarnated watch keeps time atop a tower. There is a park with a lake and ducks. A beach with a lighthouse.
The world cascades around the room. There are paths for visitors to walk on, to access the corners. There is the outline of what was once a desk beneath the buildings. There are shelves on the walls that are now distant countries across an ocean with carefully rippled blue paper waves.
It began as a dollhouse. Over time, it has become more than that.
A dolltown. A dollworld. A dolluniverse.
Constantly expanding.
Almost everyone who finds the room feels compelled to add to it. To leave the contents of their pockets repurposed as a wall or tree or