into his shoulder to force it open and this time it relents.
Here now is the stair again. The lanterns at the bottom.
The metal cage waiting for him.
The descent is maddeningly slow.
There are no pedestals in the antechamber this time. The door allows him entrance without question.
The Keeper’s office is closed and Simon hears the door open as he heads down a corridor but he does not look behind him.
It is difficult to locate the door with the heart again without his compass. He takes wrong turns and doubles back again and again. He climbs stairs made of books.
Finally he finds a familiar turn, and then the shadowed nook and the door with its burning heart.
The room beyond it is empty.
He tries the door with the feather but it insists on opening into nothingness. He closes the door again.
She could return at any moment.
She might never return.
Simon paces around the table. When he tires of pacing he sits on the chaise longue, first angling it so he can face the door. He wonders how long that cat had waited in this room for someone to open a door to release it and how it was left inside in the first place.
He tires of sitting and goes back to pacing.
He picks up a quill from the table and considers writing a letter and slipping it under the door.
He wonders what to write that would be of any use. He thinks he understands now why his mother did not leave him any letters. He cannot even tell Lenore what time or day he was here waiting as he does not have available measurements for time. He realizes how difficult it is to determine the passage of time without sunlight.
He puts the quill down.
He wonders how long is an appropriate time to wait for a girl who may or may not have been a dream. Wonders if he could have dreamed a girl in a real place or if the place is a dream and then his head hurts so he thinks perhaps he should find something to read instead of continuing to think.
He regrets leaving Sweet Sorrows in the cottage. He looks through the books on their shelves. Many are unfamiliar and strange. A heavy volume with footnotes and a raven on its cover pulls his attention more than the others, and he finds himself so drawn into its tale of two magicians in England that he loses track of time.
Then the door with the feather opens, and she is here.
Simon puts the book down. He does not wait for her to say anything. He cannot wait, he is too afraid that she will vanish again and never reappear. He closes the distance between them as quickly as he can and then he kisses her desperately, hungrily, and after a moment she kisses him back in equal measure.
Kissing, Eleanor thinks, is not done any justice in books.
They peel off each other’s clothes in layers. He curses at the strange clasps and fasteners on her garments while she laughs at the sheer number of buttons on his.
He leaves her bunny ears on.
It is easier to be in love in a room with closed doors. To have the whole world in one room. In one person. The universe condensed and intensified and burning, bright and alive and electric.
But doors cannot stay closed forever.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS stands in front of a statue of a woman covered in bees wondering if it takes a crown to make a queen.
This is the only identity he can think of for the Queen of the Bees from his newfound quest (Is this a side quest or a main quest? the voice in his head ponders) but he doesn’t know how to give her keys. He searched the marble statue for keyholes and found nothing but cracks, not that he has keys to give. He’s stuck on the never-been-forged part and he’s not sure where to find a gold key. Maybe he should sort through all the jars in the Keeper’s office, or find the room with the keys from Sweet Sorrows and he realizes the keys in the jars might be those same keys, put into storage.
He has inspected every bee, investigated the entire marble chair the woman sits upon, and found nothing. Maybe there’s another woman somewhere who rules the bees. The bees aren’t even part of the statue, they’re carved from a different stone in a warmer appropriate honey color and they’re movable. They