“What makes you think I want to talk?” Allegra asks. She walks toward Dorian and only when they are almost face-to-face does Zachary see the gun in her hand, partially obscured by the fur cuff of her coat.
The Keeper reacts before Zachary can process what’s happening. He grabs Allegra’s wrist and pulls her arm back, taking the revolver from her hand but not before she pulls the trigger. The bullet travels upward instead of where it had been aimed, directly at Dorian’s heart.
The shot ricochets off one of the golden hands hanging above them, sending it swinging, twisting backward, and smashing into the gears.
The bullet comes to rest in the tiled wall, in the center of a mural that was once a depiction of a prison cell with a girl on one side of the bars and a pirate on the other but it has cracked and faded and the damage added by the small piece of metal is indistinguishable from the damage done by time.
Above, the mechanism swinging the planets strikes
down again and this time the tiled floor succumbs to its pressure, cracking the stone below the tiles in a fissure that opens not into another book-filled hall as Zachary expects but into a cave, a gaping cavern of rock that stretches farther down, much, much farther down into shadows and darkness.
You forget that we are underground, the voice in his head remarks. You forget what that means, it continues and Zachary is no longer certain the voice is in his head after all.
The pendulum breaks free from the tangled metal and plummets.
Zachary listens for it to hit the bottom, remembering Mirabel’s champagne bottle, but hears nothing.
The fissure moves from crack to rift to chasm quickly, pulling stone and tiles and planets and broken chandeliers and books with it, approaching the spot where they stand like a wave.
Zachary takes a step back, into the office doorway. The Keeper puts a hand on his arm to steady him and it feels like everything that follows happens slowly though in 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.