Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Well, there are prisons, and then there are prisons.

i. Mirrors

A quest can end with a hero’s sacrifice. The object of the quest achieved, order restored, and a noble death mourned.

This is how the story ends: Quentin Coldwater opens a door.

Seven people wake up on the floor, gasping for air.

“Everyone,” barks Margo, “write it down before you fucking forget this time!”

Eliot grasps blindly for the notebook and pen laid out beside his body, waiting for him. Still disoriented, and absolutely certain he’s not managing to write on the lines, he scrawls out what he remembers from the dream.

Then he passes out again.

The next time they all wake up, it’s more gradual, and it feels a lot more like a bad hangover than the throes of an acid trip. People start dragging themselves into seats in a vague approximation of a circle in the main room of the Physical Kids’ Cottage, their acting home base for now, each holding a sheet of paper.

“This is like the beginning of a really bad college poetry slam,” Josh remarks.

“Or an AA meeting,” Kady replies.

“On that note,” Eliot says, swanning back into the room carrying a tray, because he’s a good host, and because acid trips and hangovers are both things he has some experience dealing with, “does anyone want a drink before we begin?” He’s handing one to Margo already.

One by one, they all take a glass. Alice hesitates, last, but then she grabs hers and knocks it back in one go.

“Okay,” Eliot says delicately, setting the tray down and taking his place in the circle (on the couch by Margo).

“Let’s just get this over with,” Alice says. She reads, “I betrayed everyone, and destroyed the keys. And then I was imprisoned in the Library, and convinced I had to save everyone, because the Monster had been released. Quentin couldn’t stand to look at me. But then he wanted to get back together, which we did. Then we went to the Mirror World, and he died.”

“Wow,” Josh says, from next to her. “You remembered all that clearly, in order, and wrote it down? Impressive.”

“It’s almost coherent,” Eliot agrees. “I mean, not the plotting, that’s shoddy, but the fact that you wrote in complete sentences after waking up from the spell should be applauded. Anyhow. Next?”

“Uh, well, Alice has set the bar high,” Josh says. He looks down at his notes. “Mine is much more fragmented. Abstract art, let’s say. But: I fucked Margo. And got turned into a fish she had to watch. I think it was more romantic than it sounds, because I drew a lot of hearts here. But not much about Quentin. Except maybe something with cake?”

No one says anything for a long moment, although Margo’s making a face like she’s finding some choice words.

Eliot clears his throat, since he’s apparently moderating this dream sharing session now. “All right. Moving on,” he prompts.

“I don’t think I’m going to be much help either,” Kady says. “There was a thing with Baba Yaga. Also, I led a revolution, and got poisoned. Huh. Maybe not in that order.” She shrugs.

“I was a goddess,” Julia begins. “I gave up my powers to create keys, like Prometheus did, when Alice destroyed the ones we had. Then, Q and I were working on building something, for the Monster, in Eliot’s body, but then I think I was possessed. By the Monster’s sister. Which… who?”

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,” Margo says. “Because you were a goddess, right? Ascended to a higher plane, here in this Cottage. We all remember that, right? In reality, I mean, not the dream.” They all nod. “And you did give up your powers to create an extra set of keys at the last minute.”

“But it wasn’t because Alice betrayed us,” Kady points out. “It was because we needed an extra set of keys to get magic back.”

“The key paradox!” Josh says. “One set to open the front door, another to unlock the Wellspring.”

Eliot thinks about it. “So this is where the stories diverge,” he says. “Julia fucks off to be a goddess, the rest of us all take the Muntjac to Blackspire. Q said he had another way into the castle, that the knight-jailer person whose place he was taking would help us get in.”

“Ora,” Julia interrupts.

“Okay, fine, Ora. But she wasn’t there. No one let us in. So then, we used the keys to get inside anyway, because we’d come that far, and there had to be another way, some kind of trick.”

“Yeah, but the door turned out to be a swallower after all. No more keys.” Margo, of course.

“Right,” Julia picks it up. “That’s when I could feel that something was wrong. That you guys were going to fail unless I helped you. And that Q was in danger.”

“And then you showed up out of nowhere, gave up your powers to make new keys, and we got magic back,” Kady says.

“We opened the door to the Wellspring. There was a flash of light. Bright, blinding light—” Josh says.

“And then we woke up on the Muntjac, and Quentin was fucking gone,” Margo finishes.

“So that’s what really happened. Agreed?” Eliot asks, and no one disagrees. “But in the dream, we did get in without using the keys. Q went off with the woman, Ora, to meet this Monster thing.”

“You followed him, with the god-killing bullet,” Margo says. “I remember sending you off.”

“I shot the Monster, and we thought it was dead, but…”

“I betrayed you all,” Alice repeats, “and destroyed the keys.”

“And then I came down and gave up my powers to create more…”

“And then the fucking Library and Fogg fucked us over,” Kady says slowly. “They took our memories or something, remember?”

“This is like, dream-within-a-dream confusing,” Josh says. “Was I a limo driver for a while?”

“Okay,” Eliot tries. “Let’s just keep going around the circle. Maybe we’re missing something. Penny?”

The other Penny, who’s been silent thus far, shakes his head. “Mine is more confusing than anyone’s. I know I helped save Julia from the Monster’s sister, but I took away her magic, somehow. I met my other self. The one from your timeline. But I think I also was him? Or became him? It’s like I was playing both parts, I’m not sure. But I—as the other me—led Coldwater through a door into the Underworld.”

“Identity crises all around,” Margo mutters. Then, she turns to Eliot. “I gave up being High King for you. I screamed my rage in the desert. My heat-and-sand hallucination of you looked fucking hot, by the way,” she adds, patting Eliot’s shoulder, which actually does make him feel a little better about the whole fucked up situation. Oh, Bambi, always with the right thing to say, Eliot thinks, wrapping an arm around her. “We got you back. But then, Q—”

“Yeah. So, do we all remember that god-awful bonfire with the song?” Eliot asks the group at large.

Kady grimaces. “Oh yeah, can’t believe that one was me.”

“So we all got sucked into it. We were trying to incept Quentin, to communicate with him, but his mind…”

“Wait,” Alice interrupts. “You didn’t say what you experienced in the dream after shooting the Monster.”

Eliot looks down at his paper. He’s written: “Possessed by Monster. Escape from Happy Place = throne room. Bambi axe, Q dead. Burned a PEACH, mf.”

“Well, I was possessed by the Monster. Endless loop of parties at Brakebills, to keep me happy and content. And then Bambi hit me with an axe.”

Repressed things are repressed for a reason, after all. No need to air them in this forum, of all places, whatever his mind had been doing in Quentin’s dream.

“You’re welcome,” Margo says, and Eliot kisses the top of her head.

“Then, the bonfire,” he resumes, folding the paper up with one hand and tucking it in his pocket.

“So, all our stories essentially end with Q being dead,” Julia says. “And you, the other you, I mean,” she gestures at the other Penny, “leading him into the Underworld is chronologically the last thing.”

“I led him to a door,” he says again. “But, like I said, it was weird. I was more aware that something was wrong, when I was your guys’ Penny. It was some serious déjà vu. I think I led him to the exact same door last time we did the spell, too, and then we all woke up here.”

The first time they did the dream-sharing spell, they had barely remembered any part of it after the initial confused moments. Hence, the notebooks this time, to write it all down while they remembered, so they could piece it together afterward.

They’ve just been trying to communicate with Quentin in a dream, the way he had spoken to Ora, in order to figure out if there’s a way he can escape, or facilitate their rescue of him. It seems, however, that they’ve stumbled upon something far more convoluted and sinister.

“How come it ends like that?” Margo asks. “Even if it is just a dream, Quentin’s dead, and what, none of us fucking think about trying to get him back from the Underworld? We don’t even talk about it, we just sing a song and move on?”

“Because that’s the point,” Alice says. “It’s a dream loop. A maze. That’s what’s keeping him trapped.” Everyone looks at her. She stares back, like she’s waiting for them to understand, then sighs and resigns herself to explanations. It must be hard sometimes, Eliot thinks, being Alice Quinn, always a few leagues ahead. “Think about it. We’re doing a spell to get into Q’s dream. He’s in Blackspire, as far as we know, and he’s dreaming about a complex and involved quest that ends in his sacrifice, with magic restored to the world, and all his friends sad about it, but ultimately moving on. Isn’t that what already happened, or what he thought would happen when he offered to stay in Blackspire in the first place?”

Eliot swallows, throat suddenly dry. He remembers Quentin standing in this room, telling them all that he would stay in Blackspire, as the new jailer. That the quest demanded sacrifice.

“So you’re saying, he’s just living out the same dream again and again and thinks it’s reality?” Josh asks.

“It would make sense,” Julia considers. “Callypso told you guys that Ora, the original jailer, the knight’s daughter, could leave whenever she wanted to. But she never wanted to, until Q offered to take her place. Why was that?”

“Because she had a ‘sacred task.’” Margo huffs a charming little snort-sigh of exasperation. “She was the noble questing type. She had to stay, to protect the world from the Monster.”

“But Bambi,” Eliot says, thinking about it, “there was no monster. We brought the gun, but we never shot anything. That was just in Q’s dream.”

“And there was no Ora,” Julia adds. “Right? There was no one in the castle at all. That’s why you had to use our set of keys to get in, and I had to make another set to get the Wellspring open.”

“Wait,” Eliot protests. “If there was no Ora, then who the fuck was Q talking to, when he made the deal to stay in the castle? She had to have existed at some point.”

“That fucking bitch,” Margo exhales. “‘Bait.’”

“What?” Eliot asks, but Josh’s eyes are lighting up in recognition.

“When Margo, Quentin, and I went to talk to Callypso, she went on about how the entire quest was basically a way to bait a trap. The whole tale of the seven keys. The knight’s daughter sets off to save her father, but her father was acting as bait, so that she would become the new jailer in the castle. Steadfast jailers, lured in by a quest. Except this time around…”

“She was the bait, and Q was lured in,” Margo finishes. “He thought he was saving her, by taking over her task, but there is no task at all, no monsters to guard. Motherfuckers.”

Josh scrunches up his face in confusion. “But what I don’t get is, if there’s no monsters in the castle, then why go through this rigmarole at all? I thought the whole idea was that someone would stand guard over these vaguely monstrous mistakes the gods had made, prevent them from getting out and destroying the world?”

“It could be that there’s a monster we just couldn’t see,” Kady offers, but Julia’s shaking her head, eyes wide.

“It’s a punishment,” Julia says. “It’s a trick. The cruelty of the old gods. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

“I still don’t see it,” Eliot says.

“Look, in the myth, Prometheus steals fire from the gods to give to humanity, and they punish him for it.”

“Yeah, he’s the one who gets his liver eaten with fava beans and a nice Chianti, even I know that,” Eliot says.

“But they also punished mankind, with Pandora, a so-called gift. A woman so beautiful and graceful that no man could resist, but then she opened a box and let evil into the previously innocent world of men.”

“The people who come up with myths are all sexist fucks,” Margo comments, as an aside.

“Agreed,” Julia says, “but here’s the thing. We know that Prometheus didn’t really steal fire, he stole magic to give to humans. And the gods punished him, but what if they’re punishing us, too? Anyone who dares to undertake the quest for magic, and accept his gift?”

“Oh. I see. It’s the castle,” Alice says, piping up again at last. “Anyone who completes the quest has to go through Blackspire. But maybe Blackspire is the monster, or it’s cursed. It lures people in who believe in the grand quest, but then they get trapped there, in a dream of… a grand quest. They think they’re saving the world from monsters, making a noble sacrifice to get magic back, but in fact…”

“They’re not the jailers,” Kady realizes. “They’re the ones in jail.”

“So Q’s trapped in a dream prison, and doesn’t realize he could just wake up and walk the fuck out?” Eliot summarizes.

“And we can’t get back in, because no more keys,” Josh adds.

There’s a long silence, before Margo breaks it with the only appropriate response. “Well, fuck. What the fuck do we do now?”

After much discussion, everyone reluctantly agrees to the other Penny’s suggestion that he try to travel into the castle alone for a few seconds, just to get a glimpse of what’s really going on.

Only his body doesn’t go anywhere. He crumples to the ground in a heap. “Penny!” exclaims Julia, and, interestingly, Kady, running forward to catch him.

He comes to, groaning. “I tried to travel in physically, but whatever the curse is, it protects the castle from entry. It forced me into an astral projection, into the dream again.”

Kady’s backed away; Julia and Josh help Penny into a chair, give him a glass of water. He turns to Alice. “You’re right, though. It’s a dream loop. I found myself back in Penny-40’s spirit, or body, or whatever, watching Quentin go through the door in the Underworld. And then, next thing I knew, I was in my own body, watching the door of Blackspire open because Ora let us in.”

Alice is nodding, unsurprised. And surprisingly unconcerned, Eliot thinks, with a flash of anger. “That must be where the loop begins and ends,” she says. “The door opening: one door turns into another.”

Endless repetitions of a thankless task. The slow, creeping realization that a split second decision, to undertake this task, was actually you signing your entire life over to it. Literally dying for the cause, and then coming back to yourself, and understanding that you still weren’t free of it, the demands and sacrifices of the quest, still ongoing. Haven’t they been there before?

But they’d been together, then. It hadn’t felt like a curse, when he had Quentin by his side.

“I refer you back to my question,” Margo says. “What the fuck are we going to do now?”

“We can’t leave him there alone,” Eliot says, and his voice sounds strange. Choked. It makes Margo look at him sideways, but no one else seems to notice.

“He can leave whenever he wants. That’s what Callypso said,” Alice says, still infuriatingly calm. “He doesn’t want to. How are we supposed to force him out of a dream that’s basically tailor-made for him, his personality and his vulnerabilities?”

“Maybe we need to use the dream world,” Julia suggests. “I know the curse probably limits how much we can change things, but there are spells you can use to manipulate a dream.” Right. She’d know, having trapped Quentin in a nightmare once before. “What if we can alter the architecture of the maze, so to speak, just enough? Rewrite the narrative of the dream so that he realizes he’s free to escape?”

“Rewrite it into what?” Margo asks. “Even if we could plagiarize Inception with a spell, Quinn is right. Q’s living out his wet dream already: a quest for magic, a heroic journey, a big sacrifice. What does he want more?”

That’s the thing, though. As much as Quentin believes in the quest, and will never quit trying, no matter the cost, there is something he cares about more. Wasn’t that what the Mosaic was all about?

“Uh. I have a really bad idea, courtesy of Leonardo DiCaprio,” Eliot starts. Everyone looks at him. “Well. Q was lured in by a quest, right? A sense of purpose, a hero’s sacrifice, archetypes, whatever. You all know I didn’t pass AP lit. But what’s better than a quest where you sacrifice yourself to save the world?”

Oddly enough, it’s Josh who gets it first. He snaps his fingers. Eliot’s still not down with him dream-romancing Margo, of course, but he does seem to be proving his worth today. “A quest where you save the world, but also get the girl and the happily ever after, of course.”

“Motherfucking Leo,” Margo breathes. “‘We all long for catharsis.’ A happy ending beats a sad one, every time.”

“Exactly,” Eliot says. “So what if we incept him with a quest that has a happy ending? More importantly, one with a helpful arrow at the end, pointing at the real door to the castle?”

“That might work,” Julia says, sounding excited. “Because, think about it. The castle is cursed. We’re always going to be working against that, whatever magic we do. But the cursed dream has to be malleable, by definition. It has to be able to change itself to fit the person it’s trapping; otherwise, it wouldn’t work. It’s like Alice and Margo were saying: for Q, a big quest and a sacrifice make enough sense to his mind that he doesn’t question it. But that wouldn’t work as well for, say, Margo.”

“Yeah, because it’s bullshit,” Margo agrees.

“So the curse probably prevents us from changing the dream drastically. But if we replace this random, sprawling quest dream of Quentin’s with another quest, maybe the castle would accept the change in plot, because it still retains the basic architecture of the dream that’s keeping him trapped. And if we’re subtle enough, maybe we could drop enough clues for him to make his way out.”

“Uh, did anyone here actually understand Inception, in detail? Because this sounds like some really difficult spellwork otherwise,” Josh says.

“Another problem,” Kady adds. “Even if we write a plot or whatever to direct the dream, Quentin’s mind is casting the parts. And none of us can remember anything outside the dream when we’re in it, right? So how do we keep him on track and not just get sucked in again ourselves? It’s not like what you and Marina did, Julia. The castle itself, the curse, is controlling the dream world in the end. So you can’t just walk in and be aware and lead him to the door. How do we influence events within the dream if we can’t even remember who we are or why we’re there?”

“That’s not entirely true,” the other Penny says. Kady doesn’t look at him, but stops talking. “I could—

“We’re not all psychic, though,” Margo interrupts.

“I don’t think that’s it. Because when I was playing myself, like myself from my own timeline, I couldn’t remember anything either. It was only when his mind also cast me as the other Penny, your Penny,” he nods at Kady, greatly daring, Eliot thinks, “or this random DJ at some point, that I knew something wasn’t right.”

“That could still just be because you’re psychic, and more sensitive to this kind of shit,” Eliot says, but Margo looks thoughtful.

“He might be on to something. When I was Janet? I think? When Fogg and the Library took our memories, in the dream, I felt like something wasn’t right, too.”

Kady exhales. “You’re right,” she admits. “I was a detective, and I knew something was wrong, I was investigating it.”

Eliot shrugs. “I don’t remember having a false identity,” he says. “I was just possessed by the Monster, so whatever it was, I didn’t have it for long.”

“So, if we’re playing ourselves in the dream, it’s too close to reality,” Julia surmises. “Our minds get sucked into the curse, and we believe that what’s happening is real. But if we’re playing someone else, it’s foreign enough to our minds that we could potentially retain some sense of who we really are, and what we’re trying to do.”

“So we write ourselves fictional roles,” Margo says. She must really be getting into it, because she doesn’t normally let her nerd side come out this obviously. “Archetypal figures of a quest, so the curse won’t question it, but similar enough to ourselves that Quentin’s mind will be sure to cast us in the correct parts.”

“The closer the characters are to how you really are, the harder it is to hold on to your real identity,” Penny says, and well, he’s the Psychic, so he would know, Eliot supposes. “Especially without Psychic training, I think you’d only be able to pull off the dual consciousness for a few minutes before the curse pulls you in, and you forget why you’re really there. There are a few shielding tricks I could do, which might buy you some time, but this curse pulled me in, and I’m a lot better at this than any of you.”

“There are seven of us, though,” Kady says. She glares at him. “We could take turns. Make it work somehow. We have to try, at least.” No one else says anything for a few seconds.

Julia breaks the silence. “Right. So, archetypal figures. Starting at the end, there’s the beloved, obviously. The object of the romantic quest, representing the promise of a new life together. That’s what gets Q out of this.”

Everyone turns to Alice.

“This is why I didn’t want magic back,” she says, sounding bitter. Eliot recalls, suddenly, that Quentin’s dream had guessed he planned to shoot the Monster, even though Quentin hadn’t actually known that Eliot had brought the gun with him at all.  Maybe the castle’s curse is reflecting the worst possible outcome to that plan, but the point is that Quentin knows him, and Margo. And he knows Alice, too. So how likely was it that Alice had actually had a plan to destroy the keys and do away with magic, just like she had in the dream?

“Magic ruins everything,” she goes on. “And now Quentin is—fine. Fine. I’ll help. I’ll research how to modify the dream architecture, and I’ll be a part of this spell if we can figure out how to do it. I’ll play whatever part you need me to play. And then, I’m done.”

“Great,” Josh says, awkwardly bright. “Alice is on the playbill. Who’s next?”

“It really changes based on the story,” Julia says. Next to Quentin, she’s probably their resident expert on the subject of quests. “But there are typically various figures who help or harm or test the hero in the course of their journey. The best thing to do would be to pick a tale to model our quest on, and modify the characters in it to fit ourselves. We can probably get away with some flexibility there. But I’m thinking two roles are non-negotiable for our purposes: we need the beloved to give us the happily ever after,” she nods at Alice, “and we need a guide.”

“A guide?” Eliot asks.

“Someone he trusts, who helps him set off on the quest,” Julia explains. “Sometimes, they’re just there at the start. Sometimes, they go a little further with the hero, but die in the middle, to create conflict, despair, and motivation. Sometimes, they’ll survive, but the hero goes on to surpass their teacher. They can be there solely as a supporting figure, or to provide a contrast in some way, to reveal more of the hero’s character. Regardless, it’s the most important relationship besides the romance.”

“You’re the obvious candidate,” Eliot points out, but Julia shakes her head.

“It’s more of a mentor figure than a childhood friend.”

“Like Gandalf?” Kady asks.

“Fogg?” Josh throws out.

Everyone thinks about that suggestion for a moment.

“Eliot,” Alice says.

“What?”

“It’s you. Of all of us, you’re the one he—”

“You were his guide, first day at Brakebills,” Margo considers. “And you took him under your wing.”

“Our wing,” Eliot corrects. “Collective.”

She looks at him pointedly. “We both know that I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t been—”

Eliot clears his throat. “Yes, well. No need to rehash all that.” His harmless yet embarrassing little crush on the cute first-year nerd is not the topic of interest for this discussion. “So what, I give him condoms and a shove in Alice’s direction, and then die heroically, halfway through?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Julia says. She’s lost in thought, staring into space. “We need you to survive. I think you’re going to be the key to all of this. Or, well. We’re going to be the keys. You’re going to be the lock.”

“Oh, good,” Eliot says, exchanging a “what the fuck?” look with Margo. “Now, if you could explain what you’re talking about…”

Julia looks up at him. “The trouble is, the guide is a fairly prominent figure. It requires a lot of screen time. According to Penny, that means that the chance you’ll be able to hold on to your sense of self throughout the quest is slim to none. I’m thinking everyone else can just make brief appearances along the way, so we’ll remember who we really are for the short period of time we’re in the dream. But you’d need to guide Quentin out of the maze without realizing that’s what you were doing, because you’d be in character practically the whole time.”

“I suppose I am a character actor,” Eliot says, mostly to say something. He’s not entirely sure he understands what Julia’s talking about.

But maybe she doesn’t fully understand it yet, either, because she says, “I need to think more about this. We need to storyboard this very carefully if it’s going to work. Alice, if you can handle researching how to influence the structure of the dream…”

Alice takes a breath. She looks troubled, but answers readily. “Yes. It’d be helpful if—maybe Josh and Margo can help me. Since they’re the ones who talked to Callypso, and she’s the architect who designed Blackspire. The physical form of the castle could have a lot to do with the architecture of the dream curse, if they’re so intimately linked.”

This really is like Inception, Eliot thinks, architects and all.

“Great,” Margo says, spectacularly unenthused, and the three of them retreat to the kitchen to talk more.

“I’ll help you,” the other Penny offers, looking at Julia. “If you’re designing the characters and the quest, having a Psychic might be useful. I can try to shield each of you from the curse while you’re in the spell, too.”

“I’ll help you too, if you could use a normal person just to bounce ideas off of.” Kady rolls her eyes and looks like she hates her life as she speaks. Eliot appreciates that in a person.

Julia smiles at them both, and the second awkward threesome goes off together.

“I’ll just stay here, then,” Eliot says, to the empty room. “Rest my voice. Get into character.”

He closes his eyes, and tries not to think about Quentin, ill-fitting blazer, mouth open, stunned and speechless, the first time Eliot had tried to play his wise and worldly guide to Brakebills and magic. The way that for all that Eliot had been leaning hard into this image of someone brilliant and sharp-edged and untouchably above it all, his heart had suffered an involuntary pang at the sight of this particular boy, for no particular reason whatsoever. And then, deceptively soft little Quentin Coldwater had proceeded to cut him open with no effort at all, almost before brilliant, sharp, untouchable Eliot even realized his armor was down and he was being touched.

Look how well that had turned out.

Well, what do they say about rehearsal and repetition?

“Practice makes perfect,” Eliot says, and tries to believe it.

Eliot finds himself flitting between the two groups for a while and sharing progress reports, but eventually they all come together again, now transplanted to their own castle in Fillory rather than the Cottage.

“Fuck me, I’m Juno the architect, and I’m fucking brilliant,” Margo says, when she announces that they need to change locations. That she’s been eager to return to Whitespire and her—their?—kingdom goes unspoken, but it seems there’s more than that at work here.

“We do like Ellen Page,” Eliot says, kissing her forehead by way of encouragement. “Tell me more.”

Margo is brilliant, but Eliot’s known that from the moment he met her. The more important thing is that her idea here might be the key to everything.

Whitespire, she explains once they’ve reassembled in the castle, was modeled on Callypso’s architectural design for Blackspire. In fact, Ember and Umber were big fat copycats who literally flipped the world over and built a mirror image of the castle the group is now trying to break into, which in magical terms, creates a very convenient opening for them.

“We think that Blackspire is the curse,” Alice says. “The architecture of the castle is literally and metaphysically the same thing as the architecture of the dream that Q is trapped in. So if we use the layout of Whitespire for our own dream spell, we should be able to overlay it perfectly, reflect our mirror image on to the curse, and—”

“Co-opt Q’s dream,” Eliot finishes.

“Exactly,” Alice replies. “I’ve got the math basically worked out. We just need to insert the details of the dream storyline into the spellwork, now,” she says, turning to Julia.

“I’ve been thinking it through,” Julia says, “and the main thing is, we need something episodic. One or two of us in each episode, so that no one has to spend too much time in the dream, and risk losing their sense of self. Alice has to star in the grand finale, and the rest of us are there as signposts along the way, to make sure things are on track for Q to make it to her. And now I’m thinking we use rooms of Whitespire to mark out the separate episodes. Little spell bubbles, one at a time. Crossing over the threshold means you’re entering the next one.”

“Stories-within-a-story,” Josh mutters.

As she’s been talking, Julia’s been handing out copies of…

“Seriously?” Margo asks. “‘The Snow Queen’? Doesn’t that give anyone else some kind of creepy Brakebills South vibes?”

“Well, South is where these two got together,” Eliot points out, and Alice sighs loudly, irritated, for whatever reason. For his part, Eliot tries not to think about standing with—with Mike, and seeing Quentin and Alice return together, and realizing… He flashes a charming smile. “Apropos, no?”

“It’s the best I could come up with,” Julia says. “There are lots of roles for us all to take on, and it’s not romantic, per se, but the protagonist sets off to save the person she loves most, who’s being held captive in a palace. And then they make it out together, because of her courage and her love. So, close enough.”

“It’s pretty damn good,” Kady says, like she’s daring anyone to disagree.

“So, you each have the relevant parts highlighted in your copies,” Julia continues.

“Fuck me. A motherfucking princess? Are you kidding me with this shit?” Margo complains.

“Listen, I’m playing not one, but two wise women,” the other Penny says, and it’s the closest he’s come to sounding like their Penny, like ever, “so stow your fucking shit.”

“Uh, question,” Eliot says, as he skims the first few pages of the story.

“There’s no guide in the original,” Julia answers, before he asks. “I know. It’s more of a religious, guided by innocence and the love of God in your heart thing.”

“I know I’m talented, but ‘innocence and love of God’ is not a part I’m going to be able to pull off.”

“I know, but it’s okay. Or it should be. As much as any of this will be okay. Because Q’s mind is mediating all of it. We’re giving him the outline of the dream, but he’s going to populate it with his subconscious. So he’ll cast us the way he thinks about us, in some sense.”

“Well, that’ll be interesting to see,” Eliot says carefully. Interesting, and not at all concerning or anxiety provoking in any way.

“So, we’re just sticking you into a version of the second scene, when she goes to the river to find out if her friend is still alive, and sets off on the quest to get him back. And we’re hoping that Q will be thinking about quests, and meeting you for the first time…”

“And see me as a worldly wise figure and mentor, I get it.”

“But Eliot,” Julia says, and she sounds even more serious than before, pulling him aside. “What I was saying before. You’re going to be going on the quest with Q, which means—”

“I’ll be in character the whole time,” he recites. “You said, I won’t be able to remember who I really am, or why I’m there.”

“We’ll help you,” Julia replies. “Whenever you cross the threshold and meet one of us, we’ll remind you why you’re really there, and you can update us on how things are going, since obviously, both Q’s mind and the curse itself are going to fuck with the dream’s outline and change things. Not to mention that you’ll be acting as kind of a free agent, since you won’t know what’s going on. But when you see us, you’ll tell us what’s actually happened, and we’ll do our best to keep pointing you and Q in the right direction.”

“Okay, but how are you going to remind me who I am, exactly?”

Julia smiles. “Don’t laugh, but it’s another Inception steal. You know in the movie, how when people have secrets, they manifest in dreams as a safe, or a bank vault, or something with a lock?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Well, we’re going to give you something that locks, where your mind should hide your true identity and purpose, because obviously that’s a secret you want to keep safe from Blackspire and the curse.”

Well, yes, but the question is, what else is Eliot’s mind going to try to hide in there? He is not, precisely, a person without any secrets at all.

“Okay,” he says uneasily. “And then, you’ll have the key, all of you?”

“It’ll be a catchphrase,” Julia says. “Whenever anyone speaks it to you, you should remember everything, just for that moment.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not going to tell you. It’s too dangerous, in case you trigger it by accident. I’m worried that if any of us are ourselves for too long, and aware that we’re actively trying to break the curse, it’ll trigger the curse’s defense mechanisms, and destabilize our spellwork.”

“We’ll get sucked into the dream, you mean, and forget who we are.”

“Or get kicked out completely,” she says. “Or the dream will reset into its original form, the loop that ends with Q’s sacrifice. I don’t know. But if an actual Psychic-Traveler couldn’t hold on to his own sense of self for that long, I don’t think we should risk Blackspire figuring out what we’re up to. The dream curse is too powerful. Our best chance is to try to slip under its radar. Which means we can only wake you up in small doses.”

At that point, Alice comes over to hash out some of the details of the spellwork with Julia, and Margo volunteers to show them the hallway in the castle that is made up of a procession of adjoining rooms, ideal for them to set up their spell.

Eliot settles down to read the rest of the story. It’s not bad, he decides. A bit religious for his tastes, but it’s… sweet. He can see why Julia looked at the little girl in this story, all courage and heart, her goodness, the way she tries, and how that draws people into her quest, and chose it for Quentin.

Quentin deserves the happy ending, he thinks. Maybe Eliot doesn’t even have a real role in the actual story, but he’s going to play his hastily ad-libbed part to the best of his ability, and get Quentin where he needs to go.

Speaking of the happy ending…

“Oh,” Eliot says. He’s wandered on to one of the balconies to smoke, but Alice is already there, apparently back from Margo’s tour.

“You don’t have to go,” she says, sounding annoyed enough that he doesn’t feel particularly inclined to stay.

Still. “Are you all right?” he asks.

She scoffs. “Do you even care?”

“Given that we’re about to embark on some dangerous and experimental magic to save Quentin’s life, I do care, if whatever’s fucking you up might fuck up our plan,” he responds.

“Well, luckily for you, nothing has ever fucked up my ability to do magic,” she sneers. “My spellwork is perfect, so don’t worry about that.”

Eliot bites down on his kneejerk, sarcastic response. “Alice,” he says. “Seriously. I’m not trying to judge you, or say that you’re not pulling your weight, because obviously, you’ve been instrumental in all this. But. I really don’t get why you’re so angry about it, and I’m worried, because, well, everyone else, they’re just signposts along the way. You and I have to bring it home. And by it, I mean him.”

“If he wants to come,” Alice says, closing her eyes. “And it’s easy for you. You don’t have to, I don’t know, dress yourself up as some image of his ideal woman, and lure him in. How am I any better than Ora, or the curse? Bait.”

“How can you say that?” Eliot asks incredulously. “How can you not know how important you are to him? You two… you’re his happy ending, Alice. In the fairytale parlance, I’d go so far as to say you’re his true love.”

She blinks her eyes open again, meets his gaze with a frustrated, blazing look. “Am I? We were together for a few weeks, Eliot! And everything after that… he wanted to get me back, so badly, but he was holding on to someone I’m not sure exists anymore, if she ever did. And now, it’s been awkward between us, for months. I don’t know if he still—or if I even want him to.”

There’s a pause while Eliot tries to find an adequate response to that.

“You’re saying, because you’re not sure you want to date him, you don’t want him to come back to this plane of existence?” Of all the selfish people in the world, Alice Quinn takes the fucking cake, he thinks, at the same time uncomfortably aware that he’s probably being unfair, for reasons he doesn’t want to acknowledge.

“Of course I want him to come back! But I don’t want him to do it under false pretenses, because he thinks he and I are going to go back to the way things were, because I’m not sure we can.”

“Who the actual fuck cares what he thinks will happen?” Jesus fucking Christ, save him from these fucking idealistic naïfs. “We get him home first. Lie, cheat, steal, kill, whatever. Get him home, and then you can let him down easy, if that’s what you want.”

“You can’t control your subconscious, Eliot!” Alice exclaims. “And a dream, a cursed dream, at that, is the sort of thing in which that matters. It’s Quentin’s dream, and we’re giving him the plot, but the moment any of us enter that world, we open ourselves to it too, don’t you see? I don’t know what’ll come out, when I’m in the dream. Even if I try to pretend… who knows how it’ll manifest, this uncertainty I’m feeling? I might not be able to—don’t you get it? How could I live with myself if—you guys are leaving it all on me, and it might not work, if I don’t love him enough.”

There’s a ringing silence.

Eliot takes another calming breath. Lets go of the anger, or at least pushes it down deep again. This is a problem he can deal with.

“Alice. Forget about enough. Forget about after. You love Q, don’t you? You want him to come home?”

“Yes, of course,” she repeats, tears in her eyes. She sounds wretched and guilty.

“Focus on that. If it all goes to plan, you’ll only need a few minutes. With Penny’s shielding work, you should be able to hold on to your consciousness for that long without getting sucked into the dream. Your subconscious shouldn’t even come into play if you’re the one in control. You convince him to come home, and then you get out before whatever uncertainty you’re feeling fucks it all up.”

Alice sighs. She rests her hands on the balustrade, clutching tightly. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just. Nervous, I guess.”

“A little stage fright is perfectly normal,” Eliot says, magnanimous, and he doesn’t embrace her, exactly, but he puts a hand on her shoulder and leaves it there, and she doesn’t protest.

She looks up at him. “What about you, though?”

“Me? I’m a veteran of the stage,” he answers glibly.

“No, I mean. Your subconscious. You’re at the most risk, of all of us, because you won’t be Eliot, there. You’ll be in character, which means that all the things under the surface, your thoughts and feelings, your fears and doubts, they might manifest in strange ways in the dream, you know? You won’t be conscious enough to control them the way the rest of us will.”

Good thing Julia’s fashioning him a lockbox for all that, after all, isn’t it? If there’s anything Eliot knows how to do, even in his sleep, it’s instinctive repression.

“Ah, you know me,” he says, waving his cigarette-holding hand, admiring the plume of smoke against the dark Fillorian sky. “All surface, all the way down. There’s really nothing much to see beneath.”

ii. A Boy and Another Boy

When Quentin finally breaks through the trees and sees the crystalline waters of Chatwin’s Torrent, he breathes out a sigh of relief. Ever since he opened the door of the centaurs’ sanctuary and stepped on to the path this morning, the air under the canopy of the trees has felt uncomfortably close, and the forest eerily quiet. Creatures and humans alike have fled in the wake of the Beast’s destruction, and the land feels as desolate as he himself does.

This place, perhaps by virtue of its very nature, feels brighter.

Quentin stumbles his way down the uncut path, and it’s not until he reaches the bank that he realizes that someone else is already there. There’s a man in the water, floating, very still. His eyes are closed. Quentin waits, not wanting to interrupt whatever healing is happening.

He waits a long while, to no avail, and then a horrifying thought strikes him. Dead bodies float, too.

“Hey!” he tries to shout, but it comes out strangled, like when you try to scream in a nightmare and can’t find your voice. Heart pounding, he wades out into the water, half-swimming as it gets deeper, until he reaches the man and grabs his shoulders.

They both startle spectacularly — the man presumably at the interruption, and Quentin at the shock of realizing that he’s alive after all — and there’s a lot of chaotic splashing and spluttering before they end up facing each other, treading water.

“What,” says the man, “the fuck.” And then, looking down at Quentin’s hand on his shoulder: “Don’t—touch me!” This last comes out as a gasp, and he shoves Quentin away hard, pulling his gloved hands back immediately.  One lands briefly on his chest, and then he sighs in apparent relief. 

“Okay, fine,” Quentin says, now a few feet from him. “Sorry, I was just trying to—I saw you floating there, not moving, and I thought—”

“What, that I was dead?”

“Well, yeah.”

The man stares at him for a second and then laughs sharply. “No. Not yet.” And he makes his way to the bank again, not bothering to look back. Quentin follows, awkwardly. Being drenched has not helped the fit of his horrible clothing, he thinks, wringing out what he can before wondering if he should be saving all this healing water instead of letting it drip away.

The stranger, on the other hand, seems unconcerned with both the state of his clothes and the potential preciousness of the commodity he’s soaked in. He sits down and gazes into the water distantly, like some dark-haired, moody Narcissus.

Quentin should probably collect the bottles of water he came here for, and maybe soak his blistered feet before heading out again, and leave this guy to his contemplation, but…

“Hey,” he says again.

“Oh,” the man says, looking up to where Quentin is standing beside him. “Sorry, did you want privacy to… I can go.” He stands up slowly, unfolding long limbs with obnoxious grace.

“No, I just wanted to, uh, apologize, again, I guess.” Not that Quentin thinks his actions were completely inexplicable, but he’s the sort of person who apologizes anyway, he supposes. “So, uh, I’m sorry? For touching you?”

The man stares at him like he’s never seen another person string together words this incoherently before. Which, maybe he hasn’t, because Quentin is sort of special in this regard, if not in any others.

But then, he sighs. “Listen. I get that you meant well. It’s just, I’m cursed,” he says flatly, holding up his hands. He’s wearing dark gloves that extend up past his elbows, and a black long sleeved tunic with a high collar, still soaked through, plastered over them. Somehow, he makes the drenched, demurely covered get-up seem both attractively suggestive and rakishly elegant. “Touch me at your peril and all that. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but it seems a bit ungrateful to inflict that on someone who was trying, however foolishly, to save my life.”

“Hey!” Quentin protests. “How was I supposed to know that you were cursed?”

“You weren’t to know that. But hero complex much? Why would you assume—are there many recorded instances of anyone drowning in Chatwin’s Torrent, in the sanctified waters of healing? What would that even look like?”

That’s a fair point, and not a question Quentin has ever considered, actually.

“I don’t know,” he says. “If the water was the cause of the injury, wouldn’t it just heal whatever damage it did as it went along?”

It’s only after Quentin says it that he realizes that the stranger probably meant his question rhetorically. But anyway, after yet another moment of staring at him oddly, the man actually takes his inquiry seriously.

“Or is damage caused by the water itself the one thing it can’t heal? That would be suitably poetic, wouldn’t it?” He forms the adjective like it’s a profanity. Then, he laughs again, and there’s something surprised in it. “Listen to me, sounding like I care. Sure sign that I’m in need of a different type of watering hole. So, gallant stranger, farewell. I wish you the best of luck on your quest.”

“How do you know I’m going on a quest?”

The man just looks at Quentin, a long, sweeping slide of his gaze, head to toe, and then back up again to meet his eyes. “Someone like you has always got a quest.”  

“Wait,” Quentin says. “Just. Did it work?”

“Hmm?”

“The waters. Did they heal you?”

“Not a scratch on me,” he says, but it’s all bitterness.

“No. I mean. Your curse.” Seeing his face, Quentin hurries to add, “I don’t mean to pry, I’m sorry. It’s just that, you’re right. I’m setting out on a quest. And at the end of it, I have to face a Beast, the one who’s drained the land of all magic, and taken it for himself. Everything except for this spring. The centaurs told me that if I came here, I would find what I needed, to break the curse and defeat the Beast. But, do the waters still have magic? And do they work against curses?”

The man considers him for a few seconds. “The magic of the spring is self-sustaining,” he says finally. “Your Beast can’t have depleted it, not while there’s anyone alive to seek out its healing powers.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well,” the man says, and pauses pointedly.

“Quentin,” Quentin supplies.

“Well, Quentin, haven’t you ever heard that magic comes from pain?”

Quentin thinks he has heard that, actually, though he’s hard pressed to recall where, right now. “So?”

“So, as long as people are in pain, they’ll seek out Chatwin’s Torrent. They offer up their pain, and the spring drinks it up, turns it into healing magic. Hence, self-sustaining. It’s really quite clever, if you think about it. Or a pointless cycle, representative of the endless pain and meaninglessness of life. You choose.”

He raises an eyebrow, mocking little smile on his face, and turns to go again.

“Wait!” Quentin calls out again.

“What?”

“You didn’t tell me your name,” Quentin says uncertainly. It’s not what he meant to say, but it’s what comes out.

“And why would I do that?”

Well, that’s a good question, too. Quentin doesn’t even know why he’s still trying to talk to this guy, who has probably been about as helpful as he’s going to be, and clearly wants to leave. But something about him throws Quentin off balance, makes him feel a little shaken, but in a good way. The way he felt opening the door and setting off on this quest, however dire the circumstances, at least bolstered by the sense that he was doing something worth doing.

And for all that he keeps trying to leave, the man hasn’t left, yet. There is that. He’s watching Quentin, waiting for an answer, almost like he wants Quentin to say something worth waiting for.

“At least tell me about the curse,” is what Quentin manages.

The man laughs. “You truly don’t quit, do you?” he asks, but fortunately, it sounds more amused than offended. “I can’t be of much assistance, though, I’m afraid. My curse hurts other people, so I’m not sure how well the waters heal curse-inflicted injuries. Usually, the victims don’t want to share things with me, afterward, if they’re still alive.” He rolls his eyes again, deceptively casual.

“Oh. Okay. Um. I’m sorry.” That went well. Quentin waits for him to leave.

Instead, however, the man hesitates, touching the collar of his tunic absently, as though feeling for something under it. He says, “As for the curse, I still have it. I’m sure of that much.”

“Sorry,” Quentin repeats.

“You didn’t curse me,” the man says, and shrugs. They stand in silence for a moment longer, before he heaves a greatly exaggerated sigh, and sits back down, still unfairly graceful, patting the spot in front of him. “Well, come on then. Tell me all about the curse you’re trying to break. I know you want to.”

“Really?” Quentin asks, but he’s already sitting down too.

“I’m not doing anything else, I suppose. So?”

“So, I loved a girl,” Quentin begins.

“Ah, a tale as old as time,” the stranger replies.

“Before, I was—I had this thing, where I felt like nothing was ever going to be okay, that nothing in my life had a purpose. But then I met her, and… it wasn’t all joy, for my spirits are often low, and she had lost her brother, and grieved him. But it was like the compass of my life worked again. See, we set off on a long journey to find her brother, and though we only found his grave, along the way, we found each other. And I think I was happy.”

Quentin says “I think” even though he knows it to be true, because he can’t feel it anymore. Whatever happiness he had then is so remote from him now that it fails to signify as fact in his mind. Despair has a way of consuming him. He knows it’s only been a matter of days and weeks, but he also feels certain he’s never known anything else besides this unspeakable desolation.

“Romantic.”

“But then we returned to our home, and discovered that a horrible Beast had taken over lands far and wide, and drained the world of its magic. How could we be content in hearth and home while this was going on?”

“Quite easily, if you had interesting enough activities to pass the time.”

Quentin rolls his own eyes at that, but continues his story. “We set off to fix it, for we had heard tell in our travels of the Wellspring, the source of all magic, the last great reservoir against the Beast, and thought to use it against him. My beloved… she was very skilled at magic.”

“I’m guessing it didn’t go well.”

“No,” he says, choking a little on the word, caught up in the memory. “No, we failed. The Beast was there waiting for us, and the last magic of the Wellspring was depleted. He injured me, and he took my love. She was enslaved by his curse, taken captive, and I had no power left to fight.”

Quentin looks down at the ground between them, then off to the left, at the rushing waters of the Torrent, and blinks away the moisture from his eyes. He doesn’t want to remember this part.

“Nigel.”

“What?”

“My name,” Nigel says. He’s a man of unexpected twists and turns, because all of a sudden, both his tone and his expression are soft and serious, nothing mocking at all. “And Quentin, I’m truly sorry.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“What happened then?” Nigel asks, and it’s nothing special, just a matter-of-fact question, but there’s something in the way he asks it that makes Quentin want to tell the truth.

Maybe it’s just that Quentin hasn’t talked to another human being since his beloved was lost to him. The centaurs, helpful as they were, had been so remote.

“I lay there, and thought I would die. I even wanted to.”

“The feeling is not unfamiliar to me,” Nigel admits, and he’s staring out into the waters in his turn, though he’s dry-eyed.

“But the centaurs found me, took me in, healed me. And they reminded me of this place, Chatwin’s Torrent. And I thought, there’s still magic in the world. The story’s not over yet. If there’s still a chance that I can defeat the Beast and save her, don’t I have to try?”

When he looks up, Nigel is smiling slightly, a wondering sort of expression in his eyes. “What?” Quentin asks.

“Nothing,” Nigel says, and tamps down on the little smile. Oddly, Quentin feels the loss of it somewhere in his chest. “So, where to? Once you’ve collected the healing waters of the spring?”

“Eventually, the Castle at the End of the World. That’s where he’s holding her. But I don’t know where it is. And I don’t know if I’m ready. I feel like I should load up on more magic, if I can find it, because how can I face the Beast again without it? But I don’t even know where to start.” He sighs, dejected. It’s not enough. He’s not strong enough to do this, no matter how he tries.

“Actually,” Nigel says, and then visibly hesitates. He seems to come to a decision, though, and continues, “You’ve already started. You already stepped out your door, right?”

“Right,” Quentin says, “for all the good it’s done me.”

“Ah, none of that. You’re here to bottle the magic of Chatwin’s Torrent, aren’t you? That’s something. More than what you had before, anyway. Besides which,” he adds, rising to his feet in one swift, lovely motion (how does he do it?), “now you have me.”

“What?”

“And I, my friend, might know where you should go next. There’s a witch, they say, who has a flower garden that grows on magic. Secret streams of it, underground, that started at the Wellspring, but spread far and wide, which your Beast may not have touched.”

“The Drowned Garden,” Quentin says, clambering to his feet as well, and feeling his spirits lift as though with the movement, too. “The flowers that speak the stories you need to hear—of course, they might be able to tell me—but how do I find this witch?”

Nigel raises an eyebrow again. It’s much friendlier, this time. “Come on, follow me.”

Quentin laughs, disbelieving, and doesn’t move. “But wait. Nigel. The roads have grown dangerous, without magic. And I can’t pay you. Why would you…”

Nigel just casts him one more long, curious look. “Make sure they sing of me in the songs they write of your quest, hero,” he says, and it’s definitely mocking, but also terribly kind, and it makes Quentin smile honestly for the first time in weeks. “I’d like to be immortalized. That shall be payment enough.”

So Quentin fills the empty bottles the centaurs had given him with water from the spring and packs them away in his knapsack, and the two of them set off together.

“It’s a bit disappointing, though, isn’t it? That magic, this beautiful thing, comes from pain?” Quentin wonders aloud, as they make their way up the steep path that led him down to Chatwin’s Torrent. “I mean, I suppose you don’t have to take such a depressing view of it. Perhaps the fact that the things that hurt you also give you the power to heal is a sign that it’s not all miserable and meaningless, after all.”

Nigel huffs, but doesn’t deign to answer that.

“But anyway. Why can’t it run on, like, love, or something?” Quentin asks, hearing the plaintiveness in his own voice, and knowing he’s just giving his companion something else to tease him with.

But in fact, it makes Nigel stop and turn to him with something like pity.

“It does,” Nigel says. “Oh, my heroic friend, if this is a lesson you still haven’t learned, I’m sorry to be the one to impart it on to you. But such is my burden, as your wise mentor and guide.” He adopts an exaggeratedly didactic tone. “Pain is the sacrifice we make to the gods, and in return, they give us magic. But where do we get the pain?”

Quentin hesitates, unsure if he’s being rhetorical again. But Nigel says nothing, waiting for him to follow. Finally, Quentin asks, “What do you mean?”

“Consult your own heart. Can’t you see?” He takes a beat, lifts his chin, shrugs his shoulders as though the answer means nothing to him. “Love is the worst pain.”

iii. The Drowned Garden

“Can you feel it?” Quentin asks.

“What?” Nigel, who’s a few paces ahead, stops and turns back.

He doesn’t know why it strikes him so forcibly at this moment, but though the long, open road Nigel is leading him on is very different than the forest path that brought Quentin to Chatwin’s Torrent in the first place, it is, in its own way, as eerie and barren and disconcerting.

“There’s no magic,” Quentin says. He closes his eyes and listens to the silence, as though to remind himself what he’s there for.

The sun rises and sets, but no birds cross the sky. Crops wilt in the fields alongside the road, unattended. Fires have to be struck by hand. The villages they pass through are dark and isolated, people huddling in their own dwellings, conserving the heat and the light as the days grow darker and cooler.

It’s the lack of magic; there’s no other explanation for the unnatural bleakness of the world. Quentin has felt it since he was knocked to the ground in the confrontation with the Beast, stunned for a second or for hours, before he opened his eyes to see the form of his beloved in front of him, glowing with the magic she had absorbed, but devoid of any feeling. She’d vanished, and in her wake, he realized, magic had departed the world as well.

His spirits are often low, he had told Nigel, but at that moment, Quentin had felt truly dead and buried, suffocating underground, the lowest he’s ever been. Whether it was the loss of magic, or his own broken heart, he still can’t say.

Both are still in force, of course, but all the same, Quentin’s spirits have lifted themselves into some semblance of positivity over the past few days. Perhaps it’s as the centaurs had promised in those early hours, when Quentin was most uninterested in recuperating from his injuries: healing the body was the first step toward healing the mind. Or perhaps it’s simply that the quest has given him back a sense of purpose, to save the girl he loves and restore magic to the world, to boot.

“Yes,” Nigel says, after a comically long pause. “We’ve established that. All the more reason to get a move on, hero. This horrible path is destroying the tread of my boots, and then I won’t be able to make the hike up to lead you to the witch’s cottage, and then where would your quest be?”

Well, and then there’s Nigel. Quentin opens his eyes and ceases his contemplation of the desolate emptiness of the world, smiling despite himself at Nigel’s mock impatience and bone-dry tone.

Nigel, for all his mercurial moods and strange quirks, is a gift of a companion, one that Quentin finds himself immeasurably grateful for, even when he’s being condescending, irritating, or both. He always seems to recognize when Quentin is overthinking things, and pulls him out of it with a quip or a metaphorical shove. Or, when conversation fails them, by singing some ridiculously bawdy tavern song to keep up the pace during dull hours of walking long distances in the cold. He objects strenuously over small insignificant annoyances throughout the day, but buckles down without complaint by night, building fires and preparing whatever meager rations they’ve managed to barter for with unexpected skill.

Questing isn’t as glamorous in real life as it seems in the stories, Quentin thinks, but all the same, it would be far worse to do alone. He tries not to remember that Nigel is only leading him to the Drowned Garden, and the witch who cultivates it. After that, he’s on his own again.

One morning, when Quentin inevitably finds himself singing the same song that Nigel has gotten stuck in his head, Nigel turns around with a hand on his heart and says, “Such language, Quentin! What kind of hero are you?”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “You were literally singing the same song yesterday,” he protests.

“My voice elevates the lyrics. On the other hand, whatever yours is doing is so far from my heights that it can hardly be called the same song,” and well, he’s not wrong, he has a beautiful voice, whereas Quentin’s is… loud, at best.

All the same, Quentin says, “I’m thinking very seriously about putting my hands around your neck and strangling you. The only thing that’s stopping me is that you’ve been stupidly vague about how to get to the Drowned Garden, so I need you alive for now.”

Whenever Quentin asks, Nigel just says, “I’ll know it when I see it,” in a lofty, annoying, sing-song tone, and usually adds something even more galling, like, “Patience, young hero.”

“Is that the only reason?” Nigel asks now, and his tone has gone a bit dark. Quentin looks up to see that he’s absently touching the scarf he’s wound around his neck, covering up any bare skin except his face.

Oh, right. Nigel hasn’t talked about his mysterious curse since the day they’ve met, and Quentin has shied from the topic, not wanting to upset him, but in addition to keeping himself austerely covered, sometimes, Nigel will react to offhanded comments like this, anything that hints at touching him. Quentin feels awkward when it happens, and sorry, but also desperately curious. He doesn’t dare to ask, though, and more often than not, the dark moments pass quickly.

Sure enough, Nigel smiles, quicksilver as always. “I thought it was because you’d have trouble reaching my neck from all the way down there,” he teases, and so of course, Quentin massacres the song more loudly in retaliation. (“At least you’ll scare away anyone who wishes us ill,” Nigel mutters, when Quentin pauses for breath.)

All in all, they’re having a relatively pleasant and uneventful day when Nigel halts suddenly. “This is it,” he says uncertainly, looking at a small dirt path that leads into the foothills, the entrance almost completely obscured by bramble. “I almost didn’t recognize it, without the flowers,” he adds.

Cutting their way through the overgrown, uphill path is tiring work, and neither of them are singing or speaking by the time they emerge to a clearing, where Quentin can see a long bridge stretching into the distance over a valley, its rails covered in creeping vines that are prematurely winter-bare of leaves or flowers. There’s another mountain at the far end of the bridge, with a winding path he can just make out.

“I thought you said it was called the Bridge of Flowers?” Quentin asks, stepping ahead, noting the conspicuous absence of any flora as he wanders forward.

Eyes fixed in the distance, searching for the witch’s cottage at the top of the distant mountain, he fails to notice the two men standing guard by the entrance of the bridge before one of them has yanked him forward, spun him around, and pinned him to the bridge’s gatepost, dangerously close to the edge of the cliff.

“Uh,” Quentin starts, confused and alarmed, but the man holding him by the neck tightens his grip warningly, so he shuts up.

Nigel, who had been following behind, halts in his tracks, holding both hands up in the air warily. “We seem to have misstepped in some way,” he says, presumably surveying the scene as well: Quentin in danger of being choked and/or thrown off a bridge, knapsack flung down in the dirt some feet away from him in the scuffle, and two men, dark skinned and capable looking, standing between them and their quest.

Knights, Quentin thinks, based on the shield and two swords that are resting by the remnants of a fire, though he can’t make out any recognizable coat of arms.

“Please, excuse us if we’ve offended,” Nigel continues. “We’re only travelers who seek to cross the bridge.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid no one is allowed to cross the bridge without paying the toll,” says the man not currently assaulting Quentin, who appears to be the elder. His manner is calm and soothing, but also firm. He also appears to be eyeing Nigel with a curious lack of hostility, given what his companion is doing to Quentin. Quentin struggles against the hold that the younger man has on him, but to no avail.

“Which is?” Nigel inquires politely.

“For two travelers? Four pieces of gold.” When Nigel scoffs, the man goes on, “It seems steep, but in these days without magic, everything is dear. We must make our living somehow. But I do apologize for the inconvenience.”

“You seem like a man of honor, in so much as such a thing exists,” Nigel says, light as anything, ambling forward like he’s taking a stroll for the pleasure of it. “I’ll be honest. We don’t have the gold. But we need to cross the bridge. So perhaps we can come to an arrangement?”

“What did you have in mind?”

Nigel, still ridiculously casually, picks up one of the swords resting on the ground, and lifts it up into a ready position with a showy sort of twirl. “We duel?” he inquires pleasantly.

“You sword fight now?” Quentin asks in disbelief, not meaning to speak aloud.

“Useful remnant of my unsavory past. You don’t?” Nigel replies, not looking at him. “What sort of hero are you?”

The knight’s sword is in his hand almost as soon as Nigel has spoken, also at the ready. “On the off chance you win, you and your companion cross the bridge, I assume,” he says, ignoring their exchange. “But when I win?”

Nigel smiles. “What would you have done with me if I had tried to run across without paying the toll?” he asks, coy.

The knight smiles in return. “Killed you where you stand.”

“Fine, then,” Nigel agrees, far too easily in Quentin’s opinion. He thinks he must make an indignant sound, or a movement, or something, because the brute holding him shoves him more firmly against the post, and Nigel’s expression flickers, though he still doesn’t look away from the knight. “And as a bonus, I promise I’ll make you work enough for it that you’ll have to take off that darling cape, and it’ll be fun for you. Let’s keep it to the grown-ups, though, hmm?” he adds, with a tilt of his head at Quentin and his captor, as though they can’t hear him.

“Don’t hurt him,” the knight directs, still staring at Nigel with undue interest.

“Father!” protests the hotheaded idiot.

“You heard me. Stand back, and keep him out of the way.”

And then they’re off. Quentin doesn’t have much frame of reference for sword fights, but this one seems… playful, which should make him happy, since Nigel probably isn’t as likely to get skewered at any moment, but it actually makes him feel rather sour, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s just that he’s being held in place, unable to make a useful contribution in any way. In either case, they’re pretty well matched: the knight is stronger, and his blows land with more force, but Nigel is quick and graceful and clever on his feet, so they don’t tend to land that often.

“It’s been some time since I had the pleasure of crossing swords with so talented an opponent,” says the knight, shrugging off his enviable fur cape after all, and what the fuck, is he flirting?

The knight’s son groans. Quentin finds himself sympathizing with his captor.

“You flatter me,” parries Nigel, sounding pleasantly breathless, as he sidesteps a particularly brutal attack.

“But even the most talented dancer tires after a time. And then what will we do?”

“Oh, darling,” Nigel says, “you have no idea how long I can dance.”

“Oh? I find myself thinking, if you could be persuaded to another type of dancing, I might be persuaded to drop the duel and let you cross the bridge.”

“Would that I were free,” Nigel sighs, sounding annoyingly quite sorry about it, “but you don’t understand the chains that bind me, good sir. I’d rather not place you at risk.”

Seriously? Whatever this curse of Nigel’s is, you’d think that he would at least use it to threaten people who are trying to kill him. It wouldn’t have to be full-body contact of the sort the knight seems to desire, Quentin thinks, still vexed at the idea. Nigel gets uppity about removing so much as his gloves to clean them, always standing far away from Quentin whenever he has to. The curse is obviously dangerous enough that a simple touch should suffice to incapacitate any opponent.

“Stop your squirming,” the knight’s son says, pushing Quentin back again. He hadn’t realized he was moving, but with the shove, Quentin hears something jingle in his captor’s pocket. Gold, he realizes suddenly, from others who have presumably paid the toll they’re extorting here.

The fight continues. It’s quite possible that Nigel could win, of course, but he could also lose, and that possibility is just not worth pursuing.

Quentin squirms again, on purpose this time. “I mean it,” the knight’s son threatens, still torn between restraining Quentin and following his father’s fight, and Quentin uses his moment of distraction to lift a few gold pieces from his pocket with his free hand, and hide them up his sleeve.

“Nig—” Quentin starts, but the knight’s son has reached his limit of patience, and tightens his grip on Quentin’s throat. Quentin chokes, panicked, but realizes after a few seconds that he can still breathe, with some difficulty.

“Quentin!” Nigel exclaims, and the split second hesitation is enough for the knight to press his advantage, and disarm him.

“It was well fought,” the knight says, holding his sword steady at Nigel’s heart. “I’m sorry to do it, but I must make an example of those who duel on my honor.”

Nigel lifts his chin. “Do it, then,” he says, and though he’s remarkably calm, Quentin feels the bottom drop out of his own stomach. He tries to speak, but nothing comes out. “But honorable as you are, won’t you give a dying man your assurance that my companion goes free? Better yet, you might let him cross the bridge unmolested. Surely my sweat and blood are toll enough.” And then, with a wink, of all things, he adds, “And the memory of me kneeling for you, which I have no doubt will warm many a cold night.”

“You’re not kneeling,” the knight says, deadpan.

“So force me to my knees,” Nigel says, as though the man isn’t going to cut off his head when he does it. “Do I have to do everything around here?”

“Wait!” Quentin tries again, through the near-chokehold.

“Shut up, Quentin,” Nigel says tersely, but the knight looks over. He must signal something to his son, because the pressure on Quentin’s windpipe eases up a little.

“I’ve just remembered,” Quentin gasps. “We have some gold. I don’t know if it’s enough, but it’s in my… it’s a secret stash, just let me…”

The knight nods, apparently not thinking of Quentin as much of a threat. Released, Quentin staggers over to Nigel, eyeing the sword at his chest warily.

“Quentin, what are you—” Nigel hisses, as he passes.

“Just trust me,” Quentin mutters back, out of the corner of his mouth. He collects his knapsack from where it’s fallen in the dirt, reaches inside and shuffles around like he’s feeling for a secret compartment. “No weapons,” he says loudly, feeling the tension at his back, “just my—ah ha!” He lets the coins fall out of his sleeve into his palm, leaving one in the pack and pulling the other three out. “Three gold coins, wasn’t it?”

“It was four,” the knight says, but his hold on the sword has relaxed.

Quentin approaches slowly. “Yes, but you’ve had the pleasure of dancing with my companion,” he replies evenly. “That’s easily worth one.”

“I’m not sure if I should feel offended or not, at being such a bargain,” Nigel says, but after a second of staring at Quentin, the knight laughs and puts down his sword.

“Easily,” he agrees, obviously relieved not to have to dispatch Nigel and still keep his honor, and when Quentin tosses him the coins, he catches them without difficulty. Then, he turns to smile at Nigel. “You were right. I had fun.”

“I keep my promises,” Nigel responds, “but if it’s no trouble to you, I’ll keep your sword as well. In case we run into trouble on the other side.”

“It’s a spare,” the knight says. “Keep it with my compliments.”

Nigel smiles again, all brazenness. “I’ll think of you when I use it,” he says, and okay, that’s enough.

Quentin grabs Nigel’s elbow. It’s safely covered, but the touch has the expected consequence of making him jump. “Nigel. Let’s go.”

“All right,” he says, shaking off Quentin’s hold, and they make their way on to the bridge. “Where did you—” Nigel starts, but Quentin shakes his head.

“Later. Once we’re on the other side. Just keep walking.” He doesn’t dare to run in case it arouses suspicion, so they make the whole harrowing way across the bridge at only a slightly fast clip.

“Okay, we made it. And I know you didn’t have any gold when we were trying to barter for food at the last village. So?”

“So,” Quentin says, risking a look back over his shoulder, but no one’s followed them. And then he explains about the gold the knight’s son had jingling away in his jacket.

Nigel halts in his tracks, forcing Quentin to stop too. “You pickpocketed him while he had you pinned, and then paid them off with their own gold?”

“Yeah, so we should probably hurry up and get some distance between us before they figure it out,” Quentin says, though he hopes the length of the bridge is enough of a head start.

“What the fuck?”

“You’re not the only one with a few skills left over from a less-than-savory past,” Quentin says with a shrug. He’s trying to sound casual, but really, he’s inordinately pleased by Nigel’s flabbergasted face. “So, what kind of hero does that make me?”

Nigel laughs, a helpless aborted little exhale of a sound. “A surprisingly interesting one,” he answers, with a flicker of his gaze over Quentin’s person, wearing an expression Quentin can’t quite read.

It’s getting colder as they prepare to hike up the tortuous mountain path that leads to the witch’s cottage, but something about that look makes Quentin’s skin prickle with unexpected warmth.

In any case, Nigel smiles brightly over his shoulder from where he’s taken the lead again, the odd tension vanishing. “Well, come on, hero. You’ve been holding out on me. Regale me with sordid tales of your unsavory past.”

“Only if you tell me where you learned to sword fight like that.”

“It was rather a good fight, wasn’t it? I mean, I was a wonder, but that knight wasn’t too shabby either,” Nigel says, with a little too much relish.

Quentin rolls his eyes. “Yeah. Speaking of which. You might have mentioned running into two extortionist knights the last time you were at the Bridge of Flowers before we wandered up there unprepared, oh wise guide.”

“They weren’t there before,” Nigel says, which Quentin had actually guessed, but still. Ribbing Nigel is fun. “They must have set up camp there after magic was lost; easy way to make a living, I guess. Before, there was this other knight, who was so old and decrepit I thought he was dead at first. He didn’t ask me for a toll, but he’s the one who told me about the witch we’re going to see.”

“You didn’t go see her before, though?” Quentin asks, because this is the most Nigel has talked about his knowledge of the Drowned Garden, or his life before Chatwin’s Torrent at all. “You weren’t looking for the Drowned Garden on purpose?”

“I didn’t even know it was called that,” Nigel answers. “Like I said, the path had a lot more flowers when I passed by the first time. It caught my eye, and I was just curious. And then, the bridge was really beautiful too, before. So I asked the guy where it led, and he told me about a witch with secret stores of magic, hidden in a flower garden. I figured it was like, you pick the flowers and get the magic, so when you said you needed magic to defeat the Beast, I thought of it.”

“You don’t pick the flowers!” Quentin interjects, scandalized. “You listen to their stories.”

“Oh, a talking flower garden, of course. That should have been my first assumption. How is this going to be useful to you, again?”

“They tell you—how can you not know this? You face the flowers with your inquiries, and if they deem you worthy, they give you their stories, the stories you need to hear. It’s like, knowledge. The pursuit of truth. One of the fundamental building blocks of magic.”

“Hm. I guess I misunderstood. The old knight did say that if I had questions about magic, the witch who lived in the cottage was a font of knowledge, so I figured she was the one who had answers.”

“You didn’t want to hear what she would say, anyway? Or go see if the magic of the flowers could help you?” Quentin asks. He carefully doesn’t mention Nigel’s curse, but Nigel gets the hint.

“I don’t need to,” he says shortly. “I already know everything I need to know about it. Enough to know that she can’t help.”

It doesn’t sit well with Quentin, but he supposes the best thing to do is leave it alone. Nigel’s curse is his business, and he’s lived with it a lot longer than Quentin has. Quentin has his own quest to complete, and should probably stay out of it.

Nigel continues, sounding highly skeptical, “And neither can her flowers. Stories, really? How is that a source of magic? I can understand if these flowers answered your questions with facts; that would at least be a useful party trick. You could ask, say, ‘where is the Castle at the End of the World?’ or ‘how do I defeat the Beast?’ But this sounds a lot more like fiction, which is like, the opposite of truth, isn’t it?”

“But the truth is more than the facts,” Quentin says.

“Uh, I think you’ll find that the facts, when correctly stated, literally are the truth.”

“No, come on. Don’t you get it?” Nigel just stares at him blankly. They’ve stopped walking again. Quentin tries to find words for something which feels so essential to him, like he’s always known it, but for some reason, all he can think of is Nigel tipping his chin up, practically asking to die.

“Look. If you’d knelt down and told that knight to kill you and he’d done it…” Quentin trails off for a second, not looking at Nigel’s face, just remembering it. “You’d be dead. That’s fact. But. If you did it for me, to save my life. Or if you did it because you thought it didn’t matter, or because you didn’t care about living anymore.” He pauses, again cautious when talking around Nigel’s curse, but Nigel doesn’t cut him off, doesn’t make a sound this time. “Or if you tried to stop it, and he did it anyway. It’s different, right? That’s the story I’d carry in my heart. The truth of you.”

The stories do matter: where people come from, the emotions that drive them, the effort they make, the intent with which they act, as much as or even more than the outcome, sometimes. Quentin believes that with his whole heart. But all the same, even as he says it, he feels like he’s used the wrong example, somehow. Because if Nigel had died…

“Uh, no. If they’d killed you, just pushed you off that bridge, I wouldn’t have cared if it was to save me, or to save magic, or save whoever,” Nigel argues, interrupting that wisp of thought. “You’d be gone. Who cares why you did it? The facts are what matter, sometimes. Everything else is just a story you tell to make yourself feel better, and frankly, I’m not sure it would work.”

Nigel’s not wrong, Quentin realizes, troubled. If he were gone, Quentin maybe, actually, wouldn’t care why he was gone. His absence would be too much on its own to consider anything else. Nigel takes up so much space in Quentin’s world, this world without magic, but still with him in it. They’ve known each other for such a short time; how is it possible he’s become so important? Maybe because he feels like the only other person in existence on this quest, the only one who’s real, somehow.

It makes Quentin reconsider, but it’s not enough to blot out the certainty at his core. If it doesn’t matter why you do things, then it becomes easier and easier to think that nothing you do matters at all. That nothing matters at all. Why do anything? Why try? Which seems to be the sinkhole into which Nigel has fallen, and that’s not right, either, Quentin knows it’s not. It’s not black and white like that. It can’t be.

Facts matter, Quentin thinks, but so do fictions, or rather, narratives. Motives and character arcs. How you live your own story, and how people will read it, and tell it. Because therein lies the possibility, beyond the static nature of the facts. There’s the ability to change, and grow, and improve; to try, to fail, to try again and triumph; to leave a mark on the world, or even on just one other person, for the better. Isn’t that what all magic is about, in the end?

Maybe it all stutters when you’re faced with a cold, hard fact like the loss of someone you really care about, but only because what that loss makes you feel is stronger than everything else, magic of the most powerful kind.

Love is the worst pain, Nigel had said. But the magic that bleeds out of it, every glance, every touch, every kiss imbued with even a drop of that mystical, protean quantity called true love… is there anything stronger in all the universe? It’s enough to defeat any beast, break any curse. Isn’t that what’s driving Quentin, and what he’s counting on, here, to complete his quest?

“Yeah, all right,” Quentin concedes. “But that’s a special case. My point is, the facts are obviously central to the truth. But they’re not all of it. The stories—the things we create from the facts, the reasons behind them, the way they make us feel—all of those make up the truth. So the flowers… they give us their stories, so that we can interpret, and build what we need to from them. There’s magic in that process, the purest kind.  Storytelling.”

Perhaps there’s more than one truth. Or maybe there’s just more than one way of seeing it, infinite ways, all the perspectives of everyone who thinks and breathes and feels. Every story is a lens, or a mirror, a way of seeing. What matters in the end is which one you believe, isn’t it?

“So I have to believe that if I stand in the Drowned Garden, the flowers will point me to where I have to go, to fulfill my quest. If they judge my heart to be true enough, that is.”

Nigel still doesn’t look fully convinced, but he says, brusque as anything, “I don’t think you have to worry about that part,” and picks up his pace before Quentin can figure out what to say to that.

The sun is beginning to set when they reach the clearing at the top of the mountain path, and the house of the witch who lives there.

She’s standing on her porch in front of the door, which is ajar. She watches them as they approach, but doesn’t speak at first. There’s a small grass plot in front of the house, with no flowers that Quentin can see.

The witch is slight, with long dark hair, and an unequivocal but confusing air of great power. It’s especially transcendent and off-putting now that there’s no other magic in the world: something about her, and the apparently unremarkable scene she occupies, seems, invisibly, to spark and glow.

“Hello,” Quentin says.

“Hello,” she says. “Who are you, and what brings you to my abode, travelers?”

Quentin has stopped at the base of the steps in front of the porch, and looks up at her like a man petitioning a goddess. “My name is Quentin, and this is Nigel, my guide. I seek knowledge,” he says, “the truth. May I have leave to visit your flower garden? And, of course, I’d be happy for any wisdom that, um, you might offer me, too,” he adds, remembering what Nigel had told him about the witch being renowned as a font of knowledge, and not wishing to offend.

She regards him for a few seconds, before coming down the steps to stand in front of him and Nigel. “The pursuit of knowledge is a valuable one, for its own sake,” the witch says. “But you might tell me, in regards to what?”

“Uh, yeah.” Haltingly, Quentin explains that he’s on a quest to defeat the Beast, save his love, and restore magic to the world. He thinks the witch looks a little amused, and why shouldn’t she? It’s not like he cuts a particularly heroic figure. But he stutters his way to the end of the explanation anyway, and her eyes, though laughing at him, are kind.

“I can see that your undertaking is a worthy one. And I might have information that could help you,” she says. “But first, please feel free to visit my garden. It’s just around the back of the house.” She gestures to a side path. “Then, return by the same path, to the front of the house. You and your companion must be tired, after your long journey. You can rest, before setting off on the next stage.”

Quentin vanishes around the corner.  When Nigel makes to follow him, however, the witch stops him. His stomach drops uneasily. “My friend, is he—” he starts.

“He’s not okay,” the witch answers. “But it’s not me you have to fear.”

“What do you mean? You’re the one who’s—if you’ve hurt him…”

“I haven’t,” she says, more urgently. “Not me. I won’t speak your name in this place, but I know the burden you carry.”

Nigel clutches a hand to his chest, instinctively feeling for the pouch he wears around his neck, and as he touches it, he blinks, and it’s Julia, Eliot realizes. “Fuck,” he says, “This is a—” Don’t say dream, don’t say spell, he reminds himself. “—trip. Oh fuck.”

“Don’t use my name, here,” Julia warns. “Nigel,” she adds, raising her eyebrows, and she gestures at him to come inside the house.

Eliot rolls his eyes and follows her. “Yes, witch,” he replies, glancing around quickly. It’s a single room, with a table and a fireplace. Apart from the front door through which they entered, there’s another door on the wall opposite, leading into the garden.

“So, tell me of your travels,” she says cautiously, as they sit down at the table, and he understands that she wants them to continue in the code of the dream as much as possible.

“You’ve heard most of it from my companion,” he says. “But, so you know how things are, uh, working. The spring where we met? The, um, river that starts the quest? Is called Chatwin’s Torrent.”

It’s Quentin’s mind, mediating the original dream outline they’ve given him, adding aspects of Fillory, and conversations that he and Eliot have already had, though perhaps Julia doesn’t know that last part.

“I see,” Julia says, clearly understanding what he's getting at.

“More than that, I told him about your flower garden,” an aspect of the original fairytale which had been woven into the dream spell, “but he’s the one who, uh, recognized it as the so-called ‘Drowned Garden,’ a name I didn’t know, but I assume is also from…”

“Yes,” Julia answers. “Certain books. Okay. We can work with this. So, he’s on a quest to defeat the Beast who took his beloved, and also to return magic to the land. A combination of things, but not unfamiliar to us,” she muses out loud.

“Yeah, with the minor change that his beloved isn’t dead. She’s been taken captive.”

“So far, so good. He defeats the Beast, restores magic, gets the girl,” and gets the fuck out, her eyes say.

“A real hero,” Eliot agrees.

“And you?” she asks, surveying his tragic get-up skeptically and wrinkling her nose. “What’s with the outfit? What are you, a monk? Because that’s unexpected.”

He sighs, and takes off his gloves, surveying his hands. “I know, right? But no, this is some kind of irrelevant side plot. I’m cursed, apparently.”

“What?” she asks, concerned. “This isn’t part of… is this his—you know—impression of you?”

“I don’t know,” Eliot says, “but I don’t think so. In fact, I suspect this might be my shit. The subterranean dwelling stuff, you know,” he says, by way of not saying “subconscious” while in this dream curse. Because honestly, Eliot casting himself as somebody literally untouchable, and then having his character pine fruitlessly after Quentin’s oblivious romantic hero type, like the earnest boy’s going to save him? It’s a little too close for comfort.

“Oh,” Julia says, still sounding a bit confused, which is good, because Eliot doesn’t particularly want her to understand this embarrassing part of his psyche. “Well, do you think it’ll get in the way of things? The quest? We don’t want you guys to get side-tracked.”

“I doubt it,” Eliot says. “We’ve barely even talked about my curse since the day we met. I, Nigel, am not particularly open about it. In fact, the curse is literally locked away in the conveniently locked pouch I am carrying at all times. Given to me by a friend.” He winks at her. Seriously, repression. He does it, his questing fairytale counterpart does it, it’s just a thing you have to do.

Actually, come to think of it, it’s hard for him to even recall the details of Nigel’s curse. He thinks he could do it, with enough effort, but huh. This is probably what Penny-23 had meant, that it would be hard to hold on to a dual consciousness for long. He’s Eliot, and he’s Nigel, but reaching too deeply for one or the other feels tenuous, like he’s in danger of flipping a toggle switch instead of retaining both identities at once. Nigel isn’t pure, simplistic archetype, like Julia’s witch, but a character with real complexity. Because of his prominence in the dream, he’s got a history, and a personality, and problems galore, and it would be far too easy for Eliot to lose himself in the fiction.

Wasn’t Quentin talking about that? The paradox of fictions that reveal the truth?

“Anyway, Quentin should still be one hundred percent focused on getting to Al—the end of his quest,” Eliot says, getting back to the point.

“Okay. I’m sending you to the princess and prince next. Because they might know about a weapon that can be used against the Beast,” she reminds him. Oh, thank God, Eliot thinks. As much as she’s going to loathe being called “princess,” he needs Bambi right now. Julia taps her fingers absently against the wooden table. “One that’s powered by the strongest magic in the world, and can only be wielded by those of the truest heart. When he gets back, I’ll tell him. He should interpret that… I think that should work,” she says to herself.

They wait for a few minutes, but Quentin fails to reappear. “What are those flowers telling him, anyway?” Eliot asks.

“Hmm? Oh, the flower garden. I didn’t actually—they don’t have a spiel, or anything.” Right, Julia hadn’t written a script for them into the spell. In “The Snow Queen,” Eliot recalls, several flowers tell stories, but here, the entire thing was more of a ruse to split them up, so that Julia could get her status report from Eliot before sending them both off on the next stage of the quest. Julia’s witch is supposed to be the actual source of knowledge pointing Quentin in the right direction, not the garden.

That’s interesting. “So, whatever they’re saying, it’s really just something—” Something that Quentin’s telling himself, Eliot realizes. Quentin is the one whose mind had taken the idea of the flower garden and interpreted it as some sort of truth-revealing magical place. Which begs the question, what exactly is he…

At that moment, there’s a crashing roll of thunder, and they both jump. Rain starts pattering down hard on the roof of the cottage.

Eliot and Julia look at each other. “That doesn’t sound normal,” he says.

“No,” she agrees.

“In fact, it sounds distinctly hostile. Like the world itself is turning against us.”

“Is it what we’re talking about?” Julia asks. But they haven’t really said anything particularly incriminating that would set off the dream curse’s hackles, have they?

“Oh, no. Flowers that tell you the stories you need to hear. It’s Quentin!” Eliot realizes, alarmed, and runs toward the back door of the cottage.

“Wait,” Julia says, raising her voice over the sound of what is fast turning into a serious storm. She throws caution to the wind in her haste to explain. “It’s a maze! Crossing that door in either direction will take you to the next room, you see? You have to pull him into the threshold at the same time and go together.”

“Fine!” Eliot shouts back. He thinks there’s now an earthquake going on too, or the ground is literally starting to split under the combined forces of the wind and the rain and the electrical storm. The dream spell is destabilizing. “Quentin!” he calls, but there’s no answer.

“But first, I have to…”   Julia dashes forward and opens the pouch he wears, drops a little stone into it, and seals the fastenings.

Nigel looks up, a bit confused by all the din. He checks instinctively for the Fairy Queen’s gift, which is hanging around his neck as always, though outside of his clothes. He tucks it away. Then he remembers that Quentin is in the garden, trying to talk to the witch’s flowers, but the storm is growing dangerous.

“Quentin!” he shouts, and sees a dark shape running toward the door.

“Nigel,” the witch says quickly, over the noise. She’s gesturing strangely, like she’s dancing, or casting a spell. “Don’t forget what we talked about. You must take your companion to see the princess I told you of, and her prince. They’ll be able to help him further with his quest, for they may know of a weapon to defeat the Beast.”

He barely absorbs what she’s saying, reaching his arms out into the gale and pulling Quentin’s fast approaching form across the threshold.

Quentin stands in the garden.

It’s a beautiful place, after so much unnatural barrenness. He can feel it coursing in the ground beneath his feet, and in the air surrounding him: magic.

There are flowers everywhere, some clustered together, some standing apart, a myriad varieties. He doesn’t know where to begin now that he’s here, which flowers to face, how to frame his question, how to prove himself worthy of the answers they can provide.

“I loved a girl,” he says at last, like he had told Nigel when they met. “I loved magic. I lost them both.”

There’s no answer but the ongoing silence.

“I lost everything,” he continues. “I didn’t think I could go on. But I did. I don’t know what it is in me, that allowed me to do that, and I don’t know if it makes me a hero, or worthy of your stories.”

He laughs a little, thinking about Nigel. What kind of hero are you?

“And I’m not here on my own, I’ve had a lot of help. But I’ve come this far, haven’t I?”

If this is the song people will sing of him, if he’s smack dab in the middle of his story, then where does it lead? That awful day, lying on the ground, thinking he would never get up again, he thought it would end in desolation, but it hasn’t. Every day he’s lived since then, every step he’s taken, has eventually brought him somewhere brighter.   Quentin thinks about seeing Chatwin’s Torrent, and remembering that magic exists, and that as much as it can hurt, it can heal, too. He thinks about meeting a cursed man who didn’t believe in anything, but set out on a quest with him anyway, out of nothing besides the innate goodness of one person realizing they could help another. He thinks about laughter and songs and bickering about the nature of truth, and realizing that he still had the capacity to make a connection, a friend.

The Beast has taken a lot from him, but not everything.

“Everything that’s happened, that’s brought me here. It has to lead to something, right? It has to mean something. It’s getting better, and maybe it’ll just keep getting better, as long as I keep trying. I’m not sure how I’m going to do this. But I want to try. So, please. Tell me the truth of where I am, and where I’m going.   The story of my quest.”

Purely on instinct, he touches one flower, a flame-red bloom that catches his eye.

“My tale is of a titan called Prometheus,” it says. “He stole fire from the gods, to give to mankind, and suffered dearly for it.”

Okay. It’s nothing to do with the Beast, or his beloved, or the Castle at the End of the World, but… “I know this story,” Quentin says slowly. But it wasn’t actually fire, was it? That’s the myth, but as he had learned, Prometheus actually gave humanity the gift of…

The ground shudders and trembles; the windows of the little cottage rattle behind him. The sky above has abruptly grown gray and swirling, threatening a storm.

Quentin takes a step back toward the house, but as he does, he sees a patch of deep purple flowers shaped like bells, fluttering and beckoning in the rising wind. Despite the threat of the storm, something makes him kneel and brush his fingertips against a particularly brilliant purple flower too.

“I tell the sequel: the story of the woman called Pandora,” says the purple bellflower. “Created by Zeus to punish mankind for Prometheus’s gift of fire. She was given a jar she was told never to open—”

“Pandora’s box,” Quentin says to himself.

“—but in her curiosity, she opened it, and released evil into the world: war, vice, disease, death, toil. By the time she shut the lid, only one thing remained within.”

Quentin knows this myth too, and the philosophical question contained within it. Because the thing left in the box: was it a positive, mankind’s recompense for all the horrors released, or was it the greatest evil of all?

The Greek probably translates most closely to expectation, he remembers, or perhaps anticipation, but there’s another word for it, the one most colloquially used, and that’s…

But wait. Why does he know this? Quentin’s not a philosophy undergraduate student. He’s not a graduate student in magic. Is he?

The earth shakes again, unstable. Lightning flashes in the sky, followed by a roll of thunder. He has to get back inside. He has to find Nigel, and return to his quest.

But there’s one last patch of flowers that draws his attention, starkly golden against the darkening gloom. He hesitates, but runs over to them instead of the door to the witch’s cottage. He touches a petal as rain pours from the sky, and he can barely hear its voice over the din.

“I sing a song of a nameless creature, the last monster within the castle, the only thing that Pandora managed to trap. Yet some would say this was the most dangerous of all; certainly, the gods feared its power, and mankind would hate it and love it in equal measure. But my story has a secret, which is that this monster can never truly be trapped, once it is named. For it has the power to create itself out of nothing, to destroy the hold of all the other evils, and to fly freely out of any cage.”

What’s locked inside that castle can never, ever be allowed to escape.

Who had said that, again? Whoever it had been, they had been talking about an actual monster, Quentin thinks, not this metaphorical thing that Pandora trapped, right? The expectation, the anticipation that everything bad can turn good again. That there’s still a chance, there’s still…

Oh. “Ho—” he starts to say, and there’s a flash of lightning right in front of his feet, and the earth splits open in front of him.

“Quentin, you have to get inside!” Eliot yells from the door. He’s holding out his hands.

Quentin dashes over the collapsing ground and makes a running leap, the sort of weightless jump you can only manage in dreams, but he catches Eliot’s hands and—

Wait, Eliot?

—Eliot pulls him over the threshold—no, it’s Nigel, isn’t it?—and it all goes black.

The early morning air is cold and the sunshine weak and watery as Quentin and Nigel make their way down the other side of the mountain, but there’s no sign of the freak storm that hit the night before. Strange, Quentin thinks, but he doesn’t dwell on it. He doesn’t recall much of what happened after Nigel pulled him over the threshold and out of the garden. He supposes that’s also a bit strange, but it doesn’t bother him that much.  He assumes he spent the night in the witch’s cottage, because he feels well-fed and well-rested, this morning.

They’re off to another kingdom, to see a princess about a magical weapon that the witch had told Nigel about while Quentin was occupied in the garden. Nigel’s rather excited about it, actually, because he’s apparently heard of the princess in question before.

“She’s amazing, Quentin, just you wait and see. And whatever you do, don’t call her a princess to her face. After her father died, she was told it was her duty to marry so that her kingdom to have a High King again, but she wasn’t having any of it.”

Quentin laughs at his unprecedented enthusiasm. “Well, this explains why you’re still with me,” he says.

“Hmm?” Nigel asks, still absorbed in his raptures about the princess.

“Your passionate admiration for this princess,” Quentin says. “Because I mean, weren’t you just going to bring me to the witch? You’ve fulfilled your end of our agreement.” He’s still smiling, aiming for a teasing tone, but it falls flat.

“Oh,” Nigel says, smile dropping off his face. “You’re right.”

“Oh, no, not that—I mean, I’m glad of your company. I just meant. We only said—you don’t have to, not if you don’t want to. If you want to go back, or stay in the princess’s kingdom, or you know, whatever. You can.”

“I can,” Nigel repeats.

“I don’t want you to go,” Quentin says, more firmly. The idea of doing this without Nigel by his side is awful, but neither does Quentin want to force him into more dangerous situations against his will. The knights at the bridge, the lightning storm last night… who knows what’s coming next? “But if you don’t want to endanger yourself, or you know, if you have better things to do, you’re free, that’s all. I know you don’t believe… you don’t have a stake in this, like I do.”

Nigel says, almost to himself, “I’ve come this far, haven’t I?”

The phrase abruptly makes Quentin think about the previous night, and his thoughts in the Drowned Garden. “That’s what I told the flowers,” he says, remembering. “That I was in the middle of my quest, and wanted to know where it led.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Nigel says, sounding surprised. “We’ve been so occupied by what the witch told me that I forgot to ask what the flowers told you. So, what was the story?”

“I don’t—it was odd,” Quentin says. The memory feels hazy, obscured by a veil of rain and wind and darkness.   “They told me about a man who stole something from the gods, and then got punished. By a woman.”

Nigel raises his eyebrows. “And this is the truth of yourself? Do go on,” he says with a leer, and Quentin laughs.

“Not like that. It’s like, there was something trapped, somewhere, a monster in a prison.” The story had been so familiar.  “Something dangerous and nameless, but I don’t think it was really a monster, not the way—and they said, it was free to leave whenever it wanted, if it could find its name.”

“Not a very secure prison then,” Nigel says.

“Or the most secure. Because how do you name something if you don’t know what it is?” Quentin thinks a little longer, but his mind remains frustratingly blank. Eventually, he shakes himself out of his reflections with a rueful smile. “Anyway, yeah. So that was their nonsensical answer to my question about where my quest was leading me. So much for my argument about storytelling being a source of magic, and a means of reaching the truth. Maybe you were right; you got the facts, and they’re what’re taking us forward.”

“I don’t know,” Nigel responds unexpectedly. “I mean, I’m no expert, but you said these flowers tell you the stories you need to hear, right? Maybe they are answering your question, and you just can’t understand it yet. But as long as you keep trying, and following your heart, the truth of what they’re saying will reveal itself to you when you need it. Like any good story, in the final pages.”

“Since when do you believe in all that?” Quentin asks.

“I don’t. Not in all that, hero,” he says, and his eyes are so warm for a second that Quentin feels almost flushed by their regard.

“You held my hands,” Quentin says suddenly, apropos of nothing.

“What?”

“When you pulled me over the threshold, to save me from the storm. You weren’t wearing your gloves.” He doesn’t ask the question, but he waits.

Nigel keeps walking in silence for a minute or two. This time, when he speaks again, he pointedly avoids Quentin’s gaze.

“These are the facts,” Nigel says finally. “I was cursed. In another land, far from here.”

Quentin says nothing, letting him continue if he wants to.

“I was born the youngest of many brothers, all of them made in the mold of our father. But I—when I was younger, I tried. I apprenticed with a blacksmith. I learned to use a sword. But the more I tried to carve myself to fit their mold, the more I realized that there would be nothing left of me at the end of it. They didn’t want me.”

Quentin’s heart aches. “Nigel,” he says.

“One day, nothing out of the ordinary, it was too much, and I decided to leave. I don’t know what madness or selfishness drove me to it, but it felt like courage, at the time. I was reckless and foolhardy. Instead of stealing away in the night, I confronted my father in front of the whole village. I wanted to hurt him, to see him brought low, the way he’d always—so I challenged him to a duel.

“By this time, he was old, and I would’ve won, everyone knew that. I didn’t want to fight him. I just wanted to humiliate him, make him concede. But one of my brothers accepted the challenge on his behalf. He’d always been stronger, always tormented me, and he probably thought that he could just… put me back in my place, like when we were children. But then we fought, and I killed him.”

Nigel’s voice is neutral and calm, like he’s talking about something that happened to someone else. Quentin wants to reach out for him, but he’s held in place, wrapped up in the horror and pain, all the worse for Nigel’s emotionless telling of it.

“I threw down my sword. I swore I would never pick one up again. I fell to my knees by his body. I begged his forgiveness, I begged my father’s. But he was still dead.”

“Nigel,” Quentin whispers, searching for anything that might help, “you couldn’t have—it’s not your—”

“They cast me out. Our village lay in the shadow of the land of the Fae, and as I left, my father spoke a curse that became truth, the way curses do, when the Fae hear them spoken. That, having abandoned the way of my people and the work of my hands, having slain my own kin, everything and everyone I touched would come to ruin.”

“And then you came to Chatwin’s Torrent?” Quentin asks.

Nigel laughs bitterly, the first emotion he’s shown throughout his tale. “No. I ran. You forget how young I was, Quentin. I couldn’t handle the guilt, so I seized upon the rage, and the rebellion. I laughed at the curse, and I kept running, and I told myself I didn’t care where I ended up, so long as it was a path leading anywhere other than that godsforsaken village. I drank. I fucked anyone and touched anything they would let me. And as time went by, and nothing happened, I came to believe that I was free, and that my father’s words had been just that: words.”

“But then?” Quentin says, hearing the fear in his own voice.

“But then, I made friends,” Nigel answers. “I stopped running. I fell in—we had a family. Years passed, the happiest of my life. But always, at the back of my mind, I felt the curse weighing upon me. And one day, it made itself known again.”

“What happened?” Quentin asks carefully. “To your friends, the person you fell—”

“I lost him,” Nigel says, cuttingly quiet. “All of them. And I did it myself, with my own…” He clenches his hands into fists, then relaxes them, forcefully. “And then it came on in force. I touched flowers, and they withered. Animals, dead by my hand. So you see,” he finishes, looking at Quentin at last, “I learned my lesson. I came somewhere far away, where I wouldn’t know anyone, and no one would touch me, and they could never be hurt.”

“You came to Chatwin’s Torrent,” Quentin repeats.

“Well,” Nigel says, with a careless shrug, “at least if I hurt someone, there was easy healing nearby.”

“But Nigel,” Quentin says, after a moment, unsure if he’s going too far, “all curses can be broken. You touched me, and I’m fine. Surely, that means there might be a way—”

“You think I haven’t thought of that?” Nigel interrupts sharply. He takes a breath, calms himself visibly. “I tried, okay? After everything happened, I did something I said I would never do. I returned to my village. My father was dead, and my other brothers grown, with their own families. I didn’t see them, but I thought, perhaps now that he was gone... so I ventured into the forest, to the realm of the Fairy Queen, to ask if I could ever be free of this.” He scoffs. “She told me she could not remove it, but for a price, she would lock it away, make it less harmful to others.”

He draws the string he wears around his neck out from under his collar, and Quentin can see now that what hangs on it is a small leather pouch, twined shut with silver fastenings.

“Her gift ameliorates the effects,” Nigel explains. “The worst of it is locked within, so that if someone brushes against my skin by accident, they need not die from the curse. A casual touch is safe enough.”

“Okay,” Quentin says, considering that. “But what does that mean, exactly, ‘casual’? Like, brief? How brief counts as casual? Or is it more about intent, like it has to be an accidental touch? Or how well you know the person touching you, like intimacy? Because you held my hands and saved my life, and that may be brief, but it’s meaningful—how can that be casual? Have you ever tried—”

“In truth, I have not tested it on the unsuspecting masses, tempted though I am sometimes,” Nigel says, wry, and oh, Quentin supposes that makes sense. “As you know, I try not to touch anyone, just in case. Gods, Quentin, you ask so many questions. Too many. It makes me wonder, like I haven’t in a long time, and that’s not to be borne,” he adds, but there’s a smile in his voice now, and he sounds lighter and fonder than he has throughout this conversation. Bright, somehow.

But Quentin feels very sad, all of a sudden, at the thought of Nigel going through his life, never touching anyone. Never feeling free to accept a touch of kindness, or concern, or love. Floating on the surface of Chatwin’s Torrent because he felt like he had nowhere else to go, and no one to care where he had gone. Not bothering to cross the Bridge of Flowers and visit the Drowned Garden for himself, because he thought there was nothing more that could be done than what he already had.

And he’d paid a price, just to get that much: the ability to not hurt someone if they touch him by accident.

He’s here, accompanying Quentin on his quest, risking his own life and saving Quentin’s more than once, and for all that he whines about the lack of proper food and the chill in the air and Quentin’s off-key singing, he hasn’t complained about this at all.

Quentin wants to take his hand. Grasp his shoulder. Brush that distracting ringlet of hair out of his face when he sleeps. Just little things, to express the sudden outpouring of sympathy and gratitude and affection he feels, which have perhaps been there, growing all along.

He doesn’t. He knows enough now to understand why the touch would only make Nigel flinch.

“What was the price?” Quentin asks finally, and Nigel smiles without any mirth whatsoever.

“Just that it’s very heavy. Strains my neck,” he says, an obvious lie, tucking the pouch back under his tunic, and leaves it at that.

Well, that’s it, Quentin decides. He’s not much of a hero, perhaps, but he’s already taken it upon himself to slay the Beast and save magic and his love. So, he promises silently, either along the way, or once it’s all done, he’ll figure out how to break Nigel’s curse, too.