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And now he never would Quentin put his head down on his father’s old desk and pounded his fist until his father’s crap old plastic keyboard jumped

“Daddy!” he sobbed, in a voice he barely recognized “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

—

Quentin went back to Brakebills the day after the funeral He didn’t like to leave his mother, but she was more comfortable with her friends than she ith him, and it was time for them to take over He’d done his part

She drove hiht before he walked away froe that was still under construction He took the elevator to the empty top floor At the stroke of noon, under a flat white sky, a portal opened for hi of white dots connected by white lines that sizzled and sparked in the cold dry air, and he stepped through it and back onto the Brakebills campus Back home

Clie It was like he’d had a week of high fever that had finally crested and broken, leaving him empty and cold and shaky but also washed clean, the toxins sweated out, the ied hie back fro home It was time to move on

When he walked into his rooht a candle, a spell he’d done a thousand tihter and hotter than he remembered

Quentin snuffed out the candle and lit it again There was no question: his ht that played around his hands as he worked was o In the darkness the colors were shifted a bit toward the violent violet end of the spectrum The power caers

He studied his hands So had broken loose in hi to help him He would have to help hi, holding back some last fraction of power But not anymore

Late that night so woke Quentin up out of a deep, drea noise—it sounded like a small rodent was trapped in his roo from his desk

It wasn’t a rodent, it was a piece of paper He’d all but forgotten about it: it was the page he’d snatched out of the air as he left the Neitherlands and stuffed into his pocket and then shoved to the back of a desk drawer So itself

When he opened the drawer it e had folded itself in three sections like a business letter and now it unfolded all at once, launching itself a couple of feet in the air Having gotten that far it hastily refolded itself the long way and began flapping frantically in circles in the diht, around and around his head, like a moth around a lamp Or like a memory of another life, another world, that wouldn’t stay buried

CHAPTER 4

Quentin didn’t look at the page froht on it, locked the desk drawer, and propped a chair against it toHe went back to bed and put a pillow over his head

It wasn’t till late the next afternoon, after PA, that he unpropped the chair and unlocked the drawer Slowly he eased it open The page had gone still—but evidently it had been psyching itself up for this ht it took off again

Quentin watched it thrash along in the air, feeling a little sorry for it He wondered where it was trying to get to Back to the Neitherlands, probably Back home

He plucked it gently out of the air and took it over to theseat so he could look at it in the sunlight Holding it flat with his palhed it down at its four corners with a candlestick, an alarlass, and a fossilized ae knehen it was beaten It gave up and went still

Now he could see what he was dealing with The text was handwritten, both sides, closely and minutely lettered in black ink with an occasional ie, dense with inforradually ate itself because of the acid in its oood pulp—but rag paper, made from cotton scraps, which would last practically forever It was torn along one edge where it had been roughly ripped from its host book A few letters had been left behind in the process, but only a few

The regular, urgent forward tilt of the black script gave the words a purposeful look, like they were trails of gunpowder leading toward so to say In places the text blocks were broken up to rams: a table of numbers with a lot of decimal points; a small but precise botanical sketch of a flowerless plant, with neat rows of leaves and a hollow seedpod; an elegant diagra circles and ellipses that could equally easily have been an atom or a solar system

The page began in the middle of one sentence It ended in the middle of another

When he looked closer he saw that the leaves of the plant avering very slightly in the breeze, and the planets (or electrons) in the diagra in their orbits, which themselves precessed in an orderly dance around one another The values in the table changed in sync with them

At first Quentin thought he couldn’t read the script at all, and he sighed out loud with relief when he began to recognize a word here and there It was a late, rather corrupt forh German, written in some eccentric variation of black-letter Gothic He could hule lyric

That, however, was the last break he caught The contents were highly theoretical and abstract—seriously high-altitude stuff, up there where the conceptual oxygen was dangerously thin There was a lot of business about es between the two under extreme conditions, at the quantum level Sometimes it was hard to tell how much of it was literal and how much of it was metaphor: when it talked about a rooster, was that some kind of symbolic alchemical rooster? Or was it an actual rooster, with feathers, cock-a-doodle-do? There wasn’t o on

And that plant He was going to have to take this over to Professor Bax in the greenhouse (or as the students referred to it, inevitably, Botany Bay) After staring at the page for three hours, during which he didn’t even make it to the other side, Quentin sat back and pressed the heels of his hands against his aching eyes

He’d missed dinner, but he could still eat with the kitchen staff One thing was clear: this was a fragical database of the adepts of the Neitherlands the It was like an ultradense meteorite fro to Earth, and there was no telling what exotic, unearthly eleht contain

He’d found a topic for his independent research project, anyway, Dean Fogg could stop noodging him about that And in a small way he’d found a new adventure It was a different kind of adventure from what they had in Fillory, a small and kind of nerdy adventure, but there was no question that’s what this was

“Thank you,” he said to the page “Thank you for being here Whatever it is you’ve got inside you, I’ll take good care of it I promise”

Was it his ihtly—did it preen itself a little, basking in the praise of its reader? He took the heavy candlestick off one corner Then, carefully, the wineglass and the clock As soon as hefor the crack under the

“Not yet” He slapped his hand down on it and replaced the candlestick with a clunk “I’m sorry, I really am But not yet”

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