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It was perfectly harmless unless you walked into it, in which case you’d be dead before you knew it One of the kids who cast it lost a hand that way, or so it was said Eventually the faculty just shrugged their shoulders and walled it off Supposedly the lost, frozen hand was still in there

Likewise, it was true: the clock was powered by a gear made of metal reclaimed from the body of the Silver Golem of BiaÅ?ystok It was also true that there was a childishly huram for Brakebills, that it was Biker Balls, and that the chalkboards would squeak painfully if you tried to write it on therow on that one bare patch of wall behind the kitchens because one of the stones had been violently cursed in a really ugly incident involving a student who’d slipped through the admissions protocols meant to screen out sociopaths and other people ic On humid days it sweated acid

There was also a secret seventh fountain, underground, accessible through a door set in the dusty plank floor of a gardening shed; it was kept cordoned off because the water teery, sharp-toothed fish And Quentin had never kno the Maze was redrawn over the suoaded the topiary ani frenzy that they fell upon and devoured each other in a kind of ghastly slow-ain out of cuttings froh They hly evolved topiary animals on Earth

This was Quentin’s world now, and it was a to hione frorand ical cosht he’d escaped forever, and lo and behold he was adjusting It turns out you can go hoain, if you have to His future was here; the years he’d spent in Fillory were gone now as if they’d never happened He mourned them alone, the only person on Earth who knew that once upon a time he used to wear a crown and sit on a throne But you couldn’t mourn forever Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do

Pacing the aisles of a silent classroo the exposed napes of rows and rows of students bent over their fall exams, he realized he’d lost his old double vision, the one that was always looking for so more, somewhere else, the world behind the world It was his oldest possession, and he’d let it slip aithout even noticing it was gone He was beco someone else, someone new

It was crazy to think that the others were still over there, riding out on hunts, receiving people in their receiving roo every afternoon in the tallest tower of Castle Whitespire And Julia was on the Far Side of the World doing God knehat But that had nothing to do with him now After all that it turned out that wasn’t his story It had all been a temporary aberration, and in due time it had corrected itself

Though he did still look up at theto find the clean, crisp crescent of Fillory By comparison Earth’s moon looked as pale and shabby and worn as an old dime

—

They were only a hundred miles north of Manhattan, but the winters at Brakebills had a different quality from winter in the city: deeper, heavier, firmer, more decisive It was as if, because it came three months late, Brakebills winter was deterood and all It was February on the outside, and the birds and plants were beginning to show gli in a foot and a half of deep silent November snow

Now that he was teaching Quentin could see why the faculty didn’t bother trying to ily focused You saw the undergrads try to jog their way through the snow, kicking up puffs of powder, then give up and just slog You could actually watch as the determination to seize the ht out of thened themselves to lonely, silent, indoor study instead There was a perennial proposal on the table, never quite adopted, to keep it winter at Brakebills all year round

Quentin was doing quite a bit of studying hied in twenty sentences, plus an inco and another at the end, and papered his walls with it Each word got its own separate sheet, which he filled up with annotations and connected to other words with long curvy chalk lines to indicate related concepts He was literally living inside the page

He kept up with his teaching, but other than that decrypting the page was his full-tian to run into a lot of mathematics, which he had to work out with a pencil and paper—you couldn’t do ical equations with coing coh with a brain

But the page was beginning to open up—like tightly furled buds the words began to bloom and reveal the ideas locked inside the hidden di with one another in unexpected ways As they took shape they also gave up clues as to the er, e came from It appeared to be a treatise on the interactions between ic and matter

On Earth, s: you could cast a spell on an object, and it became enchanted, but the object and the spell remained separate entities—the object was like a piece of e But in Fillory, Quentin knew, or at least strongly suspected, ic existed on Earth, sure, but Fillory was ic It was a fundamental difference

This was all very theoretical, and Quentin wasn’t that into theory He was still a Physical Kid at heart, and he was h energy, could you ic, one, like they were in Fillory? It felt like a forbidden idea, a boundary you weren’t supposed to cross, but it was too delicious not to at least try

He requisitioned an eical abilities it was difficult to force the delicate abstractions of the page into the crude actual world Either he cae wad of energy that lit up the rooht and practically blew out the wards he’d set up to keep hi vaporized As a precaution he worked the enchantlobes of force, like bubbles blown from a thick viscous translucent liquid, whichon

And ould he do with it anyway, even if it did work? What good was soic? This was a powerful enchantment, but it needed a purpose It was an answer in search of a question He was getting older, and it was ti that would last But what? He couldn’t see how this was getting him any closer

One evening, standing alone in the senior coht and sketching diagrams in his head, he reached into his jacket pocket for his Fillorian watch—which still didn’t work, but he liked having it with hi with it Inside was a letter typed on ahim politely, even decorously, to show up at such and such a bookstore on such and such a night in March if he was interested in a job The signature was illegible—bird scratchings