CHAPTER 2
It wasn't supposed to happen that way. Quentin had tried to go straight.
It started in the Neitherlands, the silent city of Italianate fountains and locked libraries that lies somehow behind and between everywhere else. The fountains were really doorways to other worlds, and Quentin stood leaning against the one that led to Fillory. He had just been forcibly ejected from it.
He stood there for a long time, feeling the cool roughness of the stone rim. It was reassuringly solid. The fountain was his last connection to his old life, the one where he'd been a king in a magical land. He didn't want it to be over; it wouldn't really be over till he let go and walked away. He could still have it for a little longer.
But no, he couldn't. It was done. He patted the fountain one more time and set off through the empty dream-city. He felt weightless and empty. He'd stopped being who he was, but he wasn't sure yet who he was going to be next. His head was still full of the End of the World: the setting sun, the endless thin curving beach, the two mismatched wooden chairs, the ringing crescent moon, the sputtering comets. The last sight of Julia, diving off the edge of Fillory, straight down to the Far Side of the World, down into her future.
It was a new beginning for her, but he'd hit a dead end. No more Fillory. No further.
Though he wasn't so far gone that he didn't notice how much the Neitherlands had changed. Before this it had always been quiet and serene, trapped under a bell jar of stillness and silence beneath a cloudy twilight sky. But something had happened: the gods had come back to fix the flaw in the universe that was magic, and in the crisis that followed the bell jar broke, and time and weather had come flooding in. Now the air smelled like mist. ripped, ragged clouds streamed by overhead, and patches of blue sky were mirrored in shivering pools of snowmelt. The sound of trickling water was everywhere. Reluctantly, resentfully, the Neitherlands was having its first spring.
It was a season of wreckage and ruin. All around Quentin roofless buildings lay open to the elements, the toppled bookshelves inside lying in domino rows, exposed like the ribs of rotting carcasses. Stray pages torn from the libraries of the Neitherlands floated and tumbled high in the troubled air overhead. Crossing a bridge over a canal Quentin saw that the water was almost level with the banks on either side. He wondered what would happen if it overflowed.
Probably nothing. Probably he'd get wet.
The fountain that led to Earth had changed too. The sculpture at its center was of a great brass lotus, but in the struggle over magic a swarm of dragons had used it to enter the Neitherlands, and when they came surging up through it, the flower had ripped open at the seams. Quentin thought maybe somebody would have come by and repaired it by now, but instead the fountain was repairing itself. The old flower had withered and flopped over to one side, and a new brass lotus was budding open in its place.
Quentin was studying the bud fountain, wondering if even his narrow, bony hips were narrow and bony enough to fit through it, when something brushed his shoulder. By reflex he snatched it out of the air: it was a piece of paper, a page ripped from a book. The page was dense with writing and diagrams on both sides. he was about to let it go again, to give it back to the wind, but then he didn't. He folded it in quarters and shoved it in his back pocket instead.
Then he fell to Earth.
It was raining on Earth, or at least it was in Chesterton: bucketing down, hard and freezing cold, a November New England monsoon. For reasons best known to itself the magic button had chosen to place him in the lush Massachusetts suburb where his parents lived, on the wide flat lawn in front of their too-large house. Rain hammered on the roof and streamed down the windows and vomited out of a drainpipe in a rooster tail. It soaked through his clothes almost immediately - in the Neitherlands he'd still been able to smell the sea salt of Fillory on his clothes, but now the rain dissolved it and washed it away forever. Instead he smelled the smells of autumn rain in the suburbs: mulch rotting, wooden decks swelling, wet dogs, hedges breathing.
