He stared at the stack of blank pages before him, the dip pens and steel nibs and ink pots he’d taken from Clover’s room sitting idly by. The library was quiet, familiar. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine he was back in his own time, poring over Clover’s journal or his famed book. Instead, here he was, trying to convince himself that what he was about to do was not complete heresy.
If Clover was not here to write his story, someone had to. And who knew it better than Baz? It had shaped who he was, had carried him through every chapter of his life. He knew most of it by heart. And he had Clover’s journal to help him fill in the blanks where his memory might fail him.
Still, Baz could not bring himself to pick up the pen. All he saw in his mind was the power-hungry look in Clover’s eyes, the corpses of the students he’d experimented on, Thames’s emaciated body.Thatwas Clover’s true legacy, and Baz felt crushed and helpless and foolish for ever having believed Clover had good intentions. His literary idol—someone he had looked up to all his life, had made into this hero in his head—turned out to be the villain of the story.
In truth, Baz realized he’d been idolizing someone who wasn’t real. The artist rather than the man behind the art. They were two separate beings, but how could he see them as anything but one? The story that had gotten him through childhood felt tainted now. Darkened by ill intent, crooked desires. He felt like he would never be able to read its words the same way again.
Maybe it was time he let it go. He had the power to ensureSong of the Drowned Godsnever saw the light of day. Clover’s name could fall into oblivion right here, right now, if Baz did not pick up that pen.
But so much of his own story revolved around this book. How much of history would be rewritten ifSong of the Drowned Godsdidn’t exist? How much ofhimwould be rewritten? It was not something Baz wanted to mess with. Time, he had learned, had a way of making things happen as they should.
With a sigh, Baz picked up a pen. On the middle of the top page, he inscribed the title.Song of the Drowned Godsby Cornus Clover. Before he could talk himself out of it, he started writing.
There is a scholar on these shores who breathes stories.
With those first words, purpose thrummed through him, a feeling ofrightnesssinging at his fingertips. Baz wrote the rest of it in a frenzy. His hand cramped, but he paid it no mind, so focused was he on the task. He stayed true to the story he knew, telling it in the same way, with the same words that were imprinted on his soul.
Two lines stuck with him as he wrote them from memory:Thefirst to find her is the scholar from our shores, with the stories he inhales and the words he exhales, as much sustenance to him as air. (Perhaps it would have been a more fitting metaphor to call him the lungs, but in truth he is much more like a bloodstream, for magic runs in his veins as he runs through worlds like rivers to the sea and blood through arteries.)
The scholar was always believed to have been Clover, and in a way it was. But here Baz was writing the story in Clover’s place, a scholar exhaling the same words he’d inhaled as a kid. Something shifted in his heart as he wrote. Clover’s words—the words Baz had grown up loving, the words he feared would be forever changed now that he knew the vile truth of Clover—were not Clover’s words at all, but his.Bazwas the one to have writtenSong of the Drowned Gods, not Clover.
It felt to him like he was reclaiming the story of his childhood in a way he’d never imagined he might. And maybe that was all he could hope for.
Breathing time and stories—that was Baz’s role. He was the lungs of the story, the sixth part of the equation, the unnamed puzzle piece of it all. The unsuspected breath of creation that blew through all of it, with no one ever the wiser.
When he got to the end, Baz stopped, paused, read over his work. He would leave the manuscript with Cordie so that she could get it published on her brother’s behalf, and hopefully benefit from what money it would bring in. Money that might help her raise this child of hers and keep the Clover estate afloat now that her brother wasn’t here to use whatever Tidecaller magic he’d relied on to make his fortune in the first place.
But as he read over the end, he paused again, uncertain as he considered what to do for the epilogue. Did he have to write it at all, if it had always been lost? It already existed—had been in Luce’s possession when she left. Baz suspected she might leave itin the sleepscape now, where Romie would find it two hundred years later. But what if she didn’t?
In the end, Baz wrote the epilogue anyway. When he was finished, he ripped the page out from the rest of the bound manuscript and stared at it, thinking of Kai and Luce and Romie.The Sleepers Among the Stars. He could only hope they, like the epilogue’s characters, would be the unsuspecting heroes of the story.
Before Baz could fold up the epilogue and put it in his pocket, the page shone with a light so bright Baz had to avert his gaze. He squinted down at it through splayed fingers, heart pounding in his chest. The light had dampened somewhat, flecks of it hovering over the page like tiny specks of dust.
Orash.
This couldn’t be real. He had to be imagining this, his mind so full of the story he’d been writing that it had conjured this strange dream or hallucination or whatever this was. All he heard in the back of his mind were the words he himself had written, pounding to the rhythm of his heart.
It is a song that carries on the wind like ash as it flutters across worlds, and perhaps a piece of it lingers here on this very page. Look closer. Strain your ear. The drowned gods are calling; will you answer?
Baz leaned down, bringing his face closer to the shimmering page. It smelled of possibility. Of sea salt and damp earth, sooty coals and storm clouds. The light particles emanating from it were cool on his skin, like the brightness of starlight and the velvety touch of the dark.
Baz took a breath and felt himself enveloped by the intensifying light.
Whatever magic this was pulled him into the epilogue.
Through a literal portal on a page.
When his feet struck ground, Baz half expected to find himselfbeneath a colorless sky, alone in the stillness of a great expanse of ash. The epilogue still hung from his hand, but it did not turn to dust like the manuscript had for the scholar in the story, and he was not pulled back to Aldryn like the scholar was, the memory of this place fading like a dream before he could make sense of it.
Baz was still here, with the page intact in his hand, with the strange desire to laugh at the inconceivability of the situation.
Here was not the sea of ash at all but what looked to be the sleepscape.
Baz was on the familiar star-lined path. Thishadto be a dream, yet it felt entirely real. Instinctively, he moved down the curving path, clinging desperately to the epilogue. There must be some kind of magic to it if it had brought him here.
He came upon the door to the Wychwood, unimpeded by umbrae or strange tapestries of threads pulling him back through time. His hand hovered over the vine-covered marble door as he marveled at it, every fiber of his being itching to see what lay on the other side. Butsomethingtold him to keep going. Not a voice, not a song, but this feeling of inevitability that made him pull his hand back and, without another look, walk away from the door.
Deeper down the path he went. It curved inward and downward, in a pattern he knew now to be a spiral. He came across the golden door of the Wastes and thought of the warrior’s strength. Again he pushed onward, until he reached the icy door of the fourth world. Here he hesitated.
