"The book didn't choose me," Jolyon had once told the children, a long time ago. "It nearly destroyed the one it did."
It's all Blake thinks about these days. He stares at the damaged gables of his childhood home, and thinks of the magic that is Endymion Spring. That magic had been powerful enough to destroy Diana Bentley, but it had ruined Psalmanazar too. Now, Blake acknowledges, it will claim him as well.
Because all the magic of the world had not been enough for him, and the children are adults now, and they don't believe in magic anymore.
Blake tries to visit London as much as he can. There are people he loves there, people who keep him from sinking like Psalmanazar did. His sister lives there now, not having had the choice when their parents divorced. Jolyon still teaches at Oxford, but he is so very old, and already Endymion whispers caveats and cold comfort to Blake's wet eyes.
So he skulks in America, avoiding Oxford and all that awaits him there, until one night he dreams of a tiny existence on a ventriloquist's lap, mouth moving against his will and strange words streaming from his throat like banners in a distant land.
"Will you abandon me to my fate, Endymion?"
I'm not Endymion, Blake screams, says. I'm not a boy anymore.
His vision shifts and Jolyon's face swims into view. He wears a monk's robes, snowy and pure as the day Duck was born, and the saddest smile Blake has ever seen, even in dreams. "No," he agrees mournfully. "You are not a boy anymore. You will let Endymion know, won't you, Blake?"
Endless spirals into the trap of words, beautiful and remote as the silver pages Blake now dreads. He screams and he says, and maybe he sobs, but when he wakes up next, he finds himself in London with no memory of having gotten there. A quick glance at a newspaper reveals two months have passed.
It's winter, snowing furiously; Blake's thin sweater adapted for balmy American shores is insufficient, but he doesn't notice. His feet move of their own accord through the distant crowds, so he lets them and throws back his head to drink in the shifting anonymity of the sky. To be so grand and removed from this world; it is something that he has become accustomed to, but this brand of beauty is different than the fiery grip of words: the caress of something natural and sweet.
The thought shifts uncomfortably in his mind – a dragon, he thinks faintly, always the dragon in the tree, fire and ash and a harsh embrace akin to one of love – he suddenly remembers a sunny afternoon in the Bodleian. He'd had all he wanted then. Paula Richards, sympathetic green eyes peering into the glass, explaining the concept of age to a young boy who knew better. Mephistopheles curling like commas around his feet. Duck, small and bright and painful in her raincoat, asking him why he was interested in typography. She'd seemed unhappy.
Duck. His sister. She doesn't wear that raincoat anymore.
Blake blinks, realizes that he is crying. The tears pour thick and fast down his face, and he lets them, watching his emotion freeze as it hits the icy ground. The depression underneath his feet catches his attention – looking up, he sees to his astonishment that his footprints form a question mark.
He is in the clearing next to a deserted moor where he and Duck first met Psalmanazar; Millstone Lane is a few minutes' walk from here. It is snowing, nearly a blizzard, and Blake is freezing and tracing questions in the snow. The cold strips him of his breath – he wonders if he'll ever talk again. Psalmanazar had forgotten how.
"Blake?"
He doesn't hear her, but Endymion Spring pulses a greeting against the corner of his mind. He turns to look at Duck, standing an interminable distance away (the snow bleaches all perception) with shock and fear on her face. He hates that expression, it's something that doesn't belong on her – unnatural, whispers the dragon in the tree – he draws breath to try to tell her. Ice forms in his lungs, his heart, his blood.
Her mouth opens to form words. He doesn't hear them, but reads them as they appear glimmering in the air, like an artist's signature slashed across the painting.
Duck is a good artist. Duck is good at everything.
"You scared me."
Blake doesn't reply, chooses instead to shiver into the fleece wrapped around his shoulders. She notices, and nudges the small space heater closer. The warmed air blasts against his skin, burning and abrasive upon contact, but he welcomes it with a grateful nod.
His sister hands him a mug of hot cocoa. "You're lucky I found you," she continues, and her voice shakes. Her accent has shifted considerably from the smooth American of their childhood.
He inspects his fingers, watching the blue slowly fade to pink, the dawn of life in microcosm.
She doesn't seem to mind his silence. "I was asleep," she confesses. "And I dreamed about you. Or at least, I think I did. You were burrowing down a rabbit hole."
This makes him laugh, breaking the crystal lattice that coats his throat. "Just like Alice," he says, and he is so relieved that he can still talk, at least his voice hasn't been stolen, not yet. But he knows now, doesn't he, that the book will steal everything. Some day.
Duck is ignorant of the rapid drop in his mood. "Like Alice," she agrees, smiling. "I miss her."
But Alice is fictional, Blake thinks, puzzled. Endymion Spring promptly answers his silent question, and the red bandana that usually belonged to a dog but once housed a (paper) dragon flashes in his mind. Endymion remembers all of its owners.
Will you remember me? he wonders, and doesn't realize that Duck is staring at him sadly.
(But Endymion does.)
The book's mental nudge rouses him, reminds him why he'd needed to come here but wanted to stay away. He looks up at his sister's face, just in time to catch her odd expression before she smooths it down, calm as a summer breeze. When had she learned to do that?
Maybe he'll find out one day. Maybe it'll be tomorrow. "Duck, I need to ask you to do something."
She sets her mug down carefully on a coaster – only evil people eat Turkish Delight and don't use coasters, Blake – and gives him a long, careful look. "Anything," she says, and Blake believes her.
"Before you die," he says, and the words rise like gall in his throat, "write down anything you want me to know. Anything important."
She stares. "Before I… die?"
"Not a moment before."
Duck breathes, uncertain and a little misty. If Blake looks closely enough, he can see the questions in the imprint of fog, like a ghostly finger, having writ. He can feel Endymion absorbing the unspoken words, and maybe these moments too will be recorded for future posterity. The knowledge hurts him; but all things hurt, and no tears can wash out a word of it.
"Okay," his sister agrees. Her eyes are dry, stirring the small warmth of pride in Blake's heart. "I don't know why you'd require such a thing, and I assume you wouldn't tell me if I asked," she continues with just a hint of superiority. "But I can guess."
"I'd rather you didn't," Blake says soberly.
She nods and flicks her gaze to the faded leather notebook peeking shyly from Blake's fingers. Endymion flutters slightly, its dreamscape pages lighting up briefly under her attention. She smiles, but it's distant and expressionless.
"Diana Bentley is being released tomorrow."
Shadows stir deep behind his eyes. "I know."
"I know you know," she snaps, suddenly impatient. There's a nervous edge to her voice and energy to her fingers as they weave crooked braids with the fraying threads of couch cushions. "What are you going to do?"
There was a time when her presumption annoyed him, but Endymion has taught him better in the years since. He glances down at the book, the Last Book, clasped contently with dragon teeth. Blake only carries it without the blood seal when he visits Duck.
Duck, dear Duck. She misses him, he knows. That knowledge hurts the most.
"Don't worry about it."
Duck's mouth twists; she stares at him as if from across a vast distance. "I always worry."
He smiles thinly, and doesn't tell her that he's counting on it.
That day, he visits Diana Bentley in prison for the first and last time.
They lead him to a large room that echoes with mournful reunions, and if Blake wanted to, he could read all of the stories that had transpired here, anything anyone had bothered to write down. The sharply uniformed woman indicates his table; he sits heavily, pulled down by the sudden weight of Endymion Spring. The book is clearly in its element – at the table on his left, he can see letters being exchanged between those two women (sisters who hate almost as much they love each other, Endymion relays excitedly); at the front of the room, guards exchange logs (Marcus Deacon didn't come to work this morning, his wife had their first child, which will be named Lily); near the windows, a politician officially disowns his daughter, who is blank-faced now but will weep into her journal later that night.
Blake's heart hurts. His head hurts. He presses his numb face into his palms, ignores the half-worried, half-fascinated looks from the guards, and wonders how old the real Endymion Spring had lived to be before the Last Book had claimed his soul.
(99. That's fair, isn't it, Blake?)
"I thought I'd see you far sooner than this."
He looks up. Across from him is a dark-haired woman, as pale and predatory as Dracula's wives.
"Diana Bentley." The name escapes from him in a cold breeze, and he remembers with a sudden darkening of his vision that names are powerful things.
She smiles, with teeth. "In the flesh." She has not lost the unsettling, sensuous lisp, but there is a serrated quality to it that was never there before, or perhaps he had been too young to notice. He had been thirteen years old the last time he'd met Diana, and that was when she had tried to kill him for the Last Book. Psalmanazar and Alice the dog had saved him, then.
Psalmanazar. Blake blinks. Had the man known, then, that he'd only delayed the inevitable? Perhaps it was his one act of kindness to make up for the curse he'd passed onto Blake, the next guardian of the book that contains all books. Blake has searched through Endymion's pages for any message left behind by the book's previous guardians. As far as he and Duck can tell, there have been only two: George Psalmanazar, that curiously wizardish homeless man who had once been a founding member of the Libris society, and the original Endymion Spring himself, the printer's devil whose legacy the book bears in the name stamped across the front, as fond a farewell as it seems capable of.
Psalmanazar's name isn't in the book, but his life had been stolen all the same. Blake closes his eyes and tries not to think about that.
This is my story, too, he thinks fiercely. The sudden anger, tired and frustrated, bursts out of him now, gives him strength. He raises his face to look the Shadow in the eye. "I forgive you."
Diana Bentley doesn't seem to hear. She doesn't look tired, but there is something oddly listless about her aggression. She eyes him carefully, gaze lingering on his bloodshot eyes and arms wrapped protectively around himself, the hunched spine.
"Once upon a time," she says, voice husky from disuse, "a child came to Oxford, bearing a book of forbidden knowledge."
A sunless afternoon. Christopher Winters, pointing out the painting from the fifteenth century of a small, yellow-cloaked, hunchbacked puppet sitting on a monk's lap. Scholars agree that it is an old man to symbolize wisdom, but Blake's father had disagreed. Blake, however, knows the truth.
So does Diana. "The original Endymion Spring ran away from the book," she reveals. "So did Psalmanazar. What will you do, Blake?"
"I could do that," he says slowly. "I could… sink it to the bottom of the ocean or throw it in a volcano. I could run away and live to be ninety-nine, and let it eat my soul with every breath."
"And the book will pass on to its next guardian."
"As will the Shadow," he agrees.
Diana turns to look out the window. The pale sunlight of winter streams in, weak but bright. It washes over her, illuminating her dark hair and eyes with the caress of unearthly glow. Blake watches her and thinks of Duck, Duck with whom the book is already building its connection, his sister who cannot read from the book but inexplicably can open it, can hear it.
She will be next. He knows it as if Endymion Spring had whispered it into his ear himself. No riddles this time, no caveats or wordless pages painted in black. Blake is the guardian of the Last Book, and maybe history will remember in its infinite pages that he has a sister, a sister whom he loves and must protect. He cannot protect both.
"I haven't seen the sun in such a long time," Diana says, wistful, like a little girl again.
He wants to cry. "You'll see it tomorrow," he reminds her, and that is the truth of it.
She closes her eyes now, enjoying the burn of a dying star. "Just know, Mr. Winters," she murmurs, "goodbye is never forever."
Is that mockery, or respect? He doesn't know, but looking at her, face as pure and peaceful as the morning, he thinks that maybe she knows far more about him than a singed butterfly could have ever told her. "Goodbye, Diana."
She doesn't reply. He leaves her like that, yearning for a sun now hidden behind wary clouds, heavy with snow.
It's snowing again when Blake climbs to the roof of the Bodleian. It's been several years since he last dared to step inside this corner of Oxford and he was never very familiar with the library's extensive layout, but he remembers the frantic journey from the Duke Humfrey to the rooftop very well, and so finds the path as if he'd taken it every day of his life.
The life of Blake Winters. George Psalmanazar. Endymion Spring.
The Book of Sand, the Mirror of Infinities, the Eternity Codex.
The Last Book.
Blake leans heavily against a gargoyle, and looks out over the city of dreaming spires. The frosted panes gleam palely in the winter starlight, oddly bright behind the glowing clouds. There is no moon tonight.
Endymion sits in his lap, silver pages fluttering furiously in the chilled wind scraping along the aged stone. The book is clamoring for his attention, bleeding light from the veins of stolen words, but he's just so tired right now. He just wants to look, look at the beautiful, terrible city that hides terrible, beautiful secrets in its archived depths.
The snow grows heavy. His eyes are heavy, his heart. Slowly, he becomes aware: there is a dragon in the tree.
Silver scaled, so pale that it shines nearly blue, glimmering with colors Blake isn't entirely sure exist. The dragon very nearly blends in with the snow and the spires, but the dreams in its eyes are all its own. It turns to look at him, and Blake marvels that he had seen it at all, for the Leafdragon is very nearly invisible, a sly immortal creature entwined inescapably with his mortal coil.
It seems to be waiting for him. His heart thuds precariously against his ribs.
"Just… a little more time," he begs, he says. There is no response: the dragon from a forgotten time has waited an eternity, and seems content to wait one eternity more.
He only has eternity left. Numb, shaking hands flip desperately through the book now lying quietly in his lap. Every page sings to him the same riddle, the first riddle, for Endymion Spring has always known the past and the future, but never the present.
If the Seasons join Hands together, the Order of Things will last forever… The Child may see what the Man does not: A future Time which Time forgot… The Sun must look the Shadow in the Eye, then forfeit the Book lest one Half die…
The Lesion of Darkness cannot be healed until, with Child's blood, the Whole is sealed.
("Godspeed the poor Boy on his Way," two voices of love whisper from a forgotten past. "Fear not, we'll meet some other Day.")
The last page glows brightly. Blake is crying, and the tears freeze through their tracks, catching painfully on his skin as if desperate to avoid the gleaming paper, forged from a dying dragon's skin and wisdom, an eternity ago.
These are the Words of Endymion Spring. Bring only the Insight the Inside brings.
Below, in plain ink, Endymion reveals Duck's spidery handwriting, his sister's last message to him as she lay dying, fetched through the sands of time as if she had only just whispered it now. Blake hesitates, but he needs to know, know that his sister is safe. So he looks.
Thank you.
There are no tears now. Duck has told him everything he needs to know. He is ready.
(He is forgiven.)
Blake stands up and stretches a hand out to the dragon, resting his hand briefly on its beautiful neck. It pauses as if to enjoy the warmth, and suddenly, there is no warmth, no breath left in his body.
"Earth to earth, dust to dust," he recites softly. The Last Book, clasped securely against his chest, trembles faintly. Fleetingly, he remembers a time before he'd found it: an insecure, lost boy, never good enough, always left in the shadow. "I claim my soul…"
Whatever the book had taken from him, it had given him too: he has a purpose to protect, a family to love, and a duty to fulfill. The book cannot be destroyed, but it can be sealed with blood, and his blood, Blake knows, is thick with love. None of the book's guardians had ever been particularly brave, but Blake has something they didn't: For his sister, his parents, for the book's next victim, he can be brave. Just this once.
His eyes close. "Because I must," he finishes. Teeters on the edge of the rooftop, then lets gravity take its natural course. Next to him, the dragon dives too, and through the roaring of the wind and furiously pumping blood in his ears, he can hear it howl with joy.
He smiles. They're going home.
Miles away, Duck wakes up abruptly. Gasping, though she does not understand why, she fumbles for her alarm clock to check the time. The device blinks in dull red: 23:59.
Confused, she turns over to face the window. The snow has stopped, she realizes dimly, an ocean of sleep already reclaiming her. A brief mental reminder nudges her – Blake's birthday is a minute away, she should stay awake, but the bed is warm and the starlight is soft.
By the time the world turns into the new day, Duck is fast asleep.