Quentin took a slug of flat, warm gin-and-tonic. It tasted like defeat. This was how the dream died, in a welter of plastic primary-colored board game pieces, upstairs at a bad party. They would keep looking, they would knock on all the first doors they could think of, but for the first time, lying there sprawled on the spare bed, his long legs flat out, with his back against Thomas’s rocketship headboard, Quentin took seriously the possibility that he wasn’t going back after all. Probably hundreds of years had gone by in Fillory anyway. The ruins of Whitespire were dissolving in the rain, white stones softening like sugar cubes under green moss, by a now nameless bay. The tombs of King Eliot and Queen Janet were probably long since overgrown with ivy, twin clock-trees rising from their twin plots. Perhaps he was remembered as a legend, King Quentin the Missing. The Once and Future King, like King Arthur. Except unlike Arthur he wasn’t coming back from Avalon. Just the Once King.

Well, it was a fitting place to end it, in the Chatwins’ house, where everything started. The first door. The really funny thing was that even though he’d hit bottom, he couldn’t honestly say that it was all that bad there. He had his friends, or some of them. They had Josh’s money. They still had magic, and alcohol, and sex, and food. They had everything. He thought of Venice, and the pure green Cornish landscape they’d just driven through. There was so much more to this world than he thought. What the hell did he have to complain about?

Fuck-all was the answer. One day he’d have a house like this too, and a kid like Thomas, who lay fast asleep with the lights on and his arms thrown up over his head, a marathon runner breaking the tape in his dreams. He and some lovely and talented Mrs. Quentin (Who? Poppy? Surely not) would get married, and Fillory would fade away like the dream it so fundamentally was. So what if he wasn’t a king. It had been lovely for a while, but here was real life, and he would make the most of it like everybody else. What kind of a hero was he, if he couldn’t do that?

Julia kicked his foot. By unspoken agreement they were all grimly determined to finish the game of High C’s, and it was his turn. He flicked the spinner and moved forward two waves. Josh, who was playing as the whale, had a commanding lead, but Julia (the squid) was making a late charge, leaving Poppy (fish) and Quentin (jellyfish) to battle it out for a distant third place.

Josh spun. He was on a charade square.

“Caw!” Josh said. “Caw! Caw!”

“Seagull,” they all said in unison. It was like when they were geese. Josh spun again. Julia belched.