Quentin was trying to process what Penny had said. This must have been what the dragon had meant, back in Venice. This must be the mystery at the root of it all. But it couldn’t be real. It had to be a mistake. The end of magic: that would mean the end of Brakebills, of Fillory, of everything that had happened to him since Brooklyn. He wouldn’t be a magician anymore, nobody would be. All of their double lives would become single ones again. The spark would go out of the world. He tried to work out how they’d gotten here. A trip to the Outer Island, that’s all it was supposed to be. He’d pulled a thread, and now the whole world was coming unraveled. He wanted to unpull it, to put it back, weave it back together again.

Penny was waiting for something.

“Open this for me, please,” he said. “You have to undo the catch.”

Right. No hands. Numb, but not from cold now, Quentin unhooked the bronze hook that held the cover on, then worked his fingertips between the cover and the stone. It was heavy—the metal was an inch thick—but with Poppy’s help he heaved it up and part of the way to one side. They peered in.

It took a second for the perspective to resolve, and when it did they both backed away instinctively. It was a long way down.

There was no water in the fountain. Instead it was just a vast, echoing darkness. It was like they were looking down through the oculus of an enormous dome. This must be what lay beneath the Neitherlands. Far down, Quentin would have guessed a mile, was a flat pattern of glowing white lines, like a schematic diagram of circuitry, or a maze with no solution. Among the lines, waist deep in them, stood a silvery figure. It was bald and muscled, and it must have been enormous. It was dark, but the giant made its own light. It glowed with a lovely steady silvery luminescence.

The giant was busy. It was at work. It was changing the pattern. It grasped one line, disconnected it, bent it, connected it to another line. Because they were the size of derricks, its arms moved slowly, traversing enormous distances, but they never stopped moving. Its handsome face showed no expression.

“Penny? What are we looking at?”

“Is that God?” Poppy said.

“That is a god,” Penny corrected her. “Though that is really just a term to describe a magician operating on a titanic power scale. We’ve seen at least a dozen of them; it’s hard to tell them apart. There’s one at each of these access points. But we know what they’re doing. They’re fixing it. They’re rewiring the world.”