Then they plunged out of the sunlight into the gloom of the Darkling Woods, where they’d appeared the very first time they came to Fillory. This was a more chaotic scene than the Queenswood; not all the trees were sentient, and the ones that were tended to be loners, and not very civic-minded. They spent a morning looking for the exact spot on which they’d arrived—there was a clock-tree there, they remembered, and a sort of a gully—and there would have been a nice circularity to it, paying their respects to where it had all started. But they argued about where it was, and in the end it turned out that neither of them was right, by which time they were both in bad moods. They couldn’t even find the Two Moons Inn, where they’d kind of hoped to stop for some lunch and a beer.

The next morning they broke out of the woods again and into the Clock Barrens, which turned out to be a vast flat plain sparsely covered with tiny twisted scrub trees, the tallest of them only waist high. It was a bonsai forest. The Barrens began more or less abruptly, as things tended to in Fillory: it was one of the peculiarities of Fillory that it bore an uncanny resemblance to a map of itself.

Eliot had never seen the Clock Barrens before. There had never been any particular reason to go here, and he guessed he’d just never gotten around to it. Good to check that box before it was too late.

“So that’s it,” he said.

Words failed him. They sometimes did. Eliot wondered if he was seeing it for the last time as well as the first, and what else he hadn’t seen, and wouldn’t ever see.

“I thought it would be . . .” Janet said. “I don’t know. Clockier.”

She poked at one of the stunted trees with a headless axe.

“Me too.”

“Maybe it is and we’re just looking at it wrong. Maybe from overhead it looks like a giant clock or something.”

“It so does not look like a giant clock from overhead.”