It is difficult to write those words, knowing that they will not be believed. If I were in your place I wouldn’t believe them. I would stop reading. But they are the truth, and I can’t write anything else. I am not a madman, and I am not a liar. I swear it on everything I hold sacred. I suppose I ought to say that it is God’s truth, and it is. But perhaps not the god you are thinking of.

After Martin and Fiona went into Fillory through the grandfather clock, I went through with Helen, and that is how all the events described in The Girl Who Told Time came to pass, more or less—a lifetime’s worth of adventures, all of which happened in the space of five minutes in a dusty back hallway of an old house during the first war. By then Jane was awake and alert again, so all five of us went through together.

Already I can see you shaking your head: no, you’ve got it wrong, they always went by twos. Well damn you and damn Plover too. We often went together, all of us. Why wouldn’t we have?

The truth is, there were many adventures we never told Christopher Plover about, and many more that for his own reasons he didn’t see fit to include in the books. I suppose they must not have fit neatly into the plot. I can’t help but feel that I myself was somewhat slighted in Fillory and Further. It’s petty of me to say it, but I do say it. I stood vigil at the gates of Whitespire during the Long Evening. I claimed the Sword of Six, and then broke it on the peak of Mount Merriweather. But you wouldn’t know any of that from reading Plover.

I was perhaps not a pretty young man. I wasn’t as appealing as Martin. I didn’t make good material, as they say in the literary business. But I suppose if he didn’t write about me at my best, he didn’t write about me at my worst either. He never knew the worst. None of them did, except Martin.

Regardless, all of our lives split that night. They became double. A more alert guardian than Aunt Maude would have noticed the change—the whispered colloquies, the tanned faces and uncut hair, the extra half-inch or so of height we would gain during an especially long trip to Fillory. But she didn’t notice. People are very determined to see only what they can explain.