Maybe the strangest consequence of Martin’s disappearance was that Plover started writing. Whatever went on between him and Martin, when that ended, the writing began, and one day Plover surprised us with a book. He’d had it privately printed. He called it The World in the Walls. The cover was his own charmingly amateurish drawing of Martin and the grandfather clock.

It will sound strange, but after the initial surprise the book never interested us much. We took one cursory glance at it, made fun of the illustrations—Plover had the most ignorant, sentimental ideas of what a dwarf looked like—but we already knew everything in it. People like to call the Fillory books magical, but they never seemed that way to us. If you’ve seen magic, then the Fillory books are very pale imitations indeed. Plover’s words were like dried flowers, stiff and crumbling, crushed flat between pages, when we’d had the living, blooming blossoms all around us.

Now all I can see is how simple he made everything sound. Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives.

We each of us on our own found ways to get on without Fillory. The real world was not as fantastical and brightly colored as Fillory, but it was very distracting nonetheless, and if it didn’t contain any pegasi or giants it was absolutely teeming with girls who seemed almost as magical and dangerous. Fillory was sweet, but this world was very savory. It was easy to let Fillory go when every football match and scholarship examination and furtive kiss told you to stop fighting, forget it, let it be, leave it behind. We talked about Fillory less and less among ourselves, and we went to Plover’s less and less, and the whole business began to seem less and less real.

By this time the books had begun to sell, too, and a miraculous rain of money began to fall upon us. We wouldn’t have said it out loud, or even to ourselves, but it was as if we had sold Fillory itself—or rather we’d sold its realness, reduced it to the status of a children’s fantasy, in exchange for regular and startlingly large payments into accounts which would come under our control when we were twenty-one. By the time I was seventeen and sitting an entrance examination for Merton College, Oxford, I’m not entirely sure I believed in Fillory at all anymore.