It had come over him slowly, but he’d been pretty sure for a while now. It was something Alice said. He’d been thinking about Fillory, trying to picture its dying agonies, what it would look like—but of course he knew what a dying Fillory would look like. Alice had told them. Alice had seen Fillory’s beginning, and the end of the world that came before it. The dead ocean, the dead land, the dying god. Even if he wasn’t completely sure how to do it, he knew what to do.

Of course it was also true what Alice said about people who thought they could fix everything, and it was quite possible that he was about to get himself killed for nothing, but he was going to try, and now was the time. It was six Neitherlandish blocks from the library to the Fillory fountain and they took it at a run. The Neitherlandish moon, which was small and strangely squarish, like an old-fashioned TV screen, was low in the sky ahead of them. As he ran Quentin felt that he was at the heart of a vast cosmic drama, as if the universe had chosen very briefly to turn around just him. Everything was happening at once but very slowly, as if time were both speeding up and slowing down at the same time. He noticed little details: the outlines of things, the texture of the stones, glimpses of water in canals, shadows in windows. Everything depended on his doing this right.

The Fillory fountain was in the shape of the titan Atlas struggling under the weight of a globe, which was a bit of poetic license since Fillory wasn’t a globe at all, it was flat. Quentin had planned to hurdle the rim without breaking stride and hope Fillory’s security was completely shot by now, but instead he pulled up short, because as he got closer to the fountain he saw that someone was getting out of it.

It was Janet, and she had Josh and Poppy right behind her. Janet and Poppy pushed themselves briskly up and over the side, as if they’d just completed Olympic dives; Josh threw an arm and then a leg over and sort of rolled out onto the pavement. Their clothes dried instantly, but their faces stayed shocked and haggard.

“It’s over,” Janet said. “Fillory’s dead.”

The words glanced harmlessly off Quentin’s mind. It wouldn’t let them in.

“Quentin, we just watched it,” Josh said. “It was horrible.”

The others straggled up behind him, in the darkness of the square. It was the first time in seven years that the five original Physical Kids—Eliot, Janet, Josh, Alice, Quentin—were in the same place at the same time, but the mood wasn’t celebratory.

“What happened?” Eliot said. “What did you see?”

Josh and Janet were staring at Alice.