a paper star folded from a page removed from a book
There is a stag in the snow.
Blink and he will vanish.
Was he a stag at all or was he something else?
Was he a sentiment hanging unspoken or a path not taken or a closed door left unopened?
Or was he a deer, glimpsed amongst the trees and then gone, disturbing not a single branch in his departure?
The stag is a shot left untaken. An opportunity lost.
Stolen like a kiss.
In these new forgetful times with their changed ways sometimes the stag will pause a moment longer.
He waits though once he never waited, would never dream to wait or wait to dream.
He waits now.
For someone to take the shot. For someone to pierce his heart.
To know he is remembered.
end ID]
Feeling brutally emotional about this all over again today.
I have not once ever read this before and thought "that is Dorian". But I did today.
This passage comes immediately after the scene of Dorian standing outside the Gryphon and looking in at Zachary, before Zachary has met him, thinking "Let me tell you story". There is a whole book divide (this is the opening of Book V: Written in the Stars) between that last scene and this one, but Dorian was just there in the narrative, standing with frozen fingers, after a long period of waiting where nothing has happened, looking in at the man he is beginning to wonder about.
I have come a long way following Dorian and the extraordinary path he is on from the events of this book forwards, and it's making my heart hurt (like Eleanor: "the part about the stag in the snow that made her heart hurt") just thinking about it.
I am currently in the middle of a major Fateheart re-edit ahead of getting myself a commemorative custom-bound edition made, and I have never quite been happy with the opening moment. One of the things I wanted to come back to was this moment with the stag, because in many ways I have most closely linked the image to Kat throughout the follow-up story - I am not sure why or how I never thought to read this as Dorian before.
But also because I am knee-deep in Fateheart again I want to just sit with this line by line: (lengthy exegesis below the cut)
There is a stag in the snow.
'Stag' being at least in UK culture the image of the single man - connotations of masculinity, even within the bounds of it being the male of the species who grow antlers. 'In the snow' - positions this directly in parallel to the previous scene: "Dorian stands in the snow with shaking, near-frozen fingers and scotch-warmed thoughts, watching Zachary through the glass"
Blink and he will vanish.
I have personally developed a fair bit of Dorian's backstory - an unavoidable tragedy of writing someone for so long - but as he is handled in TSS he is elusive, shady, difficult to pin down. He is the figure in the shadow, even to himself much of the time. He does not appear with distinct presence in the narrative when he does first appear, nestled comfortably into both a novel and a set of parenthesis: "He heads back upstairs to the almost empty reading rooms (a librarian with a cart organizing books, a student in a striped sweater typing at a laptop, a man who looks like he’s probably a professor actually reading a Donna Tartt novel) and heads to the far corner" Even if this isn't the first glimpse of him (though I think it's at least close to the most explicit first sighting), it's characteristic enough that it makes the point: he vanishes. Blink and you miss him. He's there without explanation or excuse, he will appear as and when he sees fit. He is a member in high standing of the Collector's Club. He knows how to disappear. And how to remain unseen. Unknown. He is a voice in the darkness first, which tells Zachary a story (forever obsessed with it being his voice and his smell which is how he first appears to Zachary. He is a scent, a breath, a story).
Was he a stag at all or was he something else?
Similarly to the above, he is elusive, he is difficult to pin down. But also in this line is the specific introduction of doubt that he is not what he seems he is.
I am a problematic person to expand upon this thought because I have nearly two million words worth of Ao3 works, WIPs, drafts, and notes which try to make sense of what else it is that he is, becomes, and can be. But even within TSS he becomes so many things: he is a storyteller, he is a figure on the steps of the NYPL, he is a spectre strung up in ribbons and severed door handles, he is a Guardian but no he isn't, he is a figure in a book the same way as Zachary (when reading Sweet Sorrows: “This…this boy in the library, with the woman in the green scarf. This is me,” he says."), but then he is anointed with the scimitar tattoo and maybe he is; he's a crewmember on Lenore's ship, he's a guest at the inn, he is hand-in-hand with the owl-headed man, he is the illustration from Fortunes and Fables, carrying it in living ink over his skin. He is a murderer, he is a lover, he kills, he restores life, he hopes, he despairs, he gives up, he gets up again.
He cuts so many figures in the darkness, and even more to Zachary: he is a phantom paramour, he a storyteller, he is a spectre and a missed opportunity, he is an unconscious body and the smell of lemon and leather, he is dead, he is alive again, he is an enigma, he is a grief, and then he is so many visions: he is a temptation in a winter sweater, he is a gift from the moon, he is the resolution to the story and the one who told it to him in the first place.
He slips through cracks in the narrative you wouldn't even know were there unless you'd read it five times.
Was he a sentiment hanging unspoken or a path not taken or a closed door left unopened?
ALL OF THOSE THINGS AND MORE.
I have written/developed a lot of Leander's story (OC from Fateheart) and spent a lot of time in that space thinking about the relationships between members of the Collector's Club and the doors they handled/hunted/destroyed. This is something Dorian and Leander have in common, this relationship with the doors of the Harbour: was Dorian also haunted by these impossible gateways, kept out of reach even though they were entrusted to destroy them? Did he ever try to open one, just to see if the stories they were told were really true? Maybe this inference is all me but I am taking this wording to mean that he didn't. He carried out his job with absolute accord. All those closed doors left unopened. All the times he could have reneged, or chased a different route and didn't.
And the 'path left untaken' - don't get me started on Dorian "remembering how he felt reading Zachary’s book, reading about what guardians once were, trying to guess what his sword would have looked like if he were a real guardian and not a poor imitation of one." How long has he been holding it against himself that all he ever really achieved was to sell his autonomy and capacity to a woman who strung him along his entire formative life? And how much longer before that did he suspect that the story they were being sold was nothing but a poor imitation of a much greater path?
Or was he a deer, glimpsed amongst the trees and then gone, disturbing not a single branch in his departure?
Okay first of all, 'glimpsed' but 'disturbing not a single branch in his departure' is all enough of its own worries - imagining that maybe he never made a difference to the story, that his part was so inconsequential, or perhaps so badly misguided, so poorly led, so futile, that he leaves nothing unchanged, that all he is is an image??
But mainly, and crucially, 'was he a deer'? There is so much here and it forms the main thesis of The Lotus Flowers, the follow-up sequel to Fateheart. I am too tired right here right now to do it justice - and I think it fares better being told in story form anyway - but if all he ever has been is a series of figures, of stories, of illustrations to the greater fables he spends his life inhabiting, then what is he to himself, even?
What is his relationship with gender? With his own body and expressions of selfhood as told through body and dress and voice and movement? You could read 'deer' as diminutive: not the regal, crowned stag figure but something smaller, more fleeting - is it a loss of masculinity? And is that a bad thing, or here is it an inevitable thing? That Dorian is this too - not just the stag but also the deer. That one figure amongst many is the fleeting thing which leaves no traces, the hint amidst the trees of some other colour, some living, moving thing?
I dunno that's just me. But I did also write 250k words of fiction about it.
The stag is a shot left untaken. An opportunity lost.
Well this is the one which is something of a gut-punch. I'm thinking of Allegra's final, parting gesture to him - her attempt to shoot him at point blank range, once he has finally expended all usefulness, even as bait to Mirabel or Zachary. To discard of him. WIth so little ceremony and nothing more than a dismissal: "What makes you think I want to talk?” And an opportunity lost: Zachary? Or the opportunity to die, perhaps? Or, gorgeously, the intrinsically connected dual-wield of both. Zachary is a life he will never get, Allegra's is a death he won't get either. He slips through the floor of the earth away from either of them, as if "disturbing not a single branch".
Of course this could also be the shots he himself didn't take - his regrets about Zachary, about not pursuing what he really wanted soon enough - perhaps because it took him so long to work out that it was what he wanted at all.
Stolen like a kiss.
Definitely thinking of Zachary, then. This is something heartbreaking: is all pleasure stolen? Waiting in the snow, standing on the other side of the glass. So long in stasis, trying your best to work out how to think for yourself - starting with such small things: “I’ve spent a great deal of my life doing what other people wanted for me and not what I wanted myself and I’m trying to change. Impulse decisions. No shoes. It’s refreshing in a terrifying sort of way.” What if a single kiss was as far as he had gotten with working out what exactly it was he wanted from Zachary? What if that was as much of an impression of himself as he had managed to glean through the trees - the first sign of caring for something beyond what he has, his whole life, been told to care about?
Or maybe it's just poetry, hm.
In these new forgetful times with their changed ways sometimes the stag will pause a moment longer.
"How did everything lead to this? One book, one man. Years of mystery and tedium and now things insist on happening all at once." The times they are a-changing indeed. Mirabel surviving the collapsing ceiling of the Harbour. Zachary feels it in his toes.
This is almost besides any Dorian-flavoured points, but I like in this line that change is a passive quality, almost: the times are forgetful and their ways are changed. Nobody - least of all the narrative - could presume to say who changed them or how. Yet time is behaving differently. Moving strangely. Those years of mystery and tedium and now time changes its ways. And inversely, Dorian slows down: there is a story happening now. The stag is almost out of step of these new times and their changing ways. Perhaps he has been out of step with regular time all his life.
Which makes sense: a storyteller must, one would be presume, be outside the story to tell it.
He waits though once he never waited, would never dream to wait or wait to dream.
CHIASMUS!!! Again with stag-Dorian being a creature out of time, out of the passage of how these stories move and flow.
Again I am thinking of the Collector's Club. Has he not spent his life in a culture/setting where they were set apart from how the rest of the world experiences the flow of Fate and Time? Something about cult structures and otherness, the weirdness of internalised set-apart-ness, of never feeling in the central stream. It's a position of power, to be sure: to be outside something, to be able to manipulate it, enter it and exit it at will - it is part of Dorian's slipperiness, his ability to morph and fade and hide in plain sight - but it is also a very manipulable space.
Imagine the dreaming that goes on in a group of people who have been ostracised from the shared understanding of the rest of the world and told indefinitely to wait. I go into this in a bit of detail in Fateheart, and far more in other fics, but I think this is a crucial part of the psyche of ex-Collector's Club members. It is a deeply isolating social and psychological position, and how much more so for Dorian, who was forcibly ejected from the comfort of the exceptionalism narrative, even though it was still alive and well and now totally beyond his reach?
Imagine being part of something secret and clandestine, almost gnostic in its private, privileged knowledge of things beyond the common world - and then being cut out of even those who have been separated. Imagine how hard it would ever be to dream again that you knew what you were.
He waits now.
YOU BET YOUR ASS HE DOES
In this fragile space called 'now'. Outside of time, at the will and whim of fate, maybe. Positioned as nothing at all. Learning from scratch how to dream for himself. How to figure out what he wants.
Of course he started with impulse decisions and no socks. Reclaiming a position, even a trembling, determined, static 'now', in the face of so much manipulation and rupture is enormous.
For someone to take the shot. For someone to pierce his heart.
'to take the shot' - has he been waiting to die all this time? 'to pierce his heart' or has he been waiting to live? To be alive, to love, to be loved, to be seen, to be captured? To be something less ephemeral than the figure in the trees and the shifting shadow through frosted glass?
I don't know. I'm doing this about it-
To know he is remembered.
To be more than a faceless voice in a story, leaving more than a mark in the snow and a broken branch in his wait.
GOD it makes me have to go for long walks and cry to stupid music.
I love this character. I have talked endlessly with friends about how little Dorian we get but how much we get out of what is there.
I don't know if I had never read this stag passage as Dorian before or if I had and then forgot. Either way I am going to sit with this for a while.
'To know he is remembered' - to expound upon the way time is used here: I love the past participle and the present tense together in this sentence. They are holding hands. He is remembered. He is and will be. He will wait for his chance to make a mark on this story.
And what a mark. What a devastating thing he is heading towards. After all that deprivation, all that uncertainty, all that disillusion - to begin to dream for himself again, to pursue bare feet and impulse decisions and finding something called a self that is stag and deer and both and none of them. To see Zachary through the frosted glass and think that maybe that is something he wants.
He was waiting for someone to pierce his heart. He was maybe thinking of Zachary. Yet when it happens only one of them is killed, and he is the one who has pierced his own heart, as effectively as if the shot had been taken after all.
Man.
I would talk more about how in the text of TSS the stag appears to Zachary each time he has an encounter with Dorian in the depths, which is also something I didn't notice until today. But frankly I think this is enough for now - if I start writing about Zachary's specific place in all of this I will not go to bed for another 3 hours.
But to end here: consider this person's slow, tentative, autonomous re-approach to the narrative: letting himself be seen, of his own volition, in his own time, letting himself choose, letting himself ease in as a voice, a hand in the dark, a notecard, an encounter. Imagine how much strength it has taken to slow himself after all that unsteadiness, and to hold that precarious 'now', looking in at Zachary, and to dream for himself. To wait.
Then to lose it all. To be shot after all. To be the one who takes the shot after all.
And then to open that dang box and give to his not-quite-lover the heart which changes everything.
Drives me absolutely bonkers. Someone should write a book about what happens to him after that. Maybe two or three.
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"Look at me, and let my looking last
See me, I'll not turn my face away
Know me, in my future and my past
Hear me, beyond what I cannot say
Take my life, from my lips into yours
Have my name, my joy and laughter too
What you feel my heart also endures
Self before me, all my best is you
Deepest midnight, winter’s longest dark
Yet the sun it rises in you now
Day saw two lives, now may one embark
Light united, stars will fall to bow
What fire, flame, and forging has begun,
Fate and Time declare that it is done."
so the most significant piece of fanfiction that I will have written to date is coming out in just a few days (follow-up to Fateheart! here we go!), but it may be too late actually because I peaked two days ago when Erin Morgenstern told me this doodle of Zachary and Dorian from The Starless Sea was delightful
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I HAVE AN INVITATION FOR YOU!!!!! please keep reading, god, if you love the starless sea enough that you're even seeing this we want YOU!!!! are you a long time starless sea fan who has never found anyone else who wants to talk about this book as much as you do? have you always wanted to write/see starless sea fanfic or fanart but didnt think there was a fandom? or have you just finished the starless sea like twenty minutes ago and have been scouring tumblr for anything you can find? WELL I'VE GOT THE PLACE FOR YOU!
WE HAVE A STARLESS SEA DISCORD SERVER!
LINK
reasons why you should join and why this server is the best:
we are all literally just obsessed with the starless sea
and the characters
we draw fanart and write fanfic and even have events with prompts to inspire you to do the same
we have a super cool minecraft server with the inn at the edge of the world and a cherry blossom forest around it with honey and candles and shit
we do storytime where we read to each other in vc from tss, fanfic, or other books and it happens all the time and its really lovely and soothing and fun
we have movie nights and movie afternoons and random impromptu movies but theres a movie every weekend
we have endless headcanons
and a whole channel dedicated to dorian hurt/comfort
i co-run it with @boogleboot who is just the coolest and if you havent met her youre missing out
and theres a bunch of other cool people there too who i love so much
we have a limericks only chat (for which i blame mod boogle its so fun you have to talk only in limericks there)
YOU LIKE THE STARLESS SEA. WE LIKE THE STARLESS SEA. COME JOIN
go click that link girl (gendy neuch). we're so excited to have you. see you in the harbour!!!!!
Leander may not appear in the starless sea even once but through all of the love he has gotten in our fandom I think its fair to say he is definitely canon in our hearts!!!!!! from @boogleboot's fan sequel Fateheart (and its sequel coming At Some Point to ao3s near you) to AUs like my Rollins au and kristins pern au, Leander has become one of the core cast of characters that our fandom holds dear and I could not be more proud of him and of Kristin for it. Hes my favorite little guy and honestly I just want you all to know how much I love him and to read Fateheart if you haven't so you too can experience the joy of Leander 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
The really interesting and very beautiful internet person with a passionate interest in The Starless Sea is reading so many drabbles. “Wow!” they think. “These are so fun! I really did enjoy that book. If only someone had written a sequel to it that is both fully-realised in both plot and form and entirely available on Ao3 (as well as partially recorded as an audiobook on soundcloud)”. They jump as there is a loud and ungainly clattering. A figure bursts through your wall.
It is me.
“HI, HAVE YOU HEARD OF FATEHEART? IT’S MY FAN-SEQUEL TO ERIN MORGENSTERN’S STARLESS S-”