It's a wonderful sort of feeling when people want to spend more time in a world you created.

How are you managing to keep everyone from aging?” Celia asks after a while. “Very carefully,” Marco answers.

Because I do not wish to know,” he says. “I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.

Memories begin to creep forward from hidden corners of your mind. Passing disappointments. Lost chances and lost causes. Heartbreaks and pain and desolate, horrible loneliness. Sorrows you thought long forgotten mingle with still-fresh wounds.

Is magic not enough to live for?

It's too late. It was too late by the time I arrived in London to turn your notebook into a dove; there were too many people already involved. Anything either of us does has an effect on everyone here, on every patron who walks through those gates. Hundreds if not thousands of people. All flies in a spiderweb that was spun when I was six years old and now I can barely move for fear of losing someone else.

It’s said that All Hallows’ Eve is one of the nights when the veil between the worlds is thin - and whether you believe in such things or not, those roaming spirits probably believe in you, or at least acknowledge your existence, considering that it used to be their own. Even the air feels different on Halloween, autumn-crisp and bright.