They share settings and characters, with the circumstances of one story sometimes changing the physical reality of another. Stories within the Starless Sea take place in in simultaneous yet separate timestreams. A fissure opens up in the floor, sending Dorian and Allegra down to the surface of the Starless Sea. They soon learn that the damage to the Harbor was caused by Allegra, who returns to the Harbor and tries to kill Dorian. The romantic tension between Zachary and Dorian escalates but is disrupted by a cataclysmic earthquake. Zachary then undertakes a quest given to him by a mysterious book, which charges Zachary with finding a man lost in time. While Zachary makes it through to the Harbor of the Starless Sea, the Collector’s Club takes Dorian prisoner, so Mirabel and Zachary work together to rescue Dorian and bring him to the Harbor. Running for their lives, the two come upon another painted door. Zachary escapes the Collector’s Club and reunites with Dorian.

Allegra wants to prevent new story seekers from entering, so the current story cycle playing out in the Starless Sea will never reach its end. The Collector’s Club, led by Allegra Cavallo, works to destroy all doors to the Starless Sea-a door like the one Zachary walked away from as a child. Others dedicate themselves as acolytes, guardians, or keepers. Some visitors take up residency and study stories to their heart’s content.

This somewhere is the Starless Sea, a fantastical realm beneath the Earth from which all stories spring. When Zachary returns with the other book, Dorian says he will take him somewhere. Dorian asks Zachary to take a book to The Collector’s Club headquarters and exchange it for another book. He goes to the meeting place listed on the card and encounters the storyteller from the ball, who goes by the name Dorian. After the story ends, Zachary finds a card in his pocket.

He also meets a storyteller who spins a tale. He attends a masquerade ball and dances with a woman dressed as Max from Where the Wild Things Are this woman, Mirabel, is the same woman from the photo. Zachary stumbles across a photo of a woman who wears three necklaces, each with a charm depicting one of the three symbols. Intrigued, he begins researching the book and its mysterious symbols. The book was donated to his university four years before his story took place. He is startled to find a story from his childhood within its pages. Zachary Ezra Rawlins, an Emerging Media graduate student at a university in Vermont, discovers a book named Sweet Sorrows in the library.

The starless sea waterstones